The Podcast Strategy: How To Build and Run A Successful Podcast with Dean Jackson and Paul Colligan – I Love Marketing Episode #405

Leads happen when somebody perceives you as viable, when somebody perceives you as somebody I want to work with. So 30 minutes with an expert doing their thing while the microphone is running is extremely compelling, but it's also fantastic for sales.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com. Dean Jackson, the brilliant one. He is always with us and he's going to be interviewing our guest today. Paul Culligan's lifestyle and business strategies are designed to tackle the strategies and opportunities of today's ever changing information economy. His company, the Podcast Partnership, leverages technology to expand reach and revenue for businesses and creates digital influencers with the simple sound of the human voice. He's the creator of the podcast report and has authored 11 technology and thought leadership books, nine of which launched as Amazon bestsellers. So, Mr. Dean Jackson and Paul Culligan, welcome. It's great to have you with us.

Wow. Let's start at the beginning. I always tell people that, you know, I look at a podcast as a better a lead conversion tool than a lead generation tool. That's my coming into it that I'm not expecting the podcast to do the heavy lifting of generating leads. It does and it can and direct people back. But I am of the idea of building the audience even separately from the podcast.

We have four questions at the Podcast Partnership. Question number one is what do you want your podcast to do?

That's exactly right.

And what's beautiful here, Dean, is you know exactly what you want your podcast to do. You want your podcast to get you leads. And by the way, podcasts are really good at that.

I look at the podcast, getting the leads is one thing, but I'm looking at the podcast as a way to create all the ancillary content that I can use from that. You know, I love marketing. When you look at the body of work that we have over coming up on 10 years, this January will be 10 years for the I Love Marketing podcast. But we've got this now legacy of all of this content that we've got to point people to and all the other content that we can create from it.

Dean said he likes his podcast to get leads. Well, let me tell you how leads happen. Leads happen when somebody perceives you as viable, when somebody perceives you as somebody I want to work with. So 30 minutes with an expert doing their thing while the microphone is running is extremely compelling, but it's also fantastic for sales. We have a client who gets at least one $3,000 lead a day from his podcast. It's a million dollar podcast, less than 500 downloads per episode. Now here's the beautiful thing. We did some research and you can do this, you can check. And by the way, when I asked him question number one, what do you want the podcast to do? He said, make the phone ring. Okay, so we make the phone ring. But here's what's interesting. We looked at his stats. You know how, you know how this whole thing happened. They listened to six or seven episodes of 20 minutes each, okay, two plus hours of time hearing the guy be in his true genius. And then they called, they were pre sold. It used to take a ton of time to do that two hour pre salt. Now they're pre sold.

What we really want, the most valuable thing for me is an exchange, an email address so that I can communicate with somebody, right? So that I can have a two way communication with someone. Turning, I call it turning an invisible prospect into a visible prospect. Because that's where it all happens. So all of the lead generation that I'm doing on the podcast is driving people to a page where they can come into my email world. So at the end of every episode we use a audio signature like the equivalent of my email super signature, saying, and that's another great episode. If you want to continue the conversation, go to morecheeselesswhiskers.com or go to ilovemarketing.com you can download a copy of our breakthrough DNA book. You can, you know, and then I say, you know, on be a guest on the podcast, try our profit activator scorecard. See how the profit activators are growing or slowing your business. So always leading to them coming to do something. Right? And that way I look at the value because everything I can, I can look at all the monetizing really happens from within the email world. Right. So how do you think about the, you know, the podcast? Like to me it seems, and maybe you have a case study or you have something on. If my goal was to build email addresses, build email address leads, and I can get Those leads for $1.50 or $2 by running Facebook ads to my exact audience or Instagram ads and having them download the book and then now sending them in this loop where they're constantly getting all the podcasts. So coming that way to the podcast, separating the lead gathering from the relationship building and the converting, how would it look? And do you have any case studies to show comparatively going the other way, like starting with the podcast as the promoting the podcast to then get the email.

My favorite case study ever in this is our mutual friend, you know, and perpetual 14 year old good boy from Clickfunnels, Russell Brunson himself. Okay, okay, Russell. One day the podcast shoots up the charts. It's like number one and two in business, like day after day after day. And I'm looking at social nothing. I'm looking at the email nothing. I'm looking at paid ads nothing. I'm looking at the topic nothing. Why is he number one or number two? The only thing that was going on at the time was I was getting a lot of emails about this offer that he was doing where it was a free media player, just pay shipping and handling with a bunch of content. Turns out what happened was. And by the way, it's documented and he talks about it all the time. He made 40 bucks for every $1 he spent on the campaign. He made $40 for every $1 he spent on the campaign. Write this one down, people. Put this one in the Zoom chat room. He made $40 for every dollar he spent on the campaign. But here's my favorite part. In addition to making $40 for every $1 he spent on the campaign, whenever anybody exited out of the process when they didn't want to pay the $9 for the MP3 shipping. Huh? You know where he sent them to the podcast?

Right on.

Once they purchased. You know where he sent them to the podcast? You know, and so the entire time he ran this campaign, the exit traffic was the podcast.

Ah, nice.

You know, and absolutely beautiful and absolutely perfect. So that is, that is my, my absolute favorite campaign ever. But, but let's talk a little bit and we'll answer a couple questions in the chat and we'll help some stuff here. My next favorite case study. And again, see, people call me all the time. Here's the beginning phone call. Usually Paul, I want to get a lot of downloads. I go, great, I can get them from China really cheap. Well, no, that's not what I mean. Oh, oh, what do you mean? What do you really want? And we have a mindset scorecard, the Coach Tool. And one of our big mindsets is impact, not downloads. So Frank Kern you introduced, well, you got Frank to write the note that started the podcast. I'd known Frank forever. I knew Frank before he was cool. And if you go to Frank Kern.com1, I think it's still there. Frank opens up the episode and Frank says, all right, guys, I got a worksheet. I'm going to go over with. You go to Frank Kern.com1 to get the worksheet. Yes. Okay. One of two things happened. A, people went, gave him the email address, you know, or B, people didn't keep listening because they didn't want to give Frank the email address. You know what Frank wants? Frank wants people who want to give him the email address.

Right. Hey, where did he.

You know, so everybody who left, fine. Great. I am not at liberty to share his conversion on that first couple of days of episodes. And Mario says it's still there, so. Thank you, Mario. Off the charts, I've never seen anything as good as the downloads to sign up, share anything I've ever done.

Yeah.

Now, it was funny because I've had people come to me go, how do I market my show? People with lists of hundreds of thousands of people say, how do I market my show? And I just have to laugh because, you know, we had a company over a million downloads, over a million email opens a month. Okay. They were in the supplements business. So, you know, the receipts, the tracking orders, the coupons, the weekly updates, you know, and people always open these things and they're like, where do we market the show on these million email opens? You get a week. The promotion comes from being at the right place. Proximity, recommendations, hanging out with the same people.

Yeah.

You know, so you put yourself in a place that might make sense if you were in the marketing world and you could buy ads on I love marketing, that would be a fantastic buy. However, if you in the marketing space and you had something of tremendous value to give to the I love marketing audience, that could be a value too. Once you get past this, I want downloads and you go to I want impact, it changes.

Let me ask you this. If you were going to start from scratch with a podcast and you got $1,000, ooh, what would be your timeline and what you would go through to launch that and maximize the thousand dollars?

I would identify shows in proximity that I want to be related to. I would spend the entirety of the thousand dollars producing a product, a tool, a service, something for those shows. And then I would go to those shows and say, hey, I got this tool for your audience that serves your audience. Let me come on the show and talk about it. So I would produce. Exactly. And I'd get three or four people for that price, probably. And then I'd be on three or four shows. And of course, I'd have another show entirely lined up to talk about. And that's where I'd begin to build my audience.

I would Spend the money on promoting, getting opt ins for my exact target audience that I want to attract. If I would do. If I. I was using books as an example, but if you had a book called this, read this if you want to be great at drawing. Right. That, that if my course and my thing is I love drawing and I've got courses and things I want to ultimately coach and help people be better drawers that I would run Facebook ads, Instagram ads to an audience of people who have indicated that they like drawing and get those downloads for a dollar or two dollars. And so for $500 I could have. Or for $1,000 I can have 500 people that are my core audience and start doing the podcast for those people. I think you talked about the numbers really don't matter in the big scheme of things. That's not the. And I think people get their ego attached to the numbers more than anything that they feel like they're a failure. Evan Carmichael and I were talking about this with the YouTube things that people Evan brought up. If you get 60 views on a video, it feels like a failure. But you think about the reality of it. If you were given a talk to 60 people at the Chamber of Commerce, you'd be nervous about that.

Right.

Like it would be a real thing. At the time we were doing the thing, we had 380 people live on the thing. And imagine that is a community theater that holds 300 people jammed to the rafters with people standing room only to hear what you have to say. That puts stuff in perspective. You know, if you think about the average church congregation is less than a couple of hundred people. So you imagine a church every week that you're speaking to of people who want to draw or want to do whatever it is that you do.

Yeah. And remember, you know, I spoke earlier. You use the number 500. I use the number 500. I have a client who has a million dollar podcasts with less than 500 downloads per episode.

Yeah.

If you got 500 real leads, you know, it's not that hard. People just want to make it complicated.

Yeah, that's interesting. All right, so I'm going to look at. I want to, I always promise Eunice that I'm going to deliver what we promise on these. So let's do some things. So we talked about why podcasting. I think we can give that a good check mark. Right. Then we're talking right now little things about optimizing and maximizing your podcast once it's online. Let's talk about this for a Second, the tech versus the content, the. All of these things. Let's talk a little bit about that. Because, you know, people think, you know, is it the. It's funny how neither of us, when I said, you got a thousand dollars to. For the podcast, our first thought wasn't about, oh, good, good microphone.

Yeah, yeah.

Got to get the. Got to get the fancy microphone going, to get the, you know, pro tools or whatever.

Well, well, let's. Let's chat about the tech for a second, because there was this. There was this influencer a couple years ago. His name was Martin Luther King Jr. And he did an episode of his show called I have a Dream. Okay. And this I have a dream episode of his show, the dude used a microphone that was like 40 years old. Okay. The soundproofing in the room was terrible. You could hear the crowd. You could hear the background noise. I think a plane flew over once. Okay. Peaked. All these things happen. It was a terrible recording. And here's the funny thing about I have a Dream. The content was pretty good. I actually really like this guy's dream, and I just wonder what would have happened had Martin Luther King Jr. Had a better microphone and maybe gone to a studio or something for that episode. Okay, obviously, tongue in cheek, but important. Okay, now, best episode of I love marketing, in my opinion.

Well, let me tell you what I think it is. Let's see if we match up.

Well, I love. I love the one with Tony Robbins.

Absolutely.

I'm just gonna say here's the funny thing, and Gina, you know, in about five seconds, she'll find that and put that in the search for this. Let me tell you about the Tony Robbins episode. Okay? Tony Robbins Joe is on a cell phone in the Holland Tunnel in New York that he paid less than $12 for. I'm certain Dean is actually on a phone line. You know, good for him. Tony is in Fiji on Skype, you know, bragging about how far away he is from his house on WI Fi. The audio experience is horrific. It is headache inducing. It is painful. It is also magic.

Yeah.

It's Tony off book. Yeah. And you don't get a lot of Tony off book.

Well, that's the thing is, like, that's what we did. You know, I had the how that happened because, you know, unless you're promoting a book or doing something, it doesn't really go on a lot of podcasts and do stuff, you know? And so I had done his. His New Money Masters series.

I remember that. Yeah, yeah.

So he came here, we shot that, and did that. And he, he told me then he would come and do our, our podcast. So I, that's how it happened that we got him, you know, the time, but he was in Fiji and it was really, you know, Joe and I were doing it late at night. It was Fiji morning. And. But the whole thing, it's exactly that. It's not about the tech or the stuff like that, it's the content. And it was great, great episode.

It was magic. It was magic. Yeah. You know, I, I saw a presentation in a podcast event in la and it was what Hollywood could teach, the podcast. And there was this moment where the guy came out, he had done some standup work and he said, you know what the standup comics favorite microphone is? And everybody leans forward, everybody likes to write down the microphone, name the one that's on the stage.

Right.

You know, and they don't care. Now up on that shelf behind me again, for those of you listening to the audio version of this, I'm pointing to a shelf. There is a $600 mic. Okay, in front of me. This mic is a $75 mic. Okay? I paid the. Now everybody's gonna go in the chat. What Mike? What Mike? What Mike? I paid an additional $15 to get this thing that lets me attach it to my desk and the very, very important spit guard. Okay, this is now the launch. What Mike? See, people are asking, sounds good. People excited about this. People. We had clients who paid the startup fee, who built the podcast, who answered question one of four, actually answered all questions and they got stuck in the podcast thing. So now what we start doing is we now send people the launch mic. Okay? It cost us less than 100 bucks to send them a gift wrapped launch mic from Amazon 2 Day Delivery. You know, and if people go, well, I want to use the mic you're using. That's why I'm now using this mic. Okay? So for less than 100 bucks, you got everything you need. All right? And podcastpartnership.com recommends is a redirect to our recommendations page, podcastpartnership.com recommends. And this mic that I'm talking to right now, there might be a letter, a better less than a hundred dollar one. And people are going to be listening to this thing in 2022, 2023, 2024. So. But for the next couple of years, podcastpartnership.com recommends will forward to the link to our favorite USB mic du jour.

You see what you've just done there?

Oh yeah. What'd I do, Dean?

Did you See what he just did there, Timothy? See, that's what he's doing there. He's sending people somewhere. This is going to be in perpetuity, is in the I love marketing world. And now you've got the right people on the right bus. This is.

Yeah, there's more coming. Okay. It's all planned. It's all planned.

Oh, good, There we go. So the. Yeah, the tech is not as important as the content. That's really the most important thing.

Right?

I look at it for me, for the content. A lot of people think, you know, what. What can you do? Because a lot of people, you know, it's a burden to constantly think of new things to talk about or to come up with. That's why if there's any way possible for you to demonstrate or to serve the audience that you're working with or hope to work with, that's a really easy way to do that. Just set up an open line where you're going to say, hey, be a guest on my podcast and we'll talk about this. And you're giving people essentially a free coaching session or a free strategy session. Somebody might pay for that you're serving, and it demonstrates that you are an expert at what you're at what you're doing. And it's so easy to come prepared, to serve, you know, compared prepared to give people value, to help them out. That's. That's a great thing. And you'll never have a shortage of people who want to be guests on the show. Right. It's all this perpetual loop is what happens now. You know, I was in my super signature. It's one of the first things, is be a guest on my podcast.

And here's the thing. How much is a client worth to you? Yeah, exactly. Good. Good answer. What was that?

About 350.

There we go. So how many do you have to convert to make 351. So you could do a podcast that the only person who ever listens to it is the person who is being interviewed. You know, so you want to think these things through. You want to be smart. What do you want the podcast to do? You know, I want the podcast to give importance to my talking to client, potential clients. Bam. You don't even have to publish the thing. What was the old. Was. Wasn't it Kennedy who said, if you're good with 35% returns, you can just ship blank tapes?

Right, right, right, right. You know, it wouldn't even be that high, probably.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, but what do you want the podcast to do, you know? Now, I'll tell you this. You cannot interview people about their personal businesses and get some Joe Rogan downloads. Unless, of course, you get the script from China off of Fiverr, you know, but what do you want the podcast to do? Question number one.

Mm, yeah, unless. And that's something, you know, you hit something on the head there. It's the. Unless there's a framework that you're apply so that people see the different ways that that framework applies.

Yep.

So that's. That's interesting. Okay, so then let's see what else was on Eunice's list. So we can. Let's just address them so we can.

Absolutely. Should we tease them? Should we give them question number two of the four, and then we'll do a few from Eunice to keep people. Yeah, it's called opening up a loop, people. Question number two is, how will you know that your podcast is doing it? Okay, this is huge. This is huge because at some point, be it your spouse, be it your cfo, be it whoever, you got to prove that it's worth it. So how will you know? Now the client, less than 500 downloads per episode, weekly show, million dollar podcast. How will you know that the phone's gonna ring? Not that complicated. Or is it? I asked him. I said, okay, phone rings. Are you gonna ask them where they came from, you know, or are you gonna try to go to the sale? Ooh, Paul. I'm gonna go try to go to the sale. Great. You know what? We did send them a cell phone. Said, put that next to your landline for your business. Every time the cell phone rings, it's the podcast. Every time the landline rings, you know, it's 25 bucks a month more for us. And yeah, you like in this, Dean. And you know, you know what happens a couple months later?

What happened, Paul?

That cell phone's ringing a lot more. The cell phone's ringing a lot more. Exactly. So, number one, what do you want your podcast to do? Number two, how are you going to know that it's doing it? So if it's the phone ring, track it. Virtual number. There's lots of ways to do it. You don't have to get another cell phone. You know, if it's opt ins. Ready for this? Track the opt ins. You know, if it's clicks. Ready for this. Track the clicks. You know, it's. It's not that complicated. Now, had a friend who has a podcast that's entirely in support of his membership site. You know what do you want the podcast to do? I want the podcast to bring people into the membership site. How you know the podcast is doing it? Well, Paul, I feel like it is. Feelings are no good. We don't track feelings, we track numbers.

Okay?

And so what I said was this. I said, it's not complicated on the show. Give everybody in the audience a coupon code for your membership site. Now you know what the coupon code is. You know, it's so funny. People do these silly coupon codes. XR5127. No coupon code. Listener.

Listener. Listener, yes.

Couple of months later, 87%. Yeah, 87% of his new opt ins to his membership site were from coupon code listener. Bam. The podcast was working. And what's amazing is when you know what you want your podcast to do and you know if the podcast is doing it. Oh, it's a lot more fun. Yeah. You know, you've heard people like, well, it's episode 521 and this guy emailed me and he's going to be a guest and I hope he has something because I got nothing.

Right, right.

We've all heard those shows and once you know how it is, it's going to track. You're at a good place.

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