The Secret To Podcast Success Is Intention About Your Passion - An Interview With Brian Kurtz - The Podcast Report

What if we had something better than podcast your passions and the profits will follow? It's the podcast report episode 120. Show notes, links, conversation and more@thepodcastreport.com 120. I've been watching the podcast industry for over a decade and one of the problems is we have this concept, we have this idea, we have almost this epic myth, if you will, that if you podcast your passions, the profits will follow. And this is a great idea. This is a great concept. This makes a lot of people feel happy, but it's just not the case. You've got to be strategic, you've got to be purposeful. And I've been talking about that for a long time. I've brought you guests, I've brought you interviews for a long time. But today I bring you something entirely different. Brian Kurtz is a direct marketing legend. If you visit thepodcastreport.com120, I'll link you out to his website and all the things we're chatting about. Brian has been responsible for building lists, profitable lists of millions in his lifespan of business. He's still around, obviously. That's why we have the interview. About 1.3 billion pieces of third class mail. This is a direct marketing titan and yeah, not a big fan of the podcast. Your passion and the profits will follow. But he's a big fan of, of podcasting. He is thrilled by podcasting, he's excited by podcasting. He understands the power of being on podcasts and he understands as a direct marketer, the opportunity for us to see revenue in podcasting. This should be exciting. This should be thrilling for all involved. So this is a big interview. This goes for a while, but oh, it is worth it. It will blow your mind. We talk about his book, we talk about what he's doing, we talk about his podcast feelings, and we give an answer. A podcast yout Passions 2.0, if you will. A meme that I hope will catch on on the Internet. You can tell I'm a big fan of this guy. The interview is in its entirety. I listened twice and I just couldn't cut anything because it's so good. This is Brian Kurtz and he's one of the best. Before we go to the interview, I want to let you know that this episode of the Podcast report is brought to you by Dial Talk. Done. Just think of it podcasting as easy as Dial Talk. Done. Want to know more? Go ahead and visit dialtalkdone.com if you haven't yet subscribed to the show, please do so. ThePodcastReport.com iTunes ThePodcastReport.com Stitcher ThePodcastReport.com Google, you've got the idea. You know where to go if you'd like to interact. Head out to the podcastreport.com120 for this episode. Or you can do the social thing. Thepodcastreport.com Twitter thepodcastreport.com Facebook. You get the idea. The podcast report is the hub. You're here. You want to do real business with your podcast, and Brian Kurtz is the man to give you some direction and give you some focus that maybe you never had before. So let's get to the interview with Brian. I have a few words when we're done, but let's go. I'm on the Skype phone with Brian Kurtz now. I got to tell you about Brian. In my initial launch into the Internet and the world of marketing on the Internet, I realized that the tech was there. The tech was very, very cool, but the tech existed in a nerd space in a nerd place. And this is over a decade ago. I met Brian as a result of Joe Polish, and Brian came from this world of direct marketing, and I'm gonna let him speak to it a little bit. But if you don't think you are a victim of direct marketing, you're absolutely wrong. Now, half of the audience is going, I know Brian. This is amazing. Half the audience is going, I direct marketing, podcasting. So I'm going to bring Brian on. Brian's going to give us a quick overview of what direct marketing is for the two who might be listening to that, and then we'll talk about how podcasting can be used for direct marketing and maybe speak to the opportunity lost by most podcasters not using the podcast for direct marketing. Brian, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks, Paul. And I'm a big fan, obviously, so this is, like, a real thrill for me. I like this. And direct marketing, it's funny. Direct marketing, like podcasting, can be used for good or evil, as we all know, but also, I think one of the big mistakes, and I think there are people on who are listening right now who probably would think when we say direct marketing, we mean direct mail, and we don't. Just to make sure direct mail is a medium within direct marketing. Just like, you know, I always say to people who say, I'm an Internet marketer, and I say, really? Why do you want to define yourself by a channel? That's crazy. Like, aren't you a direct marketer who might use the Internet as your number one source. Now, your mind is open to using all sources. And actually, you're the one that opened my mind up originally. I mean, I always like podcasting. I always like being interviewed. I definitely like to talk. I'm from New York. But I really enjoy the podcasting as yet another medium in the spectrum of direct marketing. So, first, direct marketing is not direct mail, although I did grow up in direct mail. I mean, I've been in the business for 35 years. I started when I was nine. So everybody needs to know if they're trying to calculate my screw you, right? So direct marketing is not direct mail. What direct marketing is, though, is any kind of marketing that you do in any medium, online or offline. Could be space, could be radio, could be tv, could be podcasting, could be email, could be anything that has a measurable response, that we can measure the response in what we do, and there's a return on that. And what's amazing to me, this will bring it home to you, like, in a heartbeat. Jeff Walker, one of my heroes, one of my best buddies, the guy who invented product launch formula, which is one of the best ways to sell products and services online. I mean, bar none. I mean, he says it's at least 500 million in sales of people who've used PLF. It's probably closer to a billion dollars worth of products and services. And Jeff's, again, good friend, hero of mine. I'm in his mastermind group, right? I get him to write a blurb for my new book. You know what he writes about that? It's all about direct marketing. This is Jeff Walker, who. You wouldn't think that. Now Jeff is a little older. I think he's going to be 55. So he's younger than me, not by a lot. And I always make sure he knows that. But here's a guy who's known as sort of an IM guy, right? He's an Internet marketing guy, and yet all he talks about is direct. His blurb in my book exactly says that when he realized it was all about direct marketing, that, in fact, I bought the URL eight years ago. It's all direct marketing. I have. I still own that. I think it's all. I haven't used it, but it's all direct marketing dot com. And so if it's all direct marketing, it means that everything needs to have a response. Everything needs to be about how I'm going to use this to either generate a response, generate names, and, you know, Every Internet marketer thinks about this. What's my, you know, what's going to be my lead magnet so I can get people onto my list so I can sell them something else later on. That's direct marketing. And they're practicing it and they don't even know that it was invented a long time ago and that everything that we do online today is completely sourced to that. And Perry, Marshall and I spend time talking all the time about knowing the original source of things is not just taking a scroll down memory lane. It's that if you understand the principles of how we got here, the questions you're going to ask in the high tech environment we're in today are going to be way more sophisticated, way deeper. I mean, if you understand that lookalike models were not invented by Facebook, but they were invented by people in the 1960s doing regression models for the Reader's Digest. And you can ask your Facebook advertising person questions that are way deeper about the lookalike models that they can do for you. You're like, it's game changing. It's game. You'll be so far ahead of so many other marketers. So that's my spiel on direct marketing.

So here's the challenge.

Measurable response. It's measurable.

Well, here's the challenge. So there are going to be two types listening to this. One is going to go, preacher Brian, keep going, Paul, shut up. And that's the majority of the audience. There's a small segment of the audience who's going to go, but I can't measure this. The only thing I get from podcasting is how many downloads. I don't get how far they listened. I don't get how they bought. Yes, somebody might put in how you heard about me on a website somewhere, but it's not measurable. How can you measure podcasting, Brian? If you can measure podcasting, the game changes. Talk to me.

Yeah, but I think people are measuring it. Okay. This is how I measure. I don't have my own podcast, but I'm on a lot of other people's podcasts. I just did 35 podcasts in a period of about three or four months to promote my book, basically. So why would I want podcasting to be one of the major ways that I promote my book? It's because I have an incredible offer to give to people. And in fact, the irony is my book is only available on Amazon for the most part, or Barnes and Noble, and yet I want to get the names of those buyers. So what I do is I've set up a site, thelegendsbook.com when I'm on the podcast, I start talking about my book and the legends in it and how great the content is. And we all know that everybody, you know, wants to hear all about my wonderful content, right? But then when it comes down to like, what do you got for me, it's like, go buy my book, but do it through this site. Send your receipt to this email address and then you're going to get. I'm going to over deliver this incredible amount of content that relates to the book. You know, I profile six legends in the book. I've got a swipe file of the best ads these six legends ever wrote. I have interviews with with three of them, one of which is David Ogilvy on the David Letterman show, which is fantastic. And then I've got like a PDF of a classic book. You get to download all of that for free. You got to give me your email address, of course, because I want to start building a list from this because without names, you got nothing. You can brag about all your downloads. It's sort of like the old, you know, eyeballs or, you know, I've got the most traffic, but the most traffic, the most traffic doesn't win. The biggest list wins and it's the biggest list of people who are qualified. And the beauty of podcasting is that podcasting type of. To me, the content is so rich and deep. Like you don't do podcasts for four minutes. Most podcasts are a half hour an hour sometimes. I did a two hour with Jay Abraham. I call that riffing with Socrates because he uses the Socratic method. So I was riffing with Socrates J. Abraham, AKA Jay Abraham, for two hours. Anybody who went through a two hour interview with me and Jay Abraham, first of all, I think they might be a little sick. I don't know. But if they went through a two hour interview of me and Jay Abraham and then went to a site to get a bunch of more free content from both of us and put in an email address, do I have a qualified person or why? And so the analogy I draw from my direct mail days, the best people I ever got onto my list in direct mail were people who read long copy, who read Magalogs and Bookalogues, like 64 page direct mail Bookalogs. It was these bookalogs. These were not four page letters. These were not double postcards. Different kind of person comes out of those. Not a bad person. Nobody's a bad person here. But they're not as engaged. The engagement level, indirect mail versus say a short email. If they buy or they respond to the long form direct mail, the quality of that person is going to be so much better for me long term. And I have data up the wazoo that tells me people who came in through a long form direct mail versus an email or even for a short form direct mail are going to have a much higher lifetime value because of the initial engagement. To me, podcasting is about engagement now. Yes, I would love to have stats on how long they stayed on the podcast. That would be a good thing. We do that in online marketing with video sales letters. You know, we can gauge, you know, people who are on a video sales letter for 10 minutes versus a half hour versus the full 45 minutes. Makes a huge difference of how we would then retarget them and re promote them. The person who would be on for 45 minutes, I'm ready to take them into the next level in my universe. Frank Kern teaches this. Frank Kern teaches, you know, you should. The people that absorb content piece number one and completion are ready for content piece number two. The ones who only do a piece of content number one, let's give them something else to supplement. And now there's like, apparently there's technology which I just learned about, which I probably should have known about. You probably know about it that even if you don't have controls on your video sales letter to stop and start again, if you go off a video sales letter and come back to it, the cookie can tell you where you've dropped off. So at least you don't have to start from the beginning. Even without controls. That makes perfect sense to me because it's about engagement. So I know I'm going all over the place here and I'm talking like a New Yorker, a fast talking New Yorker. But what I'm really trying to say is it's about engagement. And the more engagement, the better the quality the name, the better the quality the follow up you can do to that name. The more they're probably going to buy from you or at least engage with you, and the deeper the relationship you're going to have with them. And frankly, my list, which is not that big, the fact that it's been mostly generated through a lot of it, not mostly, but a lot of it has been generated through podcasts. Me being on someone else's podcast, getting them to opt in for more of my propaganda so that they could get on my list. I say propaganda lovingly, of course, because I think you know, they might think it is. I think it's just most amazing content ever, ever assembled. And so those people are the ones that end up joining my Mastermind groups at $20,000 and $15,000. They're the ones that buy my book. They're the ones that, you know, all the spectrum of spending small amounts of money with me to very large amounts. But I have no chance of usually getting a lot of those large amount buyers if all my names are just coming out of Facebook as opposed to an engagement. And I use that as an example. I'm using Facebook just illustratively. So I just think podcasting as a name generator, if you can figure out different ways to make sure that you can get the names of people that have absorbed content. And again, I think Frank teaches this as well as anybody. The people that go through the entire piece of content are way different than people who go through some smaller portion of it.

So how do you get a name? How do you get a name from a podcast? I mean, do people leave a podcast and go somewhere? I mean, aren't they like, jogging in the car, that type of thing? What do you do?

They are. I mean, I think that what my. My impression is that people are listening, even if they're listening to my podcast, you know, jogging or in a car. The podcasters, I mean, the good ones, I think, don't they put up a page that you can go to with links and with things. And if those links are. And again, I think the person who's doing the podcast, I haven't thought it from the podcaster's point of view. So let me talk about that. Why can't it work like an affiliate? Why can't. If the person you're interviewing ends up selling and it's an affiliate link, as opposed to just a URL, and you could share in the revenue. Why couldn't there be money? I mean, it's okay to make money.

It's okay to make money. I'm thinking more to the specifics of it. So in front of me, I have a couple of direct pieces of mail right now. And so got this one from the Crowne Plaza. Look at that. They want me to come for a free dinner. And, you know, the thing is, if I open this up, they probably want me to call a phone number.

Yeah, those are one of those financial deals where you go to a dinner.

Yeah, exactly.

They have a financial planner trying to, you know.

Exactly. But the thing is, I can take this and I can grab my phone, which is charging right to the right of me. And I can call and I can make the connection, or if I'm on Facebook, I see something, I can click the link. But right now, someone's listening to this jogging, or someone's listening to this in the car, or someone's listening to this on an airplane, and they haven't paid the $89 for in flight. Wi fi. You know, how do they make the jump? Now you're episode number 120 of the podcast report. Congratulations. And people can find all the links at the bottom.

I think you find 119 people before me. That's ridiculous.

Well, I faked it. The 60s and 70s are all a blur to me in more ways than one. And so thepodcastreport.com120 will have the link to your book. And there are people who know they can visit thepodcastreport.com120 to get the link to the book. And of course, most of you listen to this on your iPhone. If you look at the show notes, we'll have a link to that right there in the show notes. And then I'll have a link directly to Brian's book offer. But what else could you do? How do you get people to take action? Because measuring response means you got to give them an action. And the sales that are call or the Facebook page, fill out the form or the text, text back. There's a bit of a delayed response in podcasting. What does your gut tell you on how to handle that?

Yeah, and I'm glad, again, I'm not an expert in podcasting, so I'm glad you're asking this so we can. Maybe we'll come up with this together. But I have an idea. To me, like, I have an expression, life is long, which is kind of a takeoff on life is short. Right. Because we only got this one, and we might as well, like, look at it as it's long. So the relationship is not about today's podcast. The relationship is that, in your case, I love Paul Colligan. I have a shirt that says I love Paul Culligan. Are you going to send me one? Right, sure. Yeah. So basically, if I don't get on your list from today's podcast, I might get on another one, because I'm not going to always be listening here or there or elsewhere. So the idea is for you to do push marketing out to the list. So somehow, at some point in the relationship, I have to get. I have to get away. For me to be able to contact you and for you to not always be in control of the controls. And so I'm thinking, aren't there a lot of different ways, a lot of different potential touch points over the lifetime that we work together as me, as an audience on your podcast? So maybe it's, you know, when they. They have to go download it somewhere. Now, I guess you can't get it from Apple's not giving, you know, itunes isn't giving you the name. But if there's enough places in every single podcast where they will remember one thing as soon as they get somewhere, you've got to capture that name. But we want to have a lot of different places to do it. So does that make sense that it's not just one thing? Because I think if you look at it as this podcast in this space of time, you're absolutely right. I mean, the odds of me being able to capture you, but all I got to do is capture you once. And I'm making it sound like I'm being like a whore to try to get your name and then sell you all sorts of crap. That's not the point. The point is I want you in my world in a bigger way than just listening when you feel like listening on an airplane because you downloaded it at a previous time. I want you to be in my tribe and I would want to be emailing you on a regular basis. I have to get that email once. But once I get it, why can't I go out with emails about, you know, I know we're up. You probably listened to podcast number 120 with Brian, but it made me think of something from podcast number 70 and here's a transcript from that podcast. Like, you start delivering, like, content that has nothing to do with the current podcast, but it's back content. Because you got 120 podcasts full of content. So now you're engaging and creating a relationship. And then within that email there could be links. At some point they're going to go on a computer and not be jogging, I think. Right, right. They're not jogging 100% of the time. So I'm just trying to figure out. I'm brainstorming a little bit with you. I'm trying to, like, get my head out of this place of. Because I'm not. Again, I'm not a podcasting expert. I'm a direct marketing expert. So I'm thinking I want to be able to. I think you said it to me in our pre call. You were saying you were talking about someone who, like, was moving from one, like you were one medium to another. Because they were. Didn't you say something about that? They were. I got them on this medium, but then they were on this. So they were more likely to respond here versus there.

Drawing a point. But, yeah, multimedia is definitely the name of the game here.

So I guess making your podcast into multimedia and with the goal of list building.

Yes, yes. Well, there's a couple elements of play here. And it's funny because, I mean, Brian, for those of you who don't know you, how many pieces of direct mail are you responsible for personally?

Wow. I did a quick calculation that over my last 20 years, and I was in the business for 35, it was like 1.3 billion. So I guess it's somewhere between 1.3 billion and 2 billion, because if I go over 2 billion, it would sound like hyperbole.

Right. So billion with a B. The average price of the mailings across the whole world would be, what. What are you paying per mailing?

You know, and you weren't paying it.

Because you were the. But you know how much money was spent on these mailings?

Yeah, I mean, a direct mail campaign, you know, for a double postcard, you know, could be. I don't know what it is now with postage, but, you know, maybe it's 100, $150 per thousand mailed. But when I was mailing those Bookalogs and Magalogs, which were, you know, much more expensive, we were spending $500 per thousand. So that's, you know, you know, that's a million pieces. You know, I'll do the math. I mean, so if I'm mailing a million pieces at $500, a thousand, I'm being conservative, you know, that's a half a million bucks, you know, to mail. I guess if I did the math right.

Well, and. And where I'm going with this is, you know, the paradigm for podcasting. We're actually going to hit this up on, actually episode 121, the week after this. The paradigm for podcasting right now is that you shouldn't have to pay for bandwidth. And there's the reality of that, there's the marketing of that. But the idea is that you can do a show and you pay the same thing, whether or not there's one download or there's a billion downloads. Now, in the world of direct mail, you pay per piece, and therefore your list has to be good, your targeting has to be good, the offer has to be good. You can't throw something against the wall to see if it Sticks when you're paying really anything. And this is where podcasting gets interesting, because what happens is a lot of podcasters will try something because they can, oh, look, I'm going to get on the phone with so and so, and I'm going to chat with them for a while, and hopefully they'll like me, and hopefully they'll like the other guy. But unfortunately, what happens a lot of times is, you know, we have a mutual friend. We won't call him out per name, but he does a podcast where he might interview somebody for two hours, and that content might be wonderful, but for a lot of people, that two hours is enough. You know, I've dipped my toe into this world that I've been curious about. I got two hours of incredible content I. I don't need anymore. Whereas the smart podcaster does something to integrate more. Right now, a lot of you are listening and you're intrigued by Brian. And Brian said something about this book that retails for what, on Amazon?

On my book?

Yeah.

Like 12 bucks.

Okay, so Brian's got this book that retails for 12 bucks, and then he's got this package of direct marketing sales letters and different things that people have done. And. Did you say Ogilvy on Letterman?

Yeah. Yeah. There's a video. David Vogel being on David Letterman. Yeah.

Crazy, crazy. And then the idea that you're giving all that away for free right now, people are saying, huh, I want to visit this. And so if I slyly say something like, thepodcastreport.com 120, people now know they can go out to the website and click on the link and visit you. And then those of you really paying attention, I've already done that before on the show, and I will do that at the end of the show. And after Brian goes, when I do the post production, I'll do that one more time, giving you a reason to do it. And I think what happens in podcasting sometimes, sadly, is because it's so cheap and because it's so fast, we'll try things, but we won't be purposeful about things. And the thing I love about Brian is Brian came from a world where if you weren't purposeful, you went bankrupt. So Brian never had the opportunity to try something, in a way.

I wrote a blog post once. It was actually how paying postage made me a better marketer.

Yes, there we go. Speak to that.

Yeah. And I think that being intentional about everything you do, a lot of online marketers think that because email is so cheap, that if they send out a bunch of emails that may or may not bring in any orders. No harm, no foul, because I didn't get any orders, but it didn't cost me anything. Think again. It cost you a lot. Because if it was incongruent, if it was something that people were turned off by, you just get a great example in podcasting that it was totally a misdirect. Like it was. Okay, forget about the one that said the podcast was good that I heard, but I don't have to hear another one. What about if the podcast was completely off base? Now you've got people who aren't coming back. And so in the. So basically you did damage to your biggest asset, which is your list. So I think in direct mail, where I couldn't afford to go out with something that wasn't thought through, the email marketer or the podcaster thinks it doesn't really matter because it's cheap. And you know what? It really does matter. Every interaction with every person in your audience, whether it's podcasting, whether it's tv, whether it's direct mail, whether it's email, doesn't matter. It could affect, it's going to affect future response whether you get more of it or less of it. There's no doubt in my mind. And so I'm not saying that every piece of direct mail I put out was perfect for the whole audience. I mean, I was working on 2 to 4% response rates. Although 4% response rates to an Internet marketer is like, wait, that's not 0.0004. That's 4. But that's what we did. So 96% didn't respond. But I wasn't alienating the 96%. You alienate people with a broad email. What about the guy who has an email list who picks the wrong affiliate to promote that their audience thinks is a creep, a thief, it's a bad offer, whatever, that could ruin you forever. That could ruin your list after you spent all this time building your list. So I think you make a great point that you've got to be intentional about everything. Whether it costs you postage and printing or it just costs you time and effort. They're both worth a lot of money to you, long term and short term. And it's the long term that you want to look at, the long term relationship with your list. That's what direct mail was all about. Direct mail was about lifetime value. In fact, indirect mail, because it was so expensive when I did subscription offers at $39 and I sold books for $39. A lot of those billion pieces of mail. I made billions of dollars, $39 at a time. And so the fact remained that I couldn't live on that. $39 for a sale. I mean, we all know that you need to get the back end sales. But one of the things that I knew is that if I screwed up that first sale, I'd have no chance at the second sale. And frankly, direct mail was so expensive that I intentionally lost money on the first sale because I knew from experience how many people would renew for years two and three on my subscription offers. I had newsletters. I knew that I could afford to lose a certain amount in year one to make it back by the end of year two. And that was a really good prescription for $100 million business now because I lived it.

I lived two types listening to that. Type one. Yeah, that's why I'm in podcasting. I don't have to do that. Kind of a mess. But type two is going, wait a minute. You spoke to Russell Brunson a couple of weeks ago on this show. And Russell, yeah, the MP3 player was 10 bucks, but it cost him more than 10 bucks. We were actually looking at the packaging today and the shipping on it was. Let's see, it's not listed here. But he's spending more than 10 bucks to send us a $10 MP3 player. And so Russell is spending money getting people to listen to his show, about to do some projects with some other people who are going to spend money. And the money isn't the microphone, the money isn't the royalty free music. The money isn't the hosting. The money is in the marketing and in the positioning. And not even in the. Not even.

And the list building and the cross sell upsell later on.

Yeah, you know, so spending money on a podcast to market it makes sense on paper. It's the heart of some. It's like, ah, what do I do?

What do I do? No, I mean, think Rich Sheffrin, one of the great marketers ever. I just saw him a couple weeks ago and he has a quote. I got to get the exact quote. But the quote is something like, you don't really have a business until you're willing to pay for media or something like that. It's sort of like if you want to live the rest of your life never paying to acquire a name, never pay to acquire a new buyer and get all your media for free, whether it's affiliate deals, whether it's Facebook posts, whatever organic search, you don't want to pay for anything, you don't have a chance of exponentially growing your business. You have to have an offer at the end of the day that's eventually going to justify paying for some really good media, whether it's direct mail, whether it's to pay to people for your podcast. And that's where the big companies are born. The companies that are really big and expand are not companies that are figuring out how to buy, how to not, how to not buy the most media, how to get as much media for free. That's not how it works. If you can figure out how to get a return on investment, paid media, now you're talking about a higher quality customer for the long haul. And a business, not a product, a business, not a promotion.

You're a high paid consultant. Somebody comes to you and says, hey, Brian, I'm going to launch a podcast. Do you think it's a smart idea versus direct mail, versus Facebook? All the stuff you do with Perry and Facebook, and if somebody came to you and said, and let's assume the product was good, let's assume the offer was good, would you recommend that path?

It's funny, I probably say call Paul Colligan, but what I would say to them is, what's your end game? Is that a medium that's going to work for you? First of all, can you talk or are you illiterate? I would assess, is podcasting a good medium for you because you like to talk and like to interview and all that. But beyond that, it's like, what's your end game? Like, what do you want to do? Do you want to just run around to people and say, hey, I got a podcast and I got a lot of listeners? If that's what you want, great. I don't think you're going to get rich doing that. But what do you have a plan for? How are you going to. I would go right. I always go to lists. You know, I, you know, the rule of thumb in direct marketing is that it's, you know, the success of a direct marketing campaign is depends 40% on your list, 40% on your offer, and 20% on your creative. That doesn't say that the creative is half as important. What it says is if my creative and messaging is perfect and I have a shitty offer and a crappy list that I'm going to, that's not interested, I will get zero sales. However, if I have a targeted list that really likes my stuff and I have an offer that's irresistible with all kinds of free offers, and all kinds of stuff. And my copy is like mediocre. I'll make some money because I've got the audience they're going to. But then put all those things together. That's when you've got the big success stories in direct marketing. Because now you put world class creative and messaging with a great offer to a great list. I always say I use the expression when 41% is a majority. And I wasn't talking about politics. And what I meant was I changed the 40, 40, 20 to 41, 39, 20, 41% is your list. So my thing, if I had a client who said, I want to do a podcast, my thing is, how is it going to help you build your list? How is it going to help you build your tribe? How's it going to help build your audience so that you are in a long game in terms of, you know, really now? It may be. And you know more about this than I do, Paul, you know that, you know, it may be that you can, by building all of the publicity on itunes and that you can talk about that in other places and other media that I have this amazing podcast with all these listeners that could work to your favor. It could help you sell more books down the road. But at some point you need to capture the names of the people that are in love with you, because how are you going to make love to them if you don't have their name? And so I would want the podcasting to lead towards some kind of list building. But do people, I mean, am I off base just in terms of.

No, that's the angle. That's the angle. And I'm going to give you a model that we've been teaching on this show that you could either completely tear apart based on your experience or speak to it. You know, there's a show, have you ever heard of, have you ever heard of Startup by Gimlet Media?

No, I should.

There was this moment. There was this moment at the end of season one that just shook me to the court and put all the realization of this. He says, good news, we've generated 1.5 million in ads. Bad news, we spent 1.6 million getting 1.5 million.

Right, right, right.

And for me, I wouldn't know how to spend 1.5 million on the production of a podcast. Now I would not have spent 1.5 million on getting an audience for the podcast and that type of thing, but that's there. So here's the model I'd love your thoughts on. It's the Four M's of profitable podcasting. M number one, who's your market? Classic direct marketing. And if you think your podcast is for everyone, stop right there.

Yeah, I mean, niche is everything. It's always narrow to broad. So you're right in my sweet.

Step one. So market step two, the message. What are you telling this audience? You know, because, you know, if I'm, you know, if my market is, you know, tweens, and what's the message to the tweens? You know, and then of course, with message, do you have the right to deliver the message? Are you able to find people who can help deliver the message? So the market, the message. The third M is where's the money in that message? You know, I had Brian, I had a paid consulting gig about seven years ago. A guy calls me with a podcast with the craziest downloads in the world. The guy was doing insanely well. Top of the charts, doing great. And it was a foreign language podcast. He was teaching people how to speak a foreign language. And his monetization model, Brian, was, well, I'm going to sell people into Berlitz and I'm going to sell people into Rosetta Stone.

And I'm like, wait a minute, you're.

Giving away for free what you're telling people they should buy? Bad money idea. Bad money idea.

Yeah, that's lots of bad money.

Market message money. Then and only then is the media choice. Because once you've figured out all that, then hitting people once a week, you know, this podcast is the greatest sale for my consulting services. People like, okay, Paul works these things through, he talks these things through. And I might go 52 weeks listening to what Paul's doing before I do that. Podcasting makes a lot of sense. And they're not going to read a book of the transcripts, and I'm not going to get a sales that are written. So this thing serves that very.

Yeah, for you. It serves you beautifully because that's where the life is long thing. So my other thing, even if they don't write down your, they're eventually going to find you once they listen to you enough and they realize you're the guy to go to podcast.

So market message, money, then media. And sometimes maybe it's a podcast that becomes a book. You know, maybe it's. I mean, look at what Tim Ferriss did. Tim Ferriss, New York Times bestseller. But the highlights from his book, the Cliff Notes to his book, not the transcripts. Market message money, then the media choice. What's your take on that?

I Can't pick that apart at all. I think that's right on the money. Even though that's your third M. But the beauty of it is that I think people. There's a great quote from the great Bill Bernbach. I have it in my book, in the forward to the book. And it's something like, I'll try to get it perfect if I can. So Bill Bernbach's one of the fathers of advertising. Doyle Dane Birnback, one of the real mad men in the 60s, right. And his thing was never adapt your technique to the idea. Adapt your idea to the technique. Which really what he's saying is it would be like today for someone to say, shoot, that Facebook thing is huge. I gotta get on there. Well, wait a minute. Is Facebook where your audience is and can you get to them in Facebook? Well, yeah, everybody's on Facebook, so of course I can get to them. Well, no, that's not how you look at it. It's like, why does Mark Cuban on Shark Tank the first time the person says during their pitch, well, this is a really good idea, Mark, because it's a billion dollar market and I only need a little bit of it. And then what does Mark Cuban always say? I'm out. And the reason why he says he's out is because I don't need you thinking about. Because the market's so big, I'll go after some piece of it that's like, that's so convoluted. I mean, you start with the niche first and then you work your way out. And so I think your order is right of your four M's. Although I might put the. I might want to be thinking about the money right at the beginning. Only because you have to. Message and market are so important. But, you know, that's what all the startups that caused the dot bomb was because of. No one was in the room saying, how are you going to make money doing that? Now, some of them didn't care because they were getting ridiculous multiples for air. But that changed right after 2001. So I think that there's, there's a sense of, of, you know, I, I had a consultant who was a guy from the 1950s and 60s in the magazine world, and he said, never leave a meeting until you say, where does the money flow? That's his. That was his line. Adolf Hour backer built Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies Home Journal at Meredith Magazines. Where does the money flow? So that everybody's like all excited about all this stuff. We're going to do. And someone should ask the question, where does the money flow? So the money's important, but then it doesn't have to be in every medium. And some media is going to work better than others. And so podcasting is not for everybody. There's no way. Neither is. I mean, you could say that the Internet is for everybody because it's so accessible, but the Internet is a lot of different things. AdWords is different than Facebook, which is different than email marketing, which is different than display advertising. They're all different. And by the way, if anybody ever claims that they're an expert in all those things, and you only need to go to one person to buy all that media. Run away. Run away.

You know, impact versus downloads. Been trying to explain that for a decade. And finally, about six months ago, I had a realization that most people would stop their podcast if there was only one download per episode unless they realized that the one download was the President of the United States of America. Now, maybe that changes with recent issues.

I only got, like, six donors on my list, but one of them gave me $100,000.

Exactly, exactly. We want impact. And I think, unfortunately, podcasting has two elements, and this show is about doing real business with your podcast. And the enthusiast has already left because you're an evil corporate sellout. And probably. Yeah, all sorts of things we could throw at you. But I think what you bring to the game here that's so intriguing and I was so excited to get you on the show is podcasting is not the message. Podcasting is not the method. Podcasting is a channel that in some situations makes so much sense. You know, you did. How many episodes, how many podcasts did you do for the book?

I think for the book alone. I mean, I probably. Since I started my own business two years ago, I've probably been on, I don't know, somewhere between 50 and 100 podcasts, but I don't know what number. Probably closer to 100. And I was on 35, I think, in the last four or five months just to promote my book.

And.

But it was all list. It was all list building.

Yeah. And your time, if somebody called, and we all know the world's full of bargaining and this type of stuff, but if somebody called, you know, your gal and booked an hour of time with Brian, how much would it cost?

I do. Right now, I'm doing like, a thousand dollars an hour. Okay.

And that's real, guys. There are a lot of people who say they're doing that. There are people actually doing that. And that's Brian. And that's real. And I've seen him. I watched you. Actually, I won't say the gentleman's name, but it was a well known gentleman with a lot of books under his belt. And I was watching you do your thing at one of the events we were at. I'm like, ah, I love that Brian guy.

Oh, thank you.

And then I walked around, took some notes on how I'm going to try to, you know, rip you off with that. But please, you know, you've spent, you know, I'm looking at the clock now with Skype here. Where is the clock? We've been going for 58 minutes and 36 seconds. Obviously some of that was pretty show. Now, obviously you don't have 40 hours of $1,000 billable every week and we all could do the math here. But the value of this game, you're not doing this. You do this partially because we're buds and I appreciate that. But the value of the game. But we're enough of a friend that you would say, paul, this is pointless, this is worthless. Let's do something that actually makes sense. You have chosen this path to get the word out about your book. Your list. Good. Is it selling? Is it working? Are people coming into your Mastermind as a result of this? Is the whole plan there?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, but it's not like it's not immediate either. If you want a quick fix, this is like a long, it's a long game. You know, if I'm selling a 20,000 and I have two masterminds, I have a 25 and a 15. So I don't know who's going to end up coming into the Mastermind. But if I put the right kind of people into my group, anybody who listens to me on a podcast, then goes to my website to opt in and listens to another interview that I've done and then buys my book and gets all those freebies, either they like, they have to like me a little bit, just a little bit. Whether they ever have the money to buy my Mastermind get join my Mastermind may never happen. But you know what? I'm going to also be publishing great books of direct marketing. And when I go out to my list with that, they're going to eat those up at 100 bucks a pop. And it's not that I need the money. It's not about the money. It's about I have a tribe that's been vetted through. I'll call it long form copy in this particular case, if a lot of my lists came from people who listened to me on a podcast, that's as qualified as long form direct mail and way more qualified than adding names to my list or Facebook. But that doesn't mean someone from Facebook couldn't come on my list and then also join my master.

Well, we're promote this show on Facebook. I'm going to put this on my page, on the episodes page. We'll probably cross reference with you, but there's another aspect.

And again, so here's the altruistic aspect. While I'm in those four M's as well as anybody. Yeah, of course I would never, you know, you had me at hello and you said would you? You know, before you even asked me to do your podcast. It's like anything Paul asked me, I'm gonna do. But the point, the point was also that I'm also an interesting stage in my life where I'm a teacher, I'm a coach, I do a lot of stuff pro bono. Not, well, not, not as much. I probably more than I should, as Joe Polish tells me, but I give away a lot. And sometimes I'll say to somebody, I, you know, I charge $1,000 an hour. I don't want to charge you. So give $1,000 to this charity because I want to spend the time with you. But if you get it for free, you're not going to use it, that kind of thing. So I do a lot of that, but because my thing is about impact as much as it is about money. And if you keep generating impact, that's why podcasting I find so fascinating and why I'm such a huge fan of yours, because you're the guy in, in a medium that's so powerful, because podcasting is a place where people can really express themselves at a very, very high level. Get really deep, you know, it's definitely a mile deep as opposed to a mile wide. And so to me, that's where impact is made. And when you're making impact, it's not that the money just comes automatically or magically, but it's going to come because you're engaging. I use that word a lot when I talk about direct mail. Engaging. You're engaging with a prospect, with anybody who's listening to you at such a deep level. That's the kind of people you want around you. If you're going to end up monetizing it someday, and even if you don't, it's okay because you'll monetize something elsewhere.

Let's Change the game here, and if this goes radically bad, I'll just edit this out. But at the very first Podcast Expo, it was a fascinating event. I learned more from what wasn't said and what wasn't done and that kind of thing that would actually happen. But very famous podcaster said and got. Got the tribe riled up, got. They were ready to just storm la. It took place in a. Took place in Ontario, California, which it was so funny because a lot of podcasters said, why is it in Canada? But that's a whole nother issue. The podcaster stands up and just. He says, podcast your passions and the profit will follow. Which sounded great, got everybody excited. But then we got my buddy who taught people how to speak Spanish and never thought about the profit from teaching great service.

You got to think about it. You got to think about it.

So how do we rewrite what is Podcast yout Passions and the profit will follow. What is version two of that? What do we do with that?

Yeah, the way I would revise that. The passion will get you to the audience that could. This is like a Dan Sullivan thing, strategic coach, where, you know it will. It's the way to put yourself in front of the people who could write you the biggest checks. Because if you're talking in your passion and they're the. The avatar, you know, the. The. The core market for what your passion is, the key is, while it's not going to automatically put money into your bank account, you have to be intentional about how you're going to. So the 2.0 would probably be. Again, it comes down. I guess everything for me comes down to lists. It always comes down to audience and lists. And how do I get that name so I can push out to them at some point with even more passion.

So how about this? So I wrote down your notes here. Passion can get you in front of the people who. Who can write the biggest checks.

I think that's right. And then you need a plan to make sure that you could give them a really good reason to write the biggest checks. And it doesn't necessarily have to be another podcast. It could be an email. It could be a Facebook post on a retargeting. I don't know. It could be a direct mail package if you had their postal addresses, which.

Russell did when he did the MP3 player giveaway.

Exactly.

So passion can get you in front of the people who can write the biggest checks. Dash. Just give them a reason to do so.

Exactly. You got to give them a reason. You got to be intentional that's the quote.

That's the quote, my friend. That's going to be the. You're going to see that pretty much hyped up on Social because I think that is it. And passion's fun. Nobody's going to listen to this and go, boy, I wish Brian cared about direct marketing. And you are passionate about this. And this does get you in front of the people who can write the biggest checks. But if you're not intentional about it, you're going to get a whole lot of people who hold Brian in a special place in their heart, but never at an event go, hey, Brian, what would it take for a half a day, right?

And you know what, though? But here's the other side of that. Going back to the impact piece for every one of those. I am fine with hundreds and hundreds of people who buy my book and get value out of it. I don't make a penny on my book, by the way. The way, you know, it's $12 book. There's how much room is there to make money, right? That's not why I did the book. But the fact that my name is out there associated with six of the greatest legends of advertising and they can go change their life, something's going to happen. That's where. That's where you can depend on a little bit of good karma to have some money come back to you later on. But there's got to be a piece of it that, you know, is somewhat intentional. But I think if you have that intention and you're okay if you're. You can't be 100% okay with. Passion will eventually make me rich. But you can be pretty okay with, you know, if I'm intentional about my passion, the list that I produce, the. That I'm in front of people that can eventually write me a check, a lot of good stuff's going to happen. And it's not going to happen all at once either. You know, you got to be. You got to be patient.

Intention about passion.

It is Intention about passion might be.

That might be the title for this episode. All right, this is episode 120 again, the podcastreport.com120. Brian's too good. I'm not going to do some sort of in response here. You'll be able to get the link out to his book. Pick it up. The bonus pack is there. And the cool thing is, Brian, there's two people, those who have listened this far who are going to visit the podcastreport.com120 to pick up the book. And those who haven't listened this far, we're not wasting their time because they figured Brian's not the guy for me.

Right?

So you've been doing this for so long. You've been doing this for so well, you've been doing this with such class and such a sense of humor here. What does the podcaster who's looking to do real business with their podcast, not pay for their microphone and the trips out to Ontario and that kind of thing, but someone who's looking to do real business with their podcast and maybe leverage this wonderful world of direct marketing that Brian is so passionate about and loves so dearly. What is the big number one take home for them?

So people who have the podcast or have been on podcasts, either people who.

Want to use a podcast to do real business, theirs or someone else's.

Yeah, I mean, I love the. I just think if it's, I guess the big takeaway for me is that it's great content that could be used. I mean, we talk about creating content that people will pay for. What about content that people will give you their email address for? That's just as good to me. So I think that, and maybe I'm, maybe I have low expectations, like you're not going to pay me for this interview, but do you want this interview for free? Just email. You know, give me your email address and then you're on my blog list and then I got you. And so I think anybody with a podcast, whether you have one, you know, you've got great content. As Russell, we talked about his thing and you know, he's got all this, these great interviews. What Joe Polish does with his, I love marketing, how he recycles it. And then if you've been a guest, I mean, I'm constantly giving people, I might take the link that we have here and post it on my Facebook page and then put it on my, my blog page or even send it to my blog audience because, you know, then they'll learn about you and then you get the benefit of that. So it's basically to reuse, repurpose great content for the purposes of list building and eventually monetization. I guess that's the big takeaway.

I meant the, you know, it's, it's almost like as if a good chunk of the world is seeing podcasting as a one step process. Podcast your passion, don't worry about. The profits are coming, you know, and you're almost saying podcast your passion strategically so that the profits can come, you know. Yeah, step One doesn't equate to step two, but step one with just a little bit of strategy and just a little bit of purpose and just a little bit of bit of and still test and still do ab and still do all the great tools that direct marketing brought us. Do the long form episode, do the short form episode, see what kind of response you get. Do the multiple part episode, give away a great giveaway versus a generic set of notes and see what that does to your list building. Do people want more of you because you promised them something, or did people want more of you just because the content was so good? The giving you the email address is the obvious next step.

Right.

You know, and I think what happens is, you know, we can buy a MIC for under 100 bucks, we can host for less than five. We get on, we chat, we believe that the passion brings the profits. And then in a year, once we realize we've spent all these hours, nothing's there. We blame it on podcasting. You know, just like the guy who spends, you know, $300 on a Facebook ad buy and it doesn't work, blames it on Facebook or, you know, just like so and so buy. But we have this unique opportunity. You're thrilled by it, and you're a guy who has seen all the tech for a lot of decades and starting at 9 gave you that unique opportunity to still keep your youthful figure in the midst of seeing all this stuff. But that's where we are in the space. And just a little bit of positioning, a little bit of strategy, a little bit of purpose, and you've got something really, really powerful.

Yes. It's just you asked that question before. You know, if I was consulting to a client who wanted to do a podcast and not being a podcast expert, I would ask all the questions that would lead to what you just said, which is, you know, what's your long game? What do you really want to accomplish? And if you start thinking that through, you're just going to be way more strategic about it and not just do it because it's, you know, fun to do or, you know, everybody else is doing it. Everybody told me to do one. That's not obviously a good reason. So you want to be able to think it through. And if you think it through like a direct marketer, even better, because then you're going to think about response, measurable response.

Check out the podcastreport.com120 for a link to Brian's book, his website, and everything else we chatted about in this episode. I just finished the advertising solution. It's fantastic. My wife actually picked it up and she's having a blast with it as well. He has a lot to teach us. He's done a lot. And the greatest thing here, my biggest take home from this episode is that if we get smart and if we integrate these principles, these decade nearly century old concepts of direct marketing inside of podcasting, we can do these cool things. We can podcast our passions strategically for response in such a way as to see the profit. I think, Brian, for coming on the show, I know this is going to invoke some responses again. All the sites, the podcastreport.com, facebook, Twitter, 120, if you want to just comment right here on the episode and of course subscribe itunes, stitcher, Google, however you want to come, make sure you come. The podcast report, as you can see, is getting a little bit deeper, a little bit more tight, a little bit more integrated into what us podcasters can do. I've got more interviews coming, I've got more content coming that is going to help you do real business with your podcast. Can't wait to get it to you. The best way to get it, the easiest way to get it is to subscribe. It's not just truth, but it's also the power of podcasting that I do love so much, that I am so passionate about that has put me in front of the people who can write the biggest checks. Thanks so much. We'll chat next week. Bye.