Tickets To The Top, with Paul Colligan

Welcome to the next episode of Podcast Payoffs. My name is Gord Vickman, here as always with my partner, Dan Sullivan, and a very special guest joining us today. Dan, his name is Paul Colligan has a long, rich history with you and also a strategic coach. Paul is a consultant and executive producer, keynote speaker as well, and he shares strategies that really work in the podcasting industry. So naturally he'd be a good fit for Podcast Payoffs. He's a good friend of ours and good friend of the show as well, author as well of the bestsellers how to Podcast and Podcast Strategies books. How's that for an intro, Mr. Colligan?

Man, I'll take it. Send this to mom, would you?

Already done. Technology made that possible.

Yeah. I think my introduction to Paul actually precedes my first podcast. I talked with you, I met you as I meet practically everybody else through Joe Polish. You know, I talked about it, and here we are probably seven, eight years later, and I got my own podcast manager.

Yeah, you do. Well, here's the thing, Dan. Episode one, I did a little research here. Episode one of 10X Talk was August 3rd, 2012. So we're nearly nine years ago.

Almost nine years. Nine years, yeah.

And I got some fun stats. We'll be chatting.

It's a great segue, Paul. What have you seen happen in those almost 10 years? Let's say one thing that really stands out. That's a pretty heady question, but.

Well, I'll tell you, I'm going to make the transition really easy for you. I started the game in 2000. I had dinner with the CEO of Audible and I was hooked. And I wanted to launch on Audible. And he told me, you can launch on audible. It's 500k to get in. And we get 70%, you get 30%. And there's this Hogwarts mystical witch character book that's doing it. There's this Tom Clancy guy who's doing it, so you can join us. And I walked away completely defeated. I wanted to be audible, but I couldn't at that point, podcasting pops up. Bam. I can be audible now. I can be audible now. That was my instant out the door idea. And it was so much so that although podcasting was free, about two years later, I was done with the first premium podcasting platform called Premium podcasting. Spent about $20,000 getting developed and about, you know. Well, no. All four of my clients at $97 a month were big fans. I got in way, way, way too early. They say, one step ahead. You're a visionary, two steps ahead, you're a martyr. I was about 10 steps ahead. So from day one, I wanted people paying for podcasts. I wanted, you know, the premium, the hbo, you know, I mean, I remember when I was a kid in the 70s, what Daryl pays for TV. Yeah, but Daryl got King Kong without commercials and all I had was stupid sending one in cartoons. So I wanted to pay for podcasting. For a long time. People came up with it. Apple announced just recently, we're going to do it. It's out, it's rolled out, the software is there, and boy, is it fascinating because now it's in the same place. And it's not just go to a website, sign up, give a credit card, but it's that same one click functionality that we have for our apps that has created a billion dollar economy. So this is interesting. So, yes, paid podcasting, I saw it a long time ago. It's now, you know, with the cool kids, if you will. I think it's going to get really interesting.

Gord would go to podcasting conferences and the talk is, how do you monetize your podcasts? And we approach podcasting the same way, you know, we approach our quarterly books, and that is that, first of all, our podcasts are really for our existing clients, and then they are the marketing network that sends the podcasts out to other people. But I was trying to think of an image of how we approach podcasting and virtually all of our other marketing. It's kind of like the tide coming in. You're probably pretty close to the seashore where you can watch the tide come in. And it's hard to imagine when the tide's out, how it actually gets in, you know, because it's, you know, and it takes about six, seven hours and the ground isn't even wet, and seven hours later, it's 10ft deep. And so our whole point is that every podcast has a little wave coming in, but the depth of the tide, when it's full tide, is signups for the program. So, for example, the who not how book three weeks ago, we have 120 direct signups for strategic coach. We're at about 135, 140,000 copies right now. One of our marketing tech people looks at conversations where it's clearly stated that the reading of the who not how book was the deciding. That was the trigger that got people to sign up. The lifetime value of a client is $40,000. So 120 times 40,000. The next one goes in next week. It's gap in the gain. So my whole attitude is that you just keep massaging the marketplace with messages and then you pay attention to what your real sale actually is.

We have four questions here. Question number one is, what do you want the podcast to do? Question number two is, how do you know the podcast is doing it? Done. Yeah.

What do you think it means, Paul? That everything's kind of branching out right now? Like the way we handle them at Strategic Coach, we're sending out these, first of all, livable assets online. If there's some issue that a client has that one of our people is discussing with them, we probably have something in our arsenal where Dan and Shannon have discussed that in the past, or perhaps Dan with another client on multiplier mindset, they can send that out to them. So it's like doing a sales call without actually having to do a sales call to cover those issues. So that's the theory and that's the strategy behind the Strategic Coach family of podcasts, is we're sending out the messages, like Dan said, to massage people. We've never had a billboard in Kenya, but I know for sure there's 14 people who really like one of our shows in Kenya because we know that through our analytics. Will we ever have our first Kenyan client? Probably, because that's what we're doing.

One of the signups is from Kenya.

Well, there we go.

Kenya, Ghana. So we have two hour zoom calls. So when somebody signs up for the virtual program. So the big upswing has been people who are never going to come to a workshop, they're doing virtual workshops. So it's a four hour workshop that they do every two months, so it's six times a year. And then they get two connector calls. So they get 18 events a year. But I had a zoom call, and it really struck me how much life has changed in a year. Somebody from Taipei and Taiwan, Vietnam, somebody from Ho Chi Minh City and Mumbai and India, Dubai, Ghana, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam. What these people are, Paul, they're all people who have signed up for the program, but they haven't come to their first workshop yet. Okay. And one thing is that that's something that we could never have done in the past without, you know, the zoom platform. But what's really interesting when you dig deeper, they've listened to podcasts for the last five, six years.

Yep.

You know, so we felt that when we came in with Zoom, you know, because no incentive, like, no alternative. So we, you know, we went there. We weren't hitting a cold audience. We weren't hitting A cold marketplace. There were a lot of people and they had sort of in their back of their mind, they had checked a box. You know, someday I'm going to bite the bullet and I'm going to get on a plane and I'm going to go to strategic coach. Well, last year has eliminated that barrier. So we're up to 400. 400 who have signed up just for the virtual only program.

That's fantastic. And Gord, what you said, I think we're in it. We're drinking the Kool Aid. But you know what's amazing here is sales calls are long, sales calls are tedious, and sales calls are expensive. And when somebody calls and says, I listened to the first 50 episodes of 10X Talk, I'm in. Sign me up. We got rid of the long and the tedious and the expensive, and we went instantly to the conversion. Joe Polish called me once and he said, how do we put ads on I love marketing? Like Joe. No, no, no. I love marketing sells genius network. And we figured out he'd have to put ads on like 1.8 million downloads or something to get the conversion. And I'm like, if you can't get somebody in a genius network out of every 1.8 million downloads of I love marketing, you better hang up the show, Joe. You better hang up the show. Yeah, you know, and I'm looking at your stats right now. I have access to 10x talk. If it's okay with you. Can I share a number?

Yeah, please.

So in 2021, you've already had 188 downloads of episode one that was released nine years ago. You know, 8, 3, 12. You know, and so, you know, I mean, this is insane. 188 different times. And what's funny is 17 of them are on Pandora, where most of the country doesn't even know that there are podcasts. And we certainly dreamed a podcast on Pandora at the time that we launched this. And 24 of them were on Spotify, which didn't even exist when we launched this. And so what's amazing here, and countries, three in India, five in South Africa, eight in Australia. And this is just Croatia's in there. Big Croatian fans, Germany, France, they're all there. And this is something that I don't think you've gotten up in the morning and wondered, whatever happened to season one or episode one? You know, that thing just exists. It's just an ever running asset.

It takes a while to actually understand it yourself, but it takes quite a while to explain it to someone else. That an old podcast series is always new to the person who's listening to it for the first time.

Yeah, yeah.

And what they're delighted with, I mean, I just came across a. I'm a voracious reader, especially, you know, detective stories, homicide stories. So I just came across a writer who died 15 years ago, and this is the first time that I've actually read anything. And he had nine books that were written in the 1970s, 80s. And I said, oh, I found a new writer. I found a new writer. But first of all, he was around a long time, but I just discovered him. It's the same thrill as a new writer bringing out a new book. Last month, you just found something new. And it also points. I think Gord really marinated me with this when he came in and, you know, took over the structure and the organization of what we're doing. He said, what you're selling is a relationship. And he said, once you get this relationship, you don't have any competitor. You know, I notice myself, the podcasts that I go to, that I'm there because I'm just checking in with somebody that I know really well. And I like his point of view. I like how he thinks about things, and I like the guests that he has on. I like the people that he introduces me to. It's kind of hard because you think about it as radio, but radio has spectrum scarcity, right?

Exactly, Exactly.

But there is no spectrum scarcity. Right.

Never in a million years.

You can't fill up the podcast spectrum and nobody can own it.

They're certainly trying, but.

Yeah, because what happens is, I'm looking at these stats. I mean, let's talk about spectrum in a million years. You've got some big dreams over there at Coach, but I don't think anybody ever said, what about our South Africa distribution model? And you didn't have anybody check into radio. It's probably cheap in South Africa to get radio time, but you never asked for it. You never thought about it. It just happened. And the total cost of your entire South African distribution policy is zero, complete, zero cost. So let them. Let them download. And that's so different than. Whereas if you send them a copy of the quarterly book, there's some cost there. If you had them attended event, you're paying whoever's teaching the event. I went to a Coach thing in downtown Portland. I think Paul ran that one way back in the day. And I'm looking around the room, okay, each of those croissants was six bucks. The coffee was this how much are they spending to make this happen? Nothing in the podcast. Nothing in the podcast. And so as a result, you can try things that you weren't able to try before. You never would have thought of the Mumbidian strategy, but, boy, you're taking the clients, you know, I mean, is there a Mumbai and strategy up on the whiteboards?

Coach?

There is. We spend about 30% of time thinking about it. Yeah, it's really, really vital.

And the model of, you know, people think of podcasting like radio, and the model is, you know, if I'm doing a show here in Portland, I got to get a local restaurant to buy the time, which means I got to get a certain amount of people in Portland to listen to the show, to buy the time to make the local restaurant in Portland pay for it. You know, but if I have one listener in every city, you know, every country paying me lifetime value of 40 grand, you know, this is a multimillion dollar industry. How dare I think that this is about an ad for local restaurant?

Paul, in a roundabout way, I think I know the answer to this. But Dan and I were speaking on a previous episode of Podcast Payoffs. You know, bullish or bearish, on the entire, I don't even know if I can call it a trend yet of the subscription based podcast model that Apple is introducing and that Spotify is introducing. You're walling yourself off from that global audience. Yay or nay, in your opinion, is this going to fly? Yay.

But it's not the scarcity side of yay. I went to school, UC Santa Barbara. If you wanted to get drive time, there was one news station, people driving home from work. All you had to do was to buy the one ad on that one news station and you owned the entire town. That was an expensive process. That was an expensive thing. I don't have to worry about that anymore. There is revenue to be made by premium podcasting. There is room to be made by paid podcasting. But back, what do you want the podcast to do? I want to pay all the bills to premium. That's one model. What do you want the podcast to do? I want to bring in new lifetime clients at 40 grand lifetime value. That's another model. And so it's there. I mean, Audible is essentially premium podcasting. It's a nice little industry. I haven't really listened to a book on tape in so long, but they're doing okay. So it's not that the paid podcasting kills the free podcasting, it's the paid podcasting comes in the genre and makes things easier.

Yeah. Do you know Carrie Oberbrunner?

Have you ever met Cary?

Yeah.

Yep.

Well, Kerry does all of our Audibles. So with the quarterly books, he did a backlog because he came on when we already had about 10, 12 out there. So we did backlog. Some of it is subscription, but he'll do Facebook Live interview with me when the book comes out. So we do about an hour and we'll get about a thousand, you know, on the call, and then that goes out to all their Connector friends and that. So you probably reach about 20, 25,000, and then it goes on Amazon at that moment. It's one of our free zone collaborations because there's money that gets generated from the sale of the Audible subscriptions and everything like that. And we just say, well, that's your money, Gary. That's not how we make our money. We don't make our money from Audible subscriptions. That really tells me that if you're in a position and you've got a good business model and you've got good cash flow and it's sort of a predictable cash flow, I'll trade money for capability anytime, you know, in other words, if I can get a capability, that just gets me. Nobody was putting my stuff on Audible before Carrie came along. And Now I'm on 39,001 of my favorite bookstores, it's a London, and it's one of these five store book. It's right near Piccadilly. You know, it's very, very central and everything else.

Waterstone, I think, is what you're looking for.

Waterstones. Waterstones.

That wasn't me, that was the Oracle. Stealthily fine. Waterstone.

They have three restaurants in the bookstore and they have sofas and, you know, they have cafes and everything. So the first one we went out, it appeared on their Audible platform. It appeared 72 hours. 72 hours after the last one, it appeared 36 minutes after we went on. So I said, that's a nice measurement. That's a nice measurement. And what you're doing is that you're just massaging the world around a particular relationship. You know, that's what I see. I mean, it's a forever project because when would you not want somebody in the world who you can have a relationship with?

Yeah, I do think what's fun here, and I think what's important here is there's a role for this. A lot of talk is a lot of podcasts, subscribe on Tip Jars and Patreon and this type of thing. There's a lot of people saying, well, basically with the premium, Apple has turned on the one click tip jar. And there are several of my friends who are just putting their same podcast behind premium. And people can pay two bucks a month for it if they want. That one makes me a little bit nervous because, you know, do you want two bucks a month from a lot of people or do you want one out of every thousand to give you 40 grand lifetime? You know, that's the number that you want to look at. And I think there's definitely room for premium. You know, there are musicians right now who are like, forget the albums, I'm done. I'm going to release a single, going to put on itunes. I'm going to make my, you know, my itunes. You know, that model's there. But the real money is, you know, John Cougar Mellencamp was one of the last concerts here in town before we all got shut down. You know how you got Johnny's new CD by going to the concert? Because the CDs used to sell the concert, now the concert sells the cd. An interesting place. So it's gonna exist, it's gonna be good. We're gonna play with it to see what it means and how the interface is. But I think on the bigger level, what do you want the podcast to do? If anybody wants the podcast to bring in people more than four figures, it's not advertising. It's the long term relationship the podcast makes possible. Just track it, know if it works.

Paul, how are you approaching? I mean, you're a scout, you're an explorer, you're a geographer, you're basically giving structure to the podcast world. So you're someone who is someone that you'd want to stay in touch with. You know, I'd like to know how Paul's thinking about this. You as your own knowledge and your own content. How are you approaching it right now? That might be different from, let's say a year ago.

This is a new line of revenue. They didn't fix the old line, they didn't replace things. So you got to think of it newly. And so I'm going to create some content just to sell it and I'm going to put that online. I'm going to play with it. If you look at logic, part of why podcasting is so fantastic is it's one standard that nobody owns. That's why it won. That's why it did so well. It. Yet on the premium side of things, everybody has their own standard. You know, you can do premium on Apple and you can do premium on Spotify, but it's two entirely different interfaces. There will be a standard for this that'll be coming soon. You know, whether or not Apple jumps on it or not will be interesting. But so I always play, I always dip into it. You know, I'll put some stuff out there, I will see what happens. But more importantly, I'll spend some time just investing in people who do do this. You know, I'm going to buy some product, you know, I'll probably spend 5, 600 bucks by the end of the year on different premium podcasts just to see how they handle it and how they play that. What's interesting is the tech does stack on itself. And this is the thing that gets me really interested. There is a concept called dynamic ad insertion which get this is the insertion of ads dynamically. I know, crazy technology talk. We can click a button over at Genius and we could run ads for June 2021 on your August 2012 episode of 10X, you know, brand new and it's funny, people like, oh, that's crazy. Well, turn on the TV. You know, MASH was in the 70s, they're running commercials from today on. It's not that crazy of a concept. You can just do that. I think what's interesting is imagine if somebody paid for the content yet still got ads inside of it. What would people do that happens on Hulu? HBO just released the ad based version of the Hulu app. You know, now you can qualify the audience a little bit. It's hard to track, you know, how many of these downloads. We have a mutual friend, I'm pretty sure you know him, who is convinced that he is massive in Sri Lanka because of 80% of his downloads come from Sri Lanka. I'm like, no, no my friend, you are not massive in Sri Lanka. There is a server farm somewhere that is doing these downloads, you know, and this premium gateway could be really, really interesting because if it was 99 cents to get in, how many 99 cents subscribes do I get from Sri Lanka? I buy, you know, internally, I'm in Coach, I'm in 10x now. You know, we have this big membership site where we can download everything. You know, half of your quarterly books aren't on Kindle yet inside of the membership site. You know, Paul deals with it, he goes to Amazon, he clicks the button and he downloads the Kindle version because a bug, you know, who cares at this level? Yeah, and I think that's going to be a play for it.

So I think they're 99 cents on Kindle because.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm going to be okay.

I mean, again, you know, we're trying to establish a relationship here.

Yeah, exactly. Let's go exactly to that. Free downloads of the quarterly book, which is possible at Amazon. What does that tell you? 99 cents is a much better metric for how many people are taking this book seriously.

What's the Joe Polish line? If you don't pay, you don't pay attention.

And the line is Joe Polish.

Thank you.

The line is from zero to a penny. If they're willing to pull out the credit card, it doesn't have to be much. And so that's where I think premium podcasting is going to get interesting.

You mentioned dynamic ads, Paul. So one of the things we do, I talk to coach clients all the time and one of the questions that I'm sure you get all the time throughout all the conferences and the speaking engagements you are engaged in is how do I make money off this thing? And just to wrap up this episode, because we're almost out of time, but we use the dynamic ads not to sell anything directly because that would be like going from making googly eyes across the bar at someone to walking over and asking them to marry you. It's like, slow down, cowboy. You know, let's hold hands. First we have dynamic ads running on top of Inside Strategic Coach and Multiplier Mindset, sending them to a broadcast friendly URL that I bought. It's free. Toolkit Coach.

Yep.

You can't forget that even if a donkey kicks you in the head. Yep, Free Toolkit Coach. You go there, you download four of Dan's favorite tools for free. But guess what? The tools are gated. So now we know who you are. We know how to reach you because you know, you have your email address and then we have our qualifier. So are you an entrepreneur? Dah, dah, dah, dah. And from that which never existed before, these shows that we had were going out into the atmosphere, now we have a way to establish that relationship and we are generating. It's just been a slow burn at first because people I think were trying to get their head around it as well. But we are generating dozens of qualified leads from that funnel squeeze from the podcast in there. So the dynamic ads that you recorded.

How many years ago?

And it lives on. You know what, it's the gap in the GAIN mini book and the Impact feature filter.

There we go.

People love it.

They love it. Yeah.

Well, again, if it's the first time you're encountering something that's brand new. And a lot of people don't realize that good content lasts forever, I guess.

Oh, Dan, ever released the gap in the gain 22 version? The gap in the gain 23 version? The gap in the gain 24 gap and gain exists. It's fine. We got the small book and the big book version of it, but that's it. We don't have to go back and investigate that again.

Yeah.

You know, in our mindset scorecard, I don't know if that's part of the toolkit that you're giving away, but in our mindset scorecard, one of our things is assets, not episodes, you know, and once you create an asset, you can run that forever, you know, and then you run the dynamic ads up against it. Free Toolkit Coach. You know, you could run an ad right now saying, well, the whole world's coming back to work from COVID and you're trying to figure out your role as an entrepreneur in the midst of this, there's no better time to consider it, you know, that you run for a little while, you know, then in November you might run the, well, we're back in quarantine, you know, or maybe you don't run that one. We'll find out what happens in November. But, you know, but you can run new ads, updated ads. Hey, it's 2022. What better time to look at the Free Coach toolkit. So keep the content, keep the asset, not the episode, but change dynamically the ads. It's a beautiful game.

And like your John Mellencamp concert, Paul, people love hearing the hits.

Exactly.

Play the hit. Paul Colligan. Where can people find more about you?

Oh, paulcolligan.com I have a fun newsletter called Heads Up Tuesday. Every Tuesday we give you the heads up on what's happening in the industry. And it's five links, five clicks, you know, above the fold when it lands in your email box, even on the phone. So headsuptuesday.com if you want to know what's going on there.

Yeah.

Excellent. So this is a two part series wrapping up for this one. Dan, Paul, thank you. Always a pleasure.

Thank you.

We'll see you on the next episode.