Twitter Bombing Isn't The Problem - The Podcast Report Episode #25

Twitter bombing isn't the problem. It's the podcast report. Episode 25 show notes and links and conversation. Thepodcastreport.com 2, 5 show hotline is 503-897-1290. It's the podcast Report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. First, we'll start with the big idea. It's impact, not clicks, guys. It's sales, not downloads. It's position, not rank. The power of podcasting is not in these outdated metrics that everybody's following that the Twitter bombers are exploiting, but in the opportunity that new media gives us. Let's do this. Hey, this is the podcast Report. My name is Paul Calligan. I'm a six time top selling author. I wrote the business podcasting bible, the number one top selling podcast strategies. Actually have a new book coming out in a couple of months called how to Podcast. I've been part of podcasting since the beginning. I love this industry. I've loved it since day one. Two audiences for this show, the podcast, those who are podcasting, I salute you. I take off my hats and I thank you for doing what it is that you are doing. Podcasting is fabulous. The other part of my audience are those of you thinking about getting into podcasting. You want to look at what's real, what's going on and well, I hope to go into that deeply in this podcast. This is not a massive play. This is a deep one. This is about, as I said earlier, impact, not clicks, sales, not downloads, and position, not rank. All right, so the topic today is Twitter bombing isn't the problem now, why the topic? There's been a lot of buzz about the issue. I've had some personal experiences with the issue. Maybe we'll hit that in another episode. But the fact of the matter is it's been buzz it's been talking about and Dave Jackson today and the day I'm recording this. So obviously it's going to come out a couple of days later, but Dave made a video, a really impassioned video about Twitter bombing, explaining what it is and explaining why it's a bad idea and what it does bad for the industry. And I linked to it and if you head out to thepodcastreport.com 5 you will see a link to it. I appreciate Jackson all the time. I love what this guy's doing. I can't wait to see what he pulls off over at nmx. But the fact of the matter is I got to disagree a little bit. Twitter bombing is not the problem. It's an industry that ranks things based on what can be cheated and hacked from Twitter bombing. I think we are better than that. Now, Twitter bombing, three kinds of damage. Number one is it wastes a lot of time. Everybody involved in Twitter bombing time is wasted. Those who, like Dave said, click through on Twitter to find, hey, this isn't what I was looking for. Yes, we've wasted their time. Sadly, there are some tools that make social media marketing and social media automation pretty easy. But the funny thing is, a lot of these people aren't using it. Everything Dave said is absolutely right. If you spent that time actually working on your audience and actually working on your marketing, you could probably do better most of the time. So, number one, it's killing a lot of time. It's wasting a lot of time for Everybody involved. Number two, it's killing the download CPM. You know, if I can show, quote unquote, 100,000 downloads in my Libsyn account and I can get an advertiser to pay me 60 bucks per thousand downloads, you know, I've got some decent cash coming through. Then one day the auditor's gonna look at that and they're gonna go, you know, this doesn't work. And not only will they say that Paul's show doesn't work, but they'll say that podcasting doesn't work and they will pull from it. And that is a bad deal for all involved. And yes, just like Dave said, it's making the industry suspect. Can you trust podcasters now? What can you do? But here's the deal. It's a bad model. Tracking downloads, it's the lowest form of metrics. It's easy to put our hands around, but it's just not real. It's not just an issue of Twitter bombers, random people coming through because they keyword, loaded some hashtag and downloaded your podcast about puppy nutrition. But there's also a lot of people who subscribe to podcasts but never listen. Automatically download, just like, you know, email newsletters that we all claimed at some point we want to listen to the download. Metric doesn't count for pass along. Doesn't count for, you know, somebody giving it to somebody else. When you take the transcript, forwarding it, letting a friend listen to it, it doesn't count for a lot of things. It's a really bad metric. It's a really low metric. Now, I realize some say it's all we have, but if that's all we have, man, I am getting out of the business. It's a bad model. It's the lowest form. See, the real problem. Well, at the same time, the real opportunity is that new media is much more powerful than old media. We've got a lot of things that we didn't have before. Let me give you a couple of examples. Number one, if you did a podcast and only one person listened to it, you'd probably quit. Ah, but what if that one person was the President of the United States of America? Would you quit? No. Of course you don't care about downloads. You care about the impact that that podcast would have. What if you only sold one thing a year as a result of your podcast, but that one thing a year generated for you 150, $250,000 a year, you would keep doing the podcast. See, new media makes these things possible. We can make shows that a small demographic listens to, but that demographic is exactly who we are looking for and who begin to know like, and trust us and invest in what it is that we are doing and what it is that we represent. And we'd be a good place. See, the power is in the new models afforded to us by new media and not vice versa. There was a time, I mean, you know, I've been in podcasting pretty much since the beginning, and there was a time when the highest dream of the podcaster was to get on radio. And I always had to laugh because, wait a minute, we're off radio. We don't have to be on radio. That would be like somebody on CD thinking the greatest thing they could do is go back to the eight track tape. That's not the case. That's not where the money is. Now. Thank goodness we've gotten past that. We're over that part. What we've got to realize is that maybe instead of giving you $60 every time 1000 downloads are episode, maybe they give you $20 every time somebody buys a product. Now, if you can't sell three products for every 1,000 downloads, that's your problem. You could probably sell one out of every 100, one out of every 1,000. There are shows I love, the Five by Five Network. I love Back to Work. Pretty much anything they recommend, I pick up and buy because I want to support the show. I want the advertisers to know that what they are doing is exactly what and boy, instead of x per 1000 downloads, how about X per purchase or Y per real click? And there's some stuff that you can do to prevent click fraud and that type of thing. What should we track? We should track impact, not clicks. I don't care how many clicks my podcast gets. I care what impact my podcast has. Let's worry about sales as a result of our podcast. Not downloads. Downloads. They're real. Submachine somewhere grabbed it, but that's about all they represent. They don't mean that people listen. They don't mean that people have consumed. They don't mean that people have acted. They just mean that people download. And I'll tell you, as we get closer and closer to unlimited bandwidth on our mobile devices, we're going to see more and more of the downloads that don't matter. So let's track impact, not clicks. Let's track sales, not downloads. And then, most importantly, let's track position, not rank. And I'm not talking position in the charts. That's your ranking in the charts. I'm talking what does this show do for you? What position does this show place you in, in the community of people who want to consume this show? One of the greatest thrills of my life, at least my podcasting life, was when I headed out to the first podcast expo and there was a speaker that I really, really wanted to see. I thought the guy was tremendous. He's no longer in the space right now. I'm sad for that. But I wanted to see him. I wanted to tell him how much I loved him, how much I adored him, how much I thought what he was doing was absolutely fabulous. At the end of his presentation, he had a slide deck of shows that you should be listening to, and he included mine. Oh, that was so cool. And then sitting next to me happened to be Leo laporte from the Twit Network. And I just finished my book. I just gotten copies of my book, and I quickly signed a copy of my book and I handed it to Leo. And Leo says Paul Calligan, and oh, my goodness, Leo laporte knows who I am. See, the positioning of my shows was fabulous. I never ranked. I never did that well. But the people who matter, the people that I wanted to make an impact on, I was well positioned with them. Those are the things that we track. So again, impact, not clicks, sales, not downloads. Position, not rank. So what am I doing about this? Am I worried about Twitter bombing? No, I'm not. I'm not worried about fraud. I'm not worried about a bunch of things. I am building a list. If you send Ep. 25 to 503-897-1290, I will give you the transcript of this episode and the mind map that I utilize to put this whole thing Together. Now, it's going to ask you for your email list, and I'm going to build a list. Now, here's the deal. I follow all the rules. I follow all the laws. It's the smartest thing to do. If you ever went out, click the unsubscribe button and you're gone. And you've got the transcription. You've got everything. You see, I am building a list, and I am mailing that list. I'm mailing them information they want, information they are interested in. And that is going to give me impact, that is going to give me sales, and that is going to give me position. Build a list. You need to build a list. I'm also tracking clicks. Now, wait a minute, Paul. Downloads clicks. What's the difference? The clicks that come out of my website from real users and the clicks that come from my transcripts and from the Kindle book and these things, I know what's making an impact. I know what's working, and it's going great. I'm figuring out what makes me the most money, and that is what I'm building for. That is what I'm doing. And what I am doing is I am working on impact, sales and position, not clicks, downloads and rank. What can you do about this? Well, the first thing you should do is I'll tell you this. Click fraud is rampant. This Twitter bombing is just the first step. There are going to be people continuing to hack the system, and people are going to be running away from this a lot more than we'd like to admit. And if your whole model is a thousand, I've said this since day one. If your whole model is getting X for 1000 downloads, you might want to look at some other options. Find a revenue stream not related to downloads. I think you'll do much better there. Boy. I'm watching right now. I'm watching Brian Brushwood, Scam School. I'm watching what he's doing with his scam stuff store, and it doesn't matter how many downloads he's getting. He's making sales, he's doing great. He's playing the Twitter game, he's playing the podcast game. He's doing all these things. He's a hero of mine in this space and I absolutely love what he's doing. And I'll make sure to link to him as well at the Podcast Report Board. Podcastreport.com 2 5. Find revenue streams not related to downloads. Work on impact, sales and position. And you don't have to worry about the Twitter bombers. I'd love your thoughts on this episode. I'm at Twitter odcastrpt wasn't able to get the whole one. Please go ahead and follow that. We're also at facebook@facebook.com Twitter the podcast report. Likes are of course the currency of Facebook. Would love that. The blog is up. You can make a comment there. The podcast report.com forward/25. As I mentioned earlier, if you text hashtag ep2.5 to 503897, 1290 we'll get to the transcripts from this episode. You'd also leave a voicemail message. If you are international or just want to leave a voicemail message, go ahead and do that. And links at 25. We got Dave's video, the video that started all this. We've got a link to my new book. Actually I am launching a how to podcast book. It's going to be pretty cheap. Don't worry about that. It's up at Amazon. You can pre order that pretty cheaply right now. I've got a link to that and of course got a link to Brian Brushwood. My next episode. I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing. I've got an idea. I'm not sure if I can pull it off yet. Should be fun. I have no viewer voicemail this week. If you'd like to submit some viewer voicemail, go ahead and do that. The one thing I would like to do is subscribe to the show. If you have not subscribed to this podcast, if you are not subscribing to podcasts, you don't have the power of podcast. The power of podcasting is I'm here at episode 25 and a number of you started at episode one and a number of you said every time Paul gets a new episode, go ahead and forward that to me. And that's exactly what subscription does. Now, it might be different on your platform. It might be called follow. It might be called Other Things based on how you're getting your podcast. But just subscribe and get things set up so that when the next episode comes out next week you will be able to get it automatically. You can listen to this pretty much everywhere. Fine podcasts are stored. I'm@thepodcastreport.com iTunes or Stitcher, PocketCast, Tunein, Spreaker, Overcast and I'm not yet at SoundCloud, but we're almost there again. Got a new book coming out if you want to pre order that at Amazon, you can pick that up pretty, pretty cheaply. That's it. I'll let you go. Websitesthepodcastreport.com, email. It's the podcast report at outlook. Com. I gave you Twitter. I gave you Facebook. If you want to go ahead and leave me a review at itunes, or Stitcher, or even over at Spreaker, I'll take it. But that's said and done. ThePodcastReport.com25 chat with you next week. Bye.