Why Podcast Month? The Podcast Report Episode #61

Okay, Paul, why Podcast Month? The Podcast Report Episode 61 show notes, links, conversation and more at the podcastreport.com 6 1. It's the podcast report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. The big idea for this episode is simple. The more reasons to sign up for your list, the bigger the list. Podcasters need lists. Podcasters need bigger lists. Helps them reach their audience list helps them monetize more, helps them have the bigger, better impact that we're all looking for. And that's today's episode. Hey, this is Paul. Paul Culligan, podcaster, author. We've got a bunch of books, got a bunch of podcasts. You're here on this one. The Podcast Report. I've been to podcasting. I've been part of podcasting since the beginning. I love it. I love the audience. I love you, the podcaster. You are a podcaster looking to make your podcast real business or do more real business because of your podcast. This show has never been a massive play. It's always been a deep one. You're not going to see it on the top 10 list anywhere. But podcasters everywhere are using this to do more business, and that gives me a thrill. I just simply can't get anywhere else. So why the topic? Why Podcast Day? What's going on here? I'm recording this on September 1, 2015. Now, if you know this show, you know I like to do evergreen content. And so putting a date on this makes things interesting. September 30th is going to be Podcast International Podcast Day. And what I'm doing is I've decided to make the entire month, at least here on the Podcast Report month, we're going to end it with a big broadcast on September 30th. Why? Well, I need to build a bigger list. And more importantly than building a bigger list is I'm going to show you how easy it is to build a bigger list. This is a model I hope you copy. This is a model I hope you embrace. This is a model I want to see ripped off over and over and over again. The job here has been to empower you, the podcaster. The goal of the show has been to make it possible for you to see more money, more revenue, more reach, more audience with your podcast. And this is a great way to do it. I honestly don't know what's going happen at the end of the month. The numbers will be interesting. I'm sure I'll report on it. I don't know if I'm going to keep Podcast Month open Maybe it'll be a once a year thing. Not quite sure. But there'll be enough in this episode that will be evergreen, that you can listen to whenever, even if you're not in September 2015. See, the approach here is every day in the month of September, I'm going to be giving away a gift. 30 days, 30 giveaways. All of these gifts are things related to podcasting. For instance, today on September 1st, I'm going to be giving away a free copy of the Kindle book Podcast Strategies. Now, Podcast Strategies came out last year. It was $9.99 on Kindle. It was $14.99 on paperback. We were number one in seven or eight countries, I can't remember. And I'm giving everybody a copy for free. Now. Why am I doing this? I'm giving a copy away free for anybody who gives me their email address. Why? Because I'm building a list. And then tomorrow another gift, and the day after that another gift. The day after that, another gift. And whenever you sign up, you'll be able to get the back CA catalog and you go from there. Now I'm doing the full ethical email thing. If anybody ever wants to unsubscribe, there'll be an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every page. But by doing this, I hope to build a bigger list. Now, I've got some friends who are going to come on board. You're going to see something from Dave Jackson. You're going to see something from Gary Leland. You're going to see something from some others. I cannot wait to see what we've got to show you what we've got coming out for you. I hope these friends promote. I think they will. We'll have a hashtag as well on the thank you page. When people sign up, there will be a thank you that asks them to promote this as well. And it's going to work great. I'm building a list with this. Email is currency. You know, I'm giving these quote unquote free in exchange for email. But I realize the email address of you has value. I realize the email address of a podcaster has value. Email becomes currency, and that's the exchange here. Now, this model has been done a bunch of times before. This is not a new model. People do this all the time. And this giveaway process and people like giveaways. People love to feel like they've got something really, really cool. And there's no reason why a podcaster can't do this, especially the audio podcaster. When there are so many things we can't do on audio. I mean, a lot of the stuff you're going to get from me is going to be videos of different things that I just simply couldn't do on an audio podcast or documentation like the podcast Strategies books that I couldn't do on an audio podc. So it makes a lot of sense. It works great. I recommend you do it. I encourage you to do it. If you do it, please reach out to me somehow and let me know that you've done it. Maybe I can give you a shout out on social or something like that. Now, the specifics, how are we going to do this? Well, the email list is going to be run through Podcaster Cart. Podcaster Cart has an email only option that competes with all the other guys. Competes with mailchimp, competes with the Weber, all those people. What's neat about using Podcaster Cart to build the list is that because it's integrated into the e commerce system fabric, into something like E Commerce, it'll be really interesting to see how many people buy because they came in under free podcast month or how many people bought because they came in under an episode or something like that. So Podcaster Cart's going to run the email and there's going to be a daily email that's going to go out and it should be fun and we should have a quote or that kind of thing. Then that will have access to each one of them. So later Today on the 1st, the email address, the email with access to the Podcast Strategies book will go out tomorrow. Email access to the next book will go out, probably will go back, back, catalog in there as well. Still figuring those specifics out, but everything actually, no, not figuring that out. That will happen. So the second will have the second gift and the first gift, the third will have the third, the second and the first gift. I'll write each of those, I'll try to make them funny and then we'll go from there. Some things will change, some things will go away. Definitely at the end of the month, a number of the items will go away. Because one of the things you want to do when you build an email list, and this is for a podcaster or this is for anyone else, is you want to teach them the value of responding to the email. Right now you don't necessarily want to punish someone for not responding to the email. But the thing is, I mean, you know how it is. It's just like emails, it's just like podcasts. You know, we have these things, we filed them away. We want to open them up at some point and there needs to be a reason for you, the listener to open it up now. And so some things will go away. Teaching the audience to respond. Something that you definitely want to do now. The lead process, the capturing. I'm going to be using leadpages and I'm going to have the capture page there. I'm going to have the thank you page there. I'm going to be doing all sorts of testing to find the optimum page, the optimum page type. So the one that you log on to today might look very, very different from one that you log on in 5 days, 10 days, 15 days. I think that will be really, really interesting. The logo was simple. I went to fiverr.com for that. And by the way, the links to podcast to cart lead pages, Fiverr all those I will have at the show notes for this episode and@the podcastreport.com 61 podcaster card has a 30 day trial. LeadPages has a 30 day trial. If you want to take a look. Fiverr.com I got the logo at one place for everything.com is where I grab the domain name podcast month.com and what I'm doing is I'm just doing a redirect from One Place for Everything to the leadpages page. I'm not having a website built. I'm not going through that process. If you know me and you know the history of what I've done. Yeah, I don't like spending a lot of time on an audio podcast building a website. So the domain name is just going to redirect on the individual days where we do individual giveaways and I do promotion. That that'll just be a short URL. Bitly kind of links out to those individual pages. Very, very make it easy. And then as I said today, the giveaway is the Podcast Strategies Kindle Edition. This was something I did with the instant customer guys. I'm no longer with them although I have access to the books. So the opt in stuff in there isn't necess. At least something I'd recommend following at this point. But the content's still good. If you don't have a Kindle reader, know that there's Kindle software for all of your favorite mobile devices and there is even a desktop viewer and a web viewer if you don't have access to that. But that's the specifics for how all this coming together. Very, very simple. Very, very easy. I expect to spend about 10 to 15 minutes a day on it. Probably today I'm going to spend a couple hours getting everything all together, but that's it. Where I'm going with this is I'm going to build out the list for the podc. And the great thing is by giving away gifts, you know, you see this, you go to an event and you know they say, put your name in the fishbowl and win an iPad. Well, who's not going to put their name in the fishbowl? I mean, everybody wants an iPad. Promise you don't build the list that way. By giving away 30 days worth of podcasting gifts. There's nothing in this list that will be of interest to the non podcaster. Of course, I don't want anybody who's not a non podcaster. So remember that one of the things I'm not going to give away is I'm not going to give away any of my existing products or that type of thing because you don't want to give away what it is that you sell. You don't want to tell your audience that there's a way for you that you don't have to pay for this kind of thing. But my goal here, my objective here, my process here is to build my list and I recommend you do the same thing. So that goes with the. What can you do about this? Well, first of all, a 30 day model here, this giveaway process is not mine. People have done it around Christmas time, people have done it on a month time, people have done it a week. I don't think I've ever seen it go past a month. But this isn't mine. I recommend that you do it. I recommend that you think about it, you definitely can team with somebody else. If there's a bunch of podcasters in your space and you're cross promoting each other anyway, you might as well give away each other's stuff and build a list and then come through the process. I guarantee you, when I bring on Dave Jackson and when I bring on Gary Leland and those guys, you know, you'll see how this helps build their list as well. Definitely go out and do that, but team up with some others, do this, build your list. Because once that happens, the game of podcasting changes tremendously. You don't only have the release of your podcast to do something. You can mail people directly and you can say, I've got this offer or I've got this opportunity or that type of thing. So I'm going to build my list. I recommend that you take this model to build your list and I'm serious. Reach out to me if you do something like this. Having learned from this episode, probably the best thing to do is just to head out to the podcastreport.com 61 and in the comments let us know that you're doing this. But it should be a good time. How else can you reach out to me? Well, social. If you go to the podcastreport.com Twitter or the podcastreport.com Facebook et cetera, et cetera, those are all the social ways to get ahold of me, the blog as well. Again. 61 to common away links for today's episode I've got the how to Podcast book. I got a link to podcast or cart leadpages fiverr1 place for everything SMS to opt in which I've chat about the last couple of weeks, the podcast report over at Patreon and legal Podcast Music. If this is your first episode and it might be because of Podcast month, please subscribe to the show. One of the real benefits, one of the real powerful elements of podcasting is that you can get a new episode every time it comes out. And unlike this Podcaster Month giveaway where I'm going to have to deal with spam issues and that type of thing, you don't have to deal with spam with podcasting. Once you subscribed or followed or whatever it is your podcatcher calls it, then these podcasts come directly to you. So you can head out to the podcastreport.com iTunes most of you are there. Or the podcastreport.com stitcher or the podcastreport.com pocketcasts or tunein or spreaker or even iheartradio andovercast would love to have you out there. If you want to drop a note, you can drop one@the podcastreportoutlook.com and you're one of those types who has done well here. Would like to leave a review. I love reviews over at itunes or reviews at Stitcher, but this is Paul this is the Podcast Report. Head out to podcastmonth. Com, sign up to get your 30 days of free podcast related gifts and we should have a great time Chat with you next week. Bye.