How to grow and monetize your podcast | with Sammy 'Shoebox' Moses

I've given you so much gold. This is the best podcast you've ever shot.

Anyways, is there still room for new podcasts?

There is room for good podcasts. What there's not room for are vanity shit podcasts.

What are the kind of offers that work best? If you have a podcast that you can funnel your traffic into and that.

Convert that is the fastest way to help your podcast succeed is to think like that.

One host versus two hosts.

The main thing that people fail at when it comes to scaling their podcast is, is having deep passion for the content.

The only thing that doesn't work too well that we've tested are funneling straight from trailers to views.

When you start thinking like that, you will start making solutions so much faster. You're like, whoa, we cannot do that.

How do you monetize a podcast?

The best thing you're gonna do, making money off your own podcast.

We're good. We're live. We're live. So I don't want to do intros anymore. Let's just jump straight.

Totally. You can do the intro later.

Yeah, let's, let's introduce you during the conversation.

Sounds good.

So I want to hear your thoughts about the state of the podcast marketing. And kind of like what I want to know from you is do you think there's still more room for new people to enter the market? Is there still room for new podcasts?

Yeah, that's a good question. One of the things that we've always seen inside any platform that explodes, especially podcasting, TikTok, Instagram, all those things, is the question that everyone asks, is there actually room for more people? And what I have noticed about podcasting is it's still a wide open market. There's a hundred billion YouTube channels out there and there's maybe just over two or three million podcasts out that have gone past 12 to 24 episodes. And then there's pod fades.

When you open up the podcast app, it's just a sea of dead podcasts with like three episodes.

It's sea of dead podcasts. And, and so that's kind of a two part answer for me. There is room for good podcasts, meaning content is well thought out and that the person starting the podcast is thinking long rang thinking, how do I grow this in my brand forever? And starting with the end in mind for us at Evolve Podcasting, we love to see somebody start a podcast with an, with an existing business model. So they've already been selling things. They can already convert an offer.

Yeah. You can funnel traffic into something Traffic.

That's to make it worth proven. Right. There's room for that. And it's. And that. That's great because you've already got a podcast and a host or a show or a product that's helping transform lives. What there's not room for are vanity podcasts. Like, I just want to talk. Like I've produced enough of those where.

Girls in a hot tub.

Yeah. I'm like, what is this? And I think that that is just some. That'll go away. Right. I think of it. So I'm from Colorado originally, and Colorado was known for the marijuana boom in the United States. And so when that happened, every. Every lone kid that was growing weed in his basement or whatever wanted to open his own dispensary because all of a sudden it was legal. And so you had a bunch of these morons opening up dispensaries that had no business starting a business, had no business trying to get into that market. And what we found over two years is they were all gone because it was just crap. I think of that in a weird way as how good podcasts last and terrible ones go away.

Yeah, it's kind of like the male coping mechanism or male therapy. Start a podcast with your friends.

Totally. I actually one of our friends that we were talking to, she goes, I will not date anyone that says I am a podcaster.

It's a shame. I know. But what are the kind of offers that work best? If you have a podcast that you can funnel your traffic into and that.

Convert for us, we have a lot of health and wellness entrepreneurs and we do have a lot of personal development entrepreneurs too that we get to produce. We see offers all across the board that really do work well. But I think offers that I've seen work the best just to. There's kind of two offers. Right. There's one just to gather the emails or just to continue connecting with them. I've seen quizzes work really well with that. So if you want to. If you want to find out more about how you are, like what's in it for you? Take this quiz. It'll tell you how your can be better. People love quizzes. I'll take 10 quizzes a day. If I get opted in for those or if somebody shows me one. So those are great for opt ins. I love.

She just gave me a crazy idea. I'm gonna have to write. I'm gonna have to tell it to you on camera now so I don't forget it later. I'm gonna. Just gonna interrupt. We have this other brand that I've been growing with Miriam called Healthy Holistic Homes. Right.

Oh, nice.

And I have a quiz for that. And I never was quite, I made it really elaborate, coded like an entire copy of type for myself, but never like it was working. It generates some like thousands of leads there, but thousands is still small.

Yeah.

But I can now add AI analysis to that. I can have AI analyzed answers and give them personalized things. Okay, thank you for that.

Yeah, well, that's such a good thing too because when you do quizzes, what's the hardest thing is sifting through that data. Like, oh Great, I got 2,000 quiz answers. You just named it using AI and these new technologies to kind of sift through this stuff and partition out who and what needs this type of, this type of product or this type of offering.

Exactly. And you can have it quickly sort through the product offering. It's like, hey, I found from the quiz that you are A, B and C, these products would work, work well for you. And it's like way more specialized and very personalized. And instead of just like recommending if they answer this answer question like this, then recommend this product. You know, it's like more elaborate. We've been feel more personal at all.

And you know, so the second part of that, the other things that convert really well are kind of that for us, we've seen small entry products. People can buy 7 to 27 products with a super sweet upsell path with all of that. And I think that for us has been the sweet spot, especially with health and wellness. You want to help them diagnose themselves and then figure out what kind of supplements are going to give them. If it's supplements or it's coaching or if it's some sort of one on one call, if it gives them a quick transformation right away that they can see, touch, feel. They're, they are, they are more opted, they're more opted to get more products from you. And so we see the things that are quick wins, right. Like a quiz is a quick win if you find like supplements or something with doctors, A lot of times the powdered drinks and stuff that they get a discount on, those are really good offers because people love that. They're like, oh, this is good. So those, those offers team seem to be really good. Where we've seen things fail, where you don't want to go is when people obviously try to sell like this 200, $300 offer straight out of the podcast that just doesn't work.

I mean there is an angle for that, even something like that is high ticket, like 4,000 and up. And the angle is that with the podcast, if you have like a specialized guest. And I just saw this example work. This young guy, I think he was from dropshipping world, started a podcast. His name is Malinowski, Brett Malinowski. And it scaled really fast in YouTube. And he has a great YouTube channel as well. His content is good. And he had this dude, multiple guys, Hunter Hammonds and this other guy who started.

Some agency that does the similar thing that we did for mindvalley is they create like thousands of short forms and distribute them across like a lot of different channels. And the. I actually picked their brains. I spoke to them as well, and I found out that from the their podcast with Brett, they got like a bunch of leads and their offers start from like, I think the lowest offer they had is 5k.

Wow.

And so the podcasts really work for generating leads if people who, like, if you happen to have, happen to stumble upon a target market and like, with a high offer like this, you don't necessarily need like millions of listeners. It's like even like sub thousands. If, like one person converts, it's like it pays you to have the podcast.

And I think you, you said something a little unique too. So when you're talking about converting leads that for a high ticket, they got super niche. And that's what all that myriad of content that they created was designed to do, is help them really niche down their audience. So we know that when we have an audience, there are for sure products that sell at a little bit higher, from 200 to 300, but that takes us really nuancing the audience down. And most of the shows that we've started, unfortunately, they haven' narrow down their audience as much as we'd like, as much as we hammer them. Like, please niche down your audience for this format. Like, it's completely different in Instagram because you're gonna go wide. You want to go wide with talking to that, but with podcasting, you can go wide, but niche down into your topic. For example, our show, it's called the Healthy Profits podcast, but it's for health and wellness entrepreneurs who want to monetize their podcast. So it's wide. But if you're a health and wellness entrepreneur, you have a podcast, but you haven't figured out how to monetize it. That's what our show is for. And we had that up, I think for three, three or four episodes. It was not many. We had it up for less than two Weeks. And we re misses our personal podcast. We ended up grabbing the five figure client right there.

Oh.

From the show. But that took us, that took us a lot of research and that took us like, like a couple years of working with, with podcasters that were wellness entrepreneurs and figured out after years, which is weird, that the main thing that they're struggling with isn't an audience, isn't this. It's just how to monetize, like, how do I monetize this show? So we just started to really figure out what is the best way to monetize podcasts in your field. And so what we focused on was health and wellness. And we didn't, we don't, we don't really try to deviate from that. We're really learning that. And then we'll move to the next one.

And it's the power of the medium as well. Because you said you grabbed it from a single podcast or like the few podcast episodes is you have people sitting with you for a long period. It generates so much trust seeing you share your expertise, tell them exactly how you're going to do these things. And a lot of people I see, it's like the mindset out there is like, I can't give away my ideas. This is my idea. I don't want to share how we do it. It's our secret sauce. It's just like you can just give away all the details. Nobody's going to do it. They're going to hire you instead because you understand how they do these things. You understand now. You now believe that they know how to do it. They have a roadmap. They've done it.

And I think I learned that from Brendan Burchard too. He would live, he would do his who spiel, tell you exactly how he does it, exactly what you need to do, quite literally, step by step. And I remember just watching that, I was like, how is anyone gonna buy this? And yet at the end I was like, oh, I want to buy this course.

Exactly.

Even though he just showed me everything. So I mean, that's, that's where you and I totally agree is that you can give away your best stuff. As you should.

You should. Exactly. Because there's so much fluff out there. And you, why would you add more to that?

And when you started this show, I think you did it right too. I've seen so many podcasts that we're switching. They have like a 45 second to a minute intro on like, hey, this is a show about such and such. I think one of the biggest shifts I've seen that's helped a lot of our shows, especially with the landscape being so inflated right now, is that people just don't get right into the show. They just have this. This fodder in the beginning, which is just wasted air. If you can get right to, hey, why do you. Why should somebody turning this on stay with us for 35 minutes today? What's in it for them? That question is huge. All right, what's in it for the listener today? What are we doing? And people will stick around forever. And then you can cut really cool clips on that. Like, this is the best thing I've ever learned. And it's.

You're like, wait, gonna use all of those in the intro?

Totally. You better do a car crash. But this is the best thing. And then.

Oh, yeah, the sound effects.

Perfect.

The folly.

Yeah, but that's. I loved how you just started in. And if there's one big tip that people can take away from what's really working in podcasting, not just a monetization, but the format of podcast right now and just with any. Any medium is there's got to be a really solid hook. Get them in there. That hook has to just be so riveting and hit them so quickly. It just has so much power that they have to listen.

That's what we do as well. The intros really do work well, work wonders. It's just like you open story loops, create cliffhangers in the beginning. Just like you want to create curiosity hooks that they see. Oh, I want to learn about this. I want to learn about this. This seems interesting now. I better keep watching to see how this sentence ends or whatever does. That's what dire of a CEO does. That's what a lot of podcasts now do because it works. And if you make it, like, dynamic, snappy, add graphics, show production value right out the gate, it's great. What we do for Jim Quick, for example, is we front load all the animation and all the heavy work goes into the first two minutes, and later on, it's just a conversation. But in the first two minutes, we try to generate as much curiosity and show as much production value as possible. And it's been working well so far.

Do you guys have separate editors for that, or are all your editors well rounded?

That guy is the main Jim Cook editor there.

Crampy over there crushes it. He.

His legs do fall asleep sometimes, but he does great that it's.

You want to hear a really cool framework that we use? If someone loves Your show wants to use this. We use this for all of our editors. We give it to everybody to help them cut the best clips. And this is a framework that we created. Ray and my business partner, I created this. And my fiance and the queen of in our world, she and I came up with this framework called the binge framework. Because what do you want to do with the podcast is binge that. And binge is basically an acronym, so each letter stands for something different. And B stands for bring attention to a issue or a massive pain for your listener. I stands for insert an emotional story and introduce them to a solution. N stands for name the pain again, like, really hammer at home. G stands for give them a way out. So your solution, your product, whatever it is that does it. And then E stands for empower them today to take action. So bring attention to a pain, insert a story. That's like riveting. Introduce them again. And then in N, name the pain, G, give them a way out, and E empower them to take action. So if you use that framework, when you start off and you got this riveting story, that's for the intros, right? That's where you can cut it. And you can use that as the meta part of the podcast, or you can use it just in the intro, right? It should be that story. It's like we. It's really a story brand framework that we use, but we just put the word binge around it because it was a great framework to use. But we've noticed people's clips performing so much better because now the editor is like, oh, there's the story. You know, oh, here's. Here's the story.

And I would guess this is something that only, like, 1% of podcasts do. It's like, people do it with YouTube videos. They write great scripts. They really think it through. They have all these storytelling frameworks. I don't think anyone applies that to podcast interest. They just, like, out the gate, start talking about it, like, how Sammy.

Yeah. Then they do that stupid thing where like, hey, he's an author. He's a this, he's a that. And you're like, no one cares. Just like, hey, what's it? What is in this for me? And the only way, if you're not going to just give them a massive solution right away, you just need to hook them with a story. And that story needs to be like, whoa, that's crazy. But I think one of the things I learned from Alex Hormozi and why I think the binge Framework works really well. Is he talks a lot about inverse thinking. If you heard of this idea, tell me. Okay, so inverse thinking is kind of. Our brains are so wired to. To go away from pain rather than move towards pleasure. Like, we will move 10 times faster away from pain than we will from pleasure. And so what you have to do when you start thinking about this is you have to invert your thinking. So, for example, if with. With our son Rafa, one of the things we want to do is raise him really well, and instead of saying, okay, what are the best ways I should raise my son? That he's fun and engaging with people, and he is vibrant and healthy. That's one way of looking at it. That's a positive way. So inverse thinking of that would be like, what do I need to do to ruin my son's life? It would be give him shitty food. It would be, let him stay up all night. It would be, don't discipline him. Don't put him on a schedule. Make sure that he, his mother and I fight all the time. Right? It's that inverse thinking. And when you find the thing that is the part hardest, that's actually the answer you need to take. So for most couples, I guess in that example, it'd be like, mom and I should fight. That would be the fastest way to ruin this kid's life, right? So you work. The most important thing you do is you work on your relationship with your partner. So when it comes to business or when it comes to a podcast, you got to look at. Okay, so what. What would I need to do to make my show fail today? I guess I would come with no energy. I guess I would come unprepared. I guess I would come to this without good questions. Would also have really crappy audio, things like that. So the inverse of thinking positively, like, let's do all these things. When you start thinking like that, you will start making solutions so much faster. You're like, whoa, we cannot do that. And so I think that's one of the things that I've learned, and I guess I share that with your audience because I've learned that is the fastest way to help your podcast succeed is to think like that. Like, okay, what products are gonna make this a very slow win for us? Okay, two dollar products, $3 products. Without an Ascension model, it's gonna be that kind of thinking. So I've seen that really help a lot of my entrepreneurs because they think they think positively, but they would actually act better when there's more pressure from kind of that inverse. And it's not negative. It's just an inverse way of thinking.

I mean, the pressure gets you moving.

Pressure gauge moving.

Christop. Sorry. Can you let me know when we have 15 or 10 minutes left? Just signal me then. Because it's like the next podcast is coming at 11 30, so I don't want to go, like, right into it.

I've given you so much gold. This is the best podcast you've ever shot anyways.

And honestly, it honestly is. I don't want to end it, but it's like, I need to know before the next next one comes. Marissa Pierce gonna come here.

Oh, perfect. Nice.

Let's do, like, a quick detour here. Like 90 degrees. I want to know, what do you think about from the perspective of your podcast branding and building a podcast? One host versus two hosts. How does that work in your head?

If the two hosts have great chemistry, do two hosts all day. I think it's good for variety. There's so much better feedback. But I've also seen hosts that cancel each other out. You know, I think that is a. That is a really great question. I think the answer to that, though, is, is to test it, right? Testing it and just seeing what your audience thinks. And get this is one thing that we always do when we launch our podcast at Evolve Podcasting is we make our. Our clients get a testing group, 12 to 20 people that they really admire. Hopefully, it's somebody that they want to have as a client. And then it's going to be people that really know you, and then somebody that's farther ahead than you and get them in this little VIP group so that they can have some feedback loops going before your podcast launches. So you're going to create this group, and then you're gonna say, hey, we tried two or three different formats. Do you guys mind giving me your opinion on which one you like the best? Here's with our dual hosts. Here's with me just hosting, here's with an interview, and here's a solo, right? So all the different formats, we give it to them and see, like, what did you think? Once we start getting some of that feedback, we start really expanding on that show. But cool, let's do it like this, because then we know. Because it's so hard to just launch a show and be like, oh, this is gonna be great if you don't have any feedback. And everyone that I knew prior to that would launch their show without any feedback, and they're like, man, I only had, like, 50 downloads. I'm like, well, did you even test how that is going to resonate with you? And people love to be involved in that. We learned that theory from a guy named Kevin Kimlin. He has a Grow the show. His got a great podcast. It's called Grow the Show and a great platform. But when he said that, I was like, oh, my God, that's so smart. You got to have a piloting group to really figure out what to do.

In my experience, I found having two hosts way more difficult than one host. It's just harder to know what your partner's thinking and to coordinate questions.

A lot of egos.

There's egos, but there's also. It's like, I. I want to go this way with the conversation, but maybe he or she wants to go that way. So it's like we kind of clash and trail, like trails of thoughts kind of. Kind of like get mixed up and we don't know where we're going Together.

We have a show that we've produced called I'm from Denver, and one of the guys is an old radio DJ host. And you can see the skill set it takes to have dual hosts because they can feed off each other, they can, like, lob each other questions, and they have stories and these antics.

If you have radio background, that's great for podcasting.

Yeah. Any radio host that's listening to this, probably start a show.

Yeah, there's room.

There's room.

But another aspect to this, and I guess it's depending on your niche. So I mentioned before, Miriam and I, we have this healthy, holistic homes brand, and we've been both doing it. However, I had gotten this recommendation three times in the past. First two times, I wasn't ready for it. It third time now, we just had a call with Michael Fishman. Do you know him?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

The. For the onus. He started the Consumer Health Summit, and he builds, like, big brands. He built up Dave Asprey's Bulletproof, and he's like, he is absolutely brilliant and such a kind person.

And you just had a call with him?

Yeah, I just had a call. Well done.

That's a good one to talk to.

Yeah, yeah. And he. What he told me, and he framed it so well as well. The same thing that I wasn't ready for. The first two times he said that there's something in the. How the human brain is built, something in our limbic that.

Assumes or like, not assumes my English is failing me right now, but it's like, kind of attributes the leadership role to one figure. And instead of two figures. And if there's two figures, the person doesn't know who is the expert, who is the leader. And traditionally, Healthy Homes has been associated. Home is associated with a female figure. So maybe I should help with the business and have Miriam be the face of the brand instead of two people.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And we heard this from Sergey Young and somebody else even before. And then I was like, this is my content. I'm the video producer. I'm writing all the scripts, doing all the stuff, all the things. I want to be in front of the camera as well. But now, now it's just like, okay, he goes down. I'm ready to step back and let Miriam have the spotlight.

Well, let's be honest. You and I both have faces for radio, so let's let the girls step in.

Dude, what do you mean?

I'll have you know, sir, I'm considered handsome in Estonia.

Yeah, I'm. I'm dashing in the Philippines for sure. No, that's such a good point. I didn't think about that too. We have our show. Is. Is both of us on there, too? I wonder if that has tarnished our effectiveness with our show. I. Ray's gonna have to reshoot all those.

Yeah, reshoot all of them.

Yeah, all 30 episodes. Ray's gonna have to do.

It's just like, have AI erase one.

Person out, put her face on my body.

Perfect. Perfect.

That's great.

But in terms of scaling a podcast, it's like, how. Because podcasts have notoriously bad discovery because of the nature of the platform. RSS feed are. RSS feeds are not great for discovery. How do you scale a podcast? What. What initiatives to do?

Yeah. So we found a couple different options. Yes. Scaling a podcast is such a mother. Effort. It's such a hard, hard thing to figure out and crack for each individual show. Right. It's. It's like a variable across every show. You're. This health show might scale because you had a good guess. This podcast might scale because you had really good, you know, giveaways or a contest. You know what we've found for our shows right now, what we're going to try? We found that. We found a new company that we're working with, and they use a subscription model. So it's kind of a pay to play, but they are using that to scale it. So you opt in to listen to the show. There's a really nice landing page. You go there and you subscribe and you listen to the show. So that's a paid to play kind of space that we're working with. And, and I think the second thing that we're really working on next is kind of a social media aspect where we're really helping people expand their social media, specifically with Instagram, to parlay those people into the podcast. And when we say expand your social media, we're talking going from zero to a hundred thousand followers in three months using not algorithms or any of this other stuff, but how to get yourself talking to the right audience. Mirroring. Mirroring work or mirroring the content that's already working and then doing that for yourself. So you just replicate what's working in your field so that you can expand your social media reach. And then once you get to the 20, 30, 40,000 followers, parlaying those people into the podcast. So that's one of the things that we're working on. There's also networks. People can be in networks that really. I've seen that take off really well, like Overcast, Castro Podopolo.

Overcast is a network. I use it just to listen to podcasts. I actually, actually didn't know that there's a networking.

I believe there's a network. Unless I'm thinking of Cast. I'm thinking of Cast Magic. No, there's like a myriad of them.

Don't quote me on Overcast. But there's Padopolo, you know, there's. There's Podbean, all the ones that you can get yourself into the network. I think those are great places to pay for a slot. Like you can pay for a slot and get yourself in there. I've seen people have great success by paying 20 or 30 bucks or maybe $300 to put your podcast advertised inside other shows right in the beginning.

Do you also run social media ads?

I haven't seen social media ads work that well for podcasts. I know that they're the formula that Stephen Bartlett and those guys do. They're beasts. They'll actually. They'll run ads to the clips. Like they'll make a myriad of different.

Clips and also the thumbnails and stuff.

Thumbnails. But they'll run ads to those specific clips, see which ones perform the best, and then they'll use that one.

And that's the intros, right? Yeah, I've seen that as well. Somewhere somebody sent me a video.

But that's a whole. That's a whole advanced way of doing.

Yeah, you need a specialist team to do that.

You need a specialized team to do that. The main thing that people fail at when it comes to scaling their podcast is having deep passion for the content and doing some. Some tried and true grassroots marketing where it comes to doing lives like doing a live with your guest after that and fielding questions and then inside of specific messaging, whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever. And talking to your audience, being like, do you mind sharing this show? Like that simple act will take you so much farther and a lot of people just don't do it.

And there's a very simple trick. There is. Like if you're making. If you're cutting clips and cutting shorts, my. Which I'm gonna do on you as well now is I'm gonna. We're gonna. Christo is going to cut the best clips of you saying smart things where you look your best when you do you. Where you share the most value. You. And we're not going to post them. Yeah, we could, but I'm going to give the skips to you so you can post them and then people are naturally going to come and find this podcast.

Exactly. Super smart.

And I don't even have to ask you to share it. Everybody needs content.

Yeah, everyone needs content. And. And you guys do such a great job. Like I've seen Jim Quick show and I've seen what you. I'd be more than happy to share myself. Looking super tall and dashing in the Philippines on your show for sure, I think.

But do all your partners and all your podcasts have video as well or some are just audio?

Oh, we have all video now. I think we've shifted almost everybody to video.

And then how does YouTube work for your discovery? Do you optimize for YouTube especially because it has a discovery engine now.

It's such a good discovery engine. You know, we're working to find our partnership with the YouTube, with the YouTube team. It's a different ball of wax.

Yeah, completely different.

Yeah, it's like you. We thought it'd be great for our clients just to put their podcast up on YouTube and be like, cool, it's here. And then they would have like 10, 15 or 20 views on something. Yeah, you have to get so much more strategic with that front two minutes of YouTube. Making the shorts like the. The making a short and then sending it to YouTube is a total science.

Titles, thumbnails, kind of like SEO approaches could help work really well. There's like different tactics around there. You can play.

Totally. I'm open if you have any resources on that. I'm totally looking for partnerships on that because that is a huge market because.

Like what we're doing, we are focused mostly on YouTube. So we're YouTube first with everything and how we solve titles and thumbnails. For example, I talked about this in the AI Summit as well. We actually have an automation running in the background. So every time a podcast gets rendered onto a NAS or server, it gets automatically transcribed. Then the transcription gets turned into show notes, we get preliminary title options, we get preliminary thumbnail texts, and like just the description as well and stuff. And then what we can also do, there's another automation that takes the transcript, identifies multiple different article ideas, converts the podcast conversation that we're having our thoughts with AI into actual articles that can be posted on the blog or social media posts. And then you can also embed the YouTube video to them. And both. Then there's like so many benefits if you make it a bit searchable. It's like if you want to do keyword research, you can. But what we do is we kind of cut a few corners because our value is elsewhere. So we ask AI to identify searchable terms instead. It's like, what are the common searchable terms? And when somebody searches things on Google, for example, then, then YouTube transcribes all these things anyway. And your podcast can now come up with Google answers if you have chapters made correctly. And then when you embed it to your web, that also boosts the web SEO. So these things like build on each other.

So cool.

And there's like some, a lot more things you can do, like little things there.

I think Stephen Bartlett, you know, Diary of a CEO does that stuff so well too. One thing that I love about his show on YouTube is yes, he has like award winning trailers. And then once you have that, those hooks are so great. But then he'll actually give you the chapters where they're talking about it. So it's not like, oh man, do I have to search this out? Yeah, but you'll go in there and you're like, oh, this is what he was talking about. You can go find it. So you get the dopamine and you get the fulfillment of being able to find what you need. And I've noticed with his every show I've ever done, I was like, oh, I wanted to hear what he had to say about that. And then I can find it in the chapters. I end up listening to the show the whole way through. So the, the magic formula is you.

Pick your own curiosity hooks, what creates.

Yeah, it's like you choose your own adventure, but you're, you're getting information and I Think that that is one amazing formula that is a huge lift if you can do that. And that making the chapters inside YouTube and doing all this stuff is a whole nother situation. But we, we know that that works. And I think that's one thing that we'd love to be.

The only thing that doesn't work too well that we've tested are channeling, funneling straight from trailers to views. So you kind of need to establish trailers for them to work and trickle them out, like on a knowledge basis. Because we've made trailers for Jim Quick and we stopped making them because they just didn't work. Not that the trailers are bad, but for some reason the funnel wasn't working. And there's quite a few ways you can play go about the funnel. And now I just got like, I have some more ideas in my head that I want to test with these things. Things. But, but in general, funneling traffic from shorts to long form is difficult. And actually this is one, one thing that I would never do with YouTube videos. If you're posting on YouTube is if you're posting to other social media, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, and you say like, hey, I have a new podcast episode out. Here's the link. Go watch it. Bad idea, right? So what happens is somebody clicks it it. They're coming from a short form medium. They're maybe gonna watch two seconds of your podcast, maybe five seconds, then close it. Because they're not gonna watch an hour long podcast on their phones. Just looking at this. Clicking for Instagram sends a negative signal to YouTube that it sucked. Watch time goes down, starts recommending your podcast less. So that, that is a bad idea. But posting these shorts instead and not posting the direct link, but telling people to go find these things, that's gonna work and that there's another funnel with. When it comes to like Instagram, for example, you don't, you don't want to send traffic out directly. So you don't want to say like go click the link in bio and watch the podcast. You want to say something like, you have to build a funnel inside so you have pinned videos there. So don't pin like your most watched video, like coolest podcast clip. Pin the most actionable things that build up a funnel, like testimonials, where to go see the podcast and other things. It's like sales video or something. Pin those things, those things to the link in bio. So videos that you create as lead magnets, send your profile, profile video sent to the link in bio. You actually build up channel, watch Time by funneling people through multiple videos and you don't get penalized for sending traffic out.

Dang, that's nice. That's. You cut that clip. That's really smart. Yeah.

And I nailed it. Nailed it, nailed it.

Oh, wow. So you've seen that working?

Yeah, that works.

Yeah, that's great.

That's what we did for our Healthy homes. We actually built, like, for our own. Now we've abandoned TikTok ourselves, but Miriam and I will build like a. From 0 to 130, 000 followers on TikTok in two months, like, with only a few videos.

I think that's a great niche too. We have a few friends that are doing healthy homes and. And it's shocking one, how unhealthy homes are, and then two, how few resources are out there that are great to, like, get that.

Then the. The niche itself is gaining headwinds right now. Because when we talk about. When we were talking about it two years ago, we were crazy people, people. But now it's like your favorite health influencers on the train even.

Well, we had mold poisoning. Raptor. Our son was born not from the house we were living in, but I had it prior from the house that I was in. And it was so bad, that toxicity was so bad. When I tested, I was like off the charts in four of the five categories. But it didn't allow me to sleep. I had open sores on my ankles. And I mean, all this suffice to say is that I had listened to podcasts that we were producing to fix myself. And so when it comes to the power of this medium, I don't think I would have been able to find that if I hadn't known that there was health, you know, solutions there. So it's great service that you're doing. I love that you guys are covering.

Thank you. And I've been through the exact same journey. This is. Mold poisoning is exactly the reason why we started Healthy homes as well in the first place. Yeah, I got like crazy mold toxicity in Portugal. But sorry, going back to the podcast topic, how do you monetize a podcast and what are the options and what are like, accept offer, but let's say, what are some other monetization vehicles or monetization mediums there?

You know, there's the standby ones like get an affiliate, get sponsorship.

Doing Patreon, partnering with people. But honestly, the best thing you're gonna do making money off your own podcast is selling your own product. Product or service. That's just. That's Just that's the, the massive win is selling your own product and service. That's the fastest way to make money on the podcast.

What about like sponsorships and finding sponsors? Is that something you do as well?

Yeah, we do that, but that's usually the, that's usually the top of this pyramid. The bottom is just your own stuff is really where we find the most use. And using that thing. Using the podcast to get yourself on stages and as authors and in, in relationship, that has been a huge thing. We see a lot of people, great connections with their podcast and when the strategy that we like to see used is when you actually interview the person of the event that you're looking to be on and being such an incredible interviewer of that person and shining the light on them, but keeping the authority on yourself, we've seen that work so well to get people on stages. Betty Murray is one of our shows. She has a show called Menopause Mastery and she was just telling me the other day that her podcast is what's getting her on stages right now.

Yeah, so it's like more indirect and more longer as well. Inbound, basically invaluable.

And so then what happens is you get on a stage and then you sell from the stage. That's, that's a huge piece of it. I think sponsorships is probably, if there's the top most important thing, I think sponsorships is probably towards the bottom in our, in our world because a sponsorship is, is a numbers driven game. Game. Right. And then you're going to get 10% of like a two thousand dollar purple mattress. How many, how much is that going to convert and how much, how much real estate is that ad gonna make? When you have millions of listeners though, that's a great time. When you have hundreds of thousands of listeners, then I would say sponsorship is really fun, especially if they're going to cover some of the production costs. If you have higher production costs, that makes sense all day long. But when you're starting and if you have less than 10,000 listens, I would say your job is to get, get people to look at you as the authority to buy the content that you have and to buy the services and, or products that you're, you're promoting.

But what are the biggest challenges right now when you're starting a new podcast? And when should you consider that, okay, it's not what I should be doing. Are there like any red flags from your own surroundings that you pay attention.

To or like, oh my God, so many red flags. Biggest red flag is if you do not have a converting offer, don't start your show show. If you don't have something to, to sell out of the gates, that's, that's first red flag. Don't do that. If you don't have a social media following, I think that and, or a following, so to speak, work on getting that first. Right. That's one of the things we reverse engineered is making sure that we have an engine to get you from zero to a hundred thousand followers in 30 in 90 days. So we're working with a partnership there to make sure that you have a massive following before you get, get a podcast started.

So we're coming up on time? Unfortunately.

No.

Yeah, I would love, we could talk.

About this all day.

Yeah, I would love to keep, keep picking your brain but one thing that I want to like wanted to ask you before we finish is the business that we're in. So how do you see this like podcast production business changing and from this point of view is like, are people spending more, spending less or it's like, are they more excited, less excited? What's the general like sentiment?

Yeah. So from the protection standpoint for like, are people using production houses?

Yeah.

Is that what you're saying? I think again this one, it goes along with how much support people can get. At our level. The biggest thing that an entrepreneur, a seven figure entrepreneur, the people we like to work with, they just need their time, time. If somebody can do something for them faster and better, obviously that's what they're going to do. But they also need a, a really nuanced team that understands and can learn to understand their brand right away so that they can create a show. And that just means that there's, there's going to be a wide open market for podcast teams that know how to use technology, specifically AI, to really understand people's brand and can be very personable with them. And you know, working with Jim and working with podcasts, you're kind of like their little brother. And then all of a sudden you become, you have to understand their business, you're inside their business. So what I see is that people in our space that are going to be good podcast production houses, they also have to be insanely good marketers and insanely good brand creators because we're looking at their brand, we're looking at their marketing. So I think, think that is the new space that's going to happen. You're going to see like cuz Anchor FM went away, we saw that that stuff just goes away where people Just shoot something and put it up. I think that the, the room for high end production houses is actually going to get a little bit bigger. Cuz people need that especially to stand out middle of the road kind of. Production houses I think are just going.

To go away and I guess there's a lot of extra value you can add. Like you mentioned doing these extra little things that other companies don't do. It's like generating things with AI and like having these little edge, like having this little edge, it counts like a lot.

And just knowing them and their brand and then understanding the ethos. Exactly.

Being like being like a partner and helping them strategize and grow actually instead of just offering like a service that you could get a fiverr. So as we're wrapping things up, let's do the intro now in the outro. So Sammy produces top tier health podcasts. You produce something around 50 shows and I'm going to give you the thrill of the shill. Not my concept, I stole it. So it's just like shill the service and tell, tell the listener about what you do.

Sure. So at Evolve Podcasting, our main mission is to keep the leaders of the world healthy by helping them share their visions and their missions with the world. And what we love to do is help those leaders first figure out how to monetize their podcast and then create such bingeable shows that people can't help but watch them. So that's what we really focus on at Evolve Podcasting.

And we do founder brands. We help grow and scale founder brands. So we also talked a bit about storytelling frameworks and how to tell your story, which is something that we agreed on that only like 1% of the podcasts do. So if you want to learn more about founder brands growing on social media and getting more inbound and how to tell a great story in your podcast and really make your podcasts more captivating, then, then watch this video next. Thanks for listening. Bye.