Can Your Show Actually Lead To Powerful Partners? Lou Diamond's Podcast Thrive LOUD Does

Wish you were one of those influencers with raving fans who binge on your every word, consume all your content, buy everything you have to sell, and demand even more. Then stay tuned while Authority Magazine columnist and buzzfeed contributor Tracy Hazzard shares strategies, tips and tactics from top videocasters, podcasters, authors and social influencers on creating that bingeable factor. Now let's join Tracy as she explores how to rise above all the digital noise with the Binge Factor.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Binge Factor. I'm Tracy Hazzard and today I have a diamond of a podcaster. He's at diamond level of podcasting and his name is Lou Diamond. So figure he has got thousands of episodes or getting close to a thousand episodes between all of his shows. Right now he's got four shows. He's super prolific. He posts three episodes a week or more between all the different shows, so probably every day of the week. Anyway, he's just amazing. I wrote an article about him in the Authority Magazine. That's actually how we met. And that was a while ago. I will link to that in the blog post for this episode, of course, and got his insights into it.

But we never really connected in person until I happened to pop into Clubhouse.

And popped into my friend Scott Carson, who was speaking on a panel and.

Lou was the moderator.

He's been doing some brilliant things on Clubhouse and I'm going to get him to talk about it with us today.

And what I love is that Lou is so generous with his sharing about all the things he's trying, all the things he's doing. He's such an experimenter and you're just going to find so many great gems, literal diamonds, that you're going to get.

Out of this episode. So I can't wait for you to listen to him.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Lizzo. Lou diamond is the master connector. He has over a quarter century of experience in sales, relationship management, business development, and leadership coaching. He's an international keynote speaker, consultant, leadership and performance mentor, bestselling author, podcast and TV host and CEO of Thrive, helping businesses, top performers and brands thrive through the power of connecting. And that's exactly his show title. It's called Thrive Loud. L O U D All capitals Thrive Loud. He has four shows total, so we're going to talk about them in this episode. You're going to just be fascinated by all the interesting things and all the really interesting ways that Lou is marketing his business through his podcast and marketing his podcast through his business let's hear it from Lou.

Hey, Lou. Welcome in. So glad to talk to you on the binge factor instead of just in writing on an article.

Tracy, this is awesome. Get to see you, speak with you, let other people hear us. This is more bingeable than the article that we wrote.

That's right. That's right. I'm so glad we're doing this. I don't often get to talk to someone who's as prolific a podcaster as I am, so this is so much fun. We're going to have so much fun today. So you have four shows, and they are Thrive Loud. Why they listen, diamond cuts, Money talks, and Money does Talk, by the way. Evan is a talker. Like, he's great on it. Authors that thrive, that's another one. So. And they're all in varying, like, ages of. Most of those three are the new ones. Thrive Loudest. Gosh, you're getting close to 600 episodes.

We're actually past it now.

Oh, okay. But they're not all published.

I think we've got like 700, 630 in the queue, so.

Awesome. So you're way ahead. How far ahead are you recording?

That's a great question. Well, we did a special thing which will be very relevant for our conversation today. We did something special in Clubhouse, which exploded the number of guests that we did. I partnered up with success.com and Clubhouse and we did a whole feature elevating the brilliant minds of women. And this started in one of Success.com's room in clubhouse where I just basically was hearing a lot of women being frustrated that they weren't getting the media opportunities or they weren't getting the speaking opportunities. And I said, you know what? I feature women all the time on Thrive Loud.

You do? I was going to say, this is not really a special series for you. You've been featuring them since the beginning.

Exactly. But we said, you know what? Anyone that's in this room right now, raise your hand or send me a dm. Connect to me directly, and I'm going to try and get you on the show. And I begin to tell you that within an hour, there were over 50 responses. My Instagram actually blew up, which has never happened to me. I'm not that popular of a person. So all of a sudden I'm like, I don't even know what to do. We had to weed through some of it, and we've been slowly queuing them up. So as I shared with you, we've been recording a lot of really great episodes and Binging them together, three of the women that came from that group each week. And we're breaking it up with regular guests, those three, and then alternating it, which has caused this larger queue. But normally we're about two to three weeks ahead.

Oh, so that's not too far. That's the question I always get. And I think when you have a show that you've been doing for a long time, there's a tendency to get far ahead, but then there's a problem with promotion. So, like, there's this tipping point between being too far ahead and getting the promotion that you need because there's an energy from having done it.

And I will say this, look, we do three new guests every week, and that originally started with one. With one guest a week when the show first came out. And that was what we realized. We're like, hey, this is great. Thanks for coming on the program. We'll be out eight months from now. We can't do that. It'll lose the vibe, even the relevancy to it. So the ability to connect with all these great people is awesome. And I will say, I do record in binges, using binge to be. I'll have a two, you have batch recording.

Yeah.

So we do about like six to seven interviews a day type of thing.

So that's my big question for you because there's a lot of podcasters that I talk to who just can't do that. How do you stay constantly on for that long a period of time? What do you do?

So John Lee Dumas and I had this very discussion because he used to do something crazy. He would pick one day a month and he would do up to 16 interviews in one day. And I, first of all, I didn't even know there were enough hours in a day to do it. But he did. And I agreed with what he told me on. On Thrive Loud when he told me this pattern. He now does days of where he does like eight in one day. And he feeds off of the energy of those guests that come on. And I completely agreed with it. On the days that I interview all these people, I am naturally a high energy person. As you can tell right now, when I'm listening to these incredible people, I'm connecting with them, I'm hearing their stories. I'm spoiled rotten. I'm like absorbing all this crazy energy. And by the end of a binge day of recording, usually I'm like five or six. I'm not crazy like him, like eight. I feel amazing. I actually say, wow, look at all these great people I connected with, I almost feel guilty, like, well, we just interviewed you and you can't go on tomorrow because I want to. I want people to hear the same message that I've heard. But I feed off that energy. I feel great. And the truth is, you know this as a host, typically the guest is doing more speaking than the host is. So it's not as exhausting. It's really a lot of listening and paying a lot of focused attention.

I think paying attention that active listening and participating in it and prepping up because I mean, I don't like to go into any interview with nothing like, you know, at least, you know, I may be sometimes treated more casually. Not in this show, because this show I have to prepare. I have done that before where I can be a little bit. But that active listening takes energy. I hear from that because that's the definition of an extrovert. So an extrovert feeds off the energy of others and really thrives in that. To use your thrive loud. Right? Thrives in that and introverts don't. So that's our extrovert advantage. We keep hearing about those introverts having an advantage, but that's our extroverted advantage.

And I also did it for a survival tactic as well. And that was I have a lot of either speaking or client work, consulting work workshops to run that I do as part of the main business of what I do. And, and so I couldn't have them spread out throughout the week. I needed one day to be just focused on the podcast and that actually helped really structure my week very productively, very efficiently. And actually I look forward to when I wake up Friday morning and I usually have a few work client things to do in the morning, but then the whole afternoon becomes like this, just like you and I are doing right now, podcasting, which we're doing on a Friday. So it's great.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love that. That's really great. So now you've got multiple shows. Some of these shows you started in like the last year, year and a half. So you've got a lot going on now. How do you manage the multiples?

Yeah, great question. So they also grew organically and let's give some full transparency to it. Bedside readings. Authors that thrive spawn out of thrive, loud, truly out of necessity. So many authors, real authors. And I want to make that clear. You and I have both written books and whatnot, but we also have our other jobs and things we do actually.

Just self admitted, I wrote it. It's sitting back there. I didn't publish it.

Oh, okay. Right.

So I am not a public author. Yeah. So just. Yeah.

But in a perfect situation, you're a podcaster, you're a thought leader, you are somebody very key with a great media connection. A lot of these authors that are out there, that's their job. They're writers, they're New York Times best selling authors and they are promoting their books and they're using the same flow through and traffic of getting onto podcasts. And I was getting a lot of them and some of them are incredible, but they weren't necessarily the best fit for what Thrive Loud was about. But I did want to connect with these people. I partnered with Jane Ubelmeyer who runs Bedside reading and she. Bedside Reading before the Pandemic had a brilliant business model. They were putting bestselling books inside of boutique high end hotels right on the bedside at the hotel. It was promoted throughout of it and the authors would work with her to get those books distributed across the globe. She also wanted to put in an extra feature and she wanted to have them on a podcast. So we partnered together and it became a revenue model for us. Both of us Split the revenue 50, 50 down the middle and we created a new podcast program and it did two things. One, it gave me a place to put all those great authors because I was having that date problem we were talking about with all these great guests coming on Thrive Loud. It also created a whole great revenue stream for the authors. They were buying the books through that too. So it was a wonderful win win in doing that. So that one grew organically. And that doesn't happen as frequently because we have, we do those very selected by season.

But you also have diamond cuts, money talks. That was actually a part of your Thrive Loud show for a while. Evan was coming back again and again.

Yeah. So Evan was on the show his original time, coming on, hearing his story. A man who's been married now 27 times to the same woman. Make that clear. And I was fascinated by his story. And he was west coast, I was east coast and, and learned that he was a huge fan of football and sports like I am. And the two of us had this really interesting take and we said, you know what, we should put together something that covers all the things that we love, which is we love and embrace life. We're all about leadership and having people move onward and upward for thriving. And we're kind of into the, into the NFL. Maybe we could create a show that would do this and that's exactly what we did.

Yeah, you got a buddy show going on. To use that like entertainment term, it's a buddy show.

I needed a buddy show. The truth was I needed something that wasn't work related and it was totally a great way to do it. And I literally look forward to our recording days together. And that just got really popular really fast because we were also targeting it to these other avenues. And my favorite story about bringing all my worlds together is that I ended up interviewed a famous athlete on Thrive Loud. And they came over to me, they go, aren't you the guy with that Evan Money dude? The two bald guys on the, you know, cover of the Face.

You guys gotta check it out. So yeah, you're gonna have to go and check out the blog post for this episode and I'll have all the COVID arts for all those different shows. And it's a great cover art. It's got a great. I was talking about it before the recording started here. The two bald guys caricature of the two of them. And it really does look like both of you. So it's an awesome cover art.

So that one we do once a week and that's fun. And that's like. It's actually probably a stress release too on what I do. And the third one is a special program. The third one. So why they listen? One of my clients is a company called AIM Cast and they actually help people do podcasting internally inside of organizations. Big Fortune 500 companies are using podcasting to improve communication. And he had built a platform. The founder Steve Remlund, who was a guest on ThriveLoud approached me three years ago and reached out to me and said, you know what, I'm not ready for you yet, but I'm going to be and I'm going to need you. So what ended up happening was he was building this incredible player that didn't just do podcasts. It actually is awesome. It does PowerPoint presentations, slides, videos and salespeople or people mobile can use the app internally to communicate great new updates. They do product launches. They train doctors in pharmaceutical companies with this great tech. So this evolved in there. It's grown to so many different companies. And then he needed to promote it. So he reached me and he called me up one day and he goes, remember I told you a couple of years ago now we got to work together. So what we did was we said we wanted to create a program where people would have access to. To this incredible. These podcasts that you normally could not listen to because they're not on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere else. They're inside these companies. So we wanted to feature these very specific, unique programs, and we interjected with other specific, unique programs. Who knows, maybe the binge factor will be on why they listen. And that's what we decode. What is it about this really great program that is drawing in listeners and getting people attention, and they learn something from it. So we're basically amplifying the podcasting medium and bringing to light these incredible programs that are connecting and communicating really effectively in a unique way. So that's that fourth program. So it fits in very nicely with all the different things.

And you're, and you're. You're interjecting these partnerships that you've built. And that's what I really want to talk about, because you've done that so brilliantly. You've got the collaboration that you did, evaluating the brilliant minds of womenwithsuccess.com and Clubhouse right within Clubhouse to do that. And so I love that you've developed these partnership and collaborations. How do they come about?

How do you make them happen As.

A connector, and that's what I coach, speak about, train people about, is how to be a better connector in a sales, marketing, or leadership component. That's the root of the business that I do each and every day. That's what people hire me for. And podcasting, by the way, is also part of that because that is a means to connect it. We've used it as a way to connect to our business and our brand. But when I realized this amazing medium of Clubhouse, it's had some really, really great attributes. It's got some problems that I think.

Well, we're going to talk about those because I don't want to miss out on that.

I want to get both sides of it. But the good things are the connectivity to people immediately live right away. I mean, I'm a little older than you, Tracy, but I grew up in like, you know, you could have dialed into a party line type of a thing, and that was the world.

I'm a lot older than I look. I do know what party lines are.

But, you know, all those things. And now we've got this great app where we can literally network instantly. And I'll be completely honest, I was trying to figure out where was the right place to play within Clubhouse. Obviously, it's a great way to connect. I'll go into rooms where other professional speakers reside. I'll go in with our other consultants in certain businesses because that aspect. But most of the time I'm finding myself in places where podcasters were going. And then we were looking at this medium saying, okay, this is really great. And a lot of people like, oh, it's going to replace podcast. It's going to totally, totally changed the way that we listen. And I stopped and thought about it. I said, it's no different than when something is on television today. There's a little bit of fomo, like if you miss out when, oh, NBC is going to air friends at 8 o' clock on Thursday night, which they did from the late 90s all the way into whenever that show ended. And you almost felt like you had to miss it or you would tape it. Well, now everything is on demand. And that's how I think about content with podcasting. Right? You listen to it when you can listen to it. Binge factor is perfect. I listen to a show called the Rewatchables, which is a Bill Simmons podcast, which I have not missed an episode, which is so sad because I love movies. I won't listen to more than one at a time. And then I realized, that's podcasting. And then there's this amazing live interactive medium that Clubhouse is there. Why don't we just amplify our podcast through it? So the way that I did was I was trying to identify unique opportunities that can grow my business or grow the podcast. And that was the way that we were going to play with Clubhouse. That's the space that I like to dance in. Would you like to hear how we're doing?

I would love to hear it and so would our audience. They would be remiss if I didn't say, and Lou, tell us how you're doing that and what you're doing.

Okay. So when that day that I made that partnership with success.com, they were hosting a room, I invited all these. These amazing, brilliant minds women to come on to Thrive Loud. And that is exactly what we did. And it was great. And we got a lot of episodes that filtered into Thrive Loud, which was awesome because I got to connect to these people. This wasn't driving revenue to my business of Thrive, but this certainly was increasing popularity, getting a different group of listeners that we didn't ever have. It also gave me a chance to find some other amazing people that had some really good stories that might add to my listeners. Listenership. So I thought that was actually a good mix of how to do it. But what I realized is that if you're going to use partnerships or connections and all these things together, the most Important thing you have to do is it has to be a very good handshake where you're two worlds together. A great partnership, a great alliance has to have benefits for both parties. It can't just be all give and no take. It's got to give both. And that's the only way it works. The example I gave with bedside readings, authors that Thrive, Perfect match matching someone putting books in, and we're giving authors more things to do. The partnership with success.com, success.com looks great because we're helping to elevate women, something that they're trying to do consciously in their branding in their organization. And they've got another outlet when the podcast with ThriveLoud, which is embodying that, those are great partnerships. They work together. So I'm always identifying how we can both mute one another. And it doesn't always work. By the way, let's make it clear there are partnerships that probably. That's how partnerships break up. Right. Relationships don't work. Both partners aren't getting something out of it.

That's right. It happens.

But I go in looking to find where they overlap and where we can both benefit as opposed to how it's only going to help me. And I think that is a big difference. And a lot of people approach people in that way and it comes off a little rough. If you've been in Clubhouse, I've jumped in a couple of rooms and people are moderating and they're literally trying to sell their packages from the virtual Clubhouse stage. And it's not the space I want to be in. So I find the group of people within that. So what we did in Clubhouse is we created the Thrive Loud rock stars. Thrive Loud Rock Stars is a club. Here's how you get in. You had to have been a guest on Thrive Loud.

Well, you got like 630, so you got plenty.

We got a lot of people, but not everybody is on Clubhouse. We're slowly getting them on. And what we will do is each week when we launch those three new episodes, those three guests, sometime that week, we're going to go in live with those three guests. They're the other co moderators with me on the stage. It's not a re interview, it's an open discussion and we bring anybody else that wants to connect to these guests and each of those guests that are featured on Thrive Loud in the Thrive Loud Rockstar stage get a chance to talk about what they're up to. Now, like you said, sometimes there's a delay between when they first met and what's going on. They could pitch their own pieces, and I'm now continuing to promote them. And then I do something else. You know what I do?

What do you do?

I give each of them a gift. I give each of them a gift that's going to help them even better. This is the partnership thing. They already came on the show. They were kind enough to. To come on my platform, share their time, share their message with our brand, which I know they're benefiting too, but I'm also gonna give them something else. And it's customized each time to different people because they all have different needs. Sometimes it's a connection to someone that they need in one particular case. And this is my favorite. I got somebody a podcasting job, a paid podcasting thing, and that was a gift that somebody came because they had such a great platform and they were a perfect fit for this particular piece. I'm using my connecting skills as a mastermind.

You're really using your power and showing your. That's what I like.

Yeah. That's what I'm doing. That's the biggest thing. But the Thrive Loud clubhouse room, or the Thrive Loud rock stars is what we call them, is a fun to come hang out and hear what. Who's Thriving Loud each and every day.

That's it. Amazing. I love that. I'm so glad you share that. And, you know, this is what I love about having connected up with you and popped into a few of your rooms is that generosity of connection, that spirit that you have is just coming right across in that. In that medium. I mean, it's just working for you. And I don't see that in every room. You're right. Like, it's not working everywhere. You know, we're using ours really differently. We're using ours as a. I'm going to say it. It's as a nurturing platform. And that's. That's kind of how we want to look at it. Yeah. We want to help improve shows.

Yeah.

I think you're all providing really good lessons, and we try to do that, too. I know we've had a bunch of people jump in and try and come in to Thrive to the Thrive Loud Rockstar room and say, hey, I want to start a podcast. I'm like, that's great. I don't know if we're going to talk about that right now. Yeah.

I don't know. It took us a while to refine it so that we were saying, okay, we're going to be able to Nurture. Because the majority of the people who seem to be attracted to us and popping into our rooms already have podcasts. So we're going to nurture existing podcasters. That's easier for us. We can host in the hot seat. That's what we're doing there. We can really put them in and we can really help them move their show. And then a bunch of other people can learn from those. Because people tend to make the same, I wouldn't say the same mistakes, but they're the same rookie errors as you start a show that sometimes proliferate as you continue on to no matter how many episodes you have sometimes so. And most people don't get an option, don't get an option today. In our business, no one gets a strategy session with me anymore unless you're on air on my show here. Like, you just don't happen. So the fact that I'm in that room is. Gives me an opportunity to serve more, which I wish I had more. And I know that's how you're using your podcast. I know you look at it as service. I can hear it in the way you talk to people. But that service has to have a give back, I believe. I mean, it comes back to you. So how are you in that sense? How is that benefiting your business? How has podcasting raised your authority and benefited your business?

We're really going to pull the curtain back now. And as you could tell, I'm the open person here. So as you mentioned, I'll use Thrive Loud specifically. You already figured out that we found some revenue opportunities for podcasting in how we're working with Bedside Reading and how we're doing stuff with AIM Cast. There's others, by the way, I'm doing some podcast consulting for some of those bigger companies that became a different side of the business. But that's not the main. The main gig of what we do at Thrive is that we basically work with the most amazing businesses, leaders and brands and help them thrive through the power of connecting. And we do that in their sales, marketing and leadership roles and helping to work and better connect those skills. And that's what me and some of the consultants I work with help to do for all these amazing clients. And the Thrive Loud podcast was a chance to kind of feature some of those amazing companies. And actually I was helping to work with. They're not all the amazing Thrive rock stars like a Tracy Hazard, but there were a lot of folks out there that we wanted to bring to attention and really draw. And I recognized, wait A minute. I've got something here. And by the way, it probably took about 100 some odd episodes for me to figure this out.

Yeah, it doesn't always happen fast. For those of you who are newbies out there, it takes time. Lou's got it dialed in, but he's had a benefit of a lot of episodes.

It actually came from a really good question, and this is a true story. Very good friend of mine, Phil M. Jones, very well known speaker, exactly what to say. He's got the Words with Friends podcast, by the way, which is adorable. I love that he always picks a word and he picks an expert to speak about it. And it's really a great program. He does a video feature on his website. So Phil had asked me a while back because I was actually questioning, was the podcast worth it? And this was about 100 some odd episodes. 150 in. Was it worth the time? Was it what it was supposed to be doing? Because what it was supposed to be doing initially, Tracy, was to get me more awareness and branding to grow consulting and speaking opportunity. Truth be told, that's what we created it for. But there was something magical happening and I didn't exactly know what it was. I knew that I was getting connections and I knew that it was a very powerful marketing tool, but was I really making money with it? So that's what we did, was we started to look at the type of guests that we have on Thrive Loud and we started to categorize them in a different way than we had ever thought about it. And we put them in different buckets and gave a number for each one of those buckets, one increasing in number. The higher the number, the more valuable it was to the business of Thrive. So case in point, would you like to hear the three buckets?

I would love to hear the three buckets, Lou.

So bucket number one is what I call ego. Ego is who can I get on this podcast that's going to be like, wow, you had so and so on that podcast. It was people that were famous. Entertainers, athletes, actors, newscasters, media people. Names that everybody can recognize. Even other podcasters that were pretty globally famous, I guess, in that regard. And top authors, top people in their fields. These are people that would be like, wow, adds credibility to the Thrive Loud podcast. But it doesn't really put a dime in my pocket.

But it also does, though, get you other great guests because they're like, if so and so is on it, then yes. So it does, like feed itself over time. Right?

Pure ego. So we need Someone's in there because otherwise it gets a little boring. Who are these people? I don't know who it is. You want to get some attention. Like you could be like, wow, they had so and so on that show. That's pretty neat. So we had a one bucket. The two bucket, though, was a very important bucket. Category two. And we called out the thought leaders, the podcasters, the innovators, the ones that really Thrive Loud. These are the people that you have probably had in your show. These are binge factor people and these are the ones that are great guests. This is the stuff that people actually tune in and listen to. Hopefully they're listening right now. Like a Lou diamond would fit into that category as a number two. I'd like to think I'm a number one. I'm a number two in this particular thing.

You're really a number two. Blue, you're.

Yes, my wife calls me a number two all the time. Okay, so. But a number two is valuable because we actually have most of our content fits into the two. And the two is another connective way to promote the podcast. Because as great as it is to say, hey, I have somebody as a number one in the ego. Make it clear. The lovely who's now my friend, actress Shannon Elizabeth, who's amazing from the American Pie movies, she's not going out and she's spending time advertising Thrive Loud on our behalf. As great as it is, we're glad to have her. Although that's done, she's done some really cool things for us. So Shannon, if you could listen to this, we love you. The twos are great because they are the best promoters. They're the ones who know they want to promote themselves. If they're a guest on the show, they will share this podcast with everybody. And they were probably responsible for the biggest growth of listeners for our business. Twos are important, more important than ones. And then there are the threes. The threes are the people that put money in my pocket. The threes are the prospective clients. The threes are the people that I want to work with. The threes are the people that are going to hire me, Lou diamond and my company Thrive for our business services. Here's what we learned. You can't have all threes on a podcast program. Who the hell would ever listen? It would be so self serving. It would never work. You can't have all.

So I'm going to stop you there that I have quite a segment of my clients who do that. They can't watch their numbers. It's very frustrating, very scary for them, right? They might have 100 listeners and that's it, you know, ever. But their funnel works. If they look at it as a podcast, funnel works and most of the people come through it have no idea. But their business model has to be at the right level for that to work. Right? And I think your client base isn't at that right level for that to work. You still have to have a great show to make it work for you because you're at a step up.

These are CEOs of companies, people who are literally like heads of private equity groups who are basically looking to invest. This is definitely a higher clientele than your solopreneur entrepreneur type of person. That would be a revenue person for us. And by the way, I have done one on one coaching for those type of people that were twos but became a three because we found a relationship that we could work together. But few and far between, most of them are different. But they were also important for another reason. It was huge exposure for them also to be on this podcast. A lot of these are up and coming mid tier type companies that are looking for that type of marketing and this was easy. I can hire Lou to help me with this and oh my God, the payback. I'm going to work with them and they're going to make more money. Exactly why they bring me in. The threes became the business model with the 1, 2 and 3. So each month we have a formula of how many points. We can't have all threes. As I said, if I had 12 episodes a month, I can't have 36 points on all my different guests. I actually have somewhere in the low 20s. Mid 20s is probably what it is. But make it clear, spread out over the year, you start to figure out where those numbers come in.

And I think over time that you'll start to, you do start to see that overlap between the ones, twos and threes that actually do become clients. Anyway, so it starts to work over, over time.

So I've had a one who literally called me up and said, I need to speak with you because I'm speaking at a really big event and I want you to actually bring your podcast to the event. I'm going to pay you to do it and I'm going to give you a chance to speak at one of the breakout rooms. I'm like, boom, I'm there.

Yeah, awesome. That's so, so great. I love that. You know, I want to talk a little bit about how you do things and why your show is so great. I want to get to your binge factor. So when in the scope of your show did you realize people were binging on it that you had a bingeable show?

I think once we got to three guests a week, which I think happened close to the. Somewhere between 150 and the 200 episodes around there, we started to realize that we had a formula that worked in the episode. The show is short enough that really was compact enough that people like to listen. My favorite story was someone asked me if we could make the show just a little bit longer because they were commuting to work. They would get through one episode and then they started the next, and then they had to wait all day because they got to work already.

Isn't that nice when your audience goes, could you make the show longer? I would like more from you.

That's amazing. And I go, I thought we wanted it to be brief, bright and gone, which is what we sign off the show with. So it's. It was really fascinating to hear that. And that happened when we started to figure out the formula. I just gave you the one, twos and threes. And I also got to the point where I had to stop saying yes to people coming on the show, and I had to actually start saying, whoa. Now I have to actually have a process to see if they fit into these buckets and fit into our little formula and aren't going to value the key things that I want about Thrive Loud. They have to fit into the fact that are they Thrive Loud worthy because.

You have these binge listeners who you have. You have to serve.

We have to serve people because what we want are people that are thriving in their lives, their businesses and their passions every day. And in the program, we decode it for you. We map out what it is about that amazing person that you're speaking to and what they are doing that you can use, that can change the way that you think about things or just add it to your world, connect with that type of person. That is what we want. And that's when we regard bingeable. So I'd say once we got to that and people were like, wow, this is really good. Keep them coming and we can't stop.

I know you feel that pressure of it, right? So I love that. Well, you know, so what do you think? Your binge factor and all of that, what is that? That sort of key thing that really makes you just so special that people want to listen to your show?

You know, during Clubhouse, I've Been asking the like the three guests at who Come on who had just been. Their shows had just been released. They just heard it, it's fresh in their ears. It probably wasn't so long ago that I had recorded with them and I asked them what was the experience like? Did you have fun coming on Thrive Loud? And I'm not doing this to pat on on my back, but I am, I'm going to. Not only did they have fun, they actually said I challenged them in the interview in a way that they didn't think. It wasn't cookie cutter, it wasn't a pre planned thing. I do the research, but I try to make the interview as engaging and in the direction that the guest wants to go. I don't want to force them down rabbit holes that I feel I want to go down. I might challenge them and push them a little bit, but I want to hit them. I want to hit where they are right now. I want to be as present as possible. And I've been commended for that a lot. And I do feel, and I know this, that those Thrive Loud rock stars, they're now like real friends. They're real connections that want to help me. After that conversation, they're like, what can I do for you? Is the number one thing. And I'm a pretty nice, easygoing guy. But I also want to make sure though that they get their message out that it's all about what they want to do. And I don't know if a lot of hosts do. Some of them are very programmed. The reason Thrive Loud started, Tracy, was because I had a really bad experience on a podcast show. Do you want to hear the quick version of that?

Yeah, let's hear that version.

Someone gave me. I had my book master the art of Connecting. I was given a form that I had to answer before the podcast and it was eight questions and I had to answer those eight questions. And then they asked if we could do a pre call before the live recording. And they wanted me to stick to the script. Whatever I wrote, they wanted me to say back. And I said, well, why don't you just digitize this and put anyone's voice, you know, what does it matter?

Well, use AI. Yeah, let's just use the AI voice. Put me in.

It gets better. We do the rehearsal and now we go to the. To the Real Live thing. And I couldn't even believe I accepted to do this, but I did it.

Because I would have bailed out before. So I bravo to you for going all the way to check it Out.

I think I was too green at this point to do it. And it was my book publicist was the one that set it up. So I was kind of trusting them a little bit. And at the end of the interview, there was two things that happened. One, the host was mailing it in. They just did not put any energy or passion into it. It felt like they were reading it. And then the rudest thing in the entire world, the interview ended. And I go, hey, thank you so much for the opportunity. This was really, you know, really thank you for having me on your show. And he doesn't even give me. He does his sign off, and he comes back off. He goes, you changed the wording of what you were going to say on the eighth question.

Oh, my God.

And before I apologized, I don't even know why I was about to say I'm sorry. I stopped myself. And I said, well, is it really that different? It is to me.

And at that point, I said, can you do me a favor? He goes, yeah. I go, please don't air my podcast on your show. I go, cancel it, because you've just inspired me to do something and I'll be back is what I said. And I hung up the disconnected thing and I said, I am going to create a podcast that's the exact opposite of what that was.

Yours is the exact opposite of that. So bravo for you. I love that. That's kind of like you just set up. I'm not going to do this. I'm going to do it differently. It wouldn't be the binge factor if I didn't psychoanalyze your show and give you what I believe your binge factor is. And you are right on in a good part of what you've got going in. You are connecting in motion. That is the key to what you're demonstrating, what you are truly an expert in. And that's connecting right there on the fly, in motion, on air. And you're doing that brilliantly. But it is the fun factor that you're bringing in that I want to mention, because we haven't talked about this yet. You have what I would call pattern disruption going on at the beginning of your show.

So.

And you didn't have it always. It's new, it's on the newer side.

To it, but you have, like, totally different intros that are absolutely hilarious.

I wanted to just almost. Because I didn't have enough time to listen to all your episodes. You got a lot there. I wanted to, like, go all the way through and find all the different ones and listen to all the beginnings of every single episode. I could that you had this on because they were so funny. It had this. And I'm going to now date myself. It had this Murphy Brown secretary where Murphy Brown, the TV show, used to bring in a different secretary all the time. And it was usually somebody famous and they were terrible secretaries. And it was hilarious bit that they would have that ongoing through each episode. That's what you've got going at the beginning of your show. It is this fun. And then you do have a recurring bit that I'm assuming you use on social media. And we'll talk about that in a minute, because I want to talk about engagement. But you have this bit that you do that is called Fun Street. You take everybody and then they do this fast. And what I love is, is that because your guests have had so much fun over the course and they've gotten their energy up and I've seen you. You take someone who may not be too super high energy, but by the time they hit Fun street, they are ready to go and you hit them at the right moment with that. And then it's this fast bunch of questions like your favorite movies and your favorite foods and stuff like that. And sometimes they're like, oh, I feel really bad about what I said. That wasn't even an interesting food. Like, I wish I could have thought something better. I'm like, no, but it's your favorite food. And I think that's. I really just kind of sets everything up for the energy you want to create, but demonstrating really how that kind of fun, that being in the moment, that true engagement that you're creating at that time and the rapport that you're building is the reason you're successful at what you do as a connector.

Wow. By the way, Tracy, thank you for that. And coming from you, I do. I can't even. That's the highest regards I could imagine from this. So I really do appreciate it. We do take a lot of time to think about it. But you're right, our openings have been from the interns that sometimes do some funny stuff to. Well, let's give a shout out to Steve o', Brien, one of the greatest voices ever, who reads famous movie quotes, but does a spin on them that relates it to either myself or Thrive Loud. And that has always been just absolutely some of the most fun things. And trust me, when I'll make sure that you get a chance, maybe I'll even give you the audio copy for this episode if you Want for what he did for the 600th episode, which is actually just one of the most brilliant things we've done. He's done a whole bunch of them. So the openings are fun.

Okay, so everyone out there, they're going to give me the little clip part. I'm going to put it in the blog post for this episode. And you'll get a sneak peek in because his 600th may not have aired before this one does. And you'll get a sneak peek into how fun it is, but you're going to have to go to the blog.

Post to get it.

There you go. I love it. She's so good at directing people where you need to go. So, yes, we will do that, and you will, trust me, it's worth the listen alone. But when it came to Fun street, actually, that came from the other big, special reason why this show continues at the pace that it does is that I owe and bow down to my amazing thrive loud interns. And there have been close to 30 of them. These are some college students who are communication majors, and they are more than brilliant. They have come up with some of the themes. They were the ones who came up with ideas for which movies we can mix with. They've come up with special ideas for milestone episodes. They've even taken over the program, which was one of my favorites, the Intern Takeover. And they used a very cute intro from Mission Impossible, like, we stole the keys. We came in and we broke into the studio and we recorded the episode. But they're also the ones who put together a lot of the minisodes. They do the intros and outros that you hear of the show. And they were the ones that came up with Fun Street. They said, you should end. If you want to end the show on a high note, maybe you need some kind of speed questions really fast. Things that are fun, that motivate you, that keep you pumped up, that elevate your game, that are things that make you thrive. And we said, well, that must be the things that people love. And I want them happy at the end of the episode for a lot of reasons, specifically those in that three category. But I also really want it because I want the listener to also kind of like, oh, I want to see what they're doing well.

And it can happen so often. This is one of my interview tactics. So I have a training program that I teach when I get clients in who just feel uncomfortable with the interview process. And a lot of times we are too serious in our interview or we're Too, like hard hitting. Like you and I, we've been hitting it from the ground running to talk about podcasting in the industry and all those things. We didn't get a chance to like, hit the personal. And so my recommendation is that we end with the personal or end with something that is service driven. And that's exactly what you've done with that. So it ties it in and gives them a chance to be human at the end instead of these corporate people or whatever it is that they're doing. And that's much needed for the audience as well.

It's actually a shift that we do intentionally in the interviews. We start off with the business or the things that they're doing, and it slowly moves to the personal and then it really gets to the fun stuff. And that's our theme. And. And we find that every day should start and be bookended with fun from beginning to end.

I love that. I love that. Such a fun show. I could go on for hours with you, but I really want to make sure that we touch on some things that I know are really important to the audience here. And that is the engagement piece. The engagement piece. So you've been talking about how you're sort of trying to build up some engagement on clubhouse and other things, but are you using the five tips? Are you using or your five fun street questions? You know, are you using them? Are you using the miniso? Like, how are you using them in social media to try to encourage engagement with listeners?

Such a great question. I would love to tell you that there is a standard format for it, but it really depends on what ended up happening. I'm just going to use an example. I just had an opportunity to interview Amberly Lago, former fitness amazing person speaker, had a tragic accident and has recovered and lives with unbelievable pain every day. And she might be the nicest person I've ever met, somebody that you look at because she's just absolutely beautiful. And she also is beautiful on the inside too, from all the things that have happened to her. And you realize, like, oh my God, you want to hate her, but it's impossible you love her. That might have been one of the best episodes. And we video record them. So we'll create small snippets that we'll put on Instagram. Sometimes they'll be injected into the stories or we'll make a full post about it. We'll put them in LinkedIn as well, so that on LinkedIn they'll have a chance to connect. If it's a business related audience. We've even done some best of montages of that too. And that's the minisode piece where if somebody really had a great nugget, we'll try maybe a year from the date of that original episode, or even sooner, something timely like a new book launch or whatnot. We'll time someone's episode. If they came out really early and they have a book coming out six months later, their episode was before. We'll bring back a minisode right at that point and we will market it. Push the book, push the product, do.

Special things, push back to the episode. Love that.

Exactly. Link back to it. Those minisodes are great and they're short. They're like four or five minutes. So they're like quick little doses. Anything we can do to keep the connection loop going. And we're pretty much Instagram LinkedIn. I'm going to give you my Facebook and Twitter for whatever reason. I mean, where we have constant feeds of stuff. But I'm not as Twittery tweety as I should be.

Neither am I. I tell everybody. My favorite day was a couple of years ago. I gave up Twitter and I just put it onto auto post. And the funniest part is I literally wrote in my profile that I don't post live here. It's auto tweet. And if you want me live, where to find me. And people still direct message me. I'm like, duh.

We recognize Instagram and we also did some studies that more people were going directly to the Thrive Lab website from Instagram and from LinkedIn than any other place. So we said, let's just stay there. Clubhouse is the newest.

And Clubhouse is driving people right to your Instagram, really Exactly right.

And I guess also to my Twitter. But I have not going there to check to see what's.

You might need to check your direct messages now and again.

Now there's some strange people there, but yes, every now and then. So we are using every little bit slicing and dicing it. One of the coolest comments, you actually noted this. We came up with a brilliant way because we did this little promo with Spotify. I got a little advertising thing with them that I did when every seven or so guests we would do a post on Instagram and we took the image on a phone of the podcast art as it shows up in Spotify and we would literally put that as the master thing. So you would see we'd say connect with our guests and it would be a slider Instagram thing and each page would be each guest's thing. It was really cool. The problem was we caught up.

Oh, no.

We were basically going to go ahead of where we needed to do. So we have to come up with something else, but we can't keep trying. And all we want to do is find new and innovative ways to use all those mediums to bring people back.

Whitney Lauritson was on my show recently, and she's also my social media strategist. I think you know Whitney, right? She's brilliant. And she said something so fantastic to me. She was telling me about, in a sense, looking at her guests in the same way and her social media influencers, which the world she came out of. Her social media influencer get the ones that were more celebrity, the ones that had higher followings were the worst sharers, but the ones that were new in a particular platform did really well. So she had this one person who was like, really just getting into TikTok, but really early, but he blew up her show and she could see a significant tick up in it because he blew up on TikTok and so she got in early with him and he just. He was just so generous about it. I think you could blow up on.

TikTok with your mini self episodes.

It's funny you say that. There's a discussion. We're trying to figure it out ever since I saw the documentary the Social Dilemma. Oh, yeah. First of all, my daughter literally deleted TikTok from her phone after we watched that. And I was like, what do we do?

Should we do that? Well, then you better watch Fake Famous next. You may want to delete Instagram.

So true. The discussion. Someone said to me, if you have lots of followers in Instagram is the equivalent of being rich in Monopoly.

Right?

So, yeah, I think. I think TikTok might be fun for you because you fit the fun profile there. So you might. I could see a montage of all your intros going on.

That would be awesome. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Or. Or even just having, like, you know, people like me mouth out those intros and it not even being my voice could be pretty cool, too. Maybe we do something like that.

Come up with something anyway.

We'll come up.

Up with something. Put your intern brains against TikTok. I can't wait to hear what they come up with.

They'll listen to this. They will.

They will come up with something. That's right. Well, you know, you do do promos and you had. Some of them are at the very beginning, which is not something I recommend for shows that are new. So just keep this in mind. While Lou's a great example, he earned the right to do his promos before his episode starts. So he's earned the right to do that. How are you seeing conversions on those promos? How are they working for you?

It's funny because they don't go exactly as we think they do.

Yeah, that's what I was hoping you were going to say.

Like it's funny because we'll do certain promotions here. Here's what I know has worked well. We cross promoted the other podcasts on Thrive Loud and noted that that actually did work. So we got listeners over to why they listen because of promos that we put at the top of the show that absolutely worked. We've tried to do certain live events or certain things. Like even we even did a whole thing like, hey, come check out. We're going to do a big room in Clubhous. And we try to time it with that week and it didn't quite jive as much as it did. It's the most important lesson that I learned from all of this podcasting. And this is ironic as it's a binge factor because this is about how you listen. But we learned a long time ago that it is way more important that people know the episode happened and whether or not they listened to it or not. Initially I say that interesting.

Ah, profound there, Lou.

The profoundness is this. We had Mark Baumbach, who is a world famous screenwriter. He did all the Planet of the Apes movies and maybe most specifically he wrote the movie Unstoppable, which is what got him recognized that train movie with Denzel Washington. And he's brilliant. He's got a whole bunch of other things. Executive producer of a whole bunch of stuff. Awesome guy. I had him on the show and I did a post in social media that put it out there. And someone came up to me and said, hey, I saw that you had Mark Bombach on your show. And this was early on when Thrivelot started. And I said to him, like, oh, what did you think? And he goes, well, I didn't get a chance to listen to it yet, but I'm going to. And I walked away. And I remembered I got in the car, my wife was with me and I said, man, they're not listening. And then I stopped. I go, but he knew about it and he's going to listen. What does that tell me? And that's what it told me, that people are going to listen when they can binge. They're going to Listen when they can get to it. And I can't always know when that's going to be so timely. Promotions have to be things that can go evergreen. The promotions have to be go check out Thrive Loud, certain services or another podcast or things that are going to last a little bit longer. Because that small window of time that you can try and get something to promote that might be in a time window, really hard to nail down because someone might be a few weeks off from when they actually get to it. And I can't push them to have to listen. We just hope that they hear enough about it and see enough about it to get them there quickly.

Well, we're gonna have to talk about pas de ties after this call because that's exactly why I invented pas de ties. So anyway, you know, because I learned that same thing. I had a, a mentorship that we were offering and it was a contest and I wanted it and I was like, okay, well now it's done. I don't want people to have this in there. I want to remove it. And my editor, who's now my son in law, told me it's going to cost just as much for me to take it out as it was to put it in. I was like, like that's not going to happen. And I challenged my team just to figure out a way to do that.

Hold on, you had like kids at like 13, didn't you or something?

No, no. We just did an episode where I admitted that I'm 50. We just did an episode. I admitted that I'm 50. My daughter works for me. She just turned 26 and she is married. Yep. So anyway, well, Lou, let's get a little bit personal. So what do your, what does your family think? What do they think of you as a podcaster? Is this a good thing? Is it prestigious or do they go, oh, that's on the mic again.

First of all, my daughter actually has done a couple of audio spots on the show. She actually has done the ad that reads for Spotify, which we play every once in a while. I'm a little biased towards that. She actually has a really good voice, which is good too. My wife certainly doesn't listen as much as she. She listens to the ones that, that she knows the guest or she's familiar with the topic. I had one of her classmates on really a big best selling author, Ron Lieber, which was a cool thing about, about the price you pay for college. An amazing conversation. That's the stuff that she likes. She can't keep up. But she knows two things. She knows that that little formula thing actually did show some results that we're starting to. The business is picking up because of the work of the podcasting that I put into this. There are times that she will give me a. She goes, it's a marketing engine. You have to stop. You don't have to go so crazy with it.

She's not gonna let your head grow over this. Right.

And the fact that people will come up to me and tell me, wow, you're. You know, she's not getting any of those. Oh, your husband's Lou diamond on Thrive Loud. No, she's not getting any of those. She definitely keeps me in check. My kids, who are almost 21 and 18, they know about it and they recognize it, but it's like, it's dad's podcast. Whatever it is, it is what it is.

Dad podcast. Yeah. They don't always give you credit. My girls are. Because I have two young ones, too. They're always on the mic, but, you know, they like to be on the mic, but they're like, no. This podcasting thing is just.

Exactly.

Yeah.

They do love coming down to the studio and playing around with the microphones and all the sound stuff around.

You got a cool studio going on there. So that's for those of you listening. You're going to want to go check.

Out the video so you can see loose, cool studio.

Because the coloring behind you is awesome, too.

Very on brand.

Yeah, very, very on brand. So before we go, tips. If you've got someone new out there who's struggling to start a podcast, thinking about it, what's your tips for that?

Pod fading is real. If you don't believe in what you're doing and you have to have a passion, this is work. Make it clear. It's fun is all. Heck. And I'd also argue you're not going to be perfect. You're going to make mistakes. And those mistakes will only be lessons that will help you become a better podcaster, a better interviewer, a better marketer, a better promoter. It is important I go back and listen. Even the way you speak will change. I go back to some of the earlier episodes. I go, what was I doing? I was speaking 100 miles an hour, and now there's a different cadence and things that you learn. It is a process. What I will say, from a business perspective, it is the greatest connect, working tool I have ever dealt with podcasting, because you get to connect and network with some of the most amazing people if done correctly. And you work at it. You will find ways to monetize and grow the aspect of your business, if it fits that way. Or maybe most importantly, fulfill a passion that maybe you've always wanted to do to get your voice out there. But be patient and keep at it is what the advice I would give to you as it relates to starting up a show.

Oh Lou diamond, so many diamonds today. I hope that the audience really takes some notes going on. But of course we always have the blog post for this episode at the Bing. And remember that because I interviewed Lou in an article before this, there's actually another companion article which goes through some of those basic questions that we typically talk about here that I skipped over to get to the advanced stuff with Lou today. So if you want to get some of those basics and beginning advice, we've got those in the article, which will also be linked here. Lou diamond, thank you so much for coming on the show. You definitely Thrive Loud and I look forward to seeing what you're going to do in your next 600.

And Tracy, this is the open invite on your show. How the heck we haven't had you on the program is absolutely irresponsible. So here's the deal. Let's get you. Let's do that. I'll do the Home at Home.

I look forward to it and I'd be honored.

Lou.

I just love an episode where I have so many notes about things I want to follow up on, things I want to try, things I want to test out. I love that when I can learn so many things from such a brilliant podcaster. Lou he's working it like he said. He said, look, this is work and it is, but he's working it and having fun at the same time. You are going to absolutely love his show. You're going to love his style.

There's so many great takeaways from it.

This is a show to listen to, check out Thrive Loud. Check out all of them. Check out the way Diamond Cuts, Money talks. Love that one. The authors that Thrive, which is run through the bedside reading program. That's a really brilliant one. Is too the new one, why they.

Listen, partnership with aimcast shows to check out, see what he's doing, see how he's trying things out, see what's working and see if some of these tips that Lou has given you today and.

Some of the reveal about how he.

Does stuff can work for you to increase your listeners, encourage engagement and do all of those brilliant things that get you to be a top podcaster like Lou Diamond. I am so glad I could connect up with Lou. I'm going to do some more connection with him, get some more details, find out some more things, and I'll be sure to share them on a future episode. And I think we're going to have to have them back again at some.

Point, which I haven't done on the.

Show yet, so wouldn't that be fun? Let's take it one day at a time.

Remember as we podcast, because that's all you can do.

As Lou said, it can get overwhelming. Find your tactic, find your strategy, find your way. Maybe it's batch recording, maybe it's having a bigger team, maybe it's getting some help somewhere from a service company. Whatever it is, go out there, reach out and find it. Because when you give it a chance, this podcasting thing can really do great things for you and your business, just like it has for Lou diamond and his Thrive Loud brand. So thanks everyone for listening to this show. I'm Tracy Hazzard on the Binge Factor. Love to hear from you. Love to see you pop into Clubhouse. Go check out Thrive Loud Clubhouse and also go check out the Potter Ties Clubhouse because we have one now. Love to see you there. And wouldn't you like to be the host in the hot seat next time? So you can keep get me and Tom, my partner, to check out your show and give you some advice on what little shifts, tweaks and things it might take for you to develop your binge factor and create a successful podcast that serves you, your business and your audience all in one.

Thanks everyone for listening. I'll be back next time with another Binge factor.

You've been listening to the Binge Factor Podcast. For more information on podcasting and videocasting success tips and tactics, please go to thebingefactor.com and be sure to listen to our other show for podcasters called Feed you'd Brand. If you'd like to be interviewed on this show as well as featured in Tracy's column, please go to thebingefactor.com guest and apply.

Sam.