Freedom From The Marketing Revenue Rollercoaster For Podcast Hosts

Get off the marketing roller coaster and get on the automated fast track to digitally market your brand everywhere. Now join podcast producer Tom Hazard and Inc. Columnist Tracy Hazard as they share easy content building formulas and smart cut secrets proven to fuel hundreds of blogs, podcasts and brands with bingeable original content. Join the conversation on how to get your message out to the world. Be original, be heard, promote with power and purpose. Feed your brand.

Hello everyone, this is Tom and Tracy on the feed you'd brand podcast. And today we're going to take a deeper dive into the marketing rollercoaster.

That's right. So when I talk on stage about this, I'm always like moving my arms and making the roller coaster and like going, woo. And so I hopefully won't knock the microphone as I talk about this.

Oh, come on, you always talk. Tracy is Italian and she talks with her hands. I can't help it, she'll bump my groin. So I apologize in advance.

Yeah. If you hear a big thunk, I'm so sorry. But anyway, we really want to talk about the marketing roller coaster because you are on it. And as soon as I say this, you're going to go, oh, yeah, that's me.

Yeah. You may not even know it, but you probably are or have been at least time and again in your business.

Right? So you know you're on the marketing roller coaster when you work really hard to blog post and Facebook and tweet and you send out all these messages and maybe you make videos.

You know, this especially happens if you go to like a business conference or event and they talk about all these things you might not have known and you get all excited, leave that conference and you go, oh, I got to do that. I'm going to use this, I'm going to live stream. Yeah. And you do, you run real fast and you do a bunch of marketing and then you do get more business out of it.

Yeah, you're seen, you're heard, you're everywhere at once. And so all of a sudden people are like, oh, yeah, I remembered I wanted to do business with her, with him. And so you go ahead and you do that and you get more clients and then you get too busy or.

You get too comfortable or you get.

Too comfortable and you're like, oh, I could just livestream once a week, I'll be fine. But typically you get too busy. That's what I find.

You end up doing the work and then aren't working on your business as much to promote it.

You're not marketing anymore and so you drop off on the marketing. And as you drop off on the marketing, you start to go down the roller coaster.

Oh, I can see it. You're taking that deep dive. You may not even know it.

You don't really realize it until you may get a call from your accountant. That could happen. Your bookkeeper. Or you look at your bank balance, you go, oh, my God, I didn't book enough clients this month. I don't have enough business coming in. And you now you start to panic as you're hitting the bottom. And you go, you know, the big crazy. As you hit the bottom of the roller coaster.

I'm having this vision of Kevin Bacon and she's having a baby when he's like in that rocket headed toward this, the brick wall. I don't know.

Exactly. And that's where you start thinking.

That's an older reference for some of you, but.

Right. And you have that dip in revenue that comes from the dip in the roller coaster. Right? The down that happens. So you have that same dip in revenue. And it may not be for a lot of people. It's not a direct correlation because your business, for some people, you book a job, but then it doing the job and you don't see the dip in revenue for two months when you realize you didn't book enough new clients. And there goes the thunk right as I hit the microphone. Anyway, Tom's laughing at me, as usual. So anyway, so that happens. So for some, it's this really delayed reaction. You're like, what happened? When did this happen? Why don't I have enough business? Why is my revenue down this month? And now you're really behind. Now you really have to catch up because now you're really behind because you have to make up for what you didn't market 30 days or 60 days ago.

Yeah. So you shift from doing the work mode for your clients or your products, whatever it is, to then marketing mode again. And you go like 100% marketing mode. I gotta get more business.

Right. But imagine a time at which you are marketing and doing business simultaneously. And it's not taking over one or the other. It's not a one or other proposition. You don't have to give up something to do that. That's our goal. That is our absolute goal for you, for this podcast, for our clients, for what we try to do in our daily business. And that's what we want to share, is all the things that us do that so that we get on that steady, like up track, you know, that click, click, click that you have as you're going up that we want it to always be on the up.

Sure. And it's not though, the steep. Oh my gosh, almost vertical. You know, obviously you want business to grow, but you don't want to grow too fast either. So you're going to go on this sort of steady climb up, constant and consistent.

Right. It's, you know, if you talk to SEO and Google experts, that's what they want. They want to see everything going on the upward client with Google giving you more authority. Like that's technical, right. You want to have your audience growing on Facebook. Right. You want your fan level to be going up, not leveling off and not dropping. Right. Not leaving you. So, like, all of that is really our ultimate goal in everything that we do in marketing. And that's why we call this getting off the marketing roller coaster. But it is also something that is rewarded. Every single algorithm and everything is based in digital marketing in some algorithm somewhere. Mathematics, right? So if you're not a math person, that's okay.

And you don't have to be a technical person either. Just understand there's a lot of technical reality out there to it. But here's what it's all about.

It's about being consistent and constant, right? So who gets rewarded? TV shows, websites like Inc that I write for, right. They post out so many articles every day and Google can count on that. So it will send people there. Right. It knows to boost it up in the algorithm. That's what happens when you are consistent and constant in how many times a week and how often in what time and all of that, that you push out your messages, you get rewarded. It's the same thing with your fans. If they know they can hear you at five o' clock on a Friday on livestream, they're gonna know, they're gonna count on that. They're gonna look for you.

Yeah. But if you stop doing it, well, then next week they might not be there. So it is about the regularity. And people always ask us, well, how much content do I need to make a month or a week?

What kind of content? And to be honest with you, none of that matters. What matters is that you show up.

Right, I agree. And that what we often say is do as much as you can, as much as you can justify and of techniques and strategies for how to create more than you probably think you can without it taking over your business or your daily life. And those will be in some future episodes. But you do as much as you can. But the cardinal rule is you do it consistently. It's a regular, repetitive schedule, because not only do real people, your audience, pay attention to that and start to count on that and get disappointed and might leave you if you're not there one week or a couple weeks, but Google actually cares and pays attention to that, and that's really more important than a lot of things that you might think.

So, Tom, let's tell them the story about what happened to us earlier this year or last few months, I guess. So. We have this other podcast we've mentioned to you before. We have a podcast on 3D printing. It's called WTFF. And if you don't know what it is, you probably don't want to listen to it.

It's a technical thing. It's not profanity. It's a play on acronyms.

It means what the fused filament fabrication. And fused filament fabrication is the geeky term, 3D printing. So if you know enough to know that, then you're our perfect audience and please listen to it. We'd love to have more subscribers, but there's not the point of my telling you about that here. No. So we reached, like, I think we hit 467 episodes, right?

I think so.

And that was, like, April. And we were really, really busy because we had a daughter who was graduating, had two graduations from college. She graduated from two colleges. We had a wedding that was a month after all her graduations or a month and a half after all our graduations. And we were nonstop traveling because we had a lot of trade shows that I was speaking at and events that I was speaking at. And so we were doing a lot of traveling in there, too. So we had a lot going on. And all of a sudden we decided to take a hiatus.

We just had no choice. Well, really just forced on us, you know, even though we have the best systems, I mean, there were a few sort of extraordinary events in our personal life, and we had a certain amount of business that had to keep getting done. And so push came to shove and something had to give.

Right.

So we actually did take a hiatus on that podcast.

But so a forced hiatus we took. Yeah, exact happened. Tell the audience, tell everybody listening what happened on Google and what happened to us. So we've had that for a couple of years. Right. So we had a certain amount of authority built up, and we'd been pretty consistent and constant. We were very consistent and constant. We pretty much posted between three to five times a week on our blog podcast as of most recent three times a week. So we were putting out 12 episodes a month and we Facebooked LinkedIn, all of those things we posted every single day, at least somewhere.

Okay, so we take this forced hiatus and we actually, because we have been doing it consistently and constantly for so long, we did see a slight dip in certain stats for our website. But it was not dramatic. It wasn't a roller coaster move.

No. Even though it was, it would be like a little. A little dip, right? It was a little dip, a little blip in the whole scope of things because we had been so consistent and constant and because also we've picked back up and we're posting again and we're doing all of that and we didn't lose a couple of things because we have someone who posted in social media. So our social was still moving.

Oh yeah, social continued to move. It was just original content took a bit of a dip for a period of time. But because we'd been doing it for a couple of years that consistently there was something very interesting that happened. One of the things, and I don't want to get too technical with you, I'm going to try to avoid that, but one of the things that is the measure of Google, of a website of value, that it's going to send more traffic to your website, meaning you're going to come up higher on Google search on the first page, hopefully for certain search terms, is how many keywords you rank on.

So think of it and let's just use a really generalized way of thinking. Like every one of those 467 episodes that we did and blog posts that went along with them had a topic. So a keyword might be the topic.

And a keyword. Also when I say keyword, it's not just a single word either. It's usually a phrase. It's a group of a few words.

Like today might be marketing roller coaster.

Correct. That would be one of them. And there's usually a focus keyword and then there are many other keywords that get cross referenced with that one for every post. But there is a measure on website and there are several tools. We're not going to talk about today, we may talk in the future, but there are tools you can use to measure, you know, how much web traffic you're getting and some of the stats of your site. So how many organic keywords are pointed to you by Google is a major one.

And when it means organic, it means you didn't ask for it, Google gave it to you.

Right.

And so what we found is we were still increasing, although not at as fast a pace. The number of keywords we were ranking on continued to increase. Now, the average website, you should know the average. And there's more than a billion websites on the Internet. The average website ranks on something in the low 60s for a number of keyword phrases. Our websites and our clients websites that do this rank on thousands and tens of thousands of keywords by using this process. That is one of the big keys to getting increased traffic to your site.

Right? But this isn't stuff we pay for it. Like, we don't pay extra to do SEO cramming and all sorts of stuff like this. So this isn't something we're affecting and doing. It's happening naturally in the process, organically.

By following the process and creating and multicasting, if you will, this original content, right?

So being in a blog, being in audio, being maybe in video or on Instagram or someplace like that. So all of being in all of those places and all of that sending people back to your website, like, that's one of the keys there. So that's all working. But I wanted you to understand that when you are consistent and constant, you then don't ever get that low in the roller coaster again, right? And so you can do that over time. And what happened for us is, don't get me wrong, there were quite a few of our longtime listeners who said, what the heck, guys, where are you? It's been a month. You know, like, stuff like that. So we did get messages like that. And we really appreciated that because it really means, oh, my gosh, it made us want to get back so badly to doing new episodes. And so it gave us the energy to kind of come back to have that feedback. But we also, because we had so many and because we post so much in a month, it also gave some of our listeners a chance to catch up. And so it was like some of them didn't even realize till it'd been like, month later that they had caught up. They were like, oh, there aren't any new episodes. Boy, I finally caught up. Thank you for giving me a chance to breathe. So it also helped them. So for us, there were still listens happening, so we didn't see a tremendous dip in the listenership. And that's because a lot of new people come to our podcast and start at the beginning.

But it actually, in terms of what really matters for business, it wouldn't even matter if you had a big dip in the listenership. That original comment content is still on the website and that has value. And Google is still sending traffic to it every single day. And in fact they send more traffic to it every single day. Can I give one more piece of sort of geeky stat?

Yes, please. Okay, go ahead. Geek permission. This one granted.

May blow your mind a little bit, unless you already know it. But I find most people don't know it every single day. And this is a true stat. I didn't make this up. Every single day. About One quarter, maybe it's 23, 24%. About a quarter of all the search terms people type into Google. Google has never seen before.

Now keep in mind, some of that might be misspellings, some of it might be unusual new words created by a tweet that no one ever heard of before. But you know, there are new terms. And our podcast on 3D printing, that's a relatively new technology in the scope of things. Right. So there's a lot of new words there, there's new inventions every day there. So in our area there's even more.

Sure. So here's the point. Google is the keeper of everything information wise on the Internet. And you just need to accept that others try. But Google is by far and away the keeper of it. And they also control all the advertising and the dollars. And on search results where people get pointed to, Right. So when they have 25% every day of the search terms that they've never seen before, they haven't predetermined where to send someone who searches on that.

Right. Have you ever had a blank Google search turn up?

No, almost never. You may have one that only goes a couple pages deep instead of 50 pages.

Or it may say, did you mean to type this? And it gives you the correction. Right. But it doesn't ever come up blank. And that's their policy. They want to send someone somewhere useful or where they think they wanted to go.

So what do you think happens with that? About quarter of search results every day. Google is going to send them to the most relevant thing that it knows.

Of, the most relevant and the most reliable where they know there might be new information, because there's usually new information there.

So if your website in a certain field, niche, whatever it may be, has been producing regular, consistent content on the Internet on a regular basis for a long time, even though you may have a hiatus, a brief hiccup in creating new content, when Google finds some of those new terms and they say, well, the most relevant piece of content we know of is on Tom and Tracy's website, we're going to send it There, that's where you continue to go up in the number of organic keywords that are linked and indexed to your website, even if you haven't created as much new content lately. So that is a really powerful thing, especially when eventually you end up monetizing your website in one of about three dozen different ways. Then you can monetize a website that becomes very powerful and it snowballs. It goes exponential. I mean, when you start ranking on thousands of keywords, it doesn't take long before you're ranking on 10,000 keywords and then more tens of thousands of keywords.

Right? But the point of our lesson today, or the point of our discussion today is really about understanding that that marketing rollercoaster hurts you everywhere. It hurts your brand, it hurts your revenue, it hurts your Google authority. It hurts you everywhere. So finding a way to be consistent and constant in your marketing is the most critical factor. And when anyone asks me what the most important thing that they could do now, it's to find that thing that you can be consistent and constant with. For us, it was podcasting. We can be consistent and constant, with the exception of daughters getting married, extraordinary.

Events, which don't really happen all that often.

Let's hope not. Yeah, seriously. But with the exception of that, we were very consistent concept for over two years. So that really set for us was the method. It worked for us. And maybe it's livestream for you because you're always on Facebook or whatever that point is, wherever that can be and whatever that quantity is. That's another thing. Can you do it once a week? Can you do it twice a week? How often can you do it? So that's another thing that you have to consider. But when you can figure out what that is, that's your starting point. Everyone always asks me where to start. That's your starting point. So we wanted to give you that as our starting point for our very first full episode. That's not an explanation of who we are, but our very first episode of that's where our starting point is.

And obviously there's a lot of details that we're going to cover in future episodes about little pieces of that and how do you do consistent and constant, and how do you convert that content from one kind to another, you know, and what resources could you use to do it? You know, there's all sorts of details and questions yet to come, but we're going to have a lot of fun sharing that with you in the future episodes and hope that you will find value in coming back and listening even subscribing to this podcast to feed your Brand to learn more as we go.

So you can do that. You can find us on our blog post, right? And on our website, brandcastingyou.com and there's also a place for you to ask us questions there, which is really important. So if you want to hear something, if you have burning questions about how to be consistent and constant or something about the marketing roller coaster that you're on, please send us message there. You can also reach out to us on social media, on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Edyourbrand thanks for listening everybody. We'll be talking to you next time. This has been Tom and Tracy on.

Feed your brand It.

Sam.