How To Monetize Your Podcast

Don't get left behind in this digital age. Dive deep into the emerging world of podcasting. Welcome to Podcast Peeps, the Mastermind. For those looking to take their podcast to the next level, this is where podcasters come together to learn and share the best strategies to help you grow and monetize your podcast. Learn how to grow your brand and your community using your podcast as a tool. Join your hosts, Tom Hazard, Tracy Hazard, and Scott Carson as they mind share their technical marketing, monetization and growth hacks with you.

All right, everybody. Well, hey, welcome to this episode of the podcast Peeps Mastermind webinar. We are live on target here.

Welcome. We are on location in Austin, Texas, state capital of Texas. We've got the state house behind us. What's the university?

What?

I know, I know, I'm not from Texas.

The University of Texas.

University of Texas.

All right.

But it's very exciting to be here. We got a nice cityscape behind us and we're excited to have this. What is the last podcast Peeps Mastermind webinar of 2018?

That's correct. Right. A lot of people, actually over 385 people register over the four or five webinars. Yeah. Numbers on there? Yeah.

Congratulations.

Happy holidays, everybody.

Happy holidays.

Cheers. Cheers.

It's a little later here. This is. Okay, that's right.

It's 5 o' clock at California time.

Normally it's 5 o', clock, it's 7 o', clock, it's definitely Miller time or.

Whatever, you know, Exactly. But anyway, welcome here, guys. We have been doing these every other Wednesday night dating back a few months. We will be kicking them off in the new year with some different changes to it. Right. We'll get more after that as well. We got a great website, podcastpeeps.com, where you can check out the last couple episodes if you've missed them. We're not able to do it. And we also have the Podcast Peeps Facebook group for everybody there to take a look at, connect, share your thoughts. Along with that, we've got people that have been on here on the podcast or experienced podcasters, people looking to be a new podcaster. Right. People looking to get started, people looking to be guests on it. We have marketers, vendors, and had a whole variety of different people on the last couple episodes, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we've covered a good range of topics and I'm excited about our topic today because it gets something that is really of interest to everybody, no matter what kind of person you are on that list.

And so let's before we start asking questions to people, let's talk about Oregon and I. Tonight's topic, monetizing your pod, not your house exactly. Poditizing.

That's why I threw it up there.

I thought you would like that.

Thank you. That's very nice.

You're welcome. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take off. I'm going to stop sharing the slideshow. We're just gonna go to video. Yeah, there, everybody.

All right, so you get a big.

Screen of us with Christmas decorations. Those are not horns. Although you get close enough, it looks like it there for everybody. But we've got some comments already from people out there. Let's see here. Chat roll. So Ellen says. Ellen Melcomore from super type brand in Denver.

Yeah. Hey, Ellen, Good to see you. Good to hear you from you.

Exactly. And then Christina Fuller from here in central Texas will be watching while driving in heavy traffic.

Oh, my goodness. I saw the traffic today tonight. I'm glad I arrived early afternoon and didn't have to drive in that today.

Yeah, that's why I said it's perfect. I drove in. I caught it just at the very beginning of it to get it down here to the hotel. But we're, like I said, we're live on the 18th floor of Hilton Garden Inn downtown. They know it's 18 over Austin, and I have a lot of events at this hotel. Why are you guys here, though?

We got invited to a very special Mastermind event by our partner here, Scott Carson. If we close notes and, you know, I didn't really know what to expect from this. I have to be honest with you. Scott Carson invited us. Hey, guys, we're gonna have a special mastermind event. You're invited. Come to Austin. And I'm just like, Scott Carson invited me. I'm in.

Yeah, that's right.

Honestly, you put on an event, you invite us, I'm there. But I'm very excited now.

Only 14. Only 14 people.

Very exclusive. I feel honored. Thank you.

Yeah, we just actually went to Mastermind through Vegas on the way here. So, like we're masterminding for a whole week.

This is our. Yeah, a week of travel and masterminds for us trying to push ourselves and set ourselves up for successful 2019.

Well, that's exactly right. We just had our actual last student mastermind last Friday, Saturday, Sunday as well, down in Cape Coral. Flew back. Stephanie is still running around somewhere in Disney in Orlando.

She couldn't leave yet.

She couldn't leave yet. It's Christmas time, she had to get her Christmas fix in, so that's a good thing. She's there. She'll be joining us first thing tomorrow morning as well, though. But it's a just kind of bringing some groups together, our biggest, as I say, our closest friends, our affiliates that we love to promote our vendors and some of our sponsors and bring them together for a couple days because they've helped us to monetize our podcast. You guys have helped out, but also, really, it's all about how can I help them. Not just the hazards here, but everybody that's invited. How can I help market them more for the year?

And this is, I think, the number one lesson of podcasting. It's collaboration.

Right.

And if you use your podcast in a way in which you're collaborating back and forth with people and you're helping them promote their business, they're helping you promote yours. That's the first way you can do it. Whether or not you have enough views, listens, whatever that might be, that's the first value you can add to your community.

You know what? I think it's a great point. Monetizing your podcast begins with who you're adding value to and how are they adding value to you? I get referrals from you all the time. That brings me business that's monetizing my podcast. Feed your brand, which is about all the stuff we're talking about.

And in turn, if they sign up with you, I get some episodes, which helps me monetize the podcast.

You're right. I credit you five episodes. Every referral that closes, we do that for every customer, and I'll do that every day.

Yeah. So, I mean, this is really where I found both. My Ink column is very useful in adding value to my community and relationship building. So I think you have to think about monetizing loosely in a sense. Right? Yes.

I think that there's a broad definition to be had here. You know, one of our other really good friends in business is Dustin Matthews.

Yes.

And Dustin is absolutely consummate professional master marketer and someone who monetized his own business. And he, I'm sure, would tell you that one of the fastest ways you can monetize your business or your podcast is through joint ventures. And that could be affiliations. Joint ventures, maybe speaking on someone else's stage that you get the opportunity to. To promote your podcast, your product, your service, your podcast can be an excellent conduit to those types of opportunities. Right.

And thinking about that that way is really like a good first Step especially. And I always like to say that for most people, I think you don't really realize the value in your podcast. You don't really have enough audience for most shows until you've reached about a year of podcasting or 100 episodes. So if you hit 100 episodes sooner, you can kind of get a better sense for or what your downloads are and where you are with things. So that's kind of the thing. So you gotta figure out how to make that worth your while in that first year. And this is one of the easiest ways.

So I think that's a big thing with new podcasters, is they get into it and they're like, oh, how do I monetize immediately? It's like, hey, I get the secret sauce or I get a one. But I've never put it on a burger before, you know?

Well, and even this is the thing, it's like, I've had a lot of people who are like, oh, I'm a celebrity in my region or in my thing, and, you know, we get that a lot. And you're like, I'm so sure. Yeah, I'm so sure I can monetize. I can get sponsors right away. And then they don't.

You know what?

Without the proof of your show drawing an audience, it's really hard to get a sponsor. And so that's where you can say your show not only draws an audience, but it has continual growth. That's probably the number one way we see that, even if it's not amazing growth, but the fact that it's had continual growth is important to a potential sponsor. And so you got to have some episodes under your belt.

Yeah, let's dispel what that myth right away. Let's. You alluded to it, Tracy. Let's get it right out there in all its ugliness. Okay. Because we did have somebody very recently come and ask us. You know, they wanted to start a podcast. They had actually 30 episodes already recorded. They just hadn't launched it. And they're like, all right, so I need to get sponsors in order to justify paying to have this podcast produced. How can I get sponsors before I launch the show? And I'm like, you know what? I'm sorry, but it's not going to happen. And I hate to burst your bubble, but that is the reality of it. Unless you have a very close, very special relationship with someone that believes in you and is willing to pay to be a sponsor of your show from the get go. And it's a very rare situation. Yeah, and they're not going to.

Wait a second.

They're not going to assume you're going to get a certain audience within a certain period of time.

Let's make sure he said get go, not Gecko.

Not the get go.

From the get go. Yeah, from the beginning. Very unusual.

But it doesn't. But as long as you. Because I think the sponsors, the people that are looking at wanting to make sure you're going to be around for a while, right?

Yes.

Now, that being said, if you have got a big event that you've been doing year after year after year and you're adding a podcast onto it, and you have a sponsorship package you're already selling, add that sponsorship onto your podcast. It's added value for them and you can use it as conversion proof. So don't charge them more. Just build it into your package, whatever you're selling that for, and just say, oh, and I'm going to have an ad on my podcast. And then that allows you to track that and say, wow, how much traction did we get from that? Now I've got some conversion proof. So maybe you can monetize sooner because that conversion shows we did that.

Don't you think that if you have your own courses, books, services, products could be physical products? If you have something you already have to sell, that is the fastest way to monetize your podcast. You're using your podcast to market those things to get that out to a larger audience.

Oh, yeah, totally agree. Because we notice people. I get emailed all the time. Hey, I listen to your show. What classes should I sign up with? I've gone to the website. Should I sign up for your virtual? Should I sign up for the blueprint? Tell me about the mastermind. Tell me about the WCN membership. You know, those are all monetary things, you know, anywhere from. And I'll give you an example. $97 a month for like a simple membership where we send them like swag every month and a book from either a guest on the show.

Right.

Okay.

That helps us monetize it because we have a guest on with books. I try to have them give me 100 copies. If not, I'll try to buy them at their bare $3 or $6 cost to send it out to people who signed up for a membership at $97 a month. But that's the whole thing. When I started the membership back in March, you were with me actually. A traffic conversion.

Right, Yeah, I remember.

I gotta do this. We've got a pretty good following anyway, because I put out content for a couple years. And we launched this, you know, $97 a month program. We had almost 100 people sign up part of. But I'm like, well, heck, that'll monetize the show really fast, right? Exactly. But it delivers good stuff to people every day. Versus, like, we were talking about, like a podfest where people are talking about monetizing shows, like selling a single T shirt here and there. Like, I don't want to sell T shirts.

I think it needs to be really relevant to the audience. And that's one of the things that we like to really say is like, look, if you've got affiliates and sponsors and they're really relevant to show, unless you're going to get at the million downloads a month kind of level, or where you're getting like 100,000 per episode minimum, you're not going to be getting Kindle to advertise on you audio, you know, Audible or whatever. You're not going to get those brands who are advertising on John Lee Dumas podcast. Like, those are what gets done through those podcasts. Agencies that'll do it. Libsyn's the same way. It's less than 2% of their total podcasts. I think it's probably more like 1%. I think they're doubling their number from what I can tell. And so really, that's. So few people qualify for that. And why do you want it anyway? It's just gonna annoy your audience. Cause that's like radio ads, right? So 90%, it's irrelevant to them. So when we first took advertising, I'd love to tell the story. I think this is really a good way to.

When was that in the timeline of our first podcast?

So we started our podcast in April of 2015. No, 15. Because Vanessa was a year old.

Really?

April?

Yeah.

No way. Can't be, right? Well, I don't know. Anyway, it was years ago.

She's right.

All right.

It's been three and a half years. So April of 2015, we started our show. Now, we started when we did the 25 episodes a month. Kind of 20 episodes a month.

We launched with. How many did we launch with?

We only launched with three. But we launched one a day.

Well, we did one a day. Yeah. Okay.

We did one a day, one a weekday for five months.

About a year.

No, it was for five months. We hit 25,000 downloads. And at that point, and that was October, end of October or mid October, we were featured in Forbes as one of the fastest growing podcasts in our 3D printing niche. And so that catapulted us. And at that point we had just rolled out a new website. So the website was in the Google basement, right? It had zero ranking everything. And then with. By January, it was ranking.

Oh, yeah.

And it was right around that time frame that we had gotten, between October and January, we had gotten contacted by MakerBot, one of the largest 3D print manufacturers in the US and they said to us, you know, hey, we see you have a growing audience and we are exploring for the new year this budget idea of maybe budgeting podcast dollars.

Yeah, they were. Brand building is really what they were doing. They didn't have anything specific they were gonna sell at first. It was just brand awareness, Right?

It was brand awareness. But they also wanted to tap into the fact that we were designers and brands. So we actually came together and figured out a great campaign. And I think that's why it was so successful. That was part of it was that we were collaborating, saying, what would our audience be interested in and what would they respond best to that will get you the traffic that you want. So Tom actually designed a coffee sleeve that was 3D printed. And so it was something that MakerBot was gonna print and deliver by hand.

You know, they were actually gonna ship it to people.

So people had to give their email.

Go to a landing page and give their physical address and their email address complete lead gen. Right.

And so at that time, we only did these interview episodes one day a week. So we put their ad on four episodes across the month, even though we had 20, you know, in the month, and we put them on four. And at that time, because of the volume of what we were doing, and we're probably close to 30 to 35,000 at that point.

Yeah, we were.

We probably did about 1000-1500 per episode at that time. And so that's all the traffic that they got on their ads. This was part of the reason we invented Apparatitize, because I was like, this is stupid.

Like, why are we all.

Why can't we have it on all.

Our shows, the new ones? We gotta put it on everything, right?

But we didn't want it also to be outdated. So, like, that was another thing. So we only put it on the four. But we realized we had never asked the question of them, like, what would be a good return on investment? Like, how many leads do you care about? And I thought that was really funny that we didn't realize that. And so, but we asked them about midway through the campaign, and they were like, hey, if we get like one buyer of a 3D printer, it would have been totally successful and worth it, which would have been half a break even because we. I think we charged it 6,000 that first campaign.

I think it was even.

6,500.

Was it 6,500? Yeah, something like that. For a month.

Printer was $3,000. So there was like, if we get one or two, we'd be, like, thrilled. It'd be break even. But this was a test for us. And I said, oh, okay. And they said, well, I think we're thinking, like, you know, maybe 500 people, like leads coming through. And I was like, oh, okay, great. At that point, we were already like at 1000. Like, it was like, crazy good.

Yeah, it was great lead gen for them.

It was like the third lead.

They never actually shared with us how many converted. But they came back to advertise another time when they rolled out a brand new 3D printer. So they got value out of it or they wouldn't come back.

The part was that I found is that at the end of it, we started to do the numbers, but it was about a 37% conversion rate on the total of what they did.

The second meaning, I want to explain that, though, the number of total plays or downloads of those episodes, of those episodes, 37 and a half percent of that number were the number of people that opted in, gave their information, and got that free little giveaway in exchange for giving their information to them. That was a very finite, definable, and reasonable amount of money to spend to access customers that are very focused. I mean, it's a 3D printing podcast. They're selling 3D printers and 3D print materials that's directly relevant. So if you can ever find a company, if your audience is so niche that, you know, pretty much everybody who listens to my podcast is interested in this or that you can find a sponsor that you can reach out to yourself, that is going to be exactly who they're trying to reach. And they don't have to use the shotgun approach of general marketing or trying to figure out how to reach those people on Facebook or LinkedIn. You're going to be very attractive to them as real estate to advertiser.

Exactly. And one more thing that they then came back to us on is they said at the end of the month when they were evaluating it, that they had gotten just as many requests for the design file because there were lots of people who already had their printers. And they were like, well, I can buy it from you, but I mean, I Can have you send it to me, but I would love to print it myself. And so they asked us if we would go on their sister site and put it on the design file, make it available. Make it available. And we did that. And within 30 days, that had gotten another 1200 downloads, of which they captured every person that downloaded it. So they got another 1200 people who are already customers, who are. Who they knew, listen to our podcast.

Wow, that's really good.

So, you know, that is a real big.

But that's the direct advertising model. And I think especially for young podcasts, niche podcasts and new podcasts, that's a really good model to go on. Niche advertiser trying to reach a focused audience. They'll be interested to advertise when you have some kind of a definable audience. You know, we were doing it for what, eight or eight, nine months before they got interested. And by the time they advertised, we were probably almost a year in, because it takes time to put these things together, but it was meaningful. And I think that opportunity is there for any podcast. I really do.

But this is why we invented Podotize, because I was looking at that and we're like, we had 200 episodes at the time that they launched. We could have put that across our entire 200th episodes and we would have captured 35,000 downloads every single month. More people would have seen it or heard it or listened, you know, like there would have been.

Whereas otherwise there were about maybe five or six thousand downloads on those four episodes.

Yeah. And so that's where I started looking at that. And that's when we really came up with the invention of what became potatoes eventually. It was also that it had started earlier because I'd complained about doing a holiday promotion. Like we were doing this promo around the holidays where we were offering up a mentorship contest. And I was like, it's gonna be in here. And I was like, and then I'm gonna have to pay the editor to like delete, you know, move it out. Cause this is before we had our own production services. Right. I was like, I didn't want to pay it. Of course, he turned out to be my, my son in law eventually. So I was complaining about giving him more money.

Our first podcast editor was our son in law.

Music videos for rappers, big time stuff.

He's gone far beyond us. And that's great for him. We're thrilled.

So what a good point to make here. If you think about this and just taking. Analyzing it back, bringing it back down a little different we all have different niches. And some words or keywords or niches are more valuable for marketing dollars, like pay per click ads or Google AdWords and stuff like that. Like some most expensive click words are like financial terms, right? Yeah, they're like 40, 50 bucks a click.

They are for real.

Right. And 3D printing was up at that kind of value at that time? Yeah, at the time it was like 50, $60.

Right. So maybe an idea for those that are out there would be to find some. Maybe a vendor or somebody that they use is looking for leads. Because it's always cheap, it's expensive to get leads.

Basically.

When you're doing the $60 kind of model of it where you're like, everybody's competing with it, like audible, like that's where those are at. That's really hard. You have to have a really big following in order to make the conversion worth it. When you're dialed in in that niche and you go for that big dollar amount because it's a really niche keyword, it's gonna be more valuable.

But it could be something like a report because I get a lot of reports for our due diligence checklist off like one of my earliest episodes. Can I get the epic? Yeah, sure, no problem. Thank you. Grab their information. But it's something an easy people could do to set up as a mailchimp list or something like that, or fusion software, a leadpages ad where they click on it, leave their first name and email, which is usually the best things. Or indoor phone number.

Yeah, yeah.

And then it's something that's emailed out to them afterwards. But each of those clicks in our information is worth something to marketers, right?

Yeah, yeah, no question it is. And that's something that any of you can go and research. You can go and look up. Wow. Well, what are the keyword terms that might be of interest in my niche? I'm going to give you a couple of good nuggets of information here. I don't know if we've done this on the podcast before, but there is a relatively new website that has a free version and a paid version where if you're in an industry like real estate investing or you're an industry of. What would be another common one, let's say self help. Self help. Okay. You know what, some of the typical things people are going to search on that they're interested in or they're in a pain point on the ones that.

They search at 2 in the morning. That's my terminology. Like the one when you're stressed out.

Because listen to just what QVC sells at 2 o' clock in the morning.

Exactly. Your kids are stressing.

I want seven minute ads. Oh wait, I got six minute ads. Five minute ads.

Well, here's the thing. There is a website I'm gonna share with you now. It's relatively new, not a lot of people know about it. It's called Answer the Public.

Oh, it's great. When you were doing this the other night, super cool.

Answer the Public. You go and enter in some keyword phrase and you can do multiple keyword phrases and push enter and just go check it out and see all the different variations. Related information and keywords.

Some of them are junk, but a.

Lot of them are really good.

Some of them are junk, but it is gonna give you a lot. And it gives you different kind of mind map displays how to look at these things.

But it asks the who, the what, the why.

Exactly.

And it really gives you everything to use.

And I gotta be honest with you.

It'S money more than Google.

It is money more than Google. But here's the thing. English was my worst subject. Okay? I am not the writer at this table right here. Not happening. So I need help with that stuff.

So I need this more help than.

Just that fantastic tool.

Thank you.

I need this. It's a fantastic tool. And then you can then learn more, find some of those keyword phrases and you can use other tools. There is Google AdWords, which is a free tool. It's complicated.

They'Re hard to use, but there are others. They have some free searches, but then are paid versions. We belong to the paid versions because we want to dive deep into these things like Ahrefs, nsem, Rush and Buzzsumo. Those are a few different tools.

And Market Muse is.

Market Muse is. Well, that's a good one too. So these different tools, we're not gonna go. They're different tools used for different but related things to keywords.

But related things.

But related things.

No, but related things. Like a bucktologist.

That would be an example.

This is an example of the importance of a concept.

So, but anyway, here's the thing. But anyway.

You can really look up. Yeah, we have. You can really look up though and find out for yourself how much money Google is paying per click on these keywords. And that is a key piece of intelligence.

Right? That's the important number to know if what you have, if your niche that you're in, if the topics you're covering are valuable. Right? That's the Key right there.

And this is important because one of the biggest questions we get answered is how much can I charge for an ad on my podcast? How much money could I monetize? Well, I think if you have an understanding of the range of is your niche paying per click in the range of a dollar or two or $10, $25. I mean we start getting north of $10, that's some expensive pay per click that advertisers should be very interested to reach your niche audience.

Let me give you some guidelines. Just because it says 10 or $20 doesn't mean that that's the rate you charge. You can usually charge three to four times that because your audience is very dialed in and very niche and you have them captured. Right. They're listening to you.

And the fact that podcasters consume at an 85 to 95% rate versus like a Facebook ad where it's 6% or 11%.

Right. What term that Tom's talking about is it's you're just separating yourself from these very, very common, highly paper clipped words and keywords and you're moving into something that's valuable and they're searching for an audience for because there aren't a lot of places for them to place ads. That's why there's a dollar value associated with it. But again, it's not the dollar value you need to charge.

You really should charge more. In fact, you always should charge more when you have. Seriously, don't charge more.

Let them, let them whittle you down versus you charge low and they will get down. Yeah.

And first law of negotiations, forget paying you a certain amount per thousand downloads. Forget that in the early days you don't have enough downloads for that to be super meaningful to you.

And a lot of places are still preaching that. We saw that at podcast movement podcast where there are people like, oh, like $18 per thousand downloads of an episode. And I'm like, well, that's horrible. Most people would never get any money at all.

So here's the two ways that I suggest. If you're early on and you have no proof of concept conversion, go ahead and offer to do a conversion deal with someone in order to make it happen. And if they're not going to advertise otherwise. So we were lucky, they wanted to spend dollars and see what it was. But now Our number is 37%. It's pretty good, right? And you know, and it's not always easy to achieve that. Right. I mean, we've had other campaigns that did, only closer to 20, but still pretty good compared to the other advertising venues that they have. So that's even still good. So we try to watch it and kind of know where we are in that. And we are also really careful. We rarely place ads. Like, that's another thing. So when an ad gets placed, people take action on it. If you place a lot of ads, then you know they're constantly bombarded with it and they start to tune it out. So like, that's another thing. We kind of kept the exclusivity and we place a couple a year and that's really how we do it because it supports us and we can command a high value.

But the reality is though, podcast listeners, there are actual statistic numbers that podcast listeners do not mind listening to ads in shows. Seriously something like 68%.

But it's also as long as they're really relevant with what they're listening to, really relevant. Like, I couldn't advertise. Like butt cream in my episode. Wouldn't do very well.

Please don't. I don't want to listen to that.

But for some people, proctologist podcast could advertise.

You know, the medical podcast might work. No. But if it's a commodity type of product, if thinking about Procter and Gamble is trying to sell Tide on your show, that's not gonna work.

Think about it this way. It's like as you've seen over emails, right? And you do a lot more emails than we do. But when we send out emails, if we're sending out constant affiliate emails and we're doing like affiliate programs, people we don't even know if their programs of value, they really aren't partners with us. If we did that, we'd have a high unsubscribe rate. People would get that. That's what can happen to your podcast as well. So we treat that really with care and we think hardest. And is this a value? Have we tried it? Do we like it? Do we think this company is good and they're going to be around for a while? And because it's our endorsement that is on that. And so that matters to us. So thinking about that is take great care with your audience, especially in the early days. But it's no problem. This is the thing I really also loved about what we developed at Poditiz is we can take them out. So now they're gone. So if it didn't work, it's gone. If it was annoying, it's gone, right? Like, you know, you can have a lot more control over it than Having the same stuck in your podcast and have to leave it forever.

Yeah.

So but trying that conversion thing is the thing that I really wanted to say is that this is not a bad idea. If you were going to do it anyway, where you were going to pay every time somebody bought, then you might as well try it yourself. Right. And you might as well use it as your gauge for am I ready to take money from ads and am I ready to show these sponsors that what my conversion rate is?

Right.

And so that's a great way to start with it. The other thing that I do want to mention is that we have Juliet Dylan Clark. We just did a feed you'd brand episode with recently and she's got a quiz program. So she launched her podcast just this past week. It is called.

Promote profit Publish.

Promote Publish Profit. There you go. I gotta get it right.

No, it's you down with pp.

Yeah, you know me.

You're down with pp.

She wants you to promote first, which I really promote. Promote publish profit. I'm sure of it now. And I've had a little too much to drink already, obviously.

But she runs a quiz which is a lead generator to her email list of which she's going to have affiliate programs that she does with other people like she does with us and like with other programs. So in a sense it will be making her money. But that lead generation, she's taking them off of itunes and sending them straight to her site. Doing that from the beginning is super smart. That's why I love the quiz.

Let's talk about that because I think it's important. If you guys are joining us here on Zoom or on Facebook Live, it's myself, Scott Carson, Tom and tracy hazard from pottyties.com or feed your brand. Exactly.

Feed your brand podcast.

Exactly. Feed your brand podcast for those. Because we got different people commenting out here. Ryan Harper says thanks for the golden nuggets on the answer. The public. That looks really useful. Betsy West Hoffer says butt related things.

Hey, Betsy, nice to see you.

Good stuff.

Late.

Fortunately, Betsy knows us well enough that that's not as bad as it may sound.

Exactly. Exactly. We've got people over at Jack Kirby from New York. We got Ray Deer from Fort Worth, Lisa DeCastro from Florida, a whole variety of people across the country joining us on here. We've also got. Should we discuss what Ellen said up here? We like to call that 2am Pain point. The matna. The middle of the night angst.

I love that term.

Seems like you discovered the joy of the Very valuable niche. Ease the bitch of the itch of the niche. That's pretty good.

You can turn a phrase. That's why she's a brand expert.

Good stuff with that. But let's talk about it. So we're going back before that, how people give up that content of sending it to their hosting.

No, don't do that.

Let's talk about why that's so important.

Oh, my gosh.

Because that's an easy way to help you build your SEO, to help you monetize even more, to give more merit in what you're doing. Right, Tom?

Yes. At the end of the day, everything. Look, I love podcasting. I love speaking on the microphone. I am not shy at all about getting up and speaking from the stage or the stage here of our microphone.

Right.

The point is, I love podcasting. It's a great medium. We reach out to people. I love live streaming on Facebook. This is very cool, fun stuff. But at the end of the day, what do we all need to do? Get more people to come to us, to come to your turf, to consume your content, to where you can capture them, where you can make them an offer of something relevant that they need or may want. So how do you do that best? Do you do that best by saying on your podcast, oh, and my guest here has the website. You should go check out www.hisdomainnotyours.com. no, you don't want to do that. You don't want to send them from the audio away into cyberspace to the Internet. You always want to say, you know what, our guest, he's got some wonderful stuff. He's got some offer for you. You've got a discount code, whatever it might be. Or he's going to be at an event. Go to the blog post on our website for this podcast. Like, go to the blog post@feedyourbrand.co. we always say where you'll find all the links and relevant information. And so you're making people go to your website and you might think, well, that's inconvenient for them. I would argue it's not inconvenient at all. Because you know what? How many of us are listening while we're driving or while we're at the gym, Am I going to stop to write down a web URL? Am I going to remember it? No. Give your audience one thing to remember. Always. Only one. Go to your website, condition them. Go to podcastpeeps.com. that's where you're going to find what you need. That's all they have to remember, they'll go at the top of a blog feed. On that homepage or whatever that landing page is, is the latest episode. So you don't have to really tell them even where to go except your website. Click on the blog for this episode. You'll find everything you need. So that traffic is key.

You mean if they listen to an episode on their website? Are you sure itunes tracks that as a download on your website?

Itunes may not, but your podcast host will.

Your podcast does, which is delivering.

That's where the stats are coming from. Whoever you're hosted with, whether it's politize or the other guys. The reality is you've got stats somewhere and it doesn't matter where it's played. Itunes is maybe one of the biggest distribution platforms, but it's only one of them.

But it's not Even a top 10 website though.

No, it's not.

I know it's not.

Spotify hasn't beat there.

So you want to bring. This is all about traffic generation. And once you generate the traffic, you can monetize it so many different ways. And it doesn't have to be with a paid sponsor. I mean, that's a wonderful thing. Somebody wants to pay to advertise on your show, by all means, do it. You got a niche company you think could benefit from it, even if they've never done it before, pitch it to them a flat fee. Forget the amount per thousand. I mean, I would say 500, $800 to advertise in an episode. If it was only one episode or if it's across all your episodes in the month, then, you know, maybe you go a little higher. It depends on how many downloads you have. But a flat rate.

So. And we started doing in recent years not just podcast advertising, but also giving them placement on the website and doing some of those things by, you know, so they'd have great positioning within the blogs and other things like that because the website had more traffic and had more value. So you'll find over the time, especially when you're tracking both those things, stats, your website growth and the organic keyword growth, and you're tracking your podcast sets, you'll find that those are more value, can even add. So giving them a flat rate program for both, they're going to go, wow, that's really valuable to me.

What number of episodes per week do you think people need to be at to help them boost their monetization? Is it we talking once a month, which I don't think is really once a week? Twice a week.

What are you asking about how often they're publishing episodes?

Yes, yes. Because if it's once a week, that's only four weeks. Episodes a month.

The more the better. Honestly, to me, the minimum a podcast should be publishing is one a week. Because you want that audience. Think of all of our lives. TV shows get published weekly. We're conditioned in the United States to have things happen weekly.

Right.

And if you are not right, and if you're not consistent with that, I may get some people saying, oh, can I do every other week? Well, you can. Of course you could do every other week. But if you really want to get value out of your show, more content is always going to serve you better than less. And that's universal. I mean, we've had some shows launched in late October, early November, with 25 episodes from the beginning and then releasing one per weekday for the first eight weeks. And that's just to build an audience fast. And I'll tell you what, both of those podcasts did no promotion initially to their list when it launched, and very quickly, they were getting a lot of downloads. And after one month each of those shows, one got over 50,000 downloads in a month and the other got over 100,000 downloads in a month. The numbers make sense when you think about it. When you have a subscriber and day one and you have one episode, that's one download. If you have 25 episodes, guess what? They download 25 episodes. So the downloads. If you want to accelerate your ability to monetize more content sooner, as long as you can afford the time and or the money to create that content, it's going to serve you much better and monetization will come quicker. I still think the best way to monetize anybody's show from the beginning is if you have your own products or services to sell. And we mentioned that before. I had a new potential client talk with me over the last couple weeks. And they have a brilliant way to monetize from day one because they already have a membership website community where they provide value and they're only charging something really low, like $19 a month to be a member of their website, to get access to their premium content and to advertise that on a podcast audio, they're going to easily add to the number of subscribers to their membership site, which is really their ultimate goal. Now, I know not everybody has a membership website already. That is a little unusual, I would say, but it's an example of one way you can monetize right away and it has nothing to do with a sponsor. And so I think it's brilliant.

The other thing that I just want to mention is that this is one of the reasons, like, if you can't do lots of episodes, then that's why you need to host with someone like us, where you can really get that back catalog working for you. Because your downloads per month, we find that about 6, 60% ends up not being your most recent episodes. It's across the board at almost everybody's podcast, we see that you're right about that.

Yeah, it's your previously published ones because people find your show new now and.

Then they get like it and they want to go back.

Oh, what did I miss? Right. It's that fear of missing out. They want to catch up.

And so you capture those binge listeners who then, because they're listening, binge listening, they're going through multiple episodes. That ad is really resonating in their ear.

They are higher conversion rates for them.

And so that's.

The more they like, the more rapport you build. The more they like and trust you, the more it's easier for them to write a $19 check or 29 or 97 or 1500 or 3500 for printer.

Yeah, you're right. Now, let's talk about. There is a method that a lot of especially I would say bootstrapped or budget podcasts use to try to monetize their show. And it's something called Patreon. It is essentially crowdfunding for podcasts. I mean, I sort of reduce it to that. Right. You're basically, you have your podcast, you let people know, hey, if you like to support the podcast, please go to Patreon and donate to the podcast. I mean, you're basically putting your hand out, so to speak, and saying, if you like it.

Pay me to help fund the podcast. Which is nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that.

Especially if you've got a nonprofit style, passion project, social good, maybe work.

Yeah.

And that because they wanted you to keep promoting and other things like, I think eventually some, maybe even fur babies could be like.

I was exactly. You're already reading my mind.

Fur babies. What's that?

The fur babies podcast hopefully will be.

Only has two episodes.

Talk about a 2019 goal. A 2019 goal.

That's what I was thinking, is basically you. That's why I say you start a Patreon account and start, say, hey, this episode we're sponsoring Fluffy the black Kitty.

Right, Exactly. And so, you know, that's a Great way to do it. So if you have that kind of passion, project social good, that makes sense. But for the most part, what we find is that what happens when you take vacation, nobody sponsors during that time. And if you were counting on that revenue, you don't have it. This is a big deal for a lot of people who run out of time. And this is one of the biggest things I hear about patriots.

So I agree with that. One of the big things, all lessons I learned was last year, like May, we took like seven, eight days off. We went to Hawaii, didn't do an episode. Big gap, lowest month of the year. Okay. And I learned from. I was like, oh, I can't do that again. So we. Because we're taking a three week vacation.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I've been like death in the middle. So I offered up some of my students to be on. We had eight students on for basically 21 episodes. And they rotated through and it boosted it gave it a quick boost because people are listening to other people talk about their experiences and deals and case studies, which is great. We're gonna do that again when we go to Europe again this year. But that helped us out because I said, listen, even when it's not me, if I have a guest on, it's gonna boost it up. Still gonna keep it still keeps it keeps that train going.

Yeah, absolutely. Whatever you can do to maintain consistency. If you need a guest host, if you there are, do an international podcast.

Day kind of style thing where you just meet a whole bunch of people in one day. Now you banked your episodes all in one day.

Yeah. If you have an event that you're going to where you could record a bunch of interviews in a day, or if it's a three or four day event, you could do two a day or three a day. Capturing the opportunity of proximity. Right. Of you have all these people in the same place that are not always there where you can then record all those episodes, bank a whole bunch of them and save them for when you might have a gap and then, you know, maintain that.

So here's one lesson we learned the hard way. So we decided we would take a few weeks off and we did that. We actually took a whole month off and we produced replays.

We re ran some episodes.

Hate it.

Oh, they did not like that at all.

They were PO'd about it.

What do you mean produced replays?

Meaning we took old episodes we'd published that were more popular and reran them.

Like the best of reruns.

We reran them yes, in our feed. And you know what? We were not Seinfeld. People didn't like that. We were not friends. They didn't like seeing the hearing.

Our loyal subscribers were like, we don't want this. We've already heard.

Well, it's like, you know, what are you trying to pull on us here? Come on. We heard this.

So we're always really careful if we ever recover a subject or we did do one replay once, but it was so old and there was a reason to redo it. We redid an opening.

There was an update.

There was an update. So we did the update at the beginning, and when we let them listen, that way they could have just listened to of the update if they remembered it, and they could have just shut it off at that point. That's the only time we've ever done it successfully. It didn't flip out on us, but we had to do an update because there was a hurricane and it mattered.

Oh, yeah, hurricane. Come on. Having a hurricane. A podcast party. Let's see here. Ellen Gilson says it seems like a central sedan of digital thought. Leadership equals consistency. Talking about that, can you describe your premise of trust? No. Like, I thought that was so cool.

I've been talking about this recently, and Ellen and I had a conversation. So a lot of people said what you said earlier, which is know, like and trust. What I found from the podcast is that because they are passively choosing you, right? You didn't meet them before. They don't know you yet, right? So they go from someone who may have referred them or someone they trust. Maybe it's itunes they trust, right? So whoever it is are the new and noteworthy, and they happen to click on you, right? That trust comes from outside, and they find you. So then what happens is that they now get to know you, right? And they get to like you, and that's where it is. So know like and trust. I go trust like, and then know. Because now then they want to request information from you. They want to have a meeting with you. And so the knowing goes deeper. And so it's a little bit of a reversal, but it seems to be working better because it's also their choice. And that's really what I think is the most important part.

I do think we don't want to underestimate the power of the medium, okay? The human speech. And this is why authenticity is so important. You don't want to put on a front, be this Persona, like maybe a radio DJ might be, you know, my uncle was a radio dj and When I would listen to him on the radio, I almost couldn't recognize it was him.

Welcome to power 105, Bambi. You're wanted on stage three.

Bambi. He had his shtick, right? And podcast listeners don't want shtick. They want authenticity. They want you to be real. And when you are, you're in their ear every week or every day. And they get used to you because you're being real. They get to know you. You don't know them, but they really do get to know you. Or they certainly believe that they know you.

Yeah, sometimes I get tweets, and it's really personal. Like, I'm like, did I say that on the air? Like, I'm like, oh, I guess. You know what I had for dinner last night? And that we ordered ice cream from a this that happened once. We had ice cream delivered to us. Yeah.

And we made people hungry. And it's like, oh, wow, I'm really. They really are listening. They really are.

Be careful. I have notoriously bottles of Crown Royal and cigars that show up in my office. I had a very interesting thing happen today. A guy reached out. He was introduced to my podcast from somebody else. Turns out he Googled where I worked. He's in the third floor in my office building. He works for, like, TransUnion. I'm like, can you help me out my credit?

Could he boost my score a few points there? But you never know where people are going to come across you.

No, it happens at events all the time. Like, people will be like, can I, you know, have a picture with you? And I was like, do we know each other? And they're like, I listen to your podcast all the time. And I was like, oh, okay, sure.

So I think there's a really nice point to be made here, is that it's been the trend in business and entrepreneurship for the last decade that you got to write a book, you got to have a book. The book was the new business card, Right? Well, books are great. And actually, we have a book that's coming out soon, but we want to do it. But it wasn't first.

I wrote a book later.

Yeah, but it wasn't first for us. And here's why. The reality is, the podcast has become the new book in terms of business credibility. And if any of you that really have known us well for a couple of years have probably heard us say this before, but it is so true, and it bears repeating, especially for those of you that are new. Malcolm Gladwell said it best. He was interviewed by Stephen Colbert on Late night on cbs. And he had just started his podcast called Revisionist History. And Colbert, he meets all these celebrities, interviews all these actors and real authors like Stephen King and Malcolm. Well, Malcolm, yeah, real author. And he said, malcolm, why would you do a podcast? Isn't that small time? I mean, you write a book, it's a legitimate New York Times national bestseller. Why would you waste your time with a podcast? Here's what he said. He said, well, and he credited a friend of his who, I don't remember his name, who he credited. A friend is, who said, you know, I was talking with him and he told me it's because people think with their eyes, but they feel with their ears. And that is so true. You feel when you speak to people, they feel you. It's part of that authenticity.

It's part of the vibration of their hair and how it gets into their brain.

So as a podcaster, you have a lot of power. This is not a minor point. You have a lot of power and you can hopefully offer some real value through your show so that people feel that authenticity. But then you can then actually capitalize on that, whether that's monetarily or lead generation or whatever it is that you're making mission or your goal ultimately in your podcast is, is it to make money? Is just to reach more people. And we met some people talking to a guy who's 71 today about his podcast. He just wants to help people. He's at that point in his life where he wants to help people.

It's a passion project, right?

It is a way to do it. And to him, the value of the monetization is reaching a lot of people and changing their lives, helping them in some little way.

But I heard this term and I really loved it. I heard it earlier in the year, is that the new billionaire is the people who reach a billion people, impact a billion people, not make a billion dollars.

What a great thing I love.

And the money will flow. It'll probably be multi billionaire at that point. But, you know, I think that that's. You were mentioning what you were touching on, but you didn't use the term platform, right? So when you go to publish a book, publishers ask you, do you have a platform? And what they really mean is how many followers do you have? How big is your email list? And like all of those things. And if you don't have it, you're not going to sell a book. It's just not going to happen. Whether you self publish or not, you're not going to sell any copies to make you any money. So if you thought that your book was going to be monetized through that way, it won't. So one way to monetize that is to sell your book over your podcast or share your book and eventually build up a list to then be valuable. But here's the thing that we find a lot of is if you watch all of the late night talk shows, there are so many of them who come in and say, oh, and they're a podcast host. Why do they care about that? They care about it because they know that the conversation is going to continue afterwards and that means that they're going to be able to capture and continue moving on with the right niche people. And they will have dialed them in and out of the bigger reach of that late night show.

Some of our friends that we have in common have made the mistake like, oh, I'm gonna go create a book, I'm gonna go write a book. It's gonna be a bestseller. I'm gonna be the bestseller between 2 and 3am or 2 and 2:30 on, you know, at the middle of the night, you know, one niche, maybe the bestseller status. But they sell, they don't sell anything, they don't monetize anything off. Because nobody sells a lot of books these days for the most part, unless you are Stephen King or something like that. Right. Question here, Alice. Is the book the ultimate 3,000 year old symbol authority, the podcast the Ultimate Experience of 2019 value exchange.

Wow, well put, well put. I like that. That's a good quote.

Yeah. So, you know, this is the thing is that I read an article recently because I'm a big reader, right? So I'm a big reader. I still read books. I actually still physically read them and you know, it's rare, but book sales have not declined in the digital age. Books are still selling, you know, whether you're reading them on your Kindle or whatever, however you're consuming them. Yes, you may be still consuming them in a digital media, but they're still books. Right. And so book sales are the one category of all products that has not declined. And now they're not growing at a tremendous rate either, but they're not in decline. So books are valuable, but when you do them at the right time, and that really makes the biggest difference is either you build your audience and then you promote your book, or you have your book and you start using it to cultivate that audience. So do one of those two things.

Yeah, Personally, I think using a podcast to promote your book is how I would do it. It's how I am planning to do it.

The reality is we sat on our book. Right. We never published it like we wrote it five years ago.

You put out a book, especially if it's self published, it's up to you to promote it. Get the word out there. So how are you gonna do that? You know, and you can use nuggets of wisdom from your book to create an editorial calendar of great podcast episodes. And it's not audible. You're not reading the book to your audience. You're giving them pieces of information. They're gonna pique their interest and make them wanna go buy the book.

So actually, if I can say this, guys, it's a little promo eve, but next year we're going to be launching an actual full book program. We're partnering up with a couple other people. Juliette Dillon Clark, who I mentioned, she's on here. Great author. Yeah, I know because I pinged her and said, you got to get on because I just mentioned you. And so we're really doing this whole thing. If you want to podcast your way to a platform and a book all at one time, we've got a program that can cover you. And we're all just pulling in our services, but we group them together so that they're doing it in the right order. And we're all creating the strategy. So it's synergistic. It doesn't cost you any more than if you did us all separate.

Yeah. But the interests of everybody are aligned, which we often see. People in conflict, different resources in conflict. And that's been a problem. And that's the real reason why we decided to do that.

It's funny you mentioned that. We reached out recently. We're doing a book on notes. We reached out online for those that have closed note deals. And everybody is going to pay basically 500 bucks. Have a chapter.

Great.

We're crowdfunding it. 50 chapters, 50 stories. You know, that will blast. That will be a legion across the board for everybody that's involved there. They'll have their own chapter.

Brilliant.

You know what I mean? And be able to promote, I think.

Talk about ultimate ego bait and getting all of the people involved in helping create the content. You don't have to create it all now. You're only going to create it. They're going to actually help promote it because they're in it. It's the ultimate way to promote.

So we're gonna let Pop in two.

Of our favorite mentors come on in behind everybody.

Come around, Tracy.

So we've got Aaron Scott Young and Michelle Young. Welcome.

Two podcasters in their own right.

You guys are in the right place right now.

Good for you.

Very smart. So we're having a podcast mastermind. That's what this is.

Podcast Peeps webinar.

And so, Michelle, you have not totally gotten yours off, but it's coming.

But she's been doing a video for a while, though.

She's been doing videos for a long time, which is great. And so what's it going to be called? It's called Dear Michelle.

Love it.

So this is the only woman that I have trusted to be my own personal coach. Love. Right. That's how brilliant she is.

And then Erin has the Unshackled Owner podcast. And actually, you say it better than anybody, Aaron. Why don't you just say it? Tell us what it's about.

Oh. The Unshackled Owner podcast really is to help people who are primarily who are already in business, who want to figure out how to not be a slave to that company, but want to own it instead of be the most critical employee. And for those people who are still maybe working a job and are trying to get inspiration because they know they want to do something entrepreneurial, you're hearing stories and you're hearing advice from people who've made those leaps, who've skinned their knees along the way, and now have found a way to success. So it's kind of. It's inspiring, and it's nuts and bolts, and it's all about being unshackled from your business.

Love it, love it, love it.

It's a great show. Now, Aaron and I first met.

Oh, yes.

I heard his podcast.

A different podcast.

Yeah. I was on my way to an event in Las Vegas, and I was driving, and so I. Or I was flying. I was flying. But I listened to the podcast. I downloaded it to my ipod, and I'd been listening to this podcast, and it was your previous podcast, which was called the Lookout. And so I was binge listening to these episodes, and I get to this event, and this guy, he sounds really familiar to me.

He's speaking from the stage.

He's the mcn.

Oh.

And I did a keynote, but I was definitely the.

Yeah.

And it wasn't until you were introduced as a keynote that somebody said you had a podcast. That the bells went off of my head. That's the host of the podcast I was just listening to. And so that's how that happened. And I came back to fangirl Remember.

Remember what we said a few minutes ago about the power you have as a podcaster, your voice being in people's ears? That is an example of the power right there. Because Tracy didn't know Aaron, never met him personally, but when he's on stage, she then felt like, I know this person. And she was so comfortable going up to him and saying, hey, you know, I've been listening to you. I know you. And it was probably a little creepy.

For Aaron the first time he loved. No, no, Let me tell you what it was. What it was, really was. Sometimes you do your podcast and you put it up out into the world and you wonder. You see numbers or you see reviews, but you kind of wonder every time. Is anybody listening to this thing.

Right now? They are. Yes. Yes.

And you know what, to be honest, Aaron, you didn't have the hugest download numbers on the lookout, did you?

We were doing about a thousand downloads a month. So not big numbers.

That's very achievable and attainable. And look at the impact he had on Traci and other people listening to.

It's really remarkable.

One connection away from a major change. One connection away.

It's really remarkable to not meet people because I haven't done the podcast with the Facebook lives to meet people, and they literally feel like they know you and they already trust you, and you may not have ever interacted personally before and impacted their lives. And it's a pretty fantastic medium anyway.

So we'll step out and let you guys.

I don't know if any of them aired yet, but you're now doing some interviews with this that have gone through your unshackled owner program. Alexandra told me they were brilliant, and I was like, okay, as soon as I get back, I gotta listen to it.

The third or fourth one in the series of seven went up today.

Awesome.

About time.

That wasn't very good.

Let's do that again.

There we go.

So this is a brilliant strategy, which I really like, because sometimes Aaron's brilliant, right? And he's soaked together and he's built these great companies, and it makes you feel like, you know, that's really hard to achieve. But then when you hear someone who's gone through their program and they're only a few steps ahead of you, you're like, I could do that. And Aaron can be my guide. Like, all of a sudden, that that helps to close that. And when we were talking about monetization, that can make that leap for the person who isn't sure that they're ready for you. Michelle and I have talked about that a lot, that sometimes you have to do kind of on air coaching for them to understand and be comfortable with your process. Right.

We just had our fast track training recently. Seven principals in our class. Three weeks ago, three out of the seven came across me in the podcast. That's a $15,000 item. So that's one way that I was like, podcast is paid for. We're not stopping this at all.

Can I give one more thing like that? So there's a guy that I met several years ago. You guys know Dave Conklin?

Yeah.

Brilliant.

Brilliant guy. Right?

Absolutely.

So, Dave, he calls me the other day and he says, okay, what do I need to buy from you? I said, I don't know. What are you trying to do? Like, what's your goal? And he says, no, I need to sign up for one of your programs. I'm ready. So he wants to sign up for the unshackled owner class. Well, here's the point. I said, you know, Dave, there's a circumstance very similar to yours. And we just did an interview. And he goes, nope, I just heard the interview on your podcast, and that's why I'm calling you right now. So, guys, we've known each other for several years. It was never the right time. Then he heard an interview on a podcast and called me and said, just tell me what to do. And $5,000 was in my account within an hour.

Well, that's the thing. And sometimes people just have to hear from somebody else.

That's right.

Sometimes they get so used to hearing it from us, they need to hear it from somebody else. That allows it to sink in a little bit differently.

And these are often people that you look up to, you admire. And he's Dave Conklin. You saw how everybody nodded.

Yeah, because we know he's absolutely Brian.

He's a great digital marketer, amazing brander.

We'll step out and let you guys finish your thing, and then we'll eat dinner.

Sounds good. Joining us for a little bit.

Thank you.

So we have a question here, Tom, and this one, I think should be for you. It says, how can I find out the metrics of a podcast? Like reach listeners, et cetera? And also, what metrics do you look at?

Okay, so podcasting has a bit of a. I would say a legitimately criticized reputation for, yes, there's a lot of statistics, but they're not always as detailed as we would like them to be. And that is because the distribution channels for podcasts we all know are itunes and Google podcasts and homophobic Spotify and Stitcher. You know, each of those different distribution channels has their own subscribers, and they own those subscribers information. They will never tell a podcast or a host like us or anybody outside of their company who actually subscribes to your podcast. So I just want to be very upfront about that. You'll never know from a podcast who's subscribing. You will know how many downloads of your play you've gotten. And there's critical difference between total downloads and unique downloads, because a lot of people have more than one device that they listen on. I have my phone, I might have my laptop computer or my phone on my iPad, you know, and then you log into itunes with the same account from both, so they know you have more than one device. They push it out to both. That's why total downloads are more than unique downloads. Uniques are a little more accurate.

One of the stats that we do like to track is we kind of watch the first few hours of downloads because if you see in that time period, those are the people who are subscribers who, like, they wake up in the morning, they turn their phone on and it automatically downloads. So you can kind of clearly tell by those numbers that that's how you.

Subscribers us within about 12 hours of it. Publishing however many downloads you had might be a good estimation of how many subscribers you have. But at the end of the day, a download is a download is a download, and it's less important what the actual number is. But I would say evaluating the trends over time, is it continuing to grow, Is it continuing to increase, or is it falling off? Those are some of the things.

And watching it daily makes people stressed.

You want to look at it in months at a time and track those trends month at a time.

It's like getting on the scale every day, right? Don't do it.

The other thing is about the stats. You can get really valuable information. You do get geography, how many countries people are listening. You might be shocked to think, well, I'm an American. I'm podcasting in English. Well, probably pretty quickly you'll be listened to in 20 countries, 30 countries. English is a very universal language in this world and you'll be reaching a lot of countries. You'll also. 30,000 downloads per episode is stellar. Stellar. You can monetize that if you have a niche audience with a paid sponsor.

Great job.

Quickly, quickly. That's a great number. Podcast is like to hear it, but then other stats. I'll tell you the Other critical stats.

And entrepreneur stories for inspiration.

Ooh, great. One good topic. So I'll tell you, I'm not trying to be too self promotional here, but I do want to say we believed as podcasters and experiencing and recognizing. Remember we talked about earlier about getting people to come from your show to your website, to your domain? Right. Build your audience, try and capture them. Well, we believe your website is a critical part of your platform as a podcaster, and it really doesn't do you any good to evaluate your podcast statistics without also evaluating your key website statistics. So on Poditize, on our customer dashboard, if you're hosted with us, you get not only your podcast statistics statistics, but your key website statistics.

So you can log in anywhere else.

We integrated an API. Well, also, these are stats you'd have to pay $100 a month subscription just to get from Semrush. We import them into our dashboard and provide them for your website. Every customer gets that. So those different kinds of statistics are very helpful. There are other great statistics of podcasts for what the average length of time people listen to a podcast are listening to 75%, 90% or 20% and then stop listening. You can see some of those things and also how many hours per average device, how many hours of listening per average device. So there's lots of data. You can get lost in the data, but there's some good data, right?

And so here's one of the things. So like we know that 60% of our traffic is coming over our website or a podcast. So that's a good broad section of your audience. And you can get the analytics on the demographics of that from Google. So you can start tracking that and you can get is this male, female, is what is the age range? So Google gives you a lot of that information. So while we don't display all of that, that's something that you can definitely dive into your Google Analytics on your website and get that information. And you can use that as your and just extrapolate that out to apply to your overall listening audience. So keep in mind that there's a little bit of demographic shift because podcast listeners might not be those that are just searching on the web. There's a little bit of difference, but 60% of that, you're giving your a really good rate and you're giving a really good sign of who they are. The other thing I want to caution you about is that if you're doing what we call the brand casting model, where you're going from video to audio to blog, and so you're ending up on a website, you're also helping that locality issue. So there are a couple of people out there who are saying, oh, well, we put ads on shows and we do them by locality. And you know what the thing is, is that that's going to just down your place so that you barely make any money per your show because it's going to only serve up those that are in the UK at this particular, you know, and then they serve up those ads to them. So, like, it's only planning that. And so we think that that's not a great model to go because on your website, automatically with someone searching for something, Google is already giving locality first. It's just happening. And we know that that works because we know it works for our chiropractors and our practitioners that actually have practices in specific cities. They're getting more clients because they're showing up on the top of the search engine. So we like it that way better.

We got a couple questions here. Like Ryan Harper from Papelio says, started pumping out content in October. Is 3700 downloads good or bad or standard?

3700?

Yeah.

How long have they been doing it?

Since October 22nd.

Not bad.

I'd be interested to know how many episodes you've published over that time. That might help because if you've published 24 episodes and you have that many downloads, it might tell me one thing. And if you had a hundred, that would be. Or even if you publish four or six, that tells you something different. Right.

Is there any podcast analytics websites that you recommend?

Well, it's all based on where your podcast is hosted, although there are.

So a lot of people forget to pay for the analytics. Let's be really clear on that. Not every host offers it free, so you have to make sure that you buy the analytics program. It's really.

Somebody posted a link called chartable.com. there's also. PodTrack is another one, but it's got.

A Q or a C at the end.

Just a C. Just a C. Podtrack, T, R, I, C. But a good podcast host. Here's the thing. All the stats come from the media host. There are server logs for every time Anybody requests an MP3 file, which is what a podcast is. The server serving it has all the data. So really, I think the best stats come from a media host podcast hosting company who provides their own.

We hear a lot when people move hosts that their downloads change. And what we have discovered is that there are a couple of hosts who have. I'M gonna call it. Downed their numbers, change their algorithm.

59 episodes for 3700. Yeah, I'm gonna do the math.

Okay, so there are a couple of hosts out there who have down their numbers because of the people they want to place advertisements. They had to comply with the pay per click style of what counts as a CPM or a click per thousand. Right. And so they changed their metrics, their own algorithm, and it hurt a bunch of people all at once. And the people it hurt the most were the ones with the smallest podcast, the newest podcast, and it hurt their growth trajectory because it gave them a big old dip in the middle of it. And so it really hurt their podcast overall. And when they moved hosts, they would go, wow, I went back to where I was. And so they're downing their metrics on you, and it is for their own benefit and not for you. And that is the concern that I have overall with the way some of them are monetizing and putting. Because they want to make more money. So they're gonna put ads on your show. Right. But only on the 1% that's any good.

Right.

I want to return to ryan Harper's question. So, 59 episodes, which it's coming out to about 62 average downloads per episode, which is on the low side, to be frank.

But he's also in the process of, I think, converting it over from whoever's hosting it to his website as well.

Okay. That's the thing. I think that what would serve you very well, other than hopefully you have a good social media following and you're already pushing it out, or an email list and you're pushing it out to get people interested. But a blog post for every episode, and I mean a long blog post that's based on what was said in the episode. I mean, that's what we discovered and do for people. Now that is going to serve you so well, because if you don't do that, then people searching on Google aren't going to know what it is that you're talking about in each episode, because Google doesn't pay attention to what's in the audio file. They only pay attention what's in a written blog post.

And one thing, too, I know a bit more about Ryan's show is they have literally thousands of views on Facebook. Very interactive audience.

That's great.

Very interactive audience. But they're not really. He's not really promoting that. It's a podcast. They said a couple posts and it would be. Do them well to post or to have them Talk at the end of each of their Facebook lives. Hey, you can catch this by going to the propelio.com Webster podcast.

Yeah.

To download the episode if you missed it, or vice versa as well.

So this is one thing that I want to say, because this is the thing. When you decide you want to go to get a sponsor, you want to go monetize, this is the time when you need a one sheet.

Right.

You know, have you guys heard of what a speaker one sheet is? Right. It's like this document that says all about you and, like what your stats are and it's giving you your platform. Well, you should have a host. So it's not just about the host. It's about your show as well. But it gives a little about the host in the section. But you should be capturing all your numbers across your whole platform. So your video numbers, your blog post numbers, your YouTube videos, you capture them from everywhere and you show where they're all coming from. Because it all matters. Because at the end of the day.

You'Re going to total reach.

Total reach.

That's important, right?

But you have to be able to put an ad on that video. Keep that in mind. So you may have to do the mention, which doesn't allow you to do the back.

So, you know, Ryan, love to talk to you more and share some other tips. Reach out. We can connect for this webinar because it's getting kind of late in the program and yeah, we gotta go.

We gotta sop up some of this.

Alcohol, but lots of things can be done.

There's. Alexandra has the number, so it's ponotize.com inquiry query. If you choose anyone and you want to connect with Tom, that's fine.

You can find me. Scott can send you to me. I mean, you probably have my email anyway.

That question, you're automatically international. I can tell you. That's the most fascinating.

The other thing about reach and getting out. Quick last, quick tip for everybody. If you're not on at least 12 different podcast distribution channels, you need to be. And you're limiting yourself if you're not. So that another reach consideration.

Is this streaming on Facebook? Yeah, it is.

And it will be available the recording, if any of you missed any part of it, want to see the rest of it will be up on the Podcast Peeps Facebook page and it will be also on the Podcast Peeps website, I believe.

Eventually.

Yeah, in a day or two, it'll be up this week.

Yeah.

So definitely check it out.

Awesome, guys. All right, Great job.

That was fun. It's great to be be here on location in Austin, Texas, and in person with Scott. Usually, you know, we've got that little delay between our two cameras. Right? Who's talking? This is fun. We have to do more of this when we're together because we do. We do actually go to a bunch of different trade shows together. We're planning that for the new year.

So already on the calendar. So some things we talked about this weekend.

Calendar planning. 2019.

Exactly. All right, guys, well, hey, don't forget to check it out and like it. Make sure you follow the Podcast Peeps Facebook page. Share with your friends. You got fellow podcasters, they think find value. Share the video. We're here to help people out there, help us all grow in leaps and bounds, especially in the new year. Let's get your pod and gear in the new year. And once again, everybody, thanks for everybody out there. Ryan, thanks for tagging a lot of people. Alexandra, good to see you as well on there. All our friends on Facebook Live as well.

Mark, Christina, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, absolutely. Great to have so many people participating.

Yeah. Stay tuned. We'll send some new announcements on things for the podcast peeps in 2019 everybody live event. Yes.

Also, it's coming in the new year.

Yes, exactly.

All right, bye.

You've reached the end of another episode of Podcast Peeps with Tom Hazzard, Tracy Hazzard, and Scott Carson to become an exclusive member of the Podcast Peeps Mastermind. Go to podcastpeeps.com and apply today. Catch us next time to get a peek into our mindshare with the top podcasters in the industry.