Turn Your First Show Interest Straight To A Powerful New Niche Podcast Network Like Dr. Joe Sallustio Of The EdUp Experience

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

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Binge Factor. I'm Tracy Hazzard and I am going to level up our show. I'm going to Ed up our show today because we're going to talk about the Ed up experience with Dr. Joe Sallustio and Dr. Joe. Joe. He said we can call him Joe. I like to call him Dr. Joe. He deserves that. Dr. Joe Sallustio is one of the nation's foremost higher education experts. He has led a broad range of educational institutions, including a regionally accredited nonprofit university online and a regionally accredited for profit university online and a nationally accredited for profit college online and hybrid, giving him a unique and effective breadth of knowledge in on ground and online higher education administration and today's ever involving and competitive online higher education landscape. This diversity of experience is necessary to successfully lead a university into the future. Joe is the co founder, co host and co producer of America's leading higher education podcast and America's leading higher education podcast Network. Beginning in February 2020, the Ed up experience has grown to surpass 55,000 streams of its episodes and counting, interviewing leaders from all across higher education and beyond. You know, Joe has just really loved podcasting. He has just like come into this, just absolutely loves it. And now they have 17 shows on their network and they're just and they're helping other people podcast through that process. Everything's focusing on Ed up, right on growing the education and in a sense they've added a little bit of social justice in there. He'll explain that as well. But really it's just so interesting to see how you can grow from one show into a movement of things. And that's what I was really excited about to have Dr. Joe Sallustio on today so that we could really talk about that and talk about what the Ed Up Experience has turned into.

Jo, thanks so much for joining me. You know, I get to talk to someone today who has not only a lot of podcast experience himself, you have a lot of co host experience, which is rare too, and you have a network experience so this is going to be a fun conversation today. I've been really looking forward to talking with you.

Thank you for laying on the pressure really thick right at the beginning, Tracy, but I'm going to try to live up to the expectations here.

I'm not worried. I've listened to your show, so I know you'll be just fine. So, you know, you started this podcast and actually someone, one of your early co hosts, kind of pushed you and gave you an impetus into doing it. But what made you want to do it?

You know, they say timing is everything, Tracy, and I think I really believe that to be the case. I was doing a podcast as contract host with this other outfit, and it was just really a foray into podcasting. I really didn't know what I was doing. They provided a little bit of structure, and I finished my doctorate degree right in December of 2019. And it's true what they say, that you take your entire life and you wrap it around your homework, because your dissertation, you have to get it done or else you'd be in school forever. And then when it's done, you look around and you go, how did I live before this? Three to four years of a doctorate. I have all this time and I don't know what to do with it. And, you know, should I. Should I go outside and cut the grass? Should I watch tv? So right at that time, my soon to be co host, he didn't even know it yet. He'd sent me a text message and he said, hey, man, we should do something together. Didn't even say the word podcast.

And.

And before he. We came up with the idea of a podcast, I said, yes, let's do something together. I have all this time to fill. And there you have it. I said, yes, it was a podcast, and we just started and went with it.

So, you know, it's so great that you did have someone who had some background there and brought that together for you. But, you know, focusing your podcast and figuring out what you were going to talk about, I want to address that today because sometimes that's the hang up for people and they don't get it right. It frustrates them. They, you know, they think they've got their topic down and they don't. But you guys hit on something that was really good and you shifted it, molded it over the time, but you started with something that felt right for you. How did you guys go about deciding this was going to be our podcast?

You know, I wish I could tell you that it was there was some planning, and I'll talk about that in a second. But there was a lot of tripping and falling into ourselves along the way. Like, wait a minute, what are we talking about here? And what do we have on our hands? We still, to this day. Actually, we had a conversation today about something related to the podcast, and we said to each other, what is it that we have? Because it surprises us still what we actually have on our hands, and it takes on different forms, but we, you know, look, we. Higher education is a very. A lot of people look at higher ed and it's this, like, mythical creature. It's unknown. And when you think higher education, a lot of times you think elite higher education, like Harvard and Yale and there's community colleges and there's private colleges. So many facets for profit colleges. There's so many facets to higher education. And we thought we really did an external scan. We said, what podcasts exist in this genre, which is higher education, which, number one, is super boring. Tracy, I don't know if you listening to anyone talk, talk about higher ed is. I mean, can you imagine, I don't know, maybe tax accounting or.

So I have to admit here right now that you didn't get through my structure of, like, processing very fast, because that's exactly what I thought when I first saw your name. So I passed it on to my team, who bounced it back to me and said, no, this is really good. You should listen to it. And so it didn't go through my structure either. So, yeah, the expectation wasn't very high.

I don't blame you. Okay. Because again, if you're just looking at higher education, who wants to talk about that? The answer is no one. And when we did a scan of podcasts that exist in the higher ed space, there were only a couple that really existed that focused on higher education. There were two things that we noticed. Number one, paint drying. It's paint drying on a wall. You're listening to it. I love a higher education. I've worked in it for 20 years, and I can't get through some of these episodes. And I understand everything that they're talking about. And I said, wow, this is just murderous. No offense to anyone that's listening to. Number two, there were some elite guests, right? These podcasts want to talk to the president of Howard, and they would talk to the president of Harvard and Yale, by the way, we did talk to President Howard, but what about all the other presidents, the smaller college presidents? There's a ton of students going a number of ways and there's a lot of innovative leaders in ed tech and higher ed. And we thought, let's talk to everyone on this podcast and make it for and of the people, as political as that sounds, and make it fun. We started out super serious and it's really terrible to listen to our first couple of episodes. And then we said, heck with it, we're just gonna roll with this and we're gonna make fun of each other and we're gonna make fun of higher education. And along the way we'll talk about the issues so that somebody like yourself, Tracy, doesn't pass us over and go, oh God, these guys are terrible.

Well, I wasn't really worried about that, but you know. Cause I figured after so many episodes that you had enough body of work that somebody must be listening, so it must be worth it. But was it worth it in general? And that's a question going to be interested to listen to this in general. And you know, that's a question. When you're deep in a niche like that, you know, you doing your research really helps. And I applaud you guys for doing that because that can make the difference between figuring out how your show fits in and what your angle is and what you want to take on with that. But you also found out there's a market for it.

Well, and you know, you have to iterate. We started figuring out who was listening, you know, and anecdotally we didn't have the sophistication to really understand who our audience was. And so we would find out because we'd have a guest on and the guests would go, oh my God, I've been listening to your podcast for the last month. And we go, okay, wait a second, where's we have a listener? First of all, besides my wife and my co host wife and my, our producer's wife and our families, that's all we thought who was listening. And for a while that was true. And then it just sort of exploded. When I say exploded in higher education, mind you, it's not like the numbers are in the millions. I mean, we're talking about a really niche market, but you're talking about really high level business and industry professionals that are getting professional development from our podcast. So we've discovered that really high level administrators and professionals were getting professional development from our podcast episodes. And so it became greater than how many listens can we get? And what kind of impact are we really having in the space? And what kind of impact are we having as professional development as something greater than just Creating a podcast with no purpose and it's purpose that really matters. It became something greater than listeners. It was about impact of the conversation.

I love that impact and purpose. Well, let's do some of our five things because I do want to talk about the co host dynamics and how you've added hosts and other things over time. But I want to save that for a minute because some of these more mechanical things probably kind of went into your decision for some of those other things as well. So let's do that first. So the first thing that we really talk about is getting great guests. And you already just said now that you were looking at being expansive about your options for those guests. So in that who did you decide was how did you have a criteria for who was gonna make a good guest for the show?

I laugh cause again, we had no idea. We thought let's go find college presidents who are at smaller colleges that probably don't have a lot of money to market themselves, where being on our podcast can become free organic content that they can create, that they can then take and repurpose as many ways as they want to. Because you know as well as I do, Tracy, you can repurpose podcast content a million ways from Sunday. You can turn it into TR transcript and articles and audio clips and whatever the heck you want. And we started to generate a little bit of interest. We also started seeing ed tech companies who are interested in getting on a map or talking about their company start to come to us. And we built up this really. We really had some gracious guests at the beginning. We had some people that just wanted to come on the podcast. And then from there it just took on a life of its own. We couldn't say no to anyone, which was part of our downfall. So if there's going to be. When you ask about five things you should not have done, I can answer that really fast. But you know, we, and then it iterated and then we started really refining guest. We did find we had to say no to a lot of guests or else we end up with a ton of recordings, more than you could release in a given week. And all of a sudden you're behind and this guest starts knocking on your going, where's my episode? So we had to define it over time.

So listeners, I know this is the hardest question, but, you know, once you start to find you had listeners, how did you go about increasing them?

Okay, so this, this is, might be an answer you're not expecting, but for us, we didn't care as much about the number of people who are listening as much as the quality of the person listening right. Now, I know that probably doesn't surprise you, but the fact that we didn't care about the number of listeners because we liked to podcast so much. So Whether it was one person listening or 50 people or 500,000 people, we said, we're going to do this and we're going to create a legacy. These podcasts in higher ed or wherever people are podcasting, they don't go away. So if you're in a specific niche or industry, it could be legacy content, it could be used in a book, it could be referenced in classes, courses across higher education. So we started thinking about how it could be used, and we said, okay, wait a second. This is. It might be a kind of a loss leader for us. The podcast is what we do, but then what happens with it? Do we do conferences and do we, you know, speak about our interview and how do we take it to the next level beyond podcasting?

I love what we do with it. That's so great. I'm so glad. Actually, it doesn't personally surprise me, but it's not an answer we typically get right here. So I'm so glad you said that. That's fantastic.

By the way, the listeners started coming. This is like my ultimate tip. But I'll save it when they share. Which doesn't surprise you when the guest has to share it. If the guest doesn't share it, you're not getting any more listeners. I mean, that's a key, key component for anybody that's starting out.

Yeah. You want them to share it, Definitely. So producing like a pro. Your show sounds really good. You got, you know, you got some things going on there that, you know, it started out rough, just like every show, but it got better and better as you go on. So, you know, what do you do? What do you personally do in that process that helps you produce it like a professional?

I thank you for this amazing compliment you've just given me because I feel like sometimes we are just super rough still. We decided we're not going to put so much. Here's what we said. We said we are about quantity because there's so many missing conversations in higher ed. So we're going to put out as much content as possible, and if quality is secondary to that, we decided to take that risk. Where I think most podcasts, your podcast quality is really critical because people will turn you off if you have poor quality. But for us, again, we said we kind of didn't care if you don't want to listen, then don't listen. But we're going to kind of create some fun content now. We did improve it over time. Still, I swear to you, Tracy, I still forget to choose my microphone. I think I've chosen it for this.

You have, or I would have told you.

Defaults to the computer microphone. And then I'm getting ready to listen to this great guest named Tracy. And then I'm like, oh, wait a second. I never chose my good microphone. So that is why I take that compliment. I thank you so much for it because sometimes I feel like an amateur when I do this. But again, it's like I try not to take myself too seriously. And Liz and Elvin, we just go, you know what, this is just fun for us. And we're not going to take it so serious that we're putting so much pressure on perfect audio quality. That can never be perfect. It's always listening to yourself. And you have too many you knows and so's and ums and it's just, that's part of the game.

As long as it's not excruciating to listen to, like, you know, really so bad that it hurts your ears, there's really no problem there. But no, I mean, you're, for the most part, you're. I mean, I didn't listen to every one of your episodes. I'm sure you had some guests that had some rough audios because it happens to all of us. Right. You do the best you can, but on your end it's very consistent and that's important, you know. So good for you.

Well, thank you.

Yeah. And so engagement. Have you gotten some engagement and how do you encourage that more with that audience and with your guests?

We made a decision way at the beginning that we were going to pick a social media platform and dominate on that social media platform. I think it's really easy to go, okay, it's TikTok, it's LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook and what else is there now? Clubhouse. You gotta pick something you're good at and figure out if you're where your audience is first of all. And with higher ed administrators and professionals, that's where they were. That was the better crafted audience for us was LinkedIn. So we put all of our eggs in the LinkedIn basket. And so when we release episodes, they're coming out on LinkedIn. We're tagging people, we're tagging their organizations, we're tagging people that they know. We actually will DM first and second Level connections and say, hey look, the person you know is in this podcast check. It creates engagement, somebody listens to it. And then people started sharing our podcast and saying that it is a great podcast. Every time somebody does that still, still blows our mind when somebody shares our stuff and goes, hey, we listen to the experience. We'll text each other and go, do you believe this?

Still they listened. Woo hoo. Yeah. Well, you know, that's great though. But I'm so glad you said about picking one and you picked the best one. I mean if someone had come to me from your team and asked my strategic option for you, it would be go straight to LinkedIn. Right. So you chose the one that was already more comfortable for you, I'm sure. Because I'm sure that's where you were already in.

Yeah, we were three higher ed professional.

Exactly. So you already knew that. And so I, you know, I bet you you're. You find it fairly easy to, to engage back and forth with your guests there too, which helps the engagement overall.

If they share it, we're like, we just attack their post. All three of us. Our business account will all post, we'll all tag each other. So if that guest posts or shares our post. But if they post an original, something original with the link to the podcast episode, they will at least get four comments. One for me, one from Melvin, one from Liz, and one for my business account. And we do it every single time. Then we'll start tagging our pod. We're in a higher ed pod of individuals that help engagement. So we also created an infrastructure within LinkedIn to help boost our podcast engagement and the engagement of the guests by kind of sicking our loyal fans and team and friends on those posts to give them a boost. And when those get a boost, the guest comes back and goes, oh wow, I can't believe that I got that much engagement. Well, how do you guys do it? And then that can create other revenue streams.

Well, and that I think right there, that tip right there, that's something that we're lucky enough to know on our team because we have a big, a large enough team. The co hosting situation benefits you. There three diverse people all in the same industry commenting back and forth and adding that value in there, whether they're group pages or you know, or individual accounts. But the individual accounts doing that has a whole lot of power. And I think so often it's like it's the default that one of the hosts or one of the co hosts in the process will do all the work and I say that as a person who's always done all the work on social media in my co host situation. So like, you know, that actually doesn't have the boost that you found.

Yeah, I mean that as many people as you can put on it, having the net, you know, when you're talking about LinkedIn engagement too, you're talking about number of followers and every time you comment on somebody your follower, your followers are seeing it, their followers are seeing it. Between the three of us as a team at edup, we have over 100,000 followers. Liz, my co host has like 80,000 of them. But every time we do something, it's in front of a lot of people. And that continues to just gain steam over time. And, you know, listeners come and they go and sometimes it's the guests that they listen to and they don't listen in the next episode. But again, it was, for us, this is a, it really is a passion project and it's, it's a steamroller right now for us.

So monetization, that's the last thing I ask about in my five things is what, how do you monetize your show? And you've been thinking about all these other things of what you're going to do with it. So what have you started with? What have you tried out in terms of monetization?

Well, there's the traditional airtime, right? You're selling airtime. And for, in our case for higher education, it was once we defined the audience and we figured out who was listening, we thought, wait, there's companies that want to be in front of these buyers. Our audience was the buyer, is the buyer. These are higher ed professionals, administrators with budgets, with money to spend. And we found that the businesses, oh man, I'm hitting my screen. We found out the businesses wanted to be in front of these people. So that was one way that we were able to monetize. But it's really hard to do that continuously over time and earn something that's reasonable. You can earn a couple of bucks to go buy yourself sushi once in a while. But for our purposes, our audience seems like it's going to max out at some point. And so we needed other ways to monetize. So one way we're doing that coming up recently for us is we're actually doing live broadcasting from a conference. We're being paid to attend a conference, and it's a technology conference in higher education with a company called Anthology, who we've gotten very close with. And they're bringing us there to interview their guests on site and it becomes part of the, I hate to say we're a novelty, but it becomes part of the media experience of this conference. So that is one way that we are seeing our business model change. And it's a really exciting change because it didn't. Our podcast started in late January of 2020, right before coronavirus. So we have a coronavirus business essentially. So this in conference attendance, in person is brand new for us.

Really brand new.

And I'm like, okay, can I go? Can we do this in person? And so it's figuring out this other way. And that's one way we're thinking about and monetizing it over time.

Well, you and I are going to have to have a post conversation about this because we were doing this before the pandemic, then shut it down and didn't do it for a year. Now we're back up and running. So we have some big lessons learned on what you need to prepare, what you can do and what live events are like. I just did a coaching session for our clients actually on that this past week. So I'm happy to share that with you, Joe. And for those of you listening, as soon as that episode is posted in feed you'd brand, which it will be because it's posted on our companion podcast. So we have the binge factor and feed you'd brand. So when it's posted there, I'll absolutely link it up for all of you so you can check it out there as well so you can get the tips that I'm going to talk with Jo behind the scenes. So anyway everyone, now I want to touch on your binge factor. Jo, I want to hit into your binge factor because you have hit it right and I want to continue conversation because I think this is where your network started sprouting from. So what I find is that when someone has a bingeable show, they don't always know it. So Joe, did you know people were binging on your show?

No, I didn't think it would be humanly possible to binge higher education podcast material. Be honest. And I'm still surprised when somebody tells us, hey, listen to the last five, seven episodes yesterday or the day before and it literally will still blow my mind. We try to, we think we have something special with our dynamic. My co host Liz and I and then the producer Elv and it's the mix of our when we said we wanted to make it fun, we try to make it funny that by it's self deprecating humor and it's making fun of each other. Like, my co host revealed that she can't ride a bike. I rode that through the entire episode. One of the episodes, one of our guests said, it's like pulling, you know, looking under the hood. And I said, it's kind of like riding the bike, learning to ride the bike. What is? Fixing the bike while you're riding it. Right. So making jokes along the way to make it more engaging and try to transcend higher education and pick up maybe a pop culture listener every now and then that's kind of interested in us as much. So I think it's the combination of us that makes the content bingeable, because honest, honest to gosh. And I mean this with complete passion in my heart for higher ed, because I've worked at it for 20 years. Higher Ed content is not bingeable. It has to have something else around it that packages it in order to make it bingeable. And we think that it's us as a team that does that. That's my answer.

Well, I'm going to tell you that honestly, the smaller part of it, it's great that you dynamic. And you're absolutely right. Like, if I were just evaluating your show amongst other podcasts, I'd say that dynamic of the different hosts and the way that you guys communicate together and the way that you ask questions together and fill the gaps of the others. So because you have different perspectives is a really great dynamic. There's no question about it. It's a great component to the show and it is adding a lot of value. But the reality is, is that the reason your show is bingeable is simply because there's a gigantic gap in the marketplace for this information. And so if I want to expand my knowledge, if I want to be a continual learner in my. And why in higher education wouldn't she want to be a continual learner? Like, it seems, duh, obvious. And then at the same time, there isn't anything that fills that gap. And as, and you're right, your competition is like news and dry, and that's never going to fill the gap. So your dynamic helped make you guys the choice in that gap. But the reality is it's that gap that makes the binge ability happen, and that is so, so critically important. And then now you've amassed such a great amount of content in there that isn't your typical content. As you pointed out, it's not just all the same guests again and again and again that are on all the higher edge Type shows, you know, that in and of itself also creates this great variety that I can't help but want to go back through your episodes and pick and choose. And before you know it, I've listened to so many of them that I've actually binged the entire content. So that's really where your binge factor has come from, is really, you have just filled a gap beautifully.

I love that and I appreciate that outside perspective because, you know, we do hear that. We hear that actually from a lot of community college leaders that we will have on a community college president where, you know, when you think higher education, the average consumer isn't thinking about the community college. And these community college presidents are telling us you're just doing something special by highlighting these other institutions that don't get a highlight. Really appreciate that, Tracy. And it's good to hear that because we work hard to get in front of a lot of guests. You know, there's a lot. We're approaching our hundredth here soon. Probably one August, September, I don't know what, sometime later in the year, we'll have a hundred university presidents that we would have interviewed, all with really cool perspectives. It's crazy. It really is.

Well, I can't wait to see what you do with that when you've got a hundred under your belt. You know, what is that spinoff book, that article? What do these things look like? I'm looking forward to hearing what you do on that. One of the things you've done that I really want to spend some time on is you've opened up and you've started a network, the edup network, and you have something like 17 shows now. You don't just have educational based shows or higher education shows. You also have some on social justice. So it's expanded over time, too. What made you decide that a network made sense for you?

Well, when we go back to the original, I don't remember when it was, but we had someone ask us if we were interested in having a spinner spinoff series of the edup experience called Ed up edtech, because we were turning down at that point a lot of technology providers, if you will, because we wanted to concentrate on the college president. So we created a spinoff, called it a spinoff. I don't even know if that's a podcasting term of any.

Sure, why not?

It's like a movie spinoff. Yeah, yeah. A beautiful person. Her name's Holly Owens. She started at Up Ed Tech under our brand. And so we said, well, wait a minute, we know this guy in Australia and his name is Warren Kennard and could he start Ed Up Australia? And we started going, well, what if we had Ed upchina and Ed Up India? Okay, well, then we got a little too big for our britches and we kind of zeroed it down a little bit. And we created five spinoffs of the Up Experience brand. And once that started gaining steam, we had other podcasts that were in education or higher education come to us and say, hey, look, your brand is really dominating in the space. Can we be part of it? Can we be part of this? And we started, started looking at them as affiliates, saying, we want to bring on affiliate podcasts. They're part of the network. And so we grabbed a couple of education podcasts that were out there, really good ones. And then Liz, my co host, does a lot of work in social justice. She connected with some folks in the social justice arena. And the marriage of social justice and education is absolutely critical. If you want to have educated, open, mindful leaders that are respectful of each other culturally, you have to have education at a healthy heart. And so we said that that was a natural evolution for us. Let's open ourselves to some socially justice focused podcasts to integrate into the network. And really just happened. We went from the EDIP Experience podcast on one week, you know, on this single week, and two weeks later, we had eight podcasts in the network. We didn't even know what we were doing, to be honest with you.

Oh, my goodness, I love that. I love that progression of it. Well, what is your thought about how to, you know, have the network working for you and working towards, you know, overall monetization and keeping everybody going? Because now you got everybody, you gotta keep everybody going. As their podcasts are, you know, exploring different areas, you want to keep that variety going.

Yeah, and I think that's, that's critical. A part of the network expansion for us was we understand that every podcast we take on under the brand is going to make money. We know that. But we feel a responsibility to boost the them. We feel a responsibility to help these other higher education professionals boost the message of their podcast. That's the way we take our brand and we're able to give back in a way that we wouldn't have to do otherwise. We have this responsibility to the space of higher education. Right. But obviously a share agreement of some kind where we have a couple of podcasts out there that are doing well and we take a percentage of what they make. It's a small percentage. We want them to go out and make as much money as they can under our brand as possible. And if we make a couple of dollars along the way, that's great. So we have agreements in place with each of the 17 podcasts in the network. And if they go out and they make money, great. If they go out and they don't make any money, it doesn't hurt us to have our brand. We said, if you're a higher education professional, chances are in a given day you are coming across something at experience related. And that for us was the win that we were on the front of the mind of. Of education professionals all across the country, that our brand is really dominating in the space and something you think about when you hear about higher education. So I thought Ed up was catchy. Like, you're always going to level up. You're going to Ed up your skillset.

I love the title. I love the name. That is something that, you know, not everybody hits right, but you hit it right. It's fun. It has all the characteristics you want it to. It's nice and short and sweet, but it means a little bit different to every person that hears it. And. And it still resonates. Well.

Thank you. Boy, we went through like 50 names and we just said, ed up, you're going to add up. We're going to turn into a verb. You know, so when we send out our email, when we send out our email to the guests to tell them that their show is live, we say that it's time to add up. Right? So we. We're literally. It's like Facebook me Ed up, you need to add up. We're trying to turn it into a. We're trying to get it to catch on like fire.

I love it. Well, that's, you know, I love the idea of Ed Up. I mean, that's what I try to do every day of my life. Life. And so, you know, it's part of the reason I do this podcast is because I get to learn something every day. I bet you are learning stuff every single day. And I, you know, I hear that because. Especially from your co hosts. I mean, I hear Liz say something and you respond in a way that you're just like, I didn't know that. And it's a new perspective for me. How does that feel to have an opportunity to learn on the job?

It's humbling, to be honest with you. It's brain breaking sometimes to. To be like, you know, collating and collecting all of this information from the leaders that are changing the minds of our Kids and youth and adults going back to school and learning and the responsibility that each of these college presidents and leaders and CEOs have. We been really lucky to get some really high level folks, too. I mean, like the CEO of Logitech, and they went from 8 billion to $14 billion during coronavirus. Like, it's insane that the CEO was wanting to come on the Experience talk about education. But you think about how education's like a tentacle that's running through everything that we do. It's so important, and it's just so much information. It's almost like an overload sometimes where I'm just, wow, I can't believe we've spoken to that many people that are bringing this level of idea. It's humbling, to be honest.

Yeah, it's one of my favorite parts. But you're right. Brain melting sometimes. Yes, exactly. I have too much information. I've got to figure out how to collate. You're right about that.

Yeah. So much you have to, like, synthesize it. And, you know, somebody says something, you're like, oh, wow. I mean, whoa, that's so amazing. How do we take that and what do we do with this piece of information? Because everybody should know about it. And it's really, you know. And then they hear the. How grateful our guests are, too, that they have the opportunity to be on a podcast, a higher ed podcast, and be pushed out in social media in a way that they haven't, don't even do at their own institution in the way that we can do it, because we've created the platform for it. So it's their appreciation, the gratefulness, and it is really, truly humbling. We try to stay really humble, too. That's why I'm like, oh, our value. We don't even know what our value is because we don't want to get to the elite level where we're just going, oh, we only want to interview Ivy League presidents. That'd be great if they want to come out. But if I never interview an Ivy League president, I really don't care. There's a lot of other college presidents out there for me to interview. So we want to interview.

There's a lot to learn out there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, that's one of the things I love those stories that we don't hear every single day that aren't hyped up. And I wrote a column for Inc Magazine for four years, and they kept downplaying and saying, no, we want to hear stories about Elon Musk and stories about, you know, Steve Jobs. And I was like, he's dead. I can't interview him. Like, you know, it's like these people are real. They're here. I want their story, I want to hear about them because they're struggling with that day to day of making the, you know, in your case, the educational environment better. Making it, you know, better for my kids as they grow up and, you know, things like that. I want to hear those stories. The ones who've gone through it and are super successful or have this gigantic budget. Budget, not so much, because not everybody can do that.

And it's, you know, what's the, One of the most impactful things that's happening right now is the equity piece, right? It's the access to education that's been really revealed due to coronavirus. And there's some amazing leaders out there in the community college area, private colleges that are doing really hard, hard, hard work of re engaging a student population that has disappeared, right? You think about a community college student that's one little car fender bender away from quitting school. That person leaves the educational infrastructure to go get a job because they have a sick family. They don't come back. What does that mean for our economy? What does that mean for our supply chain, our gross domestic product? As you look into the future when you've lost an entire generation of workers, so that's a huge responsibility to find first gen students of color, bring education to them. So there's a lot of great leaders out there doing that level of impactful work societally that's, I mean, helps all of us in the future.

That was the one thing I was so excited to hear about on your show as I was listening to some of the episodes and checking them out because this is not my area of expertise, obviously, but I have a niece who just graduated from high school and chose not to go to college even though she got into quite a few of them. And she decided to just do the community college and work thing because she's just had this incredibly bad last year of high school experience that is making her saying, well, it's not that important to me anymore. And I just keep thinking back because I had such a great college experience. Everything was so good about it. I keep thinking, oh, you're missing it, you're missing it. But no amount of me saying that is going to change that. And it's going to really take the schools getting them excited about education again to make the difference. You know, us aunts and uncles and parents can't do that.

Which is really interesting because students today are a lot more debt conscious than I was. I didn't really understand debt. My parents certainly did when they were taking out money to send me to college. But students today are really debt conscious. And so choosing a community college and getting those general education courses out of the way saves that student thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. Now she might end up going to the university and getting the experience for two years that you and I probably imagined that we had. And you know what? That's going to be great.

Yeah. And that's what I was like. It's my baggage. I'm sure of it. And so. Yeah, but, you know, this is so great. This is why I love my job here, because I get to hear about shows and different aspects of industries that I knew nothing about. And now I was like, oh, wait, you want to know about higher education? I got the expert for you. You got to go see Dr. Joe. So, you know, watch out now. Yeah, that's right. I got the ED up experience for you, you know, and so, like, that's so great that I have that ability to do that if I can remember everybody' which is starting to get to be a problem after hundreds and hundreds of episodes doing this. But, you know, I can usually find it pretty quickly.

That's it. Well, and you'll remember the show name, right? If it's a really good show, I.

Usually remember the show name. The host name I struggle with. And a lot of times I'll mix a couple of them up because everyone has different names. Like your name's Joe and there's another one Joe. And I'll start to mix their last names up. I don't think I'll forget yours because it's pretty unusual. But so anyway. So, Joe, I hear that you seem very glad that you started a podcast, and I'm sure there's a lot of other people out there thinking about, yeah, I've had this idea. Otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this show here that you've been thinking about podcasts, what advice do you have for them?

Don't take yourself too seriously. Just start. Just start. Perfection doesn't exist, especially in your first group of episodes. But if you don't start and get on the microphone and start talking. I mean, define your topic. Try to think about who your topic is gonna resonate with. But just give it a shot. Record something and put it out there, there, and let your friends and family listen at least and give you some feedback so that you can Iterate through it. But I think, you know, one of the mistakes we made right at the beginning, if you listen to show number six in show number 66, it is way different. We were stiff. We were just like another higher education podcast in those first, I don't know, 15 or so episodes. And we just said, what are we doing? So let's take ourselves way less serious. Let's have fun with it. Because if we're not having fun doing it, it is a community commitment. There's no doubt, there's a lot of hours. And if you're doing it yourself like we are, you know, it's just the three of us. So we're doing all the recording, editing, scheduling, graphics, artwork, all of it. It takes a lot of time. And if you're not having fun doing it, then don't do it. You have to enjoy it. And therefore, then don't take yourself too seriously. Just get started. And you can get started for free. You can get a pair of your Apple headphones and zoom and go to it.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Joe, thank you for that. I appreciate that. So what's next gonna add up next?

Oh, there's a good question. You know what? Sometimes I would say we're not sure. We're not sure we're for us, we're be passing about our 70,000th download here soon. That's pretty significant for us.

Really significant. You should be really proud of your show.

Thank you. We never imagined we thought we could get to 700 or 7,000. That would be massive. So 70,000 and you know, it took us nine months to get our first 10,000 in eight months to get our next. Next 60. So it shows you that we're starting to discover that ways to monetize. And so, you know, what's next for edup is really taking advantage of the brand that we've built for free. Essentially all of our hard work. How do we get paid for it now? How do we get paid in a way that's meaningful and where we can still bring value to others? And so using our connections, using our resources, taking advantage of the speaking opportunities that we have to generate some income so that maybe, Tracy, we could write that book. I mean, we have 200 and something college leaders all talking about what the future of higher education looks like. If there was an idea for a book, that would definitely be.

Be.

Be it. Right? And then what happens next? That's, it's. We're going to keep doing episodes, we're going to keep getting those college leaders in. We might scale Back a little bit and make sure that our episodes are more meaningful than, you know, because there's this quality over quantity or, you know, how do you send them out all episodes all at once, like a Netflix model? Do you do one at a time or so? We're figuring all that stuff out still. But what's Next is episode 300 here will be on the horizon soon. Oh, no.

So looking forward to hearing what's up next for you. And we're going to have to have you come back on. And as your network gets even more monetized in itself, we'll have to do a network show. And I look forward to having you back.

I would be an honor to be back.

Okay, wonderful. But thank you, Jo, so much. The Ed up experience. You're going to find all the information for it at the binge factor, the bingefactor.com where we'll have all the links to Ed up and the whole network of shows that Jo's got going on here.

Wasn't that fun? You know, what we do with our show, what we do with it is so important. And that's what Joe has found here. Right. He's really, he and his team and all the other people who work with the show show, his other co hosts, you know, what they're doing with it to create a community to, you know, to support their mission of really exposing and giving promotion and publicity to people in the higher education world who just don't get it. It's just not as exciting as, you know, having the president of Harvard on your show, as he mentions it. Right. But these are people who are educating our children, are educating us. And to be able to see that and hear that and give them an opportunity to speak about what they're doing and what they're putting in the thing helps them build trust, authority and of course, a little bit of publicity in the process. And that is a tremendous thing and something that's not usually as exciting. Education. Right, Higher education. And I also think that though what Jo has built in a show is so fascinating because thinking about coming in something that could have been so dry and turning it into something that's dynamic and interesting and story based and really building all of that has, I think, served him really well and it has focused the network itself on doing some really good practices with all their shows. So they're learning from some of the best in the process out there. So the Ed Up Experience, fabulous show. You're going to want to check it out. Maybe it's not your cup of Tea from types of shows. I talk about this all the time. Sometimes these aren't the shows that I would end up subscribing in. I'm not exactly their user base. But then again, there's this one episode that drops in and it's just perfect for something I needed to hear right at this moment because maybe it's something that my niece who's going off to college is struggling with or whatever that might be. So you never know. And this is a trick out there, something that a lot of good podcast researchers do, right? I do it all the time is we not only just search for a show, but sometimes we search for topic. So making sure that our shows really tap into those different topics and let people know about them through the way they're typing, titled, through the descriptions that they bring is really important because you never know when someone might want to just learn something and then end up realizing that your show is the exact place to get even more than that one thing. So keep that in mind as you go forward. And I think that's one of the things you'll find out by checking out the ED Up Experience. So thank you so much Dr. Joe Saluccio for coming on the show. Love what you're doing there. I can't wait to see how the Ed up network turns into and what it grows into. And we'll have to have him to back on so we can talk about that network strategy as well. So as always, you can find links to everything the EDUP experience to Joe, to everything we talked about in this episode. You'll be able to find that@thebingefactor.com where you find video, audio, blog, images, all kinds of things, everything we have. And you'll also be able to apply to the show if you've already got a show or you'd like to nominate a show. So you can do that there as well. So thanks everyone for listening. I'm Tracey Hazzard and I'm going to be back next next time with another great podcast and podcast post for you to learn from so that you can tap in to that binge factor.

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