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A Time Tested Process For Turning Your Podcast Into a Cash Machine
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How are you doing in podcasting as a guest, host, or both?
The first question every podcast host asks themselves after recording their first episodes is, “How on earth do I make money with my podcast?” All the podcasting “Gurus” shout saying, “You need to find a sponsor for your show!” But you are left wondering if that is the right solution for your podcast. (Hint: It’s probably not!) In this session, Josh Tapp explains how he, a small-town Idaho boy, turned his failing podcast into an Apple top-25 podcast in under six months. Additionally, Josh shows us his framework for closing 5-6 figure deals without taking on any sponsors. Get ready to learn to monetize your podcast today while becoming ridiculously visible along the way!
Read The Blog Post: A Time Tested Process For Turning Your Podcast Into a Cash Machine
Get 10 to 50,000 more podcast listeners without having to spend money on ads or grind thousands of hours away promoting your podcast. How does that sound?
What about closing five to six-figure deals from your show without ever having to be a pushy, naggy, hard-selling salesperson?
I have been able to accomplish both feats, and I’ll share how you can do the same with a step-by-step guide.
A few years ago, I was on a sticky wicket with my second podcast. Fifty episodes in, and I had only a handful of listeners to show for all the hard work.
I had like five listeners, and three of them were my mom, mother-in-law, and grandmother! I love them for their support, but the reality was I wasn’t gaining any real traction.
On a particular day, I remember sitting in a mastermind one day and thinking, “I really wish that I knew how to leverage this content to actually make money.”
At the time, Russell Brunson was giving a presentation and at one point, he said, “Guys, you need to be treating your podcast as if it’s a business.”
This was a foreign concept to me. I had always thought a podcast was a marketing tool, nothing more! Something to get me more brand exposure.
As a result, I had never viewed or treated my podcast as a business.
As I left the mastermind that day, I decided to start viewing my podcast as an opportunity to talk to high-level people. Then I can leverage those people to make money and get massive amounts of exposure.
From that realization, we were able to develop a system called the Podcast Multiplier Method over the next 3 years. There was a lot of trial and error along the way. Nevertheless, this method has gotten us to the top 25 on iTunes. It also helped us start closing five and six-figure deals from our podcast without ever really selling in the traditional sense of the word.
This post is a transcription of one of the talks from our PodPros Quarterly Virtual Event.
The Podcast Multiplier Method
The Podcast Multiplier Method is a seven-step process. Before I share how the system works, I want you to say this, “I will not do steps three through seven on my own.”
Repeat it until you internalize it. This then means you’ll have somebody else on your team take care of these steps (3-7), leaving you to focus on steps 1 and 2.
Step One: Record Content
That sounds like a no-brainer, right? Yet this is often the scariest part. Many podcasters are often afraid to put themselves out there and share their voice. Yet without taking care of this crucial stage, all the rest of the steps are practically useless.
That’s why I want to challenge you to do something a little bit out of your comfort zone. First, you need to be recording a video as you record your podcast audio.
If you’re an introvert like me, you might face a hard time getting in front of a camera. The good news is that there are ways to overcome any limitations you might be feeling. One of them is to start interviewing people.
But not just anybody. It needs to be the top people in your industry. Let me use myself as an example. So our podcast is in the marketing niche. Some of the top marketing leaders I would need to interview in this industry are Russell Brunson, Grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk, basically big-name people.
However, I’ve interviewed a few people like that, and I still felt let down by the results from those interviews. After several such disappointing experiences, I had an epiphany. These A-list players were never going to promote the show for me!
A Better Alternative
What you want to be doing is looking for B-listers. I’m talking about the people who are hyper-successful in their industry but aren’t as appreciated or recognized as the A-listers.
Here’s an example.
When I first started The Lucky Titan podcast, one of my first interviews was with a guy who had built a hundred-million-dollar company in the HVAC spaces.
Despite being highly successful, his story had never been told. Crazy! Here was a guy who was very successful by any standards, yet nobody ever asked him, “Hey, will you come on my show?”
Well, I did because I knew something the rest didn’t.
If you leverage someone like him —an industry leader who doesn’t get as much PR exposure —he will promote you like crazy because you were one of the first people to offer him a stage to tell his story.
So that’s how you record a superb piece of content. Find the top players in your space and get them to come on your show.
As we go through the Podcast Multiplier Method, keep in mind that none of this is complicated stuff. I don’t expect you to have 4k quality, cinema-quality video, or amazingly produced audio.
All of this is literally a numbers game. How do you get your message out there to the masses and close some deals along the way? That’s what should be your greatest focus.
While this strategy for reaching 10 to 50,000 people requires you to produce one piece of content a week, I want to challenge you to do at least two. If you can get out of your comfort zone and network on LinkedIn and get one or two guests a week, then you’re off to the races. Better still, use PodMatch and supercharge your efforts.
Step 2: Create Partnerships
If you’ve been a podcaster for a while, you probably know that you can leverage your podcast to close deals. How you best accomplish this is through generating partnerships.
A lot of people look at sales and think they have to do a discovery call, closing call, contract call, and all these things that are often a complete waste of time!
I didn’t do any of these things, and I was still able to close a $150,000 deal when I only had five listeners on my show. How? Well, it comes back to interviewing B-listers and taking up the role of the ‘doctor.’
During the interview, my job is to prescribe them what they need.
A while back, I had a particular guest who was worth around $50 million at the time. As we were talking on the show, I was analyzing what more he could do for marketing and found that his big gap was his website.
He didn’t have a single sales funnel! Despite building his business strictly on referral, he was still missing out on a great avenue for growth.
I made up my mind that I had to find a way to help him and make some money in the process. Luckily, I already knew a guy who was fantastic at developing sales funnels! After the interview, as I thanked him for making time to appear on the show, I mentioned how he could benefit from having a well-thought-out inbound lead system. It turns out he was aware of this but didn’t know what to do. When he asked if I could connect him with someone who could help him, I answered with a resolute Yes.
I wasn’t hard selling him or anything like that. All I did was offer to introduce him to my friend. I called up my friend right after and let him know there was a potential client in need of his services. Long story short, I connected these two guys, and they closed a $150,000 deal within 20 minutes. From that one call, I got a $25,000 commission!
It doesn’t have to be industry-specific. You could be doing this with athletes, actors, entrepreneurs or whoever you want to interview. All you need to do is listen and figure out what they’re missing.
Quick disclaimer, don’t be the person who goes around telling people, “Hey, this is what you’re missing.” Something more appropriate to say would be along the lines of, “Hey, I couldn’t help but notice that you haven’t done… or have you ever thought of doing…?” Nine times out of 10, they’ll say, “Yes, I do need help with that. Who do you recommend?”
If even they don’t end up buying a product from you or any of my friends, they will often be more than ready to help promote the episode. These people are willing to give back because they’re not those A-listers. They’re the B-listers, the people whose story isn’t being told.
Recording content and creating partnerships. These first two essential steps are what you should be focusing on.
Have you learned something so far? We have many more podcasting hacks shared by the best in the industry. Learn more at PodPros Quarterly Virtual Event.
Step 3: Edit The Content
For steps three through seven, you want to have at least one person on your team taking care of it. In my case, we have six different people who work on every piece of content as it moves through the process.
If you want to blow up your brand, this is not something you can do by yourself.
Now it’s time to edit the content. The goal of this is to create three pieces of pillar content. First, the audio is edited down into a podcast episode. Different tools like Audacity and Adobe Audition help simplify this process.
The second thing is you need to do is get that episode transcribed and turned into a blog post. This will serve as the second pillar piece, a written post built off the key points shared on the podcast episode.
Finally, take that video you recorded and edit it.
Step 4: Upload the Content
Now that you have the three pieces of content, it’s time to upload them onto the appropriate platforms.
You’re probably familiar with uploading the audio episode using Buzzsprout or whatever host you prefer. By getting listed with all the different directories, your episode will be seen by 10 to 150, maybe even 250 people, right off the bat with almost zero promotion.
That’s the most important thing; that people can find you wherever they go.
Once your episode is up, it’s time to publish the blog post. The purpose of the blog post is often to collect people’s email addresses. Every time you publish a blog post on your website, it should contain some sort of pop-up or lead magnet saying, “Hey, subscribe to my email list because of X, Y, Z.”
In our case, we prefer publishing the post on LinkedIn instead of our website. We’ve found that the audience on LinkedIn is much more likely to engage with that content or even give us their email address. Therefore, in several places within the blog post, we will insert hyperlinks that lead people back to our resources. For example, “If you want to learn more about A, B, C, click here.”
Whether you use LinkedIn, Your website, or another publishing platform, that’s up to you. Whatever gives you more traffic, stick to that.
The final stage will be getting the video uploaded to YouTube.
When you put the content on these platforms, your brand is at the very least seen by a number of people. In fact, this is the whole point of the podcast multiplier method.
Your content should be seen everywhere but only consumed in the places you care about.
Step 5: Multi-purpose The Content
Now it’s time to take the three pieces of content and turn them into over 30 pieces of content.
First, create two captioned social media videos. This is very important because statistics show that most people watch videos on social media with the audio turned off.
Also, they should be 45-60 seconds max. Most social media networks have stringent specifications about video length on their platforms.
The next step will be to create three quote cards. This is very simple to do. All you need is a quick, punchy short quote, with a picture of you or the guest next to it. You can play around with the design elements. Just make sure you have at least 3 quote cards.
No, you might be wondering, “I thought you said 30 pieces of content; this is only five.” My answer is you don’t need to create anymore. Instead, you need to post these five pieces of content everywhere.
Step 6: Schedule The Content
The goal here is to take that content and schedule it so that it can be seen over and over again. However, instead of just blasting out a bunch of content at a go, you want it to resurface every couple of weeks or months.
Staggering your content like this incentivizes people to engage with you on every platform you’re on. They’ll follow you on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
Also, because you have somebody else managing this step, instead of only 4, they can schedule the content on 5, 7, or even 10 platforms.
Since each platform has its own posting specifications, each essentially becomes a unique piece of content. Now you’ve gone from zero to 4,6,8 captioned videos.
Precisely how do you schedule the five pieces of content?
On the day your episode goes live, you post one of your caption social media videos. This is basically a commercial saying, “Hey, go listen to my show.”
The day after the episode goes live, you post a little reminder on all the platforms with one of the quote cards. This should link back to the podcast episode.
Thirty days later, you’ll post the second captioned video saying, “Hey, you may have missed this episode, but it was amazing. You’ll want to check it out.” This is just a guide. You don’t have to use these exact words.
Then, 60 days later, you post the second quote card and the third quote card six months later. When you do this, you’ve gone from five pieces of content to at least 20 pieces of content right there by just posting in the big four.
Even if you’re getting zero engagement with these posts, you’re being seen everywhere. People are going to start building familiarity with your content. In a way, you become micro-famous just because your content is appearing everywhere. Again, you have to think of this whole thing as a numbers game.
When you finally make an offer, people will already know who you are. You need to be seen first.
Step 7: Collect the cash
Now it’s time to make that offer. Whether it’s on social media, your email list, or your podcast, it’s time to make an offer and start collecting cash.
The great thing about the Podcast Multiplier Method is that it works no matter what industry you’re in. You can take this methodology, implement it, and be seen even if you have zero industry experience.
If you’re not an expert in the field but want to be seen, this is the way to do it.
As you put your content out there, you’re going to get better and more refined at promoting your brand.
It doesn’t even have to be your brand; you could be promoting somebody else’s brand.
Regardless, this puts you in a position of strength. It’s a process that will allow you to keep bringing more and more amazing people onto the podcast and make money all along the way.
About the speaker: Josh Tapp
Host of the Apple Itunes Top 25 Marketing and Entrepreneurship Podcast, The Lucky Titan, Josh has worked with over 1000 of the world’s top entrepreneurs discovering their most coveted business success secrets and sharing them with the world. His company, Podcast Multipliers, has helped over 750 entrepreneurs (and counting) to launch, monetize, and scale their own industry-leading podcasts, and has generated millions of dollars in sales for his own company Podcast Multipliers.
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