SW 210 – Building a Strong Podcast Audience with The Real Brian

The Real Brian is the founder of Profitcast and Arrow Squad. Brian has a strong passion for podcasting and talks to Jason on the subject of growing your audience. He shares useful tips on how to build a loyal following, Twitter strategies you can use to grow your audience, and the different ways you can monetize your podcast.

Key Takeaways:

[1:30] Why the name ‘The Real Brian’?

[4:00] Brian and Daniel J. Lewis did a special episode about the subject of monetization. You can find it at http://www.profitcastuniverse.com/31.

[7:10] Rob Cesternino makes $6,100 in Patreon donations.

[11:45] You can monetize your podcast by reselling products.

[15:05] Podcasters have also done well with premium content as a way to generate income.

[20:50] If you have a loyal following of only 1,000 people, you can still make quite a bit of money.

[27:30] Brian talks about Twitter strategies to increase your following.

[31:05] Develop a clear idea of what you want to do with your podcast before you market yourself.

[34:50] Final thoughts? Podcast on your passion. That’s huge.

Mentioned In This Episode:

http://www.profitcastuniverse.com/

http://www.profitcastuniverse.com/31

https://www.patreon.com/

http://www.keithandthegirl.com/

https://manageflitter.com/

Tweetables:

With affiliate relationships, you might get 4-10% of the commission. With product resale, you might get 40-50%.

Don’t create an interview show just to create an interview show.

All the top podcasters are branded well. If you can make sure that your podcast is branded well, then do your marketing.

Transcript

Jason Hartman:

Hey, it’s my pleasure to welcome The Real Brian to the show and we are talking about podcasting. As you may know, he’s the founder of ProfitCast. We just wanted to drill down and get some of the secrets to success as a podcaster in terms of how to build an audience, how to monetize your show, successful and profitable podcasters out there; what are they doing? Some good stuff like this, so let’s dive in. Brian, welcome, how are you doing?

Brian:

Thank you, appreciate it. Doing really, really well, and just glad to be here. Good to talk to you again.

Jason:

So, do I have to call you The Real Brian?

Brian:

You know, it’s one of those things, I wanted a radio name. I grew up in the days of the radio and I liked radio names and when you do something a little bit more creative, people remember it, and if you don’t, they forget your name. It’s so funny.

Jason:

I’m wondering if you started that branding of yourself to defeat a competitor. So, it begs the question. Who is the fake Brian? Is the fake Brian your competitor?

Brian:

It’s the alter-ego. There is no competitor actually, it was just more for fun.

Jason:

There’s no fake Brian?

Brian:

No. You know what’s interesting is a lot of the guys have, you know, their three names, so you know, the middle names or whatever.

Jason:
What do you mean three names? Yeah, isn’t it funny that all the serial killers have three names. John Hinckley Jr.

Brian:

I thought you were going to say John Lee Dumas, but he’s not a serial killer.

Jason:

We don’t know! No, John is a great guy. But yeah, it’s funny, why is that? Remember the movie Conspiracy Theory?

Brian:

Oh yeah.

Jason:

Ever since I saw that movie with Mel Gibson, I’ve been thinking about that and it’s true. Why do they all have three names? Don’t serial killers just use a first and last name like normal people? I go by Jason Hartman. I do not use my middle name, right. What is it about serial killers that always have a middle name? I just do not get there.

Brian:

Again so they can be remembered.

Jason:

Well, some listener please email us and tell us the answer to that question. I’ve been dying to know for like, what, 15 years now.

Brian:

See, I have no idea. I haven’t gotten into the mind of a serial killer very much.

Jason:

Go watch that movie Conspiracy Theory. I bet it’s on Netflix.

Brian:

I’ve watched it years ago. It’s a good movie. There is that Serial podcast that’s out that I heard a lot of people listen to, but I never listen to it, so.

Jason:

Yeah, I listened to two episodes of serial and that was so famous, I don’t know. I just wasn’t turned on by it, but I guess everybody else liked it. I’m always the oddball, you know.

Brian:

Me too. I know. So, you can just call me Brian, that’s fine. One name is good.

Jason:

Okay, The Real Brian. So, let’s talk about, we talked about podcasting on the show, but you know, you can never talk enough about it, because it is, even though it’s, I’ll call it 11 years old now as an industry, somewhere around there, it’s not an exact time, but there are so many different models that people are trying to use to make it work, to gain audience engagement, to monetize and profit on a podcast. Let’ just talk about the monetization and tell the listeners what you’re seeing out there.

Brian:

Actually, this is fun, because Daniel J. Lewis and I did a special…

Jason:

Oh, now that’s just a middle initial, see, yeah.

Brian:

There’s another one though. It’s funny, I said that to somebody and they said, you’re co-hosting with Daniel Day Lewis?

Jason:

Right.

Brian:

Yep, we’re good friends. Last of The Mohicans and all that, yeah. No, Daniel J. Lewis and I from the Audacity to Podcast. He and I did a little cross over co-hosted episode instead of an interview, which we thought would be kind of fun, but I just realized my episode this week and it’s ProfitcastUniverse.com/31 if you want to check it out. It’s one and a half hour episode. Never done an episode that long, but we actually went into extreme depth on all of the monetization strategies that the successfully podcasters are using – well, maybe not all of them, but at least most of them anyway, most of the major ones. So, when it comes to, if you really want some in depth training, we get pretty exhausted on that. So, I just wanted to throw that out there, but I’ll name some of the ones we talked about it.

Jason:

Give us the reader’s digest version here, yeah.

Brian:

Exactly. Sponsorships are huge. That’s one that most people want to try to get into. They think that’s going to be, hey, I’m just going to go out and I’m going to podcast and I’m going to get a sponsorship and in some ways that’s going to be one of the hardest ones because you need to have the listenership, you need to be able to prove value to the sponsor that they’re going to get out of it kind of thing, but it’s certainty something worth going after and the one thing I love about sponsorship and donations.

Patreon, for example, one of the things I love about those is you can just get on and deliver your content and some of us are better behind the microphone in the sense that we just want to get on and perform, deliver the content, add value, whatever, but we really don’t want to go over here and work on like keyword generation and algorithms and other things like that. So, I think it’s a valid model for people who are really just looking to do what they’re best at.

Jason:

Tell us about Patreon?

Brian:

That’s actually something I’m looking to more on right now and I’m looking on that for my Arrow podcast, Arrow Squad, because really there’s not a lot to teach people on there, so that’s one of those things where what you can do is sign up with a Patreon account and then, you know, it’s similar to KickStarter in the sense that you gotta do a video and you gotta deliver value to those that actually contributor basally to your website, into your podcast, but with Patreon, this is an on-going thing versus KickStarter being a one-time project. So, for example, you go on and you say, if you donate $5 a month, you know, we’re going to mention you on the show or something like that. If you donate $25 a month, we’re going to give you something special, maybe you’ll get a signed copy of whatever it maybe.

Jason:

But, who is donating what? You mean..

Brian:

This would be the listeners.

Jason:

The listeners are donating and then they’re donating to your show, is what you’re saying, right? And then you give…give us an example of someone who is actually doing that and how it works, if you have an example, not sure if you do.

Brian:

Sure. I do. Actually, somebody that I actually know who is doing a very good job with this is Rob Cesternino and it’s called Rob Has a Podcast and last I checked he was making about $6,100 a month through Patreon donates.

Jason:

So, what is he doing? Yeah, that’s great.

Brian:

Yeah, he talks about TV shows. He was actually on Survivor for two seasons and so he talks about reality shows on his podcasts and basically what he says is I want to do this full time, I want to be able to devote to it, would you be willing to, you know, contribute to my podcast and then here are the different levels of contributions and here’s what you get out of them and that kind of thing.

So, it’s really, it’s an option for us to be able to keep our podcasts free, but then it gives our listeners who are, you know, loyal, devoted followers, we’re going to call it, of the podcast an option to kind of give back and say thanks for being apart of my life, thanks for sharing your content.

Jason:

Yeah, one time a long time ago I didn’t think I was monetizing my show very well, my first show, the creating wealth show and that’s just been a massively profitable thing for me. You know, I kind of didn’t think I was doing a very good job monetizing it a long time ago and so I put a donation button up there and one of my listeners just donated $200 right away without even thinking about it. I mean, I don’t know how much they thought about it, but as soon as I put the donation button up, I got a donation. I had some others too.

That sort of surprised me, but I don’t know, I go to KickStarter and I donate money to all kinds of things. Donate, I’m a backer, put it that way. You always get something in return. So, what does Rob give people in return? I remember reading Rob had Pod Movement in Dallas, but what does he give them?

Brian:

You know, I’d have to go look him up, but one of the things I know he does is he’ll give an assigned copy of something, it has more to do with his shows, you know, but he’ll give a way some certain things. Like apparel and gear basically, but there are other things where he’ll actually do a special private podcast episode for somebody, which is really cool. So, it really comes back to finding out what resonates with the listener and what is it that your community centers around. With Arrow Squad, for example, it’s easy for us to do things centered around the TV show Arrow. So, we want to make sure that whatever we give back to them, it’s delivering value centered around that topic, if that makes sense.

Jason:

Good. So, check out Patreon, that’s a great suggestion, thank you. Next one?

Brian:

Yeah, affiliate relationship is a big one that can be either – it really depends on what it is you’re – again, it comes back to what resonates with your listeners. If you’re giving away stuff that, you know, you’re sending people to affiliate links that really have nothing to do with your listenerships then yeah, it’s going to be frustrating, but what you’re looking for is products and services that you’ve used and that, again, they resonate with your listeners based on your topic. It’s something that delivers value to them and you’ve got to be able to let them know about it.

I think that’s something that I’ve learned kind of the hard way is just having a resources page on your website isn’t enough. You’ve got to point out a specific one in an episode and here’s why and here’s how it relates to that week’s episode kind of thing. That’s how I think you can deliver great value. You know who does that really well is Pat Flynn.

Jason:

Yeah, Pat, just, he produces such great content. Love his work and I’ve only recently started following him, by the way, his blog posts are really good.

Brian:

He’s been making most of his income off of affiliate commissions for quite some time now.

Jason:

Yeah, yeah, okay good. Like you said, it’s got to be relevant, because we are in the business, in the podcasting world, we are in the business of the long tail of highly relevant content. You know, I almost think podcasting should be called, I think it should have a reference like this, so we know the idea – you know, your background from radio, that’s the concept of broadcasting, it’s broad as the name would imply. It’s broad, it goes up to everybody. Podcasting is really narrow casting and I think the narrow casting concept, the long trail, you could call it long tail casting.

Brian:

I like that though.

Jason:

Chris Anderson popularized that phrase. It’s an important concept, so highly relevant stuff, very important.

Brian:

You’re right, that is the beauty of being podcasters and also in that long tail is that you really get to focus in on a product and in many ways it makes it so much easier for us as content creators to just focus. You’re not so worried about what about this and what about – does this make sense? Well, that doesn’t matter, focus on what it is you’re doing.

Jason:

Absolutely. Okay good.

Brian:

Another one that people love to talk about this and this is one that some do well with and some don’t, but that’s product resale or drop shipping, having an online store, that kind of thing, instead of affiliate relationships. With affiliate relationships, you might get somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-10% of the commission, where as the product resale or drop shipping, you might be in the neighborhood of 40-50%, or not commissions, but actual profits in that sense.

Jason:

Yeah, makes sense. Okay.

Brian:

There’s the thing where you can create your own products and you get more of your 100% profits where you’re doing trainings, ebooks, videos, stuff like that, where you can put out actually digital products on your website about your topic where you can teach others how to do whatever it is that you do.

Jason:

Yeah, your own info-products, okay.

Brian:

Which, one thing, I don’t know if we’ve mentioned this on your other show or not, but one thing that I’ve mentioned on ProfitCast quite a bit is, you know, there’s really two types of podcasts out there. There’s an education style podcast and then there’s an entertainment style and then everything else kind of follows, you know, underneath, but if you’re looking at education, it’s really easy to be creating courses and trainings like this. Entertainment on the other hand, if you’re out there doing a comedy podcast, you know, it’s a little bit different, a little bit harder to create an educational podcast or an education product even, too, unless you’re going to train people on how to do comedy or something. Like, maybe here’s the 10 steps to becoming a stand up comedian or something like that, but for most people that’s actually pretty difficult when it comes to an entertainment podcast.

Jason:

Okay, good, but entertainment you have a whole another area of stuff to sell, so yeah, okay, good. Anything more on monetization?

Brian:

Yeah, I’ll mention two more main ones. Coaching is one that follows, you know, follows a little more under like of a service instead of a product and I think in some ways it’s easier to get started with a service than a product just because many of us are expects already in something, we can go out and start coaching right now whereas creating a product takes time. So, that’s a great one and then the other too and this goes more for entertainment, but this can be for anyone.

Jason:

One thing I just want to say about that.

Brian:

Sure.

Jason:

The nice thing about a service, you know, like coaching or some type of service like that is that you’re really have a chance to iterate a lot. You can have people buy that service from you and when they buy a service, they’re not exactly sure how you’re going to deliver it, you probably aren’t either, but you can iterate, you can sense the feedback along the way as you’re providing that service and that’s a really, really helpful thing. So, I agree with you that a service might be the best first step before a product.

Brian:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jason:

Because you can probably make a better product after you deliver this service several times, because you can get that customer feedback.

Brian:

Definitely. No, I agree with that and you know, it’s funny you say that, because I’ve been trying to put together and ebook and it’s just been so challenging because I haven’t interacted enough with the clients and so I just said, you know what, let me just focus on coaching for a while and now that I’m starting to develop that coaching and I’m opening it up to more clients, the more I’m realizing, man, this is a common question. Maybe this is what the ebook should be about, you know what I mean? You’re right, you start to get what it is you need to create a product for at that point.

Jason:

Yeah, well, it’s the good old Eric Ries, Lean Startup methodology, which is great, you know, the minimum viable product and then iterate, iterate, iterate based on customer feedback, yeah, great thing.

Brian:

The last one I’ll mention is premium content and this is where basically it’s something that you’re going to sell and you’re going to sell a membership subscription. You keep your main podcast free, but maybe you create additional podcasts or maybe you create bonus episodes or extended versions of your episodes, really depends on what it is you’re looking to do, but that’s where premium content can come into play and I’m, you know, I’ve seen this model with a few people, there’s one website in particular if you like to go look into them a little bit more, they’re are called Keith and The Girl and it’s a comedy podcast and they basically have made significant money getting out there, delivering awesome comedy value, they’ve developed a huge audience, a loyal audience, and then they’ve gone out and said, okay, our back catalog from 2005 is now behind a pay wall and there’s something like 10 other podcasts that you can get as a bonus to being a subscriber.

Jason:

So, here’s the thing with that one, Brian. I really wonder if taking back catalog episodes and putting behind a pay wall, because I did that a little bit and I’m wondering if that helped or hurt me, honestly, because you lose all of the traction and the ratings from that back catalog. I think it might be better to just leave them free and put them out there. I don’t put much in terms of podcast episodes behind a pay wall, what I do though is for members of what we call Jason Hartman University, a JHU, you can say you’re an alumni. We need hoodies and t-shirts, like a real university would have, right?

Brian:

Absolutely!

Jason:

Yeah, and maybe massive student loan debt too, you know? We gotta get in what I call the government college debt industrial complex.

Brian:

There you go. Yeah.

Jason:

It’s such a rip off! But that’s — But I digress. So, we started with serial killers now we’re talking about the student loan debt scam. Oh, I tell you, let’s keep on topic. You’re so good at it, I’m terrible at it. Okay, anyway. People would go pay, but what we do put behind the pay wall was we have a monthly members only conference call and so that’s behind the pay wall and that’s more interactive than the podcast as it would imply and there’s some definite like drill down deep concepts there about real estate investing and so forth that aren’t on the podcast and I don’t know if taking your back catalog away is that good of an idea. Any thoughts on that?

Brian:

It’s funny because I’ve seen it work for some, but that’s why I said I haven’t seen it for everybody, either. So, yeah, personally I wouldn’t do it. You’re right about that. Like, even with the extended episodes. I’ve seen people do that where they’ll do a 20-30 minute episode, but if you want the full two hour episode, it’s behind the pay wall and I’m not even sure that’s necessarily the best practice. It is an option, that’s why I throw it out there, but I think what really can be good is having bonus content, you know? It’s the kind of stuff where, for example, you and I might get on and do a two hour study on what we just talked about right now.

Monetization strategies, going into the benefits, you know, that are, and figuring out away, okay, let’s look at this type of a podcaster is a sponsorship a good idea or a bad idea? And if it’s a good idea, let’s help them get started. So, you know, we might go into a two hour in depth study on this, but that’s not something you’re going to want to release on your main feed, you’re going to want to put that behind a pay wall.

Jason:

So, here’s the problem with the pay wall thing and we don’t need to belay at this point, maybe this will be the last volley on it, but the issue is when you’re doing a guest format and the guest comes on your show, the whole point of your guest being on your show is to get maximum exposure, because that’s why they’re doing it, they want exposure for their book or their business or whatever they’re doing, and you know, they gotta provide some value to earn that exposure, for sure. SO, if you put them a pay wall, that’s going to be a much smaller audience by definition. What do you say to a guest? Hey, help me create content that people pay for, but you’re not going to get part of the revenue?

Brian:

Unless it’s one of those where, you know, you do a regular show with that guest and then say we’re also going to do something special, as well.

Jason:

That’s a good idea. Yeah.

Brian:

You’re right about that, you definitely don’t want to bring somebody on that’s only for pay. I mentioned with Daniel J. Lewis and I just did. I had already interviewed him on Profitcast, so this was the, hey, let’s do something extra for our guests, but we released it as a regular episode anyway. You know, that could have been something we could have put behind a pay wall.

Jason:

Let’s talk about how to grow an audience, which is really the first step before a lot of this stuff we just discussed. What are some of the easiest ways to grow a large loyal audience and maybe also I want to ask you Brian to speak to the concept, which I think is largely overlooked by podcasters of the importance of audience engagement versus audience size. There are some podcasters out there who will maybe will remain nameless, who are using all kinds of tricks to beef up their statistics and it’s not really legit. C’mon, let’s just face it, okay. They are putting their audience size everywhere and all this kind of stuff, but you know, size, does size matter? I think you can make a fortune with an audience that’s loyal and engaged of a thousand people.

Brian:

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, you know, this is, I’m really glad you brought this up, because this is definitely one of those questions that is, I wouldn’t say, well, yeah, I’m going to say this, it’s eluding most people, eluding, not alluding, but eluding a lot of podcasters and you know, okay, so, you asked a question, I want to make sure we dig into this one a little bit. Easiest ways, first of all, that’s tough.

There’s really not an easy way per say to grow a large audience, because it takes time and work and it takes quite a bit of persistence, but here’s another thing too. I hear this question a lot, like what are the ways that I can promote my show to grow a loyal audience, for example, or like you talked about, easiest ways to grow a loyal audience. The problem people are, they’re missing a few steps, because ways to promote your show, that’s marketing, right, so if you’re going to go out there and market, you’re going to get listens, you’re going to get downloads. Now, going from that step to converting them to a loyal listener is the second step. So a lot of people are trying to say, how do I promote my show to get a loyal listener. Do you catch what’s wrong there?

Jason:

Yeah, I got it.

Brian:

So, that’s the thing. Most podcasters are thinking on that mentality where they’re like, I’m just going to go out and get loyal listeners because I put myself up on iTunes and it’s just not going to work that way. So, there’s the marketing side of things and then there’s the actual, like you said, engagement side of things, which creates that loyalty.

So, let’s look at a couple of quick marketing things to just get that out of the way, I think that stuff has been going around quite a bit, there’s, you know, getting listed on iTunes, Twitter, SoundCloud, whatever platform you want to be on. There’s the new and noteworthy aspect that goes around a lot about how to get up there. Truthfully, I don’t think new and noteworthy is really all that great unless you’re in the top 20 and even then, you still have 8 weeks and you better prove yourself in 8 weeks. After that, you’re done, right.

So, I think it’s good, but I think you really need to maximize new and noteworthy if you’re going to utilize it. If you cant maximize it, don’t spend your time as much on that. So, that’s my theory, because I’ve seen a lot of people in new and noteworthy and it’s just, it doesn’t do anything for them. But you know, like I said, if you’re listing yourself out there, you gotta make sure you’ve got blog posts for each podcast episode, because that way Google can find you. I’m hearing more and more how important YouTube is as a companion to your website.

I have heard and I don’t know if I agree with this, but I have heard people say just put your podcast on YouTube as an audio file and just put your logo there as a picture. I don’t know, for me, as a consumer, as a listener, there’s no value delivered there. So, I would look at it more from a standpoint of, you’re going to do a video on YouTube, if you’re going to utilize it, do an extra video, even if it’s just a two minute weekly video to be a companion to your actual podcast.

Jason:

Right, right. So, I’m not sure if I can’t there. YouTube good or bad or what as an companion, in which way? I mean, is the idea of putting the shows up there just as the audio track with some pictures, are you for or against that?

Brian:

I’m not sure I’m for that. I’m not saying that’s a bad strategy, but I don’t think it’s the best strategy.

Jason:

In other words, it probably wouldn’t hurt. I mean, it does take time and money to produce it and handle all that, it’s not too hard, but it does take some effort.

Brian:

When you’re listener or when you’re a viewable of YouTube of what’s the point of YouTube. What are you doing?

Jason:

Honestly, there are zillions and that’s an exact number, by the way, but somewhere around a zillion videos on YouTube just have talking heads and I keep thinking, why do I need this video? It would be so much nicer if it were on audio so that it would be portable. I don’t need to see you sitting there talking. You know? You’re not showing any visual aids, so that’s really kind of an interesting point to it too, but yeah.

Brian:

Well, that goes with what I’m saying there. Audio is, like you said, it’s portable, you can take it with you, when you’re doing video though, it’s like make the video worth while other wise don’t do video. So, if you’re going to get into YouTube, you know, like one of the things that I like to implement now is I’ve got my weekly podcast, which is audience, but I would like to do some kind of weekly video where I’m giving tips or encouragement two to five minutes, that’s it and I can actually use visual aids.

I can use screenshots or whatever where it’s just a simple thing to get me on YouTube, helps with search engines and it delivers extra value to my community and there’s a lot of other things you can do with video, but that’s some of the – there’s the other thing you’re going to hear about guest hosting, for example, getting on to other shows and the converse of that is having guests on your show and asking them to share your episode. Social media…

Jason:

I want to start doing that. I think that’s a good idea, you know, I’ve got 19 shows now and I just can’t do all of these interviews anymore. So, I did get one, not a guest host, but really more of a partner to do one of my shows where he’s doing basically every other episode and I’m doing every other episode, but I think the guest host concept is an awesome idea. I love it when guest hosts are on the radio shows I listen to. I don’t listen to them much anymore, but radio is still around, but I think the guest hosts are great sometimes.

Brian:

That’s actually something I grew up in radio too and I interviewed bands and artist and it’s something I loved. So, being able to do that is fun. I think there’s a balance though, because, speaking of John Lee Dumas, there is that quote John Lee Dumas syndrome now is where people are saying everybody’s doing interviews and it’s old already. Yeah, I get there, but at the same time interviews are still good. Balance that out. Don’t create an interview show just to create an interview show. Utilize the value of having interviews and why it’s something that’s going to actually benefit your show and your listeners and if it does, go for it, it’ll help you – people go out and promote your show and they say thanks for having me on, of course I’m going to promote your show to my listeners, to my community, and that’s huge.

Jason:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brian:

Another one –

Jason:

I think guest hosting is good.

Brian:

Yeah, I agree. You know, I’m excited to be here. It’s fun too because you get to build relationships and I love networking and making friendships with other people and so that’s another by the way is networking and not just for yourself, again, delivering value to other people, so that’s something I like doing. Another thing is there are some great Twitter strategies out there, targeted people, again, that are more in your topic, your niche and making sure you’re delivering value to them on a daily basis.

Jason:

Tell us about that. Drill down on the Twitter for a moment, if you would.

Brian:

Sure, one of the things I’d like to do with Twitter is, for example, I’ll follow people. So, here’s one, as a podcaster, I went on to Podcast Movement’s Twitter and I had ManageFlitter, I use that service, follow the followers of Podcast Movement, because I figure most of them are going to be podcasters and that’s who I’m trying to reach. So, by follow those people, you know, this is the number’s game where so many of them are going to follow you back and some of them are going to ignore you completely and that’s fine and basically what you’re doing from a number’s standpoint, you’re following about a 100 people a day, because Twitter gets mad if you do too many and then you know, five days later if they still haven’t followed you back, okay, you can unfollow them because they’re not interested, but during that time that you’re doing that numbers game, you’re delivering value and one of the things I like to do is, I put out five scheduled tweets a day, that’s the, ideally the minimum I’m looking at and each of those five tweets is either going to be like okay, I have a new show out or here’s some value and that’s going to be delivered whether it’s a question or maybe it’s a recommendation for something, maybe it’s a quote, inspiration quote kind of thing.

Basically something that’s going to engage my community on Twitter, but also something that can deliver value and deliver tips for them and if they’re looking like, oh wow. One of the things that I just delivered, I said, speak to your listeners rather than all you listeners out there in podcast land and I gave that example and that was a top tweet for the day. For some reason it struck a chord. People were like, oh, I never thought about that. Like, I’m always talking about you all out there or all those listeners rather than you.

So, that was a really cool one that I just recently got some good stats on, but that’s something I do over and over and I’ve been able to grow my community on Twitter from a 100 people to just over 3,700 people now and I haven’t been doing it that long, and so, not all of them engage of course, but the idea is that if you can get to where you’re about a 100 people on Twitter that are loyal, I hate to use the word fans, I can’t think of another word, but you know where I’m talking about, an engaged community about a 100 people. If you’re around that number, you’re in a good spot.

You brought something up earlier about the 1,000 listeners. If you had about a 1,000 listeners you could really monetization and have a great successful business and that goes back to that 100 too. If you’ve really got a 100 loyal engaged listeners that pretty much will do whatever, you know, when it comes to your podcast, then think, you can make a really nice living off of that 100 people.

Jason:

Oh, I know. You don’t need, that’s the thing. We gotta get off this size matters concepts and the audience size of podcasting, you don’t need 30,000 downloads per episode to really monetize and build a great community. You can do it with a small number of people, so that’s good.

Brian:

There are a lot of strategies, one of the things I want to get into if we’ve got time.

Jason:

Yeah, yeah.

Brian:

I think this is where – you know, there’s all those market strategic aspect, but then to me this is where you really need to be – before you go there, before you get to that point, you need to be able to deliver this first and that is, first of all, we talked about long tail, what are you going to talk about on your podcast? Do you know your topic? Are you niched down? And is the name of your podcast is clear to your listener, so when they get on to iTunes and they see your podcasts or they’re just searching for something in the search option, are they going to find your podcast first of all.

Second of all, when they look at the name of your podcast, do they know exactly what they’re going to get just with that name and the tag line and then as soon as they start listening to it,do they sound good? Do you have good equipment? Do you present yourself well, are you one of those people that has a lot of crutch phrases, you know, um, ah, whatever that may be? Are you basically something that a listener is going to like?

Because, it’s so easy – hope many podcasts that we’ve heard, they don’t sound good, man, this guest just doesn’t seem likeable, you know what I mean? And there’s a lot of that. So, it’s one of those things where you gotta be yourself, your gotta utilize your strengths and your personality, you gotta be the best of you that you can be and by delivering yourself in a way that is you and in a way that, like, you actually care about your listener and you’re staying on topic and your notes are organized, concise, you deliver it to them, so that when the podcast is done, the listener walks away going, I got exactly what I thought I was going to get.

If you can do that, your podcast is going to grow and of course you’re building relationships and if you build relationships your podcast is going to grow, but many podcasts, you look at the name, you have no idea what you’re going to get into, so you don’t even listen, because you don’t lknow what it’s about or you look at the name and you go, oh, this is what’s going to be about and all of a sudden, the podcast is all over the place for an hour and a half and it’s rambling and we have no idea what we’re talking about and you turn it off or it just sounds bad and you can’t get past the audio quality or whatever. So, there’s so many factors like that.

It really becomes around your brand, right, everybody brand themselves. All the top podcasters are branded well. If you can make sure that your podcast is branded well and this is where some people need help, you know, that’s when you go out and do your marketing, people like what they hear, if you don’t do that in the beginning and you really actually don’t master that, then, yeah, you’re not going to get that listenership growth because people aren’t going to know what they’re getting or they aren’t going to like what they hear and that kind of thing. I think that’s so important when it comes to growing your podcast and growing your audience and then you get into the loyalty and interaction stand point, so don’t read word for word. I know some people have to right away, but try to get away from that if you can. Pretend like you’re talking face to face with a friend.

Jason:

Yeah, don’t real a script, that’s terrible.

Brian:

Involve your listeners. I mean, I know we prior to talking, we were talking about another way to engage your listeners as well. One of the things I love doing is play voice messages if I can, reading emails, shouting out to them, whatever it is, but involving them. Asking questions of my listeners, because I want them to answer things. One, because I want to know what they think, but two I want them to feel like they’ve got a voice. It’s huge and then of course responding to each listener than contacts, listening to them, doing a Facebook group or something where listeners can come together and be apart of a community where they can actually interact with each other and see each other.

So, those are just a few ways where that’s going to drive loyalty and interaction and engagement and we’ve seen that in great value, again, back with our Arrow Squad show, granted, you know, when you’re talking about a TV show that leaves you with cliff hangers, people talk, right? But even with Profitcast, I’m seeing quite a bit of interaction now because of utilizing those strategies.

Jason:

Good, good stuff. Okay, anything else you want to say, Brian as we wrap up here and I want to make sure you give out your website too. You got a great looking website, I love your site.

Brian:

Oh, thank you. Appreciate that.

Jason:

ProfitcastUniverse.com, right?

Brian:

Yep, that’s it. I’ll say a couple very quick things to wrap up and that is make sure you’re podcasting about your passion. That’s huge. There’s a lot of good things out there we can podcast about that people want, but if you love it, chances are your listeners are going to love it more.

Jason:
Good advice. That same advice applies to gift-giving, I’ve heard. If you like the gift, so will the recipient, the likelihood is.

Brian:

Absolutely and the last thing really is just to make sure exude confidence, because if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years, if you  don’t have confidence, people will just, they probably won’t follow you, but if they do, if you have that confidence, they’ll follow you. I’m going to use a really great yet horrible example is, Hitler who, was obviously a very bad leader when it came to the stuff he did, but he exude..

Jason:

You can learn some things from that guy, you know, unfortunately, but he used it the wrong way, but he had several tactics that were very workable.

Brian:

And people followed him and that’s the thing. I’m not saying use his tactics, but looking at confidence like that and then using it for good. So, with your podcast, having that confidence regardless and if you don’t, step back and get the confidence before you try to get out there and, you know, fumble.

Jason:

Absolutely, yeah, good point, good point. Well, good, Profitcastuniverse.com. Brian, thank you again so much for joining us.

Brian:

Oh man, thank you Jason, I appreciate it again. It’s always a pleasure.

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