Podcasting can be a great tool to grow your business. Justin Cooke from EmpireFlippers has used podcasting to make money in multiple different ways.

Hey guys, Ryan here from podcastfast.com. Today, I have with me Justin Cook from empireflippers.com he has run podcast for a number of years now, it must be 4 or 5 years or something like that. I’ve actually followed them that entire time and listened to all their episodes.

I’ve got Justin on today because they’ve actually made money or they’ve tried to make money in multiple different ways through their podcast and they don’t do advertising on their podcast, which I’m a massive fan of. Basically, I wanted to get Justin on and go through the different ways that they’ve made money and how they see podcast as a trust-builder and, I guess, a customer-builder.

Ryan: Hey, Justin. Thanks for coming on today.

Justin: Thanks for having me on, Ryan. I appreciate it, buddy.

Ryan: Okay, so, you guys started your podcast, basically, it seems like, for the fun of it. Is that right? You started AdSense Flippers because you were making these sites but you had no intentions to actually make money from the podcast.

Justin: Yeah. So, we and a couple of friends, they’re on The Tropical MBA podcast and we met up with them in the Philippines. They were having a small retreat and we said, “Oh, let’s go meet up with these guys, see what they’re all about.” we went up there and talked to them. Joe and I were kind of just kind of relaying our story and kind of how we got started and everything and these guys are like, “Dude, you need to start a podcast!” and we were like, “You know, we don’t do podcast. I don’t even listen to podcast.”

So he started telling us kind of like about their podcast and what they’d done and we thought, “Oh, that’d be kind of fun. Let’s try it out.” So we started a podcast just to try it out, just to see what we thought. At first, we went back and listened to some podcast so we had an idea on what we liked and didn’t like. And then, we got on the mike and just started talking. And we thought it was fun. It was kind of interesting and we started to get some traction.

We already had a blog that had quite a bit of traffic. So, it was easier for us to get a little bit of traction with the podcast by just kind of using our current blog audience and kind of promoting it and getting them over to the show.

Ryan: For those of you who don’t know, Justin used to run AdSense Flippers. He was creating niche websites and was making money through advertising, like Google AdSense on those. The website and the podcast was all about how do you setup these sites? How do you create that?

Was there any motivation behind it or any intention to make money from the beginning with the website or with the podcast? Or was it really just kind of an outworking of your passion and just wanted to get it on the internet?

Justin: With the blog and the podcast, our real goal was outreach. It was to get traction, like marketing traction, get people paying attention. We know that attention is valuable on the internet. So, whether it’s through a blog or a podcast, we want people that are checking it out; that are following along. We know that’s valuable.

So, it wasn’t started as a revenue generator. That was never really the plan – to make the podcast or have the podcast make us money directly through advertising. It was just to get our message out there. Part of our inspiration along the way was Smart Passive Income’s idea of being everywhere.

So, you want to be where your customers are. If they’re listening to podcast, be on podcast. If they read blogs, be on the blogs. If they’re in forums, be in the forums with them.