Podcast Monetization Secrets

So many people in the podcast world will tell you that you have to have XX number of downloads before you can even think about monetizing your podcast.

I'm here to tell you that if you take the right steps, you can monetize your podcast with a much smaller audience than you could ever imagine.

Today, I'm taking you behind the scenes to share with you the results from my first live event.

I purposely held this event before I was ready. I knew everything would not be perfect.

I wanted my audience for this challenge to be small because I knew it would be less intimidating for me.

I had spent months working on live events for other people and I knew exactly what I had to do.

My months of preparation were well spent, because I was so out of my comfort zone for my challenge.

I followed the process and in the end, I made an irresistible offer to my ideal customers.

My goal for 2022 is to help 100 podcasts get monetized with significant and consistent revenue.

So now, I get to serve these clients at the highest level.

My first event ended with just over $40K in revenue that will come into my business in the next 90 days.

I'd say that was a success.

In this episode, I tell you what lessons you can learn from this.

I'm doing a challenge again in January and every month thereafter in 2022.

If you want to learn how to create high ticket offers for your audience, you can sign up for the challenge:

https://teampodcast.com/challenge

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.

It seems like almost every podcaster that I come in contact with…when we talk about monetizing it specifically through their own products and services, I start to get a glazed over look because they have no idea what to start with. 

So, today I'm going to show you how the level of support you can provide your people to get results for them is going to be a whole lot better if you do something, besides just creating a course for them. 

It seems like the first thing whenever I talk to people about actually creating their own products and services, is that people go right to courses and they are like, “well, I was thinking about creating a course for this, that and the other, I was thinking about creating a course for this, I could do another course for that. And I could do all these courses”.

The problem with a course…it's not that the information is the problem - you need the information. 

But many times the problem with a course is that people are so used to taking courses, getting free courses, buying courses, whatever it is, and they cannot get through them. 

Literally, the completion rate for most courses across the board is well under 10%. And the problem with that if you are someone who, as a podcaster are value based and value driven, because you're also impact motivated, right? 

You want to motivate the most people in your niche to take action and do what needs to be done to change their lives and get the results they want. 

Then what will happen is, if you only have 10% of the people that are taking your course, how are you even going to be able to judge the results that they're getting?

I mean, it's really hard for you as a course seller, and a course creator, to get testimonials of the incredible changes that people have had in their lives, if only 10% of your people finish your course. 

Courses are great courses provide great information, they provide great frameworks. But they also have a huge drawback. And this drawback is the fact that people don't make it through, and if they don't make it through the course, they don't complete the course, that is not going to change their lives, it's not going to have the desired effect that you want it to have. 

So if your people aren't meeting their goals, and getting their desired outcomes, you're not either, right? Because you're not changing the lives you set out to take right now in the online space in the digital space, where we all operate as podcasters. 

Because we are online, most of us don't have a brick and mortar podcast where people show up and we record it live. 

So we're using the online space, which means everything that we do can be digital, what happens is, we have reached a place where we are saturated with courses, we're saturated with information.

Most of it is great information. But we either don't have the motivation, the accountability, the attention span, whatever it is needed to finish the course and actually implement the things that the course taught us. 

That's the downfall of most courses. I can go through course after course, after course, after course, and if I never get a chance to implement it, my gosh, it's a waste of my time, it's a waste of my money, it's a waste of every bit of effort I put into that course. 

One of the things that I want to impress upon you today is that a lot of people are drawn to courses, because those are the kinds of things where you can create a course, and you can put it out to the world, you can even set up a sales funnel and drive traffic to a course. 

Then you can go to bed at night and you can wake up in the morning and have four Stripe notifications that you sold for courses overnight. 

That means you've reached the holy grail of passive income, right, you're selling things in your sleep. Who wouldn't love to do that?

So as creators, and as experts in our own niches, a course is very attractive to us.

So much so that we have saturated the marketplace, with course after course, after course, after course. 

You can't find a niche that doesn't have a course.

So with courses, while it has an attraction for us as a podcaster, because you can sort of create it once and sell it 100 times. 

Where we are in this marketing space is that courses alone are not enough to change lives and get the impact and the results you want. 

What we're finding and what we're seeing as being most successful is essentially building communities and programs around getting people the desired outcome that they want. 

So what happens is when you build a program, there are multiple components and whenever you're looking at building a program or what you can call it a Community, whatever you want to call it. 

When you're building one of these things, part of what you're doing as a creator, is you're evaluating what are the biggest problems that your ideal customer for that community program is.

And what can I do to put in place, maybe things like accountability, or mentoring or other things that can give that ideal customer the highest chance of achieving that desired outcome? 

And so you evaluate all these things, and then you look at it and say, what can I create, that will move them from not having this desired outcome to having this desired outcome. 

Most of the time, it is by looking at all of the problems and all of the hurdles and all of the obstacles that your ideal person is encountering that or stopping them dead in their tracks from getting to that desired outcome. 

That becomes your list of opportunities. 

And your list of opportunities, essentially, the problems that that person has become the framework for you building this program, to help them solve their problems. 

You also are going to need to build accountability into your program. 

In my experience, I pay a lot of money for two huge masterminds right now. And literally like $3,000 a month off right off the top goes into paying for these different masterminds. 

But when we have a Wednesday at noon, meeting that I'm going to every single week, suddenly, Tuesday becomes my most productive day of the week, because I have to give an account of myself and my progress on Wednesday at noon. 

And I don't know about you, but I'm really not into public humiliation. So I want to come across with the goods for those meetings. The same thing when I have an implementation call with my mastermind. 

And I know on Friday, they're going to be asking at 10am in the morning, like where are you on this and let's help you get this whatever it is implemented. If I haven't done the work ahead of time they're going to know and part of the reason I pay so much money is so that I have a high cost and a high probability of following through.

I need to have something on the line that I will lose. 

So programs are going to trump courses, right now they are going to be more powerful than courses. But here's the other part. Programs are also something because they have more than just information built into them. 

And because they have more than just the tactics and the tools built into them, they have all of the things that help you with the implementation, they have all of the things that help you with a motivation, they have all of the things that help you with the accountability, because they have all those things built in. 

Most people today would rather pay $3,000 for a program, that will get them where they want to go in a specified amount of time, that's pretty darn fast, rather than paying $300 for a course, that they may or may not ever finish. 

And even if they do finish, they may or may not ever implement. And realistically, for me, as a creator, and me as someone who wants to help people and wants to impact people, I would rather have my people in my sphere, so that I can keep my hands on them. 

Then I can get my arms around what's going on with their problems, because that helps me serve the rest of my people even better. 

So I don't want someone anonymously consuming my course, or my content or whatever, that I can't know who they are, and that I can't know what they're building and that I can't know what their struggles are. 

Because it's going to help me help them if I know that. And so the idea of just creating courses and creating courses, and then going out and trying to sell them like that sort of 1992.

When you're thinking about creating something, you need to think bigger than just a course. 

So I hope this has been helpful for you today. I've been having a great time this week, I have been doing a perfect podcast offer challenge. 

I am so excited about the people that have been in that and the clarity they've been getting and the breakthroughs they've been having and the things that they're going to be putting out into the world to hopefully help other people in their niches, get the results. 

I've got one that's starting again, another challenge, same thing and to start January 10, we're going to be doing it and hopefully, having more people get in there and understand the whole value of creating a high ticket offer so that you can serve your clients at a much higher level, get better results and get paid a whole lot better for it and and feel really good about the results you're getting to.

So if you want to sign up for that challenge, you can go to Teampodcast.com/challenge, and it will be there and you can just sign up.

It starts in January 10. And so it'll be a way to start your new year off, right, and really get your first quarter set for massive, massive results. 

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.

Monetizing your podcast isn't just a switch that you can turn on and off at the drop of a hat. There's a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes just to get you ready to earn that first podcast dollar.

There are 3 important things that you need to do in order to get monetization ready.

1) Niche down as tight as you possibly can

2) Determine the top 4 or 5 problems your niche has.

3) Come up with solutions to those top 4 or 5 problems.

I'll explain more about that in this episode.

By the way, I'm doing a free 5 day challenge to help you build your perfect podcast offer that starts on Dec. 6th. If you're serious about getting monetized, then there's no reason not to jump in there!

The Perfect Podcast Offer Free 5 Day Challenge

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.

Have you ever looked at really successful people and wondered, how are they doing it? Well, many times with a podcast, we look at other people that we think are successful, but the problem is we really don't know is success having a podcast that lasts a certain amount of episodes? Is success having a certain amount of status associated with your podcast? Is success actually making money from your podcast?

One of the things that I see over and over again, is podcasts are starting with the idea that if they just start and start putting out content, that somehow that will draw in the right people, and they can make money from it, and it can completely change their life.

And podcasting can change your life. But you've got to have a system and it's got to be set up the right way.

I've made more than more than a million dollars from podcasting. And I'm here to help you do the same thing.

I am just wanting to collapse the time it takes to get from seven figures in a business to eight figures in a business. And my goal is to help you do the same with your podcast on whatever scale you're looking to monetize.

The whole point of this podcast is to go against the conventional wisdom that says, "if you start a podcast plan on spending three years putting out content, and then after about three years, you'll finally have built enough of an audience to monetize".

I say that is complete BS! You can monetize a podcast very, very quickly.

The things that you do to set up your podcast for success will depend on how much money you make in the future.

So there's a lot of things that we can do, and we've got to know how.

One of the things that I've been really, really focused on for 2021, and for even the rest of this year, is getting people results.

The bottom line is information alone is not enough to change people's lives.

And the one thing you have to realize is that if people are going to come to you in your business, and they're going to want to give you their credit card and they're going to say take my money, please, please, please take my money.

It is because you've got to have a solution for them that solves a pressing problem, you've got to be able to get your podcast listener turned client a highly desired result in their life.

If your offer is about making something better...

If your offer is about making someone stronger...

If your offer is making someone healthier...

If your offer is an improvement offer...

You really need to be able to offer transformation.

The way you get transformation is by getting people results.

The results I'm focused on is getting people from having a podcast that is stuck in free content creation mode, to simply giving out content every single week and not getting anything in return - to taking that same effort that they're putting into the podcast and formatting it in a different way and making more offers and getting people money in exchange for the value that they're providing.

So there's a completely different way of podcasting and it doesn't take huge numbers. I've shared with you my numbers before and the 1000s of dollars that I make a month from this podcast is from a very small audience and the audience is growing every single month.

At the same time, many conventional podcast gurus want to make you feel like you don't have a right to ask for money or to make an offer if you don't have a big enough audience.

So my question becomes, what is big enough? What is big enough? Every business starts by signing their first customer, right? Every business starts by processing their first credit card.

If you are not planning on monetizing your podcast, then what you have is a very expensive hobby. Simply put, right, there's no point and you continuing to invest in a lot, and to pay a lot, and to do all these things if you don't have a plan to monetize.

But many times having the plan to monetize and saying yes, I would love to make money...yes, I hope to make money...yes, ultimately, that would be my ideal to make money - is not the same as making money from my podcast.

And there's a big gulf, there's a big, it's almost like you're standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. And on your side is free content creation mode. And on the other side is a fully monetized podcast that's bringing you increasing predictable revenue every single month.

And in order to get there, you've got the big huge gulf between those two sides of the Grand Canyon. And you can try hiking down. And you know, there are books that have been written about all the people that died on the way around the Grand Canyon, or into the Grand Canyon, or somehow hiking or whatever they're doing around the Grand Canyon.

But I can also tell you stories of podcasts that have died from making the trip trying to get to the other side, and they didn't know what they were doing.

All I'm doing is just trying to build a bridge right across the top. So it's the easiest, shortest, quickest, most accessible path to monetization.

You don't need to hike two miles down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and encounter rattlesnakes and rockslides and avalanches, and flooding rivers and all these things just to get there to potentially get to the other side and not be able to make it up the hill.

So we're just trying to get you there as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, information is not enough for me to tell you how to do it, I've got to show you, I've got to help you implement. And I've got to help lay out your path to monetization.

I have a very tried and true method for this that people all over the world use to monetize businesses, month after month and year after a year and grow to multiple seven, eight, whatever 10 figure businesses where they are getting multi million dollar, you know, multi million dollar even months sometimes. That's what people do with this method.

It's not my method, I didn't come up with an initially. I've just adapted it for podcasters, and for where you are.

So one of the things that we have going on starting next week, December 6, we have the Perfect Podcast Offer Challenge that is coming out - it is a five day free challenge.

It is absolutely for you, if you've just made a few dollars from your podcast, if you've not figured out how to make your first dollar yet or if you have done a few things, but nothing's really worked or you've gotten discouraged or whatever.

The good news is - this is the challenge for you. What we'll do in those five days is -we will show you each day, add another layer on how you can create the perfect podcast offer for your audience.

And then what you can do to get your podcast listeners to move towards you. Because in a lot of ways, you know the problems your audience already has, you know the problems you need to solve for them. And we've just got to get a path laid out so that you know exactly what levers you're pulling; exactly what products you're selling.

This offer is the process of us building essentially your first product that you're going to sell to your podcast audience. And so the challenge starts December 6 that runs all the way through December 10. We meet every single day for an hour.

There is a VIP access where you can get some additional things and there's additional hours of coaching in there. But let me just tell you, I'm so excited. It's going to be one of the most fun things I've ever done in my business because I I do a lot of coaching in my regular business in the course of a month. And so some of my favorite times is actually meeting one on one with my podcast coaching clients that are so excited about what they're doing. And I get to help them customize and help them build their plans and their products and their roadmap to monetization. And so one of the things that you're going to be able to do from this challenge is to get Get with me. And we're going to be able to do that together in just a very, very short amount of time. So if you need the boost, and some of you are going to be able to take the challenge, and honestly have your product out there and launched before January 1 2022, and then you have an entire year to build on it and grow on it and scale it. And that's what we want you to do. So go to teampodcast.com/chellenge, that's all you've got to do. It's, it'll be right there, you can sign up for the challenge.

Join the Perfect Podcast Offer Challenge starting Dec. 6th here.

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.

Here's another episode that may help you!

As crazy as it seems, 2022 is almost here. Let me ask you a question. This time last year, did you think that 2021 would be the year you would monetize your podcast? Are you disappointed with your progress with your podcast this year?

In order to make progress, I have had to set myself up for success.

While I am an independent learner, I’ve realized that I can either go way too far down the rabbit hole of independent learning, or I can get bored with it and never really take action or get results.

I make the most progress when I have instruction, then implementation, and accountability.

Left to my own devices, I’ll overcomplicate things. I’ll let my mental barriers that aren’t real completely derail my progress.

Have you ever set out to accomplish something and at every turn, you found there was another barrier.

Maybe you wanted to film a video. You sit down at your desk, you get out your phone and get ready to record.

Then you realize when you start recording that more of the background is visible than you want.

So now, you clean the house and get the scene right.

Then you record again, and you realize that the lighting is terrible.

So, you set off trying to find the best, but cheapest ring lights for video.

Then 2 days later when you Amazon order some in, you set up your ring light and start recording again.

Now, the light has made every gray hair stand out, and you aren’t going on camera like that. So, you make an appointment with your salon to get that taken care of.

Days later, you return to record your video, and as soon as you get started, your lawn service shows up and there’s so much noise that you’ll never be able to record.

You put it off again, and try to record the next day.

By this time, you’ve read what you wrote for a script and it doesn’t make as much sense to you, so you stop and rework the script.

The next day, you sit down to record again, but now that you are reading the script, it looks weird on video because your eyes are moving like you are reading and you are looking at the words you are reading, not the camera.

So, clearly you need a teleprompter. So you’re not sure how much that costs, so you start researching some options online and eventually purchase a teleprompter.

It comes a few days later, but you don’t really have time to figure out how to use it.

So, you set it aside, and the pattern continues and you never get your video made.

You see, we have a tendency to overcomplicate things.

The reality is that simplicity is always better - for you and for your audience.

I was in an online training session the other day and the instructor said a phrase that stuck with me:

Simplicity sells, and complexity fails.

It’s true.

Even when you are trying to determine WHAT you want to sell to your audience.

There is literally no shortage of things you could create to sell to your audience. 

The sky is the limit and our minds run wild.

We think of all the possibilities that exist.

We get carried away with making something big...and COMPLEX.

After all, we’ve got to WOW our audience, or else they won’t buy it, right?

The reality is that we can come up with one simple premise and one big idea that will move the needle for our audiences, and create a product or a program around that.

And launching that one simple program that you get people into will be so much more valuable to you because it was simple enough to actually launch, rather than you spending months of time planning for a BIG program that you can’t even get your arms around to bring to life.

We let comparison cause us to overcomplicate things.

In reality, some of us are so afraid of launching that we do everything right up to that point and never really put it out there.

We walk away and start something else and drive that project all the way up to launch and then walk it back and distract ourselves with something else.

Am I describing anyone else besides myself? I mean come on somebody!

There are people right now who will pay you to help you solve a problem in their lives, but you haven’t figured out how to offer it.

You haven’t figured out how to deliver it.

You haven’t figured out the process to complete the entire sales cycle so you can earn money from your podcast.

I am tired of you spinning out when it comes to monetizing your podcast.

I don’t need you to understand the entire process from start to finish.

I don’t need you to be able to answer every question about the ways you are going to monetize.

I just want you to get one win really quickly that will lead you one step closer to monetization.

Then all you have to do is take the next step right in front of you.

5 day Challenge to Create the Perfect Podcast Offer

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.

I think most podcasters have been sold a bill of goods whenever it comes to their podcast. They think that just by creating a podcast once a week, and being consistent over the next however many months, they are going to be able to monetize it and make big money, just from their podcast. And in my experience, that is a lie. 

Today, I'm going to give you a little bit of a dose of reality and sort of pull the curtains back, so to speak, on some of the I don't want to say the myths, but some of the lies that people have been fed in order to start a podcast.

I’m just going to call out some of that today, and then talk about what it really takes to monetize your podcast and have significant income coming in through that channel. 

Over the last 3 years, my mission has become to get as many podcasts monetized as possible. 

Now, that is not an easy task, partly because many podcasters are not “there yet”. 

With monetization, it's not about their expertise level, it's not about their skill set. It's not about the quality of their show, it is about the mental piece that they have not been able to come to terms with. 

To put it bluntly, they're afraid to monetize their podcasts, they're scared that if they try to do something, to move their listeners to take action in such a way that they will give them money, open up their wallet, give them their credit card, that somehow they will end up offending someone.

They will end up losing a listener - and my goodness, why do we not want to lose listeners that will never be customers anyway? 

So I'm here today to talk to you about what I think is just a bill of goods that many people have been sold with podcasting. 

Many people come into podcasting, feeling like the only way to monetize a podcast is through sponsors. 

And they start asking questions like, “at what point do I have enough downloads that I can start pitching sponsors?”

If I can pitch sponsors, and I can bring in all this money from my podcast, then all I have to do is create content. And the reality is, for those of you that haven't monetized their sponsorships, it is a hard row to hoe - that's an old southern saying, and if you've ever had to work in a garden, and hoe a garden row, you know what a tough road to hoe is. 

So it is very difficult number one, to garner enough downloads to even have companies be interested in your platform. And then the flip side of that coin is, if you have people interested in your platform, they are not generally willing to pay what you feel like access to your platform is worth. 

How about that? 

Once you get there, you find out the grass is not all that green on the other side of sponsorships. 

You know, the best thing I can think of to compare it to and back in the days I spent, you know, 20 something years working in other people's businesses before I started my own. And I can remember, every time I would start a new job, there's this euphoria. 

There's this honeymoon phase, that you just think this is the job I have been waiting for all my life. 

I am so thankful for this job. I am going to love getting up and coming to work and doing this. I can see myself doing this, like this is going to be my last job until I retire. And then very quickly, within generally three weeks to a month the facade starts to fade and some cracks begin to appear. And you find out there's this one coworker that's just living to make your life miserable. And there's this one manager that is just difficult to work with. And then things happen within the company and you begin to realize that you don't really mean as much to the company as the company means to you.

And before you know it the job that you thought was awesome and perfect, and that you finally felt a sense of relief about has turned into the same thing that you have been running from from every other job that you've had. 

And that is kind of what happens with sponsorships. 

People push, try to get downloads, try to grow their audience, try to do all these things. They spend hours building a media kit and they try to make themselves look attractive to sponsors that have the same target audience that they do. 

They spend hours reaching out and the minute they get that little glimmer of hope enough of a response that makes them think maybe this is it, maybe I'm finally landing the sponsorship. 

Then they come back around to find that the sponsor is only going to pay them less than $100 per ad. 

And you think well, how many ads can I have each month? How many ads can I have per episode. 

If I could get one of those to do $100 an episode, then maybe I could get more than one sponsor to do $100 an episode. And you begin to do the math. And you begin to realize that you need $5000, $6000, whatever your number is, every single month in order for your podcast, to be worthwhile to be sustainable, to actually bring value back to your life. 

And once you do the math, you realize, that means I need 50 ad spots that I can get buyers for every single month. And maybe you've gotten one. 

And they're willing to do one ad on each show each week. 

Okay, so now you've got four ads out of that 50 that are sold, where are you going to find the other 46?

Your time. And your effort and your energy that you're putting into your podcast are worth way more than that.

I'm not saying this podcasting route is not an easy route to riches. 

Because here's the thing about making money with your podcast - very few people get to the point where they are completely monetizing through sponsorships. And if they are, and they're able to make decent money, let me tell you the few things that they have in common, and most of them are approaching companies and getting ads themselves. 

To be honest, most podcasters are not experts at selling. And I really resonate with this because I will say I am not an expert at selling, what I can be an expert in is really coming from a place of value. 

if all you want to do is interview people, and all you want to do is put out one episode a month, and then you want to be able to walk away and you don't want anyone to bother you in between those episodes. And you don't want to make yourself available at all for anything else. Then please walk away from podcasting because ultimately you're going to pod fade anyway. 

I can just save you 1000s of dollars by having you go ahead and stop now 1000s of dollars and or hundreds of hours of your time by having you stop now before you go down the road any further. 

It's going to take a lot more effort on your part to get it monetized. Unless you are willing to build a community around what you're doing with your podcast, and the people that are your ideal customers and ideal listeners from your podcast, then you will end up failing.

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.

So many times when you start your podcast, you really have no idea what to expect. And the only way you can gauge your success is by what you've seen on Facebook groups, or what you're hearing from other podcasters.

And you think, "Wow, that's a huge amount of success. If I only have a fraction of that, I'll be doing awesome."

What I see very often is that people have a skewed view of reality of being a podcaster.

Today, I want to give you a little bit of a reality check. It's tough love, but you're going to need it because it will help you not feel quite so bad about yourself whenever you think things might be going wrong.

One of the things that I find a big letdown whenever podcasters, you know, they go through all the hype of starting a podcast, and they launched the podcast, and not many people listen, and they don't really know what to expect.

And they're like, was this good? Or is this bad?

And I've literally had people launch three episodes and never come back to podcasting. And it's like, what were they expecting? Did they think like, automatically, they were gonna get 10,000 people downloading their show overnight for no apparent reason?

Many podcasters don't realize it is a long slog for a lot of people. What I want to tell you today is just a reality check to make sure that you don't give up on something too soon.

But at the same time, this has no bearing on whether you can earn money or not with your podcast.

You need to know these things, so if anything, you can then shortcut success, right? So it's a way to tell you what averages are and what I'm seeing with clients. And over the years, I've worked with almost close to 300 podcasts, and there is a lot of commonalities.

One of the things that people always struggle with is how many downloads is normal? Like, is 100 good? Is 100 bad? I have this many downloads, Christy. Is it good?

So for most people, most podcasters, the first barrier is getting to that 1000 download/month mark. When you get to 1000 downloads a month, then from 1000 to 5000 will come much quicker often, then the from zero to 1000 a month.

The median number of podcast downloads in a month is something like 127. Think about that, when you see people talking about getting 20, 30,40, 100,000 or 150,000 downloads in a month, they are truly in the upper 1% of podcasters.

So to be realistic, understand that that zero to 1000 downloads will be your first milestone. So the quicker you can hit 1000 downloads in a single month. Then the quicker you can keep pushing on to that 5000 And then that 10,000 download mark a month. That's what you want to be focused on.

Downloads alone don't mean anything. I've told you stories of podcasters that I've worked with, and they had 700 downloads in a month, and then they kept working, they eventually had 7000. Then they had more than 10,000 downloads, and they still weren't making any money. So it's not downloads alone. They don't mean anything alone in a vacuum, other than it's a vanity metric that people are listening.

I had a podcast launch one time, and this podcaster wanted me to put an opt in on their homepage on their website. I told them that we just need a lead magnet. We were going put this opt in on their homepage. They didn't get us the lead magnet in time, and there were some technical issues behind the scenes.

So their podcast launched and it was literally like three days after their podcast launched, that their opt in was up and ready to go. I can remember getting sort of a hostile email from this client saying they wonder how many opt ins they missed out on from the launch of their podcast, because the opt in wasn't ready until three days after they launched. And granted, if they had gotten us everything on time, and there weren't problems on their back end, we could have had it all set up.

I had to chuckle to myself, because the idea that you as a podcaster will come out with a podcast episode and number one will have a juicy enough anything lead magnet to get someone listening to your podcast and right away to go to your website, to download something that you have or just opt in for something is just really unheard of.

It can literally take months for the average listener to begin going to your website to opt in to something. So you could literally have an opt in up for an entire year, and unless you are doing some special offers, and you are really selling it hard, I would say an average podcaster may get 100 opt ins a year. Does that surprise you?

Think about it, podcasts are one of the things that you can do while you're multitasking. You can be cooking dinner, you can be mowing grass, you can be at the gym, you can be babysitting, you can do all kinds of things, while you're listening to a podcast. You can be in the car, and it's not always convenient for somebody to go to your website.

By that same token, people many times are on their smartphone while they're listening to a podcast, and many of them are not going to go from their podcast app, toggle over to their web browser, and remember a URL that you gave them to go and put in an opt in to your lead magnet.

But what you have to realize is in true measure of statistics, and what your success really is as a podcaster is more to do with how many opt ins you have for your email list versus how many downloads you have.

Both tell you something, but downloads are definitely a vanity metric, but opt ins are for real.

Opt ins are people wanting your content. What you have to realize is if you want listeners to go to your website and do something, opt in to something, download something, whatever it is, you have got to give them a very, very juicy reason to go to your website.

You've got to give your podcast listeners something that is highly, highly desired and it's highly valued. Otherwise, they're not going to be motivated enough to act. It's not worth it to them.

What happens many times is podcasters will create one lead magnet, and it's like the 10 ways to do something. And they use the same lead magnet constantly, and they never get anyone to opt in to it, but they never change the opt in.

Having only one lead magnet that you promote for every podcast episode would be the equivalent of me going out fishing and having one rod and one type of bait, and only going to one spot.

If you ever come fishing with me, there's going to be 18 rods on the boat. There's going to be six different types of bait. There's going to be artificial jigs, there's there's going to be skirted lures, there's going to be all kinds of bait - rigged ballyhoo -I mean it's just gonna be crazy.

We have a smorgasbord out there. You know why? Because my goal when I go fishing is to come back with the fish box full and if I go out with one type of rod or one rod and one type of bait, I might not run into anything that's interested in that that day.

But if I take all my equipment, and I have 18 rods and some of them are trolling rods and some of them are jigging rods and some of them are reef fishing rods, those are also each going to have a special kind of bait that I'm going to use.

If I'm going out fishing, and if you're going out on your podcast, and you want to get results, you want to come back with your fish box full, you've got to be prepared.

If one type of bait isn't working, I will switch to another type. And if the spot where I am, isn't working, I'll move to another spot. It just makes sense. It's logical, right?

So if you put out a lead magnet, and you make a legitimate effort to test it, and see if it's highly desired, and it doesn't get any opt ins, then think about it, you probably need to change what you're doing.

I'm gonna give you a quick shortcut here, if you have a lead magnet, and it's highly desirable, why not take $20 - a nice crispy $20 Bill - and head on over to your Facebook business manager and set up an ad sequence where you're running ads targeted to your ideal person for the niche you're in with that lead magnet as a free download.

So there's nothing they have to pay for, you're just going to spend $20, to go out there on Facebook and see if people are interested in this. If you spend $20, $30, $40, whatever it is, and you get people that click through and don't download your free thing, then your free thing isn't right.

If your ideal audience don't even want it for free, then you've learned a lesson, so go try something different. And keep doing that until you get one that people are opting into.

This why people say give away more value than you feel like you should for free. It takes that in this day and age to get people to move to get people to get to your website to get people to opt in to what you're doing.

I see this happen very often with many podcast hosts - when they start out, they go out and they sign up as an affiliate for Audible or Amazon. They think the main goal for monetization to start out with is to monetize through affiliates.

It's very likely that most podcasters will never get any conversions from these affiliate partnerships. You have to be very careful, or choosy with what affiliates you choose.

I recommend my clients become Amazon affiliates, because Amazon is a little bit different, it's not going to make you a lot of money immediately. With Amazon, you're building out links over time. It's sort of like SEO, where you're building a web of affiliate links, page by page and post by post on your website.

If you don't do it, two years from now, you're going to have 350 posts on your website that have zero affiliate links and have the ability to bring you in $0 a month because they're not affiliated with Amazon.

But if you start now and you become an Amazon affiliate, you know, you might get 86 cents this month of Amazon commission, and 86 cents isn't that much but you're just starting out. So maybe you know six months from now you get $1.87 affiliate commission, and then you keep building and you keep doing it you keep doing it and you keep linking up books and things that are on Amazon that are talked about in your podcast, and eventually, you might get to a point where you're making $10 or $15, or $20.

If you do a post about your morning ritual or what you do during the day and you link up all the products that you use and your Amazon account, then you're putting out blog posts that promote Amazon affiliate links, you might have a big month, especially around Christmas, where you earn $70 or $80.

Now, no one is going to live full time off their Amazon affiliate commission, especially after Amazon cut affiliate commission on during pandemic. It's a small amount that can build over time. But what it can be is truly passive income.

I'm not doing anything every week to get Amazon affiliate commission. But I have 1000s of links out there on my website that I have put out there with each podcast, we link up our you know, books and anything else that we do, I've got them on post all around on different websites that I have, where the links are there.

The reason I take the time to use Amazon affiliate links is because at some point in time, those pages are probably going to get traffic. And if I'm sending traffic to Amazon, I want to get credit for it. It's not going to be something you can live off of, you may in a couple of years, get to the point where you can kind of count on your podcast hosting fees to be paid for. Realistically, but it'll take you a while earn any significant commissions from Amazon.

So, understand what you're looking at if you really want affiliate income. You really want to find affiliates that are going to work for your audience. Figure out the products that you and your audience use, and then make it a point to pitch them and sell them on every podcast episode.

In my regular business, my Team Podcast business, every single month, I'm setting up new podcasts, I'm launching new podcasts for clients. So it makes sense for me to be an affiliate of the podcast hosting companies that my clients depend on me to recommend to them.

Now, I don't recommend clients to a podcast hosting service because I'm and affiliate - I recommend them to the podcast hosting service that I use, and the hosts that I love and the hosts that I love working with. And because of my relationship with them, I went ahead and became an affiliate. But even then, I had two podcast hosting companies that I recommended based on, what the client needed. And with one of them, I get paid 50% of the first month's billing one time. So I might make $10 for an affiliate referral. And they pay out quarterly, and I would get $40, $50, $60 in affiliate commission.

At the same time, I began using a new hosting company for my podcast for this podcast that you're listening to, and I love it. I love what they're doing. I love the innovation that they're doing. They keep adding new features all the time, they let you have multiple podcasts without charging you a separate fee, which I had, four accounts set up with my other podcast host because I was having to pay a monthly fee for each one.

So again, using them, and I love them. And when I found out that their affiliate program pays 25% recurring commission for the life of my referrals, obviously, it makes sense for me to refer someone to one podcast host over another. So I want you to look for affiliates that give you recurring commission. Everything that I am an affiliate for all fall into what a podcaster would need - things like Squadcast, or Riverside or using Amazon affiliates for the microphones that I recommend and the audio interfaces and the headphones and things like that, that people are always asking me about. Why would I not link those up with my Amazon link? If people are asking me what mic do you recommend, I'm selling that mic and tell him to go to Amazon and get it. Why should I not get commission for that?

If I'm having to tell people where to go to record their podcast, and sharing my tools that we use for Click Funnels and Surfer SEO these are products that I use, I love and they helped my business; they helped me grow. Why would I not want other people to use them as well? And if I'm recommending them, why would I not be an affiliate for them?

When I build an affiliate relationship, I'm going to be looking for companies that have a monthly recurring commission. I don't want just a one time payout.

I wanted to make my company, Team Podcast's affiliate program the same type of recurring model that I want you to have - monthly recurring commission. If you refer someone to me, I'm going to give you 10% of the lifetime billing of every single month of service of that customer that you sent me.

I want to be the good affiliate that you could recommend. But you have to be realistic about the amount of money you can make and it's never wrong to try to set yourself up to have multiple streams of income from your podcast.

You want to have multiple streams of income, but understand putting all your faith in affiliate marketing, unless you are really good and have a system for affiliate marketing, which you could but the average podcaster doesn't - you don't have an email list, you don't have, a built in audience base to sell affiliate products to, so you're trying to sell them to strangers that are listening to your podcast episodes for the content, and not really looking for the tools or other things that you're recommending.

You want things like affiliate marketing and affiliate products to be part of your revenue portfolio. I'm like 10 years into this game of being in business for myself, and I would say, five to six years into affiliate marketing. And every year, I can probably track back, maybe around $10,000 of total revenue from affiliates.

Now, here's the thing, I'm not doing a lot. It's all stuff that I'm doing incidentally; I'm not building marketing campaigns. I could do a lot more for affiliate marketing, but I am not pushing it as my main source of income, because it's not going to be that for me. But at the same time, I don't want to leave $10,000 on the table every year? It doesn't make sense to do that.

You should take advantage of every single opportunity if there is something that you can be an affiliate for - whether it's a joint venture that you can partner with somebody and pitch it to your podcast or whatever - I'm all for doing that.

Pat Flynn was great at affiliate marketing when he first started. Whenever John Lee Dumas started his podcast, and that was back in the time whenever Pat Flynn hadn't really taken on podcasting to the fullest extent. So Pat might put out one podcast a month. But he was the original one that started publishing income reports, you would see his income reports and he was making, $30,000 a month, and $40,000 a month. It was literally all from affiliate income.

Pat Flynn made a ton of money from affiliate marketing . He was thrilled with that until he saw John Lee Dumas come along. John started doing sponsorships for his podcast, and then he started doing Podcasters Paradise. And he started creating courses and all these different things. And Pat realized his affiliate income is only scratching the surface of what he could be making, so he changed his model and began creating courses and other programs and communities and things like that.

it might take you six months or a year to get your first commission from an affiliate, and you might even find that your affiliates have what do you call it payout thresholds. If an affiliate has a payout threshold of $250, unless your earning total $250, that commission doesn't get paid out to you. So it's gonna sit there until you push it over the $250 threshold and then they pay out.

So understand that it's part of it. It needs to be something about...

What are the best ways to promote a podcast? This is a question every podcaster has asked at least once and a problem that you come back to again and again after trying and failing with different promotional strategies.

Today, I'm going to flip podcast promotion on its head and show you how you are trying way too hard. 

In podcasting, we have a lot of things backwards and this idea of podcast promotion is one that we completely mess up on an ongoing basis.

You see, once you have your own show the average podcaster goes on the hunt looking for someone to interview on their podcast. Then the podcast host schedules an interview and sends the guest their list of questions. Then the day of the interview rolls around and you connect with your podcast guests, ask your questions and then have what you feel like is an awesome discussion with the guest and you feel like you've made a great podcast.

Eventually, the podcast gets published to your own audience, and then you go on a hunt across the internet looking for more podcast listeners and places to promote this interview to. You feel like if you can just get the interview in front of enough people, that surely some of them will be interested in the topic and listen to the show. Then your will have a successful podcast.

Have you ever been out an about in your daily life of running errands and taking care of your household, and have a mundane task like pumping gas at the gas station turn into a weird encounter when a sketchy character walks up to you while you are pumping gas, and they have a gold chain or a watch or something else that they perceive as valuable, and the want to unload it to you because they need the money?

Well, this is kind of how the rest of the internet views your efforts to promote your podcast on your social channels. Your target audience isn't looking for or wanting your content, but yet you show up in the least likely of places, trying to shove your podcast content in the face of potential listeners, and promising them they will love it if they just listen to it.

Here's what you have to realize about the internet. Everyday there are thousands of people online who are searching for specific types of content and they would love to come across some of the topics you talk about in your podcast.

Traffic on the internet already exists. There are a few things you need to know to capture this existing traffic.

It isn't your job to create traffic to your podcast episodes. Podcast directories already get all the traffic you could ever need. It's like pulling teeth to get people who are uninterested in your podcast topic to become new listeners based on your promotional efforts with social media posts.

You will continue to fall flat on your face if you think that sort of podcast marketing and promotion will get you new listeners.

It's time consuming to cross promote your episode links on all the social media channels where you could possibly find podcast listeners.

It won't and it will only leave you frustrated and exhausted to go about podcast discovery this way.

A better way to create content is to realize that there is already tons of traffic for your niche that is on the internet everyday. You just have to get your podcast in front of that traffic and it's not always to promote a podcast with spammy links.

You just have to focus on podcast SEO instead of social media ads or other podcast growth methods.

What is that traffic looking for?

There are SEO tools that can give you this information.

This information can become a goldmine for you and it will increase your current listeners.

If you start creating content by looking for what a majority of the people in your niche are searching for each and everyday, then your job becomes to create content that will be found by them when they are searching in the podcast apps.

Again, you aren't trying to create traffic, you are just wanting to jump in front of as much existing traffic in your niche of the podcasting community as possible.

This relieves you of the burden of having to spam your podcast links all over social media platforms to people who aren't the least bit interested in your podcast content and may not even be podcast listeners in the first place.

So, the framework I want to show you is:

1) Use a trustworthy SEO (search engine optimization) tool to determine what podcast listeners in your podcast niche are searching for. (If they are looking for you, then you don't have do podcast promotion, right?)

2) Rank the top things your podcast audience is searching for based on the number of monthly searches.

3) Create a podcast episode about that topic and use the exact search phrase as the title of your new episode.

4) Rinse and repeat every time you create a new episode published to your RSS feed and podcast website.

The best tools for keyword research for your podcasts are:

- Free - ubersuggest.com for a couple of free searches per day.

- Cheap - paid chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere

- Best - SurferSEO - I use and love this tool so much that I am an affiliate for it. Surfer gives you every tool you need to do keyword research for your podcast, content planning for each podcast episode, do an SEO audit of your podcast website, and also write your podcast content that can rank on Google.

It's the easiest SEO tool I have ever used, and I have used a bunch of them. I have paid for SEM Rush previously, and this is hands down a much better tool. Surfer is also constantly adding new features to the tool, so it just gets better and better over time.

To help you get a better feel for what Surfer can do for you, I have created a video on my youtube channel that I have linked in the show notes, and I've also shared that video with my private Facebook group called, Podcast Monetization Secrets.

If you want the special benefits of signing up through my affiliate link, just go to TeamPodcast.com/surfer.

I can use the Content Planner in Surfer and find out all of the keywords and keyword phrases that my podcast audience is looking for. The results tell me how many online searches there are just in the US each month for those keywords.

So, I could easily take the top searched keywords and phrases and make those my next several podcast episodes.

By doing this process, all you are doing is identifying WHAT solutions your podcast listening audience is searching for. Then, using the real data, you are playing the odds of SEO, you are creating content that is highly searched for, in the hopes that you can siphon off some of that existing internet traffic for your podcasts.

Then, I can use the Surfer content editor to create SEO optimized content for my podcast website that will have a high statistical probability of ranking on Google. 

I can do this because Surfer gives me all of the keywords to use in the correct saturation levels to outrank other podcasters and the existing ranking Google content.

It will tell me how many H1 headings I need to use. It will tell me how many paragraphs I need to have in my podcast content. It will also tell me how many images I need to have in the other podcasts to outrank exiting ranked pages.

Armed with all of this, I can create the first episode and post it to my website.

THEN, I can grab the url for the blog post and put it into Surfer to do an audit on that page for the exact keywords I am trying to rank for. This keyword phrase then becomes my podcast title.

If you follow this process, you will get more organic traffic to your podcast, from all channels - Google podcasts, Apple Podcasts, etc.

The best part is, that traffic won't be disinterested people on social media that really don't care what you are talking about. They will be people who are searching a podcast directory for your solutions.

The traffic you will get will be the people who are actively searching for the type of content you are providing in your podcast feed. Other podcasts can randomly pick topics and hit or miss with the traffic game.

Then they are left to open the rest of their week on podcast promotion.

Now, which type of podcast traffic would you rather have finding your podcast?

The traffic for which you have had to do a massive pattern interrupt to get their attention on social media because the weren't already looking for your solutions?

Or the person who is desperately searching Apple Podcasts for solutions to the problems you can solve and they stumble upon your podcast content because - hello SEO - and they immediately feel grateful that they have discovered your show and they binge listen to all of your podcasts and become podcast subscribers?

I know which one will ultimately make a better customer and that should be the one you want coming into your funnel and becoming raving fans of your own podcast.

If you do this, you will be doing almost the exact opposite of what other podcasters in your niche are doing.

It will give you an unfair advantage over your competitor's podcast promotion efforts and you will never again have to promote a podcast into every Facebook group you can find.

You'll also never again have to run Facebook ads just to try to find your target audience who listen to podcasts. Better yet, your target audience will find you!

So again, the framework is:

1) Use a trustworthy SEO tool to determine what people in your niche are searching for. I recommend Surfer SEO.

2) Rank the top things your podcast audience is searching for based on the number of monthly searches.

3) Create a podcast episode about that topic and use the exact search phrase as the title of your podcast episode.

Again, If you want the special benefits of signing up through my affiliate link, just go to TeamPodcast.com/surfer.

Let's face it...

Apple Podcasts will never promote a podcast for you. They will let you drive podcast traffic to their platform all day long without any reward.

Unless you want to spend 80% of your time doing podcast promotion and only 20% of your time creating content, then you should follow this framework to create highly desirable podcast content.

Some podcast gurus will tell you that the 80/20 rule for content creation vs. promotion makes sense, but what they fail to realize is that you are an expert in your niche and creating content is your passion.

You didn't set out to become a marketer with a special expertise in podcast promotion.

Granted, podcast promotion will always go hand in hand with podcast content creation, but it doesn't have to be nearly as painful.

By now you are aware that Google is the largest search engine.

The second largest search engine is YouTube.

The third biggest search engine is Apple Podcasts.

If you only play in the podcast audio space, you have #1 and #2 search engines covered.

It only makes sense that you would take advantage of the 2nd largest search engine by getting your content on YouTube as well.

Plus, since Google now owns YouTube, guess what types of content Google pushes higher in the rankings - podcasts or YouTube video?

You guessed it - video for the win!

When you put out content week after week, it only makes sense that you would use an SEO tool like Surfer SEO to help set you up for success.

If you put all the effort into your podcast and miss the most important piece of discoverability, it is no wonder that you will struggle to find listeners and eventually get frustrated and walk away from your podcast.

You don't want to ignore these SEO tactics and be left spending all your money on Facebook ads to try to find your audience.

If you follow these SEO tactics from your first episode to your next episode, then you are building an SEO traffic powerhouse over time.

My Mother always said, "Anything that is worth doing is worth doing right!". And SEO is exactly that - worth doing right.

From podcast episode titles, to formatting your content, to keyword saturation, it ALL matters!

Paying attention to all of these things will make your podcast marketing efforts pay off in a big way. In fact, your podcast marketing could be turned into SEO tactics and you'd probably have just as big of an impact on your audience growth.

Don't just promote your podcast on social media. Sure, you'll need to be on social media for your podcast launch to try and build buzz and build a following.

Then after your podcast launch, you can let your social media followers know that you release episodes each week.

Wouldn't it be a relief if you didn't feel like you had to be on ALL the social media channels ALL the time?

After all, social media can be as exhausting as it is toxic.

Podcast marketing isn't just about social media though. In fact, there are so many better ways to promote your podcast. I've literally seen podcast producers who only know to tell clients to promote on social media.

If social media is the main way you promote your podcast, then it is no wonder you are exhausted, overwhelmed, tired and cranky.

Use SEO to your advantage and unburden yourself fo the obligation to be all over social media. Social media is a noisy place to be and your audience will get more if they can find you when they are searching for you!Again, If you want the special benefits of signing up through my affiliate link, just go to TeamPodcast.com/surfer.

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.

I see a lot of sales pitches and read a ton of marketing messages in my line of work and I feel like so often there is one main reason that our offers are not converting. So, it doesn’t matter whether your offer is for a free lead magnet or a paid product, if you fix this one issue then you will be so much more successful. I’ll tell you what that is, right after this.

So, in one of my masterminds recently, we’ve been discussing our offers. People have been throwing their offers and offer ideas out to the group for feedback, and very often it seems like the offer is sort of a word salad.

I get that it’s sometimes hard to articulate what you do and how you help people. It’s something I hear often with my clients. Many times they have had a business going for several years and it’s been ok, but they still talk in really generic terms about how they help people.

The more I immerse myself in marketing, marketing language, marketing copy, and surround myself with world class marketers, the easier this flaw is to spot.

So what is this falw I’m referring to?

In business and in marketing, you need to build around one BIG idea.

And to be honest, when you first start your business, you may have a BIG idea at the time, but soon the marketplace is flooded with everyone else doing the same thing and you have to change your BIG idea.

When I started Team Podcast, I started it because I could not find the company that I wanted to hire to work on my podcast.

At that time, in 2012, there were no one-stop-shops where you could get all the post production done on your podcast for one price.

There was a company, called Podfly, that was sort of working in that direction, but I couldn’t stand the parameters they put around the length of your audio files and how many “um” removals would be included in your package before you got an extra charge.

So when I started, my one BIG idea was doing all the post production on a podcast for one price per episode, and not nickel and dime-ing my customers with every little thing that other companies were doing.

Fast forward to nearly 10 years later and almost every podcast production company has that model now. So, even though I was ahead of the curve at the time, my BIG idea from 10 years ago is no longer a BIG idea.

I’ve told you about how I got a virtual punch in the gut from a client that led me down the path of marketing and monetizing podcasts, so now my BIG idea isn’t just that we will produce podcasts like everyone else is doing, but we will also work with podcasters to help monetize their podcasts.

It takes a completely different skill set to learn the marketing skills to monetize a podcast, and I’ve spent the last almost 4 years now investing heavily in earning my marketing chops. 

The result is that now I won’t launch another podcast that isn’t going to be monetized. And I know how and when I will pull the levers of monetization.

Why is it so important to have a BIG idea?

There are several reasons, but let me highlight the most important ones:

1. The marketplace is more crowded than ever! With social media, online access and 24 hour TV consumption, your ideal customers are bombarded with more ads per day than ever before. Your BIG idea will help you stand out in the crowded marketplace.
2. Your customers have a shorter attention span than ever. Face it, we live in an instant gratification age. Consumers no longer have the attention span to make it through a long sales cycle, or for it to take months for them to get their problems solved.
3. Improvement offers no longer capture your customers. Your customers are looking for transformation and if you can’t provide it, someone else will.
4. Generalists are out and specialists are in. You’ve heard that “riches are in the niches” and every business has to niche down to survive in this market. Pick one sub-niche of your niche and find an area where you provide transformation. When you have an offer that works, go all in on that one offer.

In some of the training I am going through in Russell Brunson’s mastermind, we’ve talked extensively about creating a tight niche.

One of my coaches says to “carve out a niche so tight that only you fit in it!”

One of the things carving out a niche that only you fit in requires on our part is to really understand who we serve inside and out.

I’m not just talking about who the person you serve is. I’m talking way deeper than that.

I’m talking about their needs and desires, what have they already tried and failed at, who are they currently turning to for help and tons of other really specific knowledge you need to have about your “who”. 

The reality is that you have to really love the “who” you are serving in order to create a real transformation.

Let me give you an idea of some questions you should get clear on about your “who” that will enable you to come up with your BIG idea.

I’m going to assume that you already have a pretty good idea of who your “who” is, so I’ll pick up there.

What are their problems?

What are their concerns?

What do they want? I’m not talking about what do they think they want, I’m talking about what do they really want. 

You’ve probably heard about the guy who walks into the hardware store needing to purchase a ¾ inch drill bit. It might seem obvious that this guy WANTS a ¾ inch drill bit. I mean, hello, Captain Obvious, right?

But actually, a ¾ inch drill bit is not at all what that guy wants. What he really wants is a ¾ inch hole.

See what I mean about getting below the surface? And the more you do this and know your who intimately, the better you can come up with your BIG Idea.

What does your who want to avoid at all costs? Part of your BIG idea could be helping them avoid that!

What fears are already present in your who?

What do they love?

What do they hate or despise?

What are they already spending their money on?

Where are they currently spending their money?

What do they do for fun? Where do they hang out in real life?

What books are they reading?

What are some of their core beliefs?

What are their blind spots? 

Where are they stuck?

Who is presently letting them down?

What industries or companies are currently failing them?

What old models, methods or systems are failing them?

What lies are they believing?

Who else is loving your who well?

How aware is your who of the problem you want to solve for them?

Is your who already looking for solutions?

What else has my who already tried?

This is literally just a short list of questions that you need to be able to answer about your who. There are so many more that can be answered to help you get inside the mind of your who.

It may seem overwhelming to think about all of these things, but it can be catastrophic to your business to ignore them.

Your who is looking for a transformation in one specific area and it is up to you to carve out a niche just small enough that you are the only one that fits in it.

Don’t try to model what you are doing after what your competitors are doing. Most of the time they are just winging it anyway. They are so entrenched in what has always been done that they probably aren’t willing to change even if their customers ask them to.

In creating your BIG idea, you are in effect creating a movement. In creating transformation for your audience, you are giving them a new identity to embrace. The more you can get your audience to embrace their new identity and the transformation you are offering them, the more successful your business will be.

Most of us don’t think BIG enough when we are creating our BIG idea. 

But my friends, we are the entrepreneurs, we are the change makers. We are the ones who don’t settle for the status quo.

We are the ones who break the rules, because we know the rules only exist to serve other people and not our who.

We are the ones who can bring transformation to the lives of our who if we can only get our heads around our BIG idea.

It’s not enough to educate people. Yes, education is good, but it isn’t motivating enough to cause your who to take action.

Helping people with a problem isn’t enough. Your who could go broke trying to get “help” from every gurus who can only get them a little further down the line.

In order to be successful, you must be willing to think big enough and implement fast enough to create a transformational journey that your who will go on with you.

And let me be real with you about this. Most of the time when we as entrepreneurs and problem solvers don’t think BIG enough to create a transformational experience for our who, it is because we are afraid!

We fear calling our shot and having to live up to the transformational standard we promised our who.

We don’t believe in ourselves enough to make waves in our industry.

We are scared to put ourselves out there and open ourselves up to scrutiny and ridicule.

We don’t want to be disruptive because we are worried about our competition coming after us.

Let me tell you this:

If you create enough transformations, no one will listen to the naysayers.

If you change enough lives, you’ll create so many evangelists for your program that you won’t have to fend off attacks because they will do it for you.

If you truly love your who enough, you will be willing to transform your own life so that you can keep transforming theirs.

And this is the point at which you stop chasing money and you start chasing impact. 

And the more impact you achieve, the more money you will receive.

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.

I hear it over and over again - the first “real marketing” that a podcaster does is social media marketing. Then after spending a whole lot of money, they look around and start scrutinizing their stats and then scratch their heads because they aren’t sure whether it made any difference at all in their podcast.

I am asked about this often and I see questions in the podcast Facebook groups about it, so I wanted to take some time today and explain to you why I am so against social media marketing for the majority of podcasters.

So first, let’s define what social media marketing is:

This is where you run paid ads on social media platforms in order to try to get people to listen to your podcast.

Facebook has made it so easy to “boost a post” that almost every podcaster I’ve ever talked to has fallen for it at least once.

I am NOT talking about posting on social media platforms or sharing your episodes with followers. I always think that’s a good idea, but I also think it is not impactful enough for most podcasters to justify hiring a social media manager to manage this.

So the bottom line I am trying to help you avoid today is spending money on ads and social media management that will yield very little ROI, so that you can put your money into things that can actually bring you a legitimate return on your investment.

So, let me explain why this is an activity that most of you shouldn’t participate in, and then I’ll tackle the real question of what you should do instead of social media marketing.

• In strict marketing terms, the vast majority of ad campaigns that a podcaster would run would be considered an AWARENESS Campaign.

This means that there isn’t really something an audience member can buy from the ad, and the ad is just being run to make you aware of a podcast.

Let me just explain to you quickly why awareness campaigns are not something you should aspire to:

1. They are incredibly expensive to run, since all your ad spend is going into educating the marketplace that you exist, and not to buy your products or services.
2. Most of the time awareness campaigns are exclusively done by huge multi-national corporations who want to be remembered favorably by the audience.
3. You can never really determine the ROI from an awareness campaign, so you are most often lighting your money on fire.
4. Awareness campaigns are not targeted, so of all the people you have the potential to reach, only a fraction of them will be your target avatar.

Ok, so now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, this is where we start getting real about this conversation.

WHY are you really wanting to run social media ads?

I mean what is the real end goal?

To get more downloads, right?

And what does getting more downloads mean for most podcasters?

Well, of course it means you have more listeners, but what do you as a podcaster get out of having 1000 downloads rather than 200 downloads?

I mean, how much more money will you make when you have 1000 downloads vs. 200 downloads?

For the vast majority of podcasters, and maybe even you, it means absolutely nothing. There is a zero dollar difference in those 2 numbers.

Why?

Because the average podcaster does not have an offer that their podcast listeners can buy.

So this means that most podcasters aren’t selling anything.

And yet, when I talk to those podcasters, almost all of them will tell me that one of their goals is to earn some income from their podcast.

So why the disconnect?

1. Podcasters turn to social media marketing when they don’t know what else to do instead.
2. Podcasters see other podcasters who also don’t know what they are doing and also aren’t making any money, do it, so they follow suit. I’ll let you think about that, but why would you mimic that person anyway? If you’re looking for someone to emulate, at least pick someone who is earning money from their podcast, right?

Now, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but if you don’t currently have an offer - and I’m talking about a paid offer, not just a free lead magnet - then you AREN’T ready for ANY sort of paid advertising.

And that includes spending money on a “marketing” person.

But Christy, why?

Because you have no way in the world to get ANY ROI on either your paid activities or your marketing person! Do you hate money that much?

It is my opinion that if you don’t have an offer that you can sell to your podcast audience, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!

You can stop all your other peripheral activities until you have an offer.

That means you don’t need a new logo…

That means you don’t need to upgrade your microphone…

That means you don’t need to rebrand your website…

That means you don’t need a new pair of headphones…

Literally, nothing else that you can do for your podcast matters until you have an offer.

Your house is on fire if you don’t have an offer!

All of your efforts are in vain if you don’t have something to sell to your audience.

You have the cart before the horse if you don’t have an offer!

A couple of years ago, I learned a very expensive lesson.

I spent about $30K to bring on a Fractional CMO for my business. In case you aren’t familiar with the concept, it’s a way for businesses like mine, who don’t need a full time Chief Marketing, of Finance or whatever, Officer, to pay for one that just works for you part time, and then that person probably has 5-10 companies that they provide this service for and that equals more than a full time income for them.

We created a lot of activity to try and build a local podcast network here in the Florida Keys. 

We were first to the marketplace.

He came up with a catchy brand.

He built a cool looking website.

He made us fancy business cards.

He made t-shirts.

We had a movie premier for The Messengers: A Podcast Documentary that I was featured in and invited the community.

We started building an app.

We started recruiting and training advertising and sales reps.

We started holding monthly meetings in the community.

We did all of these “activities” without ever once having a product to sell to anyone.

In fact, even for all the activities we did, the timing was off on each and every one of them because we were trying to bring together an audience and we had NOTHING to gather them around!

The longer this relationship lasted, the more I started scratching my head and wondering what in the world we were doing. 

After some consultations with my attorney, I ended up firing this CMO and cutting all ties with him. 

Of course, then I began to scrutinize all the red flags over the course of our relationship and I realized…

I was trusting him to build our website and he didn’t have a website of his own.

I was trusting him to figure out our marketing campaigns and he didn’t have a track record of marketing campaigns he had run that I could look at.

Eventually, I realized that this person was really a “branding” person and not really a marketer. What I wouldn’t give to have known that at the time!

Now, I’m not saying that branding is bad, but what I am saying is “there is a time and a place for everything.” And we didn’t need marketing, branding, advertising, or community involvement until we actually had a product/offer to bring to those channels!

The same thing is true for you.

Again, this is my opinion, so take it for what it is worth, but your offer should be the first thing that you create.

Then once you have an offer, then you can reverse engineer your lead magnet.

Once you have an offer, you can even reverse engineer your podcast!

Because most podcasters don’t have an offer, they aren’t ready for any type of advertising yet.

Then once you do have an offer, all your ads, all your podcasts and everything else you do should lead back to your offer!

Want to learn more? Join our private Facebook group here!

You can also find Christy and her team at www.teampodcast.com!

Need help getting your podcast optimized and ready for monetization? Learn more about the Podcast Tune Up here.