LMSM 65 | First Podcasting Anniversary

 

We publish our 65th episode exactly one year after publishing our first. In this episode, we look back on our progress, missteps, processes, lessons learned and set some public goals for 2022.

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Lessons Learned From Our First Year Of Podcasting

In this episode, we are looking back at the one-year anniversary of the show. Frank and I go back and look at the first year, and what we have done through our 60 some episodes. What’s worked, what hasn’t worked, what we were happy with, what our goals are for next year, and all the lessons we have learned. When I say we have learned, pretty much I have learned since I do all the work on this thing.

Frankie.

Ian, you son of a bitch.

Your Italian is popping out. That’s how you get it done, right there.       

I have started to watch The Sopranos. Did I ever tell you I have never watched The Sopranos?

You have told me that. It would always piss me off. It is one of the top five TV shows of all time. How far are you? Are you into Season 2 yet?

No. I’m still at episode three. I’m a gangster movie guy. Seeing gangster movies, it is not a gangster movie. They blew up a building and I’m like, “I’ve seen better.” A Bronx Tale was better than that.

It gets way better in Season2. After Season 3, it’s awesome. At some point, you get invested in all the characters. After Season 3 and 4, there is always this layer of tension in The Sopranos that someone is about to get off, and you don’t know who or when. There is always danger lurking around every character. It’s such a good show for that reason alone. You are never sure what’s going to happen.

We were not talking about The Sopranos. We were talking about branding, marketing and advertising. That show has got an amazing long tale. There are so many people who talk about it. It still pops up in my newsfeed. I’m a huge Mad Men fan. In Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, the writer or creator of Mad Men, is one of the writers for the last two seasons of The Sopranos. He is the head writer.

The thing that is fascinating is in episode one, Tony Soprano goes, “People can’t go into a shrink or they’re going to come into a restaurant like this, stick a gun to the back of my head and shoot me.” I do know that that’s how he dies in the end. It’s fascinating that they foreshadowed it on episode one.

The Sopranos is incredible at branding. They found a way to get attention awareness. It’s much easier when you have the Megaphone of HBO, where people are going to watch your shows because you have a track record. We are about a year into this show. We produced our first episodes in the fall of 2020. We did our big launch end of December, early January of 2021. We have aired about 60 episodes.

In this episode, we were going to talk about what we’ve learned, and what the first year was, but more importantly, what are we doing next? What are the logical steps we need to take? We were airing this because Frank and I had this discussion organically. Most people are like this. You get used to this in companies as you near the end of a year. It’s a very definitive date where it makes you reflect on the year.

New Years always make you full of hope and make you think about different things, but there are also planning. Frank and I are now at a point where we’re saying, “Here’s what we’ve done far. What do we do for an encore? What do we do next year? What do we want it to look like in a year? Are we happy with the progress we’ve made? Do we want to change anything? Do we need to do anything differently?” This episode is going to be all about us trying to talk it through and knowing that we don’t have all of the answers either.

In December, we were doing an event in CG called Tell Your Story or Someone Else Will. What we are going to talk about is how important it is in our businesses, which is direct-to-seller sales and marketing for houses to tell your story because the landscape is very crowded. It’s a lot more crowded than it was when most of us started.

There are a lot of people who are bad actors. You are going to get lumped in with them if you don’t create your own story. We are going to focus on several different people. One of which is going to tell a story to kick us off. One has a small team. He is in Utah. He tells his story very differently because he has got a small team, and then he’s got somebody who’s got somebody who’s got somebody else who has got a national brand and has a mastermind with a ticket price of $100,000 per person per year. It is a big number. His brand is quite different.

How do you advertise, how do you brand, and how do your market become relevant. The other thing I was telling Ian as we were prepping is I had a call about the December event. I joined CG in 2012. Around 2014 and 2015, people stopped talking about marketing and started talking about branding. Branding and marketing are very different.

What you’re going after, who you’re targeting, what you’re trying to accomplish, you are admitting that you’re no longer paycheck to paycheck when you go to a branding model. Social media is all about branding. What we were going to talk about in this show is how do you properly brand, get eyeballs and get people that will be sticky with your product?

We can get started by sharing with everyone what we have learned along the way of recording. If we take our first episode, we prepare a lot for it. We built an outline. It was a good episode. We recorded maybe 4 or 5, and then we decided which ones we were going to release right away. Along the way, our audio has gotten better. We bought better mics.

Frank learned how to keep the microphone a little closer to his mouth and speak into it. Our lighting has gotten better. Frank has changed different places where he recorded. The office where you record matters for sound. If you are in a place that has all hardwood and high ceilings, you are going to sound like you’re in an echo chamber. A little bit smaller office with carpet is a little bit better. It is studio quality. We were getting smarter about equipment, but the equipment was pretty cheap. We have a couple of microphones and we use Zoom to record every week. It doesn’t take much more equipment than that. That is about all we’ve paid for on something physical that we have purchased for this.

The big shift to me is in technology. When you and I have talked to people, we’re like, “What are you going to talk about?” That’s pretty endless for us. Because we’re friends, we talk anyways. We have similar things that we find interesting or different things pop up in the news, or we see things or articles like, “That is an episode.” Creating the content for us is pretty easy.

The other thing for me that I had to get used to is this isn’t a job interview. This is entertainment. If it’s boring, not interesting, or something that is compelling, people aren’t going to listen. You got to have some fun with it. You have to think about anecdotes and stories, things that might be compelling. What I thought about in becoming a podcaster is who do I like to listen to and why? Can I emulate them in some way?

The hard part for most people starting a podcast is coming up with enough content. Execution is always the number one challenge. Click To Tweet

I’m not Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell. They are much better writers than I am. I’m not Tim Ferriss. How do they tell stories? What do they talk about? What I’m left with a show, it’s like, “Why do I think about it later? What was it about that? Was it factual, a fun story or an anecdote? Was it something historical or something I can relate to?” Those are the things you got to be comfortable with. As you’re crafting an agenda and you’re thinking about things, what I often do is take notes as we’re doing a show. As Ian said something that strikes me, it becomes more conversational, which makes the show fun.

You mentioned something that is important for anyone who is thinking about doing this. One, you got to have a niche. We do. Our niche is all centered around business, starting businesses and careers. We do get into investing. It is a general business show. We do some stuff on psychology and motivation. That is some of the stuff that people like the most.

Our first year was all about testing. We didn’t know how this was going to go. We didn’t know how to do a show. We found a marketing firm that we send the raw video to. They helped us build our website. They transcribe our show. They turn it into a blog post which is helpful in getting people to go to your website. Google uses SEO search terms like, what words do you use? They put it in there. That gets more people organically coming to look at it.

We didn’t know how it was going to go. This is important when you are starting anything. We didn’t put too much pressure on ourselves. We didn’t say, “It’s got to have this many views. It’s got to have this many followers.” We didn’t do any of that. It was more, “We’re going to make 50 episodes. We’re going to put them out there, and then we’re going to decide or is anyone watching it?” After our 50th, we talked about it a little and 100%, people were watching it. We almost had no goals.

First Podcasting Anniversary: If you’re looking to get rich quickly, podcasting is not necessarily the way to do it, unless you are coming in with a huge audience.

 

We each put about $5,000 into it at first. That largely pays for video editing and the marketing firm that goes and puts this episode on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, and all those places, and builds our blog posts. Other than that, we didn’t spend money on marketing. The only marketing we did was dropping little clips onto LinkedIn and Facebook.

From our standpoint, it is not a big investment of money because it was a big investment of time for us to figure out how these fit into our work lives because both Frank and I own multiple businesses and we’re invested in multiple partnerships. Time is valuable to us and we needed to figure out how this was going to fit in, and we figured it out. Wednesday is podcast day. Wednesday morning, we spent three and a half hours together, and then the two of us go scramble and do extra stuff around it throughout the rest of the week.

Our whole theme here is we have fun. If we can’t have fun and if we don’t like doing it together, it is not going to work. In addition to having fun, can we find that audience? Neither of our wives listens to it but somehow, we still have almost 20,000 downloads. People are listening. Again, we are not Tim Ferriss, but we started. What Tim Ferriss talked about. He did an episode on how he had 770 million downloads. I listened to it twice. It is fascinating. His goal when he started was less daunting than ours. He wanted to start with six episodes.

We had a goal of 50, but we thought we had some stuff in the can that we wanted to talk about and go through. We were committed to doing it for one full year. If we did six, we probably would have quit because we’ve got a lot of shit going on. We don’t get the immediate impact that he had because we don’t have the same name. To that end, that’s where we started.

Our show has been downloaded 18,000 times. A typical episode for Frank and I is an hour long. A lot of the stats that you get on a show are going to be a lot lower than the number of views you get on a Facebook post or a LinkedIn post. I get 18,000 views on some of the things I write on LinkedIn, but how much time does a view cost somebody on LinkedIn? It might cost them a couple of seconds. They click on it, look at it, click off, and it counts as a view.

Whereas with us to download a show, click on download and listen to it. You are devoting half an hour to the two of us, which is cool. We appreciate everyone that does it. For us, that number has been growing every month. In 30 days, we have 3,000 downloads. If you were to annualize that, we would be double what we have done so far in our first twelve months. It has been growing.

A big day for us is 200 to 150 downloads in a day. We were averaging probably close to 150 downloads a day. A typical episode that we make after 30 days, and these numbers are important to advertisers and things of that such. By no means are we even close to being able to make money on advertising yet. There are a couple of million podcasts out there. It is not like we are new to this game. Even though I still think we are early, which is crazy. I still think it’s not too flooded.

Our typical show is going to get 150 downloads after 30 days. That is an average show. Now, we were north of 300. We were over 300 downloads on all the new ones that we go with. That has grown. When we first started, it was closer to 75 downloads per episode. That’s growing and again, that’s with $0 marketing. We’re not funneling anyone here. We don’t have any advertisements. We were going to get into a little bit of that as we get through some of this. Those are some of the numbers. Primarily, almost all of those downloads, 85% are from the United States.

Our next biggest country that follows us is the United Kingdom which has downloaded this over 300 times. We were popular in the Philippines at 165, France, Singapore, India, Poland, which my wife is going to be very excited about is in our top ten, Germany and Spain. The United States is where our money is. Sixty percent of our shows are listened to on Apple Podcasts. That’s a little higher than normal. Apple Podcasts is a little bit more of an affluent watcher to someone that has an iPhone.

It’s a more expensive phone, and then we’ve got Stitcher and Spotify. Google Chrome is 5%. People are watching. iHeart Radio is really low, that’s 2%. We were trying to figure out a way that we market differently, knowing that the majority of people who listen to our show are doing it on Apple. The other thing also is the majority of people listening are on a mobile device.

There is nothing like statistics being read to you over the radio that’s compelling on a device. If you haven’t already tuned off, you may not have arms or hands. However, you said something in there that I did find interesting, and I wanted to comment on it. NBC started on November 15th, 1926. The most popular shows on television are the ones that are most recent. M*A*S*H was 60 years after they launched. Seinfeld was almost 70 years after they launched.

The point I’m getting at is many people think you’re late to the podcast game. Tim Ferriss talks about this. He thinks we were still incredibly early. There are tons of them but this is an emerging market that’s maybe 10 or 12 years old and it’s just getting started. There’s that side of it. The other thing is I hear ads on this like, “Do you want to make more money? You should start podcasting.” That’s horse crap. It’s hard to build an audience. It’s hard to produce a show, get the work done, and get it out there.

If you’re looking to get rich quick, I don’t necessarily know if a podcast is a way to do it unless you are coming in with a huge audience already. Those are some things that I don’t think Ian and I thought this was a blog that we could share with our kids at some point. If they wanted to listen to it, they could listen to it and get to know their dads. Our friends could listen in, but we turned it into something else, but you need to know what your goals are going in. Getting rich quick is not something in the podcast space that is attainable.

You're not serious about a business until you consider bringing an employee on it. Click To Tweet

To kill right away in a podcast, you would have to have a big following somewhere on social media. Assuming that your big following is going to follow your show as well. From platform to platform, there are not as many people as you would think that just jump and translate over. Some people just want to watch you on Facebook. Some people just want to pay attention to you on YouTube.

Some people only want to follow you on Twitter. I have certain people I only follow on Twitter. I don’t go to their profile and try to follow them everywhere. That’s only a few people where I follow them in different places. That is something else that we’ve figured out over time because Frank and I have different audiences in different places.

It’s worth bringing it up as we summarize a little bit our top ten episodes. Number one is our Anatomy of a $10 Million Deal. It’s interesting. That is the episode we produced the most, so we had multiple cameras on us. We’ve also spent the most on getting all those clips out. It was very highly produced. That did a little better on Facebook. It got shared a little more and got more people interested. What do you think, Frank?

It’s that and also the subject matter. It’s a big episode. A $10 million deal is a big boy deal. We roll up our sleeves and talk about how we did it, what the process was, how much money people made. It’s real. It is a compelling episode.

What’s interesting is that’s part two. Part one is nowhere in our top twenty. I don’t know why that is, but in the Anatomy of a $10 Million Deal, only part two made our top ten.

In part one, we talked a lot about the concept. In part two, we talked a lot about cash. It comes down a lot to execution. It comes down to actually making the money, which is the source where people are usually compelled.

Our number two out of 60 episodes is Do You Maximize or Satisfice? It’s like a random article I read in the Harvard Business Review and sent it to Frank. He was like, “That’s interesting.” We did some research on it. We put a pretty good outline together on it. For that to be our number two is surprising. I would have to go back and listen to that episode to see why. You get a certain number of subscribers, so you get a certain number of downloads every time, but the ones that do well that make it into the top ten get forwarded a lot. Somehow someone forwarded that a lot to each other.

That was a good episode. I thought that was a very interesting episode and something unique. It was also early when people had been downloading it or whatnot.

Number three, Five Questions to Ask Yourself When You’re Stuck. I remember that was a fun episode.

People have told me that that helped because we all get stuck. We all get stuck into different things. My son’s first permanent memory is most likely going to be the time I took him on the ATV in the snow and we got stuck. I ran off the side of the road. We got stuck in the mud. He still talks about it like, “Daddy got stuck in the mud.” Getting stuck and how do you get unstuck is relevant for people who are two all the way through people that are 50 to 100.

Number four, this one is interesting because Frank had to encourage me to do it, How To Use Industrial Property To Replace Your Salary. I brought it up at one point and then I put it on the back burner. It was sitting on our list. The reason why I was hesitant about even doing it is I didn’t know how much it would resonate with people. The way in which I was able to do it excludes a lot of people because I started by paying cash. It ended up getting into a lot deeper interview by Frank than he did of me. Similar to number one, as you said, Frank, that one is very tactical like, “Here is exactly how I did something.”

I think so. You left out the part about you got a humongous check when you quit NVR, and that was the hesitancy in doing the episode in the first place. People are interested in asset class allocation and different ways to go about structuring things. That is why it played well. People have come up to me and said, “It is interesting hearing about it because I’m a residential guy and this is clearly something that is hiding in plain sight.”

Number five is How To Answer Five Of The Most Common Job Interview Questions. We thought that would do great. The name of that is a very sticky SEO deal. Number six is The Art Of War. This is the first time that made it to the top ten where we had guests. Both David Neil and Jonathan Clark of The Eighth Mile Consulting have nice followings online. That helped this episode do well. They shared it a lot on their social. The learning for us there is it does work when you add a guest who has some bit of a following that they’re going to share it as well.

That was fun. We did it at 6:00 AM because it’s 7:00 PM there for the time change.

Number seven is Loyalty Hurting Your Career. That one we talked about is so many people are misguided about the concept of loyalty, and how long they should stay with a company, and assume that companies are going to replicate that loyalty.

There have been all the great things in our lives. There’s Watergate, then there’s Monicagate. It’s gone from gates to the great. There was The Great Recession and now they call it The Great Resignation. I feel like that’s relevant in today’s environment because, after COVID, we thought that we were going to go broke and work 100 hours a day until it was no longer sustainable. People have now prioritized me, myself, my health, my wellbeing, and that includes where I live and how I conduct myself. Loyalty plays a big part in that. People are shifting towards being loyal to themselves. This is one of the big takeaways from the pandemic.

Number eight is, Are You Self-Handicapping? Which is a psychological term where people say things that they don’t mean like, “Money is the root of all evil,” or if they’re about to do a big race, they will say, “I stayed up all night. I didn’t get enough sleep.” It’s making excuses before you even try, which ends up leaning into you losing. That resonated with people.

Number nine, How To Ask Your Manager For A Pay Raise. We get into nuts and bolts in that episode. It didn’t surprise me at all that that one got forwarded around a lot because we are very specific on the right scripts of what to say and what not to say. If you’re going to ask for more money, here’s exactly how you need to do it.

Number ten is Do You Want To Stick It To Your Former Employer? We use Tom Brady as an example in that episode of someone who went to a different company, went back to play his former company and how much he must have wanted to win. Those are our top episodes. Anything terribly surprising in those ten that made it in there?

That’s the best. I’m surprised Fantasy Football didn’t do better, but that makes sense. The things with big names like Shaquille and we brought the Gary Vee one and get some pretty good pops at some point. Those guys are all over the internet.

Some of the ones that we did that are in there have had twelve months for people to scroll back. What happens is you get a new audience and they like an episode, and they read the last episode. What they will do is they will scroll down until they find an episode that seems interesting. You get pops every once in a while. The stuff that we had released in February or March will get like 50 downloads in a week and we’d say, “Where did that come from?” It is a new audience that has scrolled back through your catalog and go back and start listening to a bunch of them, which is what I do with podcasts.

One of the things that I do think was smart is we ended up releasing our tenth episode first. By the time we released our first one, we had a little bit of momentum because our first one is awkward when we first get started. We used to take breaks and there were all kinds of stuff that we worked around. The audio was broken in a couple of instances. Ian’s dog jumped on a computer and shut off the recording. If there was a problem, we have encountered it.

LMSM 65 | First Podcasting Anniversary

First Podcasting Anniversary: Your audience won’t typically follow you on different platforms. Most of them only watch you on a single social media and not anywhere else.

 

We weren’t the well-oiled and highly produced machine that we are now. We started something and a lot of people have ideas and say, “I want to do a podcast.” A lot of people say, “I want to start a business.” How many people do you know who started a business and they said, “I had that idea?” It’s like, “You had an idea and you didn’t do anything about it.”

Execution is the hard part. The hard part for most people in starting a podcast is coming up with enough content. Frank and I know the content we want to talk about. It is not for everyone. Some people like it and some don’t. We’ll never run out of material to talk about every week. We have a backlog of ten ideas that we need to put outlines together.

I find it funny when people are like, “I could do that. I have an idea.” My son was born end of October of 2018. I remember calling Ian. He has 2 or 3 days old and we were talking like, “I’m not tired yet.” I was looking at my wife. We both slept for over eight hours. We have got a 3.5-year-old and an 8-month-old and she yawned out of nowhere.

I equate this to that. You’re not tired with a three-day-old. You’re on locomotion and adrenaline. You got a 3.5-year-old and 1-year-old, keeping two kids alive. You’re dealing with temper tantrums and yogurt on your nicest painting. When they go to bed, you’re dealing with being tired and grinded down. You got to go make lunch or put a bottle together. I don’t do most of this. My wife does almost all of it.

The point I’m getting at is that’s when tired sets in with parenting. When you got a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old, it’s a lot. That’s what podcasting is. Podcasting is not showing up once, doing it once, and congratulations. The well-produced Malcolm Gladwells of the world, who I like a lot of his stuff, does a season with twelve episodes, and he has got a staff of 40 people.

What Ian and I are doing is we got more budget than most. We come up with a topic, things we are interested and things that keep us moving as a narrative of what we were thinking about and living through. We talk about it and memorialize it, and that is fun for us. What we were getting into now is because we’re businessmen, do we want to make this a business? Do we want to continue to keep this as a hobby? That’s a great tax write-off because we’re spending money. Do we want to turn it into something because we think there’s something here?

We’re self-confident enough to think that this is pretty good. We’ve gotten enough feedback that tells us that these conversations are in the back office with two executives who chop things up and talk real about business items. It then comes down to marketing. Do we want to continue to have Ian do the clips, and then bitching me that I didn’t do enough work? Is that what’s important? Do we want to grow? Do we want to put things in front of it?

In the episode, we did where Ian went and saw Gary Vee, he mentioned in the recording that Gary Vee changed outfits three times while Ian was with him for two hours. Gary Vee is highly produced. He is a commodity and does things with incredible intentionality. What we started off is a hobby to see if it works and if it’s going to become something that people know about. We start getting 92nd percentile on downloads. If we get into the 95th percentile or 99th percentile, it’s because we took extremely precise and consistent action as we do in everything else in our business.

Something you said is important, maybe we were in the top 10% or 15% downloads of episodes, but the only people making money are in the top 1%. The jump from saying, I’m a top 15%, 10% podcast to I’m a top 1%. It’s logarithmic. It’s like a hockey stick to get there. You are adding a couple of zeros per episode to talk about how to grow it. For us, we went from 75 to 150 to 300. We’ve got some 500, 600, 700 download episodes after 30 days, which is the metric that matters. How do we get to 7,000, 17,000 or 70,000 downloads? If you’re doing anything, one of the things you get to start with is, what are our aspirations?

If you want to decide what to give your first employee, give them all the things you hate about the business. Click To Tweet

Let’s answer that. Tim Ferriss’s was six episodes. Ours is to get a year. We got a year in. We got t-shirts, hats, and we’ve had some fun. What we see is, “We got momentum.” As you said earlier, it’s a year-end, let’s re-assess.

Those t-shirts are for sale. If you would like to acquire one of our Let Me Speak To A Manager t-shirts, please reach out to Frank or Ian and we will quote you a price. We do have extra. We offer that and the cotton is Egyptian cotton. Frank spent hours working on the softness.

Multiple drafts.

We know you’re one of our OGs if you reach out to us because you are deep in this episode. The question is, what’s our aspiration for what’s next? In anything you are doing or any business you’re starting, you have to lay out, “What do we want it to be?” If we’re doing this episode again in December of 2022, where do we want to be? How many downloads? How much bigger do we want to be? I’m at a point where we know how to make this content. We need to spend some money on marketing. We spent none. When we went through this, Frank and I were getting frustrated with ourselves of like, “How does this get a little bigger? What are we going to do?”

We don’t even have an Instagram page. We didn’t have a TikTok. We do almost nothing on Facebook. I don’t think we have a Facebook page for just this show. Everything Frank and I were doing were off of our individuals. Since then, we created TikTok and Instagram pages. The question is with 60-some episodes, we have 600 to 700 1 to 2-minute clips of us talking about various things from investing to starting a company, to real estate, to clowning around marketing, sales or psychology.

We could post 4, 5, 6 1-minute clips a day on all social media on our branded show social media sites, and not run out for the next year and a half. That is without us creating new stuff all the time. What Frank and I are now looking at is, “Who’s going to do that for us? Do we hire someone part-time?” It’s not a full-time job, but can you get someone part-time that’s just posting there that knows our voice.

Is that someone on Frank’s team or working with me on some of the things that I’m doing? How do we get the word out? What are we spending? One, do you have social media sites? Are you posting? That will cost some money to get someone to post to it. The other big thing is, what are you doing about actual ad spending?

I don’t know if there’s anything to add. It’s intentionality. We got to pick and choose, “Are we going to do this or not? Are we going to put staff behind it?” One of the things that we’ve talked about that we’ve never done the episode is, “When do you hire your first employee?” For me, it’s always been a barometer of hiring an employee when you’re able to afford it. Ian and I are in a position where we can. That’s one.

Two, are there things that will grow the business that I don’t enjoy doing or I don’t look forward to doing, or I don’t want to do anymore? That’s part of it. Ian wanted to be very hands-on with the clips and the posting. I knew from the jump that I didn’t have the time nor the inclination to do it. He is better at writing. It’s time to look at it and say, “What can we both do? How do we structure that?” That transcends across every single business you could ever be in.

You’re not serious about a business until you consider bringing an employee on. It doesn’t mean you have to, but when you get to a place where I got to bring an employee on, you are serious about getting involved in the business because now you are bringing someone else with you and trust their livelihood with you.

I love what Frank said, “If you want to decide what to give your first employee, give them all the things you hate about the business.” Normally, there is more of that than the strategic stuff. If you hate a lot of the things that the business does, you won’t grow it. You’ll want to quit. You’ll want it to stop and not do it anymore.

If you are contemplating outsourcing your camera time and being in front of a microphone on a podcast, you shouldn’t be in podcasting at all. Get out, but if you want to outsource some of the other things like the advertising, you could be in the right medium, you’re just doing the wrong things. That’s where we have to refocus.

For us, we have to figure out a budget. We’re thinking about how much do we spend on advertising a month? We’ve landed on we’d be good with $1,000 each putting it in. We have a marketing firm that we have to spend. What is that number going to come down to between the two of us putting into this show, marketing and trying to grow it? A number come out to a combined $30,000 to $40,000 that we spend on growing this. Is that going to get a return? No, there’s a zero chance that it gets any return in 2022.

It comes down to what’s a brand worth for you. The end goal, if we are getting 70,000 downloads an episode, there is advertising you can charge. You can make money from people wanting to put ads on your site. The bigger picture is Frank and I have multiple businesses that we do some together, some not together, where this show would act as marketing for other businesses.

Frank has Cava Coaching. Frank and I both raise money for real estate deals. I can tell you we’ve had multiple investors in both real estate deals and my tech company that have heard about those things from this show. I have several consulting deals that I’ve done with large businesses that I’m now teaching their managers my leadership essentials class.

The decision-makers were followers of our show. To me, if someone listens to a podcast, that’s like an hour-long sales call that I get without putting the time in. The more that that spreads, the more our other businesses can flourish in marketing. That money of us growing that brand, how many people are going to get into our other programs and businesses?

I talked about this. Ian and I were talking about this a lot. There is a difference between advertising and branding. This has been a little bit of an advertisement. We recorded the Westwood Holdings deal, where he raised a $4.5 million bond. We got that recording and sent it to our investors and said, “Listen to this. The deal’s a little different, read the prospectus as well, but this was an overview of it.” We didn’t record it thinking it would be that but it was. That is a sales tool, but this is mostly a branding tool. It is up on our social media sites. It goes all over the place.

People are like, “I didn’t know you did this. I didn’t know Ian had the ability to do that. I didn’t know you guys were diverse like this.” It becomes something different from straight advertising. The easiest thing you can look at is, what is branding? Coca-Cola has been sponsoring the Olympics since 1928. They are signed on through 2032, so it’s a 104-year run. I’m sure they are going to keep doing it. In the 2016 Rio Games, they had 500 million social media impressions. That costs them $3 billion. What do 500 million impressions turn into? I don’t know, but that’s why branding is important.

LMSM 65 | First Podcasting Anniversary

First Podcasting Anniversary: The cool thing about podcasting is you get to set your own hurdles.

 

Coca-Cola and Let Me Speak to a Manager are on the opposite ends of the branding spectrum, allow me to assure you, but the case is it is a branding tool for us. Do you know what else is a branding tool that all of us see and use? LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter. That’s what it is. It’s direct-to-consumer. Have you ever noticed when you read an article, they quote the Twitter article, and then the Twitter article is actually in the article? Put it there once and we see it twice. Consumers can control their narratives. An athlete can control their narrative. They don’t have to go to a reporter. If you want this to be a branding tool for you, it can be.

We had the Gary Vee episode where we talked about some of the advice he gave. It was Wednesday. On Monday, I created a TikTok site for Frank and me. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m terrible at it. Frank didn’t even know I did it until a day later because I played with it a little bit. I got all these little clips. I started posting little clips of us.

It’s like 36 hours later, we’ve got a couple of hundred followers on TikTok, which is a lot more than the 50 followers we have on YouTube where we had a site for a year. We have got all kinds of shares, comments and likes. It’s like, “This is embarrassing. We have only put nine episodes up and we have 600 little clips we could put on TikTok. We should have been doing this months ago.” I’m not going to beat ourselves up. We don’t have the time to do it months ago, but that’s where I look at it.

For me, marketing, branding and all of it, you have to test. We have been testing on LinkedIn. We know what works there. We’ve been testing on Facebook. We haven’t tested Instagram. We haven’t tested TikTok. In TikTok, we’ve got a lot of eyeballs. I don’t know how much those will translate. We will have to figure that out at some point, but we know what advertising does over there. That might be a place where we go heavy versus the other places because we’ve tested it and it’s resonating.

This will be my last salvo in this episode. If you’re going to get into podcasting, get into it and do it. It’s a long-term type of thing. You can always quit but you can start. If you want to, commit to it. In addition to what Ian talked about marketing, branding, advertising, those types of things, you need to do some of it yourself. Ian built our clips at first because he said he had the time and he’s good at it. He wanted to edit it and put out a certain message because he wrote most of the copy. We have not done shit with our YouTube channel. It’s pretty evident. You can’t even find it, but these are the little things that you start to look at.

We don’t even know our login. This is what’s embarrassing. Frank’s trying to get someone to help us, but we can’t tell him our login or password because we don’t know who created it for us.

The most important thing, it doesn’t matter because it’s not in alignment with what we set out to do at first. At first, it was just to get 50 episodes. We did it. Now, we can start worrying about other things like putting out the next 50, but finding people who will listen to it. That’s the next step. That’s how everything in life works. You got across the first hurdle before you can get to the second one. The cool thing about podcasting is you get to set the hurdles. That’s what we have liked and learned through this process.

I love what you just said. You take one step at a time. The first step is let’s figure out what our show should be and let’s create content. The next step for us, which is in any business, is to create a product or service, then find the customers and grow awareness. We were in awareness mode. It’s on us to figure out how do we build the brand. We do that through social media, advertising and marketing. That’s our next big step in 2022.

If you’ve read this episode, you’ve done so before we spend a nickel in marketing. That means somehow or another, you found us, you like us, and you read this. For that, all we can say is thank you.

We like you. Even the ugly followers, we like you too.

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