Are you an entrepreneur with a podcast? Or you're simply a podcaster? Today podcasting is becoming a popular way of growing your business and getting your first client in a few weeks. Well, how can you use your podcast as a marketing tool? In an interview, Cliff Durvenois reveals a podcasting strategy that generates leads and sales without sounding salesy.
Do you have to be an extrovert to successfully start a podcast?
Absolutely not! It's easy to sit inside your little office and talk to another person. The only difference is you have a microphone.
Common Challenges Podcasters Face
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Overcoming perfectionism
Looking at top-rated podcasts with over 40 years of experience in interviewing, you might feel like you have to be perfect to compete. You want to be at that level. But when you sit and do interviews, it's not perfect at all. Then, you find yourself in a trap; recording and re-recording.
Perfectionism becomes the hardest thing to overcome as a podcaster. But once you get past that, podcasting actually becomes fun. You can just map out a little story, get on the microphone, upload, and share it. The world will hear it.
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Approaching podcasting like a podcaster
Yes. A podcaster is somebody who podcasts. Podcasting is their product. And they need 10,000 downloads or a hundred thousand downloads of their episodes so that they can get sponsors.
But if you’re an entrepreneur with a podcast, it changes everything.
You don't have 3 days a week to spend working on one podcast. You don't need to have a hundred thousand downloads. You don't have to wait 16 to 18 months before you can get any traction. Well, what can you do with your podcast to grow? Build Relationships!
Building relationships through podcasting
Start asking yourself: who's somebody who could help my business? More importantly, how can I help them? When you start thinking that way, all of your connections become strategic. Who can help me to move my business forward?
Reach out to them and say:
Hey Trudy, I've been listening to your stuff on social media. I've been listening to your podcast. I would love to interview you on my podcast. I would love to have you come and talk about X, Y, and Z on my podcast. Let me know if you're available.
Through your podcast, you've reached out to them. They get access to your audience. And if they share your podcast, you get access to their audience. But you get an opportunity to sit with these people for half an hour or an hour.
Talk to them just like you would talk to anybody else. Learn more about them and ask them questions about their business. Build that relationship. Once you do this, it's very easy for me to open up your email, and just send them a note. You’ll always get a response.
Follow them on social. Like their posts. Comment on their post. These people now are all in your wheelhouse. It becomes very easy for you now to come back and say: I'd love to be on your podcast.
The podcast builds a relationship so fast. With this, you don’t have to wait for 16 to 18 months. You can do it within the first 30 days.
The Best Way of Introducing Your Business to Your Podcast Guests
You could invite these people to your podcast and just give them a sales pitch. But the conversation almost feels dirty at the end of it. Your guest will start thinking the only reason you interviewed them is to ask for the sale.
You have the opportunity but you don't have to be salesy about it.
When you reach out to people, you can have the call to action for whatever it is that you're doing. Don't push it. Just say: Hey, we would love to have you as a guest on our podcast.
People look at email signatures. If you have a really good call to action, people may click on it and see your business. You should use things like that. Never once bring up the sales call during the podcast.
What you do for clients can strategically be part of your podcast. For example, Cliff talks about how to overcome the challenges of being an entrepreneur with a podcast. How to grow your podcast. How do you market your podcast.
Cover that specific pain point. When the interview is over, potentially 9 out of 10 people will indicate if they're interested in moving forward with you.
By this point in time, you've had multiple touchpoints with them. You’re able to send them episodes that they can listen to. They've heard your commercial and everything about it.
The relationship is the most important thing…
When they share the interview podcast with their audience, They're putting a stamp of approval on that. Then if people are interested, they can always click on your podcast.
They can listen to more episodes. They can visit the website as well. Join the email newsletter. Get all the freebies that come with it. They can go the whole nine yards.
Being pushy after the interview is something I just simply would not recommend. If they are interested, they will let you know. It's the relationship that you want.
Monetizing a podcast, even if you’re just getting started
What process can you use with your podcast to get clients? What other ways can you use to monetize your podcast?
There are other people out there that can do what you're doing. But people choose who they want to work with. Let's see Cliff's experience of getting the first customer on his podcast:
“On this particular episode, I had to cancel my interviews because my sister passed away. I was really busted up because I was actually very close to my sister. So when it came time to do the podcast episode, I had nothing ready.
I got on the microphone, and spent 25 minutes talking about my sister; what she meant to me, and some of my favorite memories growing up with her. What her passing meant to me.
I put that episode out there and I was shocked It became the most downloaded episode of the series. It was the first time I'd ever broken the 100-download episode mark on a podcast episode before.
My first client reached out to me. Finally, I had to ask him, what it was about that particular episode that made him want to work with me. He said: well, in that episode, you talked about how your sister had passed away. And a year ago, my mother passed away. It reminded me so much about my relationship with my mother, and I knew that you understood what that was like. I knew that you were the right person to work with.”
By sharing these personal stories, or adventures that you go on, people can follow you. They get to know you and trust you. Gaining that trust is the key to connecting and getting more clients.
Well, how can you gain people’s trust from your podcast?
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Opening up about who you are as a person
Let them understand who you are as a person. What do you value? What’s important to you?
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Share parts of your process for getting results for people
Pick a piece of what you do and spend about 20 minutes talking about it. How did you discover it? Share the story behind it. Go through that entire thought process; how did you test it? How do you know that it works? How are your clients getting results with it?
Does the number of podcast downloads matter?
Most podcasters think: I should be getting thousands of downloads on my podcast. And if I'm not getting thousands of downloads, I must be a failure.
But when you use your podcast as a relationship-building tool, downloads don't matter.
If you get to a hundred thousand downloads, that's great. The more people that hear your message, the better. But your priority should be about trying to touch base with your ideal customer avatar, who listens to the podcast.
Don't look at the download metrics. It doesn't matter if you have 10,000 downloads or 100,000 downloads. If you're not getting any new business from it, what good is it?
How you can speed up the time it takes to start a podcast
You may want to know how you get your podcast off the ground quickly. Or how to edit your podcast episode in less than 30 minutes.
Cliff created a framework with a system in place for editing podcast episodes quickly and smoothly. It’s made for people who don't want to mess around with editing. And don't want to come up with show notes.
The service takes the hardest part of the podcasting off your hands; the editing and the show notes. It provides them to you on a silver platter.
3 Easy Steps to Create Podcast Show Notes That Attract More Listeners
- If you look at any interview, it's not a single story. It’s a series of stories. When you're doing your show notes, look for the questions. How did the person answer them?
- Then, come up with some great titles.
- Next, add a timestamp to it. So if somebody's looking through the show notes, they can see that timestamp and say:
I don't have five hours to listen to all these. But I got five minutes to listen to this one bullet point.
- They’ll click on it and go right to that second in the episode where you're asking the question and then spend a couple minutes answering it.
Different parts of the interview are going to resonate with different people.
From there, decide on the main points of the episode and that gives you the podcast description. This is where you get your SEO juice because people are looking for this kind of information.
How to Run Your Podcasts on YouTube and Grow Your Audience
Break the episode down into bite-sized chunks. When people are on YouTube, they treat it just like Google. It's a search engine. So they're looking for something.
Breaking down your podcast to each question that you ask, gives you potentially 5, 7, or 8 small videos that you can share on YouTube. You can SEO the daylights out of each of them.
The YouTube algorithm tracks how long people watch your videos. If somebody watches two minutes of a 30-minute interview, YouTube is going to scrap that video. They're not going to show it to anybody because people aren't watching it.
But if you watch two minutes of a four-minute video, YouTube is going to say: this video must be powerful. They’re going to serve it up to a lot more people. YouTube wants eyeballs on your content.
You give your audience a very interactive piece of content that answers their question in five minutes.
If you’d like to learn more about growing your business with your podcast, check out How To Get Leads With A Guest Podcasting Strategy.
And if you’re wondering how to manage all the editing that comes with producing a podcast episode, Trudy uses Descript, which is a very useful editing tool that makes it super easy to create the transcript, audio and video all at the same time. It saves her hours and hours of work every week. Check out this video where she runs through some of Descript’s features.