You don’t need to be Joe Rogan to make money with a podcast.
TL;DR:
- Podcasts are a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader/authority in a market
- Podcasts can be used to nurture leads and eventually turn your leads into customers
- There are a number of personal developments benefits that come with producing a podcast like developing your listening skills, your ability to think on your feet, and to quickly build rapport with strangers
The Branding Deep Dive podcast launched in September 2020 with the first episode diving into the marketing strategy of Ford’s revival of the iconic Bronco.
Taking the first step and starting a podcast was the hardest part, and once we saw the benefits of having a podcast we never looked back. Here’s some of the biggest benefits we’ve seen running a podcast ourselves.
1. Establishing Yourself As A Thought Leader In Your Market
The most obvious benefit of having a podcast is that it builds your authority in the market you’re in. If you start a podcast about B2B content marketing for example, even if its just you talking about best practices without any guests, you can leverage the content to prove to people that you know what you’re talking about.
In this example, if you had a business that did B2B content marketing for clients, you can see how this would be beneficial. Educating your prospects is one of the fastest ways to build trust with them and eventually convert those prospects into customers.
2. Nurturing Leads
Google ran a study on what it takes for people to trust someone enough to make a buying decision and they coined the 7-11-4 rule. The rule states that 7 hours of interaction, across 11 touch points, in 4 separate locations before a prospect makes a purchase. What this means is that if you’re only doing one type of content on one platform, you’re leaving money on the table.
Alex Hormozi’s quick rise to internet fame and becoming a best selling author is a great example of this concept. The man shows up everywhere. He’s on YouTube, Instagram, X, Linkedin creating content, but he also has his own podcast, does guest appearances on other podcasts, has business courses online, and does live speaking events. He’s increasing the radius of how many people are exposed to his content, and also increasing the depth of the relationship they can develop with him by giving away hours and hours of his best stuff for free.
3. Personal Development Benefits
Being an entrepreneur means that you constantly have to be developing your own personal skillset in a variety of domains in order take your business to the next level. Having a podcast allows you to develop a number of important interpersonal skills that will easily translate to other aspects of business. Here are the skills that I honed the most with:
- Building Rapport with Strangers Quickly
If you have an interview show, what usually happens is that you book the slot for about an hour and you spend the first 10 min introducing yourself and building rapport with the guest before you start recording. You have 10 minutes to break down the walls and connect so that the next 30-50 min aren’t a total nightmare.
- Listening
With interview shows, you have to listen to the guest and contribute to the conversation as well. Podcasts aren’t like journalist interviews where there’s a series of questions and you just go through them one by one. You’re co creating the episode with the guest so the better you are at listening, the better your contributions will be
- Clear, confident communication
Having a podcast gives you a platform where you can show up and consciously hone your ability to show up confidently on camera and speak clearly. It may seem like some people are naturals at this, but the ones that are truly great have tons of experience. A podcast is a way to get those reps in situations that aren’t high pressure.
When I started bringing on guests, I would get butterflies in my stomach before we’d record. After about 15-20 guests, I got used to it and it was no longer a big deal for me. In fact, even presentations I had to do at work or interviews I was doing for jobs became a lot easier for me. I still had nerves, but they weren’t nearly as bad because I was getting reps so often.
- Building A Network
By reaching out to people that I wanted to interview on the podcast, I was able to meet and make a positive impression on a lot of the people that I looked up to. Not everyone you interview on your podcast will end up being your BFF, but every once in a while you will create a relationship that extends beyond the 1 hour of the podcast.
One of the founders I had on the podcast is now someone I consider a mentor. Had it not been for interviewing him on the podcast and then reaching out again after, this would not have happened.
- Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
If you actually take your podcast seriously and want to produce a high quality product that reaches the maximum number of people it can, it will require you to be uncomfortable. It took me months of cold emails to get my first few guests on the podcast, but at this point most of the guests actually come to me inbound. That’s just one example, this will vary person to person but great work requires some level of sacrifice.
Resetting Expectations
Although there are a lot of benefits creating a podcast, here are some things you need to know before you start so you don’t have false expectations.
- Podcast Growth Is HARD
Podcasts should not be used as a way to get to new prospects, unless you have a video podcast and have highly edited videos with killer thumbnails and titles to match. For most businesses, podcasts are great for lead nurturing, but terrible for lead generation. You’re asking people to take time out of their day to consume your content. Maybe when there wasn’t as much information available at the palm of everyone’s hands this would have been seen as more valuable, but in today’s day and age you’re content is competing for attention with billions of other pieces of content.
Unlike google search for blogs and YouTube for video content, there’re really no good discovery platform for audio. This is getting better and over time this may not be true, but for now if you want to grow your podcast its not enough to simply post the audio. You need to spend time making your titles, graphics, and descriptions catchy. And its also a good idea to leverage a platform that is good for growth, for example repurpose podcast content onto a social media platform like instagram or start a youtube channel or start a blog.
- Ads Are Not The Only Way To Monetize A Podcast
There’s a lot of attention given to how much podcasters make off ad reads, but if you’re making a podcast for your business then you don’t want to divert your listeners attention to a different product or service, you want them to do business with you.
Use your podcast to establish authority and showcase examples of the results you can get for your customers, this will make it so that your listeners then become your paying customers, and you’ll be making much more off that than any ad read.