Speaker 1: 0:00

Because what's the stat? How many episodes does an average podcast get to before?

Speaker 2: 0:06

they quit Well one, but I always look past that One. Is the average, really, I think it's one, maybe one and a half or something like that. But to get to eight, if you make it past one. So let's imagine you get your second episode. Congratulations making it to eight. So between two and eight, only 47% of people make it to that point.

Speaker 1: 0:26

Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Welcome to the show, Alex. How are you doing today, Buzz? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:39

I'm saying I love the fact that you made time to be on this show. I really do appreciate it. I know you're very, very busy. Two books this year, Not just one book. Most people are like, yeah, I launched a book, you know, and no, we're just going to do two books at the same time because you know I'm Alex Sanfilippo, right? So then you come onto my show and you try to battle me on blues, Like my dark blue is definitely killing it right here. You have your lights are a little higher than mine, but I'm like the battle of blues is on here.

Speaker 2: 1:09

So that is so funny. The first thing that I mentioned and thought when I got on I was like Ooh, I need to level up my desk in my background. I'm like look at yours. I'm like man, I'm doing some stuff wrong. I'm like taking screenshots. You don know it. Can we cut this guy out of this picture so I can get my ideal?

Speaker 1: 1:27

setup going. I can learn about it. I want to see. So I've seen your behind the scenes thing and I've actually had clients ask me about my setup and so I think in next month, when things slow down just a little bit, I'm going to go ahead and do a YouTube video of a tour of my studio so people can see how simple it is to look fabulous.

Speaker 2: 1:45

Well said, said, I would like you to use that voice the whole time you're doing like the walkthrough of it. You know it's interesting. I did that. I put it on youtube. I think it's a private video on youtube, I'm not certain on that, but it's my most popular video. Oh yeah, people are always like, hey, that that setup's cool and it's just great to be able to be like here. It is instead of like, yeah, let me spend 10 minutes explaining it to you and trying to be helpful, so like, yeah, just listed everything out we used, and since then it's upgraded a little bit, so I probably am overdue for another video.

Speaker 2: 2:12

You know what I'll do I'll release the same week as you. We'll just. We'll just make it a competition, see who gets out first.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Love it. I call it the buzzworthy energy. So now for our listeners. You are now listening to a show that has two podcast hosts. Two podcast hosts, a very successful podcast, two podcast hosts that have used their podcast to position their businesses for growth. And that's what we're going to be talking about today.

Speaker 1: 2:44

Because, alex, one of the books he talked about is what we're gonna be talking about today. Which book is that? What's the title of the book? That is on host PodMatch, host Mastery. There you go, host Mastery, and we'll make sure that we have a link to your book.

Speaker 1: 2:58

And we're also gonna be talking about your platform, because Alex is the founder of PodMatch, which is an awesome program that I use to find good guests for my show and, when I'm guesting, find good hosts to be on show. So definitely an awesome place. We're going to get you guys all that information. But what we're going to talk about today is why you should consider starting your own podcast to help build your business. So the first question I'm going to ask is the obvious question why a podcast when I have a business to run and I don't seem to have a lot of bandwidth as the founder and CEO and the salesperson and the chief dishwasher and all the things that it takes to run my business. You're coming in here to giving me more homework. Why should I even consider it, alex?

Speaker 2: 3:54

Well, first off, maybe find someone to help with the dishes. That's huge. That would be helpful, right, my?

Speaker 1: 3:59

job right there. We're done with the interview. He gave you all the information you need right there no, you're right.

Speaker 2: 4:05

The point is like when you're that early entrepreneur, early business, like you are all the things, and if someone's checking this out and you're not in that lane, you're like, hey, I've already kind of delegated that stuff. There are full-on solutions where you don't have to touch anything with your podcast unless you want to be the voice on it, and you're like I don't even want to be the voice on it. You technically don't have to do that either. So when your team can, you can hire somebody again. That's like a full, like we won't really get into that too much, but there are options out there. Through some very simple searches you can find like full solutions for B2B uh podcasting where you're like, hey, I don't really want to touch it, but I know I need one. And today I think we'll talk more about some some of like the uh, the entry level side of things, like how to get into the space and what value it really adds. But uh, yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:46

So we're able to delegate it right. So we got that that objection out, so why? Why even consider it? Then what? What does hosting a podcast bring to um, specifically to B2B businesses?

Speaker 2: 5:00

Yeah, I'm going to share a story to answer this question. If that's right Buzz, this was a couple of years ago. I started looking into what's called SMS marketing, so text message marketing, where you get a number and it can blast a bunch of people. I was curious to see if that would work for the business. So I went to a search engine and I found three different companies that do it. I was like cool, there are companies that do this, so I don't have to do it manually. Right Again, talking about, like delegating some of this stuff, I'm like cool, there's companies that handle it.

Speaker 2: 5:23

I still don't know anything about it, me being at. I was born in 1988. So I'll let you figure out the age. Like, whenever you're listening to this, you can figure out how old I am. But I was like man, I'm gonna go to a podcast to see if I can learn a little about this SMS marketing stuff. Like, let me see if this works and it turns out. One of those three companies that I was looking at had a podcast that was not pushing their product, telling you you need to buy it 10 things it's gonna do for you. No, they were telling you how to be successful in SMS marketing.

Speaker 2: 5:55

This is what it enables. This is how you're able to like, really impact people. These are the words you wanna use. This is how long you want those messages to be, all those things. I learned two things One, that I could use SMS marketing and probably do really well with it, and two, I figured out which company I wanted to buy from, and it was funny. I told my wife afterwards, like you know what, let me see where they were on price point, because I didn't even take that into consideration. They just helped me. I went back. They were the most expensive of the three and their capabilities weren't that different. Sure, they had a couple of things made them stand out, but the reality is I went with them regardless of price, because they actually invested my education, so I knew I could succeed with their product.

Speaker 1: 6:29

Exactly.

Speaker 1: 6:31

I love that you're bringing that education piece in, because I think one of the things we've been talking about as of late here is AI, and I was talking with somebody and he was talking about the information is power? I said information is no longer power. Information's free and it's at the tip of our fingers. Anybody can have any information they want now, in seconds, on our phone, now even right. But wisdom with information is priceless, and I think when we take the responsibility of teaching or at least offering insights on how to get where people want to be, draws people in, and I personally spent a year being a guest on other people's show to figure out what kind of show I would want, because people are like you've got the voice for a freaking radio show, you should have your own podcast, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah, I don't. There's like a million, there's 2 million podcasts, you know. I'm like and how many marketing podcasts are there? Not as many as you would think. Not as many good ones anyway, and so. But for me, it took me a year to figure out what my voice was going to be, how we were going to do it, and we have a very different show. I mean we almost. It's like you don't know what you're going to get from episode to episode when it comes to format, right, so we break a lot of rules when it came to it, but we found that being ourselves and being the person that I am, which is a teacher I love teaching and I get better at what I do every time I teach. So this is doing exactly what you're talking about with that SMS is that we're we keep bringing in this value for our folks so that once they get stuck because they will get stuck Like if you kept listening to that SMS show you and you said, oh, I'm going to use all their how to's, I'm going to go and get their, their assets and go to the you know the links and maybe even watch a webinar or stuff like that and keep working on it. At some point you're going to get stuck or your team's going to get stuck and you're going to have to hire that company anyway. Right, and that's fine. So I think that bringing that authority is like one of the biggest reasons I do it, and it sounds like that's where you see people showing that value before and showing people how to be there, because not everybody's going to be ready for you anyway. So this is a great way to filter people out. If they're DIYers, they're never going to be your client, right? If they're DIYers, they're never going to be your client, right? If they're ready for you and you resonate with what they're going through, boom, there it is.

Speaker 1: 9:06

So you mentioned that there's a process of getting into being a host. Let's start there. So we've decided like yes, I want to build my authority. I want to increase my know like trust quotient with my audience. I want to increase my no like trust quotient with my audience. I want to have more things to talk about on my social media so that I can be more consistent without having to do a lot more work. So how do we get started?

Speaker 2: 9:23

A lot of people want to overcomplicate this buzz and there's like these, like documents that are a hundred pages long explaining how to start a podcast. I'm like whew, so I'm not affiliated with this company, but you need a hosting provider. I happen to use buzzsproutcom.

Speaker 1: 9:37

They're also not affiliated with Buzz here with us today but at least I don't think they're in the company after you. Well, we love them.

Speaker 2: 9:44

And so buzzsproutcom, I think, to start, I think the starting plan, and I have a $14 a month plan. I have a $14 a month plan.

Speaker 1: 9:50

I think there's a $12 a month plan oh there's no one else.

Speaker 2: 9:51

Okay, for free or something like that, I'm sure, but what that does is that gives you a platform to post your content. So when you record into a microphone, you're basically going to upload it there and they're going to syndicate it for you, which is a fancy way of saying it's going to go to Apple, spotify, amazon, youtube, like all the different places, automatically on your behalf. So you're not like posting at all, and the reality is that's all you need to do to have a podcast. Yes, you need a title, you need a description, need some cover art, you need at least one episode to get started, but beyond that you don't need a whole lot. And even the setups that we have here like this is my forever microphone I'm using.

Speaker 2: 10:25

I'll probably upgrade my camera at some point, but I started talking directly into my phone. That's how I started. Now, if you're B2B, I don't suggest doing that. Have a level of pride. Maybe invest up front in some better gear and get started. But, buzz, I maybe oversimplified it because I've been in this so long Did I miss something?

Speaker 1: 10:44

that's key that you think I should mention you had the two pieces, which is a good microphone, right, and for folks who even like for here, for folks who are watching this on YouTube. You know we're we're both in nice studios, right, um, but I use my studio for my client meetings, I'd use it for my webinars, I use it for when I'm doing a guest speaking with other people's masterminds and stuff like that. So that's why I have invested in that and, plus, I also come from a background of media production, so I can't have anything less than buzzworthy, right. So, with that said microphone, if you're just doing a podcast, you do not have to make it video. There's a lot of people who say you have to do the video because we're in the age of video. I say that would be maybe phase two of you upgrading your show. If it sticks right, microphone, then somewhere to put the show. Buzzsprout. I love Buzzsprout. Neither of us have affiliates with it, so it's just what we use and it's super simple. Even iHeartRadio is on that one, which I think is one that's under realized on that platform.

Speaker 1: 11:44

And then just some. You don't even have to have somebody to talk to, like you didn't even talk about guests, and a lot of people are like well, I don't want to have to go and get guests and I'm like on my show. I don't like to try to hunt for guests, or I don't want to settle for okay, guests, I want awesome guests like Alex. So I'll do monologues until I find a group of guests and then I'll do a bunch of guests and then I'll go back to monologues and it keeps it fresh for me, right? And that's the thing I think that in being simple, you're keeping it easy for you to maintain, because what's the? What's the stat I, how many people, how many episodes does a stand, a average podcast, get to before?

Speaker 2: 12:27

they quit Well one, but I always look past that One is the average really, I think I think it's one, maybe one and a. I always look past that. One Is the average really. I think it's one, maybe one and a half or something like that. But to get to eight, if you make it past one. So let's imagine you get your second episode, congratulations, making it to eight. So between two and eight, only 47% of people make it to that point.

Speaker 2: 12:49

And then 100, by the way 100 is where I consider like meaningful traction to start happening. It's less than I can't remember the exact percentage off my head. It's like right around 10% of people make it that far, or something like that. It's like man and, by the way, I keep the stats updated, so I'm not just like making this up. If you go to pod matchcom slash report, you can. It doesn't need an email address or anything like that. That's like all the but I mean. Here's the thing.

Speaker 2: 13:08

By the way, starting a podcast is not the same thing as having a podcast. It's really important that upfront you commit like this is part of the launch. I think it's committing to a certain amount of time that you say I'm going to do this regardless of the response that I receive, the downloads I get any of those things. Those metrics ignore those for as long as you can, saying I'm going to try this once a week, once every other week, once a month for one year before I make any decision on how to change this Now of course, update your format, get better at it, but just don't quit along the way, because that's what is required.

Speaker 2: 13:40

to really be a podcaster is to consistently release value adding episodes for your listeners to hear 100%.

Speaker 1: 13:46

And one of the things I tell my clients is that go ahead and just get 10 episodes recorded and ready to go and don't release them all at once and now you're 10. And if you do it once a week right, and I usually say people is like I've got a client right now they're they're launching their podcasts and they're only doing every other week I'm like that's better than zero, right. So I'm like, okay, great, there's people who only do it once a month. Now, the people who do it once a month usually do longer shows and they curate a lot more information per show, right. But the standard that I've seen is usually once a week.

Speaker 1: 14:23

But do what's good for you and get 10 of them in there. So if you did one every other week and you just recorded 10, okay, you can get 10 done in like a week or two weeks done, right. And you said you're doing every other week, you now have five months worth of podcasts already scheduled and in Buzzsprout you can have them all scheduled at the same time and put them out to where they roll out automatically and you don't even have to worry about it for five months. That gives you five months to come up with the next five months worth of content. If you do it every week, you're talking two and a half months. That's almost a whole quarter, and that's just, and you're going to be in the top 10 percentile because you've already passed 10 episodes right.

Speaker 2: 15:02

What we do internally with us is we do 13 weeks is kind of like how we batch them. So we batch the work in 13 week groupings, which is a full quarter. We do that four times a year and we basically say, cool, 13 are done. We take six weeks off and then we come back to it, we start doing the next round again and we get it knocked out in just a couple of weeks.

Speaker 2: 15:19

The podcast really is like the center of our education. It's the center of what brings people to what we do. The amount of time we spend on it is so small in comparison to some of the other tasks that don't yield nearly the result. And again, it's our educational wing. This is how people understand what we do, but also how to succeed as a podcast guest host, because our podcast is about podcasting, but it's just that's the world that we live in and man, it's just not taking a whole lot of time, but it's really been very valuable for a lot of people and us as well, because we have great speakers. Come on and share.

Speaker 1: 15:50

I want the listeners to hear what Alex just said, that it is the hub of our educational piece. Education and marketing go hand in hand. Nowadays, people don't care what you know until they know how much you care. Well, nobody cares more than your teachers. Period. End of story.

Speaker 1: 16:11

Right, if people are willing to teach you things that they usually get paid for, that means they care, and you can hear it in their voices. You can see it in the quality or the value they bring to know and not just leaving out one little piece of information that makes it a house of cards, but really giving you stuff that you can run with. Those are the people you should follow. Those are the people that you should then aspire to be right. And so if there's somebody that you've listened to a podcast or maybe you listen, you watch their YouTube channels Same thing, guys. Like. A YouTube channel is just another form of podcasting, right, it's just a different channel of it with that uses video, but it's people talking on microphones in front of cameras, versus not in front of cameras, like that's it right. So I like the. There was another thing you said in there, in that we do not need to be paying attention to the number of downloads for the first 100, which would be, if you did every week, almost two years episodes. Why is that?

Speaker 2: 17:21

Man, because I find that people that are looking too much at that are looking for the wrong validation for what they do. A great example of this is if you only work with billionaires. Let's imagine, right In the United States specifically, and you're like all right, I have a podcast that's tailored to those billionaires, but only 770 people are listening every week. I don't get it. Well, there's only 770 billionaires in the United States, so why are you going to say why is this show not getting bigger? Well, it shouldn't, right, and that's a very extreme example of the idea of having a niche, a vertical that you serve in. For me, my podcast is not huge. Like if you go to the website podmatchcom, slash episodes I actually show my download numbers there and it's it's not a lot. And people are always like wow, I thought you have a bigger podcast. I'm like I speak to podcast guests and hosts who want to level up. Like, how many of those are there, right? Like there's not a whole lot, and so I just find that, like, looking at that on an ongoing basis breeds the wrong thing. What I say to look at is how much value am I adding? Is this a good, diverse base of education? Am I developing that know, like and trust, as you brought up earlier, buzz Like is that stuff becoming part of this really well?

Speaker 2: 18:24

And the other thing I'll mention here is I think that some of us are preconditioned by social media and that's why we want to look at the numbers, because numbers really do matter on social media. But this is not the same thing. You can't compare the two. The best example I can give is someone who is on social media. They're usually on the couch killing time, not really focused, not necessarily looking to educate themselves, not always, but most of the time. The general population of people there, that's kind of the time waster thing. When people are listening to podcasts, I say it's equivalent to somebody sitting in a seat with you on stage. They're there to learn and to educate themselves and to further the craft that they're so desperately working to make bigger, to improve, to get better, right, and so those things are really different and that's why I say from day one like, don't commit to the stats, look every now and then to make sure it doesn't say zero, because then something might be broken, right.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Right, right, right, you marry to it. Yeah, and when we talk about not very big, like when I first started my podcast two years ago, a little over two years ago now, I mean our first week we got eight downloads and that's with us promoting it, right, and I've got like eight or 9,000 people on LinkedIn and four or 5,000 people on Facebook and I would figure like I'd get at least a hundred of them to listen to it. No, eight, eight in a whole week, you know, and that didn't go very far and in, and I don't think that it matters if it gets much bigger than maybe a hundred downloads. You know, there's a lot of. There's people I meet that are, you know, just like you were talking about. You know, like yourself, like people think they have big podcasts and it's like no, they have big podcasts and it's like no, they have a very loyal small following. And if you think about your business, how many of those listeners could you serve if they all came at once? Right, you don't need 30,000 people unless you know that it's only going to be 0.00002% that are going to actually call you. Right, but the thing is this I have found well, I mean even with me guesting and we're going to have to have you back to talk about guesting as well.

Speaker 1: 20:16

Um, the I had one interview that I did with um. A guy who did that was taught that talked to tradesmen, right. Um, somebody called me off that show. It was a $60,000 contract from just hearing me talk for 30 minutes on somebody else's show. So when I got that, that was like the kick in the pants. To go by the way, you should be doing that every day on your own show, right, because I was borrowing somebody else's audience. You don't have to have an audience to build your authority. Just having the podcast puts you at a next echelon of building authority, and doing that no like trust that we've been talking about. So what is the? So if we're getting out there, we're using it. Is a podcast just good for podcasting, or is there something else we could do with our podcast to help our marketing?

Speaker 2: 21:10

Yeah, I mean first and foremost, like the podcast itself. Like you said, it's an authority builder. It makes you stand out. I'm sure there's an SEO impact, which I talked to Buzz about that. I'm sure there's something there as well. That's out of my lane. But the big thing in the way that we use it strategically internally and I'll just say this is my favorite way to use a podcast is when someone comes in saying I wish I knew more about X, I want to learn how to Y. I've been really focused on Z.

Speaker 2: 21:34

We have built out an internal system where we can just look up do we have a podcast episode about X, y or Z that this person's asking about? If we do, we in a very nice way. We don't say, listen to this episode, right. We say, hey, I actually talked to my buddy, buzz about this on the podcast. I think you'd really value from hearing what he has to say about this on the podcast. I think you'd really value from hearing what he has to say about this.

Speaker 2: 21:51

Here's a link to it. And every time it converts and every time they're saying what else do you do? How else can I work with you to tell me more about your world? And we build a very relational business through this wing of very hands-on education that doesn't require extra work. The episode's out. We've built this repository, this database of hundreds of episodes now that we can use at any given moment, and to me that's the real power of it. When people ask me questions, they don't stump me because I'm not the one giving the answer. Someone else came to my show that's much smarter than me and gave the answer. I'm just pushing people to that resource.