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Podcast Evolution: Strategies for Visibility & Monetization in 2024 with Erin Billings
Ever wondered how to pivot your podcasting strategy in an industry that's constantly evolving?
That's exactly what Erin Billings and I tackle in our latest chat, packed with insights on staying afloat amidst market shifts like Spotify's cutbacks and the decline of ad revenue.
By dissecting four core elements of a successful podcasting ecosystem, we give you a masterclass on leveraging market research, analytics, and strategic marketing to not only reach but resonate with your audience.
Erin introduces the 'pod funnel' concept, a formidable strategy linking podcasts to lead generation and business growth, detailing how to craft compelling content that enthralls both public and private listeners, particularly during times of celebration.
Wrapping up, we examine the finesse of monetization within the podcasting realm, from dynamic ads to private podcasts, leveraging tools like Hello Audio for enhanced lead generation.
Sharing personal experiences, we dive into the high conversion rates from targeted landing pages and the unexpected perks of intertwining media in podcast promotion. This episode is full of actionable insights whether you're a veteran podcaster or just tuning in, eager to refine your content strategy and excel in this ever-changing podcasting landscape.
So the landscape of podcasting in general is changing. Is your content? Is it really reaching your audience? First of all, have you done market research for your podcast? This is the information. If you're going to go and say, I would love for you to sponsor my podcast, you have to have this data to be able to hand over to the person that you're asking. I mean, generally, you're creating a pitch deck, but keeping the analytics all in one place is something that I have found, personally, to be incredibly important.
Speaker 2:I'm so happy to have Erine back on the show after two years to talk about podcast funnels. Erine, do you want to reintroduce yourself? For those who have missed the first episode of yours, I'd love to start with that.
Speaker 1:Sure, my name is Erin Billings. You know, I'm a creative, I'm a producer, I own a done for you agency called Click Management, and so creatives tend to be up late at night, and so I've just been kind of I've been getting all these creative downloads of things that I want to do and projects that I already have in the works, and so it's. You know, I was up till about four o'clock this morning, just. You know, my brain just naturally gravitates towards work, just because I love what I do so much. So it's, yeah, I do things with podcasts, specifically podcast funnels. I'm a music producer. I recently did an entire orchestration project for an artist that won the Masked Singer. Let's see what else has she been on. She was on Glee, she was on Dancing with the Stars. She won that. So, like, I do a lot of things still in the music industry, but I've really pivoted everything towards podcasting and I love it. It's such a fun platform to be heard, to share your message all across the world and really make an impact in people's lives.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I can relate with being up late at night. I think I went to sleep at 3am.
Speaker 1:Well you're, I get the creative vibe from you two. So like we're all kind of similar in that way, yeah, I know I woke up at 12.
Speaker 2:But I don't know, it's so crazy to me that you're so heavily still involved in the music industry. I mean, they all come together like full circle, right? It's just the podcasting and the music industry, and it's just like I don't think you can ever shake it off and just be like nope, nope, not doing any projects anymore. No, I'm just well, that's what I do.
Speaker 1:It's very. Actually, my music team is actually my podcast team, which that's something that I don't think people realize. You know it's the same recording components. We use the same skill set that we use in music for podcasting. I use the same skill set whenever I'm producing musicals and plays and things for stage as I use for podcasting and even some projects that I'm working on for television and like series and stuff like that. You know it's all the same creative skill set, but it's okay, how do I take this creativity and put it in this, on this platform and in this format, and what's going to serve my audience best here?
Speaker 2:What do you think just to compare it to two years ago when podcasting was, you know, still very much in, but what do you think has changed as far as, like, people using podcasts to grow their names and visibility in the past two years, like, where do you see this heading?
Speaker 1:So what I can tell you is that podcasting has had a huge shift in the past two years, just from a strictly business standpoint. So let's look at the industry. Let's let me just give you a quick overview. Let's take a look at Spotify. Spotify cut 6% of their podcast workforce last year. And it's not just Spotify. Google Podcast is on its way out. It's I call it the dinosaur, because it literally is. It's a dinosaur and people don't use it. That's why they are repositioning it right now.
Speaker 1:If you look at some of the different podcast hosting platforms that are either pivoting their strategy or they are going out of business, or they are being bought up by a bigger conglomerate. So the the ad, podcast ads there's not near as much money going into podcast ads in the past two years as there was during the pandemic. So the landscape of podcasting in general is changing and so going forward. That's why I'm a very strategic person whenever it comes to well, anything in life. But we have to be much more strategic with how we podcast, the systems that we put in place so that we succeed. Otherwise it's going to fall flat, and that can be in your content, that can be in your messaging, that could be in your marketing. You know, those are the things. I call it the podcast ecosystem. You have to have all of the parts of the ecosystem in place for a healthy, successful podcast, just like we have to have a good ecosystem in place to breathe whenever we walk outside. So that's just kind of my take on it.
Speaker 2:How will you describe a healthy ecosystem?
Speaker 1:for the podcast specifically.
Speaker 1:Sure. So, like I mentioned the that in my, in my mind, there's four different things that make a good podcast, the first being the creative. So the creative meaning what is your content? Is it really reaching your audience? First of all, have you done market research for your podcast? That is something that whenever I meet with podcasters and they're asking me why am I not getting any downloads, why am I not monetizing? Well, have you done your research? Have you ran your comps? Like, do you know who you are talking to? What are your, what are your analytics telling you? You know those kinds of things.
Speaker 1:I love analytics, I love a good data set, and so, especially whenever it comes to the marketing component, we have to look at the numbers. But the first thing is you know the content. The creative it has to be engaging for people to want to continue to listen and for you to have a higher retention rate from week to week for your listeners. So the creative has to be popping. And then the messaging. So what is the messaging that you are using in your marketing to get people to listen? The messaging, that's.
Speaker 1:I think that's like the lost art whenever it comes to content creation, Because messaging can make or break your business, not just your podcast, but your business. And so whenever your messaging is aligned with your business strategy, with your personal brand strategy, with all of these different things, whenever things in alignment, that's when you have higher conversion rates. And then the marketing. So, like I was talking about, let's look at the analytics, not only the podcast analytics, but let's look at the analytics on your social media platforms, at your email marketing, at your SMS marketing. I look at analytics because I also use media to help grow my base. That media is one arm of my business because it is so powerful. And so you know, looking at the analytics of the visibility report that you get whenever you publish a press release, those kinds of things, monitoring the click-through rates and the engagement rates, all of that stuff matters. And so whenever you have those four components in place, it really does, like that's when your podcast really blows up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think maybe we can talk about this a bit more and going to the funnel itself, but If you have four, maybe you nail the creative side right. You nail the creative, you know who you're talking to, but then still you can get people to listen. That's also a problem. So it seems to me that your pillars, they come hand in hand and if something is missing it's just not going to go very well, right.
Speaker 1:That's. You know I don't like to speak in black and white. You know you can have, you know, okay, success if, let's say, you have three out of the four, but if you only have one of the four, you probably are only getting 10 downloads an episode. And so that's really and there's another part of this that, like I know, people will roll their eyes whenever they hear me say this but there's a consistency factor as well, Because you can be putting out episodes week after week after week, but if you're not promoting them, nobody's going to know that you have a new episode out. So there's there's lots of variables at play.
Speaker 1:The people that come to me to work with me, we. What I do in like one of the first sessions is I just say, okay, I want to look at all of the numbers, and I'm not talking about your like, just hosting platform analytics. There are multiple layers of analytics that people don't even think about. For example, I bet you didn't know that you could go into your Apple podcasts connect account and look at your consumption rate, which is one of the most important metrics. You can actually find it in Spotify for podcasters as well. So each individual distributor has their own platform that you can go into and look at a deeper level, deeper level of analytics, and that's where you really find the T.
Speaker 2:Wow, I'm. I'm still going to go to my podcasters. You know Apple or Spotify blockers. I'm just going to check the consumption rate, because I haven't checked either. I'm like shit, okay.
Speaker 1:That's. That's a really good metric to let you know how you're connecting with your audience, because if your consumption rate is like 20%, then that tells me you have either too long of episodes or they're just not interested. So I also use consumption rate to gauge. Okay, is an hour episode too long? For some people it is. I'm a 20 minute episode listener, like I like 20 to 30 minutes Now, of course, like my podcast. Well, one of my podcasts, touchy Subjects.
Speaker 1:Whenever I have panels, there's no way I can get in and out in 30 minutes or less. When I have three people that all like to talk, there's no way those episodes end up being an hour to hour 15. But what I've noticed is, because I pick really good panelists, people tend to stay because what they're saying is interesting. But another way that you can look at your analytics is by okay, for example, when we're talking in context of content, let's go through your latest season of episodes. What are your top three? And then what context is that like? What content pillar do those fall under? And then create more episodes like the ones that have the highest engagement, and then what that does is that just keeps people listening. So, for example, touchy Subjects.
Speaker 1:I think my three highest episodes were one about cults, which that's something that everybody loves, so I knew that that was going to be an instant hit One about spiritual narcissism that was probably my highest downloaded episode last year because narcissism is trendy. It is a trendy word right now and people are into it, so I know that I can go do another thing about narcissism and it'll blow up. The other one was about reconstructing relationships, and so if I make more episodes around those three areas, I know that they are going to attract the right listeners and the consumption rate is going to go up and they're going to keep listening, because what I found with my podcast is people binge the heck out of it, because it is such a good content strategy, because I did my market research and I know who is listening to my podcast.
Speaker 2:I love that. By the way, I keep seeing the Touchy Subject episodes as well, and I just am a huge fan, so keep them coming, thank, you, thank you. I wanted to ask you this because obviously we talk about what people need, what people want to hear and send to and be more strategic on that. But what do you think is the balance between what the creator wants to talk about versus what other people want to hear? Because I think there has to be some kind of balance. I'm like okay, you know what?
Speaker 2:I know it's trendy, but it's just like. I just want to talk about this topic.
Speaker 1:That's a really great question. I think we tend to flock towards people that are in alignment with our value systems and, for example. So I'm just going to use Touchy Subjects because it's fresh for me right now, because I'm working on season two and I know that. So Touchy Subjects is all about faith, deconstruction and reconstruction. So the backstory here real quick.
Speaker 1:While I was working in music, I would also work in church, because that was just extra cash. I just show up on Sunday, be the music director, talk in the talk back mic, tell everybody what to do and where to go, and that's money in the bank, perfect. Well, I was on staff at a mega church and I was sexually harassed by four pastors on staff and it rocked my world because, as a Christian, as a pastor's kid, that completely just it disrupted my view of how pastors should be, and so I didn't know that there was a word for how I was feeling back then. But the word is deconstruction, and so I put deconstruction on everything. I call myself a deconstruction advocate because I know how deconstructing my faith has actually made me closer to God. It's made me closer to my family. It's really helped me get myself into alignment with what my true values are versus my conditioned values and beliefs, and so people tend to navigate, you know, they go towards the people that they see are going with similar situations. So, for example, I have had a lot of chronic illness in my body because I was repressing so much anger and resentment towards the church, and so whenever I started to heal those issues, my chronic illnesses actually got better, and so I did some episodes about how trauma affects the body.
Speaker 1:Now, those were episodes that I created because they were important to me. Now, that was actually my least listened to episode all year. It was still, you know, a good download count, but it was the least one, but I did it for me, because that's something that I know that maybe the people out there listening may not be ready to hear that, but I guarantee you, even if it's a year down the road, I will get a message from somebody saying, hey, thanks for that tip. I'm going to go talk to a human design expert and they're going to tell me how to fix my digestion by living and eating according to my human design digestion, you know. Or I'm going to go talk to somebody that can help me regulate my nervous system, you know, and those are things that I talked about in that episode, because that's important to me. It may not be relevant for my audience today, but I guarantee you it will at some point, and so I think for me that's the balance, and, of course, to each their own.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I love that and I think the your main viewpoint that deconstructing your faith is still Kind of lingering in all of the episodes I'm sure, like when you talk about spiritual narcissism, for example you're still talking through your viewpoint of you know that's your own, so it's not like you're completely Abandoning who you are when you talk about topics and you're just like, well, that's what's you know trending and and Completely forgetting who you are when you talk about it.
Speaker 2:It's still you and still your own take on it, I imagine. So it's not, yes, so far off and, of course, taking topics that are important to you as well, even though it's not the most Downloaded now I mean, yeah, you can stay true to yourself in the process as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Okay, I think it's. It's a nice bit to go to the podcast funnels and I want you to. I think you mentioned as well in the in the private messages that we had a Client that you know you have managed to get pretty high success with their podcast funnels. What is a podcast funnel and how can we Cultivate that?
Speaker 1:in our own show. So a pod. I call it a pod funnel, just because it's a trendy word, catchy it is.
Speaker 1:I like pod funnels because I think that people should be using their podcast. If you're podcasting for business or to monetize, you have to get leads to monetize, and so a podcast funnel essentially is a lead generation machine, and so the way that I run a podcast funnel so, first of all, we've got public podcasts, we've got private podcasts, and you can you can do either or or. You can do both. Recently I did a project for the holidays and I did a public facing prop the podcast to get people interested and then I did a simultaneous private podcast as a lead generation because I'm in the process of Starting a nonprofit and so I'm building the email list for my nonprofit. So For me, what I did was the public, was interviews, where I would go in, and I interviewed 14 experts on different areas Regarding the holidays. So what are the issues that people face during the holiday season? You know they have to deal with toxic family members. They have to deal with their kids being home for two or three weeks and they don't know what to do with them. They've got to deal with potentially gaining weight, because the food is so good at the holidays that they have no self-control and they don't want to gain weight. They want to stay on budget so that by the time January rolls around they still have money in their bank account. You know and so that just that's four episodes off the top of my head that I invited experts to come and I interviewed them and then what I allowed them to do on the private side was they were allowed to give a 15-20 minute training so that people could go in and learn real, actionable tips and strategies to be able to improve their life during the holiday season. And it was very successful. This particular pod funnel, I was able to get it to chart within the first month of publishing it. It, as of, I think, like this past week, it was in the top 2% global rank Within a month. So so on the public side of things, it was very, very, very effective. And then on the private side of things is the lead generation. So I create a landing page that says the holiday survival Private podcast. You know, you put in your information and then it gives them a link to be able to subscribe on whatever podcast platform they are and Listen to the trainings.
Speaker 1:I Also monetized through dynamic ads. So dynamic ads are when you can put an attribution link Into your podcast show notes and you can track the clicks and you can actually in in some, in some technology you can actually track the conversion rates as well. I did not use that because I did not have time, because I was working on a Christmas music project for that artist, so I was doing multiple huge things at once. So I didn't go the full length, I just did the basic pod funnel, and so what I found was that we had over.
Speaker 1:I did two different dynamic ads. One of the dynamic ads had got 50 leads Just from having a dynamic ad in the podcast funnel. So that's not bad, considering they were in one episode. Yeah, so, and of course I think we had I Want to say we had about 15,000 listeners for that particular project. So that's where you know. Okay, 50 leads compared to 15,000. They not all 15,000 listened to every single episode, but that's not bad for that one particular episode. And then I think we had I Want to say we had about 700 leads From that. So if I think it might have been in the 712 range, yeah, so that's not bad.
Speaker 2:So, so, basically, just to you, for the listeners who don't know the difference between a public and a private podcast, so that basically the private one is a subscription based podcast, right? When people can pay a monthly fee to listen, to access the episodes, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't have to see yeah, so you can charge for the private. You can run it like patreon or something like that. I'd the way I did. It was free. I do have clients that I've done pod funnels for that.
Speaker 1:They made theirs paid mm-hmm and In fact, one of them is projected to hit six figures from that funnel Just because the series was such a hit. So you know there's there's multiple ways of doing it. But yeah, the private podcast it's. You can actually choose. Do you want to listen to it on Apple? Do you want to listen to it on Google? Do you want to listen to? You know, all the different Distributors are still the same. It's just, it's not public RSS, it is a private RSS and okay, track you. You get much better analytics on a private. I can actually tell who listened the like, their email address and how many, how, the, the consumption rates. It's it's on the private side of things. There's some like it's basically a listener CRM.
Speaker 2:It's really cool, so so basically, the listener CRM is it's only for the private podcast. I mean that you get more Data on, oh yeah, the listeners and if you use.
Speaker 1:So I use hello audio and I love hello audio Because it is a listener CRM. That's how they've branded themselves and, with that said, you can go in there. You can see who is listening. You can listen. You can see how much they're listening. You can actually Tag them if they listen to a specific episode. You can tag them and they will hear a Dynamic ad that maybe the people who aren't listening to every episode they may. So it's like you can put a special offer If they've listened to all ten episodes that you have out. You know there's there's different things that you can do with it that you can't do with just a regular Private pod or public podcast. Rather.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so basically just to recap on the, but both funnel, right. So one of the ways for you and for your clients to Monetize, you know, gain more leads, get leads, you know, out of the show, was to kind of create this private and public podcast and they kind of the in dance with each other, in working together, right, right. What are other ways that we can go about monetizing? If that's what we want, and at which point can we turn our show into something that is monetizable?
Speaker 1:So you can monetize from the jump. I know people who don't have, you know they might be in the 5 or 10 percent global rank and they're monetizing and so you don't have to have, you know, a thousand downloads per episode to monetize. There's other structures that you can put into place. I have clients that have merch lines to monetize their podcast. I have clients that have newsletters like sub stack blogs that they monetize that way. I have clients that have marketing packages, so sponsors, but a little bit more elevated Affiliate marketing. I have a client who has a dog podcast and she went to a really cute little bougie dog boutique and they sell these really like chic dog leashes, and so anybody who buys a leash from her link in her podcast gets to. You know she'll make a commission off of that. So you know there's all of those different kinds of ways. There's sponsors. Sponsors is a much more advanced. I don't.
Speaker 1:I, whenever I tell people when it comes to podcasting, I say start in the other ways before you go to sponsors, because sponsors is a different beast and you have to have the metrics. And a lot of times when it comes to like, for example, I have a client who is projected to hit one million downloads this year and they are working towards sponsors. They have a few sponsors, but the way that I like to do sponsors is actually through a marketing package. But you can also do brand deals, because they have 100,000 followers on TikTok. They have 50,000 followers on Instagram. You know they have 22,000 people listening to their podcast monthly. At least 22 is like the bottom number. So those are sponsor level metrics. A lot of times people have to work there and so, but you can still put a marketing package in place if you have a good engaged following, especially because podcast listeners tend to buy more.
Speaker 1:There are statistics that prove that, because they say that podcast listeners are more educated. They say that there is more trust built from the host. That's why host read ads are better received than just regular. You know the sponsor creating the ad themselves, so you can actually charge more if you're going to have ads that are not your own on your podcast. You can charge more if it's host read, and so there's.
Speaker 1:But also one of the reasons I tell people not to go straight to sponsors is because sponsors is based off of your CPM, your cost per 1000 listeners. So if you only have 1000 listeners, then you're going to only see, you know, 18 to $25 for a 30 second ad per 1000 listeners. So it's not a whole lot of money. But if you have 22,000 downloads, 22 times 25, I don't do math in public, but you get the idea there's a little bit more money involved there. And then when you add in the marketing package of OK, well, I'm going to put a little blurb at the end of my newsletter that will have your link or I'll put you know we can do it TikTok live, that kind of thing and get your face out there in front of the TikTok audience as well as the podcast audience. That's where the money is. So you know there's lots of ways to monetize a podcast. Those are some of my favorites.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love them. I love how you said that you need to build. There has to be you know the metrics that has to be there for sponsors. It doesn't work, you know, without, because they care about metrics. Can you fake metrics? By the way, I just wonder, because you can buy followers on Instagram, I wonder if you can tell when it's bought.
Speaker 1:You can't fake podcast metrics, as far as I can tell, because oh, that's well, that's a really good. So podcast metrics are generally IAB certified. So if your metrics are IAB certified, then those are real because you're getting they're using third party Like, for example, if you go to listennotescom, you can plug in whatever podcasts that you'd like to listen to. You can see their global rank. They're using third party API to tell you that rank, so that kind of stuff, and those are based off of the IAB certified analytics. So you can't fake that.
Speaker 2:Okay, just something I was curious about. You know if there is something.
Speaker 1:I have so something that I just created, because I have a few new clients that are going in the in the sponsor direction. I have something that I created for them and I can give it to you, and if you want to give it to your audience, you're welcome to as well. But I it's literally a Google sheet, but it's an, it's a I call it the pod tracker, and we're just tracking our analytics across all platforms, because this, this is the information. If you're going to go and say I would love for you to sponsor my podcast, you have to have this data to be able to hand over to the person that you're asking. I mean, generally, you're creating a pitch deck, but keeping the analytics all in one place is something that I have found, personally, to be incredibly important. It also gives you a more holistic view of how you're doing in your business.
Speaker 1:Is my email list growing? Is my text list growing? You know, am I getting more followers on the other platforms? That's important stuff. You know how many is my Facebook group growing? All of those things matter, and so having your analytics all in one place, I believe, is very helpful for all of us to see. So I'm happy I'll give you that. It's just like I said, it's a Google sheet.
Speaker 2:Just create some opting for that and we can throw it in the show notes somewhere for the people to download it up to.
Speaker 1:If you want to Sure, yeah, no like that's, it's it's easy, but it's like it's common sense. But I do think it's very important to have all of that data easily grabbable.
Speaker 2:I wanted to ask you this as well, because people ask me this question all the time, especially because I know Facebook ads side. How can they get more listeners on the show, Like, can they do paid ads to get more listeners, or what are the? Other ways for people to get just as far as like promotion you know, obviously posting on social media. Well, what are your go to ways to do for yourself or for your clients to get to make sure that you actually do a good job? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Paid ads. I love paid ads. I have a Facebook ads expert on my team. That is just phenomenal. And so I generally run lead gen ads because you know, for example, if you're running meta ads which is Facebook and Instagram for those out there listening that don't know how this works. So if you're doing like in a brand awareness ad, people are just going to look at it. If you run an engagement ad, people are just going to engage with it, meaning they're going to like, they're going to comment it. Meta shows engagement ads to people who engage. Meta shows traffic ads to people who click and it shows lead generation ads to people who opt in and actually engage in that way. And so I run lead generation ads for my podcast, so that you know that the creative, the copy, all has to be in alignment with the landing page that you send them to. This is how you get the highest conversion rate. My average conversion rate on landing page from Podfunnel is 45% with my clients, which is really high because the industry standard is, I believe, 20.
Speaker 2:18, 18 actually, oh, it's 18. Yeah, ok, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so 45 is pretty good, it's very good. So 45% conversion rate from add to landing page into the Podfunnel. Now, from there, once you have the email address, you want them to engage. So you're going to want to send an email sequence or a text sequence. Now here's the kicker.
Speaker 1:I have had 100% engagement on all of my Podfunnels that I've ran like this. That's unheard of. I have it written down here. The average live workshop attendance rate is between 10 and 20%. Average 30% is good for engagement rate. If you do a video series, about less than 5%, so we're knocking. If you do a Podfunnel, as opposed to a webinar or something like that, we're seeing much higher engagement. I mean near perfect. We did have perfect, but I don't always want to put it out there as guarantees as you're going to have a perfect engagement, but in my experience we have had perfect engagement. A lot of the reason is because of the email and SMS. Because emails the average open rate for email is 20%. The average open rate for SMS is 99%. So SMS has been a game changer for Podfunnels because it's so much easier to just click and listen and that's another way to open up, a way to nurture. Podcasts are great for nurture and so you know, having the SMS opportunity, you should be able to close in those conversations.
Speaker 2:Do you feel that putting the phone number field making the ads more expensive? Because that's what I've been seeing for clients, not for podcasts specifically, but for like webinar, live webinar or like pre-recorded, you know, evergreen stuff Is that the more information we ask, the more expensive the ads get.
Speaker 1:I haven't seen that with our clients. I can't speak to that. Our cost per lead so we did a huge Podfunnel project that was time sensitive back in October and our cost per lead was 265, and we had over 700 leads for that. Yeah, it's pretty good. So, like I said, my my Facebook at ads expert she's amazing, but also the messaging it like. You don't get those kinds of metrics without the messaging Just being nailed and I mean I have a really good messaging expert on my team. So it's one of those things where this is that podcast ecosystem that I was talking about. When you have all of them working together, man, it is a phenomenal system and it's created and it's like, okay, I can sit back and relax these leads are gonna.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's that's.
Speaker 1:That's why I love a good Pod funnel, because I don't like doing you. You might see me doing like one masterclass a month, just because I like to engage with people. But if I'm gonna put something out on evergreen, it's gonna be a pod funnel Mm-hmm, because the like, the metrics don't lie.
Speaker 2:Yeah so. I love it and I also love your team that you have such a great team, you know, and you kind of put together a really, really awesome team. I Haven't.
Speaker 1:Oh, the other thing that I was gonna mention was media, because I you asked me what I do personally media. So I like, yes, I have. I love my team. I am very, very thankful for them because I'm one of those people that I choose people to work with based off of you know they have these strengths that are weaknesses of mine, and so when you build a really solid team that you know we all shine in different areas and then we come together, man, there's nothing we can't do and I love that. But Media is another area that has been very and I don't think people realize that you can use media To grow. Your podcast I just did this with, with the holiday podcast and the day that, the day that I released the two press releases, were the two days that it charted.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 1:Wow, so like I can't make it up. The cool thing about media these days and this is something that I've been testing is that you can actually embed your podcast into a press release. You can embed YouTube you like, of course you can embed like images and stuff like that. But if you embed that podcast right into the press release, that's easy download because they're just gonna click the listen. And so for me, what I do is I embed the trailer, get people because, like, if you don't have a trailer for your podcast, I highly recommend Putting one together, because people go to the trailer to listen. It's just like a movie. If I see a trailer in a commercial, it's like, oh, I'm gonna. I literally just want to go see Mean Girls over the weekend. You know, I saw the trailer. I was like that looks really good.
Speaker 2:Was it good, by the way I was contemplating and seeing?
Speaker 1:okay, so was it good? Yes, but it was basically the musical I did. Here's what I didn't like about Mean Girls, and this is, of course, my music industry brain coming out the. I don't think they should have replicated the same exact Storyline. I think that had. Did you see the gossip girl reboot on HBO Max? Oh yeah, it was really bad. So they but they should have taken that direction with Mean Girls. They should have made it a new crew of Mean Girls instead of. It's the same exact story With oh, it is music.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh, my god, and it's funny because, like, there were certain lines, of course, that they did not change throughout the whole thing, but it just didn't feel right because I mean, the original Mean Girls is a cult classic, so that's where, like, I liked it, it was good. I Think I would have differed, did it differently, but that's okay. The music side of things was was okay. I didn't particularly care for some of the. There was one actress that I thought nailed it. She was the girl who played Regina George. She nailed it. But everybody else, oh, you know what I did, like the, the Janice and Damien duo. They were great, but those were the only three that I was like. Yes, everybody else was kind of iffy, but that's just my take on the movie. Movie reviews.
Speaker 2:Okay, people think back to the topics. Sorry, welcome to my. Yeah, no. I mean it was worth it, but you know, yeah, so we were talking about, you know, trailer creating trailer for our show. Mm-hmm, I love.
Speaker 1:I love a good trailer trailers. We underestimate their value, and so what I started doing? So whenever we notice that, you know, numbers across the board in podcasting we're dipping as you know, this was last year, like around the middle of last year, or whenever, I can't tell you how many people started coming to me saying You're in my podcast, numbers are dipping. What's going on here? I started testing different things. One of my clients. I Started testing a series model, and so what we do is we create a trailer for every series, and the series will be about eight, you know, six to eight episodes, and that model worked like a charm. But what I recognized was that people were going to listen to the trailer to see if they wanted to listen to the series hmm, so you've got to have a bang-in trailer To be able to let people know what they're getting into.
Speaker 1:And actually, if I go to my metrics for the holiday survival podcast I created, oh, there's another piece. If you are out there and you're thinking about starting a podcast, the reason you want to trailer is because that gets you your feeds across the board for the other platforms without you having to wait for a week and a half for Apple podcast to give you an RSS feed. You Upload the trailer as the thing to get you the feed and then you can set your launch date from there so that you're not waiting. You would, you don't want to launch with only, let's say, spotify. So that's where that's what I tell people to do create your trailer and then, once that's done, once we have all of your feeds, then we'll we'll set the launch date.
Speaker 1:But the trailer is so good for One like if you have guests on your podcasts. It allows people to hear the kinds of guests that you have and you know it, they can vibe with it or they could hear it and they'd be like you know it. Yeah, this, this isn't worth my time. So you know, I just I like trailers, trailers For my clients and for myself have been very beneficial.
Speaker 2:Get on the trailer train guys. Trailers are the best I mean I wanted to talk to you about before you know, we wrap up our episode because, when I keep it as well, under an hour Cost okay. So when we talked about either it's a press release or An average cost for investing to get more visibility, or on our episodes, what would be Something that people need to invest or that you see the people have been investing working with you Just for the Ad cost.
Speaker 1:I mean. Well, the ad cost, you can okay. So here's the crazy thing if you have a really solid audience and you have really good caption, creative, and your landing page converts, all of that contributes towards cost. I Know people, in fact, that the Facebook ads expert on my team, she actually teaches her clients how to get $3 leads, and there's people that they just put their ads on $3 a day. You know, and and there's different strategies, because sometimes we want to have a traffic ad to get people to click so that we can then retarget them with the lead generation ad. So there's different, there's other strategies at play. So I, in my past, what I've done is, you know, if I want to just keep something in In ads on retainer let's say I'm running ads to my Facebook group I'm gonna just put $3 a day and Just kind of set it there and forget it. To be honest with you, unless you know, I'm checking the metrics and I'm like something's not quite right here, and then I stop it and then reboot, try again and I set it to $3 a day. So for that, you know that could be $30 a month. If I am in the middle of a launch, you can bump that up to $10 a day. I know I have clients that they had $150 as their budget for ads for a launch. They had 77 leads out of that $150 and then they made $41,000 Because I believe they got seven or eight clients out of it. Nice, so that's where these kinds of things can really be beneficial. So you don't have to spend a lot of money on ads. Now I do have clients.
Speaker 1:Like I said, we had a time sensitive client who she was putting on a retreat and so we did an entire pod funnel that was thematically consistent with the retreat and she was the one who she was at first. We tested once with $100 a day and we did that for three days and Then we turned that. We tested ten different audiences for those three days, then we turned off all but I think two or three of the audiences and then we put in $1,000 a day. Wow, and that's how we scaled it and we only ran these ads for ten days total. So you know she was willing to put that that kind of money into it because she was going to make and she did, she. She made a really nice ROI off of the entire project and in fact she's going to continue to make money because this is something that she can replicate every year, so like this is a staple in her coaching program.
Speaker 1:So you know I the cost of a press release, you can do it anywhere from $79 to $1,500. If you want a national news line, I don't necessarily like I don't run national news lines unless I'm doing a major project national Newslines are fantastic and that's how you get into the bigger publications. But for something like a podcast launch let's say you are launching your podcast and you just want to do a press release about that you can get away with spending $500 on a press release and that's including the writing of it and You're still going to see results. You're going to still get clicks. You're still going. You can still put in your you know, in your bio as seen on Generally it's picked up by like Yahoo or market watch, sometimes business insider or Bloomberg.
Speaker 1:You know it just depends. This is earned media, so it's not like you're paying, it's the you know you, they have to pick it up. But you know, for 500 bucks you can be seen by thousands and you can be where the people that you want. You know where your audience is there. They're on those platforms. So it makes sense to do it and it's credibility for you because you've been seen in the media.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Yeah, so what you're saying is basically For all types of budgets, it's it's quite doable, whether it's a smaller budget or you want to have something bigger that you can launch. It's really Ads are, and then PR is. It's all over. It's it's quite accessible to people, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, people, people think that I mean you can get featured in media for free if you know how to do it. That's something that I teach in some of like. I have podcasting programs and then I have media programs. One of my favorite things to do is teach media because I fell into it. You know, I was working with artists from like American Idol and so I was literally Booking these artists. We would do a show. So this was back when American Idol was on Fox. I would, anytime we were on tour. If we, let's say, we did a little run across I 70 in the United States, I would book us in Denver, kansas City, st Louis, you know, columbus, ohio I would. I would book us in those Fox news stations along the tour route and then that got more people to show up to the gig. And so you know, that's how I fell into media Like I. I didn't. I don't have a PR degree. My all of my education is in music, but it's real life education.
Speaker 2:Oh no, it's total real and then I get, so I I've toured with an artist from the Voice.
Speaker 1:We did the same thing because it worked so well with the artist from American Idol. He was like, well, can you book me on NBC? And I was like, let's try it. And it worked. And so that's where you know these kinds of real life skills actually, and we didn't pay for that. So I teach people. You know, if you want to be a guest post in, let's say, business insider, here's how you write the pitch. Here's how you go about this process of pitching yourself. Pitching there is an art. In fact I'm I'm going to be doing a masterclass in February called the art of the pitch. And Even in podcasting, like if you want to be guesting in podcast, you have to know how to do it. I have influencers on my podcasts all the time. It's because there is an art to getting people to want to come on your program and that you know there's a nuance to it and it's it's so important that we know that whenever we're pitching ourselves or pitching ourselves, we know that whenever we're pitching ourselves or pitching our clients.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that and I love that. You know you have both covered as far as the visibility goes for the shows right. Whether it's PR, whether it's podcasting, it's. It's pretty much a nicely done for you With you package that you guys have put together, and I think even back in the days I was so amazed by it was more on the podcast side, but now it has been expanding as well, that I've noticed. So, yeah, yes, congrats.
Speaker 1:Thank you I this is. This is fun, like we're in, we're entrepreneurs to do what we love, and that's like this is. I eat this stuff up. Like I said, I was up till four o'clock in the morning. I'm not complaining about it. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Speaker 2:You know, like this is my life.
Speaker 1:This is what I love to do and you know I love helping people. That's like I said, my biggest goal in life is to make an impact. That's why I'm starting a nonprofit this year and I'm all of that's in the works and I'm gonna be taking these same ideals. You know, honestly, touchy subjects is the premise for my nonprofit and so I. That's why these pod funnels actually do make a difference, because whenever I get my 501c3 paperwork from the IRS here in the United States, I'm gonna be able to say hey guys, I now have a tax exempt, you can donate and your money is going to go towards helping people, just like all of us, that have been hurt by the church. And you know we're going to get resources for people to have the ability to work with a therapist work, you know, to heal their CPTSD or whatever it is, or even to Put programs into churches or faith organizations to help them be more inclusive and Accessible to all people. That's very important to me.
Speaker 2:And so that's like a big mission. I mean Mm-hmm from touchy subjects to making it to a nonprofit. It's it's awesome. It's awesome that you're a part of that and doing that. It's so awesome.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I'm I'm listen, I'm excited there's I have so many things in the works and 2024 has some good energy behind it. Oh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure I feel the same way. Even last year was Amazing for me.
Speaker 1:I don't know about you, but last year was hard for me, but oh no, like there was a lot of stuff going on health-wise but, man, I like I learned so much and I feel like you know.
Speaker 1:People talk about the quantum leap and, honestly, at first I thought it was BS, but but like now I'm like oh, I had my healing quantum leap last year, which I know that that is the foundation for my life's work, so no complaints here. You know, either either we succeed or we learn, and Exactly, and both are exactly in my mind.
Speaker 2:Exactly, that's such a good way to look at it. Well, thank you so much, erin, for being here. So many Amazing value again on this one. What are some ways that people can get in touch with you, or where should they start if they want to Either work with you like do down for you, like have done for you for the show, more visibility, more PR? Got some both final ads like how can they get in touch with you?
Speaker 1:The easiest way is to find me on Facebook. I'm probably there the most. I have a group on Facebook called the podcast connect community and in there I give trainings. We honestly it's a very engaged little small community, like we just started it, but the people in there are fantastic. We there's real community there. It's not just like drop a link and call it a day, you know, post and ghost, it's. It's. People are in there. We're having conversations.
Speaker 1:Actually, we're having a diversity roundtable at the end of the month because, like I said, they're just a month. Because, like I said, diversity, equity and inclusion is very important to belonging and in the online space, like, I want to make sure that all voices are heard. I think that's really important. So that's something that we do inside of the podcast connect community. That's a very easy place to find me Facebook. Or on Instagram, you can find me personally. Like my personal brand is the real Aaron Billings, and I'm real, I'm very myself. But my business Instagram is called click management, so you can find me in any one of those places. Or and and just send me a message. I'm everybody says I'm a little bit intimidating, but I promise I'm approachable.