Amplify Your Business Success with Strategic Podcasting | EP268

Ready to transform your podcasting hobby into a powerful business growth engine? Discover how consistent and strategic podcasting can establish your authority and expand your reach, all while giving you the freedom to step back when you need to. Learn from industry examples like Amy Porterfield's journey, and understand the art of crafting content that resonates with your audience and fuels your business success. Tune in to hear my personal insights and strategies for reaching a stage of scalability where you can choose to engage with your business on your own terms.

Unlock the secrets of podcast monetisation as we break down actionable strategies to align your podcast content with your business goals. From selling your own products and affiliate marketing to securing sponsorships, we'll cover various ways to generate revenue while staying authentic to your brand. Learn the importance of networking through your podcast, building valuable relationships, and repurposing content across different platforms to maximize your reach. Finally, get tips on maintaining a consistent posting schedule to keep your audience hooked and manage your workload efficiently. Don't miss this episode, which is packed with insights to help you leverage podcasting for sustainable business growth!

Claire Bartlett Episode
Jules White Episode

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Chapters

• 0:00 Using Podcasting to Scale Business
• 12:11 Podcast Monetization Strategies
• 19:21 Leveraging Podcast Networking and Consistency

Transcript

Donna Eade: 0:30

You're listening to the Mindset in Action podcast the place to be to grow and streamline your business. I'm your host, donna Eade. Let's jump into the show. You can focus on things that are barriers, or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem. Tim Cook, Welcome back to the podcast. Everybody, I'm so glad to have you here today for another solo episode with me. Today we're going to be talking about scaling your business and using podcasting to help you with that.

Donna Eade: 1:11

So not everybody wants to scale their business. I understand that and I know. For me personally, the idea of having 20 employees relying on me for their income absolutely scares the bejesus out of me and I just don't want that responsibility. Quite frankly, it's enough responsibility to look after myself and my cats and my daughter and my partner, so that is enough for me. I don't need any more responsibility in that case. So let's jump into this with the idea that we are looking at not necessarily scaling to multiple millions of pounds, which is absolutely perfectly okay If you do. You can think and dream that, but even if you're not looking to get there, I'm sure there is part of you that wants to see your business get to the point where you can step away and take a proper holiday and your business still be running without you, whether that's because you've got a VA on to on task, working in back end taking care of all of the emails and responding to clients and just holding down the fort while you're away, or whether you have automated your systems to do that for you so you can step away. I know so so many business owners that go on holiday and end up still working in some respect, whether that is just keeping a track on the emails because they don't want to come back to a huge inbox full of overwhelmingness, or whether it is actually taking client calls whilst they're on holiday, and even the big entrepreneurs do it. So just a few weeks ago I was in the members area for FEA Create an FEA membership. I'm part of the members club over there with Carrie Green.

Donna Eade: 3:00

She was in Greece on holiday with her family and took an hour out of her day to do the CEO Power Hour with us. So that was crazy to me. Because she has got a team. She could have had one of the team go through. I think she has previously had one of the team go through. I think she has previously had somebody from the team do that. So I'm thinking, unless it was like a last minute holiday and she was like you know what, no, I'll do the power hour, that's fine, or whether it was something else, I don't know, but the fact is she doesn't have to do that and she didn't have to do it. The fact she chose to do it was lovely. It was lovely to have her live with us to do that, because that is like the one thing a month where she is usually there to do it with us, but she doesn't need to and she has a team that could do it. But there's the difference is that that was a choice that she made, and what we're looking at here is scaling to the point where it gives us that freedom of choice. So if you want to show up for a certain client because they're in the middle of doing something and you want to be there for them, that is absolutely fine. But if you want to be able to go on holiday with your family and completely switch off from the business, then there is a element of scale that needs to take place for you to be able to do that, and that is what we're going to be talking about today.

Donna Eade: 4:21

So why podcasting and how is that relevant? Well, podcasting is a really great tool, which I've spoken about many times before, to actually establish your authority, to grow your audience and therefore grow your business. The popularity of podcasting is growing and therefore it is something that business owners can take advantage of, and I have given you stats before, but I will give you them here again 90% of people who start a podcast don't get past episode 3, and of the 10% that do, 90% of them don't get past episode 21. So if you can be part of the 1% that gets to episode 22, then you have a really good, solid grounding for standing out in your niche as an expert that is, a go-to person in the world of podcasting. Now, this is not to say that you're going to become Amy Porterfield overnight.

Donna Eade: 5:25

Amy's been doing this for 10 years, but when you look at her business and her podcast, you can see how the two have grown together and scaled. So when I first started listening to her back in 2014, she had her podcast, just started it not long ago, and she had three programs. She had List Builders Society, which I think was List Builders Lab at the time. She had webinars that convert and courses that do something. I can't remember what the the title was for that one, but she had three different programs that she used to promote. Now, 10 years later, she has.

Donna Eade: 6:05

She still has list builder society, which it is now called, which she sells as an evergreen in the background. You don't really hear about her talking about it too much in a public forum. It is there, they run ads to it and it's kind of ticking along in the background, but her main focus is DCA, which is Digital Course Academy, which she sells once a year and that kind of combines the webinars that convert and the courses. I don't think it's courses that convert, but maybe it is, but um doesn't. It combines those two along with giving you a really good sort of business foundation there. So she does that once a year now and she sells that.

Donna Eade: 6:47

The list builders society is in the background being sold on evergreen. So that has been the change in how she structures her business. Her podcast has grown from being a weekly show that she used to do. I don't know how many downloads she used to get back then, but she had the desire to get it to a million downloads a month, which she has now hit. I don't know if she continues to maintain it above a million or whether it drops down, goes back up and things like that. I'm sure it does. But the overarching thing is she hit a million and now her podcast is up there in the hundreds of thousands of downloads a month, versus you know where she was back in the beginning. And she has 20-ish employees working for her in her business and she does two podcast episodes a week. So the podcast grows, the business grows, the employees grow, the revenue grows, the business itself gets tighter.

Donna Eade: 7:51

So she went from selling three different things on rotation kind of talking about it, selling one, then selling the other, then selling the other, because that's the order they went in and then starting again to selling one main product once a year and having other things that tick along in the background. And obviously she has her affiliate promotions. She's always been an affiliate for B-School marie forleo and she does some other affiliate promotions. She promoted jenna kutcher's course not long ago and she's done tribe before with steve mclaren, which I think is now called the membership something. It's not called tribe anymore but, um, she does a lot of affiliate marketing in that respect. So there is many different strings to her bow but at the core of her business has slimmed down and she's blown up. So that is kind of the power of having these consistent elements of your business like a podcast that is going to help you to grow your audience and build and scale that business. So let's look at the way that podcasting can help with your business growth. So I have said it previously, but it is a great way to build your brand authority and trust with your audience.

Donna Eade: 9:07

And if you haven't heard me tell the little story that I tell about this, it is that because people are listening and they are only using one source, one sense to connect with you, it is heightened because all they're doing is listening. They can't visually see you, they can't touch you, they can't smell you, they can't taste you. They are only using that one sense. So that one sense is heightened. And, generally speaking, most people who listen to podcast episodes are listening through headphones and this is where the difference comes in, because if they're listening through headphones, all of a sudden you're getting this really intimate connection with your listener because you are speaking directly into their ears and I have said it before, but that is really really powerful. And when you are watching a video, you don't get that same thing because you're distracted by the visuals. You're not necessarily got headphones on, but you can also see that they're not directly talking to you and it's just a little bit of a trick of the mind.

Donna Eade: 10:11

I suppose, that when we can see people and we know that they're not really talking directly to us, we can't unsee that. But when you are listening to somebody, it's like we're having a genuine conversation here, me and you. I am having a conversation with you and I could start whispering in your ear right now, which I'm not going to do because that would be really, really weird, but there is that ability and there is not many people that you would allow to do that, and so that puts this level of trust on the podcast host that not a lot of people in you know blogs and videos and those realms have with their audience, or, if they do, it takes a longer time to build it, because it's that time factor of those people showing up and being authentic all the time to be like, oh yes, they are genuinely this person, which isn't always the case, I might add. But that's where the trust comes from, whereas with a podcast, it's almost short-cutting that because you're getting that really close, in-depth connection with your listener. So it's a really, really powerful tool to use for marketing to be able to share your story and to be able to market yourself and your business and share from a real, genuine place what it is that you want to help people with. So that is my thoughts on marketing using podcasting for marketing purposes to help you grow your business, because people love to hear a story right, people love stories and if you can share case studies and your story through your podcast, it's just going to hit in a deeper way because of the audio experience. It really is quite magical and so, yeah, but with great responsibility, with great power, comes great responsibility. So you have to make sure that you are being genuine, authentic and honest with what you're doing with your podcast.

Donna Eade: 12:11

You know I've been pretty vulnerable on my podcast over the years with sharing my story, and that is because I want people to know that I'm genuinely just a regular person like anyone else and you can do what I do. So if I'm doing a podcast, you can do a podcast too. If I'm selling a program, you can sell a program too, like there is nothing special about me in that way and by being able to share authentically with you guys the struggles that I have and the issues that I go through, that enables me to to build more trust with you guys, because you can see that I am just like you in that respect. You know I'm not sitting up here on a pedestal going. This is what you need to do. I've already made it. Because I haven't I haven't already made it, I'm here in the trenches with you, working all of this out alongside you, trying to make a success of it, wanting that so much for you and wanting to share the little bit that I can do to help you get there, and podcasting is that for me. So next, we are going to look at scaling your business. So we looked at the marketing there. We're going to look at scaling now on a more deeper level.

Donna Eade: 13:29

So when you're looking to scale your business with your podcast, there has to be a plan in place. Like with anything in business, we need to plan it. So your content needs to be planned and aligned with your business goals. There is no point whatsoever in just picking up the microphone and recording an episode and putting it out there and hoping for the best and it having absolutely no connection to anything else. So for me my podcast falls into four categories that I want it to hit and any episode that comes on needs to hit one of those pillars, at least for me to have it go up on the podcast. So with that I know that if it hits one of those four pillars then it is hitting what my podcast is really about and what I want to talk about on my podcast. So this, for example, falls under the audience building pillar of my podcast. I want to talk about how we build our audiences. So this would come under that category scaling your business. You're going to be building your audience if you're scaling your business. So as long as it hits one of those four categories, then it fits with the podcast.

Donna Eade: 14:36

But then you also have to look at what are you doing over the course of the year. I never sit down to plan out my podcast episodes without looking at my marketing calendar and seeing what's coming up, because you need to make sure that your podcast is aligned with your marketing calendar. So if you've got a big promotion coming up in December, for example, your podcast episodes the month before at least need to be talking about the promotion like need to be around warming up the audience to what's coming and if you have been following along the last few weeks, you will notice that that may well just be what's happening right now on this podcast, because I have mentioned my masterclass that's coming up at the end of the month. You know I'm not going to shy away from the fact that I have a new masterclass coming out and that my program is going to be opening up at the end of the month for the last time this year for you to get in so you can start to work on your podcast and get it ready to launch for next year. Start to work on your podcast and get it ready to launch for next year. Like that's not a secret and I don't make it a secret. That is me being upfront and honest with you guys. But that's what you need to do with your podcast is make sure that it is aligned with that calendar. If you are not promoting something particularly, then you need to be making sure that your podcast episodes are aligning with your lead magnets, like we were talking about last week. You know you want to be building your audience in that downtime so that when you come to a promotion time. You've got new listeners and new people that you can talk to on your email list, so you need to be making sure that your podcast episodes are aligning to your business goals for it to help you to scale your business.

Donna Eade: 16:29

There are also things that you can do to scale in terms of monetizing your podcast. So one of the big things that I've always talked about is selling your own stuff, which is what I tend to stick to on my podcast is selling my own stuff. I have tried a bit of affiliate marketing here and there um not had a huge amount of success with it, but my audience is fairly small. So you know you can't say either way. If you've got a much bigger audience than me, then potentially there is more room there, but you've got to try these things. You know you've got to try it and then you've got to try it again because you know a year from now that it'll be in a different position where potentially it will work. So affiliate marketing could be a good way to monetize your podcast.

Donna Eade: 17:14

You can look at sponsorships and I had a fantastic call with Claire Bartlett, who was on the podcast, a couple of weeks ago talking about confidence building and we talked about bike face, if you remember that episode. So that is there for you to go back and listen to. But we also had her in my Facebook group, so if you're not part of the Facebook group, the link is always in the show notes so you can go over to any episode and you can get into the Facebook group and at the moment, at the time you're listening to this, you can probably still go and listen to it. I am going to be downloading them and using them for my second podcast, so they're not going to stay up there, but at the moment, I believe they are still up up there. You can go and listen to our pod chat with Claire Bartlett, where we talked about sponsorships and how she managed to secure a sponsorship for her podcast before she even launched. And it's a really, really great idea and it's something that I hadn't really thought was possible until Claire said it, and then I was like, well, of course it is. Why wouldn't it be like? Absolutely, that's an amazing thing to do.

Donna Eade: 18:23

So look at companies that align with you and what it is that you do, and look at reaching out to them for sponsorships. So a couple of things to look at with that is do they pay for podcast advertising or youtube advertising at all and does it really truly align with you? So, for example, if Catherine and Julie of the Far Too Fabulous podcast wanted to get a sponsor for their podcast, they could reach out to a company like Athletic Greens, for example. Now you would need to talk to Julie about whether she felt like that was a good connect for her, because she is very, very particular on the supplements and things that people take and the brands that are used, so it would need to be something that she was heavily aligned with, as, yes, this is a good product to take. So I'm just using Athletic Greens as an example.

Donna Eade: 19:21

You could also say Huel, you know things like that, these types of things that are aimed at helping you live a healthier lifestyle, work with the premise of their podcast, and they could reach out to a company like that because it's a big company. They pay YouTubers to advertise their products in their YouTube ads, so it is not a stretch to think that they would pay somebody to advertise it on their podcast. So she could talk about it in the podcast, or they could just have a segment that is actually an advert for it. Where they do an ad read for it. You can make up your own sort of package of what works for you and what you charge for it and you could get a sponsorship for your podcast. So that's a great way of monetizing the podcast as well. So you can also leverage your podcast for networking. So we're looking at scaling our business here.

Donna Eade: 20:19

Networking is a really important tool in my arsenal and I feel like it should be in every business owner's toolbox. But if you can invite people onto your podcast, that is growing your network. I have got connections all over the world pretty much at this point because I have spoken to people. I think there's probably only two continents that I haven't had a guest from. I would have to go back and check, but I have had a guest from Australia, I've had a guest from Canada, I've had a guest from America, I've had a guest from Jamaica, I have had guests from Europe. So I have had quite a lot of guests from all over and that is really a great network to have because it's reaching new audiences and it really opens the world up to you. So you can have guests that come on, but also you can use your podcast.

Donna Eade: 21:17

When you are networking, talk about your podcast and that means that the people within the room may well come and listen to it. If it's aligned with what they're interested in, they become a follower of you. They become somebody who is getting to know you a lot better than you've got to know them. So unless you go and have a one-to-one and start building a relationship with that person, they might be in the background listening to your podcast for weeks on end and might become a client and your podcast is actually doing your nurturing for you and without you having to do anything, which is amazing. But it is a way of helping you build your network by having guests on that you can build relationships with, but also enhancing the networking that you're already doing by having people listen to the podcast, and that will enable you to scale as well.

Donna Eade: 22:10

And then we've talked about it before but the repurposing aspect of it there is so much content within a podcast that you can reuse in different ways to hit different audiences. So people will often say social media gurus and things will say, go where your audience is. So if your audience is on Instagram, be on Instagram. If your audience is in LinkedIn, go on LinkedIn and maybe your audience is actually on all of those different platforms and it's not as niche as you can't say that they're only on one platform, so you need to hit them in different ways. So you could do a LinkedIn newsletter, you can do soundbite reels, you can do posts on Facebook all from your podcast that are going to help people come and find you and listen into your podcast and get into your world.

Donna Eade: 22:59

And if you use the strategies we were talking about last week with the lead magnets, your email list and your podcast then it becomes this, just this cycle machine that just starts rolling down a hill. So I want to come on to some common pitfalls and how to avoid them, because I think it's important to look at that when we are talking about our podcast. There are things that people do that it's just like why are you doing that? That is not what you want to be doing. Don't get me started on the audio quality, because that's one of my biggest bugbears about podcasters. But looking at the strategy side of things, inconsistent posting is really going to be a downfall because you become part of somebody's routine if you do a weekly podcast and they expect you to be there.

Donna Eade: 23:46

So it's not that they necessarily expect you to be there every Thursday if that's when you release your podcast, but they expect you to be there when they are listening to you at their time. So, for example, I release my podcast on a Thursday. Say, a listener always goes to the gym on a Friday morning. They're not going to be listening to my podcast when it releases on Thursday morning, but on Friday morning they go into their app, they go and find my podcast, they queue it up and they listen while they're on the treadmill and that is their routine. They know I release on a Thursday, but every Friday is when they go to the gym and every Friday morning is when they listen to me. So if I don't upload on a Thursday and they go to find me on Friday, they open up their app and I'm not there, then they're going to be like, oh, I should have done this one this week. And then they're going to be like, oh, I should have done this one this week and then they're going to find something else to listen to. And if they find something else to listen to that interests them enough, then they might never come back to me because they might go well, this is my new thing because they're uploading every week and they don't break, so I'm just going to carry on listening to this.

Donna Eade: 24:51

So if you don't upload regularly, you lose your listeners. But it's about setting expectations. So I've spoken about it before. Like, if you can do seasonal shows, so you upload 12, have a break, upload another 12, have a break. Maybe do that two or three times in a year, so it's a lot less pressure on you. You can do the batching side of it. So you actually you've only sort of taking maybe three to six weeks out of your year on the podcast recording and editing side of it, and then you've got three seasons for the year. Perhaps that's how you're doing it, but you need to prep your audience for it and they need to be aware of it. So you need to try even more so in that respect to get people on your email list so that you can directly message them and tell them that the new season is out. And you need to make sure that it is part of your content plan that when your podcast isn't out, that you are sharing the old episodes and that you are hyping up the new season so that people are constantly aware that there is more coming, because then they kind of leave the door open for you and when you come back they will come back to you because they're excited about it. But if you just disappear and don't upload for three weeks and then you come back and you do four episodes and then you disappear again, it's too flaky and in my opinion it kind of reflects on the service they're going to get from you.

Donna Eade: 26:16

If you can't be consistent with your podcast, then how are you going to be consistent with me as a client? That would be my question and that's just to me. It's then damaging your authority. So I say whatever you're going to do, do it, commit to it and stick to it rather than be flaky with it. If you're not sure that you're going to bother uploading on a regular basis, then don't bother. Starting is my advice. So if you want to try it, then start as a seasonal podcast and say, like I've got six episodes or 12 episodes that are going to come out. We'll see how it goes goes, see what I like you might leave it at one season. You become part of that 90%. That don't get past episode 21 in that respect. But at least you tried it and you were consistent with it. So if you did want to carry on, people would understand what is going on. But it is really like it's so damaging to be flaky with that, because podcasting is really something that becomes part of people's routines, so you want to make sure that you are being consistent.

Donna Eade: 27:19

The second thing is lack of promotion. So the number of people that I, in fact, I know somebody who you know, you guys know quite well as well not going to name names but she has a podcast and she barely ever talks about it and I'm like what are you doing? Like this is prime gold value that you're providing here for people and they don't even know it exists. So you need to be talking about it, you need to be promoting about it and you need to be doing it more than you think you do. So at the moment I am pretty poor at this Like I will promote the episode on the day that it goes out and then I really don't talk about it again because I have got so much other stuff that I need to talk about. So if I had nothing to say, then I would definitely share the episode again, share something different, and there's so much you can share from one episode, but I just don't find the time. So for me it's like it's always boggles me me when people say I don't know what to talk about on social media, I'm like gosh, there is so much you can talk about because social media is such a short form way of communicating that that that, if you know your stuff, that you've just got there's content for days with inside you, there really is, so you need to be promoting it.

Donna Eade: 28:32

I need to be promoting more. You need to promote more than you think you do, because there is so much value in there and you don't have to do it all at once. I think that's the other thing. Like at the moment, my LinkedIn newsletter is actually a monthly newsletter that goes out and it is the blog post that goes alongside the Mike Action podcast episodes that I did. So I did a series of 12 of those and that gives me 12 months worth of my newsletter, and so once a month, a newsletter goes out talking about whatever that episode was talking about and that gets new people listening to that podcast and gives it more airspace again every month. So there is lots you can do to utilise your podcast to promote it and share it, and that's a common pitfall that people fall into is not promoting it enough.

Donna Eade: 29:27

And then the other is ignoring analytics. Now, I know a lot of people find numbers boring. I love numbers. I track all of the numbers. In fact, I know a lot of people find numbers boring. I love numbers, I track all of the numbers. In fact, I told Jules White, the SEO lady we had on, a few weeks ago. I told her all of the metrics that I track from my Google Analytics and she was like Donna, you do not need to be tracking all of that, these are the ones you need to track. And I was just like, oh, but I like seeing the numbers.

Donna Eade: 29:51

So analytics, they're important and it's not because you need to see that you're getting a thousand downloads a month. That's not why it's important. It's important to see that there is growth there, that there is consistency and or growth with your listenership, because if you are dropping your listeners, like they're dying off off, then that you need to know that so you can adjust what you're doing, because obviously something's not resonating if it's going up or if you get huge downloads on one episode, like what on earth did you talk about and can you talk about it again in a different way. You know these are stats that you need to pay attention to. It's not so important what the number is, but what direction it's going in. So that's really important to pay attention to that so that you can actually adjust your strategy with your podcast to grow it more and to resonate more with your audience. So that is it for today's episode. I hope you have enjoyed that little scoot through ways you can use podcasting to scale your business.

Donna Eade: 31:01

Avoid those common pitfalls inconsistency, lack of promotion and ignoring your analytics the end of the year, or you want to have it ready for January? Then come and join me for my free masterclass start your podcast and grow your audience, which is happening on the 24th, 25th and 26th of this month. It is not long now. If you haven't signed up for one of the classes, get in to the show notes and do that, don't forget. It's a bitly link, bitly forward, slash ep268map. You can go there and you can get your link to sign up for the masterclass. And it is all over my social media. So if you're connected with me anywhere you'll have seen the link for it. So come and join me for one of those live classes. I'd love to see you in my Zoom room and I will see you next week. Bye for now.