Chris Hutchins: recommendation

Transcript context

…Any last words of wisdom on the world of podcasting? Starting a podcast? Continuing a podcast? Yeah, I've got three things for you. One, this is a little bit of a financial outlay, but I think it's really interesting. There's this podcast app called Overcast, and it's not the biggest in the world, but you can run ads in it. And the thing I like is that the ads are much more reasonably priced than a lot of other places and they're very dynamic. So I would encourage anyone listening to watch it for a few weeks if you have a podcast and you want to experiment, because the same ad could be $200 one week and $700 the next week depending on how much demand there is for that category. So you can wait and hold out. But what I like is they take your art from your podcast and then you can rewrite your description and they tell you how many people saw the ad, how many people tapped on it, and how many people subscribed to the podcast after seeing the ad. And technically they could also listen to the trailer, they could listen to an episode. And they even give you benchmarks of what to expect. So for a few hundred dollars, you could go in and run an ad for your podcast. Now, I would say in all of the experiments I've done with them, I've probably garnered... I'm looking at some numbers, like hundreds of subscribers, not thousands. And I've probably spent maybe a $1,000. The average cost to acquire a podcast listener, if you're doing paid marketing is about anywhere from three to $10 depending on the appeal of your show, what kind of audience? I'm sure it could go way over that for a business show. And by business I mean, B2B focused kind of show. So, let's call it $5. So it's not going to be the best way to grow your audience. At some point, if you're at enough scale that you have ads in your show and how much a customer's worth, maybe it makes sense to pay $5 because your LTV of a podcast listener is $7. But getting it started, that's not you. What you can do is say, "Okay, what was my click-through rate on the ad?" Which will tell you if someone doesn't click, it's either not a good description or it's not a good set of content, or your cover art's not good. So you can think about, "Okay, I actually need to figure out the podcast before I even have content." And you could run this ad with a trailer before you even record anything. And then it's like, "Okay, well people tapped on it, how many of them subscribed?" And I like to use this as a way to say, "Okay, well the benchmark said I was going to get about 50 subscriptions for this ad that was going to get a thousand taps and I got seven." So these aren't people who weren't interested. These are people who read the description, were like, this is interesting, and they didn't subscribe. That means my content probably sucks. That means someone listened to a trailer or an episode or something more than the description in the image and decided, "This is not for me." Maybe they looked at your episodes, I don't know. y sucks. That means someone listened to a trailer or an episode or something more than the description in the image and decided, "This is not for me." Maybe they looked at your episodes, I don't know. But if they don't tap on it, if you're supposed to get a 2% click-through rate and you get 0.5, then it's actually the topic or the way I describe it or the cover sucks. And so I like that as a way to, for a few hundred dollars, get a good test. I've even thought of running an AB test of the same podcast with two different descriptions. I wish you could do it with two different cover arts. So I don't know, that's like a cheap way to do a little bit of testing. One other thing that I'll share is I just try to share the podcast everywhere. So you've probably noticed that in all of my emails at the bottom, it's like, "Oh, great, talk to you Chris." And then it says, "Hey, want to upgrade your life, money or travel? Check out my podcast and newsletter." I'm taking every opportunity I can to let anyone know about it because you never know it'll happen. And my favorite example, especially, when it's written that it doesn't come across a big bulky signature was we bought some floor mats and one of them didn't fit. And I was going back and forth with the customer service person and they actually replied and they were like, "Oh, thanks for sending me that podcast. I really appreciate it." They thought I was just randomly telling them, "Hey, if you want to upgrade your life, check this out." They didn't know it was my signature. So I got a new listener from customer service from a floor mat company. Which by the way, here's one hack that I also learned from the floor mat company. Come to my show for hacks, but if you're ever trying to get a deal on something, that floor mat company, I just pulled up the live chat and just asked. And I said, "Hey, I'm looking at these floor mats, think you could give me a discount. It's a little expensive." And it was like, "Yeah, refresh your cart. It'll be 15% off." So, this episode's not about all the hacks, but there's one cool one.…

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