Leveraging new media to generate visibility, leads, & revenue — Steve Olsher // Podcast Magazine

Quotes

• “It’s not profitable. There’s a whole lot of people out there who invested a ton of time, energy, and resources and they never made a dollar. Let’s just get that out of the table.” - Steve“The pod-fade, right? That’s the term of the day?” - Ben “If we break down the numbers, it is pretty interesting. As of today, there are about 1.7 million which is up from just shy of a million pre-pandemic. Lots more shows, so what does that mean? It also means there’s a lot of pod-fade where people start and they stop roughly after nine or ten episodes. So, just using easy math here let’s take it down to 1.6 million, there’s really only about 400,000 shows, believe it or not, that is still active and producing content with more than episodes. So about half of the 1.6 million stopped, and about half of those have less than ten episodes. That’s one thing to take into consideration.” - Steve“The difference is consistency and staying the course and also having a clarity around why am I doing this and how this supports a bigger, overall vision in terms of what I want to do with the people whether it’s one person or a million people who tune in, download and listen to that episode on a weekly basis.” - Steve“One of the things that I think is working against podcasters is this little thing I call ‘math’. Most of the industry think of monetization by selling advertising at a 25 to 50 dollar CPM basically taking the display media model and trying to shoehorn it into what is replacing radio ad, audio ads, and to me that’s crazy.” - Ben “The MarTech podcast generates, let’s call it 100,000 downloads per month total and we’re a daily show. That means we’d be making 5,000 grand a month, 60 grand a year if we sold 100% of our inventory and 50 other CPM. I live in the suburbs of San Francisco, I’m not paying the rent on 60 grand a year, and obviously, we have a different monetization path but isn’t it math that drives people away from podcasting?” - Ben “I’ve got a friend who started a show that specifically caters to audiophiles. People who love high-end stereo equipment. Very small market but these people would, on average, drop 10 grand for a pair of speakers. What does that mean? It means that he’s able to go to these companies and he’s able to get numbers that are astronomically off the charts because he’s not tying himself to CPM because it’s all about reaching a very specific market that is of incredible value.” - Steve“Is it possible to make money through ads and sponsors? Absolutely. Is it going to be the most lucrative option? Definitely not.” - Steve“There’s a couple of key ways to do it. One of the initiatives we are putting forth is, ‘how do you take people offline?’ Because ultimately, the real money lies in getting in a conversation with people outside of the show.” - Steve“There is no easier, faster, better way to move people into higher products programs and services than to actually be able to develop real relationships with those people and go belly to belly, chest to chest and develop that real rapport, that community that people want to be an active part of.” - Steve“We’re big fans of the new media trifecta where the brand, the podcast, and the online course are all of the same name.” - Steve“The reality is, do you have to do an event? No, you don’t have to. But can you make money off the event before you even open the doors? Absolutely.” - Steve“At the end of the day, I believe that every business needs to have a very clearly defined profit path and your profit path can be entirely different from ours. You just have to have clarity on what that customer journey looks like from the moment they become familiar with you to wherever that last step is on the path that someone can take with you and a  lot of people just don’t have that same clarity.” - Steve“For us, it really just became crystal clear back in October 2019 that this medium is going to be really, really well for the foreseeable future and if in fact, podcasters are through the 2020s what rock and roll stars were to the 1960s, why isn’t there a Sports Illustrated type magazine for podcasting?” - Steve“We made a calculated decision here that completely zags while everyone else is zigging and it has truly made all the difference. There’s not a person in the industry that we can’t touch and say, we want to sit down with them for a feature and literally every door opens.” - Steve