How to become an ‘Icon’ in your niche

Quotes

• “I was an entrepreneur, had a non-alcoholic club and then got involved with catalogs very early online and that became Liquor.com then I got into real estate development and got into the whole world of speaking, podcasting, and so on.” - Steve“I am going over a decade now in this space, we started our podcast magazine and our first issue hit in February 2020.” - Steve“So the ironic part about Podcast Magazine is you actually have some printed copies of the magazine talking about digital and new media.” - Ben “It boils down to having clarity, first and foremost, about your profit path. When they start out not knowing who you are, they become familiar with you, and once they understand who you are they want to come into your ecosystem and eventually get to know your process.” - Steve“What I have seen and know to be true is that podcasting can be a really great way to basically offer a point of entry for people to be able to get into your world and get exposure to people you might not normally have exposure and access to.” - Steve“There are people who put a lot of money into podcast advertising and frankly, they’re smart to do so. When it comes down to it, it is a very captive audience. In podcasting, the retention rate and the recall rate in terms of processing the message is through the roof so, from a brand perspective, it makes it a pretty easy decision.” - Steve“The reality is when you have this type of channel, you have a podcast and you’re having a meaningful discussion and you’re talking about it in a way that is very niche-specific, it’s easy to attract the most likely listener who is going to resonate with that conversation.” - Steve “From that standpoint, because podcasts would fall into that category of pulled media, the consumer pulls that information, they pull that episode, that content when they want from wherever they are and of course on their preferred device, it’s basically the equivalent of 100% email open rate.” - Steve“One of the reasons why I think the medium is so effective is because it is audio-only, people have their hands-free so they’re able to consume the media without necessarily being pulled away from it. You can do other things so they actually consume the ads, they’re not interrupted by them and you’re allowed a longer ad format.” - Ben“I can’t think of a lot of other marketing channels where you have an ad that lasts 30 to 60 seconds, that someone’s not pulling away from. Even a television ad which is sight, sound, and motion, people see the ads and they pull away.”  - Ben “There are a lot of shows that we’re able to turn their podcasts into a business. For most podcasts the 99.9% need to look at it more holistically in terms of the business of the podcast which means they’re not gonna be able to make enough money simply from sponsors or ad reach or any of that nature to really move the needle for them.” - Steve“When you look at where people have the ability to turn those conversations into revenue, it largely falls in line with taking whatever that conversation is and modeling it in the ways that you do in your own unique way and inviting people to participate in that sort of dialogue with you.” - Steve“That’s a hugely important point. When you’re looking at podcast advertising specifically as a brand, you need to be considering things like your reach, your frequency, and a lot of the shows even those in the ranks at the app store, they’re still only from tens to hundreds of thousands per month which doesn’t provide you the volume to hit critical mass.” - Ben“You’re either going to be spending across multiple shows to drive an impact or you need to deeply integrate into their shows and find other ways outside of just the advertising. Something that we focus on here with the MarTech podcast with our sponsorship program is how do we start integrating things like advertorial content, some of the data that we’re able to collect and aggregate from our podcast to start supporting our sponsors. At the end of the day, each brand is going to have its own path to revenue.” - Ben“We work with the coach, the author, the speaker, the solopreneur, the small business owner that wants to put the power of podcasts into their business.” - Steve“For us, we’re really great at branding people around that whole conversation becoming a kind of influence in the niche so the people that have success following our framework end up with brands like the profitable photographer and then creating a podcast called, ‘The Profitable Photographer’ then having an online course called, The Profitable Photographer and on and on.” - Steve“Our success story really revolves around helping people leverage what we call the ‘new media trifecta’ where their brand, their podcast name, and their online course all share the same name which gives them leverage and ultimately meaningful revenue for them.” - Steve