AP 0629: Should I Create a Launch Team for My Podcast?

AskPat 629 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey! What's up, everybody! Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 629 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week. We have a great question today from David.

But before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com. FreshBooks is an awesome company making it super easy for all of us to manage our business finances. Keeping track of our expenses and especially, the invoicing. It makes invoicing super simple. With just a few clicks, you can actually send an invoice to your clients, your students, your customers, anybody you're working with, really, who you need to bill. And, they will have an easy way to pay you. This saves so much time. You have to check it out. Literally, less than 30 seconds to do all of that. It's just one of the best pieces of software that you can use to help you manage your business finances. If you want to check it out for 30 days for free, go to Freshbooks.com/askpat. Make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section. Again, that's FreshBooks.com/askpat, enter “Ask Pat.”

Alright. Here's today's question from David.

David: Hey, Pat. David here. I'm a huge fan. Thank you for everything that you do. Really, really appreciate all your great content. My question today is about podcasts. Specifically, I'm wondering if similar to getting together a launch team for a book, it might be a good idea to get together a launch team for a new podcast. I'll be releasing my podcast for the first time in about three weeks time. I'm just wondering if it'd be worth my while to get together some people to help me with the launch. I'm thinking maybe I could get a group of people together to leave ratings and reviews for when it comes out for us to help me spread the word? The size of my list is quite small. My reach on social media and that's, it's small at the moment, too. I reckon with everybody that I have and how responsive that they've been through this stuff that I've put out, if I'll be, I'll be doing well to get say 20, 25 people. So, will that make any difference at all? Is it a good idea to get together a launch team for a podcast? Would you have any other ideas or suggestions or tips on how to go about it? I understand that, maybe, I'm might have already done the launch by the time you get to listen to this on record and answer. But I would really still appreciate your feedback on anything I'm missing or anything at all in relation to this. Okay. Thanks Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey. What's up, David? Thank you so much for the question. I believe that by the time you listen to this, your podcast already be out. So, I apologize, I'm unable to get this answer to you in time but like you said, you still want to hear answer. I think a lot people could benefit from hearing this answer because the quick answer is yes, absolutely. You can benefit from launching anything—a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog, a book, a product, a course, anything to kickstart a campaign—if you have a team behind you.

Now, there's an episode of the SPI podcast that if you're interested in building your launch team. Again, it doesn't have to be with a book or a podcast or anything specifically. If you're launching anything, if you have a team behind it, it can really help you kick start and just really launch with a bang. There's an episode of the SPI podcast, episode 198. If you go to smartpassiveincome.com/session198, that'll take you to an interview that I have with my street team leader. His name is Daniel Decker and he led the team he helped created. But, we go over the entire process so anybody can do the exact same thing. The reason this is important, you touched on a few of those things. You can launch with a bang, you can have a lot people behind you, you can have people leaving reviews, sharing that thing, but also, you get some feedback beforehand. That's what they get in return. They get early access to those things. So, they would have early access to your podcast. They can leave feedback.

But, if it's great, they're gonna want to push out. They're gonna want to promote it because when you get access to something and then that person who gives you early access says, “Okay. Go!” You're going to to want to push it out because you're going to feel like you have something special that not everybody else has. So, as a member of a launch team, you're gonna feel great and you want to help promote it. You want to get the word out there. Especially if you know it's going to be big. You want to be the first people out there to share it with your friends and family.

But, as the person who has this launch thing coming out, man, it doesn't even take a big team to have a dramatic effect. I talked to a lot of people before I launched my book, Will It Fly? Which had a launch team of about 400 to 500 people, which is pretty big actually. When Let Go came out there was a smaller launch team and I've noticed and heard from people that even launch teams of 30 to 50 people can really have a dramatic effect. Because really, the last thing you want is to launch something and have there be crickets. Even just a small manner of ease, even just a small amount of shares can really get things going. Plus, when people come near a page, who haven't found you, who don't even know who you are, when they see your reviews they're already, when they see activity already happening it's just social proof meaning that they know that there's something there that's worth listening to or worth watching or worth buying.

So, again, yes. Take advantage of a launch team. Try and prepare maybe two months ahead of time. Maybe even earlier if you want to get people early access to things so you can get feedback and make changes if you need to. But again, I highly recommend listening to that episode, smartpassiveincome.com/session198 to listen to that podcast with Daniel Decker and I. And we go through the entire process, step by step for you. So again, that's smartpassiveincome.com/session198.

David, I want to wish you the best of luck with your podcast. Hope it's going well. For everybody else out there listening, if you want to start a podcast of your own, just go to PodcastingTutorial.com. I walk you through the whole thing. No emails required. No payments. It's absolutely free. It's helped thousands of people start their podcasting. It can help you, too.

Again, best of luck to everybody. Thank you so much, Daniel or David for the question. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For everybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much and as always, I love to end with a quote. And today's quote comes from Guy Kawasaki, it's short but sweet and that is, “Keep calm and post often.”

Cheers. Take Care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Cheers. Goodbye.