by: AskPat 588 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to Episode 588 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.
All right, here's today's question from Luke.
Luke Guy: Hi Pat, my name's Luke Guy. For starters, I want to say thank you sir for the inspiration from SPI and from AskPat. From those two I'm able to generate an income every month more than my full time job. That's because your inspiration sir, and I thank you. Here's my question. The income's coming from a website that I have called, LukeGuy.com, and I'm talking about SEO guidelines, interpreting guidelines from Google, and how I'm taking my interpretation and growing my clients and my business together.
From that, I'm wanting to create a podcast based on that. I love to talk, I love connecting, and I feel like this is a great opportunity. However, I don't want this to flop, and I would really love a prelaunch strategy. A plan for me to stick to, to really make this thing take off. I looked online and there's not really a prelaunch strategy out there for podcasting. If you had to come up with one, what would you suggest for me to do within the next two to three months before my podcast is released? Hopefully get back with me Pat, and if you would send me a shirt, that would be amazing. I do appreciate you sir. Hopefully I hear back from you. Thank you sir, and you have a good one. Okay, bye.
Pat Flynn: Hey Luke, what's up? Thank you so much for the question man, I appreciate it. First of all, congrats on all of your success. I think it's awesome that you're out there, and you're helping everybody, especially in the world of SEO. It seems like things are going well. I think it's very smart of you to consider doing a podcast, because a podcast for me has been the number one thing that has helped to grow my business, it's helped to develop on a scalable level, real relationships with people because when you think about it, everybody out there is listening to you in their ears, and you can do that on a scalable level. That power of the voice is just so incredible.
Great job, I think it's the right thing to do for a lot of brands. If you have an inkling of a thought that you might want to do a podcast, I would recommend that any of you out there, to get it setup. Go to PodcastingTutorial.com. That's my free tutorial on how to get a podcast setup. It's helped thousands of people get their podcast setup, and it's completely free. There's no opt ins, or emails required. It's six high quality videos that walks you through all of the things from equipment, to how to record, to getting your podcast up. It's the thing I wish I had when I first started. Luke or anybody else, if you need some of those pointers moving forward with that, great. PodcastingTutorial.com is the place to go.
Now in terms of a prelaunch strategy, this is kind of the next level of asking questions, or podcasting tips for those who are just starting out. I think this is great. In terms of starting you, you could start now. Even if you don't have a podcast, even if you don't know what you're going to be talking about. Just hinting at the idea with your audience that you're going to be doing something like this, is a great prelaunch strategy. Why? Because you're actually teasing this idea. You're getting people to know, and get used to the fact that you're going to come out with something.
What I would do is actually survey your audience, and even talk to people individually about what your show should be. I think part of the prelaunch strategy is actually figuring out what your show is about, and what is it going to be, what topics people want to cover. I think that's primarily one thing that you could do very easily on social media channels. Say, “Hey guys, I'm thinking about starting a podcast. What topics would you like to see me discuss?” If you could somehow get people involved in that way, I mean that's an immediate touch point that is going to plant a seed in people's head, and be reminded of it later on. They're going to have multiple touch points between now, and the point at which you launch of course.
Just starting with something like that, where you're getting your audience involved, especially those who are going to be raving fans of you already. I mean, they're going to be really excited about it, and it's going to help them to get behind it even sooner. One thing that I heard the other day that I hadn't heard anybody do, which is a very popular strategy in the book world that kind of relates to what I just mentioned to, is to create a prelaunch group, or a sort of a street team if you will.
In the book world, creating a street team of 100 people, or even 50 can be very beneficial cause you give them early access to the manuscripts, you get immediate feedback, you get them all excited about it. In exchange for that, you get reviews, you get subscriptions, you get…or not subscriptions for books, but you get people who purchase it, even though they got the free one. A lot of them will continue to buy through, because they've just gotten so much value from you. Also share it, and post reviews on their own sites, not just on Amazon about those books.
You can do the same thing with a podcast. I think this is something that many podcasts could have benefited from, I know I could have to. I just didn't think about it. I want to pass it on to you Luke, and everybody else out there. What you do is, actually there's a great podcast episode, let me see if I could find it. Prelaunch group, smart passive income. There was an interview I did with Daniel Decker, actually that didn't, look up word. Daniel Decker Smart Passive Income. Ah, there it is. Okay, episode 198 of Smart Passive Income, so SmartPassiveIncome.com/Session198. That's going to give you access to building a book launch street team. That is for my new book, Will It Fly? All the strategies mentioned in that episode by Daniel Decker, who is managing that launch team, can be applied to launching anything really. A course, a membership site, and of course a podcast, which is why I'm mentioning it here. Again, that's Episode 198 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast.
Do that, get 50 people to apply to get early access to your podcast, and some of this sort of…at the time it would be kind of exclusive content. Record and episode for example, or two, of which you think this thing is going to be like. Share it with those people who are in this sort of private Facebook group that you create, and get immediate feedback on it. Get people excited about it, and of course in exchange you can get people to, on the day that it launches. Imagine launching your podcast and knowing 100% that you have this group of 50 to 100 people. Even 20 people would be huge, that are going to subscribe, that are going to leave reviews, that are going to share it. I mean, that's huge, especially when you're launching. Having this launch team behind the launch of your podcast is a smart idea.
I would also tease bits and pieces. Once you have sort of a bank of episodes, I would obviously launch with more than one episode. I guess it's not obvious to those of you who haven't launched a podcast. That's something that I didn't do, and it was a huge mistake. I launched my podcast in July of 2010 with one episode, and that was bad. I shared that episode with my existing audience, like you have an existing audience Luke. If you just had one episode and you said, “Hey guys, here's my first podcast episode.” Of course mine was about all the episodes that were coming, I mean there's just nothing else to get. Because it was just kind of telling people what the podcast was about, and there was hardly any value in that way. It just didn't work out very well.
I even got some one star reviews like, “Hey Pat, where's the rest of the stuff? Come on, we're ready for it.” Launch with three to five live when you go to iTunes and you submit your RSS feed. Again, PodcastingTutorial.com will walk you through that process. Make sure you have at least three podcast episodes live before you actually sort of make a big event out of the launch. That would work very, very well because more people are going to be able to listen to more episodes, they get in front of more of your calls to actions, you're going to have more opportunities for people to subscribe. Obviously there's going to be more downloads, which is going to tell iTunes that this new show is worth listening to. You're going to get into new and noteworthy much faster, you're going to get into the what's hot list most likely, and you're going to be able to rank.
Rankings are always the falling, in a shortest period of time. Subscriptions, downloads, ratings, and reviews. Get as many of those as you can in the shortest period of time. You might also want to tease some sort of contest before hand. Getting people to move in some way, shape, or form. Giving something away to the first number of people who leave reviews. That would work very well. Chris Ducker and I when we launched the One Day Business Breakthrough podcast, which is coming back guys. I know it's been almost over a year now I think. It is a show that Chris Ducker and I both what to continue to do, we've just been both working on each of our own separate projects. We're going to come back and do it, promise.
When we launched that podcast, it launched extremely high in the rankings, in the overall pod—it was like number 17 overall podcast I think when it launched. Part of that reason was because we had a lot of people leave reviews, because there was a contest around it. We actually gave away t-shirts, and we would randomly read off a review everyday for the first week. We came out with five episodes, and then I think we came out with one each day for that week, just to make a huge deal of it.
Now, you don't have to do that, but I would have a bank of podcast episodes just recorded already so you have those handy. The cool thing you can do, especially with those first few episodes Luke. This is something that the guys over from LeadPages did very well with their ConversionCast podcast. Is they would tease bits and pieces, and quotes from their episodes that were coming out on launch day. They would continue to email their list, and reveal more. It was almost like an event. You hear these concerts that are being put on in your area, and on the radio they say, “And we're going to announce another guest artist who's going to be there, Selena Gomez is going to be joining us. For those of you who love Selena get your tickets, blah, blah, blah.”
Then the next day it's like, “Oh my gosh, Justin Bieber's going to be there.” Obviously depends on your target audience, and those types of people wouldn't resonate with some others. You get the gist. Teasing bits and pieces, teasing who your first initial guests are. Again, really the overall theme here is just make a huge deal out of it, and treat it like an event. Treat the launch of your podcast like an event, which means you treat the prelaunch of your podcast like you would treat the prelaunch of an event. Tease it, share bits and pieces of it, get people excited, have a date that it's going to come out, and then just blow their minds when they kind of get access to it. Then again like I said, I think that launch group's going to work out very well too.
Keep me posted Luke, I appreciate you, and I wish you all the best. Thank you so much for the question today, we're going to send you an AskPat T-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. I also want to give a shout out to everybody else out there whose asked questions. Obviously without these questions, this show wouldn't exist. I appreciate you guys.
Head on over to AskPat.com if you have any questions, and I would love to listen to them and potentially have them here on the show. Of course you get a free T-shirt if you get featured, just like Luke did today. Thank you so much, I appreciate you. Here's a quote to finish off the day from Neil Patel. He says, “You can't just place a few buy buttons on your website and expect your visitors to buy.” There's a lot more to that obviously. Keep that in mind. Cheers, take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.