AP 0432: How Do I Turn Podcast Listeners into Email Subscribers?

AskPat 432 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What is up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 432 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me. Today at the time of this, not at the time of this recording, because I'm in my office right now, but at the time that this episode goes live, which is Wednesday, September 16th, I will be in the air flying over to Charlotte, North Carolina to attend FinCon, which is the Financial Blogger Conference.

I love this conference; it's one of my favorites. If you're going to be there, please come and say hi to me. Look for my red backpack. It says “Hello, My Name Is Pat.” I can't wait to see you there. I'll be speaking about Periscope, actually, a couple days later. And I'm super, super excited about that. So if you aren't on Periscope yet and you want to watch that, I'm actually going to be doing a live Periscope on stage. Go ahead and follow me on Periscope at PatFlynn.

Now we have a great question today from Joe. But before we get to Joe's question I want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com, making it super easy for everybody out there (including myself) and three million other small business to manage our finances from the income, our expenses, and also invoicing. Super easy and professional. And you can just get rid of those headaches and stresses you have about managing your finances and keeping your books. This is why it's called FreshBooks, because they help you organize everything that's going on financially in your business. And come tax season, it's just a couple clicks for you to get what you need to be able to file and do all those things that you need. So if you want to check it out for 30 days for free, head on over to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “AskPat.”

Alright, here's today's question from Joe.

Joe: Hi, Pat. My name is Joe, and I have a podcast called The Q2 Podcast. My question is about how to get my podcast subscribers to respond to my podcast call-to-action. Specifically, to join my email list. I average about 10,000 downloads per month, but see virtually no conversion with my email bribe, and I'm beginning to wonder if the Podbean stats I'm looking at are even legitimate. Am I talking to myself here? Am I seeing web crawlers that are being tagged as downloads? Just curious if you can help me out. I really appreciate it. Thanks again for all you do.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Joe, what's up? Thank you so much for the question. Podbean stats . . . I use Podbean myself, and typically the hosts for podcasts are numbers that are actually true. So, Libsyn, SoundCloud, and Podbean are all hosts that I've worked with before, and the numbers as far as I know, and as far as I can tell, the numbers are true for the most part. So the question is, “Well, why aren't people joining your list?” Now, I don't know much about your call-to-action is and what it is your bribe is, but that has everything to do with your conversion rates. Now the trick is, or the hard part is . . . because people are listening on-the-go, it is very difficult . . . more difficult than if people are reading a blog post for example . . . It is difficult for people to go from listening on-the-go. Maybe they're at the gym or on a walk or in the car . . . to actually respond to your CTA or remembering to do so because they're on-the-go. They can't join your email list because they're doing something. They have to go to a website and load that and click on a button, then click on the name field to leave their name. And then the email field to leave their email. And then do all that sort of stuff. I mean, it's a lot of work.

So there are a number of things you can do to make a person's life easier and to have an increase in the chances that people are going to subscribe to your email list via your podcast. Or, if you're doing a video, you can use the same rules. Number one is to just make sure you have one call to action. A lot of times podcasters, and I've been known to do this myself, you'll have like 40 calls-to-action at the end. I mean, not like 40, but a number of different calls-to-action. The more options and the more calls-to-action you give to people, the less likely they are going to take any action at all. And some of the mistakes I've made in the past on podcast episodes are telling people to join me on Facebook and then join me on Twitter, and then after that subscribe to my email list, and then go to the show notes, and then doing this and then doing that. Of course, when you share all those things, nobody does anything.

So, just make sure you have one, or at max two calls-to-action. But, if you want to be ninja with it, just one really. But just to go to one particular landing page where they then get information about this bribe that you are giving them, or this lead magnet. Because you want them to subscribe to your email list, and you need to make it easy for them. So, one landing page.

The landing page itself could be, or should be, something that is very easy to remember and go to. So that is a link for example . . . I do one of two things. I either have Pretty Link, so I have a WordPress website, and there is a plugin called Pretty Links that makes it very easy to take a really long link and make it nice and short and easy. For example, that's how my affiliate link with BlueHost is SmartPassiveIncome.com/BlueHost. Very easy to remember, super-simple, you can take that home with you later and recall it. EbooksTheSmartWay.com, that goes to a lead magnet, EbooksTheSmartWay. And people can subscribe there instead of going to SmartPassiveIncome.com/Ebooks-The-Smart-Way, which is the actual URL. But EbooksTheSmartWay.com is a domain that I just got on GoDaddy. It just forwards to that domain, and it makes it very easy for people to go to. HowToStartAnEmailList.com, that's another one that I got that goes to a particular blog post that was really popular on my blog. That makes it easy for them to go to. PodcastingTutorial.com is another example of that. So those are things you can do to make sure that people can easily remember that URL.

Now, at the point at which you mention this lead magnet, you want to have a clear benefit for people to go and do that. You can't just say, “Oh, subscribe to my email list and you'll get this.” You want to do that, plus tell them what they're going to get. Tell them why it would be silly of them to not actually subscribe. So, what are the benefits? Not the features. “Well, there's 30 pages and it's going to show you how to do this.” No, but what can actually happen when you do that? So, when people go to Ebooks the Smart Way and download my ebook, they're going to have the clearest step-by-step information to create their ebook and market it. That's the feature. The benefit is that all the information you need to start and market and automate any ebook is right there. You don't have to go searching for it online. It's all condensed into that one ebook and you'll save time, you'll save money, and you'll be able to create your product much sooner and help serve your audience. That's the benefit.

So I hope you can see the difference there. Typically, a feature is followed by a benefit and is only divided with the word “because” or “so that.” So: “Feature” so that “benefit.” Think about it that way. The “so that” is very important. Feature so that “this.” Wings so that you can fly so that you can get there faster so that you can be with your kids. I don't know, I'm just kind of making that up. But, you know what I mean? Feature so that benefit. So just keep that in mind when you are delivering this call-to-action via your voice to your audience. You want to get people excited and make them feel silly for not taking that action. So that's the first thing.

Now, when they get on that landing page, you want to make it very easy and clear to actually subscribe to your email list. Now you can see here that there's a lot of different points of failure, points at which people could drop out. And the less steps to take, the higher the conversion rates will be, and the more people start thinking about this process, the more they are going to drop out as well. So again, you want to make it super incredibly easy. So when people go to that link, maybe it's a page on your site, but even better, maybe it's a LeadPage that's already set up. It's already formatted in a way for higher conversions where when people click on a link, they then get options to subscribe with their email and then boom there you go. Plus it delivers the lead magnets for you really simply. So using something like LeadPages will work as well. And again, having an image of your bribe or lead magnet will help increase conversions as well, even if it's something like an electronic ebook.

I recommend you all go to EbooksTheSmartWay.com. You see how easy to remember that is? EbooksTheSmartWay.com. You can see an image there with my ebook. And it's just an ebook, but it makes it tangible. It makes it feel like it's something you could hold. Even though people know it's an ebook, it just looks like there's some value to it. And that's the most important thing here. You want to make sure that this option bribe, whatever it is that you have to offer, actually has some value. People will actually get results from this information that you're sharing with them. And it doesn't have to be that long, either. I will say that Ebooks The Smart Way is fairly long. It's about 20 to 30 pages, and I spent a lot of time on that. But you don't need to do that these days. It could perhaps be, like Clay Collins mentions in Smart Passive Income Episode 78, just a two- or one-page PDF of the top tools that people in your space will want to use. Tools that will cut out time, tools that will . . . again, insert benefit here. And that tool list . . . people love tools. People love tools because it's a shortcut. It makes it very easy for people to feel like, when they get that tool, they're going to get the results that you also have. So get those tools on a list. That can be a PDF file somewhat nicely formatted. You can even use something like Fiverr.com to have somebody format that page for you and create a template that you can then use for other lead magnets down the road.

You could also create a specific lead magnet for a specific episode, Joe. I would recommend you do that, because you're going to have something that is actually relevant to that particular content. That's another strategy that Clay Collins uses and mentions in Episode 78. So if you really want to increase your subscriber rate, I would highly recommend that. And LeadPages, and there's other tools out there that they have these tools built in that allow you to collect email addresses with people's mobile phones. So that would be the final tip I have for you actually. And using something like LeadDigits . . . and I will say, it's not free. It comes with the pro version of LeadPages. But, if you have the opportunity to use that, and hopefully this is helpful for you and other people out there that have LeadPages already, I know a lot of you in my audience have it. It allows you to say on your podcast, “Just text this word to these five numbers.” And what happens is they get an immediate reply that says, “Thank you for wanting to download this book. Just reply with your email address.” And the people who are on the other end with their mobile device just text in their email address, and when they do that, they get that lead magnet automatically sent to them. It automatically places them into your email list. Again, just super easy.

That's probably the number one way to do it from your podcast. That's something I'm going to be implementing more in the upcoming episodes that I have on Smart Passive Income. I've heard from people like Amy Porterfield and Clay Collins and John Lee Dumas that this is working. Especially when we think about, well, where are people listening to these podcasts? They're on-the-go. Text messaging is something that can be done really easily. I would recommend you check that out. So that's LeadDigits if you use LeadPages. There are other tools out there you can find that also have this capability.

So Joe, hopefully this helps. I highly, highly recommend you check out Episode 78 of the SmartPassiveIncome podcast. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session78. And I thank you for your time and your question today. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt today for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much. And for everybody else out there who has a question, you can head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask it right there on that page.

I also want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com. They've helped me because I used to keep track of my books with Excel. It was just a major headache. Now I use FreshBooks and it just makes it incredibly easy to connect with everything out there that has to do with my income and my expenses. So I can easily see what's going on and check on the health of my business, find some points where I can save money, and also, come tax season, it just makes it super easy as well. Plus, if you do any invoicing . . . for example, if you have any coaching students or clients or you do any consulting, it just makes it really easy and professional so you can get paid sooner. And worry more about the work you need to do for your business. So, to check it out for 30 days for free, head on over to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “AskPat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “AskPat” for a 30-day free trial.

Thanks so much for your time and attention today. I can't wait to serve you tomorrow in the next episode of AskPat. And to finish off as always, here's a quote, and this quote is from Earl Nightingale: “We become what we think about.”

Cheers, take care, and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.