Binge Factor Media

How do you leverage marketing to create podcast business growth? Our guest in this episode will show you the way! Tracy Hazzard sits down for a lively conversation with Adam Hommey, the host of The Business + Passion podcast. Adam talks about how he got into podcasting and shares his formula that has made his podcast a success. Tune in and learn more about podcasting and business growth from Tracy and Adam.

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How To Effectively Inject Podcast Business Growth By Making A Difference To Your Market With Adam Hommey Of The Business + Passion Podcast

I have a podcaster who also has a podcast system. He calls it The R.E.A.C.H System and we’re going to define that while he’s here. Adam Hommey. I was on his show and that’s how we connected. He did a massive amount of interviews at once on his BRILLIANCE+PASSION Podcast. He called it The BRILLIANCE+PASSION Project because it was a project that he got going. Plus, he has a show that he did before that for quite a number of years. He has over 450 episodes there, The Business Creators Radio Show. Adam Hommey, I’m excited to have him.

He is a speaker, author, trainer and consultant with years of experience helping business creators like you win at the game of business and marketing so you can thrive from the intersection of your brilliance and your passion while making a difference for your community, market and audience. He is the author of Groundhog Day is an Event, Not a Business Strategy and a contributing author to Journeys To Success: The Millennial Edition and both international Amazon bestsellers. He has spoken on stages around the country for many years and is a sought expert on podcasting for entrepreneurs. As the creator of the R.E.A.C.H System, Adam helps exponentially reach more profitable customers.

I was intrigued by all of the different things that Adam puts into his thought process into his show. His R.E.A.C.H System is hundreds of pages and it is a thorough system. He gave me a sneak peek into it. There’s a lot of definite deep substance and thought process and experience that he’s building into the podcast. He is looking at podcasting like a funnel or a marketing system and that’s what he approaches everything with the system’s mind and you’re going to get that in this interview. Here is Adam Hommey, the BRILLIANCE+PASSION Podcast and The Business Creators Radio Show.

Adam, it’s fun to have you on the flip side of this and now getting to interview you and talk about the BRILLIANCE+PASSION Podcast Project because that was quite an undertaking that you did, but I want to start at the beginning. What made you start your first podcast? What made you start Business Creators Radio?

We have to rewind to 2012. I created something called The Business Creators Institute, which in its original conception was going to be a center through which I promoted recorded training programs. The first and what turned out to be the last training program I did was something I sold from a few stages of some conferences I spoke at that autumn. It was basically about how to understand the technology behind your business that you could either do it yourself or if you’re hiring somebody and have a sense that they knew what they were talking about.

I needed a demo for how to build a website on WordPress thing and I came up with the idea of doing something called The Business Creators Radio Show, which was going to be a podcast. I set this thing up as the demo. I let it sit there for about eight months and then I remembered that it existed. I decided to go ahead and try this podcasting thing to see what happened. I didn’t know 1,000th of what I know today. I thought that you either got approved for this thing called iTunes or you didn’t exist.

I submitted its RSS feed to iTunes and I was told it would take about 30 days to get approval and then it happened 24 hours later. In the meantime, I had no episodes. We’re starting to see some of the things that manifest in terms of what we look to solve when it comes to helping entrepreneurs launch their podcasts. Fortunately, I had some existing recorded audio training that I could just simply switch the beginnings and endings of and I immediately announced that new episodes were coming soon but right now, tune in for some of our greatest hits.

I love it. You had the greatest hits before you had the show. That’s such a great strategy. Fly the plane and build it while you go.

Since then, we’ve had an episode every single Tuesday for almost eight years without one miss. Sometimes it gets so busy we have to increase the frequency to twice a week. We may be going into that right now actually. It ebbs and flows a little bit. There are rare occasions where we almost have to go hunting for guests, but most of the time, we have a backlog and we sometimes have to increase the frequency, so somebody is not waiting for six months for their brilliance and their passion to be shown to their community, market and audience.

Before we talk about BRILLIANCE+PASSION, I want to talk a little bit about the original show because you’re an advanced podcaster. We don’t often get a chance to talk to someone who’s got more than 300 episodes and you’ve got 450-plus by now. You’ve got 70 on the new one. We’ve got a crash course in some of the things that work and don’t work. I want to ask you some of those questions first before we move on. The way I was viewing it, but it seems that you didn’t choose to do volumes here. Your Business Creator Show that got 450, but you haven’t selected to move them into volumes. Is there a reason for that choice?

No, there was never even any thought about that. What happened in my business is I went through about a three-year period where I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I love the clients I had. I tolerated the work I was doing with them, but I didn’t want to grow it. I didn’t see it as my future. When I looked down on the future, all I saw was a blank screen. In the meantime, that meant that I had nothing to promote and to market and no answer to the question, “What do you do?”

The Business Creators Radio Show was my salvation. For three years, every week, every Tuesday, there was a fresh new episode for my audience. For me, there was a fresh new conversation every week, a new opportunity to explore a new avenue, an opportunity to make a connection that could lead me to something. I continue to get new clients, but I just didn’t have any concerted campaigns to do it. I hit it off with some people and we ended up doing some business together.

What’s fun about that is I got to test doing a few things without officially announcing I was in that business. Some of the things that I did during those three years are things that I would never say publicly that I did simply because it falls into that same category as sometimes you see on social media. People will start a viral post that says, “Post that weird job that nobody would believe you had.” I had a few of those.

You’re not going to share it with us.

No.

You all are going to have to listen to his show and guess which one.

Good luck.

Especially if you’re going to see their 450 shows, that’s a lot to go through.

A couple of other things that are interesting about it is my shows didn’t even have intro and outro bumpers. It’s one of those things that I never got around to. They’re just playing narratives where it starts with me speaking and ends with me speaking. I use the excuse for the longest time that I want to show that you can be as guerilla as possible with this and still make money. I reframed it as me setting the example of doing the most guerilla podcast in the world and having it be a centerpiece of my marketing.

Also, it would be a good thing to inspire the person who is under the impression that they have to spend $20,000 on audio equipment, possibly even add an addition to their house with soundproof insulation. They have to spend $15,000 on marketing and branding before they even answer the question, “What kind of podcast do I want to do?” I want to do the absolute diametric opposite of anything that holds anybody back from getting into this modality. After a while, it got to a time where I thought to myself, “Come on, you can do intros and outros.” We did them. It was nice for me because it saves me five minutes each time.

At some point along the lines, you figured out what you wanted to do. What is it that you want to do?

Podcasting is where I ultimately found my love. Originally, we did a pilot of a guest booking agency. I have people on my staff who can work with you to get you booked on podcasts. We have all kinds of connections that are not available off the transom. We do work with some clients on that right now. I did a pilot program on that and it went pretty well. What I’m seeing these days is a swing in a pendulum.

I’ve been predicting it for years and it pretty much happened where the power in the relationship has shifted much to the host. It’s to the point where some of the agencies that used to foist their applicants upon my show, trying to get as many of them booked as possible, have simply gone off the air. I’m now seeing more folks participating and I belong to some of these groups, saying on LinkedIn and Facebook with titles like, “Meet a guest. Find a guest. Be a guest.” On the entire premises, you do the same thing through networking.

Relationship building through podcasting, imagine that.

There are still some agencies that are doing well. What distinguishes them from some of the other agencies is, as I said about my own, having access to relationships and opportunities that simply cannot be found off the transom. The agencies where their primary modality was to send pitches and fill out application forms, those are the ones who fell by the wayside. To be successful as a booking company, it’s about those relationships and the ability to create connections which is to me what podcasting is all about when we get down to it.

It sounds like it’s your favorite part anyway.

The hosting part is my favorite.

Podcast Business Growth: It’s really about those relationships and those that have the ability to create connections, which is what podcasting is really all about when you get down to it.

You started the BRILLIANCE+PASSION Project, which is a podcast, and you did it all, recorded 70 and then launched it. Let’s go through the model of what you did because it’s interesting and it follows a little bit, but you’ve got some nice twists on in it. It follows a little bit of what we would have called the virtual summit model before, but you’ve put that podcast twist on it. What do you do there?

Back in the day, I started a group on Facebook called Everything Podcasting which is the foundation of my community around discussing everything podcasting, hosting, guessing and interest thereof. I got more and more members. We crossed the 300 thresholds fairly quickly and I was determined as much as possible to have that personal connection with every single member of that group. Now, I had a few ways of going about this, I could do the free strategy session model.

I could do the thing like connect with people on social media then I immediately send them these long messages in their DMs. They are all about, “Me, me, me. I’d like a schedule a demo.” I’ll circle around and follow up every week until I find out that my messages are being screenshot and made fun of in coaching groups. I didn’t want to do that either. I thought, “This is a group about podcasting. I’ll start a podcast about this.”

I could not put it under the aegis of The Business Creators Radio Show because those episodes are one-hour private mastermind sessions. The listener feels like they’re tuning in on a private mastermind session. The avatar for that type of show is somebody who is probably doing it while they’re running, jogging or otherwise spacing out. It’s audio-only, which is great because I’m not going to hold my media pose for an hour to get that.

On the other hand, The BRILLIANCE+PASSION episodes were designed to be my way of connecting with people and opening conversations that could lead to close deals, expanded opportunities and what have you. I engage somebody to assist me in connecting with all the members of the group. We still haven’t gone through all of them. There are still many to go. There’s my LinkedIn tribe which has thousands and I have many unopened conversations there. This project may never end.

That’s how we got connected. One of your team members reached out to me on LinkedIn because we were already connected over there.

She started her work and I thought, “I’ll get 10 or 15 of these in a few weeks and then we’ll put this thing on the air.” I blinked and I saw that I had 56 interviews scheduled. There’s a point where I was seeing that I had fourteen lined up on one day. Imagine what that did to my need to manage the rest of my life because my other business’s interest didn’t go away. My clients didn’t go away. My other marketing didn’t go away or anything like that. I had to find a way to make all this work. Plus, all these opening conversations were leading to more follow-up conversations putting even more weight on the calendar.

It took a while to get us to the point where we had to draw a line and say, “We got to launch this.” We had a few people who kept asking when their episode was going to go, which is a fair question. You interview because you do from a sense of altruism and you want to be as helpful as soon as possible. What I decided to do is we picked 60 as our cut-off, but again it was going so fast, it zoomed by me.

We got it to 70. We put a brief pause on doing the interviews and I decided to use it as an opportunity to once again demonstrate the polar and diametric opposite of some of the misconceptions about podcasting. I wanted to create a model that shows that you can watch this and have it be a successful launch, do an ungodly number of episodes and still have a whole bunch of stuff and go wrong in that process and have it happened in record time.

Here was what caught us. In our model for launching podcasts, we encourage our clients to the same time they launched their dedicated website for their podcast launch a companion video channel. YouTube is the most common one, but if they have any objection to YouTube, they can use Rumble or something like that. It doesn’t matter. Just pick one because they all show up in search engine results on search engines.

I had never thought of this because I had never been in that situation. When you start a new YouTube channel, you’re limited on how many episodes you load per day. I had this vision of I validated the YouTube channel by having a text me the number and everything. I thought my length limits are off. I went to the directory on my hard drive, where I lined up all 70 in my MP4s and clicked upload. After I got to eleven, I got the big red alert.

There are some things that we don’t realize are going to happen to us when we do these things. We got a brilliant model and it’s going to work.

I had it all set up. We even created a master document of the content of all the blog posts or the website and the YouTube episodes. Even a little note that says, “This one only goes on the YouTube episode. This one only goes on the blog post, etc.” I thought, “We’ll get these uploaded really quick and then I’ll give this to my assistant and that will take her two hours to copy-paste.”

As I set it up, it was a copy-paste for each one, no big deal. That didn’t quite happen. I wasn’t rescheduling this. We just went ahead with a podcast that didn’t have a companion video channel. We embedded the episodes directly into the post, which we’re eventually going to undo. A reason I share these encounters is that I want to show people there’s always a way.

There’s always a hack around. There’s always a workaround. This is the thing sometimes, we think we know it works and then it doesn’t work the next time. YouTube changes their model, which you could have done as many videos as you wanted to years ago, it would have been fine if you had done it then but you do it now and it doesn’t work. This is just the model of things that shift over time and that’s why when you do something new and you’re testing it out, you’re much more a valuable resource.

That’s a part of what drove me to create what’s called the Podcast R.E.A.C.H System. That’s a compendium of my years of experience and experimentation on this and looking at podcasting from a different model than some other folks may view. We hear a lot about getting all those listeners and downloads and all that. My view on that is if you treat getting listeners and downloads as a result where there isn’t a goal, you’ll achieve it faster and achieved it more sustainably. When you focus on the actions that get that for, you’re creating a sustainable engine rather than a pump and dump.

There’s a couple of big distinctions that I want to talk about between The Business Creators Radio Show and the BRILLIANCE+PASSION Podcast. You’ve done this thing where one is a short format. The BRILLIANCE+PASSION is the short format. It’s pre-determined questions. You go through the same set of questions each time and your Business Creators Radio Shows is an hour long and a lot more in-depth, as you put it. It was more of a mastermind that people are getting to listen to. Did you find over time that you were attracted to one model or the other? Are you finding any more success one versus the other?

They both have their place. To say that one is better than the other or one is more successful than the other, is another misconception that we sometimes see out there. You are living proof is a fallacy that you can only have one podcast. You get one shot at this. No, you want another podcast or another podcast.

They have different goals. One has one certain goal and the other has certain different goals that we’ve already discussed. The BRILLIANCE+PASSION Project is a networking tool. There are legitimate interviews and they get all the same promotional consideration as episodes on The Business Creators Radio Show. It has its marketing engine behind it and everything else. However, the main conversation that happens with BRILLIANCE+PASSION is in the follow-up. Wherein in the Business Creators Radio Show often the primary conversation is the interview itself.

You’ve mentioned the R.E.A.C.H System twice now and I want to make sure because R.E.A.C.H is an acronym. What does R.E.A.C.H stand for?

Originally, we weren’t sure if we were going to call this R.E.A.C.H or R.E.A.C.T. We knew that we needed an acronym because acronyms are a great way of explaining things. We went back and forth between R.E.A.C.H and R.E.A.C.T. The R stands for Represent, Reinvent and Reverberate your business and brand. At our VIP level, we work with entrepreneurs who are using the podcast to spearhead their way into a market that they haven’t played in up until now and help them achieve notoriety and fame quickly as the host of that show. It’s the conduit of information or as the credential user for those interviews.

The E stands for Engage your ideal prospects, clients, customers and business allies. We’ve seen statistics that show that offering free strategy sessions can lead up to a 50% no-show rate of the people who scheduled the free strategy session. With scheduling a podcast interview, you have a 99% yes show rate. It’s engaging. A, achieve greater presence and make a difference. You use the new media to credentialize other influencers and thought leaders and transform them into unpaid evangelists for your business and brand.

The C stands for Close more deals and Create the business and lifestyle you deserve. It’s about accelerating the know, like and trust continuum. The H has two meanings, Harmonize with your market and become the Hunted, not the hunter. Instead of begging others for a few minutes of their time, inspire them to bang down your door and demand you’ve met them to your prospecting funnel. I have an article out. It’s on the R.E.A.C.H Systems website that has the title Candidly, Launch Your Podcast and Get Free Business Coaching. Let’s think about this. You get it, but I’ll explain it briefly for your readers. How many folks out there would you love to have a conversation with?

Podcast Business Growth: The main conversation that happens with Brands + Passion is in the follow-up. Whereas with the Business Creators radio show, often the primary conversation is the interview itself.

You want them to ask you to have a conversation with you, right?

Exactly. There are many ways you can do it. You can graze around their social media like you’re flirting with them and hope that they eventually notice you or you can keep that going to the point where you feel comfortable like DM them and saying, “I love what you’re talking about. Can I pick your brain?” Nobody will be picking my brain. You are not going to be shoving stuff in my brain.

My good friend Miguel De Jesus met Daymond John at a traffic conversion summit, I believe it was. He posted a meme of himself with Daymond John and the caption said, “I want to talk to you, but I don’t know what to say.” We want to meet people, but we don’t know what we want to speak with them about.

Having a podcast and offering the opportunity to have a conversation with you, answers that question. It’s all about creating the framework for an initial conversation if you’re using it for relationship-building purposes as far as becoming the hunted, not the hunter. Instead of thinking, “How can I reach such a person? I would just love to have a conversation with him. I don’t know what I want to say to them, but I want to have a conversation with them.” If you show up at their doorstep rather than asking them for something but giving them something, you’re going to get a lot more yeses quickly.

You said it might have been R.E.A.C.T. What was the T if you use T instead?

I don’t know. We didn’t use it, so I don’t care.

We have our three questions here. They used to be five, but we have now shortened them to three in this set because we have passed our 100th episode mark and you’re in our second set. We now have three questions instead of five because we found that some were overlapping so much. We made it more concise. Our three sections and three things that we want to ask you about is getting great guests. You had tons of guests on here. Did you find that there were factors and things that you wish you had shifted so that you could get better opportunities? Were there some criteria or any screening that you started to refine over time?

The first 70 episodes, the first 70 conversations were a great market research experience and I’ll be completely candid with this. The purpose of the BRILLIANCE+PASSION Project is ultimately to find entrepreneurs who want to launch your podcast and want to hire us to do that for them. I got some priceless education on who I should be scheduling follow-up conversations with. I won’t give any details about that because I don’t want anybody to feel that they’re more or less and that actually goes to the second learning experience, which is what other offers are? What are other opportunities to work together? What are other benefits that we can experience together?

I should not have been in your funnel, right? We had a great conversation.

That’s where I’m going with this. You are unlikely to be a client for the podcast R.E.A.C.H System. However, the conversation that opened that we have on an ongoing basis is we could potentially be mutual resources for each other. We’re still in the process of defining what that means but the fact is I don’t believe there’s such a thing as competition per se. Even if you gave me a checklist of the twelve things you do and I gave you the checklist of the twelve things I do, they’re all the same twelve things. We still serve different markets. We have different personalities, styles and types of clients in situations we work best with. There’s something that you don’t do that I do and there’s something that I do that you don’t or whatever and vice versa. You get the idea.

That’s why I went to your show. I would have gone on because I recognized it for what it was because I’m in the business. I was like, “I’d like to talk to him. I like to get to know him because I’d like to find out and I believe him.” As our good friend Scott Carson calls it, it’s Co-op petition. That’s what it is. It’s like why shouldn’t we be a co-op and competitors at the same time because there’s so much room for that.

We can raise the industry in general. I’m here. I just want more podcasters in the marketplace. If you’re going to build them like Adam, then all the better. Now that you’ve gone through that 70, what definitions and how would you start to define it if you were one of your clients who is saying, “I need to have conversations with potential clients.” What criteria would you start to screen for?

I wouldn’t change a thing.

Would you still keep it open?

The original purpose is still the same. It’s my modality for opening conversations. It doesn’t have to have one perfectly defined outcome. Just because somebody may or may not be a viable prospect for the podcast R.E.A.C.H System, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other opportunities. For example, I’ve been getting more bookings on shows like yours than I’ve ever gotten before at a faster rate simply because I put reciprocity upfront. Sometimes the end game is you get an additional media exposure opportunity for yourself. I was on a podcast. This was Andy Grant’s Real Men Feel Project and that wasn’t about podcasting. It was more about what it means to be a man. I’ve been dying to have a piece of content I can point to that explains my thoughts about being a man.

That’s awesome that you got to have an opportunity to have that conversation.

I probably accelerated the likelihood of that even being possible by a factor of fifteen. Andy’s a nice guy. Let’s look at it from the podcaster’s point of view in general. I could have been the 95th person to email him yet another pitch and he would have taken one look at that and said, “This guy is selling podcasting services. I don’t need him. Next.”

However, because I opened that conversation with him, we found ways to be mutually supportive of each other’s brands. That’s just one example right there. Look at it and I’ve said this many times in my live streams and teachings is if you want to get booked on more shows, podcasts and stages, find yourself being invited to more virtual summits where you’re the person who gets in. You’re not the person who is sent to jump through the flaming hoops that are set up for you to fail because they don’t want you. You’re the one that’s actually in the summit and we all know what we’re talking about there. This is a great way to do it.

It opens more doors when you make more offers. Engaging and growing your listener base. That is the second thing that most podcasters come and say, “I need to engage more with my audience and I need to grow my listener base.” What are some things that you do on the post-production like you’re done with the show on the promotion side of things to help you do that?

We encourage them to share their episode. I specifically tell them that if they remember to tag me, I will jump in and help them algorithmically by commenting on it, by adding it to my social media threads to get them more hits. I don’t come out and say this but in terms of other things I may do and in terms of deciding what my greatest hits are and things like that. Whether or not they are promoting it is candidly going to be a consideration. I’m speaking the real world here.

Now, this sounds like a grade A level stuff, but it’s what it is. It’s the basics. You can come up with all the fancy-schmancy algorithmic wonderful technological stuff, but it comes down to creating a great experience for the guests where they enjoyed being on the show. They felt it was an opportunity for them to show the intersection of their brilliance in their passion that they want others to see it. The one that they want to proudly say, “This is an example of one of my great episodes.”

As the host, we create that experience for them as much as possible and that will encourage them to do it. Plus, give them some support along the way, like some basic swipe files. I sent you guys an extremely basic swipe file. You probably looked at it and thought, “Did he get this out of a kindergarten coloring book?” The thing is, people are moving fast. They have a lot of things being called upon to promote and I left it simple.

This was something that they didn’t have to think hard about. All they had to do is put in their link and put in their title. Some of the many people who shared when we launched it just use it word for word, paste it in their link and paste it in their title. Some of them added a paragraph where they shared some of the great things and what have you. It was also was surprising because there were a few episodes where I didn’t think I was going to hear from the person and they went around banging the drum-like they were leading the band promoting this thing.

Podcast Business Growth: Instead of begging others for a few minutes of their time, inspire them to bang down your door and demand that you admit them through your prospecting funnel.

I’m going to make sure that everyone gets linked to. I’ll drop the promotional posts that I created for it because we did a custom one. You can see the differences in what we did, but it still has the basic information that you provided in there. We just put our twist on it because we do this every day, but I’ll drop that into this post so people can see what a good promotion of an episode that you’ve been on looks like.

Here’s another thing whether or not you’re onto social media networks, 1 or 50, there are some that you care about that you’re going to spend time on and some that are probably repeaters you’ve delegated to others what have you. Be clear as much as you can with your guests about which are the ones that you are on. For me, it’s LinkedIn and Facebook. I may have a couple of profiles set up in a couple of other places. They’re mostly they’re just so that nobody takes my name. There are two networks I play on and that’s it. Those are the ones I can help you with. I had a few folks say, “I put you on Instagram and I couldn’t find you.” “You’re not going to find me on Instagram. I’m not on Instagram but thank you so much for the share.”

That’s the thing it’s like where you participate is one thing, but where your guests participate, that’s an added exposure. It’s great when they’re sharing in somewhere else, even if you don’t exist there.

You can’t hit them all, and also doing this on an ongoing basis gives you intelligence on maybe there’s somewhere else you should be or there’s somewhere you are right now and we are just spinning your wheels. Every little thorough thing you can do to gain marketing intelligence to help you optimize your efforts is a good thing.

That’s going to engage more and grow the listener base. That’s great tips there, Adam. Thank you. Let’s talk about monetization and the definition of success. I like to use the definition of success instead of monetization because it’s not always a straight line to money-making efforts. It might be authority growth or whatever. For you, let’s talk Business Creators Radio Show first, but for you what is the definition of success for that show?

It was an episode of that show, but it could have been me appearing on some other podcasts. It’s when somebody appears on your schedule or saying they heard you on the podcast and were intrigued by what you have to say. They want to have a conversation about having you help them bring their startup into revenue. You sign up for that and then you sign a $30,000 deal off of that based on that type of thing happening. That’s how I got one of my clients. She swears to this day that she knows somebody who referred me, but she can’t tell me who that is.

It’s probably herself listening to your show.

That’s where I was going with this. I remember at the time her saying that she had heard me on a podcast and thought something I said was interesting but couldn’t say what that was. What I believe happened is that just like I believe there’s no such thing as a truth, I believe that there are facts that we interpret through the lens of our way of viewing things. I believe that she believed she was referred to me because I was either on another show or it was my show and whoever the other person was, did a good job of saying, “You need to speak with Adam. He’s good at this.” That counts as a referral.

You had that referral happening on-air. That’s fantastic. What about the BRILLIANCE+PASSION Project? It just got out there. What do you define its success because it’s a different model?

More reachers and podcast juice for me. These are two things we’ve already covered. It was you that I had this conversation with. When people think of podcast monetization, they think of finding a sponsor who’s going to pay me per download or what have you. If you want to go on one of those platforms that does that where eventually you will make $25 a month, more power to you. I believe that there are two great ways to monetize. One of which is when you get clients and that’s number one with a bullet.

The other one is when your show gains so much popularity in a scene is such a beacon of knowledge and whatever industry market or niche you’re in that some whale comes to you and says, “We want to sponsor your entire show or we want to sponsor 100 episodes.” It might have been you or might have been somebody else and I’m going to genericized this because I don’t know how much I’m able to say if it was you. I remember hearing a story of somebody who had a podcast that they had to abandon. It was on a very niche topic.

That’s mine. You’re talking about my 3D print show.

We can say it. You said if Hewlett Packard came to you and said, “We want to sponsor your show because we spent a year trying to knock your show out of the rankings and since we can’t do it, we might as well join them.”

That’s exactly what happened. It was me.

That’s what I mean by a whale. I have a client who charges $500 to sponsor one of her episodes and she gets that amount paid because there’ll be a company that will be willing to pay $500 to sponsor one episode that they can point to and say, “We sponsored it.”

What I’m interested to hear is because you are just like we are. Absolute promoters of the trifecta or the triad of podcasting. The podcast, the video channel and the blogs have all of the website and everything together. I’m interested to see how your shorter format show with the shorter blogs do versus the original show blogs that used to do or you’d still do on your Business Creators Radio Show. Also, you did 70 at once. I want to see if you see that absolute boost in the same way that you normally see from your weekly show.

That’s something we’re still in the process of discovering.

I’m looking forward to hearing that. I’m going to have to have you back on so we can talk about that. That retrospective because there are technical things that you’ve done, Adam, that are interesting and dropping as many as you did. Even the most aggressive podcasters typically do 25. You’ve outdone yourself there. You did those three times.

We tell people to watch between 8 and 12. The number varies depending on what the industry standard is. I can give your readers one real quick tech tip if you’re interested. We had to create all these fancy-schmancy graphics to give you and the other 69 people that you could put into your social media posts in your emails. You’re thinking, “We have to use Canva and create 70 files or we have to go into Photoshop and we have to find a way to duplicate the tab 70 times.” We use PowerPoint. We have that new version, the one that streams that off the cloud and allows you to save things high-density PNG images. Duplicate slide, paste in the picture, change the name and change title and link.

Do this 70 times and then you can save the entire deck as a collection of PNG files and you simply go in and rename them. Here’s one other thing, when you rename your files whether it’s your episode images, video files and audio files, be consistent with a pattern. When we added 70 episodes to our WordPress website, we used the PowerPress plugin because we stream it directly from our site and Amazon AWS and we use that to feed it to syndicators. If you’re doing the save as on a blog post, do you want to have to go back and look up the name and file name every time? Do you want to know that all you need to do is click the thing where it says edit, type the guest’s name and all lowercase letters with no spaces and hit save?

Let’s talk bingeaibility, Adam, because this is The Binge Factor. We can’t leave without talking about bingeing. Do you have an idea of what might make the BRILLIANCE+PASSION Podcast bingeable?

There is some controversial stuff in there or that some people might find controversial. In several of the episodes I use an analogy intentionally because one of our questions is if you could go back in time and change one thing you’ve experienced or one thing you’ve done, what would it be and why? Our most popular answer that by the way, is I wouldn’t change a thing because what happened is what got me here.

I’ll use an example and I’ve been sharing this for years. My intellectual junk food is alternate history. One of the big scenarios you see in an alternate history is somebody goes back and kills Hitler before he had a chance to get started or make sure he was never born. You’re thinking, “We save 15 million lives and the world’s going to be a utopia now.” They go back and make sure that Hitler was never born or make sure they never went to politics or shoot them in the head or make sure he dies in a war injury in World War I or what have you.

They go back to 2020 and say, “Shoot, everything shifted,” because Hitler was a fantastic orator. He had oratorical skills. He had the ability to create something that already existed and focused on it. The ideas, as sinister and disgusting as they were, existed and they were not exactly in a vacuum somewhere. He simply created a focal point and a wedge. That’s all he did. He was crap for a military commander. I’ve read over a dozen of them is because he wasn’t around, somebody who knew what they were doing in the war was and they won.

Podcast Business Growth: It really comes down to creating a great experience for the guests where they really enjoyed being on the show where they felt it was an opportunity then for them to really show the intersection of their brilliance and their passion, they want others to see it.

The future got worse, not better. We don’t know what our alternate outcome is. There’s a bunch of shows that are like that out there. You have a question that then opens up these interesting options and then because of that, I want to hear what the next person says. It created this binge factor throughout that model of doing it.

For me, it’s the idea of having conversations and going somewhat tangential sometimes on things that are beyond the typical business talk and looking at some of the pop culture things and some of the things we discuss outside of business which shows it’s just fun. We get to explore a bunch of ideas. Another one of our questions is if you could meet somebody famous, alive or dead, who would they be and what question would you have for them if they had the opportunity. Did we get a range on that one?

That’s a funny thing. I was listening to more of the show because I always listened before I do the interview and I’m listening to what other people say. I was like, “What did I say?” I had to re-listen to my episode because I was like, “I know what I said but did I say that?” You had to go back and listen. Even I had to go back and listen to my own, which is a good thing.

I’ve been binging a bit myself because I like to go back and check again some of the funny stories and interesting things that have come up in the conversation. Even though it’s a short format, I designed it in such a way where even within those fifteen minutes, there is flexibility. It’s important to have flexibility because whether the host or the guest is supplying the questions or it’s a hybrid of the two or it’s just the natural conversation which it isn’t, it’s planned out even readers don’t think it is.

You’re going to get that guest where you ask them one question and they take the entire 30 minutes or 1 hour, then you’re going to get that one where you’ve asked all your questions, it is four minutes in and they give one-word answers. Now, what do you do with the rest of the time? This is where storytelling, seed-based marketing and your ability to make use of analogies and metaphors and make it a more interesting experience. To me, that’s what makes it binge-able.

I’m going to say that, “Yes, there’s the factor of how the show is run and what does.” That is right on with what you said. There’s also a factor that’s you, Adam. In the process of it, from listening to both your shows because it’s apparent in both the shows, what I found is that your ability to establish a fast rapport. These were not long interview slots that you gave us, to begin with. This was fast. We didn’t have a lot of pre-talk and we dove right in. We got a connection quickly.

Your binge factor, Adam, is that your ability to make a report and connection and build that relationship fast and then pull it through the rest of that interview even though there is that programmatic quality to it. Your energy of keeping that interest in building the relationship with us and understanding why we’re answering what we’re answering and being intrigued by those answers. That is your personal binge factor and the bingeability that you bring to your shows.

Thank you very much. Sometimes I say bad words on the Business Creators Radio Show. I have people that tune in to see if I’m going to do it. We addressed that inside the podcast R.E.A.C.H System. One of the modules is whether or not you should use profanity in your episodes. Now, you can take it from your personal feelings about it. If that’s the approach you want to take, that’s fine. Some people don’t want to see that stuff. They don’t have that in their show. Great, awesome. Some people like to take that edgy approach, so they throw some in just for fun.

I’m going to give this to your followers. Regardless of which approach you take, it’s important to remember that it’s a situational thing. You have to remember that other than your efforts, your guest is going to have the greatest influence on whether that episode sees the light of day. You want them to be excited. If you check that guest out and you see that they like to drop the occasional f-bomb and you see that their social media is edgy, real and raw, then you can go there with them usually. I share it because it gives them the opportunity to indulge in that without necessarily having to do it themselves because I’ll be doing it. If I’m seeing something that’s stayed and solid or what have you, I might say, “Golly Gee Wilikers,” once or twice.

Seriously because it’s about making your guests want to share it. If you have somebody out there who’s saying, “I can’t stand means with profanity and if you keep posting them, I’m going to unfriend you.” You’re probably not going to get them to share too much of your episode if you go off on a rant. For them, you go the Golly Gee Wilikers rant.

You can do that matching without losing your authenticity. Think about anybody who is a president of the United States. The way they speak at a campaign rally versus a state of the union address, versus a news conference, versus some meeting with a special interest group, versus a thank you meeting for their supporters. That’s five different tones of voice and still authentically the same person.

Adam, I’m glad you came on the show, but before we go, I want to make sure that you have an opportunity to address one thing that comes up. What are the biggest objections you get to people who are still on that permanent potential, unable to get off the fence and start their show? What are the objections that you come up against?

We have several of them. I’ll highlight a couple for the sake of time here. A big one we get is particularly when it comes to interviewing formats, the prospects or the permanent potentials will say, “But if I’m interviewing other people, then that makes it all about them. How is that promoting my business?” We’ve already answered that. It’s about getting your guests excited to share the fact that they’re on your show.

They will credential themselves by saying, “Look, I was on The Binge Factor. I was on the Business Creators Radio Show. I was on the BRILLIANCE+PASSION.” Combine that with a host being able to use storytelling, metaphors and analogies to get your message into the conversation. That’s one. There’s another one that says, “It’s hard and it takes a lot of time.” I say that after you’ve done that raw recording and if it takes you more than five minutes to post-production, you got to look at your process against taking it too long.

I’m working with one of my clients who has been struggling to get her video and audio files created. It’s something she ultimately intends to outsource, but at this point, she is not yet at the outsourcing point. At the same time, once you have the process in place, whoever she outsources to, she doesn’t have to spend $1,200 to get a video created.

You want to do it at the most efficient, cost-effective way.

What we did with her is we looked at her technological setup and I’m not going to get into PC versus Mac, whatever. I told her to get Camtasia. It’s an hour working with her to set Camtasia up. That was also part of my secret of how we post-produce 70 episodes in basically one day is we had our intros and outros pre-recorded as MP4 files. We had the commercials that we insert and we usually set those right before the intros. If you give me one more minute, in the end, I’ll explain why we did. We have the episode in the middle where we snip off the little edges like, “Let’s pause for five seconds. We have to get to the point.” If I had notes that there was a tech issue, I can go back and cut that. Drop, cut, splice, fade, render and then produce special, go to the same folder, give the same file name and there’s your MP3.

You just dropped a message about advertisements. Let’s talk about that quickly.

When we were going into post-production, our original plan is we were going to have them be the intro, commercial, episode, outro. I rendered one and I watched it and I thought I wasn’t going to see the content until my next birthday. I’m thinking, “Did we overdo this and am I going to reschedule this because I have the voiceover artists do this again? We’re going to deal with speaking speeds and everything else and what have you.” I have this crazy idea, intro, commercial, commercial and intro. Now it feels like it’s pulling me in because think about it when you watch something on any social media network that has a sponsored advertisement, do you see the content first or do they usually make you sit through a commercial first?

That’s the way Netflix and Hulu run.

We made that one small switch. To me, it made it so much more bingeable because I matched it to the experience I used to see. Remember, I’ve disclosed candidly. I don’t care about $0.20 at a time monetization. I’m not even going for it. I look to replicate as much as possible. I follow some YouTube channels that have been demonetized because they don’t make community standards or what have you. I noticed that some that do documentaries and history stuff, the stuff that I binge on, that’s part of the reason the stuff gets demonetized. It’s because it might not give the version of history that somebody likes separate conversation.

What I noticed in their designs is they did get sponsors to just pay for that entire episode and they put the sponsor commercial first. I just replicated the model. Look around, see what other people are doing and look at your own experience consuming content and notice the trends and match it. There are other people who have done the research and figure out how it works.

Thank you, Adam, so much for being so open and sharing and being such a prolific podcaster that you have such great information to share with us.

I look forward to sharing this with everybody I know.

Thanks so much.

—

Some high energy from Adam and he’s matching my energy as we were talking about the end. We both have this high hyper energy. I’m going to link the interview Adam did of me so you’ll be able to see that. That’ll give you an idea of how his show sounds. You can check it right out. Check that episode. You can see how he matched my energy and how he interjected stories into it because you guys know me already. You know what I would say amongst those things and now you get to hear how he structured that interview with someone you already know. That will make it a lot more interesting for you to check out his show from that perspective.

Podcast Business Growth: You have to remember that other than your own efforts, your guests are going to have the greatest influence on whether that episode sees the light of day. So you want them to be excited.

The other thing is that there are some things that Adam and I are aligned with ad there are others that we are just not. That’s because we’re running different kinds of businesses. It’s always so good to get a broad business approach to double-check and see what’s going on in your mind, such as the mention of putting the ad at the beginning. I’m not a fan of the ad at all. If your show is an advertisement in of itself, it’s a network builder.

There doesn’t need to be an ad because the show is a draw for you. There doesn’t need to be an ad but the idea if you do need an ad or if you’ve got a sponsor and you’re running one of those things, putting that ad at a pre-intro roll is a different model of doing it altogether. It might work for you and it might be too pushy for your audience. It depends on your show.

It works for Adam because of his personality and the type of business he’s running. He needs you to think about what this shows purpose is for him as well. He needs to put that at the forefront there and that works for him. It might not be the right choice for you and that’s where strategy comes in to be thinking about what strategically is the best? In these ideas that I’m pulling from listening to all of these experts that I have here on the show, what little pieces can I pull together that are going to make this work for me?

Keep in mind, sometimes you drawing all this advice from all these different people isn’t always working. That’s my role here as the host. That’s my role here as the curator and the editor because I can edit out things that I know might be detrimental to you. I didn’t edit anything out of Adam that was going to be detrimental. That’s not the case. I might edit out a few ums, ahs and awkward pauses, but I didn’t edit out any content because I didn’t need to because his advice is thorough, detailed and helpful.

Sometimes you have to play that role as the host of editing and carefully curating and sometimes, it means not inviting a guest on that you think it’s going to be counter to the mission of your show. Keeping that in mind that there’s always that option of recording your show and then saying, “I’m sorry, that didn’t work out. The audio quality was bad, I can’t air that. Let’s reschedule in the future, I’ll reach out to you,” and then never reach out. It will become apparent from the interview process if it’s not a fit.

For Adam, I knew he would be the right fit. As you know, I rarely invite someone who offers podcasting advice and podcasting services because I don’t want you to have that. Not because I’m being competitive, as Adam put it, and controlling about who you get exposure to, but I want to make sure that you’re not going to have too many coaches in your ear. With too many differing opinions because that can hurt you. If you take one little piece over here and then it counteracts with other pieces of advice, I’ve been giving you consistently here or things that have been presented from successes that have been happening from the podcasters that are on our show here.

Your job and your role is this tight curation of who comes on your show and what they get to say and what they get to share on how you direct your questions and how you control that interview in the process. That’s what happened here. Adam and I are looking at maybe there’s going to be a long-term relationship because we’re working on something pretty secret that we’re going to launch. We might have these deeper relationships with other podcast coaches and other podcast strategists because their views might be the one thing that you need. Their direction of creating a podcast funnel and creating a virtual summit into a much better podcast. These things might be more useful to you than my straight services of what we do.

We’re still here on the post-production. We’re still here out to provide Podetize hosting. All of that still exists. We can complement all of these coaches and strategists and other people out there and make the entire industry grow and make all of your shows better and better so that you don’t pod fade and you don’t quit your show because you didn’t get the support you needed. If you didn’t strategically set them up, to begin with, then I’ve done my job of being the cheerleader for the industry if that’s what it is and my role is. The cheerleader, the chief strategist, whatever you want to call me in this process. That’s my role here.

Remember that the hosting position is the power position in the whole thing because you control what people hear, who they hear and how that message comes across. I will bring other podcasters back like Adam Hommey, other views, ways, types of shows to take a look at and other ways to a podcast. I will bring you that every week here on the show. Nothing’s changing there. That will happen again on The Binge Factor.

Important Links:

• The R.E.A.C.H System
• Tracy Hazzard – Previous episode on BRILLIANCE+PASSION Podcast

Listen to the episode here:

• BRILLIANCE+PASSION Podcast
• The Business Creators Radio Show
• Groundhog Day is an Event, Not a Business Strategy
• Journeys To Success: The Millennial Edition
• The Business Creators Institute
• Everything Podcasting
• LinkedIn – Adam Hommey
• Podcast R.E.A.C.H System
• Candidly, Launch Your Podcast and Get Free Business Coaching
• Real Men Feel Project – Challenging Masculine Stereotypes episode with Adam Hommey
• Facebook – Adam Hommey

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