Binge Factor Media

Podcasting is a haven for curious minds. It is a great outlet for experts to impart valuable information and for audiences to receive them. That is why podcast hosts need to be good interviewers and listeners to draw out the information that is shared and needed. As such, they must make the best of the time given by both guests and audiences by making a great show. Embodying that in his podcasting endeavors is Jason Hartman, the CEO of JasonHartman.com and The Hartman Media Company. Someone who has brute force tested, Jason is the host of Creating Wealth Real Estate Investing, which has over 1,459 episodes. In this episode, he joins host, Tracy Hazzard, to tell us how he has invested in extreme podcasting and why it is important to become an agent for your podcast audience. He talks about how he imparts his own knowledge, even while having guests over, as well as how he takes the time to record all these shows while staying so informed. One to provide a great podcasting experience, Jason then shares with us some great tips on choosing your guests (and not just anybody famous), increasing your audience, producing and monetizing your show, and encouraging engagement.

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Investing In Extreme Podcasting And Becoming An Agent For Your Podcast Audience With Jason Hartman

I have on extreme podcaster, Jason Hartman. I personally listen to his Creating Wealth Real Estate Investing Podcast and he has over 1,459 episodes. We’re talking someone who has brute force tested. I found out that he has twenty others that he is involved with. He either start it and now has guest hosts on. There’s a real lot of podcasting experience here and he has some great tips. Some of it is in-line with what we talk about here but some of it is a new perspective on how you should look at your podcast and your show. I know you’re going to enjoy this. Let me tell you a little bit more about Jason. He’s been involved in several thousand real estate transactions. He has owned income properties in eleven states and seventeen cities.

His company is Platinum Properties Investment Network. He helps people achieve the American dream of financial freedom by purchasing income property. He has the podcasts, educational events, referrals, mentoring, software to track your investments, investors can easily locate, finance, and purchase properties in exceptional markets. He has a whole slew of resources for people at his website. You are not going to want to miss this episode. He has started a media company which is Hartman Media Company and he also has a foundation. Jason started while in college at the age of nineteen and bargaining on a career in real estate.

He is a scrappy go-getter, knows how to put it together, and that’s exactly how he got started. I am impressed with the style of the show and you will be too. I’m impressed because it takes in many things. He’s instinctually done many things because of how he is and how he investigates the world that you’re going to learn here. That is a common thread between many of the successful podcasters I’ve talked to. You want to check out the show, the advice, and why he’s got this thread going that makes his show bingeable and appealing to the audience. Let’s go to Jason Hartman.

Jason, thanks for joining me. You are quite a prolific podcaster. Your Creating Wealth Real Estate Investing Podcast has 1,459 episodes for five-plus years, five days a week. You told me you have a whole list of other podcasts. How do you do it?

I have a lot of what I call business hobbies. Being a curious person, I started my first show back in 2006, The Creating Wealth Show, which is still my main show. I didn’t always publish five days a week. The original intent was one day a week. Sadly, I made many mistakes over the years and there were times when I published irregularly and didn’t publish an episode for three weeks at a time. For many years, we’ve been very consistent publishing 3 to 5 episodes per week. For a while during the pandemic crisis, we were publishing seven days a week because there was so much news. I had a lot of success with that show. Back in about 2008 or 2009, I started a few other shows and those worked and took off nicely. Since then, I’ve even started more shows. One of the things I’ve discovered that podcasting is great for is when I want to learn something, and I’m a very curious person, I’ll start a podcast on that topic.

That’s not crazy at all. That’s exactly why I have a podcast on blockchain and I’m not an expert.

You get to interview a lot of the thought leaders and industry leaders and you get to learn from them. As podcasters, we don’t have to be the subject matter experts, our guests do. They’re the ones that need to impart their brilliance. All we need to do is learn how to be good interviewers, to listen well, to ask good questions, to draw them out and get them to be candid with us. That’s what we do is as the interviewer for our audience. Of course, I’m always on both sides of that coin like now you’re interviewing me.

You got to be on the other side sometimes too. Did you start out as a great interviewer? You’ve done thousands of episodes. You get into this place where you’re good at it now, but did you start out that way?

I’ve always been good as a conversationalist. I’ve always been very curious and most of my shows are centered around personal finance and real estate investing, specifically. I liked talking about these geeky subjects when it comes to economics. I like talking about it. I do it for free but it turns a lot of money doing it too.

How did podcasting come into your mind like, “This is the thing I’m going to try. This is the thing I’m going to do?”

I remember the exact moment I first ever heard the word podcast. It was sometime in 2005. I used to live in Orange County, California. I lived in Irvine and Newport Coast. I moved around in those areas. I was driving on a Saturday afternoon on Jamboree Road in Newport Beach and I was listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy on KFI AM Talk Radio. He answers tech questions and one of his listeners called in and asked about podcasting. At that time, I had this girlfriend and she was an Apple cult member. She loved her iPod more than anything in the world. That’s when it was a big deal to have an iPod and now that was no big deal. Back then, iPod were starting to be in this huge rage and she loved her iPod. When someone said podcast, I connected the two naturally, although they’re not connected. My ears perked up.

At that time, I had a little radio show on KRLA AM Talk Radio. I would do that show every Saturday at Terrestrial Radio Show. It was all real estate investing and listeners would call and ask questions and stuff. It was never very successful. I did learn a little bit about broadcasting and stuff then. I had done a book tour about five years earlier for my first book and I did hundreds of radio interviews being the guest. I remember I used to get up at 3:00 AM at my home in Newport Coast and I would do 6:00 AM East Coast drive, which was a popular prime time spot to be on the radio. These radio talk show hosts would interview me about my book called Become The Brand Of Choice, it was about personal branding. I learned some interview techniques from them. That’s how it evolved.

You have an interesting show because there’s a large portion at the beginning that is you talking about and setting up the interview that you’re going to do, where it’s a lot of your thought process. That’s what you’re giving us is your thought process into things. It’s not like it’s a lesson which a lot of shows are. It’s more of, “Here’s something to ponder and something to think about.” There are lessons in there and then it seamlessly ties to your interview. How do you plan that? Do you do the interview and then do that after? What is your process there because it seems seamless?

The real answer is my audience say they love my tangents. We have a thing among my audience community called Tangent Alerts, “Jason’s going off on another tangent.” Frankly, that’s a result of my core planning. I don’t plan the shows at all. In fact, many times, I’m extremely busy. For example, for our episode, I know who the guest is because I prerecorded that interview, but I did not record my monologue portion. I’ll do that off the cuff after this interview, after my next phone call. One of the things most podcasters do is they take the easy way out a bit, which is they just do interviews. All the content is generated by the guests.

I do think one of the things my audience like is they like my monologues and the shows where there are no guests where I talk myself. That helps the audience know you better. At first, it helps you develop your content and your own philosophy. That’s an ongoing process. It’s never finished, but after you’ve done that, it also helps you impart your philosophy to your audience. There are lots of shows where people interview people. You got interested in podcasting for some reason. It wasn’t just to interview a bunch of random people. It was to impart your ideas to the world. You can subtly do that in an interview because you get to talk a little bit too, but you’re never going to do it unless you’re doing monologues.

That’s the number one piece of advice I do give my clients when they’re looking at their podcast. After a while, I was like, “Why aren’t you doing solo shows? Why aren’t you doing longer intros so that you have a monologue at the beginning? Why aren’t you doing that?” It is the thing most audience ask for. They want more of you. You have a very in-depth way of talking throughout. There are lots of economic terms and other things that you’ve talked to over time. You don’t redefine everything in every episode. Your long time audience I’m sure know your things. What it comes across is you’re very informed about what’s going on, what happened in the markets, what’s going on in real estate economies in certain States and other places. How do you have time to record all the shows and stay so informed?

That’s a challenge. There’s no question. I don’t watch TV news or anything. I try to get all of my content commercial-free because if you listen to terrestrial radio or television, it’s eighteen minutes per hour of commercials, so you’re losing a third of the time. That’s the first part about being efficient. A lot of the news I get from reading email newsletters and from my guests and other interviews. It builds upon itself. That’s a nice thing for your efficiency. When you’re interviewing people all the time, you learn from them, you assimilate what they say, and then you teach it back to your audience in a different episode.

I love that building of knowledge too. I can see why that’s a successful strategy for you.

I’ll give you something interesting that your audience might be interested in. One of the ideas every podcaster in your audience should try and use is to create the information or content once, but repurpose it as many ways as possible. For example, if you like to write, have a professional voiceover actor read your blog posts or read your newsletters and then you can play them on your podcast. You can do it in your own voice, but it’s nice for the audience if they hear multiple voices on your show, especially if they’re the opposite gender of you. The intro to my main show is a female. A lot of my guests are male because they are more interested in finances. We struggled to get more women on the show and we do get some.

I’ve got a great one. I already made a note for you. I’ve had her on The Binge Factor. She’s incredible. Veronica Dagher of the Wall Street Journal. She’s got a great podcast on women and wealth. She’s going to make a great guest for you. That’s how we need to connect that.

We have a show called the WIN Show, Women Investing Network. Our mutual friend Sharon Lechter of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame, Robert Kiyosaki. She co-authored books with him. She is a guest host in that show.

I love the guest host model. I’ve started a couple of shows where we had cohost, and then I turned it over to them after I transferred the authority, and then I occasionally pop in for fun.

I recommend that you not say to another podcaster or another person that they’re going to be your cohost. I recommend you say, “Would you to guest host some episodes?” There’s no commitment. If they’re terrible, you can kick them out. If you introduce them as a guest host, the audience won’t mind if they never hear from them again. They won’t think, “This show is so inconsistent.”

Johnny Carson, Jay Leno transfer kind of thing. Guest host for a long time. Let’s make sure the audience likes you before we got this.

Extreme Podcasting: Podcasters don’t have to be the subject matter experts; our guests do. They’re the ones that need to impart their brilliance.

Make sure they’re going to stick around too. One of the other unique ideas is to create and repurpose content. A voiceover actor is a good way to do that because if those are small pieces like if they are blog posts, they might only be 5 or 8 minutes long when they’re read. If they’re read by someone else and you do a monologue in that show and let’s say it’s a half-hour show, in the middle of it you put 5 or 8 minutes and say, “I’ve got one of our blog posts and we’d like you to hear this little lesson on some topic.” It splits the show up. It makes it a little more interesting for the audience. Instead of being a book, it’s a magazine. A magazine, you turn the pages, you get different articles, you never got authors, different ads, and pictures. That’s a little more interesting for the audience.

You’re stylizing your show. That’s great.

The other thing I wanted to say in terms of repurposing content is a couple of years ago, I started a new show called Jason Hartman In The Hot Seat. I’m spending all this time being interviewed by other people like Tracy Hazzard and that’s great. It’s good that they aired it on their show and their audience heard from me, what if I could do them a favor and drive some traffic back their way and also get more listenership myself. I started this new show where I only replay interviews that other people when they interview me on the Hot Seat Show.

We do some best of reels and we put it into a whole feed of its own. It’s very similar. I love that idea. It’s a great idea and it works well for you, by the way. Don’t forget to put it in your press page, everyone. I love the title In The Hot Seat. That’s a great way to do it. Before I get into the binge factor portion of this, which I want to do, I want to get your advice because you’ve already given us some great tips here. What I want to do is get the best ways. We’re going to go over our five best ways. The five best ways to start with is booking great guests, which you have some incredible guests and I’m guessing you didn’t just cold call them.

A little bit. My show was mostly a monologue show until about episode number 60 or 70. My problem was I was running out of things to talk about. I got to start getting some guests on the show. When I lived in Newport Coast, I held a fundraiser. This is not political because I know some people don’t like them but that’s politics. A friend of mine was connected with this person’s campaign that I’m about to mention and he was running for president and its Pat Buchanan. I had a nice big home in Newport Coast. It’s a nice area. I volunteered my home for Pat Buchanan to have a fundraiser.

He came and spoke. People had to pay $100 to come. We had appetizers, took pictures, and all that good stuff, but years later I thought, I need some guests for my shows. He’d be a good one. He’s on TV all the time. He’s famous and he’s written a bunch of books. We reached out to him and he owed me a favor. He came on the show and he did a great episode. Right after that, I got Harry Dent, another big economist that I’d been following. He’s been on the show ten times. When you get a couple of these big name guests in a certain field, they’re all peers. They know each other. They’re maybe competitors, colleagues, peers, or whatever. You can get more because you have social proof.

The fact that you have repeat guests says a lot to a prospective guest because you wouldn’t go back on a show that sucked. You wouldn’t do it.

Some people wouldn’t come back because sometimes I grow them a bit. Let me mention one more thing on growing your guest. Here’s another flaw I see that a lot of podcasters have. They think that their customer is the guest. That’s not true. Your customer is the audience and you are the agent of the audience. The audience has agreed to give you their most valuable resource time. You’ve got to protect their time. Don’t just accept any guest. If a guest interview is terrible, don’t run it. Throw it in the trash. Don’t let the guests get away with a bunch of self-promotion and a bunch of no content. Some guests I’ve interviewed and I’m like, “Where’s the beef?”

It’s the same soundbites as everybody else.

Interestingly, some of the more famous guests are the worse.

I keep saying that here on the show and nobody has believed me. I’m glad you’re repeating that because I’ve had that happen to me.

I had Brian Tracy on. I like Brian Tracy. He’s a total self-promoter. It was a crappy episode. I didn’t like it. I did run it because he was famous. That’s one thing. I’ve heard Tony Robbins interviewed on other shows and he’s self-promoting.

This is one of the things, great authors, good authors, the ones that I liked that write well and some great speakers are terrible guests and that happens. You were talking about being an agent of the audience and I love that term. That’s a great way. We always put our audience-first model. We’re always talking about that here on the show because we want to increase the audience. If you don’t have a great show, you’re not going to increase the audience. Do you have a concerted effort? Do you have anything you do in marketing to help yourself increase the audience or do you let it happen organically?

I have not found the Holy Grail to marketing a podcast. I was hoping you could teach me how but the world of podcasting is organic. I have dabbled, I’ve tried advertising a little bit, I’ve tried advertising on other podcasts but none of it has worked very for me. It may be worked for somebody, but it hasn’t worked for me. You need to get found and keep doing a good job. Podcasting is not for impatient people. This is a long game strategy here. Even my audience is not that big. I’ve got a highly engaged audience that has made me many millions of dollars. That’s been great. First off, a lot of podcasts are flat out lie about their audience size. They Twitter bomb and I don’t need to mention names, but hopefully you know who they are. Many podcasters do have big audiences, but the question is, how much money are they making? How much engagement are they getting out of that audience? A lot of times your audience is big, but it’s not doing any of that.

Engagement goes down over a certain size. We see it consistently. You’re so right there. How do you produce in a professional way? I know you have a team.

I’ve always had a producer. I don’t know how to do audio editing. I’d like to know how because I could do more micro editing and stuff. I record and put the episode in a Dropbox folder, they pick it up, and do the editing.

Extreme Podcasting: When you’re interviewing people all the time, you learn from them, assimilate what they say, and then teach it to your audience in a different episode.

How do you encourage engagement in your audience?

We have not been great at this, but when we’ve done it, it worked. I think that contests are good. One of my team members, Brittany, who’s been with us for about twelve years. She would always do a couple of cute little things on our web forms. For example, people would go to JasonHartman.com/contest. You can go there and you can see what we’ve done. What she would do is she’d have the typical thing, enter the contest to win the Apple AirPods, a ring doorbell, or some Amazon Alexa. We do a giveaway like that. They would go there and put on the typical thing, name, phone number, email address but she would always put in a couple of cute little things like two questions. We wouldn’t require answers, but most people would answer them. It would be like, “What questions or comments do you have for Jason? Tell us what you love about the Creating Wealth Show.” First off, you get great content because you can answer all those questions on your show. You also get great testimonials as well. Minor little hack, big results.

Monetization, you mentioned earlier that you’re not a big fan of listening to content with ads. I noticed there are not any ads in your show that I heard in the few that I listened to.

That’s my own fault. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any ads. I just think that radio and TV have way too many ads. You get so little content per hour. It’s ridiculous.

They seem very irrelevant. That’s more the case. They seem too many because it’s not relevant to you.

That’s the shotgun advertising words. On a podcast, if you screen your advertisers, you can get targeted advertising that your audience want to hear. People always want to find good products and services. The reason you don’t hear ads on my podcast is because we haven’t made any effort in selling advertising, which is our fault.

How do you look at it as a return on investment then?

The return on investment for the show is my main show. The Creating Wealth Show is a show that was always geared toward getting clients who are real estate investors. We’ve made many millions of dollars on that strategy alone. We’ve sold some educational products back when we had live conferences, which sadly we can’t do at the moment. We would sell tickets to our live conferences and that made us quite a bit of money. It’s mostly selling properties to investors. That was far and away from the most lucrative part of our strategy.

Do you think you have a bingeable show?

People say, I do. Many times I’ve heard this over the years where they’re at one of our live conferences or they’ll reach out through the website or something and say, “I discovered your show two months ago and I’ve driven my wife crazy because all I do is listen to you. I’ve gone backwards and I’ve listened to your entire back catalog,” which now is hard to do. Some people say that they’ve listened 2 or 3 times to every episode. I’m flattered.

Do you have any idea why it might be bingeable?

Some of the stuff we talked about already. It’s the quality of the guests and the quality of the interview. The fact that it’s not all guests. The fact that you do mix it up a little bit and have like magazine style. All of those factors.

I always give everybody my opinion because I evaluate hundreds of shows. My view on it is that what I see as a consistent factor across shows that I know are bingeable is that you have an in-depth show. There’s nothing dumbed down here and what you do. You’re talking about broader economic topics. You’re touching on things that people don’t know about. Instead of doing the one-on-one explanation of everything, you make sure it’s defined enough that it’s understandable, but you give them resources and places to go find that. It makes the audience wants to bring themselves up to the level and that gives you an aspirational show. I want to be as good as you or I want to be as informed as you. Your my go-to information helped me be that informed in what I’m doing on a daily basis. You don’t want to miss out once you’re in that place.

That’s a good point. Thank you for that. One more thing I’d put in there. Some podcasts I listened to, I’m sure there’s a market for it, but I’m too type A and too impatient. I don’t like it when two people are chitchatting. That bores me. I’m like, “Get to the point.”

Let’s talk about the topics. Let’s get into it.

It’s like, “What did you do last weekend?” Seriously? I don’t think anybody cares.

Extreme Podcasting: Your customer is the audience, and you are the agent of the audience. The audience has agreed to give you their most valuable resource time. You’ve got to protect their time.

Do you have any advice for aspiring podcasters out there or existing ones who need to up their game?

If you’re going to get into the world of podcasting and you’re from the world of internet marketing for example, or direct response marketing of any sort. This is not fast. This is a slow, long-term strategy. You’ve got to be consistent about it. You better plan to be consistent and stick with it. Many people give up too early. The other thing I’d say is don’t look at your numbers or agonize about your numbers. If I was holding a conference and I invited you to give a speech and of course you have something to promote behind that. You sell properties or you have a financial newsletter or whatever it is.

If I told you, “I’m going to have 100 people at this conference and you can come and give a half hour speech.” You’d probably say yes. That would be a good promotional opportunity for you. If you have an audience of 100 people that will listen to you and listen to you consistently, that’s gold. If you can get that audience up to 500 or 1,000, you’re going to be at the bottom of the podcast pyramid. Those numbers are tiny in the world of podcasting but you can make a ton of money off 1,000 people. I don’t look at my numbers very much. I don’t agonize about my numbers. I don’t think about them too much.

I try to get people not to.

I agree with you. I know that we get a lot of clients from the show. They’re making money and it’s all good.

Jason, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate your insights into extreme podcasting as I’m going to call it. What I liked is that last bit of advice was showing that you have this viewpoint of a long-term investment in podcasting, which must go along great with the investment strategies you’re advising all the time anyway. Thanks again.

Thank you, Tracy and happy podcasting.

Investing In Extreme Podcasting And Becoming An Agent For Your Podcast Audience — Final Thoughts

I don’t know about you but I’ve got a whole slew of notes here. There are many good nuggets of information and ideas to try. I love the idea of the contest and adding in a couple of extra questions. Sometimes we do it anyway but it never dawned on me that we could do it in a way to get the feedback and get testimonials back. We do it because of bots and other things. Now that makes a lot of sense. You can see how he’s cultivating his brand in a way that makes you want to choose him. When he said that his first book was called Become The Brand Of Choice, that makes complete sense to me. It is in line with everything that he’s done and everything that he’s about.

I love the depth which he goes to. The other thing that I completely agree with and have found for myself, maybe it’s the way my mind works, the way Jason’s mind works, and maybe it’s the way your mind works too. I have found that being able to look at your podcast as an exploration, as an experiment, as an opportunity. When you look at it from that perspective, the interviews are less stressful, everything flows, everything is easier. When you put that and add to that mix being an agent of the audience as he talked to, now you have the magic. You have great curiosity and interest in things. You’re being a cultivator and a curator for your audience and being careful about what you put in front of them to make sure that they get value and caring about that value.

You add to that this unwillingness to compromise like, why should I have to do a dumbed down show? Why should I have to do it simple? Let’s do this in a way that puts the right people at the right level as my audience. Draw them in excitement. If it’s 200 people or 20,000 people, it doesn’t matter. I love Jason’s advice and I am glad I was able to get him on the Binge Factor. This happened from this great group I got connected to. I want to give them a little shout out. Mike Calhoun and Board of Advisors. It’s an incredible group. I’m amazed at the mentorship group and mastermind that they put together. That’s how I met Jason.

It’s impressive to think about that one quick meeting and all of a sudden, you have an interview that inspires you and gets you going. Think about that when you’re reaching out there and asking for guests. It was simple. I had fifteen minutes and at the end of it, he messaged me something and I immediately messaged back and said, “I hear you’re a podcaster, I’d love to have you on my show.” It’s done. Think about that too. There’s a power in that connection where I knew the interest. I knew the caliber of the group. I knew he was going to make a great guest. I had no idea he was going to be such a great guest. That’s where wonderful surprises and where I get to learn in this whole process and where I get to get excited about what I’m going to bring you next.

I have connections to not all of Jason’s shows because he’s got so many. I have connections to Hartman Media, Creating Wealth, and how to find Jason everywhere on social media and on the internet. Thanks again, everyone. I hope you’re getting as much nuggets of knowledge that you’re applying into your show and that you’re using some of this advice and trying it out. If you are, I’d love to hear back from you. Reach out to me on social media. You can reach out anywhere at Hazz Design or Feed Your Brand. Let me know what you’re thinking. I’d love to know when you’ve applied something and had a success factor too. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be my next guest on the Binge Factor.

Don’t miss Tracy Hazzard’s Authority Magazine article about Jason Hartman too!

Important Links:

• Creating Wealth Real Estate Investing Podcast
• Platinum Properties Investment Network
• Hartman Media Company
• Jason Hartman
• Become The Brand Of Choice
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• Jason Hartman In The Hot Seat
• JasonHartman.com/contest
• Board of Advisors
• Hazz Design
• Feed Your Brand
• https://www.Facebook.com/jasonhartman.com/
• https://www.JasonHartman.com/about/
• https://Podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id216013968

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