Binge Factor Media

Podcasting is one interesting industry as its timeliness captures the interest of many. However, as for the hosts themselves, achieving podcasting success takes more than just publishing episodes and waiting for listeners to flock to them. Joining Tracy Hazzard is Paul Higgins of Build Live Give podcast in discussing the right strategies every podcaster should keep in mind to achieve a better following, integrity, and revenue. He explains how making a 0.5 episode allowed him to connect with old and new listeners alike, how LinkedIn can be utilized to promote podcasts, his four categories of guests, the untapped strength of solo podcast episodes, and more.

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One Podcast Host Compels Million Dollar Companies To Fulfill The Desire To Live And Give More – Meet Paul Higgins Of The Build Live Give Podcast

I’ve got Paul Higgins from Build Live Give. I love the story of how Paul and I had met here, which is ironic because he’s already my client, but I didn’t know it. What happened is that I was on Pat Flynn Show. I was on Smart Passive Income. I did my usual thing and gave my talk about things. Various people have reached out to me and Paul was one of them. He reached out to me via LinkedIn and said, “I heard you on the show. I appreciate what you said. This was a takeaway for me.” He sent a nice little share and connected up with me, which I hadn’t been connected with him before.

We were able to connect up. When I went to check out his show, we had a little exchange. I asked him what the name of his show was and he shared it with me. When I looked it up, I saw he had done 225-plus episodes. I was like, “You need to be on my show.” I invited him on my show to come. As I was doing my research to interview him, I went to his blog and I thought, “The logo is looking familiar. The blog format is looking familiar. It looks like what my team normally does.” I called up Tom Hazzard, my partner and husband, and said, “Is Paul Higgins one of our clients?” He goes, “He is.”

This whole time, Paul didn’t tell me that he was a client. I didn’t realize it because I have many clients. It’s sometimes hard to realize that there’s not an overlap in them. Build Live Give is his show and it’s a great show. I enjoyed getting to know him. I love that he reached out to me via LinkedIn and we met in that random, fortuitous way that happens as you go through everything you do in the podcasting world. I love that that’s exactly what happened with us here. Let me tell you a little bit more about Paul because you’re going to be fascinated by what he’s done and his story. His show is amazingly filled with a lot of trials, tribulations and things that he’s had to overcome and push through to do what he wanted to do.

Paul Higgins is a business mentor, podcaster and a published author who helps coaches and consultants to build online businesses to fund their lifestyles. He has many years of experience in sales and marketing, finishing up an eighteen-year gig at the Coca-Cola Company, leading the marketing strategy for $700 million business unit. In 2011, he left to manage his inherited kidney condition. He has founded and sold two businesses and had a successful transplant from his best mate in February 2019. With his new found energy, he loves to mentor, spend time with his teenage children and play golf.

He has a book called Build Live Give and 100% of the proceeds go to the Purple House. I’m excited to invite you to read about Paul and you’re going to quickly tap into his binge factor because you’re going to know how wonderful he is in giving and doing all the things. We don’t get to the binge factor all the way until the end. I’m going to do a few things different in this episode. I don’t want you to miss out on it. Stay all the way tune through the end. Thank you for reading and check out Paul Higgins, Build Live Give.

Paul, thanks for joining me. I’m excited to talk to you.

The same. I’m very excited for this.

Build Live Give is a great name. It wasn’t your first name though, if I’m not wrong about the way I heard that in your 0.5 episode? You talk about the fact that you’ve shifted the show a few times and the name is a shift. What name did you start with?

I started with Corporate Escapees.

That seems interesting and exciting. How long ago was that?

I launched it a few years ago. In 2018, I changed it. Corporate Escapees followed my journey. I was a corporate executive, then went and built my own businesses. I couldn’t find any podcasts that were ideal for me so I scratch my own itch. I launched that and I thought, “I’m no longer a corporate escapee. I’m a business owner in my own right.” I heard once on a podcast someone talk about build, live, give and I thought, “That’s me.” I quickly googled it. The domain was there. I’m like, “Done.” Now, my book, podcast, product-based company, everything is now Build Live Give. That’s how I came about.

It came out of doing it and shifting into what was right at the time. That’s the one thing that I want everyone to learn as a lesson from you is that it’s okay to make the shift. The audience is right there with you, whether you think they are or not. Most likely, you didn’t lose anyone in that process.

If anything, I gained for the better.

Podcasting Success: Podcasting keeps topics relevant and a lot easier to put out and promote, especially through LinkedIn.

You’ve done well over 250 episodes, but you have shifted it along the way and you have done this 0.5 episode. What’s the point of it? Tell the people why you did the 0.5.

I went into someone’s podcast because I’m a prolific listener, about 1 to 2 hours a day at 2.5 times speed. That’s how I collect many brand experts. That’s how I found yourself and Tom. I’m constantly finding people. I listened to a few and I thought, “It’s no longer relevant.” What they were doing at the start of the show is no longer relevant. I’m someone that will listen to every episode. I’m not saying everyone will do that, but I love to go through and learn the journey as I go.

I thought, “If you’ve listened to episode 250 and you go to episode one, it seems disconnected. Why don’t you guide people?” It’s a simple episode where I go through, “This is how I started. This is me now. These are my favorite episodes. This is what the whole premise of the show is.” It gives someone a nice warm welcome. It’s no different to your LinkedIn profile where your About section should be a lovely warm welcome. My first episode wasn’t a lovely warm welcome. I’m very nervous and didn’t know what I was doing.

You’re a podcast binge listener in and off yourself. You are the definition of a binge listener who pod fast. Pod fast doesn’t mean starving. It means you consume it at a high speed. You’re the consummate of the ultimate binge listener. That’s what we’re always looking for here on the show and how do we reach them. You realized early on that you have a pattern for how you listen too. Many binge listeners, this is a pattern that I hear again and again. As they go to your very beginning, they’ll read your description and they’ll go to the first episode because they don’t normally have a 0.5 somewhere along the way or anything else. They’ll go to your first episode and they’ll take a listen.

iTunes or Apple Podcasts has a teaser, a feature where you can highlight it at one. You can put your 0.5 up there and have that be there, but not everyone has iPhone. I don’t. Not every one of us gets the benefit of that, but having that is a great benefit. I guarantee you, the binge listeners and podcasters on iTunes or Apple podcasts will do that. They get to go there and then they usually go to your most recent because they know and understand that a lot probably changed. Is that the way you do it as well when you listen?

Yeah. Let’s say someone’s got 200 podcasts. You’d think, “Which are the ones that they consider the podcasts that are going to benefit their audience the best?” That’s the other reason I did it so that you can help people get that journey. People can bounce around however they like. That’s important because we’re also busy. It’s not as if they’re going to listen in sequence from 1 to 200.

Some people do but not everybody. We jump around to what’s worth it for us. That’s sometimes hard to judge when you have names of people you’ve never heard before. You turned this into now not just a podcast or not just exploring corporate escapism. You’ve turned it into a coaching business. Tell everyone about the business model, how it works and when in that process did your book come?

My key business is mentoring, coaching. It’s a similar thing but for me, it’s for low seven-figure service-based business owners that want to get into high seven. Predominantly, they’ve got two key things that are stopping them. One is they’re doing most of the sales, and the second is they’re doing most of the delivery. I’m sure we’ve all heard that. I’ve got a simple twelve-week program with 29 components that solves that. That’s my one-on-one and I’ve got a group that goes through the same thing. We’ve got online that supports the group. At the start, I’ve got a sales machine which is getting clients on LinkedIn, which for B2B service-based businesses is fantastic.

Think of it as the new virtual coffee. It used to happen in networking groups. COVID is fast-tracked now. Everyone’s doing this on Zoom and it sped it up. They’re the key products that I have. In 2018, I was on dialysis. I had kidney failure and I thought, “How can I best use this time? How can I give back?” which is the Give section. That’s when I thought, “Why don’t I write a book of all the things that I’ve learned from being a corporate director for one of the largest companies in the world to building my own businesses, exiting one and continuing to work while I was in a hospital bed. Why don’t I write a book to do that?” It was killing time but most importantly, it gave back to others.

Your book is your gift. Did you sell a lot?

No.

You’re not alone. I laugh because every one of us is going, “We all have one of those on the back shelf.” What is it about that? Everyone out there who I talk to, their book doesn’t sell. I was looking at the statistics. The vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, did $350,000 in book sales in 2018. I thought about that and I was like, “She was a senator and prepping to run for office, and she could only generate $350,000 worth of book sales? That seems awful and sad. If someone at that level can’t do it, why are we as entrepreneurs expecting that we can do that?” That doesn’t mean our book doesn’t have value. It means our expectations of its return maybe are a little off.

For me, if I couldn’t help someone in my mentoring, but I’d already gone through and solve the challenges they were facing now, I could give them the book. Often, I’ll be in a call and say, “My best advice to you is go on and read my book because it’s got the best advice I can give you. You can listen to the audiobook. You can read it at your speed.” That’s what I do. I’d love to sell more only for the fact that 100% of the proceeds go to a charity that I support.

You wanted that to have more value. I totally understand that.

I’d like to help The Purple House more. With all of my health challenges, even to get a book out took everything I had and then to market it on top of it. It was a little bit about timing because I nearly passed away in 2008. I had a nephrectomy and that scared me enough to think, “When I go through this transplant, what’s life going to be?” I lived for four years not knowing what my life was going to be. I thought, “If I go and put all this money behind a book and then I can’t do anything because I’ve got complications with my kidney or whatever happens.” It may be a bit of an excuse.

It’s a valid one out there. Everybody’s going, “We’re giving you a pass, Paul. Don’t worry about that.” In some cases, the book in and of itself is another form of service, just like our podcast might be at times. Give yourself a pass on that. You don’t know what it will afford you in the future. This is what I was thinking about. Maybe the new model of speaking is I come and I do a virtual event for you, and you buy my book and send it to all your members. Who knows? That’s the speaking fee in the future. That book may have high commerce value. We don’t know.

If I had the choice between doing a podcast or a book, I’d take a podcast every day.

I have three books. That’s a lot of the reasons why the books have not left my credenza to get to publishing because I know I don’t have the time to market them. I know that that’s not there for me, but it is that timeliness of the podcast that always feels like by the time I’m about ready to publish the book, it’s already out of date. That part of it as a podcaster is hard to reconcile.

I found it difficult to constantly refer to the book. Whereas a podcast, you are shining the light on the guest. I’ll also do an individual podcast as well, but that’s too weak. With LinkedIn, for some of my guests, I’d get 200,000 views to their posts on LinkedIn. To me, that’s giving enormous value. Whereas the book is about me. It’s harder to do that. That’s the other reason why I love podcasting because the topics are relevant. It’s a lot easier to put out but it’s also a lot easier to promote especially through LinkedIn, the modern book is.

You’re heavy into LinkedIn. I’ve heard that because you have that message on all your shows. Are you using the content differently on LinkedIn? How are you using your podcast content on LinkedIn? There are a lot of people out there curious to know that.

I post three times a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. On the Tuesday, it’s my interview. Thursday, it’s my solo. I’ll write a post specific to the podcast and then I’ll have the link to the podcast below. That’s working incredibly well. A bad post for me might be 5,000 views and a good post for me is a couple of hundred thousand. In my website, I’m too embarrassed to say how many views it gets a year, but 200,000 views to a podcast post that took you fifteen minutes to write takes a fair while to get. My results improved since I’ve been using your service to get the better SEO value out of the show notes. I think that’s been incredibly beneficial, but still a fifteen-minute post on LinkedIn is big.

It’s got a lot of views there for you. That’s working well. Are there any keys to how you post it, to how you frame up what you’re talking about?

The fundamental of a post is having an intriguing statement. It’s no different to journalists. You think about a newsfeed. I view technically someone flicking through your news feed. What you want to do is stop them and get them to open it. It’s no different to email or copy anywhere else. Make sure that above they see more, it’s a very intriguing statement to get them to open more. That’s number one. The second is tell a story, make it enjoyable. Make sure there’s plenty of white space and maximum two lines in a sentence. Give them values. What will they get out of it? I say, “This is the value you’ll get from listening to this podcast.” It’s very clear why they would invest their time. Always have a question. The algorithm with LinkedIn is comments are worth double what a like is.

What’s the best way to get comments? Ask a question and then have a call to action, which is thumbs up. “If you liked the post, give a thumbs up. If you’d like to connect, please do.” It’s guiding people where to go next. The last thing is the hashtags. Now your LinkedIn posts are searchable by Google. You’ll get SEO value posting on LinkedIn. Three hashtags are what Google uses. I say three hashtags and one of your own, that’s four. That’s it at the bottom. If anyone ever wants to know what a hashtag, how many followers it’s got, you go into your search in LinkedIn, you type hashtag podcasting, it will tell you that there are seven million people that followed podcasting. You can pick your different hashtags based on the theme of the posts but also based on you want some large following, but you also want some smaller ones that are more specific to the content.

You get married in the big following.

Podcasting Success: It’s a great thing to get back when someone’s showing you what they’ve taken and learned out of your podcast.

Sometimes you want to be a small fish in a big pond. Sometimes you want to be the big fish.

Thank you so much for that advice. That was thorough and I can see why your posts are doing well in that process. It’s not always translating though into people leaving the platform and coming to listen and that’s something we were talking about. How is the process of going from great circulation in LinkedIn to people reaching out, listening more and then asking for coaching? What is that flow for you?

When someone approaches me on LinkedIn, I get my team. They look at who’s approached and I always ask, “Thanks for wanting to connect. Did you find me through one of my blogs or through one of my podcast episodes?” It’s amazing how often someone will say, “Through your podcast.” That’s the first way to do it. The other thing is to the people that like and comment on the posts, then you reach out to them. You specifically put the link into the post and you say, “It’s great that you liked and commented on X post. What was the value that you gained?” Once again, you’re starting that conversation.

You’re creating that engagement already, which we love to talk about as a sign of a community building going on.

It’s the like, know, and trust. You’re validating that they’ve already made the choice to do that. When you do the outreach, if someone comes back with a specific focus that they’re doing, and you’ve got a podcast interview that you think answers that question, all I say, “Would you be open to listening to a podcast where my guests has given specific advice on that?” If they say yes, then you can send them the podcast. There are three ways there that you can link your podcast and LinkedIn together.

You don’t know how many other people are watching that engagement going if you’re doing it live within your comments and your posts anyway. That’s a great way to go about doing that. That’s wonderful flow through. Are you getting good coaching clients though out of the podcast? How is that working for you?

I look at four types of guests. One is an icon. From an Australian example, Nathan Chan, the CEO of Foundr. He’s got a million people on Instagram that follow him. He’s got a very large audience. Getting him on, I get some access to his community and his community is aligned to mine. Also, it helps me get other guests on my podcasts that are similar. That’s the icon. The brand builder is where they’ve got an audience that you would love to be in front of. That’s the second. The third is what I call a bank builder. That may seem a bit harsh, but it’s people you think you could help and you’re declaring to them that you’re on the podcast, but you have got an ulterior motive. It’s not smoke and mirrors, but you’re saying, “I’d love to have you on. Prior to that, these are some things that I’ve seen on your website and I’d love to talk to you about that.”

They are the potential client that you’re bringing on.

If you can get 25% of your guests to be a prospect, that helps. If it’s not right for them, they may know people. There’s still that referral. The last one is an expert where I’d bring on someone that is giving exact value to my target market that they would find it hard to get anywhere else.

This is something I’m asking for. Why not? The audience may want it too. That’s always helpful too.

In the podcast, it’s always got PaulHigginsMentoring.com/questions where you can ask me any questions, I’ll reply. They also asked for topics. When someone gives me a topic that I want covered, then I’ll find that expert and get them on.

You’re still responding through that engagement process. We’re already tipping into our five tips here. The first one is get great guests. I love that Paul broke that down for you into the way that he looks at his guests differently. When you look at them differently, then it’s easy to see the value in each one of them, and find the right ones that are going to be a right fit for you and for the answer your audience is looking for. Let’s go to the second part of our tips which is, how do you increase listeners?

This is one I must admit that I’m struggling with the most. I’m roughly about 1,000 downloads and listeners a week. I’m not 100% sure on the split but let’s say it’s close to one-to-one. My show is about a hundred or more than that, but that’s the average. For me, definitely LinkedIn is helping with those numbers. We’re also doing some work on Instagram and Facebook to promote it. I must admit to triple my listeners over the next three months, I don’t have a plan for that.

Every time I ask someone, “If you’ve been listening to this show,” this is the one they go like, “I wish I was doing better here.” You are not alone in that process. We’re all looking for the secret formula. Unfortunately, it’s different for every person. It’s not a one size fits all, which is what you’re finding. You’re working towards the areas of which you have the best audience already, most influence and then you try new areas. Let’s see if I can take what I’m doing on LinkedIn and expand it to Instagram and see if it works.

The one thing that I do here, and I’m curious because I want to tie this to the tip you gave back in it, that you had these people who are brand builders. This was the number one initial strategy that John Lee Dumas, Pat Flynn and all of those people out there were talking about, which was to get those brands, the people you’re calling the brand builders as your guests, the ones who are going to share you with their audience and their audience is a right match to you. Therefore, you’ll get new listeners under that process. Are you finding that in decline, that that’s not working as well as it used to work?

I think it is. Everyone thinks I’ll get an icon and share the episode. If they’ve already got content, they’re not going to put your content before theirs unless the interview is that good that you’ve asked questions. I’ve had a couple of cases like that, but that’s not going to give you the boost. The brand building part, it’s not as effective as what it was when I started a few years ago. Maybe it’s the way that I’m doing that I haven’t changed it enough. I’ve found that a lot of the social media is saturated now. More important is their lists sometimes in what their social media following is. What we do now is we track all the assets that everyone’s put out, each of the guests. We’re doing better now and seeing exactly where it was shared and how it was shared.

You’re the first one of my clients who do what we recommend, which is to follow up and see if your guests posted or shared it. That’s a great way to say, “We put all the investment in time and energy into this guest.” If we don’t take a few minutes to follow up, double check and see if they shared it, put it on their website and send them a quick email reminding them that they were supposed to, then you didn’t capitalize on that opportunity. Our third thing is to produce like a pro. Everyone knows you’re my client. When you first reached out to me, I had no idea when I accepted you for the show. What do you personally do in this process that makes your show a much more professional production?

We have a thorough onboarding process. Normally, meet the guests first to understand exactly the value that they want to get out of the show, and how they can link it to the audience that I know well, and can we do that? That’s one thing, but then we send the questions. We say which ones are always asked, which ones are optional. We also say that it’s conversational so they get a good understanding for that. We remind people getting closer on exactly how the process is going to go and what’s going to happen.

There’s a website link that we’ve got all of this for them. On the show beforehand, I go through my standard questions that everyone always asks me. I cover those off like FAQs so they are comfortable before we go live. I always ask what can we improve after every podcast, “What did we do well? Could we improve?” Sometimes it’s quite embarrassing because they say, “There’s not anything that I would recommend. I’ve been to many podcasts. Yours is one of the most professional shows I’ve been on.” Anything that they do give, we put back into the process.

You’re always continually learning. That’s the sign of a professional right there. We talked about engagement and you talked about the ways that which you encourage engagement through the commenting. A lot of people have found that they’ll ask for topics and they’ll do these things, and they don’t get answers. How do you keep that going on? Do you give them some recognition? What do you do to get them to continue to suggest you topics and ideas?

In my solo shows where people have asked the question and they’ve asked for that specific topic, I always call it out. I say, “Thanks to so-and-so for providing the great question and topic.” That’s one way of rewarding them. The other one is when people come in through LinkedIn and they approach me through the podcast, then I asked them some questions there to get better, “What do you like? What could we improve?” I’m trying to get more engagement there. Also, my guest. If my guests love the interview, I say, “If you’d love it, would you mind giving me a LinkedIn recommendation to share that love with others?” That’s another way that I’m getting the engagement there. These are some of the key ways that I do it, but it is lonely. I bumped into someone that’s been listening to my podcast for three years and I’m like, “You’re the one.” It’s funny that you have thousands of people that listened, but very few contact you. I always go out of my way. I heard you on Pat Flynn’s podcast, but I went out of my way to thank you for what you did, what I learned out of it and what I applied.

This is the story. He reaches out to thank me. I check out his show and say, “This is a great show. Why don’t you come on my show?” You didn’t ask for that, but I offered it because you reached out to me and I wanted to reward that because it doesn’t happen often enough. That rewarding engagement makes a big difference. That’s where you’re hitting on something that’s working for you.

A little LinkedIn tip there. Let’s say Pat puts out some fantastic episode. If I’ve generally learned, what I’ll do is reference Pat in the link and say, “This is exactly what I learned. You can learn the same thing. This is what I applied, and this was the result.” I’ll do a little post on that. That’s also bringing Pat’s audience.

You’re tagging him. He’s going to see it too.

That’s something you can do for any podcasts that you’ve listened to. Sometimes people do that with mine. It’s a great thing to get back when someone’s showing you what they’ve taken, learn and the results they’ve got out of your podcast.

Podcasting Success: Get people to listen to the things you are constantly iterating on and let them learn.

Look at all these great LinkedIn tips we’ve all gotten here. You mentioned one that I love, LinkedIn recommendations. I write recommendations to people all the time because they don’t always ask for them and they should. Giving you a recommendation for being a great host, that’s a nice thing to do for someone that you’ve had a great time with and who gave you some publicity. You’re giving them a little shout out that says, “They ask great questions,” or whatever it is that you want to say about them. It’s a great way to go about doing that. If you need to build that up in your LinkedIn profile, go and ask for it. The last one of our tips is, what’s the best way to monetize your show? This is a struggle for a lot of people, but what have you found to be that path to the coaching client monetization? What does it look like?

I always declared that I would love to talk to you. If they tell me what the key focus is and always ask them, “Have you got anyone helping you with that?” If they say, “No, I’m at a dead end.” I’d say, “I exactly help people like you with that. Let’s do the podcast interview, but I’d separately like to talk to you about that.” I find that all nice and transparent. That works well to then go through the discovery call and investment call.

You’d set up the expectation. That’s the type of guests you refer to as your bank builder. The ones where their expectation is this, “Of course, I’m going to guest you on the show, but I’m also looking to have a good conversation with you because I think we’re well-matched here.”

If I know I can genuinely help them, then I’ll say that. That’s the pre-meeting for the podcast. The other thing is that I have a fantastic assessment, PaulHigginsMentoring.com/assessment, which is fifteen questions in three minutes, and worked out if you’re going to have a high or a low seven-figure big business in 2021. I always talk about that in my podcast. That’s self-promoting.

They are self-assessing at the same time and that works out as well. They benefit too.

I’ve also got a sponsor as well. I use Dubb, which is a fantastic sales and marketing video platform. I use that for all my LinkedIn. I always give a specific example. It’s a live ad but it’s me talking about how I’ve used that platform each time.

I’m not familiar with Dubb. I’d love to know a little bit more about it and what we’ll do is we’re going to put your affiliate link in the post at The Binge Factor for Dubb so that they know that they heard you, not me. Tell us a little bit how it works and how you use it.

The overall thing is that everyone gets bombarded on LinkedIn with text messages and you don’t know anything about them. We all get them. I say to people, “If you don’t like them, the people that you’re sending the exact same message doesn’t like it.” Let’s change the game. What I always do is I send a connection request saying, “I love connecting with high performing business owners. I can see you’re one. Would you be open to connecting? PS. I will send you a personal video based on you connecting.” As soon as they do connect, then I send them a video. The video is about a minute long and I say, “It’s great to connect. This is a reason why I’ve reached out.”

It’s always building a relationship. I say at the end, “If you’d like to have a chat, there’s a 30-minute booking link below. Also, I’ve looked at your profile, looked at some of your posts, etc. I think these tips would help you, but it’s completely optional. There are some videos below. Always watch in the two times speed because I talk too slow. They’re there for you.” That’s in Dubb. When they viewed it, so I can track all the analytics of how many times they’ve viewed it, how long they viewed it for. My team keeps track of all of that.

That’s working within LinkedIn messaging. That’s what you’re talking about is you’re sending that video through the messaging app.

No. What I’m doing is using the contact information email I’ve got, and I’m sending it to that. I always say that finding a LinkedIn message is a little bit like finding a golden wrapper in a Willy Wonka bar. There are many of them and it’s hard. The platform is not fantastic. I get them on an email. The other thing on email is you can track through your sales CRM when and how many times they’ve opened it. You’ve got all that data then to go and have what I call hot potato conversation. That’s why Dubb is brilliant. Dubb has got a little Chrome extension. It’s on your email. All you do is launch your email, put in their email address. You hit the little extension. It will bring up all the videos that you’ve got. You select the one that you want to put in and it will automatically cut the video in to be automatically played by them.

New tool and new tips out here on the show. You can increase traffic from all over the place. You started doing solo shows. You weren’t doing them always from the beginning, but you started doing more of them. Did that come from your audience?

It came from my members in my community. Tina Dietz said, “Paul, you’re bringing the spotlight on your interviewee, but what about you? You don’t talk a lot about you.” I’m like, “I’ll bring a little bit more of that into the interviews, more of a conversation.” I get that. What I’ll do is a 5 or 10-minute show that is specific to a topic that I can help people with. It’s normally what I’ve helped my mentorees with. I then do that and it’s enjoyable. I’m spending too much time doing it. I was typing it out. It’s way too much time. Now, it’s a couple of bullet points. I talked to those more conversational, ten minutes max around five minutes and that’s it.

The interesting thing is when I went through your show catalog and I spot check, this is how I research every new podcaster who comes across on The Binge Factor. I listened to your 0.5 and to your recent one. I’ll spot pick in the middle anyone I happen to maybe know, or that way I don’t have to listen as much to them and I can listen to you that’s why I do that. I know you interviewed Nathan Hirsch and he’s a friend of mine. I know a lot about him and his business. I could skip through what he was saying and skip the types of questions you were asking and learn more about how you operate your show.

That’s my process and that’s how I do it. I listened to everybody on double speed because I don’t have enough time to get through all the podcasts. I’d need to get through in time. In doing that though, what I found was that in your particular case, the solo shows are honing in on a better audience for you in a way that maybe because of your guesting strategy of them being a little bit spread out in their purpose. They’re not as focused on the audience as much in a couple of the cases. The clear thread through is not there. By getting this tied in and doing them throughout your month, you’re pulling it back into how you help people the most. How long have you been doing the solo episodes?

Eight months.

I’d be curious for you to start taking a look at the episode differences because you might be starting to see that they’re trending up on those particular episodes in that. That means that your regular listeners, the ones who’ve been with you the longest aren’t skipping them. They are making sure they don’t miss them. Some of us get behind on our podcasts. I’m sure you do as well. You’re like, “I would love to listen to all The Pat Flynn Show, but I don’t have enough time.” You swing your spot and you start to skip, but you’re now not skipping the ones with your particular content and topic, that’s powerful there because that says that you’re serving a membership community and a growth factor for what you’re doing. That’s a good sign of future monetization growing. What’s been the biggest challenge when you started it and what do you think is your biggest challenge now?

When I started it, I suppose that went into my health journey. It was being consistent. When I was going to go into hospital, I never knew when the next test was going to come. I got good at batching and making sure that I always had twenty shows at least in the can at any particular time no matter what happened with my health. One thing I’m proud of was no matter what’s happened, I’ve never missed a week of releasing the podcast. I’ve got to thank my team for that as well. They’ve been outstanding in making that happen. Also, the pressure of the show notes was a huge weight off my shoulder of I’ve got to write the show notes.

I love the interview part, but the show note part was a killer for me. That’s definitely made a big difference. The biggest thing now is how can I get more people to listen for the point that I want them to learn from the things that I’m constantly iterating on. Whether it’s LinkedIn, sales or building high performing teams, whether they are experts that can help them solve a problem. The biggest struggle for me at the moment is hit a ceiling of 4,000 to 5,000 listens or downloads a month. How do I get that to 10,000?

I’m going to do my close with you on air with me and I don’t normally do that. The reason is that you are a client. It’s like coaching at the same time, but let’s hit that last thing, your binge factor. You’re a big binge listener. You know what binge listeners are. What do you think is your binge factor?

It’s my authenticity and practical advice. When you listen to my solo episode, I want you to be able to take three steps that are going to make a difference to your business. That’s for my solo shows. That’s the key thing that I want to have that is different for the interviews. It’s that authenticity of people who you might want to be. They’re not that far in front of you that you can’t relate to them, but you can listen to something and say, “Now I can go and do something with it.” The way that I always look at it is, how many things are people going to put down or write down for my podcasts? That’s what I want them to take away versus, “I’ll listen to a lot of podcasts and the story is great, but what am I going to do with that?”

You’re the first one in a long time who’s gotten their binge factor close to right on exactly what I was going to say. That’s a sign because you are a listener first. Few podcasters that I talked to are listeners. There’s a clear distinction between those that listen and those that don’t, and because you listen, you more quickly identified it. It is your ability to do takeaways, to give something actionable. Even right here on the show, I always have a little side section of my notepad. I always put the guest’s name at the top and their podcast name, just in case my brain dies right there and I can’t remember what it is.

Beyond that, there’s nothing on the paper when I start unless I know specifically I want to have a question. The only thing I put on this piece of paper with you was 0.5 EP so that I would know to talk to you about the 0.5. The rest of it, I leave to make little notes. Some of it is my closing notes of what I’m going to say at the end, and some of it is the next question I want to ask when you’re done. Sometimes I put a big asterisk and that’s in the middle of the page. In this case it says, “Tracy’s space.” It was a great idea that you gave. You gave me a takeaway right here on the show is something that I could do, which means that you gave that to my audience as well.

You’re giving takeaways at all points. You’re making sure that whether it’s your solo show, interview show, or you being interviewed by somebody else, you’re constantly giving actionable takeaways. Not enough shows are like that. It’s a right match to your audience, that’s why you’re bingeable. It may also be why you’re not a right fit for a very large audience and that’s going to be okay. If you’re attracting action takers, then you’re going to have a higher percentage of your audience or your guests who take action, who take you up on your offer for coaching, on your offer for mentorship, on your opportunities. We don’t need a giant audience. We need a good percentage of that action taking audience.

That’s something that we’ve been looking at here. It’s identifying how do we get straight to the prospects and skip the leads? That sounds weird to a lot of people out there, but it is getting straight into attracting in and nurturing the characteristics of our ideal prospect. You’re doing that with your show. How do we make sure that more of those people find you because you got to have lead somewhere? You don’t know that they’re all out there looking for you. Your show is great, Build Live Give. I’m going to give back to you right now. My give back to you as a little bit of mentorship on what I think others should take away from the show, from what you’ve said and what you could build on.

Podcasting Success: Podcast hosting cannot force people to subscribe, making trust a huge thing in this industry.

Two things besides the one that I gave you, which was the idea of saying, “Where’s that prospect and how can I do more that’s perfect for that prospect?” It’s to switch up our mindset on a know, like and trust model, and instead look at it as a trust, like, know. They’re finding you, they’re already listening to you so they do already trust you. We have a higher trust in podcast hosting. Why? It’s because you can’t push and force me to subscribe. I’ve chosen to subscribe. There’s already a higher trust factor if I hit that subscribe button because I know you can’t get my email. You can’t find me that way. Apple or whoever you’re using, don’t let you.

I have a higher degree of opportunity to trust you because the benevolence part is already taken care of. You’re out there giving me a show. I already naturally want to start to reward that. If they stick around and are binge-listening, they like you. They would skip you if they didn’t like you. They’ll skip it, move on, unsubscribe and move on to somebody else. They’re not skipping you so they like you already. We’re moving through that process. Now, how do I get them to want to know me and reach out to me instead of me pushing them to get to know them? How do we do that in that opposite model? Let’s take a look at that piece tightly and what you can do there.

If you flip that thinking around, now you only have one thing you have to concentrate and work on, what does that look like for yourself? That’s the key for your future growth because if you tie those two things, the action takers that you want, business builders that are already in the right world, or they wouldn’t have found you, and then tying that to, “All I have to do is nurture that know section and get them to do the outreach.”

The last idea I have for you and for the audience is that there’s so much power going on LinkedIn that people are trying and doing badly. I get asked for virtual coffee every five minutes. I’ve got 25 in my inbox that I skipped over and didn’t read because I have a business that I’m building. I’m very busy building it so to have five minutes for virtual coffee is not possible. How do we instead find other ways to do that?

Your LinkedIn posts are an excellent way to do that because that’s my learning process. It’s my newsfeed in the morning. I’m flipping through that and reading people’s posts. I’m checking people out. The people that I appreciate what they post all the time, I go and check them out because sometimes they don’t always show up in your feed. Go see the last article you posted and what it was. There are a handful of those people that I go back to and check again. What about LinkedIn Live? Your solo shows would make great LinkedIn Live.

I hear it’s a little bit easier to get in the process, especially if you’ve already been posting videos for a while that all you have to do is apply. They don’t always accept everybody and it is a curated system through LinkedIn, but if you’re regularly posting videos and it’s getting the circulation like yours are, it shouldn’t be as difficult for you to get a LinkedIn Live opportunity. That might be the fastest path for you to grow because it’s growing in an area of which you already do well. You don’t have to go out and learn a whole new platform or channel.

I have requests for it.

Revisit it again because I didn’t hear for a long time and someone told me to, “Go and apply again.” Keep applying and then what I also heard from someone is if you post consistently videos like your short ones, the five minutes, but do 3-to-5-minute videos for a month, they look at that favorably when your application goes up for review. You may want to start doing it and then apply.

One thing that you said about the virtual coffee meetings. At the end of all of my personalized videos, I say, “If this is not the right time for you, no problem at all. I completely understand, just let me know.”

You are still letting them off the hook and that’s good. It is the people who are sometimes the busiest that are busy for the wrong reasons. Those are the people you do want to meet, but the approach might be to find them where they’re at, where they’re looking, where they’re already using their time and be inserted in that process. That’s why I’m suggesting that the LinkedIn for you in the video side of that. If Dubb is working for you over here, maybe I’ll start to feel like you’re talking to me straight in my feed and then the coffee seems like, “I already know you. I already like you. I’m already ready. I want to get to know you. I’m happy to take you up on your coffee opportunity.” Paul, thank you for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I hope that this audience got actionable items on how to build, live and give just like Paul Higgins. Thank you for giving to our audience here.

It’s my pleasure. If anyone’s got any questions, anything I can help with on the Build from the show, please reach out.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. We’ll be back next time with another binge factor fabulous podcast host.

Don’t miss Tracy Hazzard’s Authority Magazine article about Paul Higgins too!

Important Links:

• Build Live Give
• Build Live Give
• The Purple House
• PaulHigginsMentoring.com/assessment
• PaulHigginsMentoring.com/questions
• Dubb
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/paulhigginsmentoring/
• https://Twitter.com/buildlivegive
• https://www.Facebook.com/BuildLiveGive/
• https://www.YouTube.com/channel/UCUmIG9TF9O8dLV2MkGKXktg
• https://www.Instagram.com/paulhigginsmentoring/

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