Binge Factor Media

When starting a podcast, you’re not only talking about yourself, but you’re podcasting to win clients. How do you do that? Sarah Walton is a business mentor, coach, creator, and the voice behind The Game On Girlfriend Podcast. In this episode, she chats with Tracy Hazzard to discuss how you can make podcasting a platform to attract clients for your business. Podcasting can be a great lead magnet if you know what you’re doing. Get valuable tips on podcasting, monetization, and guesting by tuning in. Plus, Sarah shares her experience with video podcasting and how using multiple channels at once has helped her grow.

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Watch the episode here

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Podcasting As A Valuable Platform To Win Clients For Your Business With Sarah Walton Of The Game On Girlfriend Podcast

I got Sarah Walton, The Game On Girlfriend Podcast. She is a coach who is making her podcast work. I am so excited to have such great guests here and this is another one that was sent to me by a great publicist. I love when I get the people in here who are podcasting and get how to make podcasting an essential part of their business, and that is what Sarah has going on. She has got this amazing business going on.

She is a business mentor who has been featured on the Today Show. She speaks at women’s conferences all over the world and has helped hundreds of women start and grow businesses they love. Originally from Salt Lake City, she spent her fifteen-year corporate career in New York City navigating the male-dominated world of tech, managing a P&L worth hundreds of millions of dollars, working closely with Marianne Williamson, mentoring dozens of women, and balancing motherhood at the same time.

She is the voice behind The Game On Girlfriend Podcast and she is known for our weekly Sarah Uncut TV show on YouTube and live Coffee With Coach streaming video conversations on Monday mornings. Her specialty is making sales fun as she helps women heal the relationship with money. She works with a handful of one-to-one clients every year runs her quarterly group Sprints and is known for her powerful expansion coaching program The Sales Mastermind, which runs twice a year.

She has become the go-to source of inspiration, no-nonsense teaching, and practical integration for women in business. She is also going to be your go-to person for some practical advice. That is what I love about the show. I loved having this mind share, brain share, networking, all these top-level layers and layers of value built into my show for myself, for you, the audience, for the guests that come on my show and Sarah Walton is the perfect example of that. I am so glad to have her on the show. Let’s hear it from Sarah Walton, Game On Girlfriend Podcast host.

Sarah, I am so glad you are here. Game On Girlfriend, let’s start our game here and let’s talk podcasting. I loved that you did a recap 100th episode because it made my job easier when I was researching your show to go check out great clips and great things. What I loved about that episode was that you had other people involved in it. It wasn’t just your favorites. It was what other people thought were their favorites as well. What did you learn from that recap?

You hit that right on there because doing that, first of all, was so cool and I do have a podcast editor, where I did my first 30 episodes myself because I wanted to make sure if the stuff ever hit the fan, I could do it myself and not be caught like, “We can’t produce an episode.” I love her and trust her so much, and so she was the first one I asked this question of like, “Which one has been your favorites?” She will say to me, “I was editing this one and you made me cry,” or this happened or that happened. She had a list. She answered me so quickly when I sent that out. I included our video editors and my assistant, and then we went through and looked at the ratings and I sent out an email to our list.

I was like, “I know you guys listen. What is your favorite because I wanted it to be real and authentic.” What did I learn from that? I learned I need to eat my own dog food as I like to say. What I realized is that there was in my life a ten-minute sweaty conversation I needed to have. I say that a lot. Part of the theme is like, “This is not your practice life.”

That is what I think does make that podcast bingeable is people are like, “It is not my practice life, but I do not know how to do X or I am not following this dream or pick a thing.” One of the phrases I say all the time is, “Your best life is probably a ten-minute sweaty conversation away. That is a conversation you do not want to have.”

I have to be so straight with you. When I listened to me, talking to me, as we recapped that 100th episode, I was like, “I was talking to me when I recorded this and I need to make sure I am listening to what I say too.” Some of the reasons I like having the podcast because it holds you to a certain standard. You can’t say and do things in a podcast and then not do it yourself. I have to be straight with you. That is what I learned personally. What I learned professionally and as a podcaster was that people do listen more than we think they do. I know that sounds goofy. “Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for that newsletter. You really do listen.”

Podcasting To Win Clients: Understand that the creation mode of podcasting, that creative effort we have, is part of a huge flow of creative energies. And when you’re not allowing other people to play with you, you’re not allowing them to express themselves either.

They do and sometimes they will quote you back to you, which is my favorite thing that happens. I am like, “That is where that realization that I am not doing what I said I was going to do.” They will ask me like, “Where is this?” I am like, “I didn’t do it. Did I?” I set it on the air and then I dropped the ball. I was like, “I will do it now. I promise.”

You are using the podcast as a part of your coaching business. It is lead generation and growth to the coaching business. It is a great demonstration of how you coach as well. It is right out there demoing what value you bring to the world and I love that. At the end of the day, when you are running a coaching business or that type of business through your podcast, it is your integrity that they are looking for. They want to see if you are going to do what you say you are going to do. At the end of the day, that is so critically important for all of us to not demo it on air, but demo it in real life. That follow-through matters.

Being a podcaster absolutely made me a better coach, but it has made me a better human because I have to bring myself to it. I could have passed it, but I do not know who that would benefit. It certainly would not benefit me. It would not benefit anybody that listens, and so it does call me to be my best self, and I love it for that. You caught onto something that a lot of people miss and that I intentionally created the podcast as lead generation, of course, because people are like, “Coaches are weird. I do not trust them. There are all the coachy coaches. There is a guru coach. There the McDonald’s of coaches.” It is bananas.

I wanted people to hear how I coach. For me, there was a secondary piece because my expertise is about money, mindset, and sales. I know that everybody listening to me has not dealt with their money mindset and they do not know how to sell so they may not be able to afford to work with me. I was like, “Now that my business is doing so well, what can I do? What can I produce that will help those people?”

One, either get out there and have fun. They might listen to it, change, and have their sweaty ten-minute conversation or do what they need to do and move on. They may also figure out how to make enough money to come and work with me, join this community and make things better, but I wish for more people.

What I love about podcasts so much is that it is a free medium for so many people, but I wish, inside the coaching industry, more people use it that way to say, “This is what I do. This is how I do it and I want you to have a sample of that like no holds barred. I am not trying to trick you.” People think that about coaches and so I will be totally straight. It is me hammering my industry too to be like you guys. Let’s step it up a little bit.

I always analyze people’s binge factors. That in its essence is your binge factor right there. The fact that you give so much away on your show is a part of the way you work and your business. Then you do it in a non-salesy, non-pushy way. You are giving away in the sense of, “You need this right now, and if this touches you, you are going to come back to me. I know you will.” You leave it out there like that and I love that because that is the way coaching needs to work. You are right about the industry needs to shift there.

I totally agree with you. I know so many people are afraid of coaches and I get it. With the pressure and all the bro stuff that has been happening, here I am saying like, “Women deserve to have money. Women should know what these tools are.” Money is the most powerful tool we have access to and we spend more time reading the owner’s manual of our freaking microwave ovens than we do understanding how our money works, and that is bananas. If I am going to go out there and change it once again, I got to eat my own dog food and offer it to people who may not understand how it works yet but by listening, they can figure it out and change their lives. That is what coaching is for in my humble opinion.

I am so glad you talked about money because I wanted to ask you this question in this way. I heard on the show that you grew up poor like barely had bread poor. How does that shift happen when you say, “I am going to invest in myself.” We see so many podcasters take it all on themselves because they do not want to spend the money on any part of it. They are not investing in the success growth because now they can’t concentrate on the area they need to making a great show.

You hit it really hard right there. That is the nugget of all of it. The way that we view the support we deserve is the way that we view our value in the world, which sounds cheesy. I do not mean that to be esoteric. I am very serious about this. The experience somebody has in purchasing a pair of Jimmy Choo’s, let’s say. It is a work of art, outrageously priced, unbelievably beautiful, and not always comfortable, but gorgeous.

The experience of purchasing that for yourself and walking across the floor in a pair of Jimmy Choo’s is a completely different experience from running over to Payless to pick up some sneakers. Are they both shoes? Absolutely. Will they both work on the function that you need? Absolutely. The experience of who you are on the planet is completely different.

I think when we are trying to make money, whether it is podcasting or starting a business, whatever it is, you have to be honest with ourselves about how we are viewing it. I am a bootstrapper too. As I said, I edited my first 30 episodes myself. Part of that was financial like, “I am not making money from this yet. Let me investigate it. Let me make sure it is going to work. Let’s make sure this is a medium for me.” That was also a strategic decision. It was also, “If the stuff hit the fan, I could take care of it myself,” and then I realized how time-consuming it was. I was like, “A-ha. Hold please.”

I have to tell you, I am like a secret geek and I loved editing. I loved making guests sound better and taking out their extra ums or when they would stutter. That made me so excited. I was so jazzed about that. I was like, “I hope other people make me sound less good.” I totally got excited about that, but that is not why I am on the planet. It is fun and I love it, but my job is to transform people’s relationship to money so they can share their own gifts and make a living doing that.

That is where I had to spend my time. My editor, whom I love and adore so much, wakes up every day going, “I can’t wait to add it.” It is her thing. That is what she is here to do. What we want to understand is where we are investing the money is we are valuing ourselves. We are giving ourselves the Jimmy Choo experience of like, “I am a podcaster. This is what I do and I have a team of support around me because we are effing good at this. Like this is what we do. We are amazing at this.”

What you want to always look for is how you bring in other people who were on this planet to do that role, because now they are fulfilling their dreams. They are super excited and you are supporting that and that support lifts up your podcast. You then get the editor who does the beautiful graphics or somebody who does a headline or graphics.

All those wonderful things that could come in there, and then an SEO expert who could make sure your show notes get found. Why would you not invest in that? Do you think it is not worthy of that? If that is the case, why are you making it? I am dead serious about that. What are you doing? What are you? A garage?

Do you deserve the garage band version of everything or do you deserve people who are on this planet to support other people at their geniuses by sharing their geniuses, and it goes round and round. Understanding the creation mode of podcasting and the creative effort that we have is part of a huge flow of creative energies. When you are not allowing other people to play with you, you are not allowing them to express themselves either. Does that make sense?

It does, and I am so glad you said it in that way. That is what I was hoping how you were going to take because there is also this view of doing things where you are saying, “I am a podcaster. I am doing this thing,” but you are not doing it. You are not all the way in it. You are not invested in it both in time, money, energy, and all of those things because you are scratching the surface. Is that worth it? It is still a lot of time to scratch the surface and you are not getting that full of value from it. For me, the other side of it is if I can invest in something that is going to get me a greater value for the time I am spending and my time can be better spent, then it is a worthwhile investment.

Podcasting To Win Clients: If you’re going to run your podcast like a business, you’ve got to put on your CEO hat and recognize where your valuable time is being spent.

I always challenge any one of my clients or students. I give them a formula where they figure out what a dollar amount of an hour of their time is worth. I recommend everybody to do that. I will give you the quick formula right now because that is how I roll. If you are reading this and you are like, “I totally can’t afford an editor. That is crazy.” “Hold, please. I want you to think about your financial goal over the next year.”

I am going to pretend. Let’s say it is $100,000 then you want to figure out how much you want to work every week. Let’s say as a podcast or whatever, I do 20 hours, 10 hours, or whatever. You figure that out. If you want to work ten hours a week, you multiply that by 52 because there are 52 weeks in the year. Let’s say multiply by ten. You want to work 520 hours in a year. You divide that $100,000 by 520 and that will tell you how much an hour of your time is worth. If you are the creator, you are the CEO. That is what your creative value time is worth. For a lot of people, it ends up being around anywhere from $500 to $800 an hour.

All of a sudden, they are like, “Doing laundry is expensive. Editing my podcast is outrageously expensive.” That is the way you want to look at it. If you are going to run your podcasts like a business, you got to put on your CEO hat and recognize where your valuable time is being spent. Not only do you now get to employ somebody where this is their zone of genius. This is what they are here to do. You are putting more revenue back into the business because your creative mind is on more creative things for the business to generate that $100,000 goal or whatever it is. Does that make sense?

You said something right there. You run your podcast like a business. What are some aspects that make it run like a business for you?

For me, we have made a strategic decision, at least so far not to run ads. I did that because I do believe my podcast personally is an act of service. For me, where I look at it as a business move is the best networking event I could ever go to ever in the history of mankind. I have literally thousands of people every week where I am like, “I am Sarah. I am going to help you with your money mindset, and I am great at teaching you how to sell. I am going to help you figure out what your expertise is and help you package that. you can sell it. I am giving constant examples of how I do that.” It is like when you are at Costco or wherever and they are giving out the free samples. That is a business move.

That is a strategic decision by the CEO saying, “If I put this product in someone’s hands, they are going to fall in love with it and they are going to come and buy it.” That is what my podcast is for me. In addition, I am always giving away tools and inviting people to come beyond my newsletter list in order to do that.

They then get a whole other side of me because we have a YouTube channel where I do Sarah Uncut and God knows what comes out of my mouth when I do that. They get this great sampling of who I am and whether or not I am real and they can trust me. For me, that strategic business decision is about introducing our product which is me. I am coaching as many people as I possibly can and they can figure out whether they like it or not.

It is also a lead magnet directive for people to come into our world, stay connected with me, and figure out if I am the person that they want to be hanging out with when their numbers do not add up. When they are freaked out about revenue or do not want to feel salesy because I do not teach the salesy way to sell, they come on in and they get super excited.

They are like, “She sold to me and I did not feel sold to.” I get that all the time. They are like, “I get that and you clearly did not get any Botox, which makes me like you.” I think that is a compliment. It makes me laugh every time. They were like, “I knew you were for real because you did not get Botox.” I am like, “Okay.” That is the sampling because they are like, “Can I trust her? Is she for real?”

When I first started my show, we did not have the video. The first time I did a live stream, one of our longtime listeners reached out and said, “Tracy, I thought you were taller.” I was like, “I think I am taller too.” I pretend to be tall. Let’s do our three things because you touched on them briefly, but I want to dive a little bit deeper into them. Let’s talk about guests because when you talk about networking, you are not only networking with your audience, but you are networking with those guests. How do you find great guests? How do you decide if they are worthy of being on your show?

It is so tough. I will be straight with everybody because I have made mistakes. There were people I do not think I vetted hard enough, not because they are not wonderful people. They are and they are doing great things, but they were either too nervous, they felt a little bit too green, or they hadn’t flushed it out enough.

I spend my extra pulling it out of them. Again, not that it is bad because that is also me saying, “Here is what I do as a coach. I can see your genius. I can pull it out of you and help you package it and create.” I have always turned it into something great, but I would much prefer that I am bringing someone on who is like, “I have this idea that I could make portraits out of puppies,” and I am like, “I can’t believe how much money we are making.”

That is inspiring to people and I want to bring on people like that. For the most part of what we do, people are like, “Come on the podcast and talk about how you got started in this because this is crazy.” I fall in love with people. It is a thing I do. That can happen a lot that way, and then the other thing we do is we allow people to submit. When that happens, my assistant has a coffee date with them for ten minutes. I do not like wasting people’s time, and if she is like, “I know you got to hear this story. This is a cool origin story.” They then have a coffee date with me and then we pick a date and time.

In a sense, I tapped into the content that you are developing. You are always exploring who is going to fit this, what is going to be right for the audience, and what I want to talk about. That is an organic way to allow the guesting to happen. It is not hard to get a guest. I think that it is harder than it is. It is one of the things that I keep saying, “Why are some of my clients struggling with that? This seems like that should be the easy part.”

We then sit down and we have this conversation about, “We will brainstorm a list.” If you do not have the names, brainstorm the topics and go find the names. It should come naturally to you. I am so glad that it is the way that you do that. If we did not have an audience, we would not have a podcast. I know that the hardest thing for about every podcaster I have interviewed is increasing their listener base. What do you do on the marketing side that helps you grow those audiences?

It is the harder part, honestly, because it is a loud space. We have to be honest about that. Anyone can start a podcast where the threshold to entry is not as high as I feel it should be. I wish Apple Podcasts was listening and not looking at how many you have in your bank when you try to apply. I have been in business for years, so we have our organic newsletter lists. We absolutely do that. Our podcast guests share it. Absolutely, that helps. I love being able to do Stories and Instagram has been huge for us and God helped me. I love my people. They made me go on to TikTok, which was the last thing I wanted to do.

You guys can put it all. I do not want to know what is going on over there. I can’t get into something else. They were laughing so hard, but we have seen an extraordinary boost. In full disclosure, the other thing I have done is I hired a podcast agent who gets me on other people’s shows because I ran out of time looking at other people’s zones of genius.

She loves to connect with people. She is brilliant at it, and she has this affinity for podcasts. I hired her and we have seen the absolute, not quite the hockey stick straight up, steady tick up because we are being introduced to new audiences. I know not everyone can run out and get a podcast agent which you probably can have somebody on your team.

Podcasting To Win Clients: How to be a great guest and find great guests: understand their audience, what they want to hear, and how you can contribute to them.

I love doing this with teenagers. I have them in my house and has helped us all, but with teenagers to be like, “Can you go find podcasts? Do you think I would be great on it?” They will and they do and then I share it on my Sarah Uncut videos on YouTube. I did two back-to-back. How to be a great guest and how to find great guests, and what I said was, you have got to understand their audience, what they want to hear, and how you can contribute to them. If you can figure that out, you will grow your audience.

Podcast swapping is one of those great ways because they have their own audience and show. You do if there is synergy. It is going to be absolutely amazing in terms of cross-pollination. With monetization, you talked about how this is a lead generation and it is networking for your business for your coaching. How have you seen the results? What return on investment in your time and energy has happened and your money too?

I have absolutely seen it in several different ways. I will see it when somebody book like a discovery call with me. I have the question, how did you find me? My podcast or I was a guest on someone else’s podcast. Those are both important because I need to be able to track this. I would say we are at 0.75% of those.

It is either me being a guest or they listened to the podcast. I have seen it there, and then what happens is they will join my Sprints. I do quarterly Sprints is what I call them. One goal, one quarter, and you sprint towards it. That is my entry-level program that a lot of people love to join because how hard is it to stick to one goal over a quarter? We all have shiny ball syndrome.

Everybody gets excited. They come in there and that is a massive sampling of me as a coach. What we have seen happen is someone comes in through, hearing me on a podcast or listening to our podcast, they then tend to bring in 2 or 3 more friends in the next round. That is exponential organic growth. I always say to people, “If you think about it, everybody has a different business.”

If you think about it, you probably need to work with about 200 to 300 people a year, mostly businesses. That is not that many. If you can look at how many people are finding me through the podcast, it is going to be a return on investment if you are doing it well, and that is important as a podcast host that people have to be very clear either about what they are going to get from listening, number one, but how they can work with you outside of that. For those of us that have bigger audiences, we do get like, “Can we come and sponsor a podcast episode?” So far we have said no but those will start to come in as well and now the podcast is basically self-sustaining.

Something you said just sparked a thing that I have been talking about. We have been running a certified strategist program teaching people how to be better podcast business people. For people who want to offer editing services, strategic coaching services, or any of those things to be podcast coaches, we have been helping them formulate their business model.

One of the things that come up again and again is the two things you have talked about. One is the value of their time. They did not realize their hourly rate needed to be so much higher than they had planned, and the number of people that they are going to have to work with over the course of a year to make it sustainable for them. It is not a business in the format that they were thinking about.

It is a side hustle at that point. It is never going to turn into that unless they get to those two things developed. I can imagine that for so many other businesses, they have not thought about this, and the value of working with you. You have got that all dialed in. It is so much amazing. What we have not talked about yet though is the fact that you have videocasts and podcasts.

This was a big controversy at our coaching call. Which one is better, video casting or podcasting? I was like, “They are like two different animals. I do not even know how you can compare them.” I would love your thought on this because you did the podcast first and then added the videocast. How did adding video change the dynamic of everything and what do you think of the two media types?

I am totally with you. I do not think we can compare, and as humans, we love to rank, compare, and stop it. On this one, you can’t because some people on video is frightening. They should not be on video. They accidentally pick their nose, pick at their eyes, or constantly twirl their hair. Please do not do video. Not because you are a bad person but video is not your thing. That is an important thing to know. Forgive me because I have a horrific cold, but for people who do not have great podcast voices, and there are some, other people I love to listen to where everyone once in a while from. I am like, “I wish this was on video because it gives people a little bit more to look at and consume.

If you do not have the most gorgeous voice for podcasting, it can provide a new way for people to consume the incredible value you are providing but in a way that might be softer for them. As far as why we made the decision, one of my best friends, her name is Michele Wang, a fashion influencer on YouTube and she has exploded. She is doing incredibly well and she is like, “What the heck is wrong with you?”

We were literally doing a girl’s weekend and we were out in Vegas hanging out by the pool. She is like, “Are you freaking kidding me? Video is so your thing. You have done online courses. You do Coffee With Coach. What is wrong with you?” I was like, “These are good points.” It started with that and video as a medium. I happened to be incredibly comfortable with it. When I met my video editor, she was like, “I tell you what to do when you do it.” I am like, “I don’t.” It is natural for me personally. I do not have a thing about it. I sometimes get pissed off about my hair or I do not like my makeup. That can happen, but overall, what do I care? As long as the message gets out.

It was that push from somebody else inside the industry who understands YouTube very well, who understands what to do and why to do it that way. We only do it for interviews. I do not do solo episodes on video mostly because I am lazy and I like to batch and I am not changing my shirt when I am batching. It is not happening. I love you guys but our solo episodes are still audio-only. When we decided to turn to video, I did interviews and a lot of research. I read the YouTube formula. I tried to understand that it is a very hard place to break in, and then I hired an SEO expert who used to work at Google to write the notes inside of YouTube to make sure we were hitting that correctly.

People who were looking for me could find me. We did it in this vein of like, “I am totally comfortable on camera. Why shouldn’t we add this? This is okay but it is more money. Now, we have video editing on top of audio editing. We have the writer that is coming in and working on SEO for us.” It was a spend, but what I found is podcast viewing on YouTube has become a massive thing. There are some people who will not listen anymore. They only watch and there is a whole YouTube world out there of YouTube consumers that do not leave the platform.

I do not care what you all are doing. If it is not on YouTube you are doing, what doesn’t exist. I was like, “That is not fair. Those people need support too.” I viewed it that way as another entry point for people to come and find us or consume a little bit and leave. That is cool too, but at least they will remember, “I have seen her somewhere before.” I wanted that factor for our business. I hope I answered your question.

You absolutely did. It is interesting that you looked at it because few people understand the YouTube formula or the videocast formula that it is an SEO play and because Google owns YouTube, it is a simple fact. You got to obey Google’s laws in order to participate over there. It probably improved your podcast at the same time because SEO is a secret to podcasting that most people do not know because everything is a search engine. Everything has got to be found somehow. It has had a cascading effect on your podcast.

I am sure it has. I always tell people, “You got to look at the whole soup that makes up your business.” For us, big soup at the moment because of the video podcast. We have been doing that now for a full year. I started Sarah Uncut, which is where I literally turn on my phone and God knows what comes out of my mouth. We do that once a week on YouTube. We put that up on YouTube and I did Coffee With Coach on YouTube now instead of on Facebook because I hate Facebook. I am so over it. I am never going back. Upping the Instagram Stories and Instagram videos. The pandemic did that for us that organically happened, and then we have the SEO writer that we brought in as well and the podcast agent.

Podcasting To Win Clients: There’s no greater resource than your listeners. There’s just a wealth of information there, and they love to tell you.

It has been layer after layer. What I tell my clients is I got to eat my own dog food again. We look at it all and go, “Everything is coming up. Everything is rising. Website views and the podcast listenings are rising.” The YouTube channel is the slowest part to grow, but it is also going up. We have to look at all of that as a collective soup. I believe that. When people say, “What is the number one thing I can do?” I am like, “Produce good content.” That is the number one thing you can do, and then the second thing is know your descriptions and keywords.

The number one question you can ask, I have been teaching people this for a long time because my background was in tech before I became a coach, is, “Would someone sit down to Google to hit your podcast?” If you look at the titles of our podcast episodes, you can tell that is what I did. It is literally like, “I woke up last night terrified, what do I do?”

It is because I know somebody is going to sit down and Google that, and sure enough, they do. When we see the sales calls come in, I was saying it came from a podcast and the secondary one is a googled. There you were. Taking the care and the time to 1) Make sure when they hit it and they get the answer they were looking for. Do not cheat on that and 2) Make sure you know what they are asking to get to you.

The googling part is the sorely underestimated side of podcasting because that is how people find podcasts more than searching within the app because there are 2.5 million podcasts on Apple. As you said, not discerning but there are only about 450,000 that are actively posting in any given month. That means it is a smaller playing field of what is current and Google only likes to give out what is current. You can rank there.

The other part of what you said in your titling is delivering the content, and that is what I love most about your intro. I always try to pick something that everybody should check out your show for it is stylistic things. Normally, I say this in the close but I am going to say this on air because I want to discuss your intro. Your intro is not a typical intro. You have a preamble at the beginning where you are diving in, you are attracting people, and getting them in which works better on video.

It is because if you do not capture them in the first 30 seconds and a video, forget it, they are done. You might not even have 30 seconds. You might have ten. You got to jump right in. Having an intro with music and the whole thing coming first can sometimes be a mistake in that media type. Here, you do your preamble then you transition to your intro music and everything, which you have your wonderful daughter record, which I love because it is very original and fun.

I love that she says, “Now, here’s my mom.” I love that part because you keep thinking as you are listening to it for the first time, “Is that your daughter?” She then sends it and you are like, “She is.” “I was right.” It has this fun that catches you off guard, and then you go back into the content again. You are delivering content from the moment of your show and it makes a real difference. What made you decide on that structure for that introduction?

You nailed it. It was my small foray at that point into video and also my own experience I hated. Going to a podcast is like, “For the other day,” and I am like, “I love you. I do not care. I am here to figure something out. If I am feeling that way and it is someone I love, they are going to feel that way about me too. I do not care how much they love me.” They are going to be like, “Shut the hell up, Sarah. Tell me what I came here to find out.” I am still not that good on video. I still have a lot of work to do with that. We are trying harder and doing more about that, but I do think it was that foray into video on Instagram and on Stories that helped me understand nobody cares. They need what they need. This is not your show.

It then starts there.

Yeah, but it is not. I will tell the editor, “If I ramble, take it out. I totally trust you.” I say the same thing about my interviews. I might sit with somebody for fifteen minutes. If you turn out a fifteen-minute podcast episode because of that, I trust you. That is the other reason we bring in people we love. They have got our backs too because sometimes, we are so close to it and we can’t see it.

I am like, “That might have been important to the guest to say.” I have to trust them to be like, “This is about giving the consumer what they came here for. The listener needs something.” It came out of that whole idea. My daughter whom I do not know where she pulled that out was the best intro ever. We recorded it three times. I am like, “Who are you, child?”

She got the inflections. I am like, “What is happening?” I swear to God, I was working on the podcast graphic. I am like, “How do you make the font big enough? This stupid thing is only the size of a nickel and how someone is going to decide if they should listen to this or not.” I was in that mode and I pulled into the driveway and she went, “Hey, mom.” I was like, “She needs to do the intro.” It was literally like that. I can’t claim any brilliant idea other than sometimes, we get handed great ideas out of the clear blue sky, and that is what that was.

I will say to anybody, if you are wondering about changing things for your podcast and you have had shower moments when you have the brilliant idea in the shower. Listen to those because that is what will make you stand out. It is so sad to me and I have done it too, but how many people copy. It is like, “Why would anybody listen to you if you sound like everybody else?”

Especially in your marketplace because you need to stand out as that coach and demo for them what they are going to get. Being original matters here.

I am being real and I am like, “I have kids and they are all over my life.” Get them in the podcast too. It is all good.

Sarah, before we go, what advice do you have for the podcasters who have been doing this a little while, need to step up their game, and take a look at what is next for them. What do you recommend?

I am going to give you guys one of my biggest secrets. Swear to God, this is huge. It sounds so simple, but it is a big deal. Send a one-question survey to anybody who is on your newsletter list or do a short podcast episode that says, “Guys, I have set up a special email account. I need you to tell me the one thing you need me to cover in 2022.” If you do that, you will be blown away by the responses you get. What is so beautiful about doing that is you are asking the audience what they want to hear, but it will give you more content than you could ever imagine because you will see trends and ideas, and you will be like, “They want to know about dolphins.” You then are like, “I didn’t know that.”

That is one of my biggest secrets. Anybody is on my newsletter list once every six months. I am like, “What is the number one thing you need to hear?” It gives me the richest most beautiful content because it is what they want to know. If you are bored or you are feeling stale, it is a great way to jumpstart that. The other thing I would recommend is as those answers come in because there is no greater resource than your listeners.

Podcasting To Win Clients: It’s okay to rerecord your intro. It’s okay to change the format. It’s okay to change things up a little bit based on what people need from you.

There is not. There is a wealth of information there and they love to tell you they love it. Everybody is like, “I do not want to bug them.” I am like, “No. They love telling you the stuff.” If new music, intro, or idea for the podcast itself comes out of those questions that they are asking you or the things they want to talk to you about and go refresh.

It is important. I did not say throw everything out and start over but refresh. It is okay to rerecord your intro or change the format. It is okay to change things up a little bit based on what people need from you. Doing it that way is so organic. It is so fresh and it lightens people up because they are like, “I asked that question.” They get so excited and now, they are involved, and then they share it around and go, “I am the one she is talking about.” I get so excited when I do that, and I get texts like, “That was me.” I am like, “You and 1,500 other people. That is amazing. I am so excited for you.” They do end up asking very similar questions. It is fun and it is so engaging for the audience.

One of the things I love most about podcasting is how fluid it is. It is not difficult to go change your cover art and intro.

It is, and have fun with it. If you are feeling stagnant, your audience might be too, so get excited again. Do what you need to do to get re-engaged to remember why you started in the first place.

What is next for you, Sarah?

Heavens to Betsy. If I only knew. Inside the wonderful world of podcasting, I was a guest on two beautiful women. They invited me for their 100th episode. I had been on before and they are like, “We want you to come back for the 100th episode,” and they brought one other woman with them. The four of us had so much fun on this podcast. We have decided to do a retreat in the Caribbean. I am so excited and a little bit terrified. I want to be with people again. One of the great things about podcasting is we can do it whenever and not change our shirts. I miss people and so I am super excited and that came out of podcasting.

This is exactly what I am going to say off-air but I am going to do it on-air so people can see what I do, how I network, and how I use my show. I heard in one of my network calls that they were talking about doing an intense location-based travel for entrepreneurs. They were talking about the wife and the relationship. There is a husband-and-wife team that is going to be doing these amazing local shopping trips where you can have your location, your event, or whatever it is that you are going to do, but she will be organizing all the local shops that you want to know about, but you won’t find on your own. I was like, “That is the coolest luxury trip idea I have ever heard.”

I was like, “I am there because maybe I do not want to go on the golf day, but I would totally love to go shopping for the day.” I love the idea of it. I might have to connect you with her and then you could find out some more about how you could do that in the Caribbean. These are the kinds of connections.

This is what I love to do at the end of my show. After it is over, I would be like, “I got to connect you with so-and-so.” That pays you back in dividends when I make those connections for other people and for Sarah, it is going to come back to you. I love that. That is a great challenge for you. Kicking off some of your Sprints that way makes such sense. You can get concentrated time to think about it and when you are away from your business because that is important too.

I work exclusively with women. It is like, “Not only away from the business, but away from life. It is because we do so many things. We wear so many hats. You got to get out of that every once in a while and focus and be with other people who were focusing too. It is cool.

Game On Girlfriend, fabulous podcaster Walton, amazing show. I am so proud that you have gone over 100 episodes. Keep going hundreds more.

Thank you so much, Tracy. It has been such a joy to be here with you.

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Lots of nuggets. Gold dropping everywhere from Sarah. She is demonstrating how she brings value to you. That makes you want to peel back the layers and get to know her better. The more you get to know her, the more you start to realize she has these programs, these groups, and doing Sprints. This is amazing. All the layers of things that she has developed.

This show, its whole point is to get you to want to learn more. She has already discovered that the power of podcasting is not enough in and of itself. It is not enough alone. You got to add video, blog, good SEO, and all of these great digital marketing strategies into the mix, and then you are fully activating the amount of time, energy, and money you are spending on podcasting to make it work as a whole for your business as an attractor.

That is what I love about how straightforward she was in sharing everything. Go check out what she is doing and her YouTube channel. See what that is and do not forget to listen to the podcast Game On Girlfriend because you got to check out that enticing intro. She is making me want to up my game, making me switch things around, and making me rethink how I am going to run my show in the future. When someone does that, that is the power of what I am trying to bring you here on the show. When she makes me think, and I have been doing this a long time, then she has got to be making you think as well.

I am so glad to have someone as powerful and amazing as Sarah Walton on the show. I am always looking for new guests. Looking for you to suggest some. Looking for you to decide that you are ready, qualified, and you can’t wait to be on my show. Make sure you go to TheBingeFactor.com and apply right there. Thanks, everyone, for reading and I will be back next time with another bingeable host.

Important Links

• The Game On Girlfriend Podcast
• Coffee With Coach
• The Sales Mastermind
• YouTube – Sarah Walton
• @TheSarahWalton – Instagram
• @SarahWaltonPage – Facebook
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/SarahWalton/