Binge Factor Media

Podcasts take numerous shapes and forms. While many podcasters record lengthy episodes that they can repurpose in multiple ways, there are also a significant number of listeners out there who prefer shorter episodes. Introducing the charms of short episodes here in the show is someone who takes an unusual approach at formatting his podcast. Together with Tracy Hazzard is Tom Poland, multiple best-selling author and the host of Marketing the Invisible—a show that asks seven questions in seven minutes. Honoring the form, they go through seven questions that take us inside the life and mind of Tom as well as some of the strategies he uses to market and monetize his show. He then discusses the advantages of creating short podcast episodes, emphasizing how it attracts binge listeners. If you’re thinking of doing something short form, tight, intense, and a binge factor way, then allow Tom to tell you in this great conversation.

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Seven Minute Marketing: How Short Podcast Episodes Can Attract Binge Listeners With Tom Poland

I’ve got another podcaster for you. I’ve got this one coming from around the world. We’re going international with our interviews and I love that. I’m excited to bring to you the host of Marketing the Invisible, Tom Poland. Tom is a multiple best-selling author. I’ve got one of his books, Inbound Marketing Book. He works with professionals and with marketing services advice software. He has clients in 27 cities and fifteen-time zones. He has personally started and sold multiple businesses, including having led teams of over 100 people and revenue in excess of $20 million. He’s spoken on global speaking platforms alongside Brian Tracy, Marshall Goldsmith, Dr. Ivan Misner, Michael Port, and many others. He describes themselves as voluntarily married and lives on the white sands of Castaways Beach in Queensland, Australia. Thanks, Tom, for joining me.

You’re welcome.

You have such an unusual formatted show that I want to do something different here. Normally, we get into who you are, why you started podcasting and all that but we’re going to jump straight in because your format is seven questions in seven minutes. That’s unusual and I wanted to highlight that. We’re going to jump into my five things, my best ways and we’re going to jump right into that and then we’ll get back to talking about why you formatted your show this way. On the show, we talk about the lessons learned from podcasting on the best ways to do these five things. What are some of the best ways you found to book great guests?

Get referrals from other guests and I can also get referrals from other guests to other hosts. One of the little strategies that I have is that before I let my guests go, I say, “I’d love to do some cross-referrals. You’ve probably been to other shows that were great and you probably know other guests. I know other hosts. Why don’t we circle back in a week or two and explore that?”

You’ll follow up later, which is great because it gives you a chance to have a lengthier conversation.

First of all, we book the time before they leave that call. Before they hang up Zoom procedure, we book it in. I have a URL, ExploreJV.com, and they can go there. It’s critical to book that before they disappear because otherwise, they just fall between the cracks. They’re busy and we’re busy, and we don’t do it as it’s booked down. The second reason for booking another time is that the second time you meet someone, that’s suddenly a friend. There’s some powerful psychology about that. By having that second meeting and by being a little bit patient, the rapport levels are established at a deep level and it’s so much easier, whereas the first time, it’s often a little bit tense.

You’re building relationship, which is such a key to growth in your business. I love that.

That’s the beautiful thing about a podcast. You’re relationship building, but it’s fun and it’s interesting. I say to my clients, “I’m technically sure there are some hurdles for you, but this is going to be something you love to do.”

I’m glad you said that because I agree. I was like, “Why would you want to market all the hardware? This is so much more fun.” What are some of the best ways to increase your listeners?

One of the things we do is that when we book the guest, we ask them how they’ll promote the show. Whether it’s social media or an email list, we don’t say they have to do it any which way at all. They make that commitment before when they’re enthusiastic. We send out an email to say, “Your pants are being released with your social media assets.” We let some stuff and we remind them, “By the way, you had mentioned you’re going to promote it.” We drive traffic back to our landing page with our features and then there’s a pop-up window with a free giveaway. That’s how we increase subscribers from the show. In terms of how we increase listeners, I have no idea. I know that’s a terrible answer, but we get the show out there and people share it. The reason I started a podcast was because I learned from smart people like you that one of the big things about podcasting is the building of the relationship with the guests.

It’s not the primary goal. How do you produce it in a professional way?

I get someone like you to do it. Most people like me that enjoy having guests on the show and enjoying that repetitive like what we’re doing and so on, and upgrade technically, the people person. I call them dogs and cats. Dogs love interviewing people that are talking and sharing. They get excited, enthusiastic, run around, barking, and tails wagging. Cats will sit back and the other details to technical people. I say to every one of my clients who go around, “Outsource the production, distribution, and social media sharing assets, and find someone like Podetize to do all that stuff for you.”

I want everybody to realize that I met Tom as a client.

I don’t have an affiliate connection or anything like that. I’m not getting kicked back. I’m just saying, this is reality. Do what you are born to do, which is probably interviewing people, having fun and spreading the word. At least technical stuff that the cats and dogs should not try me out.

I was sitting back and remembering that my daughter used to have this TV show where there was this CatDog. It was this cartoon when she was a teenager and it’s coming into my head. I might be that one where I can flip back and forth and do one each but it’s rare and unusual. People shouldn’t do it.

About 1 in 50. I’ve been talking about cats and dogs for decades and I’ve written about the two different personality types. About 1 in 10 is true, but about 1 in 50 is what I call a dog-cat. That makes some of the best clients that make some of the best entrepreneurs because they can see the big picture. There are a people person and they relate to people but they also relate to the technical side. It’s rare. If you’re one of 49 out of the other 50 like me, for goodness sake, get Podetize on your side and take all of that nightmare out of your way.

Do you encourage engagement in your community and how do you do it?

I totally suck at that because it requires persistence, routine and responding to people. I don’t do it but we do get it done and people can contact us. I always respond to every email but I don’t chase bigger shiny things, I suppose.

You’re encouraging the engagement back with the guests, so you’re encouraging it on the relationship in the other way.

We always give people a means to reach out if they want to do that. The primary purpose of our podcast exercises is to separate that relationship with the guest to the key influencer. Secondly, we want to give good quality content to our email list because that’s our goldmine, itself our most valuable asset. At Leadsology, we got some private lists. Thirdly, and it’s probably a distant third is, how many people download the thing? How many people listen? How many people share it? The whole engagement thing is something I would love to do, but I got to find me a cat to do that because I know. The thing about a dog trying to meow is that even if you do it, it’s not going to sound good and you won’t keep doing it because it’s not your inclination. Creating a community around it would be stupendous.

I suspect up my fifth thing here, you’re monetizing your show from that mining of your Leadsology list, as you’ve referred to it. Your mining off your list and your money on the relationships with the influencer. It’s what I would call alternative monetization. How’s that working out for you?

It’s incredibly well. I use the short line in my brain between action and result. I’m not good at going around corners and being secure. The whole content marketing thing, I don’t get it.

You’re doing it.

Short Podcast Episodes: There are a people person and they relate to people but they also relate to the technical side.

I am, I suppose, but what we do with a guest is we run it through an algorithm before we get them onto the show.

That sounds very cat to me.

That’s not something a dog does. I didn’t build the algorithm. I hired two data scientists and they worked on this for six months. I have a data miner in the Philippines who I pay a modest salary, it’s $7 an hour but she gets a monthly bonus for $25 for every interview that was conducted. The interview has to get through the algorithm and the algorithm tells me what’s the JV partner like what it turn out to be. The guests that are coming on the show, we already know they run webinars or they have a free giveaway that’s quite valuable. We check the content out and if we think it’s good quality, we’ve got a good idea of what their email size is and how responsive it is because of the algorithm.

They come through the algorithm and they’re identified by the data miner in the Philippines. I don’t do any of this. If they pass the test, I give some green light to a data miner in the Philippines who then sends the invitations for the show. The guests that are on the show, not all of them because some of them are just fun to interview and they’ve got a great message and that’s exciting for me, too. Most of the guests on the show have been carefully pre-selected and screened because we know they’re going to make a great JV partner.

There’s that alternative monetization. Readers of The Binge Factor, this is what we keep talking about. There are many different ways to look at the value in your podcast and the value at what that adds to your business. This is what’s valuable to you. Let’s talk about that. You are an inbound marketing and you are an expert in generating leads and mining those leads. How did you make this decision that you’re going to start a podcast?

Accidentally. What we did is, we launched this massive online magazine. When you get the tablet, you flick through it, the pages wrestle as you go through, they curl over into the glossy photos, and there are links everywhere. I thought, “This will be a great lead generation.” Incidentally, I do specialize in inbound lead gen, but nine out of ten things that I’ve tried and failed miserably, this is one of them. We put a lot of money and time, I had a publisher and an editor, and we got marketing contributors. My thing was, “Let’s establish a relationship with people who are key influencers. Let’s get them contributing to this online magazine and make it amazing.” We ran this thing for six months and we had lots of downloads and subscribers, but in terms of a direct marketing mechanism, it failed miserably. Getting people to submit articles is like herding cats. The deadlines are coming up and they’re like, “I’ll give it to you as soon as possible. I promise,” and they don’t. Putting a magazine together, if you have done that, you know it’s not easy.

I wrote a column for almost five years for Inc. Magazine and I’m submitting six articles a month. They would be this nasty message at the end of every month. They’d be like, “You all have a deadline and you’re not meeting it.” We would do this and then everybody would post on the last day of the month.

I get the magazine out and sign. You’re on top of a line and go, “That is your little stats again.”

My big tip out there if you want to be featured in a magazine, go the last week of the month and give it to the writer practically pre-written and you’ll be covered in no time.

That’s what I’m talking about because the deadline is there. The podcast came about by accident. Getting a whole lot of articles from a whole lot of people all around the world was a nightmare and it wasn’t producing the results. I thought, “I wonder what would happen if I started a podcast.” This is way back when podcasts had almost died out.

They had that little dip there.

They went boom and all of a sudden, I didn’t hear anything. People went broke or tried to make money on a podcast. Last few years of massive resurgence for all the right reasons. Back then, I thought, “What if I interviewed someone?” I started a podcast and all the authors of these articles turned up on time and then it evolved from there. I figured out, “All these people are coming on the podcast because they want to be seen, they want to be heard and they want to get the message out.” That could make good JV partners. I started exploring that and we developed what I call the bridging question, which was we finished the interview. It’s the same meeting and I would say, “I wonder if you want to have a conversation about how we can grow each other’s email list.” They’d go, “Yes.”

They’re like, “That’s everybody’s problem so yes.”

What good marketing does is it puts an offer in front of someone who’s already looking for that offer, but the problem is if you emailed them and said, “Do you want to have a conversation about growing your email list?” They go, “Tom who? I don’t know you. I get spam. Go away.” It’s getting on the show, then the next stage was carefully pre-selecting them and then the next stage was the algorithm. It’s evolved over quite a few years and we’ve got this nice streamlined system where I don’t initiate. The other key for dogs is don’t initiate anything that requires data mining, detail or appointment setting because you should be barking not meowing.

Go to Upwork.com, which is to me, the best platform for finding freelancers because they have all these things called filters. You can find the crème de la crème at the best price. Look after them and give them an incentive monthly bonus. You get someone to give them a checklist. If you’re looking for a guest, we have the whole algorithm thing but you’d have to start with that. Get them finding the gift, get them reaching out, do the interview and then give it to Podetize to make money out of it.

You’ve got 180 episodes or something like that?

I started doing this in 1995.

You have before and then you have the catalog.

This is the third iteration. In 1995, we would hire a recording studio. We walk past the rooms to the rock bands smoking dope and whatever they were crack or whatever they’re on. We get our suit and tie and do this interview with someone a business leader. We started with podcasting back then and they were originally on eight tracks. I’m ashamed to admit that. Podcasts came along after CDs and one day, I remember sitting there thinking, “I don’t think I need to do this anymore.” It’s $500 to hire a studio for one hour. Marketing the Invisible is the third iteration. Before that, we had business owners marketing briefly or the bomb. We used to send out thousands of emails around every week saying, “He’s your bomb,” which is probably not a good look in terms of 9/11 or so on. Before that, it was called Success University. This is the third iteration, Marketing the Invisible.

You’ve got a different format. Readers out there, you need to subscribe to it, read it, and get a sense of what’s going on because he’s doing something interesting. You’re also going to go through all these episodes and go, “I need to learn that. I can learn that in seven minutes.” That’s fantastic. You do your intro right with the guests there. They give you a little bit of feedback and then you go straight into your seven questions. You tell them the time sometimes when you’re on it. You’re like, “You have five minutes left.”

Before every question, I give them, “How many minutes we got left?” “Question number three, four minutes left. Question number seven, last question, 30 seconds left.”

Marketing The Invisble

If you go, “Ten seconds left,” I don’t know what to say.

In the interview, part of the gimmick I suppose is, normally, there’s a countdown timer on the screen underneath the guest so you can see the tension is building on how they’re going to make it, and we cut the interview.

You have a big buzzer at the end.

Some people describe me as lazy, but I don’t think it is lazy. I just like efficiency. We give them the questions when they book. We ask them to nominate a title and put how to in front of it and then at the end, in just seven minutes, how to generate more leads through Instagram or whatever. That’s always the title format and we ask them to nominate a landing page so we can drive some traffic back to the website. We want to invoke the Law of Psychological Reciprocity, where we do something cool for them. If I can get on my show and drive some traffic, whatever we can, I always let them know. It could only be a few people and it might be a couple of hundred. I don’t know but we’ll do what we can. That’s all set up.

When they come to the interview, they know what the questions are. I know what the title is. I’ve got the bio and we’ve got the landing page. It takes three minutes to do a soundcheck and confirm everything and then the interview starts. The interview itself, I start it fast and I’ll say, “3, 2, 1. Hello everyone, a warm welcome to another episode of Marketing the Invisible. I’m Tom Poland and my guest is Tracy Hazzard. Tracy, a warm welcome. Where are you hanging out?” It’s fast and without fluff around with the weather or how the Rangers are on the weekend, did they sack or whatever. It’s straight into it. The whole interview, including the intro, is nine minutes and we’re done, and they book for 30 minutes. We’re going to some space left to talk about JVs or cross-marketing.

In and of itself, there’s a repetitiveness and comfort factor. You tread that fine line between it. This is the binge factor that you don’t head into repetitiveness. Sometimes, when people do the same questions week after week like I do my five things, it can become repetitive that it becomes boring and uninteresting to the reader. The time factor that you’ve created, that intensity of time that speed round and that passion that comes across because I’m like, “I’m on the clock. I have to answer this.” That’s what’s traded to remove it away from being boring and repetitive and that’s your key. That’s why it’s working because I’ve seen a lot of people do the same questions again. Your intense scrutiny on the time and that pressure of the time on the guest is your definite binge factor.

I think you’re on the money honey, I hadn’t realized that but that you pointed it out, what a clever guy I am.

You often give me the binge factor here and someone will go, “I did that on purpose.” “Sure. Yes.” It’s okay if it wasn’t carefully constructed, but that’s what comes across. The other thing is that, especially in marketing, I see this again and again, marketers have the attention span of a gnat. They need something short. I often counsel clients and say, “You cannot have a short format no matter how many people tell you, they want you under ten-minute videos. That won’t work for your audience,” but for your audience, it’s perfect. You might be horrified at this but I have imagined there’s a large portion of your audience who’s also listening to it on 1.5 to 2 times speed. You are prime podfasters.

That’s clever, too. It makes sense. This is like going to the doctors and seeing an X-ray of your bone, “That’s inside of you?” You’re like a radiographer.

You’ve been podcasting long enough that some fun things, some interesting things, and maybe some not so fun things have happened to you. Do you have some funny, interesting stories?

One of the beauties about podcasting is I can do it from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world, of course. I’m an introvert. I come alive for interviews, talks and things like that. Other than that, my wife’s in Germany. She’s visiting her sick mom and so on and I went on to the phone in case someone calls me and says, “Tom, you’re home alone. Come over for dinner.” No, I don’t want to do that. What I’m leading up to is that the retake moments on when the courier knocks on the door with a sledgehammer in the middle of an interview and my dog is taking exception to that, starts barking, runs out and knocks over the vase with the flower. It’s gone from this fast-paced interview. We’ve got three and a half minutes left. We’ve got two and a half minutes left and all mayhem breaks loose in the middle of the interview. It’s one of those moments I try to avoid. It’s curious and with Amazon delivering every other day. I do all my shopping from home. I bought all my clothes online and I don’t get out much.

Even the extroverts here like my daughter say this all the time, “Mom, where’d you get that?” “I’m a busy person. I bought it on Amazon. I had it delivered to us.” Where do you think I got it from? It’s not an introvert’s thing.

“Mom, it’s called the internet.”

We use it all the time. These things happen to all of us. It doesn’t matter how seasoned we are. You can’t control everything.

These sorts of things have happened many times here. You know what technology is like. In addition to the fact, occasionally, if I schedule something for Monday morning, I never work Sunday morning and I miss a meeting or something stupid like that. Technology sometimes goes AWOL on you and you can’t be upset about it. You can’t be wanting to be perfect that your world comes crashing down around you if you let it get down. They’ll get up. Any experienced guest on a podcast show understands that it’s not like turning up to the local cafe. There’s technology involved.

Everyone here knows my story that I finally get to interview Gary Vee and I have zero recordings from that. The technology failed, but it failed so badly that Tom and I turned it into a product. There has to be something good out of it. Those things happen to all of us. I’m glad you said that because even in a recording studio, those things happen. I’ve hired professionals and they have that. You got the best-selling author. Has there been anything that that authority raising thing that has come out of your podcast?

I wish I could say yes. I’m a household name or something, but I don’t know. You’re probably better qualified to answer that because I’m the guy on the inside of my brain that I find it quite hard to look. You get that helicopter view.

Have you gotten maybe more speaking events and everything? You’ve been speaking all over the place.

I gave them out the invitation, but mostly, they wanted me to fly for 27 hours. I’ve done over 500 gigs and if someone wants to fly me to a business class and have someone meet with the airport and I probably go yes. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant because it’s the right opportunity. I don’t want to do this whole thing where I fly to Dallas for 27 hours, you get twenty minutes on stage and you pay for yourself. If someone’s going to look up as a speaker, I’ll certainly do that. I had an invitation to go and speak at the National Speakers Association in the UK, so I’ll probably look at that because that’s a fun crowd. It’s like going to a comedy club and mixing with the guys and girls that are sick enough to stand behind the microphone, and try and get a laugh. NSA is a cross between that and a dog show. They’re all dressed up. It’s a bit of a fashion event, but the fun as well. Things like that are interesting. We need to have someone like you to guest. It’s like number three on the list I’ve mentioned. It’s the relationship and it’s adding value to our subscribers. Number three is getting it to listen to.

Short Podcast Episodes: Long-form sales copies work well for wanderers and explorers but not for seekers.

I want to talk a little bit about that because you’re an expert in this, as I was skimming your book and taking a look at some things. You have this analysis of our audiences here, whether it’s your email list or your audience in general. You have 3% of people who are seekers. They’re out there looking for something, they’re ready to jump, and they take action quickly. I agree with you. I love to have like that point and I usually put it right up at the top of the landing page. It says, “If you want this done for you, click. Give them the way out.” I like to put a place in for that because they’re not going to read the whole thing. You have explorers and the third one was called wanderers. You have that model of it. Are we seeing a shift though in that? You have 3% and 12% and then the remaining 85%. Are you starting to see a shift happen? Because email marketing and a lot of these market meetings are getting so noisy. I’m starting to see integration in that percentage.

I’m not sure about the percentages but what’s working for one of those segments and you had absolutely hit the nail on the head. Way back many years ago when I did direct marketing. We would send out 10,000 letters in long-form and two pages long. We were sending them out to people that we did not know from Adam. We had to convince them that coming to the seminar and workshop is a great idea even though they’ve never thought about it and they hadn’t heard of us. Long-form sales copies work well for wanderers and it worked well for explorers. It didn’t work too well for seekers because they’re not going to read 23 pages.

They agreed well and then what happened is people go, “Why do your programs have 25 screens on your website? Who wants that?” The explorers want to dive deep and have a read, but for the seekers, they just want to know, “How do I buy? How do I sign up? How do I join?” Having that at the top of the page, like you’ve got it, that’s what the 3% seekers. What the seekers will tolerate has diminished rapidly over the years. With our JV program, if I’m going to reach out to a JV partner, I’m not going more than a short benefit-rich subject line and maybe two short sentences with an explicit call to action.

Even our email list has 22,000 subscribers. The subject line is 1, 2 or 3 and some curly brackets. It gets their attention to see the webinar because we’re promoting someone to a webinar or to gift because we’re promoting someone’s landing page and then MTI, Marketing the Invisible podcast, a seven-minute interview. They know immediately what format it is. Is it a giveaway? Is that a webinar? Is it a podcast? There’s a benefit after that because when you do about how things have changed, in the old days, curiosities drag people in. “Does this apply to you?” You go, “How much a surprise to me. I haven’t read the email,” and then you end up three pages later.

You figure out what it’s all about. People don’t do that anymore. They go subject line, delete. They’ll not even reading the body of the text. We know from our open rates, they’ve gone from 25% down to 23% down to 19% down to 14%. The open rates are falling. We know from webinars, it’s still at 41% but because we do some tricky things, we started with 40% attendance rates, even in live events used to be 67% attendance rates. Even when people paid for it, only 2/3 would show up. Webinars 40% and then 25%, 12%, 8%. It’s horrendous.

We had one like that where I give the same talk all the time on stages and usually it overruns the room. They’ll plan on a breakout room and they’ll be standing room only. I know that this talk converts. I know that it gets people and we did that. We ran a webinar and this show up rate was dismal. I was like, “What happened here?” There are 100 people that signed up and then practically nobody showed. I’m like, “What’s going on?”

With the trickled webinars, you’ve got to be explicit and take the opposite of dishes out and say, “There will be no replay.” In caps like you’re shouting it, “It’s live only.” By doing that and finding that Wednesday, 4:00 PM Eastern is the sweet spot, we get 41% attendance.

You just gave us some secrets here. That’s the thing. On your show, we don’t get a lot of you because you’re rapid-fire seven questions is all about we get of you. Is there more of you on your website?

Yes, there’s a fair bit more. Leadsology.guru is the main website. My bio is there.

If you’ve got some hard-interesting data, hard one information, and things that fail, where do we assess you for that? Do you have that?

The best source of skinny and oldest, all the tips and how to use JVs, webinars and everything else is Inbound Marketing. People go to Amazon, go to Books then search for Inbound Marketing. They’ll find my bright yellow book. We’re thinking of doing that with a free pair of sunglasses, maybe nuclear yellow. We can keep the Kindle version at $1 while you’re doing our launch. The paperback will go to $12 and the Kindle goes to $12 because we’d rather people buy the paperback. It sits around on their desk and it’s bright yellow.

It reminds them to read it. This one jumped to the top of my pile, not just because you sent it to me, but because it’s bright. There were some smart moves there as well. You do have a way for people to get to access some of your thoughts. What we find with podcasting is that audiences want more of you, the host, and you don’t give a lot of that because you’ve got your short segments. Somewhere else, we want to get that.

The other place, if they have a conversation for fifteen minutes, let’s talk and see. If I’ve got something I want, they can go to INeedInbound.com. We give people different resources, then we can satisfy the seekers, explorers, and wanderers. There’s a couple there. There’s the website, book, and console.

You’ve tried a lot of things over the years and you’d mentioned that you tried a bunch that failed. We all do. On Monday nights, Juliet Clark and I, who’s another podcast host, we dish about what’s not working in marketing. Usually, it’s what’s not working. We talk about stuff that we’ve tried and stuff that our clients have tried. We talked about some of the stuff that you guys are doing like, “You are wasting your time.” We’ve got an episode on chatbots and I’m watching it go horrendously bad. I’m sure we’re all cringing on the other end. You’ve got the two simple LinkedIn things, like the two messages that you could do and that’s way simple compared to the chatbot. I’m serious that one of our clients has done 100 messages. It’s all programmed and it’s crazy. The episode is going to be called Bots Gone Wild because that’s what it is. You’ve probably got lots of these things as well. You mentioned five-day challenges and some of these other things. Are there other things besides the show-up rate and webinars that are not doing well? You’re starting to see failure happen.

Chapter two of my book, Inbound Marketing Book, lists sixteen marketing methods you may have tried and why they haven’t worked. Mostly, they don’t work because 97% of marketing methods fail. My estimation after 39 years of being a sales marketing expert and trying lots of things that don’t work, my conclusion is 97% of marketing efforts fail for one simple reason, which is people don’t want to do it.

They don’t want to do the hard work.

It’s like a dog trying to meow. It’s not hard work.

You’re talking about the person on the other end doesn’t want it?

Inbound Marketing Book

No, I’m talking about the marketer. Here’s what happens. A typical scenario, one day, someone goes to a seminar on Facebook advertising and funnels, and they go, “This must be a dream.” I set these funnels up and I can just lie on the beach in the middle of money and wash my beautiful body. What’s not to love about that? It’s like the holy grail of marketing is, “I don’t do anything and I get clients coming in.” They come back, but they’ve heard about tripwires, segmentation, autoresponders, split testing, colors, and titles, and they wake up the next morning. They go, “I should do those funnel things.”

The moment you hear yourself going, “I should,” you are going to fail because one of three things is going to happen. You’ve got to start and stop it because you don’t want to do it and it hurts your head because you’re a dog and you’re not a cat. If you’re a cat, you should do funnels. This applies almost universally, people are successful at funnels that are telling you should do funnels. They have twelve PhDs. People locked in a room figuring all this stuff out for them every single day and they’re spending $60,000 a month on us. I know because I’m in the mastermind group of some of them.

The little old me sitting here in Castaways Beach going to do funnels or other things, you started, you stop it or you’ll start it and do it consistently only when the money runs out or you never started at all. Either three scenarios that come out of I should versus I want. If there’s marketing that’s like a podcast, I want to do a podcast and I do them. Whatever you do regularly enough, you get good at but the starter fluid, the ignition is, “I want to do this thing.” Other than that, most marketing methods fail because they’re too expensive, too complicated or they’re ineffective. This thing is in chapter two.

You’re pointing it out. That’s exactly how I ended up in the business and out of the design business because I wanted to do it. We wanted to do it because we’re detailed people and my Tom balances me out. He’s definitely a cat and he’s got all those things. The systems fall into place and all of those things happen for us. Other people were like, “Can you do this for me?” That’s how it happened. It eclipsed our regular business to the point where like, “Why are we still doing this design business?”

You two are a great team because you got a dog and a cat and that’s all always the best. I’m going to surround myself with cats.

We have a 55 cat team. We’ve got a big team like that. We have lots of kittens and we have our office puppy on top of it all who manages to interrupt our show. Tom, any last parting words for someone who’s on that fence if they want to start a podcast but you haven’t pulled the trigger yet?

First of all, do a checklist of what you’re looking for in a guest. Second thing, get a Calendly, time table or whatever and find a booking link and set that up. Number three, go Upwork and find a Filipino contractor to take the checklist, use the link and reach out and books and guests, then you’re committed.

You have to do it and you have to show up.

You’ve got guests booked and never confuse. There’s an old saying consultancy, “Never confuse promise with delivery.” Get committed. It’s the same if you’re going to do a webinar. Build a program the number of people that sit around on their butt for the years going, “I got to build a program.” Sell the thing and then build it. If nothing else, set that point in building it and then figuring out then wants to buy it. Sell it, get some cash in, then build the thing, and have a start date of, say, the first of next month or whatever it is. Go through the pain and the stress of whatever you have to go through mentally, the fear of failure, and everything else, which we all go through and do it because then, it will happen. You’ll get guests booked in.

Thank you, Tom. I’m glad you came on the show. I’m glad we got to talk about Marketing the Invisible and your unusual binge factor of seven questions in seven minutes.

I appreciate the opportunity. It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks for making it fun.

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This is an exciting episode. Thinking about doing something short form, tight, intense, and creating a binge factor that way. The way Tom Poland is an incredible model to follow if it’s the right audience for you and Tom clearly knows his audience. That’s what I want to point out here. Tom Poland is an absolute expert at understanding his audience and understanding the psychological mindset behind them of what drives them to buy, consume or convert. All of those things matter in the process and he’s got that dialed in. That’s why he’s an inbound marketing expert. That’s why he’s an expert on generating leads and he’s utilized his podcast in a different way to make it lead generating for him.

Remember, he’s not generating those leads from readers as much as he is from his guests. It’s a different model of alternative monetization, but one that is going to be so valuable to many of you out there. Less than 2% of podcasts make money off of their podcast itself from that listener and advertising sponsorship side. Keep in mind that 98% of you out there, Tom’s found a great model that works for him and works for his business. He wants to do it as he pointed out. Take a good read to Marketing the Invisible with Tom Poland. Subscribe, read, there are tons of episodes on there that are going to help you figure out how to market your show because there are lots of great nuggets in those seven minutes every single week. Read that one as well.

If you would like to be featured on the show, don’t forget you’ve got to reach out at TheBingeFactor.com, fill out our form and see if you qualify as a guest. I also am always looking for suggestions. If you have a great podcaster you’ve listened to, suggest them up, and you can email us there as well. You can find us everywhere on social media @FeedYourBrand. We’re still at the old because we’re part of Feed Your Brand. You can also find us at Podetize.com. Anywhere you want to search for us, you’ll be able to find us. I’ll be back with another podcaster and another great model for you to format as well. Take care.

Don’t miss Tracy Hazzard’s Authority Magazine article about Tom Poland too!

Important Links:

• Marketing the Invisible – Podcast
• Inbound Marketing Book
• ExploreJV.com
• Podetize
• Upwork.com
• Leadsology.guru
• INeedInbound.com
• @FeedYourBrand – Facebook
• Podetize.com

About Tom Poland