#37 | Your Podcast Will Never Bring You Regular Clients Without This Secret Ingredient 99% Miss (Add This TODAY)

0:00You're pitching your coaching program directly on your podcast, but barely anyone is booking calls. Here's what you're missing. Welcome to How to Grow a Podcast that attracts high-ticket online coaching clients. The show helping coaches, consultants, and experts turn your slow-growth podcast into a profitable client attraction system. At the end of this episode, I'll share a little more about who I am and what we do at my company, getmorelisteners.com. It might even shock you. But for now, let's dive into the episode. In today's episode, you'll discover the biggest mistakes podcasters make that makes it impossible for their email list to grow.

0:42Why pitching straight to your listeners has super slow conversions. And finally, a simple content strategy that turns more listeners into email subscribers and paying clients. Let's dive in. Here's the thing. We have a podcast. We all love podcasting. I love podcasting. It's a great reason to get together if you have a co-host, or if you have a solo episode, just get together with yourself. And if you've got guests, get together with your guests. And it's good fun. But with this good fun, it's a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of energy being spent on the podcast to build an audience, and also to make an ROI from the time that's been invested.

1:25At the end of the day, we know you can make a ton of money if you do podcasting the right way. We also know that there's honestly just a lot of terrible advice and guidance out there for entrepreneurs and experts who are looking to build an audience, who are looking to take their podcast to the next level. And while we love to debunk those things on this podcast, there's also a lot of areas within podcasting that there just isn't that much advice for at all. And so people tend to default to the most obvious solution or the most obvious way forward, which is not always the best. And the one we want to discuss today is how to convert listeners from listening to the podcast to take the next step with you whether that is buying a product or whether that is booking a sales call with you or anything like that.

2:17And to be clear there's lots of bad advice around certain areas. I personally feel that this one there just isn't that much advice at all on how to do that. Do you pitch straight from the podcast? Do you just ask people to get on a sales call there and then? Do you get them to follow your social media, then DM them? The possibilities are endless. That's so true. The possibilities are endless. And I guess for us, we want to start with the question, well, what is the best way to actually turn a listener into a paying client? What does that process look like? And like you mentioned, the obvious, or maybe the typical path that people would normally take, is that they record a podcast about a specific topic.

3:08And then at the end of that episode, they would give a call to action, or they would have an ad read. Hey guys, if you enjoyed this episode, by the way, you can join my program. Or, hey guys, if you enjoyed this episode, you can join my freebie. Whatever it might be, they give a call to action at the end. And oftentimes, it's pitching a program. It's pitching their offer to their audience. And again, I don't think this is a product of just being the general advice. I don't think there's a load of people telling people to do this. I think there's just not really much advice on how is best to approach this.

3:47And so, of course, the most obvious thing is, well, I'll just pitch on the podcast. I'll just give the call to action directly on the podcast to convert people. They've listened to me for half an hour, an hour. If I mention a sales call here, if I mention my book or whatever, people should just go out and click buy right off the bat. But oftentimes, when we speak to podcasters, and let's say, for example, you're not in a spot where you are pitching straight on the podcast, but you're thinking about it in the future, and you're considering, how do I approach things? This might be a route and a trend of thought that you might follow.

4:30But the thing is, after speaking to literally hundreds of podcasters, audited a bunch of different shows, we started to notice a very clear pattern that a lot of people who are experts and entrepreneurs who are pitching straight on their show, meaning they're trying to get people to book a call or take the next step, They rarely ever get calls consistently. It's inconsistent, that's the thing. So it can work here or there, and you might have had episodes that just randomly get you calls booked on your calendar. But it's not as consistent. You have less control over it. And at the same time, if you're listening to this right now, and you're thinking, well, I've been asking people to get on a call with me, or I've been asking people to sign up for my coaching in the podcast, and you haven't been getting any conversions, then this episode is absolutely for you.

5:28Because we're going to address why we don't think that's effective and what to do instead. To me, if the typical path is record an episode, then pitch at the end to book a call, and that typical path for all intents and purposes makes sense theoretically, why is it then that the majority of people who are following this typical path don't get the results you'd assume they'd get? Like, what are we missing here? And again, if this is you right now, you're not necessarily missing anything. It might just be that you're targeting listeners and really hitting listeners with the call to action at the wrong time.

6:02So why is that? When you say at the wrong time, when else am I going to hit them with a call to action to buy my stuff or join my program? And it's certainly not a case of you're not providing enough value or they don't trust you enough yet. No, nothing like that. Again, if they've listened to your whole episode, you've probably done that great. The issue is really with the state of mind and even the physical state the listeners are oftentimes in when they hear your call to action on the podcast. So firstly, when you say the state of mind, what do you mean by that? Actually, I'm going to do it the other way around.

6:36So let's start with physical. People listen to podcasts when they're driving. People listen to podcasts when they're working out. People listen to podcasts when they're doing the dishes. People listen to podcasts when they are walking the dog. And so when we're doing these things, we're not really in the physical state to stop and take an action. You'd have to really grab someone in their tracks for them to pull over at the side of the road to take your call to action or to stop the treadmill for a moment to go and buy your book. And of course, you might think, well, okay, I've said it. Maybe at the end of their workout, they'll remember to do it.

7:10But we know that doesn't happen. By that point, they've got another call, or they've got a text, or they're already on to the next episode and they've forgotten. And that's not, again, that is no reflection on you or the stickiness of your call to action. It's just the reality of the situation listeners are in. Which is, again, they're actively doing something else. Their attention is divided in terms of their actual physical activity. So they're not able to take action straight away, especially when it's like, book a call, buy my program, buy this product. Now, we see why we say that this can happen sometimes if you have a lot of volume, thousands plus downloads per episode.

7:50Just by sheer volume, you'll have a couple people who might just be sitting there attentively listening to your podcast, but it's unlikely to be the case if you think about how you yourself consume your podcast. Are you sitting there overlooking the beautiful ocean on a sunny day listening to podcasts attentively? Maybe if you're on holiday, but a majority of the time, probably not. And again, to really reaffirm, you've not done anything wrong if this is how you give your call to actions and it's not working. It's just that when we give call to actions like that, just raw on the podcast, we are taking a very small chance that we're catching listeners at the exact right moment in their physical operation for them to take that call to action.

8:33And then to circle back to what the mental side of it is, it follows the physical side. They're just not in tune and ready to buy because they're doing something else. Put simply, and there's also something to be said for the fact that people are not yet used to buying from a podcast. So what is the solution if we're not just going to jump ship to YouTube? Great question. The solution is actually pretty simple, very simple. Instead of trying to pitch to your audience directly from your podcast and getting them to make a massive commitment, it's a big commitment you're asking them to make, we start by getting them to make a micro-commitment for a massive reward.

9:12That sounds like a buzzword to me, micro-commitment. That sounds like the solution to all of my business problems. So what this simply is, it's a fancy way of saying we want to offer your audience a highly valuable lead magnet, also known as a freebie, a valuable resource, an extremely valuable resource that they can actually take for free. In exchange, they'll give you their email. Everyone knows about this. It should be relatively obvious. But a really important part about this is it needs to be honestly a massive value add to their lives. And why this is different to just booking a call is again, when you tell someone to book a call or to purchase a program, the intent, the actual action they have to take is massive.

9:57They have to be highly committed to take this action to maybe hopefully get the reward that they want. And they have to stop what they're doing. Whereas we ask for a micro-commitment from them, for a massive reward. Hey, go here and click on this button and just accept this online course about how to grow a coaching business. For example, small commitment, massive payoff. In their mind, it's a much higher incentive for them to just take that action right there. 100 % of the audience are ready to make that commitment of getting something for free from you right now. Or booking a call? It's still like, it's the idea of doing it while walking on a treadmill.

10:38But again, if you're reinforcing that call to action every time, you're in people's ear all the time. It's counterintuitive because it's harder for people to take an action when they're walking on a treadmill, but they can listen to you all the time, and therefore makes them more likely to take the action with you. That's it. It's really thinking of the percentages. Out of, let's say I've got a thousand listeners. Every single one of these thousand listeners are willing and able to make the commitment of getting a free course for free. They're ready. They're in a state of mind to just be ready to do that.

11:14Whereas with buying, only maybe like 5 % of your audience, probably even less, like 3 % of your audience are ready to buy and take that action right now of actually showing some level of commitment of purchase or intent to buy. So that's the difference. With that being said, the question then becomes, okay, well, some of our listeners might be thinking, well, I already give freebies. I already give away lead magnets and no one's taking action. So I want to just finish off by sharing the mistake that we see people make over and over again when it comes to growing their email list subscribers. So what is that?

11:52Well, there's two main mistakes we see that hurt conversions. And we really see this with clients because there's a big difference between some that are getting way more conversions to their email list with way less downloads than others. One's simple, one's not so simple. Let's go into the slightly more elaborate one right now. The likelihood of someone taking your call to action to gain a lead magnet is increased or reduced depending on what the theme of the episode was and what you've just been talking about. So look, let's say we've done an episode about podcast SEO, the process of ranking higher on Apple and Spotify.

12:29Let's say we've just done a big how-to episode on that, and we round it off by saying, just click the link below and we will give you a free mini audit of your podcast SEO and suggest some areas that you can improve to become more visible on Apple and Spotify. because that is just the icing on the cake to what we've just been talking about. You're very in the zone with that area and that is even more appealing and even more logical as a next step for you. However, if we did the whole episode about SEO and then finished off with a call to action to join our program or to download our free guide to being a guest on more podcasts, it's not the same.

13:07The conversion rates are not going to be the same. You can see that clear as day. So that's one thing And it sounds really obvious, but again, if you're just giving the same call to action, you might not always be thinking about how your episodes really tee up that call to action. So what would the solution for this be? Well, the solution is, if you've been listening, you can probably infer it. You want to make sure there is a connection. You want to connect the topic to the call to action. And it's easier to take your standard, your current lead magnet or your best freebie, and reverse engineer what episode would lead up to that rather than vice versa.

13:46So for us, if we were giving out a personalized mini SEO audit as our call to action, of course we would want to think, okay, well, let's make an episode about podcast SEO. We would want to make sure we make an episode about podcast SEO and probably even a couple of different ones with different angles and test both of them with the same call to action and then see the conversions. And then I said there was another simple fix as well. This is more of a pet peeve. If you're saying, join my newsletter, subscribe to my mailing list, I got news for you. That's not the most appealing value proposition for people.

14:22The thing is, no one wants to just join another newsletter. We've all got so many emails, so many newsletters that don't provide any value to us. And by the way, I'm not saying yours is bad. Yours is likely amazing. But how you're currently, if you are approaching it in that way, think about it from the listener's perspective. You've got a treasure, a golden treasure, and you're wrapping it up by saying, join my newsletter. Keeping in mind, people don't really like having more newsletters to join. So although you think it's valuable, just think about how you're presenting and communicating the value of that.

14:57What are they going to gain from joining that newsletter? So the simple solution is present your lead magnet in the most attractive way by asking yourself, what will my audience gain from joining this? And thinking about the actual transformation they're going to go through, not your deliverables of five weekly emails to keep you motivated. No, think about a specific problem you'll actually solve from doing this. To make this more tangible, for the SEO one, it would be, hey, have complete clarity. If you don't want to get bogged down in SEO technobabble and you want complete clarity around if your podcast is optimized for podcast SEO, our team of experts would go in there, do a mini audit on your show.

15:39You get it back within 24 hours and you know the exact keywords to rank for to have the fastest growth, to break past your slow growth, and to finally become more visible on Apple and Spotify. That's way more attractive than, hey, join my newsletter, join my mailing list. So look, let's summarize. The principle here is when you're pitching directly from your podcast, you are chancing a very small chance that you're hitting the 3 % of people who are really ready to make a big commitment there and then, such as a purchase, especially when they're walking on the treadmill. Now, on the flip side, emails are the thing that allow your brand to remain top of mind for your audience until they're ready to buy.

16:20So it's much more effective to capture people's emails and then always be able to hit their inbox whenever you like and always target them until they're in that state of mind, rather than trying to catch them in the right moment on the podcast. And the way we view our podcast is not that it's the leading thing of generating sales for us. However, it has done that. But really, it serves the larger purpose of capturing people into our ecosystem. And I would encourage you to look at it the same way. We do these episodes for one very simple reason, to give you the clarity that you need to understand why your podcast isn't growing or monetizing as fast as you'd like, and then giving you very simple, very clear, and very direct actions you can start taking today for faster growth and podcast monetization.

17:06So with that being said, we'll catch you in the next episode. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. At the start of this episode, I said I'd tell you a little bit about me. So I'm about to share a secret with you. One that might mean you hate me. Completely quit listening to this podcast and think I'm a total scam. However, I want to be transparent. Are you ready? Well, my name is Tony. No, of course that's not the secret. The secret is that I'm actually a robot. My creators are Tighe and Anthony, hence my name, Tony. The sick bastards. Anyway, they are the founders of GetMoreListeners.com.

17:52In the last five years, they've coached and interviewed over 400 podcasters and generated multiple six figures from their own show. They gave me access to everything they know, and I'm here to share it with you. So while I don't understand why you humans are so obsessed with coffee, I do understand how to grow a podcast that actually brings you new clients regularly. So here's my offer to you. If you want to finally understand why your podcast isn't growing and get a personalized roadmap to fix it, in less than 30 seconds, you can go to getmorelisteners.com slash onlinecoachaudit. Enter your show name and we'll send you back a free mini podcast audit.

18:32It's completely customized to you and your show. That's getmorelisteners.com slash onlinecoachaudit. The link is also in the show notes of this episode.