756: 6 Perks I Wish I Knew About Podcasting 8 Years Ago

0:01Okay, I have been on this ruthless pursuit to purge any clothes that I'm not actually wearing. Like if I haven't reached for it in months, it's got to go. I am trying to be really intentional about what I bring into my closet right now, which means I am only buying pieces that I know I will actually wear and use. Revolve just gets it though. I'm literally wearing my brown Autry sneakers from there right now and my new suede purse. It fits my laptop in it. So it's basically a fancy shoulder bag that works for everything. I love finding pieces like that. Things that look good, but also work hard for my actual life.

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1:15So happy shopping. And so I just like love the creativity that podcasting offers that really can get you thinking through different ways of how you can move the needle with a podcast. And let me tell you there are so many different ways we do this. Hey, my name is Jenna Kutcher and I am obsessed with all things business, marketing numbers, and helping you to navigate both the messy and the magical seasons of this thing called life. I'm a small town mama who took a$300 camera, grew a successful photo biz, and now I work from home and run a seven figure online business. I teach you the tried and true secrets to building a career you adore.

1:55Shy away from the real talk? No way. Money, hardship, growth, loss, and marketing are all topics we discuss here. Think of this as your one-stop shop for happy hour with a gal pal mixed with business school. Pull up a seat, make sure you're cozy, and get ready to be challenged and encouraged while you learn. This is the Gold Digger Podcast. No one told me to expect these things when I started podcasting. Now, over the last seven and a half years, I have stepped up to the mic every single week to talk about things like business, marriage, motherhood, health, evolution, brand, basically all the things.

2:31And honestly, podcasting has been one of the most fulfilling ways that I have been able to share my story, connect with you and make a bigger impact. Today, what I'm going to do is walk you through six unexpected perks of podcasting that most podcasters aren't talking about. Sure, we all know that podcasts provide credibility for your brand and they can open up new monetization opportunities and build your community in a whole new way. But these six perks, I want to go deeper on because to me, they are different. They might surprise you. And I bet by the end of this episode, you're going to be asking yourself, should I start my own podcast?

3:06And the answer is yes, by the way. If you're already considering starting your own podcast or you're curious what steps you would need to take in order to get your own show launched, I have something for you. Grab a seat in my free training. It's called Podcasting 101, three easy steps to launch your own show at freepodcastclass.com. That's freepodcastclass.com. Inside of this masterclass, you're going to learn how to start, record, monetize, launch, and market your own podcast in just three easy steps. It is way easier than you're thinking it's going to be. And I will show you how in my free podcast class, which you can sign up for at freepodcastclass.com.

3:45Let's dive on into the unexpected perks of podcasting. Ooh, growing pains hurt. And when you're a marketer trying to generate leads for your brand new business, you know the pain all too well. Thankfully, there's HubSpot for Startups, a special program that gives startups discounts on HubSpot and so much more. But first, let's talk about the platform. The platform that unites your entire front office from marketing to sales to support. The platform that streamlines your support tickets, generates more leads, and increases sales. The platform that scales right along with you. Oh, and don't even get me started on the educational articles, industry reports, videos, tips, templates, literally everything founders need to help scale.

4:31HubSpot for startups has it all. So get ready to build a brand everyone loves and make your startup growing pains a thing of the past. Visit hubspot.com slash startups to see how much you can save. That's hubspot.com slash startups. You want to know something kind of crazy about podcasting? Having your own podcast gives you an excuse to reach out to people that you admire, that you would love to be friends with, that you would love to learn from with an opportunity. Let me explain. There have been so many times in my career, which has been over a decade, where I have reached out to people who I would love to learn from.

5:14I mean, chances are, if you've ever done anything great in your life, there's always been someone who has wanted to learn from you. Or maybe you've gotten the line, can I pick your brain about this? Or maybe you've asked somebody that. The truth is a podcast gives you this amazing excuse, if we want to call it that, to reach out to people that you want to connect with and give them something, give them an opportunity. Most people don't realize that even if you had a teeny tiny podcast, reaching out to someone and saying, you have something valuable to share. I would love to host you on my show.

5:50let me make you the star of my show, that would be a very exciting opportunity for a lot of people. When I think of the fact that my podcast has afforded me the opportunity to interview hundreds of successful, diverse, incredible, brilliant women over the years, oh my gosh, I would have never had access to these people without my show. And what's even better about that is when you get them on your podcast, you can ask them basically anything you want. Now it's so funny because whenever we go to dinner or whenever I am with a group of people, they just prepare themselves because I'm going to ask a million questions.

6:37We used to die when we were kids because anytime we would bring friends home, my mom, we would be like, Hey guys, just heads up. My mom's going to ask you like 21 questions. She's going to want to know like your grandparents' names, where your parents work, how many siblings you have, what your birth order is. Like we would always just tease. And it's so funny because I am 1000 % my mother. I love that she was curious and I love that she asked questions. And to be honest, so many of my friends adopted my mom as their own mom, I think because she cared and asked questions. But there is something so powerful about getting the opportunity to interview people that you admire, that you want to learn from, that you want to learn more about.

7:17And think about, just think for a minute, because I think there's people listening right now who have dreamt about having a podcast, but they're like, what do I have to offer? Like, I don't know. If you wanted to get in touch with people and connect with people, having a podcast is the best way to say to somebody, I admire you. I want to give you a stage. I want to sit down for a conversation. I want to center you, your expertise and your experiences. And I would love to do that on my podcast. It is such an incredible, incredible aspect of podcasting that doesn't get spoken about often enough.

7:53I will never forget the day that I was sitting in this very chair and I got to interview Matthew McConaughey and my phone went off and I had it on do not disturb. And after my interview with Matthew McConaughey, I pick up my phone. I saw my dad had called and I called my dad back and I was like, Hey, sorry. He's like, what were you up to? I'm like interviewing Matthew McConaughey. Like that would not have happened without having a podcast. And so if you are someone who wants to build out your network, who wants to get in touch with people who you want to learn from, who loves to ask questions and be curious, a podcast would be an amazing way to expand your platform.

8:30No other platform that I can think of than podcasting gives you that ability to center someone on your stage. It's such a beautiful honor and privilege for people. And the fact that you get to reach out with something to offer instead of something to take makes the whole transaction and relationship different. I have to admit, I was the worst interviewer of all times. The worst. If you have listened since episode number two, you would know. And over the years, I like have just tried so hard to become a better interviewer. I think I get better every single year, but don't let the fear that you're not going to know what to say or what questions to ask hold you back.

9:17You are going to get better and better with time. I will be a testimony to that fact. And you can already start thinking about who would you like to have conversations with? Here's a really quick pro tip about podcasting is if you can get one name that people would recognize or one person that people respect on your podcast, you can leverage that until the end of time to get more people. I can't tell you the amount of pitches that I'll get where they will list out my friends as former guests. And I'm like, oh, well, if so-and-so thought this was valuable, then it must be valuable. And so if you can use your magic, which is you, to get someone that has a more recognizable name on your show.

10:04It's only going to build out the roster of people that you have access to. I just think it's so cool that we live in an era where we can sit in our home. For me, for many of the years, it was in my closet, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And you get to interview people you admire. I mean, how stinking cool. Podcasting is amazing. Okay. The second thing that podcasting allows you to do, it is a perk is that you get to do something that I call gentle selling. You get to raise awareness about what you sell without feeling like you are a spammy sleazy marketer. There are so many different ways you can leverage your podcast to speak about your offers without overtly shouting from the rooftops, buy from here.

10:52This is what I need you to buy. What I think is so cool about podcasting is that it gives you so many opportunities to have conversations, to do interviews, to create content around what it is that you're selling without feeling like you are doing this hard selling that so many of us are turned off by or straight up refuse to do. If you are someone who does not like to be loud or someone who doesn't like selling, which by the way, every time I'm in a room with a ton of women, I will ask people like, who loves selling? And like maybe two people's hands go up. Most women have a very visceral response to this idea of selling.

11:32I think we've all had bad encounters of people trying to sell us stuff that we don't want or need. I think we all have some sort of guilt or mindset block. And when I say all, I shouldn't generalize. I think most of us, I'll speak for myself, have some sort of money mindset that we need to tweak. And so selling to us is freaking scary, but so many men aren't afraid to sell. And a lot of people I know can say selling is a service. So how do we shift this and how does podcasting come in here? So think about it. Let's just talk, for example, about this episode right here. I am talking about the power of podcasting.

12:10You do not have to do anything, but just listen to this episode and you are going to get value out of it. But if you want more information, I have an entire your masterclass that talks about podcasting, that teaches you more on this topic at freepodcastclass.com. Now, if you sign up for that webinar, you'll also learn about my paid program, the Podcast Lab, which is an amazing course that will teach you everything you need to know to get your show off the ground. But this podcast episode, it doesn't really feel like a sales pitch because I'm just straight up serving and giving you that information.

12:41The sales portion of it is just through an invitation that you can RSVP yes or no to. It doesn't feel icky to me. It feels like giving people that are ready for the next step, the next step. And for the people who aren't, you get to enjoy the show and go on with your day. What a beautiful thing. And so with a podcast, you can create content specifically about your offer. You can create content around your offer like this. You can even covertly create content talking about something that maybe is relevant with your offer, but looping your offer in. I was in a mastermind this last year and one of the girls, I'll never forget this because I just thought this was so powerful.

13:17She was like, in every single podcast episode, I just make an effort to reference one product that I have, one offer that I have. I'm not selling it. I'm not even talking about it. I could just say like, this week we noticed a spike in sales in my podcast lab program. And she just says, by raising awareness and reminding people that these offers exist, it has shifted my business. And I was like, that is so brilliant because I think most of us are sick of selling or afraid of selling. And so having a podcast allows you to get people results for free, to create amazing, valuable content, and to extend invitations for the people that are ready for the next step in which your offer will solve.

13:59And so I just love that there's this way to gently sell through raising awareness. Your podcast is this awareness channel. And I think that when you start to recognize and get to be strategic about how you remind people what it is that you do, who you serve and how you show up in the world, that will just keep you front of mind for them. And we've all heard those different statistics of like, it takes someone eight exposures to make a purchasing decision or things like that. With a podcast, you are consistently showing up and offering value and building that relationship, that know, like, and trust factor so that when the time comes that someone is ready for what it is that you have to offer, you are the person that comes to mind.

14:41You have already shown that you are responsible, that you are smart, that you are strategic, that you are valuable. And you've reminded them over and over again, Hey, when you're ready, this is here for you. And I just, I love that approach. It feels so much better to me. Every single thing that I teach, whether it's Instagram or email marketing is like serve, serve, serve, serve, serve, and then sell. And so podcasting for me allows me to do that. And I just, I couldn't shout it from the rooftops louder or maybe even quieter in this because we're talking about just raising gentle awareness. Look, I've become kind of a systems nerd and anything that gives me more space in my day, I'm all in.

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17:21Go to shopify.com slash gold digger. shopify.com slash gold digger. Okay. So number three is talking about monetizing, because I think a lot of people think that in order to monetize a podcast, you have to have a massive audience. You have to have an ad agency. You have to do all these different things. You can be so savvy and strategic with your podcast that there are so many different ways that you can monetize it and or get valuable insight and data to help you with your own internal offers. So you can get sponsors, you can create brand partnerships, you can partner with guests that you have on your show that have an offer that would be aligned with your audience.

18:03You can drive affiliate income, you can drive sponsored income. There are so many different ways. So I've shared this on the podcast before, but one of the first ways that I helped move the needle in my life from my podcast before I was able to land big sponsors or make a big monetary impact was that Drew and I used to argue, it's still actually quite like a frequent argument in our life, in our marriage is like, what are we going to eat? Like we both have this deep desire to be people that have like a calendar that has like all the meals that we could prep and like all the food that's ready for us.

18:37We are just not those people. And so years and years and years ago, back when we lived in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, we signed up for HelloFresh and they have this great partner program. It was literally like I was a regular customer. It was like, if you share and somebody signs up, you get like$40 off your next box. And it was just like this recurring ongoing thing. And so I created a very simple landing page. It was like jennacutcher.com slash HelloFresh. And all I did was just put a button on the page that linked to my affiliate code. And so many of my listeners, because it was such a great solution.

19:10I'm like, if you're a busy entrepreneur and you hate preparing meals, just like we do, HelloFresh has been the best solution for us. And then I told people where to go. And we ended up getting our groceries for free, no joke, for over a year. We didn't pay for meals. That was like saving like$100 a week, if not more in grocery bills, just through leveraging a regular affiliate program. This was not skeezy. This was not me using any notoriety to partner with the brand. This was literally just using the link that they gave me because I was a paying customer. So you can get really savvy and build different channels that can impact your life, that can change your relationships.

19:52And if in the future you want to have bigger sponsors, I could have gone to Hello Fresh and been like, Hey, look, I have sent 300 people your way. Would you want to do something at a larger capacity? I didn't even do that. That to me, getting free groceries was valuable enough at that stage of our life. But it's a really cool thing. Another thing that you can do is that if you are having guests that are coming on their show and they're talking about their products or their services, you could ask them, do you have a partner program? Or do you have a specific offer that you could give to my audience that we could track to see the results?

20:24Even if you're not getting monetary gain, you can start to see trends of what your audience is actually taking action on, what they're curious about, what they're interested in. It can be a really powerful way to get information for you to know what you should create next or what your audience is actually hungry for. And so think through different ways, whether it's using refer friend links, whether it is reaching out to brands that you know and love that you've been a customer of and seeing if there's opportunities to partner, whether you're reaching out to friends or peers in your industry and saying, come on my show, let's do like a little profit share or an affiliate deal.

21:00Thinking through all those different ways, you can monetize your podcast and or get very valuable insight and data that you could get nowhere else that will help guide your decisions and make a real result when it comes to monetization. And so I just like love the creativity that podcasting offers that really can get you thinking through different ways of how you can move the needle with a podcast. And let me tell you, there are so many different ways we do this. Okay. This one is probably my favorite. And as a content creator and someone who speaks with a lot of content creators and knows the struggle, podcasting is absolutely going to help you dominate content creation.

21:45Let me break this down. When you record a podcast, you can get so many things done in one foul swoop. I don't even know what a foul swoop is, but you can do it. Think through this with me right now. We take one podcast episode. You could take that podcast episode. You could turn it into a YouTube video. You could splice and dice it for social media content. You could create show notes on your blog as like a show description. You can take email content from it. I mean, there are so many different ways you can leverage one podcast episode to become a very valuable piece of content all the way across your brand.

22:27So many of us are on this hamster wheel of creating content, posting it, moving on to the next. It's like just create, publish, repeat, create, publish, repeat. We're not actually asking ourselves, how can we promote this one piece of content in a bunch of different ways and get as much lifespan out of it? Like how can we try to trick these algorithms who tell us like our content is only relevant for three to five hours and say, I want to get at least at least a week's worth of content out of this one piece. And so when you think about podcasting, you are taking care of so many different assets just in how you're creating it that you can spice and dice it in a million different ways.

23:07One thing that I love to teach is like, how can you take one piece of content and promote it 10 different ways? I teach how to do this on Pinterest. I teach how to do this just in content creation in the process of it. And so for example, let me break down this episode for you. So I ideated this episode and then I created a really great outline. And as I was creating the outline, I was being strategic and thinking through, okay, if I were going to do, let's say like a five paragraph essay for my blog, what would I need? I would need an intro, the main meat of the content, and then an outro. And so in this case, we have the intro, we have the six perks of podcasting.

23:43Then we have the outro. When I created my outline, I was already thinking about my blog. I was also thinking about social media posts. Okay. What would be kind of the hook? What would people be curious about? When we take this one podcast episode, it's going to go up on YouTube. It's going to stream on LinkedIn. It's going to be spliced and diced into multiple reels. It's going to go onto Pinterest. It's going to be a part of an email promotion. It's going to be in Instagram stories and Instagram posts and Instagram reels. It's going to be everywhere. And so if you are someone who has been struggling with content creation, having a podcast can allow you to think just slightly more strategically and get way more content out of one piece.

24:25So you could spend one hour or less recording a podcast episode and have enough content to use for the next week or even beyond. And I just think it's really powerful because so many of us are really thinking through this content thing in a way of like, okay, it's just going to live and die. It's going to live and die. Oh my gosh, I got to get on and post. Oh, I said something yesterday. It didn't land. What am I going to say today? What do I even have to post? Do I even look good enough? Do I have any pictures? And so it's just like, it can take a lot of the guesswork out of the content piece that so many of us are struggling with.

24:57And again, allow us to send people to something that is more long form, which we'll talk about and the power of having that long form content that builds up this library. So let's talk about the next one. Building out a content library. Every single day, I get hundreds of DMs of people asking specific questions that have to do with business. And the coolest thing about that is that we probably have a podcast episode that covers that question. I've done hundreds of episodes at this point. There's probably not many topics that I haven't covered yet. So when you have a podcast, you get to build out an entire content library strategically and a library that will help answer people's biggest questions before they can ask them.

25:45You get to tell the full story. You get to document your journey. You get to set yourself up as an authority while building this out. And you get to have this ability to share more about you and why you do what you do. Because let's be honest, there are probably 20 other people in a 50 mile radius that could do what you do or that do what you do. When I think back to when I was a wedding photographer, I was a very small fish in a very large pond. When you create content like this, that serves people that answers those questions, it is helping differentiate you from the others, but it's also giving you this ability to showcase the things that make you, you.