69. How to Make $150K/Month by Starting a Podcast

0:00Patience, drive, discipline. You've got to have passion for what you're talking about. You've got to be willing to do the due diligence, to do the research, to put yourself in your listener. and avatar shoes. You've got to be engaging and you've got to be unique. Hello and welcome to another episode of the UpFlip podcast. I'm your host, Alex Freeman. Today, we're looking at Entrepreneurs on Fire, one of the world's most popular business podcasts. They've released nearly 4 ,000 episodes since launching in 2012, including interviews with thought leaders like Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Barbara Corcoran.

0:36Kate Erickson is a huge part of that success. She joined Fire Nation shortly after their launch to create systems and products and hosts Kate's Take, taking listeners behind the scenes of seven-figure businesses. I'm excited to hear her insights into how to start and grow a profitable podcasting business, and I hope you are too. Let's talk to her. Kate, how you doing? I'm doing awesome, Alex. How are you? I'm doing great. It's a great day. To kind of get us started, can you talk about when you joined the EO Fire team and kind of the inspiration behind creating the podcast in general? Yeah, absolutely.

1:10So my now husband, my then boyfriend, John, had the idea to start Entrepreneurs on Fire because he was sick of driving in the car and having to listen to the radio. And there are a couple of podcasts producing weekly shows around entrepreneurship. And he was really intrigued by these interviews, super inspired. And so he thought, why isn't anyone doing this daily? I'm in the car every single day. I want more of this content. So he decided to be the change that he wanted to see. He went ahead and launched that podcast. And within about six months, I was working a corporate job at the time. He said, Kate, this thing's kind of taken off.

1:43Like, what do you think about quitting your job and joining me? And that was kind of the inspiration for me to jump ship and join the team. Wow. I mean, that's just an incredible leap to take. What is it that has made EO Fire so successful? Like, what's the secret sauce that you all are doing different from other podcasts? I wish there was an easy answer to that. But as you know, and I'm sure all the listeners know, there is no one silver bullet or golden ticket or any of that stuff. But with entrepreneurs on fire, you know, I think there is a lot of things working at the same time that combine to create the success that we have today.

2:20I think one of those things was timing. When John got into the podcasting game, it was not what it is today. I think that his podcast was very unique. Back then, there was no other daily podcast interviewing entrepreneurs. And he's a really hard worker. When he puts his mind to something, he's focused, he's driven, he's disciplined, he holds himself accountable. And that's really tough to do because there are distractions everywhere. So I think that those are some of the things at play that pull people off course from getting to where they want to be with their business. And John had the perfect formula going.

2:56You did mention that podcasting being a different animal then than it is now, but I'm curious if we can kind of put some markers in the ground on this timeline. How long did it take to get to the first 100 subscribers and then the first 1000 subscribers? So the first 100 subscribers was probably like within a month, I would say, and the first 1000 very quickly thereafter, it was very much kind of a little hockey stick, if you will. The first few downloads were, of course, me, his mom, his other family members. But word caught on really fast. You know, he was interviewing some really big names in the entrepreneurial space.

3:31He had set himself up for success, building relationships, hiring a mentor, becoming a part of a mastermind. And this support system that he had around him sharing the podcast to their existing audiences really helped us take off quite quickly there in the beginning. Now, obviously, it's one thing to have subscriber growth going through the roof. But if the podcast is going to be a business, then obviously revenue needs to start to come into play. So can you talk about how in the early days EO Fire started to convert some of those listeners and subscribers into revenue and what might be the most effective way to do that now?

4:03Yeah. So what we always started out with, product services, offers from the very beginning, and what we still do today is we listen to what our audience is telling us that they want. We don't guess. We don't create something out of thin air. We don't say, oh, I think this is a good idea. I'm going to create it. We listen to our listeners and then we create what a lot of people are asking us for. And some of John's very first revenue was listeners reaching out to him and saying, do you mentor people? You know a lot of stuff. You are obviously, you know, getting pretty seasoned in the podcasting space.

4:38And I'm looking for a mentor. Like, will you coach me? And that was actually the first revenue that John generated is people reaching out and asking if he would coach them. That's really interesting because I think that most people hear podcasts, oh, it's sponsorships, that's the revenue stream. Can you break down the different revenue streams that now make up EO Fire? Yeah. So we have four main revenue streams right now. That would be sponsorships, affiliate revenue, our physical products, which are journals and books. And then we have our online courses. So that is Podcasters Paradise, our flagship product, where we teach people how to create, grow and monetize their own podcasts.

5:14And over the years, we've had multiple other online courses. But actually today, that is the only online course that we have running. We at one time had a course on webinars. We have a lot of free funnels that go into our affiliate offers. So those would be the four main revenue streams right now. And how does that break down in the makeup of the monthly revenue? Is it like a clean 25 % in each category? No. Where's the big one? Where's the smaller one? Sponsorships is the big one for sure. our physical products is the smallest one. Makes a lot of sense, right? You can scale sponsorships really easily when you have a lot of listeners.

5:51And physical products always come with storage and fees and advertising and all that other stuff. Not any of the things that people usually think about when they're thinking about selling physical products. It sounds really fun to put your logo on something and have someone buy it, but the profit margins are not great. I'm sure some people have cracked the code on this. It's just never been like a super hardcore focus of ours. We wanted to get our journals into the hands of people to help make an impact. And we've been able to do that. So we call it a success, right? But it is our lowest income generator.

6:23Percentage wise, I'd say sponsorships are probably about 80%. And then courses and affiliates are maybe 13 each. And then the rest is the journals. Looking back, what do you think is the one thing that was the most impactful in helping EO Fire grow? And why do you think that made such a big difference? Relationships. I really think that the relationships that John built starting before he ever even launched the podcast, like he invested real time, real energy, real feelings into creating great relationships with great people. And that support network, whether it was people he was in a mastermind with, whether it was mentors or people that he had hired and paid money, that support system and all the guests who have been on the podcast.

7:09I mean, we owe huge credit to our guests who come on the podcast because especially in the early days, as I mentioned before, them sharing out the podcast was a huge reason why our listenership grew as fast as it did. Now, I guess the flip side of talking about all the great growth is what's been the lowest point for EO Fire so far and how did you get back from it, whatever that point was? I definitely remember a moment in time when John and I were sitting in my office. I was sitting exactly where I'm sitting right now recording this interview with you. John was sitting on a little couch that I have in my office facing me and we looked at each other and we're kind of going through what we were running at the time, what products and services we were offering, what our team looked like.

7:53We had a core team of six virtual team members and then probably like three to four contractors who were all on retainer. And we just looked at each other and said, this is not the business that we want to run. We got excited. We got inspired. John has a lot of great ideas. I love implementing ideas. And you know, it's easy to get carried away when you're on a roll and you want to make a bigger impact and you want to grow and you want to do bigger and better things. But you always have to be checking in with yourself because if you get down the road far enough to where you're running a business that you don't love, then what are you doing it for?

8:31A quick reminder to our listeners that if you're enjoying this episode, make sure you let us know about it by reviewing on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this podcast. Kate, creating a podcast is a lot of work and all of the content accoutrements that go alongside a podcast as well. It's not just sit down and do the interview. How do you maintain your momentum as a content creator and keep yourself from burning out? A lot of it's the systems that we have set up in place. Both John and I are big, huge fans of batching the work that we do. In batching the work that we do, we're never constantly churning, churning, churning, churning.

9:08It's more like sprints. So when I say batching, it's taking content and doing multiple of those in one session versus spreading it out, say, over across a week or a couple of weeks or a month. Today, John is in his office right next to mine recording seven back-to-back interviews. That means that he does not need to record another interview until next week. And so everything that we have set up in the business, especially our content creation, blog content, email content, any of that content, that's all created in batches. So there's never like this constant feeling of you never get a break, right?

9:43And I love that setup for working. I think it's the most productive way for work to happen. So sort of the next series of questions I have for you is a little bit of the how-to section. So if you want to just kind of like think towards a listener who's considering getting into the podcasting game and what advice you may offer them, that's probably the best way to approach these. So the first one being like, how do you grow an audience quickly? How do you build that up? And what are maybe some benchmarks of episode downloads that somebody should be looking at to know whether or not it's working?

10:09So in terms of benchmark, Libsyn puts out stats on a regular basis. That's a podcast media host that we use. And around 125 downloads per episode is a normal median, what you can expect from most podcasts. So if you're above that, then you're doing great. How do you grow a podcast audience quickly? You don't. Again, I feel like we were in a very unique position at the time. We were able to grow an audience quickly and there's always going to be anomalies like that. For the 99 % of other podcasters, this does not happen overnight. Podcasting is a long game. And I really think that where your focus has to be to grow an audience is you have to know exactly who your audience is and you have to have a very clear niche.

10:55And those are two things that 99 % of podcasters are not doing before they launch their podcast because they're so excited about growing. They're so excited about monetizing, but they're skipping the foundation. That's a great point. And I kind of want to stick with that topic for just a second. If someone is maybe unsure about what their specific podcast that they want to host is or produce, how can they go about choosing that niche and focus for the show? Yeah, definitely. So we have an exercise that we like to call your zone of fire. But also, I'm sure most people know it as like your zone of genius exercise.

11:30And this is just taking time, taking out a sheet of paper, drawing a line down the middle. On the left, you have your expertise. On the right, you have your passion. and you spend five minutes on each side, writing out everything that you have experience doing and then everything that you are passionate about. And at the end of those five minutes on each side, just keep writing. Even if you run out of things to write about, keep thinking about it until your timer goes off because oftentimes that's when we actually find the things that we have experience doing and that we're passionate about. And then you're gonna set a timer and you're gonna figure out where there's overlap.

12:04Where do your experiences and your expertise and your passion meet. And when I say experiences and expertise, I'm not talking you went to college for it or you've studied 10 ,000 hours of it. Like for me, one of my expertises is I'm a super organized person. And that might not be something that comes to mind to me like immediately. But when I think about if my friends come to me and ask me something, if somebody asked me for advice, if I were to ask my family what they think that I'm really good at or what some of my skills are, that's kind of the expertise that I'm talking about here. That overlap is your zone of fire, and that would be a really awesome place to start.

12:41So outside of not niching down and all of that, what is one mistake that you see other podcasters make that hinders their growth? Being like over obsessive about it. I mean, just living in their stats and only focusing on their numbers. You have to understand that if you have an episode with 100 downloads, that means that you just stood in front of 100 people and they listen to you, that's pretty huge, right? Not many of us stand in front of 100 people and get to share a message. So I really think that the biggest mistake people make is they get too caught up in the numbers. They get too caught up in what it's supposed to look like or what it has to look like or it's not going the way that I want it.

13:19And I think that benchmarks are really important. I think that stats are really important, but I don't think that it's something that you should beat yourself up over. It's all about iteration. If you're not seeing the numbers that you like or that you want, then you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out why. And then one more kind of in this same vein about popular podcast niches. Like, are there any that are oversaturated that new podcasters should like definitely avoid? Or is it really if you've got the expertise, you should give it a shot? I say if you have the expertise, you should give it a shot.

13:49There certainly are podcast categories that are more heavily podcasted about. Religion, comedy, business is a big one. But you know what? I don't think that that should stop people from starting a podcast on a topic that they are super passionate about, that they have experience with, and that they have gone out, found an avatar, they know a niche, and they know that there's people out there that need this. You just need to be unique. It's okay if there's other podcasts already doing this. How are you going to make yourself different? I love that. Let's talk about the EO Fire podcast network. So there's several channels within the network.

14:24Can you briefly talk about what each focus is on and the value of separating them out into different channels as opposed to having them all in one feed? Yeah, definitely. So Entrepreneurs on Fire is the flagship. I started a podcast called Kate's Take in 2014, a couple years after that, because again, going back to listening to our listeners, a lot of people were asking about what was going on behind the scenes of this business. Like, how are you doing this? What do your systems look like? How do you create those systems? What does it look like to manage a community? How are you launching these products?

14:55How do I set up a funnel? So many questions that are all the things that I do in the business. So I thought, Hey, why don't I start a podcast? And I'll start teaching people exactly what I'm doing. I'll talk about the systems that we create. I'll talk about those marketing funnels and the products and all of that. So that was the inspiration to start Kate's Take. It was also just a really big exercise for me personally and putting myself out there. I'm very much like a behind the scenes person, and I'm not an extrovert. And I knew that it would be a great challenge for me to start that podcast.

15:26We also have quotes on fire, which is John Daly sharing a quote and just kind of providing a little inspiration there. Those are kind of more the niche ones and the daily fire where it was just kind of a way to give people a really super quick bit of inspiration for their day. And again, that was just something that people always ask about, like, you should do a quote show, you should do an inspiration show. And so we gave it a try. We wanted to see what would happen. And those shows also get good study downloads. So we continue doing them. Can you talk about what you think are the main skills that you need to run a profitable podcast?

16:03I'll say empire, empire. Empire, that's a biggie. Patience, drive, discipline. You've got to have passion for what you're talking about. You've got to be willing to do the due diligence, to do the research, to put yourself in your listener and avatar shoes. You've got to be engaging and you've got to be unique. I love all of that. That's all really, really strong advice and developable skills, not necessarily a talent you're born with necessarily, but you can develop all of those skills, which is great. Can you talk about choosing the right platform for your podcast in terms of like a hosting platform?

16:38Like what does EO Fire use and what should somebody be looking for when they're making that decision? We use Libsyn. And the reason that we use Libsyn and we love Libsyn is they are fully focused on podcasters. They don't have a music platform. They don't host a bunch of different types of files. They don't offer everything to everyone. And a lot of podcast hosting platforms out there do offer not everything, but a lot to a lot of different people. So we've always loved the focus that Libsyn has in the podcasting space. They always have their finger on the pulse. They put out a great podcast called The Feed, where they talk about podcasting news.

17:15So they're very much into educating the podcasting space, keeping podcasters informed. Their support is awesome. Support is a biggie. I mean, a lot of people ask, why shouldn't I just go on a free hosting platform? And my answer to that is you get what you pay for. And so I've always believed that Lipson has incredibly reasonable hosting plans starting at like$5 a month, depending on how often you're podcasting and how big your files are, the cost goes up from there. But I've always been of the opinion that it's well worth it to invest. I mean, even if it's 15 bucks, that's like skipping lunch one day, you know, eat lunch at home instead of going out for lunch.

17:52It's not that big of an investment if you're really serious about podcasting. What about your equipment setup? What is your equipment setup? What does it look like to record and edit episodes? And what maybe would you recommend someone who doesn't yet have the gear? What should they go out looking for? Alex, I'm so super simple when it comes to podcasting. Like I want to be able to take my podcasting stuff with me anywhere. I don't usually do that. I like recording in my office. I don't like podcasting while I travel, but I want to have that freedom. So I literally have a MacBook Pro laptop. I have an ATR 2100 USB plugged into my laptop.

18:26And when I'm recording my own episodes, I'm doing that into Adobe Audition, which is my favorite recording and editing platform. This is a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. So if you have that subscription, then Adobe Edition is included. If not, you can either get the Creative Cloud or you can just do a subscription to Adobe Edition. There are also great free options out there. There's GarageBand for Mac users. There's Audacity for PC. So I'm not saying that Adobe Edition is the only option. It's certainly not, but that's what I use and love. You know, you mentioned the Adobe Creative Cloud and maybe that slides into these tools as well.

19:00On the promotion and marketing side, what tools and software do you recommend for podcasters to be taking advantage of? There are some really cool things coming out with AI and just the influx of interest in all these different platforms. One that I'm really impressed with right now and that I've got my eye on, we haven't fully integrated into our own systems yet, but it's called Capshow. Have you heard of this? Yeah, that name sounds really familiar, but I also have not dabbled into it yet. Okay. Yeah. So it's C-A-P-S-H-O. Had the pleasure of meeting the founders at Podfest this year in Florida.

19:34And I just think they're doing some really awesome things. So CapShow is a really cool tool. We use also repurpose.io. Hanni Mora created this tool. It's a great audiogram tool that will put your podcast on YouTube and on social media channels. So we use a few tools like that Hootsuite to schedule out social media posts. And then we're big, big fans of Boomerang for Gmail, which is a tool that helps you schedule out emails. So when we're talking like guest reminders and any of those automated emails that go along with scheduling an interview and following up on that, which you guys do a great job of on your podcast.

20:12All those email notifications can be systematized and scheduled so that you don't have to worry about, you know, being there, clicking a button. So this is going to bring us to a section of the show that we call our Fan Blitz questions. These questions come from our YouTube community. You can go to youtube.com slash upflip, join the community and pose questions to future podcast guests. So Kate, We got about eight questions. We're going to try and do a 90 seconds. Ooh, all right. Are you ready? Yes. All right. When you were first starting the business, were you afraid of the competition? No. Great answer.

20:45If you could go back in time and tell your younger self, don't do this thing, what would it be? Be afraid to start. How would you feel about working for someone who knows less than you? I don't think I'd feel super great about that, to be honest. What was that deciding moment in your previous job, which made you say, yep, never doing this again? I was offered a promotion and then it was taken away from me. Ooh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If you could sell your product or service to one celebrity, who would it be? Oprah. Ooh, great choice. If there was a movie made about your journey, what would the title be?

21:21Just Start. Can you tell us about your most bizarre business encounter? I've had so many of them daily. I get emails that I just can't believe that they're actually being sent. So I've got lots of them. Last one here. What or who would you like to have as a mascot for the EO Fire brand? Oh, it's got to be a flame, a walking flame. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It has to be a flame. All right. That is it for the fan blitz questions. Kate, we've been doing the show for a while now. You did the absolute best in recognizing the blitz portion of those questions. So really well done on that. Well done.

21:58I follow instruction well. You win fan blitz questions. You did it. A few more questions from me, and you can take a little more than three seconds to answer these. Okay. Can you talk us through the lead funnel and how you go about building an effective lead funnel and how you increase conversions in that lead funnel? Yes. So we've identified our podcast as the top of our funnel, meaning that everyone who's coming into our business is very likely encountering us for the first time because they've listened to the podcast. So that's, of course, been among many iterations and testing and researching and looking at stats and website visitors and all this good stuff.

22:38So the fact that we identified that as the top of our funnel means that every call to action that we want to lead into one of our funnels is being audibly said by John on the podcast. So if we know that people are reaching us most likely for the first time through the podcast, then our calls to action are going to lead them into either a free course onto our weekly email list, or if we're running a promotion or a deal or something like that, probably to a phone call with John. And we've enhanced that and iterated on that by testing different calls to action, by testing different offers. Again, all the free courses that I mentioned, those have all been requested by our audience in bulk.

23:23And so as one example, one of our greatest converting funnels is to our Podcasters Paradise course. So if you listen to Entrepreneurs on Fire, you've probably heard John talk about freepodcastcourse.com before. That is a free course that will teach you how to create and launch your podcast. And at the end of that free course, we invite you to a masterclass, also free, where John talks for one hour about the perfect launch plan, how to grow your podcast, and how to monetize your podcast. And at the end of that masterclass, we're going to invite you to join Podcasters Paradise. So that's kind of like a very abbreviated look at what one of our funnels looks like.