Hala Taha: How I Grow New Podcasts From 0 to 100K Downloads Per Month | So Money

0:00Today's episode is sponsored in part by Shopify Indeed, Intuit, Intuit, Framework, tools. Learn more at quickbooks.com slash money. Publish beautiful and production-ready websites with Framer. Get started building for free today at framer.com slash profiting for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. Quo is the smarter way to run your business communications. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash profiting. Working Genius helps you fill gaps in your organization. Take the Working Genius assessment and get 20 % off with code profiting at workinggenius.com.

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1:34what's up young and profiters welcome back to the show and i've got something a little different for you today instead of replaying one of my yap classics i'm sharing an interview that i did on the so money podcast with farnoosh tarobi farnoosh is an award-winning finance expert She's one of the top influencers in personal finance, and she invited me onto her show to break down some of the secrets behind my success with the podcast and my company, Yap Media. Farnoosh and I talked about how I started Young and Profiting as a side hustle while working at Disney and how I grew it into one of the top business podcasts in the world.

2:11We cover all the things that matter when it comes to launching and growing a podcast, like how to build an audience from scratch, how to grow your show organically, and how to monetize your content even if you're just starting out. You guys know that I love to get into the nitty gritty, the actionable stuff. So I also talked about the exact strategies I've used to help others grow their podcasts. The same strategies that took one show from 200 downloads a month to 200 ,000. Whether you're a podcaster, entrepreneur, or just trying to build your brand, this episode can help take things to the next level.

2:45I'm so pumped for you to hear it. Let's get right into it.

2:51Welcome to So Money. Are you ready to talk about money? I am super excited to be on the show. I have a sense it's one of your favorite topics. Your podcast is called Young and Profiting. You love to dish about dollars and cents, but for our time together, Hala, you have so many gifts to give us, so much to teach us about drive, about building a business, about recovering from failure. I was learning a lot about you before our episode now. And I love to start sometimes when guests have so much that's going on in their adult lives that's so admiring. I want to know what life was like for you growing up.

3:33Who was Hala as a young girl? And what were her visions? I have some follow-up questions to that, but I'm just going to let you take that and see where you go with it. Because I just love to see if there's any dots to connect there? Yeah, 100%. So as a young girl, I was really, really outgoing. So one funny thing that my parents always say is that I sang before I spoke. So I love to sing. And I would like break out into performance as a little like two, three year old and then fast forward to elementary school, I was the lead in all the plays. And so I was always sort of like, this really outgoing, bubbly, shining stars, the youngest of four kids, and so had a really outgoing personality.

4:15I also had a really strong entrepreneurship spirit at a young age, like very young age. I would convince my cousins down the street to do lemonade stands, but then I would take it to the next level and we'd go to the park and make slushy stands. Then in the winter, I would sell hot chocolate. I would have my cousins and my friends make artwork and then I would sell it to all the parents at the different like PTA meetings and things like this. And so I was always just like trying to figure out a way to make money. I would make bracelets and then sell them in the summer. And I just always wanted to work.

4:50And as, you know, a kid of immigrant parents, my parents were 100 % Palestinian. My dad was a surgeon. They really cared about education, and they actually didn't want me to work. And I had a job since 13 years old, and I would convince and cry and beg for my parents to take me to work and allow me to work. And so I had a job since 13 years old and I probably had about 15 jobs before I got into college. I can relate to that. My parents also immigrants and prioritized studying over flipping burgers for sure. I'm curious for you, what was the motivation to work at such a young age? There's money involved, but what did the money represent to you?

5:35I grew up feeling like as long as I had money in my bank account and a license, I was invincible because I saw a lot of women around me who didn't have money, who were even intimidated to drive on the highway. They always insisted that their husbands take the driving seat. And I thought, well, that doesn't feel like freedom to me. So, and this is again, my child brain deciding what freedom means, but like, what did work represent for you in terms of your freedom? them? Well, my parents were pretty well off. My dad was a doctor, but I wasn't spoiled at all. Because my dad basically put all my nieces and nephews overseas through college.

6:16And so and my parents were kind of grew up really poor. And so they never wanted to buy me clothes or like, really, I wanted like all this fashionable clothes. I wanted cool bags. I it was more about like me just wanting to pay for my stuff. So most of my jobs were actually retail jobs where I'd sell clothes and get a discount so that I could wear really cool clothes and like get makeup that I wanted or skincare that I wanted. It was really just to fund me wanting, you know, to spoil myself. And so fast forward to today, when you think about your relationship with money, how has it evolved? Like when, you know, what is your why, I suppose, for scaling as quickly as you are, and we're going to get into the successes and so many of the wins of your business, is.

6:59But what drives you now? Because I just did a bunch of episodes on the show about what is enough, you know, and that's a very personal question and answer. And I just want to know, what is your why today as you pursue financial greatness? So I understand that life is limitless. I understand that things can scale really quickly if you have the right idea and the right systems. And for me, I'm trying to grow my company to be like$100 million company, right? So that's my goal. And it's really to help people in the process. I am the type of person where I always have teams around me, even when I had volunteer groups that I couldn't afford to pay.

7:41I've always had teams of 20, 30, 40, 50 people that helped me with my mission. Even working for free, we can get into that. But I also really enjoy paying for people's livelihoods and having a big team and being responsible for people's salaries and seeing them grow and make more money. That really drives me as well. It's like growing my team and their potential as well really motivates me. So tell us about this. I see people calling it a media empire. Yep. Media. You have your own podcast, Young and Profiting, as well as cultivating and growing other podcasts via a network, your own network. You have an MBA, you have background in marketing and consulting.

8:24So tell us about the current operation that you have and what, tell us all about it. Yeah. So I have multiple businesses. Number one is my podcast that I started five and a half years ago. That's a business entity in itself. So we get lots of sponsorships. My personal brand gets lots of sponsorships. I punch way above my weight. I'm as much money as the top podcasts in the world because I really understand how to monetize all my channels. And I've really mastered this whole monetization of the podcast industry. So that's my first business. My second business is my social agency. So I'm one of the biggest influencers on LinkedIn.

9:02And I have a social media agency that's known as the number one LinkedIn marketing agency. So I run a lot of influencers on that platform, like Marshall Goldsmith and Heather Monahan and Matt Higgins from Shark Tank, Kara Golden of Hint Water. So lots of CEOs, celebrities, podcasters, I run their social media, their LinkedIn, their Instagram, their YouTube. And I also do podcast production. So we were the best podcast agency of 2022 and awarded that. So I have a podcast agency and a social agency. That's another part of my business. And then lastly, I have a podcast network. So a year and a half ago, I launched the Yap Media Podcast Network.

9:37It's the number one business and self-improvement podcast network where I grow and monetize other shows. So the same way that I get sponsorships from my podcast, I also get them for about 25 top business and self-improvement shows. And then I take a rev share of their sponsorship. So tell us the secrets. How are you growing podcasts to scale and making it super duper profitable? I have people all the time coming to me and say, I think I want to start a podcast, but it's so crowded. I don't know. What's your advice to someone who's like, I want to, I want to be holla. I want to start a really phenomenal podcast that is sustainable as well as profitable because a lot of people quit.

10:15Yeah. Cause podcasting is not easy and there's really two ways to go about it. One way is you have money and you can invest in advertising and media buying. So all the different podcast players out there, there's about 70 different podcast players that make up the industry. Spotify, Apple make up about 60 % of all listening apps. And then the other 30 % is like 70 different apps that you can advertise on. So you can advertise on 30 % of the podcast players. So that presents a really big opportunity. You want to advertise where the podcast listeners already are. Instead of having to convince them from social media to listen to the podcast platform that you're soliciting, potentially download the app, find your episode.

10:58Instead, you just advertise in the podcast player itself through banner ads, through integrating yourself in the onboarding series and so on. So all these different podcast players have different advertising opportunities. The other way that you advertise in the podcast apps is through buying commercials on other podcasts in your niche, guesting on other podcasts in your niche, and so on. So there's lots of different tactics to advertise within the podcast players. That's one way. And basically, if you have money, a company like mine, I'm one of the biggest experts in terms of growing shows, I can put together a plan and exactly know if you're like, I want to get to 100K downloads a month, I can say, okay, here's your three-month plan.

11:36This is how much you're going to spend, probably around$10 ,000 a month, and I'll get you to 100 ,000 consistent downloads per month with real subscribers and so on, right? So that's one way. If you have money, you can just pay to play, right? This is like anything out there right now. You can just pay to play. If you don't have money, it's going to be a longer term game. Typically, you want to have at least one platform where you have an audience. You need to pull an audience from somewhere. You're not going to just put up a show and people are going to magically find it. That's not how it is.

12:06It's not 2016 anymore. There's lots of competition. Okay. So having a social media presence and then really focusing on closing the loop. So this is what a lot of people miss. They put up micro content videos, they put up social posts, and they promote a podcast episode. They have a link in their bio or link in the caption, whatever it is. And they really are expecting people to click the link, find their episode. Maybe if you're smart, you might do a chartable smart link to your direct episode. But most podcasters, like they're not even that tech savvy to do that. So they're really expecting a lot.

12:38They're creating a lot of friction. You need to close the loop. And that means one-on-one combat in the DM. So you put up a post. Anybody who likes and comments is raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm potentially interested in this podcast episode. You then need to DM them a link to the direct episode. Hey, I noticed that you engaged on this post. I'd love for you to listen to my podcast. Here's the link. Then you follow up. Hey, did you get a chance to subscribe? And you do that all day and you promote and you bring people from social to your podcast. Now that's a much longer game, but that's how you do it for free.

13:08I may or may not have been taking notes. I'm just saying. That's, you know, I, I actually like noticed that I liked someone's post the other day on LinkedIn on, on Instagram. It was a story and I immediately got a DM from them and I was like, wow, this person's quick. They're on, they're, they're, they're really, uh, scouting all their, you know, their engagement. I was like, no, it was an automatic DM, but it was really, it was really well done. It was smart. Yeah. You can use like many chat or like, there's lots of different softwares where you can sort of automate this, but I always recommend that like having a VA that does it manually where you have scripts and it's super like personal.

13:44I think that always does better. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.

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17:37Now, I was listening to you an interview of yours. You've talked about this on your podcast and other shows about how COVID was a real game changer for you in terms of just, I think for all of us, it was a time for at minimum reflection. Like, what am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? What is the meaning of everything that I'm doing? and I know that you went through a lot of personal hurdles and challenges, grieving during that, during that time. And I would love if you, to the extent that you're willing to share, what was the, what was the impact of that? It was like 2021, I think was a really, you called it the hardest and the best year of your life.

18:15Yeah, it was, it was 2020. So actually in March of 2020, that's when the pandemic really hit, at least New Jersey and all my families in New Jersey and my family was one of the first to get hit by the pandemic. So this was when nobody knew about it. It was really scary. If you had COVID, it was like you had the plague, like everybody, like nobody talked to you for months and things like this. So my entire, my mom, my dad, and my brother was visiting them all got COVID. And my aunt and uncle down the street also got COVID. And so my family's doctors, so they got it all really fast because they were like in the hospitals and stuff like this.

18:54And so they caught it really fast. And I ended up going home. I was living with my boyfriend at the time in Brooklyn. And my sister basically called me up and she was like, Hala, you know, this was in lockdown, like the first week of lockdown. When I was working at Disney at the time, I was working from home. She's like, Hala, mom and dad have COVID. You've got like 30 minutes. Let me know if you want me to pick you up. I'm going to go take care of mom and dad. And I was like, well, of course, I'm going to go take care of mom and dad. So she picked me up. I didn't have a car at the time. and I get to the house and everyone is extremely sick.

19:29So this is like the first wave of COVID where it was like just really tough. My brother is like super fit, like pretty young and he was like really, really sick. So it was very scary. Me and my sister were staying in the basement. We were wearing like hazmat suits. You know, for a week I was just like really covered up and we were basically like not eating all day in the basement, like having like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before we went to sleep, like sleeping with like dirty old comforters on the couch because we just nobody was prepared and like we just didn't want to sleep upstairs because we thought it was like really contaminated we didn't know what to do so then my dad got like very very sick and like we were we were like trying to get like an oxygen machine for him and like doing and all everybody's a doctor so we were like just like trying to self uh like help him because we knew if he went to the hospital like it would be really bad because the hospitals were really overwhelmed at the time.

20:25And we knew that he wasn't going to get attention. And he actually said like, hey, if you send me to the hospital, like you guys aren't going to see me again. And that was the truth. So there was nothing we could do. He was basically dying. And so we called the ambulance at one point and he got like wheeled away to the hospital. And at that point, I was working from home. I ended up staying in Watchung, New Jersey for three months because I basically couldn't go back to Brooklyn. I had got COVID myself. My dad was in the hospital at this time for about like a month and a half. I remember watching him on Zoom.

20:57I would have him on my Zoom and work and be like working at the same time. He was pretty much unconscious. They traked him right away. He looked really uncomfortable. It was like really mortifying to see him like suffering that whole time. And the worst part is that we weren't allowed to visit him because at that time there was no visitors allowed. and even the nurses like barely went in his room and he could barely see and I feel like all he could do is hear so I used to just sing to him all day and like just try to soothe him so it was a really difficult time but I was also really bored because none of my friends wanted to see me I couldn't see my boyfriend I was working on my podcast which was like business as usual I had like 20 volunteers at the time that worked for me for free so I was like doing my regular thing working on my podcast, working on Disney.

21:41And at some point, you know, every time I used to end a podcast episode, my podcast was already like a top 10 how to podcast. That was my category at the time. I had big authors. My podcast was big and I was already a LinkedIn influencer, but I was just doing it on the side. I wasn't making money. And this was like about two years into it. And the guests that would come on my show, they would always end and be like, Kala, I know that you're really big on LinkedIn and it's like super impressive. Like, can you do this for me? or they would say, Hala, you grew this incredible podcast. Like, could you produce a podcast for me?

22:12I'd love to do this. And these were all really wealthy, accomplished people. And I'd always be like, no, I'm sorry. Like, I've got this great job at Disney. I can't help you. I've got a volunteer team. They just work for free. It's just a hobby. This is just a passion project. And I would always like kind of like push them off until one day, a lady, Heather Monahan, who's still my client, this was three years ago. She basically was stalking me on LinkedIn And every video, she'd be like, holla, I need you to do this. Like holla, get it together. Like run my social media. And I told her, I was like, Heather, I can't run it for you because I don't have the team.