Becoming An Influencer – PTC 502

To be a successful podcaster, you can't simply be a nice host who offends nobody. You need to be an authority and influencer in your niche.

THE KEY TO BECOMING AN INFLUENCER

You need the confidence to step up, step out and embrace your personality.

Sure, you have a personality. You just need to define it, refine it, and let it shine.

We sometimes get too caught up in what we do rather than why we do it. Your "why" is so much more important than your what.

I recently discovered Myron Golden on YouTube. Myron said, "There are many people out there who would love to buy what you already love to sell if they only knew you existed. Instead of finding more people to sell to, make yourself more findable to those people who already want to buy what you already love to sell."

You become more findable by being more interesting. Your six steps to success isn't interesting. Everything interesting is about people.

Create more relationships, and you'll attract more people.

WE LACK RELATIONSHIPS

It's my mission to create more relationships in society.

Tech has sucked relationships out of society. That makes it too easy to be against each other rather than supporting each other.

We don't shop at the store any longer. Our shopping is done online.

When I was a kid, we would go hang at the mall. Today, the malls barely exist. If my kids watched Mallrats or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, they wouldn't understand most of the jokes.

Many of us work remotely. We don't hang with our coworkers around the water cooler or at happy hour.

You aren't even required to go into the gas station any more. It's pay at the pump.

We don't watch movies with others at the movie theaters, because movies are on our television.

Kids aren't congregating at the arcade or in the park or at the pool. They are at home online with their virtual friends.

CONNECTING WITH PEOPLE

My daughter knew most of her freshman class in college before she ever stepped foot on campus.

She graduated high school as COVID hit. Before her first semester began, they began having meet-ups on Zoom with all incoming freshman. She met a lot of people.

On the day I dropped her off, we were walking down main street right off campus. I suddenly hear someone say, "Hey, Emma."

I was stunned. We are in a small town thousands of miles from home. How could anyone possibly know her.

After a brief chat, she tells me that was one of the girls on the Zoom calls.

During that semester, all students attended class virtually from their dorm rooms. Meals were delivered by food service or picked up to be eaten in their room. Nobody was allowed to have roommates due to the pandemic.

It was very easy for students to have no relationships with anyone. They could do everything alone in their room.

If Emma hadn't been diligent about meeting others, she could have easily gone through college unnoticed. Fortunately, she met as many as possible. She also became president of her freshman class.

GET NOTICED

If you want to get noticed, build your audience, and attract your ideal clients, you need to get noticed as well.

Tech will kill your relationships unless you're diligent about getting in front of your target audience. Solopreneur is a dangerous career if you're not careful.

So, how do you become an influencer?

You define your personality. Share that personality through stories that allow people to get to know you. Then, get on stages as often as you can to get people familiar with you.

Like Myron said, they would love to buy what you already love to sell if they only knew you existed. It's time to let them know.

There were two recent articles in Inside Radio that show why this is so important.

PODCASTERS ARE INFLUENCERS

The first article referenced Magna's Media Trials and Vox Media study called "A New Era Of Influence".

The study referenced individuals whose influence matters most to listeners. It found that 75% of respondents value podcasters' influence. Social media influencers and celebrities from TV/film both landed at 15%.

If you want to be an influencer, have a podcast and be unique.

INFLUENCERS AREN'T ADVERTISING

The second article showed the importance of using your podcast for influence rather than advertising.

We've talked about this many times before. Advertising on your podcast is just a bad idea.

If you really want this to sink in, grab a pen and paper to write down a few numbers.

Podcasting has taken the term CPM from traditional media. CPM is an acronym for Cost Per Mille, or cost per thousand. Mille is Latin for thousand.

According to investopedia.com, cost per thousand is a marketing term that refers to the cost an advertiser pays per 1,000 advertising impressions. In radio, it would be the cost to reach 1,000 listeners.

It might be said that a radio station had 3,000 average quarter hour listeners. That would mean on average 3,000 people are listening to that particular station at that particular time.

If the CPM is $25, the price of a commercial would be $75. You would divide 3,000 listeners by 1,000 to get the number of thousands. That equals 3.

We then multiply our 3 by our CPM which is $25 to get our $75 commercial. All stations in a market are treated roughly the same.

How many thousands of listener do you have for your show?

THE ADVERTISING ABYSS

According to the other article in Inside Radio, "Podcast CPMs ticked up slightly in June according to Libsyn Ads. Based on the spots sold through its platform says the average CPM for a one-minute ad was $21.90."

Let's do the math. The big agencies are looking for podcasts with at least 5,000 downloads per episode. Libsyn says only 7% of all podcasts on Libsyn reach that level.

Let's pretend that you're lucky enough to be one of those 7%.

If you have 5,000 listeners, that would be five groups of 1,000 for our per thousand calculation. If the CPM or cost per thousand is $21.90, your one-minute commercial on your show is worth $109.50.

Now, how many commercials are you willing to clutter your show with before your listeners tune away? Let's say that number is six with two at the beginning, two in the middle and two at the end.

But really, how often do you listen to the two minutes of commercials at the beginning of your favorite show before you hit the skip button?

We'll go with six for the sake of discussion. Now each episode is worth six commercials times the $109.50 for each ad. That's a total of $657 per show.

Four episodes per month generates $2,628.

If you sell your advertiser by quarter, it would generate $8,451. That would be 24 clients over the course of the year to generate $34,164 annually.

Now $34,000 sounds pretty good. I can hear you saying, "Erik, I'd take $34,000 for creating my podcast."

WHY YOU WON'T WIN WITH ADS

Here's the problem... or problems.

One, you are trading the goodwill you've built with your audience for the cash the ads are generating. Your fans don't like the commercials.

How many times have you been listening to your favorite podcast or watching a YouTube video and said, "Fantastic! Another Wix commercial!" Right.

You get just as aggravated as I do. Do you really want to do that to the people you are trying to attract as clients? I didn't think so.

Problem number two... it takes a lot of time to land an advertiser. I've spent 35 years in radio. We had 15 sales people working 40 hours a week trying to sell advertising.

Now granted, we were selling 24 hours of content. But many of those advertisers were on multiple hours a day.

You're trying to land coaching clients. You're trying to find time to produce your podcast on a regular basis. There needs to be time to market your business and handle the other tasks.

You don't have time to sell advertising. And you don't have time to keep your advertisers happy when they tell you, "It's not working." It doesn't matter how many customers the advertiser gets, they always think it should have been more.

And problem number three is the revenue. $34,000 sounds like a lot, but that is it. The number doesn't go any higher unless you add more commercials, which we know is a bad.

You can't charge more due to the CPM. The CPM treats your listeners just like every other listener. You're a commodity.

BECOME AN INFLUENCER

Instead, build relationships. Demonstrate your authority. Become an influencer in your niche.

Are you ready to see if it's possible for you to become an authority and influencer? Let's have a conversation.

Go to www.PodcastTalentCoach.com/apply, click the button and apply to have a chat with me. We will develop your plan and see how I can help and support you to achieve your podcast goals.