Lessons - The Podcast Strategy That Beats Legacy Media | Ben Shapiro - Media Entrepreneur

In this lesson's episode, explore how reinvention and relationship building can turn a career into a scalable venture. Discover how short-term consulting evolved into a strategic path, understand how podcasting became a reliable relationship engine beyond traditional outreach, and uncover how adapting to audience behavior can transform a simple idea into a growing media business. You said the version of your business now of creating all this content and also what you do for other businesses, that was sort of birthed in your understanding of building relationships. So yeah, how did you understand the podcasting was the way that you wanted to go and you didn't just want to turn into a brand specialist or a customer success of retention specialist. You very, very targeted. I'm a marketer by trade. So more of a generalist and a strategist than an individual channel expert. I'm also extroverted. So I really feel things and kind of live on the outside as opposed to the inside. And so when I had this job that I'd worked so hard to get and then it didn't go well, you know, there was the emotional personal part of my career that I needed to feel through and reconsider. So I was hurt. I was frustrated. I was upset. And it was either they were going to fire me or I was going to walk out the door. I still don't note to this day, whether I quitter was fired, but it's a little of both. And so I walked away and said, I'm going to take three months off. I've never really taken three months off from working and I'm going to go figure out what I want to do with my life or at least what my next J OB is going to be. And after three days of sitting at home, I had rebuilt my personal website, benjshap.com to basically be an online resume, which was basically the homepage for my consulting practice. And so I launched that website on a Friday. And that Monday, I launched the website on a Thursday, got a note from a friend on Friday saying, I need to hire you as a consultant and I was in the office on Monday. So I took, you know, three days off in between jobs, even though I plan on taking three months off, but they were short term projects. It doesn't count, right? It wasn't a full time W2 job with healthcare and equity and all the stuff. The money was better than what I was making, right? My wife had health care. I guess I still probably had Cobra or, you know, I was sort of covered in terms of all of the like life things you need. And I started taking on short term projects. One short term project led to the next led to the next led to some process and three years later, I looked up and I was running a six figure consulting business and I had done it for years. So I just never hit that point where the short term projects dried up. And I built, you know, outreach and processes and use marketing technology to scale the business, but I, after three years of being an independent marketing consultant, all the sudden, I was walking around saying I do brand development and marketing strategy help people figure out the overlap between who they are and who their customers are. And then how do you cultivate marketing channels to get them off the ground stuff that I was inherently good at because I had experience in performance marketing, but new brand marketing as well. And so after three years, I came to the realization that I was building a consulting network off the back of my personal network of consulting business off the back of my personal network. So I was reaching out to the 1500 contacts that I had on LinkedIn, talking them about what I was doing and how I was helping other companies that were in similar stages and found enough work to survive. But after three years, I was running out of, what's that? Did you enjoy it? Did you enjoy jumping into this? Or was this like I'm just curious because most, yeah, I loved it. Yeah, I loved it. I love the independence. I love the autonomy. I felt I had more respect in my career by me being the product. People were buying the sounds bad, buying me, right, not buying a marketer. They were hiring Ben. And so, you know, call me egotistical. That felt good. And when the projects went well, it felt like I was doing well. So I enjoyed coming in and having respect and authority and autonomy as opposed to all of the pressure from being an in house marketing, you know, VP that was hoping that the equity that I was going to earn in four years from now would be worth something. And so I felt I was able to realize the work I was doing monetarily faster. I got more credit. I enjoyed running a business. I enjoyed growing it, building my own products, thinking about my own branding. And then I wanted to expand. And so after three years, I started the MarTech podcast because I needed to reach more people. So my clients became early and growth stage marketing companies. And so I created the MarTech podcast to interview the people I wanted to have as my customers, not thinking that the audience would grow very quickly. You know, I didn't have any any plans on being, you know, web famous or pod famous or whatever it is. I definitely wasn't thinking about being a B2B influencer, which is, you know, part of what my business is now, I was just thinking I was going to go interview people I wanted to be my clients and help promote a piece of content for them to build a relationship. And that was going to be your sales strategy. Basically, you're using the podcast as a sales strategy. Yeah, exactly. And truthfully, it was an experiment that went completely wrong. So I wanted to get a couple months into building the podcast, get some traction to then show people that I had credibility, look how good this podcast is. I've been doing it for three months. We've got 15 episodes and a little traction and what ended up happening was I realized that an individual episode was being consumed an hour long episode, people were consuming 25% of it. So I cut the episodes I was recording and half and then people were consuming like 55% of it. So the shorter I made the episodes, the higher percentage people were consuming them. And then when I cut them in half again, instead of it going to like 75% it was, you know, almost all of the episodes. So I found this format where I was able to interview someone and get, you know, somewhere between two to five pieces of content out of an interview and all of a sudden, the audience was listening to the entire episode. And since we had five episodes instead of two a week now we had a daily podcast. There was more organic growth. There was more virality because the guests were sharing the content because I was producing more for them and the audience grew faster. So I looked up after three months and said, God, I've got like 3500 downloads a month and we're growing at like a 30% clip. I'm just going to keep doing this for another six months and somebody told me I can make more than beer money when I get to 10,000 downloads a month. That doesn't seem like it's that far away. Half consult and half do this podcast thing and after 11 months we had 10,000 downloads a month and I said, I'm not going to do the lead generation thing I was going to do originally I'm not going to try to sell to my guests. I'm going to see if I can sell sponsorships to people that want to reach marketers and I sold $25,000 of inventory in the first 30 days and the next thing you know I was off to the races and then we were really good beer money. I don't drink that much beer anymore. So I mean, that's like a lifetime supply beer for me did that that also have the added effect of creating a nice inbound funnel for your business that you start to get leads from that as well for some of the consulting things or did you never really explore that? I pushed them away when I went to the sponsorship model and this is probably a mistake but I put a lot of chips in the same basket of like I'm doing this thing I'm going to go see if I could sell some sponsorships and so I got some you know interest in consulting work but mostly what I was doing was starting to off board my consulting clients saying I'm doing this podcast it's taking half of my time. I had an anchor client that paid the bills that took half my time and all the other relationships I started to basically put them on ice and the life of them wrap them up hand them off to do the podcast figuring I would be able to monetize the podcast and what I was trying to do originally was diversify my revenue streams. I'll make a hundred thousand dollars a year if I'm lucky as a podcast host I'll make a hundred thousand dollars a year from this anchor client I'll split it 50 50 and then the podcast revenue just outpaced all my consulting revenue and so what I did was I transitioned the anchor client to being a sponsor of the second podcast I created the voices of search podcast and then I had two daily shows. I was able to basically leverage the same monetization model which was helping us monetize at a faster rate than the industry. So to break that down how you structured your podcast format is extremely short form so you're 15 you're 15 minutes basically and then you you take this long format so this long for piece of content and you're not only using that as like for your content marketing but you're using that to create this daily show. I don't think a lot of people that I know have actually adopted your strategy I think a lot of people do more of the long form strategy to do like a show per week or something like that. Is this the way that you feel that all podcasts should be built out because like I'm taking notes and now I'm thinking through like how the how do I turn my show into a daily show without doing daily hour long conversations with different people so curious about people starting a show is this the format they want to to go for is this just because you have a certain niche that you're trying to serve. I think it depends on what you're talking about and the audience that you're trying to profile trying to reach I think it also depends on who the host is. Your show is great and it's longer form content than mine don't change a thing I love your show. But I mean it works but I mean for somebody starting out this is this is a conversation for somebody starting out because then you have you know you have the opposite of the spectrum you're talking about this before the Joe Rogan's at the three hours and like the the audience obviously is there too so then the question becomes. So how do you understand your audience how do you best serve them this is a classic marketing problem now and you figured out and I'm curious because is it because your podcast is highly actionable like sort of bites of of things that they can do tomorrow versus I really want to get to know someone so I'm going to have a three hour conversation with them and I like understand the inner workings of their mind maybe they maybe the business leader doesn't care about that maybe that's why it works. Yeah so I always think of our podcast and the reason why the format works is because the content is dense and so for people to understand you know the ins and outs of choosing a CDP that meets the needs of their business. There's a lot of acronyms there's a lot of word salad flying around and it's hard to sort of comprehend all of it so after 15 minutes your brains just like I don't get it listening to something that's a little bit more narrative driven like what's the story how did somebody go through the hurdles. I would consider your podcast to be more entertaining because people are telling their life stories and how they became successful and so I think that you know it's easier for people to listen to that format of content you know it's kind of like well what's better a short or a long YouTube video or a short or a long blog post well it depends what you're talking about right. If we're talking about math textbooks you know you need to give me one line at a time and let me think about it true I'm not that smart you know some people can can digest that format quickly so I do think that it all comes down to understanding who your customers are who you're trying to reach with the content. What the purpose of it is and that should dictate the format for us marketing technology can be complicated and dense and after 15 minutes I work in marketing technology I don't want to listen to it for more than 15 minutes. So you know it's hard to to get more out of that sort of 15 minute time frame at least that's my philosophy and why we've created our show so what we do is we break down dense content into short form so people can digest it daily and start to build the overall understanding of the genre and the topic we do it for marketing we do it for organic growth you know SEO we're just launch our third show the revenue generator which is. You know revops and combining marketing and product and sales so you know there's a lot of complication in mastering these types of business mediums and so we try to make it easy and digestible and we keep it light and we keep it fun. But you know if I was having an interesting conversation with somebody that was meant to last an hour and I cut it off after 15 minutes I think the audience would be annoyed. So I think it depends on what you're what you're really trying to accomplish.