From Cold Brew to Podcast Gold: Seth Goldstein's Journey Explained!

Foreign. That's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew. And I'm your host, Brett Dice.

If you could please subscribe to this podcast on all your favorite podcasting apps, leave a five star review. Really just help with the rankings and let me know how I am doing. But this week I'm gonna be talking with Seth Goldstein is an entrepreneur, founder, podcaster, techie, father, husband, and social media junkie. He's been podcasting since 2010, which is even before I kind of started.

So he's been doing a lot longer than I have. And he's owned his own digital marketing company, Goldstein Media, for more than 15 years. Welcome to the show, Seth. How's it going?

Brett, how you doing? Thanks for having me. Doing good. When the first question is all my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

I like coffee. It doesn't like me, so I have to drink tea. You have any like specific teas that you like? Like anything with a lot of caffeine.

So it'd be more like green tea. I think green tea has the most caffeine. They're and they're not a sponsor of anything for me, but they Tea Republic, Republic of Tea has a high caffeinated, like more than caffeine than coffee. Black tea that I drink every day wakes me up, gets me about halfway through the day before I have to have another cup.

But I do like coffee a lot. It just irks my belly. So we'll leave it at 2. Too acidic?

Is that what it is? I don't know what it is. It just hurts my belly. Gotcha.

Have you tried like cold brew? Because cold brew is less. I love cold brew. It actually might help with the stomach thing if it's acidity.

I'll try that out. Yeah, I, I, I just tend, I, I found the tea that works. Dive into that every once in a while. I'll treat myself to a coffee and then regret it later.

All right, I gave a brief some of your expertise. Can you listen a little bit more about what you do? Yes, absolutely. So, yes, I've been podcasting since 2010, so I'm, I like to say that's like the second renaissance of podcasting.

Second round of podcasters first were in their early aughts like 2005-2010. Adam Curry, Leo Laporte, all those guys kind of got in there at the start. I kind of came in when it started to be easier to podcast. Like there was Google hangouts on air that this recorded stuff and video and all that stuff that just seemed to work, and I could get my head around it.

So I started that. I've actually been a Digital Marketer since 2008. The best time to start a business at the height of a global recession. But it's also, when you think about it as an entrepreneur, no one's going to hire you during a global recession, so you got to start your own shingle.

And I've been doing that ever since. That's been like 17 years. And then about a year and a half ago, I decided, hey, I've been helping people with podcasting for a while. Why don't I monetize that?

So I started Podcast Mastery, where I help podcasters kind of get a handle on the whole craziness that is this podcasting Third renaissance, I like to call it now. Got you. And so, yeah, you are correct. Podcasting started.

Well, technically, it started in 2005. That was kind of the first time itunes really did something with it. But the first artist feed was like, 2003 was like the first act. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I had to look up because I think I saw, like a job description said, like, 20 plus or 25 plus years of podcast experience. And I'm like, nobody has that because it hasn't been around that long. Yeah, I do think there has. Yeah, I do think that.

That people were dabbling before, but Apple, of course, made it popular, so go figure. Speaking of podcasts, like, what should. What should markers know about podcasting? Because I feel like they.

They kind of understand it and it's getting more popular and I'm getting. Being a lot more requests, but I don't think they really understand, like, like downloads, for example, like, who they should sponsor because they feel like that you. They should have like, the Joe Rogans and everything, and that's like the 0.100001% of podcasts.

So what should they know about sponsorships and, like, getting guests on and all that stuff? It. Finding guests isn't as hard as you would think. You know, just ask.

And people love to talk about themselves, so that's easy. As far as downloads go, I feel like downloads are going away because people don't download podcasts anymore. They stream them. So there's like, there's a streaming streams metric and there's a download metric, and the download metric is kind of going literally just kind of evolutionarily going away because no one technically downloads them anymore.

And when you think about it, I think marketers and business owners who want to sponsor podcasts should look at podcasts that are in their ne. In their niche, that are in that talk about what they. Who they want to get in front of, where they're, you know, fish. Where the fish are, essentially.

And you want to make sure that you find the podcast. You're not going to find the Joe Rogan, Samuel Robbins, you know, you can. You're going to spend a freaking fortune on them. And you're probably not gonna get any hits on it.

If someone has like a hundred listeners per their episode or 30 per episode by 100 per month or whatever, and you get two deals from it, or you get a bunch of clicks from it, that's all matters. I feel like metrics are less important than results. And so. And I also think that you have to give it more than a month.

You should commit to three to six months on being in someone's podcast. And then if it doesn't work, all right, it didn't work. You know, you tried it, you know, no harm, no foul, but you can't get results in a month. Very rarely will you find, oh, unless you're a vitamin supplement and Joe Rogan likes your vitamin supplement, then you might get a hit.

But like, if you're, let's say. Let's say you're doing a local podcast in, let's say, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which is where I live, and the, and the icp, the customer profile of the. Of the people who listen are local business owners or local homeowners or whatever, there's a handyman podcast, and you are a landscaper. That's like a perfect spot to talk about what you do and have an ad spot on it.

But then there's also bigger podcasts that are a little bit more ambiguous on what you should. You should be where you should be. But it can't hurt to try it and see if it works because podcasting is only getting more and more popular. Yeah, I mean, from the numbers, it's.

The advertising is still going up and there's still not as much podcast as there are blogs, because, I mean, I kind of like, look at almost in the same light, because blogs came around when the Internet was first introduced because it was 495. Yeah, it's easier to write. And there wasn't as much to, like, upload because it was more of a word document instead of like audio or video, which we have now. So, I mean, for th.

For those looking, how. How would they find the podcast maybe to advertise? Would they look at listen notes? Would they try to, like, do Some general searches.

Because I feel like that's the biggest hurdle for a lot of marketers is where do I find the podcast in my niche? I would go. I mean, honestly not. It's not called itunes anymore.

Apple Podcast is a great place to look. Pod Chaser is a great place to look. Honestly, even IMDb has a way to put your credits in. It's a pain.

It's a royal pain. I tried Vinnie Pasta Vito, who's a, who's a big name guy on Pod Match and all that stuff. He is like, oh, you gotta be an IMDb but he's also from traditional media. He's like, oh, he's got his credits, edit credits and all that stuff.

He's like, you can be IMDb as a podcaster, but also just start listening to podcasts that you want to listen to that you think might be interesting to you. And if they're interesting to you, they're probably interested in someone else. And you never know, you might get in front of someone who isn't looking for, looking for lawn care service, but they might know someone who does. And they say, well, I've been listening to this podcast every week and Joe's lawn service comes up.

You need a lawn service, give Joe a call. I mean, it's word of mouth. It really is. The best word of mouth is that and it's repetition.

The more you hear the message, the more you're going to remember it. Like, was it Paleo Valley beef sticks? As much as I hate their ads on YouTube, I'm going to remember them forever. I won't ever buy them because they annoy me, because they're the worst ads.

But if you have a good ad and you don't annoy me and you mean that I can remember, which is half the battle. That's great. So, so how do you make the less annoying ads? Because I know on TV when, like when you're doing on tv, it's like the show is at this volume and then all of a sudden the ad goes to like 50 and you're like, I need to mute this because I'm not going to like do this little volume up, volume down dance.

Like how Shine video is the worst for that. Have you noticed that Amazon, Netflix seems to get their levels right? Apple tv, I don't get ads on Apple tv. So that's besides the point.

But Hulu gets it is really loud and so is Amazon Video. They're like, I'm like, honestly, I don't know if that's something that the Advertisers control or the streaming services controls. But like honestly also have good visuals because if it's louder and you get muted, if you have a good visual you'll probably unmute, be unmuted at least the first time. So people are like wait, what are they doing?

Like the wall, the the selfie YETI guy now that the AI does with the yeti and it's talking and so it makes you click on to hear what the heck, what is that thing. So be creative and with AI now because even though it's back in the. Back in later the teens and the early aughts on tv there's the good ads that people paid millions of dollars for and then the car ads that are really cheesy. Now we can all look like there's really good ads because the technology is caught up.

That's another reason why back in 94 there's no nothing. There's no podcasts because there's no bandwidth for was not in 2005 really is when it hit is when people were listening to MP3s. People, you know, the music industry had the reckoning with Napster. And so then they came around to itunes and Apple and all that stuff.

That's everything happened for a reason. And now you can have a good looking ad pretty quickly. And if you're doing a video podcast, you want those ads everywhere. You want them in YouTube, you want them on the podcast, you want to be awesome for podcasts.

Because sometimes people, I'm sure people will listen to this and some people will watch this and when you think about it, you want to have as good audio as you have video because you don't know when, how they're consuming it. They only just have all video stuff that's all visual and not have anything good audio on it. Got you. And so I mean from the podcaster side, it's a mess to figure out your stats.

You have like 50 different options now. And so how do the podcasters convince the marketers to sponsor them? Because even I have like chartable. There's YouTube because YouTube doesn't share with my own podcasting host.

There's Spotify because Spotify doesn't share. Like everybody doesn't share with anybody. The V which you're on. I know Captivate has its own stats.

I generally tell people to number one, gather all your stats and then kind of making a magic. What's the word? Amalgamation. Brutalizing that word.

But make kind of meld them all together and get an estimate and you know the tilt of the little squiggle that's like. It's just about. Always put a tilt before that about this many people. People.

And if it's a weird number, bump that up to the next hundred, you know, so let's say. Let's say you came to that number and it was a. Let's say you get 153 people a month. Listen to your show.

That's a very specific number. I'd say 130. I say go 135. 140.

150. It's kind of. And then put the tilta and say it's about this a month for per episode. Because they're just glancing at this.

They're not going like, oh, well, he's off by 10. It's true. Most marketers are not going to be like, all right, I'm really going to research this. Unless they have AI do it.

And even AI won't. AI will get it wrong. So, I mean, we. We have that, and then we have also RSS feed 2.

0 eventually coming out, which will add video to it. Will that help with. Will that help with the numbers a little bit more? Because I know, like I said, YouTube has their own.

If you're doing a video podcast, you're not getting it. Like, I have Captivate. You're not getting on Captivate at all. They don't count that at all.

And so how do. Like, is that going to help with that issue? Because the issue is, is that now we have, like, two different formats, and they're basically split stats in a way. I think this is making everything more confusing, honestly, because people are not gonna.

Aren't gonna know about it, number one. And then once they're educated and they know about it, you're gonna get another set of stats. You're just gonna give you stats. You're in stats purgatory.

And it really goes back to just kind of melding it together and. And creating a story around the stats, saying, like, on YouTube, we're here. And generally, this is what the listeners we have in general are the people who. I think a lot of advertisers who I've talked to, if you do video, want to know how your video is performing on YouTube and how.

And then if you are like, oh, you do audio too, which, if you're a podcast, should be audio too. They say they want to know the audio numbers. So it's. Separate them and then put them together kind of thing, in my opinion.

Got you. I mean, for example, my sets on Spotify I'm hitting women on YouTube, it's mostly men. And I'm like, all right, I sure. Like, I'm.

I would just, I would just meld this together and, and say generally I. It's split. 50. 50 or it's 40.

Where for that other percentages, 60, 30 or 60? 40. 70, 30, yeah. 60, 30, 60, 40.

Yeah, exactly. Like you talked about before, downloads are going away. So how should we actually do that? Is it like time watched now?

Because I feel like YouTube had the better option of like time watched instead of like downloads because downloads. Someone could download it some. It could be auto download and you have no idea if actually someone listen to it. Timeless, I feel is more, more advantageous.

Or streams. But streams could be. They could stream for five minutes and it's a 30 minute episode. So again, it's Amal.

Amalgamate. I can't say the word, I'm using it a lot. But an amalgamation of the two and saying like, you know, we get a certain amount of streams a month and this is generally the amount of time people listen to how long they listen to our show. And literally it's probably the stats in the media kit.

I mean, when in doubt, more information doesn't usually hurt. Doesn't usually hurt. True. And so, I mean we talked.

You mentioned AI a little bit. So where's this going in the podcast industry? I use AI for like the show notes and a bunch of different stuff because transcriptions and all that stuff is easier with AI than me doing it and spending hours trying to do it. But we also now have the script saying that they have their own AI avatars and you could not even be in front of the camera anymore, which I'm not really in favor of.

It's kind of cool, but I'm probably will never use it because I don't think. Yeah, I don't think it's really just a thing. Well, it's not real. I mean, it looks like you, but it's not real.

It's too perfect too. There's no ums and ahs and. And I'm a very big proponent of telling my clients it's not effing npr. You're allowed to take a breath, you're allowed to take a beat.

You can go, ah, let me think about that. Like, and. And then honestly, don't edit this out. That makes it human.

That makes them more approachable, in my opinion. And if you think about it that way, AI is doing that. And if they do it like, I think Notebook LM their Podcasts, they've got actually pretty good with the ums and ahs, but if you get long enough in it, they start repeating the ums and odds at the same time. They run.

They run out of, like, things, colloquialisms. It's very funny. So basically, like, use it as a tool, but just don't, like, rely on it, like, so heavily that you just take yourself out of the old product. Take yourself out of the equation, and if you had the budget, hire a voiceover artist for the front and back bumpers.

It sounds better. It's just better. I know for one of my shows I did with a client, I have a voiceover artist because I have the budget to get this done. Another person used 11 labs for the bumpers, and it sounds halfway decent for welcome to this show.

You're listening to this with so and so. That's fine. I mean, I know I hear voiceovers screaming, no, it's not fine. But really, it's fine.

If you don't have the budget, they're not gonna get the money anyhow. So. No. And I mean, yeah, for them, it's like, it's taking my job away.

But it's like, well, I mean, yeah, because if you get too expensive, I'm not gonna be able to afford it. A lot of people aren't going to be able to afford it. So when you're too expensive, I'm gonna go for the cheaper option, unfortunately. Yeah.

And it's not even the cheaper option. Sometimes you just need to get the stuff out, and working back and forth on the bumper takes too long. So I'm still a big proponent of using voiceover artists when you can. Absolutely.

I'm not trying to say don't use them. I'm just saying sometimes if it's a small podcast project that has no budget, take that into account. Yeah, it's not the essential tools that you actually need. It's a nice to have, but it's not essential.

So what do you think the future of podcasting is going to look like? I mean, we've talked about how it's still going up. It's still going strong for the time being. I mean, sometimes it'll be downturns.

I mean, I've seen my downloads up one month and down one month. It's kind of like the stock market. Like, where am I going to be this month? So where, where is it?

Where? What's the future trends for the next five to 10 years? Are we going to get more and more? Are we still going to get the pod fades of people, pod feeds.

And that's my kind of my goal with Podcast Master is to help people not fade on the podcast, adjust their cadence, maybe of how many times they put on a show. But don't shut down the show or take a hiatus and let people know you're taking a hiatus and stuff like that. But I think, I think one of the biggest worries, if I'll get to your question, one of the biggest worries is that are you too late? I've been hearing that.

Am I too late to do a podcast? No, no, absolutely not. And I think that podcasting is only getting more and more popular in next year, five to 10 years. Absolutely.

Just like newsletters have come around. Ran a newsletter in my newsletter about how newsletters. I said newsletters three times there, how newsletters are the next big thing for journalists. Because the democratization of the medium and the media, it's the same thing.

This is the democratization, that's a hard word to say, democratization of radio. It's the podcast. And everyone can do a podcast if they want. And if it's interesting enough, people will listen to it.

And you have to be dedicated to actually do it because people need to find you and it takes time. It takes, I would say about three to six months even for people to find you. A lot of time. I think there's, that the stat is there's 200 active, 200,000 active podcasts.

There's 4 million podcasts out there or more. But a lot of them have faded or have gone away. And there's nothing wrong with it. Let's say it's Ryan's course.

I've been podcasting for 15 plus years. I've had probably 15 different podcasts over those years. And they've run their course. Some have been 10 episodes and I'm like, yeah, I'm feeling this anymore.

Let me pivot and do a different show. And then there's some like digital Morgan dives going on. I started in 2018 and then it's been going on since then. But we had a two year hiatus because I just got busy with entrepreneurs.

Enigma, the other podcast I do, it's been going on since 2021. That one's entrepreneurs. Enigma has been going on non stop every week for, since 2021, which it seems like yesterday, but really it's a long time ago. And what's your one pitch to marketers that are kind of hesitant about actually like sponsoring or doing ads?

What's your one pitch about why it's Good to actually do it on podcasting. Because number one, it's cheaper. They get on the radio. Really, it's cheaper.

If you think about sponsoring a show, you're probably going to spend 500 to a thousand a month depending on, let's say it's a weekly or bi weekly show. That's a lot more. If you try to do it on radio or Sirius or do it through Spotify directly, you're going. If you go directly to the podcaster, going to be thrilled to have you.

And you can say, well, I'm looking to spend this. What can you give me for this? But it's definitely cheaper. For now at least inflation happens.

Well, it's cheaper depending on which podcast you go to as a whole. Yeah, that's also. Let's keep that in mind too. If you go to Joe Rogan, it's not exactly going to be cheap, but if you go on Entrepreneurs Enigma, I can guarantee you I'll give you a good deal.

All right, people listening to this episode, they're wondering where can they find you online to learn more? Well, I gave a bunch of, I already gave a bunch of links there, but best place to go, honestly is social. SethGoldstein Me, literally all my links are there. Goldstein Media, the web agency is there.

Podcast Mastery, the podcast agency, Coaching practices there. You can find me on LinkedIn everywhere. Just look for me. I'm pretty noticeable.

All right, any final thoughts for listeners? Oh, this has been so much fun, dude. I love. Also, don't be afraid to guest on other people's podcasts.

Like me. Being on your show is gonna have people say, oh, I'm gonna check out Seth's show. Like that's word of mouth. Brilliant thing.

All right, thank you, Seth for joining Digital Coffee Marketing, Reading, sharing knowledge on podcasting. Thank you for having me and thank. You for listening as always, please subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcasting apps. Leave a five star review.

It's a with the rankings and let me know how I am doing. But join me next week as I talk about what's going on, the PR and marketing industry and the great thought leaders in there as well. All right, guys, stay safe, get to understanding podcasting and see if it actually works for you to start one, guest one or advertise on one and see you next week later.