#40 | The ULTIMATE GUIDE To Growing & Generating Revenue From Your B2B Podcast Without Social Media, Paid Ads or High Profile Guests

Speaker A: This is the ultimate guide for growing and monetizing your B2B podcast way faster. Without social media, paid ads, or high profile guests. Here's the proven system. Welcome to how to grow a, uh, B2B podcast, the show helping founders, CEOs and marketing leaders turn their podcast from a brand awareness expense into a predictable lead generation engine. At the end of this episode, I'll share a little more about who I am and what we do at my company, getmorelisteners.com it might even shock you. But for now, let's dive into the episode. Today you'll discover why social media and high profile guests are killing your show's chances of growing faster. One simple change that helped a client grow past 30,000 monthly downloads and earned tens of thousands with their show. And finally, three fundamental things every B2B podcaster needs to grow a profitable show. Well, look, let's, let's give the last one away right off the bat, peel back the curtain and then explain exactly how to implement what we're going to talk about. The three things that you need to grow a, uh, profitable B2B podcast is firstly, a way to turn more strangers into listeners. Secondly, a way to keep those listeners coming back for more, and thirdly, a way to reach more of those listeners consistently. It really is as simple as what we just mentioned there. Turning strangers into listeners, getting them coming back for more, and then having a mechanism to reach more of them. After interviewing coaching 400 B2B podcasters. The sad reality is that most B2B podcasts, we speak to entrepreneurs, experts with shows, have dying podcasts that aren't growing. They're reaching the exact same hundred listeners after years of podcasting. And for a lot of them, they didn't feel like they're making the impact and they're certainly not making the money they want to. And the reason why they're struggling to grow is because they're following the typical growth strategy. Well, it tends to look something like you launch a show and then you post consistently. You invite the biggest names you can onto your show and you invest energy into getting high profile guests, credible people to interview for your own podcast. You post about it on social media and you hope for the best. That's literally it. But the issue is for most people, and maybe you've experienced this as well, years go by and the show hasn't paid off the traction it deserves. You've spent years on the podcast and yeah, you've become this amazing podcaster who has these impactful conversations that you really enjoy but you are wishing the show would reach way more listeners, make way more money, make way more impact. But it's having the complete opposite reaction. It's actually this expensive thing you keep doing that's barely growing. And the reason why this happens to so many B2B podcasts is because they don't have an actual plan in place, a process, a proven way to reach more listeners. Without those things, you end up stuck with a podcast that feels like a time sucking hobby with no clear or straightforward roi. You start feeling embarrassed when people ask about your download numbers, maybe even not looking at analytics because you feel a bit embarrassed. You put out episodes every single week, but you still feel invisible in your industry. You are uncertain about what's actually working, and you feel like you're constantly guessing when it comes to an actual growth strategy. If any of this resonates with you, you might even be left wondering if you should just quit. Or you might have considered that at some point because the show is not paying off and not bringing you what you thought it would, apart from obviously all the enjoyment, but nothing else from a business point of view. If that's you, if any of those things feel familiar, that's exactly what we want to fix in this episode. So, look, we want to quickly reveal the missing things that most B2B podcasters are missing. That causes endless pain from frustration and makes the podcast feel like this additional thing you're doing that's starting to feel exhausting, defeating and unmotivating. Well, most B2B podcasters are missing either a uniquely positioned show that really stands out in their space, meaning amongst other podcasts in their space, or a reliable system for reaching new listeners. Reliable meaning you actually understand what you're putting in will get you X result. Not hitting and hoping, but knowing, okay, I post this, I will get on average this many listeners, or I will take this action, action. I will get this type of return. And most B2B podcasters sadly miss both for a very long time. But even if you have fixed one, you'll still fail without the other. And what this looks like is, let's say you have a ton of exposure onto a podcast that doesn't have a unique positioning. You won't have listeners that turn into a listener, and they won't stick around long term and vice versa. Let's say, for example, you have an incredible show that's truly unique, but you don't have a way to reach more of the right listeners. Your podcast still won't grow. Now, most B2B podcasters never invest their time in learning both of these. So they stay stuck going through a process of trial and error, or even worse, not even trying at all to spend 1, 2, 3, sometimes even 5 years being consistent with the show for nothing to really pay off. So today we want to help you fix that. We want to walk you through four specific steps we take our clients through to grow a highly engaged listenership as fast as possible and start making way more money from their show. So what's step number one? Well, step number one is about building your show's USP or unique selling point. Imagine you own a food truck business. You move it into a small town to sell smash burgers at a food market. And it's a small town and the people who live there have never tasted a Smashburger before. What would happen? It would be exciting. People haven't experienced it before, so it would likely grow in popularity and you would have a fairly straightforward path to really succeed with your food truck business because you'd be bringing something new to the market. There's so little competition that it's easy for you to be the top choice. Of course you're going to be the number one place for Smashburgers and of course people are going to be excited about it. But let's say 10 years go by and there's now 25 different smashburger trucks at the market. Let's say you were the 26th and you were then just coming along at that 10 year point. What would it be like to try and make it with selling Smash Burgers at that point? How different would it be? I think it'd be way harder. You'll have much higher competition. It'll be way harder to actually stand out because you're just essentially a commodity. There's a bunch of different smash burger stands out there and quite frankly, there's no reason why people should go to your new smash burger stand versus everyone else. So you're not really an obvious choice in the market anymore. And this is such a big issue in the B2B podcasting space. Now, how this looks is having an interview based show, having a show that releases weekly, it's about an hour, having a show that covers general topics. If you fall into any of those categories, these are the type of characteristics that put you in the 26th smash burger category. Where it worked a while ago, but it's been very, very overdone now and it makes it near impossible to rise to the top and actually get noticed Now. It's important to know that we're not saying that you shouldn't have a podcast in a popular space. That's actually a good thing. But you need to have a podcast where there's a twist. If not, it's way harder to stand out and gain traction fast. Look, I remember we had a client called Laura, and for four years she was podcasting. She grew a show to 4,000 monthly downloads, but her issue was she launched her show in the leadership space, and at that time, there was barely any other shows actively posting talking about leadership. Her show was super general, interviewing leaders in the space, and the podcast took off. But years down the line, as more people started making podcasts about leadership, her show was no longer different. It no longer stood out. And the growth started to Flatline at this 4000 download mark to the point where the numbers started to decline month after month after month. She got to a spot where she's feeling defeated, demotivated, and she started questioning, hey, I'm investing. All of this time, I'm spending it on this podcast. I. But the show isn't growing, and I'm not generating an income. And that's when she started to reach out to our team to work with us one on one to fix her growth issues. Now, what we found when we started working with her was that although she was in a popular niche and there was tons of demand for her type of content, there was nothing unique about her specific show. So new listeners would essentially ignore her and just go to the industry leaders in her space. That's what led to the decline in her listenership. Now, what was the shift that we made with Laura's specific show to make it more unique, to help her stand out and to help her go from declining growth at 4,000 monthly downloads to six months later, 15,000 monthly downloads, and six months after that, 30,000 monthly downloads and tens of thousands of additional profit added to her podcast? Well, we made her show more unique, and there were two main ways that we did it. Number one was we helped her better target a segment of the market within leadership, so she could be the absolute only option and most obvious option for those listeners. So within the leadership space, there's a ton of different types of people listening to shows. There are managers, there are C suite leaders. There are entrepreneurial leaders. There are people who want to be leaders. It's very hard to ever be the best show when you're trying to serve all those different types of people. We helped Laura reposition the show. So instead of just an overarching leadership communication show, she honed in on what she was best at, which was helping introverts in a corporate role improved their communication and charisma so they could work their way up and step into more of a leadership role. This change was huge because it meant that out of all the people searching for leadership podcasts, the ones who actually were introverts who wanted to work on their communication aspect of their leadership the most, this show just became the gold mine, the thing that just stood out so much compared to everything else. Now this is great, but something else we did and you can imagine how much this would have helped the growth of the show and how much it stands out to that particular audience. Something else we did is we found a really interesting and exciting way to deliver that content. Instead of just bog standard interviews and maybe some solo episodes too, we added a completely new segment. In Laura's case it was bite sized solo episodes where each one reverse engineered a speech done by an A lister, whether that's a famous politician, artist, spokesperson, whatever. She reverse engineered what they did in that speech that made them charismatic and a good communicator, and then tailored the insight to her specific audience. Again, introverts in a corporate role, you m can imagine not only how valuable this was to that particular audience because it's made for them, specifically all the examples, everything is filtered through the nuance of if you're an introvert in a corporate setting, but also it's just something new and exciting. Way more exciting compared to the normal interview based shows who are all talking about leadership, but that being delivered in a unique way. Number one, she's attracting way more of the right listeners. But two, when they listen to the podcast they're like holy crap, I literally can't get this content anywhere else. And that's why people stuck around. The audience went crazy for it and the show exploded in a span of 6 to 12 months. Now look, when it comes to your unique positioning, it's not about just being different for being different's sake. It's about presenting your B2B podcast in a way that's wildly attractive, catches the attention of the listeners you want to reach, and consistently delivers high quality content they can't get anywhere else. That's what it means to have a truly unique show that stands out and gains traction fast. That's step number one of our four step system, having a truly unique B2B podcast. The remaining three steps are demand based content strategy, podcast SEO to rank on Apple and Spotify, and strategic podcast guesting where you appear as a guest on other top B2B podcasts. If this is clicking for you, if you are starting to see where the holes are with your current strategy, then that should be encouraging because it means that you. You're not at this brick wall. You can push through, you can grow your podcast. It is possible. We want to also make this clear that you don't have to try to figure this stuff out alone. By all means, if that's what you want to do, fantastic. But if you are in a spot where this totally makes sense to you, but in terms of how to properly apply it, you don't want to just spend another three to six months, another year, two years, going through a process of trial and error. You don't want to get bogged down in the wrong details and you'd rather just work with mentors and experts directly, one on one, to hold your hand every step of the way, to make sure you have a well positioned show that's unique and stands out to help you build a demand based content strategy based on what's proven to gain traction in your space, to help you rank on page one of Apple and Spotify so you're being found by thousands of the right listeners every single month, organically. And finally, to place you consistently on top B2B podcasts in your space without you worrying about the grunt work or the complexity around actually being a guest on other top shows. There'll be more details in a moment about how we can help you personally hit your podcasting goals with ease this year. So we covered why social media and high profile guests are killing your show's chances of growing faster. One simple change that helped a client grow past 30,000 monthly downloads and earn tens of thousands with their show. And three fundamental things every B2B podcaster needs to grow a profitable show. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. At the start of this episode, I said I'd tell you a little bit about me. So I'm about to share a secret with you. One that means you might hate me, quit listening to this podcast and think I'm a total scam. However, I want to be transparent. Are you ready? Well, my name is Tony. No, of course that's not the secret. The secret is that I'm actually a robot. My creators are, uh, Tig and Anthony, hence my name, Tony the Sick Bastards. Anyway, they are the founders of Get More Listeners. In the last five years, they've coached and interviewed over 400 podcasters and generated multiple six figures from their own podcast. They gave me access to everything they know and I'm here to share it with you. So while I don't understand why you humans are so obsessed with coffee, and I do understand to grow a, uh, B2B podcast that actually generates leads and nurtures them. So here's my offer to you. If you want to finally understand why your podcast isn't growing and get a personalized roadmap to fix it in less than 30 seconds, you can go to getmorelisteners.com B2B audit. Enter your show name, and we'll send you back a, uh, free mini podcast Audit. It's completely customized to you and your show. That's getmorelisteners.com B2B audit. The link is also in the show notes of this episode.