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Most business owners who create content are sitting on a gold mine of warm leads. But sadly, those leads are not turning into paying customers.

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Why? Well, it's because those leads never make.

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It onto your email list.

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And even if they do, you don't.

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Really email them all that much. So instead of building trust and driving sales on Autopilot, you're stuck constantly selling on social media or pouring money into.

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Paid ads just to stay visible.

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But imagine if instead your content actually generated leads, leads that landed on your list or warmed up over time and were ready to buy when the moment was right.

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Well, that's exactly what I'm gonna walk you through how to do today. My name is Kev Michael, and this is Grow the Show, the podcast that.

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Helps business owners grow their podcast.

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And most business owners come to me asking, how do I use my podcast.

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To get more sales?

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Well, today I'm gonna share with you.

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The simple strategy that helped me increase my revenue by over 200% via email. In this episode, I'm gonna break down three things. Number one, why you should get your audience on your email list. Number two, how to get them to want to join your email list.

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And then number three, what to do.

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With them once they are on your email list. I've learned these lessons the hard way so that you can skip all of the pain that I had to go through.

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And if you haven't met me before, hi, my name is Kev Michael, and let me tell you how I learned these lessons the hard way so that you can skip all this pain that I had to go through. So in May of 2018, while I was a software at a big health insurance company, I launched a podcast about my hometown. Just a couple months after that, I decided to go all in on being an entrepreneur. And I left that full time job to do the podcast full time. Over the next two years, I grew that podcast past 100,000 downloads and $120,000 in monetized revenue. And in June 2020, I launched Grow the Show, which is a company that since then has helped other podcasters and business owners grow their audience and monetize. Now, in 2021, Grow the Show did really well. The company did 518k in overall revenue, and I had three employees in addition to myself. But it didn't stop there, because in 2022, the company tripled and I did $1.3 million in revenue with 12 employees. Then things got way out of hand and I scaled back the company dramatically in 2023, scaled back down to $500k in revenue. And I basically became a solopreneur with one or two assistants or employees, and I focused on content. That period of time is when I learned the power of the email list, because I didn't start emailing my list regularly until February 2022, which was 18 months into scale and Grow the Show. So during that time period, February 21 to January 2022, the new clients of my coaching program came almost exclusively from Facebook and Instagram ads. And the way it would work is people would see the ad, which would go to a webinar, which I called a free masterclass. But here's the problem. If people didn't book a call within one to two days after seeing that ad, they never bought. And that's because they saw the ad once. That was their opportunity to click on the thing. And if that didn't happen, I didn't do anything to re engage or retarget people. But this process still worked really well. I averaged $47.5k per month in revenue. I had three employees. My offer was the Grow the show accelerator. And things were going great. Things were super profitable. But then in February 2022, I started emailing my list because I was talking to a friend about how to grow my company, and he asked me about how I was using my email list, and I was like, I don't know. I don't really use it much. He said, you should do that, man. You should email your list. Well, I started doing that, and the impact was huge. So before emailing the list the previous six months prior, like I said before, my offer was the Grow the show accelerator. I had three employees, and my revenue was 47 and a half thousand dollars per month. After emailing my list, the only thing that changed was I started emailing my list every single day. I had the same offer, I had the same team. And in the subsequent year, the company averaged $107,000 per month. That is a 226% increase in revenue that we experienced by changing nothing but emailing the list more. Now, this was really impactful because just emailing my list regularly every week solved several problems all at once. The first problem that it solved is that people would opt into my ads, they'd watch the masterclass, and if they didn't book a call, they would just simply forget that that happened and never book a call, and I'd never see them again. Well, by emailing the list regularly, I was able to keep Grow the Show top of mind. Also, sometimes that masterclass that, like, hour long of value wasn't enough to convince people to book a call. They saw it, they're like, I don't really think I want to book a call. But once I started emailing regularly, those emails provided additional value, social proof, and objection handling, which would help people decide to get on the call. So more people got on the call with the same amount of ad spend. Another problem that I experienced is that sometimes people would opt in before they were ready to buy. You know, they were just looking for information, and they weren't yet in a position where it made sense for them to join a podcast coaching program. And so email solved that, because by emailing them regularly and providing value, they would hear from me while they're in the buying mood. Another problem that email solved is that at that point, I was only talking about my offers on my podcast and on social media, which reached a smaller fraction of my audience. Because with your podcast, you can only really reasonably expect to reach 5 to 10% of your total podcast audience in a given episode. And on social media, you're thrilled if you reach 2%, even 1% of the people that are following you. So it's really hard on those platforms to reach the people who are in your audience. But with email, you're virtually guaranteed to reach them unless they unsubscribe or your emails are going to the promotions tab, which is solvable. So emailing solved a lot of problems, But I still had another problem, a really big problem that I needed to solve. You see, back then in 2022, when I was doing 100k in revenue per month, I was still completely reliant on paid ads to get new clients. And if you were a podcaster in 2022, there's a good chance that you saw my ads, because while I still run ads today, I was spending about 10 times the amount that I'm spending today on ads. In 2022, I allowed my company to grow and the expenses in my company to grow like crazy. And so in order for me to meet expenses and pay my employees, I had to continue spending tons of money every single month on ads. And if I ever stopped spending money on ads, new lead flow would drop and revenue would drop. And this got me into really big trouble. So my company actually grew too big. And so here's what that paid ad spiral did to me. Number one, I didn't understand at the time that paid ads actually get more expensive as you scale. So as your company gets bigger and you spend more and more on ads, it costs you more per person to reach the right people. I can explain that in another episode if you're interested. At that time my team had grown to 12, so I expanded my sales team, I hired setters, I launched an internal production agency, and so I had this huge team and expenses ballooned. Meanwhile, every month I was spending more and more and more money on ads to get more leads because the plane had gotten so big I had to keep shoveling fuel into the engine, which makes no sense, but I think you're following me here in order to just keep the plane in the air. And yes, this eventually broke. So I literally in 2023 took a step back, descaled my company, and since then have been reconfiguring what I do now. Ironically, the whole time my organic content with Grow the show was very popular with my audience of podcasters, but I was using it more as a lead nurturing mechanism, not a lead generation mechanism. And let me explain the difference between those two things. Lead so Lead Nurture content is content that you publish that is there to deepen trust. It is not gonna get new people to discover you, but the people who already know who you are are really gonna be able to dive deep with you and trust you way more. Compare that to lead gen content, which is where your content itself brings in new traffic. It gets people to discover you for the first time. When I work with entrepreneurs who are looking to have audience driven business, we have to get really clear behind what content are we publishing to generate leads and what content are we publishing to nurture leads. Now to be fair, it is not a complete one or the other, right? They are not mutually exclusive. Lead Nurture content can definitely generate leads and lead generating content can definitely nurture leads. But you want to have intention behind those pieces of content and also which platforms that you're on. Your favorite creator's favorite creator Jay Clouse talks about this all the time and he uses different words to describe this, which is also really, really great. He calls Lead Gen Content Discovery content and he calls Lead Nurture Content Relationship content Lead Gen Content Discovery content gets people to discover you. Lead Nurture content Relationship content deepens your relationship with people. So audio podcasts and emails are almost exclusively lead nurturing content and social media and To a degree, YouTube is lead gen content. I'll cover more of that in another episode if you want leave a comment letting me know that you want that. So if you in 2023 I made some slight adjustments to my organic content. At that time I was using the Grow the Show podcast almost exclusively as Lead nurturing. So I wasn't even worried. Ironically, I wasn't trying to grow the show of Grow the Show. I was using ads to get people to discover me and then sending them to the podcast so that they could be like, wow, this guy really knows what he's talking about. I want to work with him. But once my ad spiral finally broke and I couldn't spend as much money on ads anymore, I needed a different way to generate leads. So I made adjustments to the Grow the Show podcast, and when I did that, leads started to flow in like crazy for free. It was insane. And what I learned is that when you do it this way, popular pieces of content that you publish generate leads constantly and for years to come. I still to this day get leads from episodes of my podcast that I published years ago. It's way more leverage than ads and way more leverage than cranking out social media posts all day, every day, all week. Another reason why this is awesome is because it's not as predictable as ads. One of the great things about ads is that it is very predictable. You can look at your metrics and it's very easy to project what's going to happen next. With content, that's not really the case, but content is so much cheaper than spending tons and tons of money on meta ads. Back in 2022, when things were going crazy and I was spending up to $80,000 a month on ads, I was paying 10 to 15,000 dol per lead per lead. That is not the case with organic content. Now, with your organic content, not as many of your leads are hyper targeted. If you know how to do ads right, you get really good at targeting and only bringing in the right leads. But that's okay. I'm cool with that. The next thing is that leads that come from content are better because they already trust you. They already know who you are compared to leads that come from an ad, who tend to be very skeptical and they're like, so tell me about yourself, tell me who you are, tell me what you do. And it's like, oh my God, I've this person's totally not going to buy this right now because they just are worried that I'm a scammer. Whereas people who come from content, they got value from your first before they go into your sales process. And for that reason, trust is much higher from the start because you led with value and you gave them something first. Here's why generating leads for my content was so impactful. The problem that I had before was I was only Getting new leads from paid ads. So I had to keep spending more and more on ads to get more leads. Well, getting people from my content to join my email list was free because I was already spending the money and time to make the content. So I was basically getting free leads out of something I was already doing. Another problem that I had is that I had so many leads in my organic audience who had never gotten onto my email list, which was pretty funny at the time because I was running tons of ads and getting all these emails. But there were thousands of people who had discovered grow the show elsewhere and had never seen the ad on Instagram and were never offered the chance to join my email list. So by getting leads from my content, I was able to scrape all of these folks who've been listening to my stuff for years and were never offered the opportunity to get onto my email list. So these are all the reasons why I've learned it's beneficial to get your content audience onto your email list. Number one, you're gonna get more leads onto your email list. Number two, those leads are already going to be warm and trusting. Number three, you won't have to spend extra on ads to get those leads. Number four, you're gonna publish the content once and leads are gonna come through indefinitely. Number five, you're going to have direct access to contact those leads. Unlike social media, where you got to hope that the algorithm shows you to the people who said they want to see your stuff next, you're steadily going to be providing value sharing, case studies and handling objections on those email lists. So people who aren't really ready to book a call will finally be able to do so. You're going to be top of mind when they're ready to buy, and you're going to convince them via your emails to be ready to buy. So that's why you should get your audience onto your email list. But more importantly, how do you get your audience to want to join your email list? Well, you do that by offering something useful in exchange for joining your email list. And so generally, you can offer one of two things to get someone on your email list. Number one is that is you're going to offer them a newsletter. So being on the email list is going to be valuable to them. Or you can offer a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something that solves a problem for the subscriber or for free. So let's talk about newsletters first. What I found is that in aggregate, successful creator newsletters are one of three things. Number one, a short essay this is like. So if you've ever been on Justin Welch's the Saturday Solopreneur newsletter, you've seen what a short essay looks like. You can also make a newsletter that's three to five useful nuggets. And so Tim Ferriss 5 Bullet Friday has been around for ages. Really, really valuable, really tiny little nuggets. Also, James Clear's Three2One email newsletter is really popular. It's three to five useful nuggets. You can also do a content digest, which is where you send an email that summarizes all of the content you've published over the last week. So if you publish different things on different platforms, this can serve as that one stop shop. Hey, here's all the stuff that I published this week that you may have missed. So Amy Porterfield's newsletter looks like that. Or you can make a newsletter that's a hybrid of all of the above. It's kind of all of those things. And Jay Clouse, who I mentioned earlier, does this in Creator Science. It's kind of all of this stuff. It's a content digest. It's useful nuggets. It's a short essay shout out to you, Jay, I don't know how you do it. So you can do a newsletter to get people onto your email list, or you can offer a lead magnet. And so there's a few types of lead magnets. Number one, there's a diagnostic lead magnet that is like a free consultation or a free discovery call, or I've been testing recently doing podcast audits, where I say if you submit this form and you qualify, we will audit your podcast. You can do a quiz. I've seen quizzes lately where people are like, what kind of XYZ are you? And you take the quiz and people give you your email. That's a diagnostic lead magnet. There's also educational lead magnets, which is like an ultimate guide PDF or a webinar or a how to masterclass. And there's a couple types of educational lead magnets. So you can do like a here's how to get outcome or here's how to get transformation lead magnet. So that's like an ultimate guide or a webinar or a masterclass. Or you can also do a lead magnet that just solves the first step of multiple steps. These types of lead magnets can be a video, they can be an email course, they can be a PDF, they can be an ebook, whatever it is. But it's an educational lead magnet that educates the consumer of the lead magnet. On what their problem is, why they have a problem and what the solution might be. Or you can also offer simply a free trial. A lot of software companies do that. So like a free month or the first time we do something, it's free. Or you can offer a discount like 10% off your first order. And so here's an example of a diagnostic lead magnet. That is a quiz. Amy Porterfield put this out. It's three types of people are replacing their income with a digital course. Take the quiz to see if you're one of them and it asks people questions and then for the right people it says, yes, it's you. And then you're on her email list. This is an example of an educational lead magnet. So this is the masterclass that I sent people to when I was running ads and it did great. And it's also one of my most popular lead magnets. Now people go to growtheshow.commasterclass and they see an hour long presentation where I am walking through how to grow and monetize a podcast. Note, I have not updated that masterclass in two years. So some of the information at this point is a little out of date. But you can go to growtheshow.com masterclass if you want to see this lead magnet in action. And then here's an example of a discount lead magnet. So if you go to stitchfix.com, they're going to say, do you want $10 off your first order? That's a lead magnet. You have to give them your email in Exchange for that $10 off, which means they're paying $10 per email. Once you have something valuable that you can offer in exchange for joining your email list, then you need to create a landing page. The landing page is where they're actually going to do the transaction of giving you their email address in exchange for whatever you promised them. And the key to having a high converting landing page is this. Keep it simple. If you're on the video version of this episode right now, you can see I'm showing you a landing page for for my masterclass that had a 29% opt in rate. This landing page has the title up top and then it has four bullets on what you're going to get in the masterclass. And then underneath that there's a button that says access the masterclass. Now, when people click on the button, another box pops up that asks them for their email. Now this opt in page is devastatingly simple. And I can tell you that whenever I work with entrepreneurs who are looking to get leads. They make their landing pages really complicated because they think they need to cram as much information as possible into that landing page. Let me give them more information and more proof that this is gonna be good. When in actuality, what I have found through testing literally hundreds of dollars on meta ads, I've spent over half a million dollars on meta ads just by myself. Is that the simpler the landing page, the better it converts. And so the one that I'm showing right now in the episode has a 29% opt in rate where it used to have a picture of me on it and when it had that picture, it had a 20% opt in rate. Yes, that's right. When I removed the picture of myself looking cool and professional, opt in rate went up by 50%. And I'm not the worst looking guy. But the thing is, the landing page just became very simply. Here's what you get if you opt into this lead magnet. Very, very simple. So if you're having trouble opting in, try making your opt in page more simple and I bet you get a higher opt in rate. Here's another example of an opt in page that I've used. This one had a 38% opt in rate, which is the highest opt in rate I've ever achieved for myself. It's from my email course, the 12 days of podcastgrowth.com it does have the Grow the show logo and it crushes and it's almost identical to the masterclass opt in page. It does very, very well. It's very simple. So once you have the very simple landing page, your next step is to actually send your audience to it. And this is the important part. This is where you want to make great calls to action within your content. Now, last week's episode of Chief Audience Officer went over in painstaking detail how to make great CTAs. So definitely, if you haven't yet consume that. If you're on the audio platforms, it'll be the most recent episode. If you're on YouTube, we'll make it show up somewhere. But you definitely want to make sure that you consume that episode so you can learn how to make great CTAs from your content to your email list. So let's assume you're doing that. You're making great calls to action and people are opting in. Well, the job is not done because you now need to get them to actually consume the lead magnet. This is something that a lot of people miss. And this is important because if someone gives you their email because they want a lead magnet, but they never consume the lead magnet. So if it's a masterclass, they don't watch the masterclass. If it's a discount, they don't use the discount. If it's a PDF, they never open the PDF. If it's an e book, they never download or read the ebook. That's what you want to avoid. And it is your job to make sure that they consume the lead magnet. And so there's three ways that you can make that happen. Number one, make it take as few steps as possible to consume the lead magnet. Please, for the love of all things good, don't make it a scavenger hunt. Which I've seen before. I've talked to clients, I've talked to people where I'm like, okay, what's your lead magnet? And they're like, oh, it's a free course. And I'm like, oh, God. Free courses are tough because they're just. They're so complicated. And I'm like, okay, once someone opts in, how do they get to the course? Well, they go to this page, and then they have to go to the app store on their phone and download my app, and then they have to make an account, and then they got to go to their email and confirm their email address and set a new password. Then they got to open up the app and navigate to the course. I'm like, there is not a single human being on this planet who's going to go through all those steps to get your free course. The second way to get more lead magnet consumption is to very simply, when someone opts into your email list to get a lead magnet, immediately send them an email that reminds them that they opted into your email list to get a lead magnet. You need to say, hey, here's what this is. Here's what it's going to do for you. Here's why it's awesome. And sometimes I'll be even as overt to say, hey, you saw an ad that you clicked on, an ad that promised you a masterclass on how to grow and monetize your podcast. I'm the guy who made that ad. And so here I am emailing you the masterclass like you requested, because people are just doing stuff online. They don't remember it. And a lot of times it happens where people are like, what's this email about a masterclass? This must be spam, when 10 minutes ago, they opted into it. So your first email really wants to make it clear, here's what this is. Here's why it's awesome, and here's why you should consume it. And then the third thing I recommend is at minimum, follow up within a week. So if you sent them an email to get access to a masterclass, what a lot of people will do is send the lead magnet and then put them on their newsletter. What I like to do is within a week, send an automated email that follows up and say, hey, did you watch the masterclass? Was it helpful? Ask them if they got any value from it. And so here's an example of the initial email that I send when you opt into the masterclass, as you can see, it's like, hey, here's the podcast growth masterclass you requested. Here's the headline, here's the link to watch. Here's what you're going to get in this. Oh, by the way, consider booking a call. Okay, so we've learned why you should get your audience on your email list. We've learned how to get them to want to join your email list. Now we must learn what to do with them once they are on your email list. And so let me ask you this, does this sound like you? Yeah, I got a bunch of emails on my list, but I never really email them. I can't blame you. As I said earlier, that used to be me. You gotta email your list. These people have typed in their email so you can email them. Everybody knows how this stuff works. They know how to unsubscribe. If they're still there, they still want your emails. It's okay. And the way that I did this, that grew company revenue by over 200% was this way was I emailed three types of emails to my list. The first type was the value email with a P.S. this is where the bulk of the email is useful, valuable stuff. And then at the end, there's a PS to have a call to action of some sort. But if you're on my email list now, you see that type of email every Tuesday or Wednesday. I say, hey, this is the episode that I made this week. Go consume it. By the way, if you want to book a call, here's how to do it. The second type of email that you can send is called the indirect offer. This is where the email appears to be a value email, but by the end, there's a concrete cta. And so a great example of this is if you email your list with a case study of a client or customer that you worked with or a persuasive essay on why it's a good idea to get help now with whatever you help people with. And then finally, and my favorite one, the one that you don't want to abuse but works really well is the direct offer email. This is where you send an email and the whole email is just, hey, here's what I have to offer. If you want that, book a call here. Everybody's afraid to do these. And yes, they do have a higher unsubscribe rate, but I'm telling you, man, they make sales. I like to make the direct offer once, at most once a month, usually about once or twice a quarter. So I might send an email about a new episode of the show. I'll include the thumbnail of that episode of the show. And then at the end I'll say, P.S. if you want XYZ, book a call or apply here. You'd be surprised. A lot of times this gets more throughput than the other types of emails. Then there's the indirect offer. That's where you send an email that says, hey, let me tell you a client's story. And the email actually tells the story. And here's the part is actually valuable. Somebody genuinely learns from what you put in that email. But by the end, it gets into more of a concrete CTA where it's like, hey, if you want to experience what these people experienced, book a call here. And then finally is the direct offer email where it's just, hey, if you want this, this and this, click here and apply to book a call or whatever your sales process is. Okay? So that's what you do with them. Once you're on their email list, you email them and use one of those three email types. Rule of thumb is that you want to be at about a 5 to 1 ratio of value emails with indirect emails. So I like to send five value emails for every one indirect email. And then in there I just pepper direct emails based on what I need. So that's going to do it for this episode. My hope is that this helps you to build an audience of buyers. If you have any questions at all about this, please let me know in the comments. If you're on YouTube or Spotify or if you're on Apple Podcasts, there's a link in the description of this episode to submit some feedback. My name is Kev Michael. This is Grow the Show and I will see you in the next one.