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Podcast Answer Man
484 - The Long Game of Podcasting: Lessons From 5,000+ Episodes with Guest Scott Smith
00:49:30
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- [00:00]
A
In this episode of Podcast Answer man, you're going to receive a significant number of insights from two podcasters who have been podcasting for more than 20 years. Well, hello my friend and welcome back to another episode of the podcast Answer Man. My name is Cliff Ravenscraft and this is the podcast about podcasting, helping you take your message, your business and your life to the next level. That's right. It doesn't matter if you are brand new to this content creating world or if you've been creating content for many years. There's something we can all do to take everything we do in life to the next level. And I am taking this podcast to the next level by bringing in one of my friends, Scott Smith, who has been podcasting since 2005. He has, and he. You're about ready to hear him correct me. Let's see here. Over 150 million downloads with 5,282 episodes that have been published. And actually we had this conversation a few days ago, so the numbers increased a little bit since then. But if you ever wondered what it would be like to just listen like a fly on the wall to two different podcasters who have been creating content where by the way, I'm just now getting ready to approach over 5,000 episodes myself over the past 20 years. Scott and I are a part of a club of people who have been doing this for two decades. And, and there are some things about the old days that are just fun to reminisce about. But also when you've got somebody who has been publishing so much that you've got a catalog, an archive of over 5,000 podcast episodes, there's so many things we learn along the way. In this conversation. You'll get insights about business models, advertising, the trials and errors that come up with trying to figure out membership models and technology stacks. Then when life kind of gets in the way, when you have a big idea and you're ready to take a plunge forward and then life just smacks you up side the head with a two by four and says, ah, hold on, there's something else that's going to take your attention for a little while. This episode has so much to offer you. This is not just a casual conversation, an interview with somebody that you may or may not know that you care about or whatever. Just listen to this. As a content creator, whether you've been creating content for many years or you're thinking about launching your very first show, there is so much in this conversation that will drastically help you take your podcasting efforts to A whole new level. At the end of this episode, I will remind you to check out the show notes to see the list of insights that I compiled to make sure that you don't miss any of these beautiful gems. Without any further ado, here is my friend Scott Smith from the Daily Boost podcast. Scott, over 100 million downloads and over 5,000 podcast episodes, man. How do you keep yourself going in the podcasting world?
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B
No idea, man. And you're a little light. I think it's 150 million and I think it's 5,282, not to be specific.
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A
Tell me, when did you first discover podcasting?
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B
I discovered it in. It was over the Christmas holiday in 2004 and if you recall back that far back in November, I believe USA Today and I think it was the New York Times kind of acknowledge podcasting on a national scale. And they said, here it is. It's something called this RSS feed thing. And I have a picture of me today, I wish I knew and I would have brought it. It was me sitting at this very old small computer in my, my gym shorts and just looking for something to do online. I was Googling basically, and I found this thing called a podcast. I said, that's interesting. A podcast. I think, I think maybe I can do that. I have a broadcast background. And I thought, well, I was trying to get into personal growth and my own consulting world. I was trying to build that up and I just didn't know how to do it. It's when you get into something that requires content and you have no content, that's a hard step. And so I, I saw it, I walked in the living room, I told my wife, I said, honey, I think I found it. It's called a podcast. And she said, predictably, pod. What? Because nobody knew what a podcast was, but, but I got it, I understood it and I immediately went back in, I started kind of dealing with it. It took me about three months. It kind of figured out because we didn't have WordPress, we didn't have anybody make our RSS feeds. You remember? It was crazy. We had nothing.
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A
Yeah, we were using text based editors and hand coding RSS code inside of it and saving it as a XML file and FTPing it up to our web servers.
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B
Yes, we were, we're doing it all. And you know, it's kind of funny because you know how we second guess ourselves sometimes. I done radio 20, 20 years at that point. I wasn't afraid of a microphone, I wasn't afraid of any of this. Stuff. And all of a sudden I'm in the studio whispering as if I'm a podcaster. Like I was just playing podcast guy. Right? Because that's what they were all doing is very NPR ish back in the beginning. Napsterish actually is what it was more like. And I did that for a while and it felt uncomfortable. So what I ended up doing was I thought I had to launch somehow. So I had this idea in radio to do what was called a 60 second vignette. And you've heard them before and typically it's a story or something at 60 seconds long and there's an ad on it and they kind of tease you in, they run an ad, they come back and they do the rest of it. I said, well, I'll make these vignettes and I'll put them on the radio. So I wrote 260 of them five days a week, one every single day for an entire year. And I had this crazy idea, I said, well, let's make them a podcast instead. So I did. I just didn't do a commercial. I just created these 60 second podcasts. They ran Monday through Friday and I launched them. And a funny story, I remember going out, I put them out on the feed. Friday night I hit live. I went out to TGI Fridays for some dinner, had some Sesame Jack chicken wings, some fries and a couple of beers. And I came back to about 20 emails saying, My gosh, where have you been? I love you, I love you, I love you. And I was, I was live to the world and. And that was it. And game on. Because the emails didn't stop coming and I just kept going. That's, that's pretty much how I got the start and that's how long I've been doing it.
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A
Do you remember the first podcast that you ever subscribed to?
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B
I'm sure it was. Was it Adam Curry, the source code?
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A
Yeah, mine was this week in tech. Before it was.
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B
Yeah, I was gonna say that was. It was one or the other for me right then. Same thing.
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A
Yeah. So mine was Revenge of the Screensavers is what it was originally called. It was a bunch of folks that Leo Laporte gathered from the tech TV days. But yeah, so there was that. And then I heard him talk about Adam Curry and so I started with the daily source codes and boy did I. The Daily source code. I listened to that every single day. And then I heard both of them in the same week talk about this guy named Father Roderick Von Hogen who was a Catholic priest from the Netherlands who was reporting live from the Vatican about who's gonna be the new pope back in the day. This is in 2005. And so I'm like, sure, why not? And I started. And, you know, to this day, I've never missed an episode of Father Roderick Von Hogan's podcast all the way since 2005. And I still listen to Mac Break weekly every single week since. I've been listening to Leo every week since 2005.
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B
You are a super fan, man. There's no doubt. I mean, I can't say that I, I, yeah, I, it's, it's interesting. I, I got into the shows. There was no industry back then, and we didn't know what was going on. And so they were the, they were the lifeline to allow us. And then I, I got an email or a phone or something from Adam one day asking to, To. To feature me, and I still have that clip. You may have done that as well. So he was promoting podcasts that he put my original shows on his podcast. I thought I'd made it big time, man, when that happened, but I haven't listened. It's interesting. When it comes to listening to a podcast, I'm very hit or miss. I tend to focus on my content, I tend to study a lot, and I'll get into a couple of months of listening, and then I'll just go away for a couple months and not even keep up with it. Yeah, just who I am personally.
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A
Well, for me, I used to be an avid podcast listener. It was like most of the content I consumed was that, and I would listen to about seven different shows every single week without fail, and then occasional shows here and there of other things dashed in there. Since the pandemic, everything has changed. And today I probably only listen to three different podcasts on a consistent weekly basis, and it's really only two that I don't want to go a week without listening. And that's the two that I just mentioned. Father Roderick and Leah laporte.
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B
Yeah. So my question is that, okay, since the Pandemic, a lot has changed, and for you to make that kind of change and go down to two podcasts a week, what changed for you?
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A
Clubhouse. We were all locked in and no interactions. Couldn't go to conferences, couldn't speak, didn't do any of that stuff. And the entire globe is looking for ways to connect. And millions upon millions upon millions of people flocked to Clubhouse, and it gave us this real live interaction. You could host rooms, people could come in And. And I spent. No, I invested approximately four to eight hours a day, seven days a week on Clubhouse throughout the Pandemic. And that will eat into your podcast consumption time.
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B
Yeah. Yeah. What a hot mess that was. And it was a lot of fun until all the marketers took over and kind of killed it. But I. You know, for me, the pandemic was not Clubhouse, although I think I did one. And I had a bunch of people show up just because I was doing one. My thing was in. In the pandemic, I think everybody in California, and this is a joke I do all the time. So if you're in California, please don't get mad at me. I think they all became a life coach and they all got a microphone. I wish I were selling microphones back in 2020 and 2021, because it was like over a million new podcasts. It changed. It changed. We had so much more volume. Everything grew by a million, million and a half. And within a couple years, they were all gone again. So I think just so many voices out there.
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A
Yep. So that's the first thing that shifted my consumption habits. And the second thing that shifted my consumption habits was TikTok. I mean, TikTok is absolutely, hands down, the best curated social media content experience I've ever had since the original days of Twitter without an algorithm. I really miss original Twitter when you could subscribe to the updates of everybody you know, who you care about with no ads, no other junk, no promoted content, and you never missed a single update. So you always know what they had on their sandwich for lunch each day. I really miss this very vital, important information.
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B
That's right. I heard their coffee maker in the background. I saw it right there. Yeah, it was real. Yeah. I've never been a TikTok person. I've tried it. And I exited from it because it was so scary. Because it was that addictive. Yeah, it's good.
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A
I will say that I am back more towards the podcast consumption time. So for me, I'm back in the place where I listen to about seven to 15 podcast episodes a week, but they're not. I'm jumping in and out of people's shows here and there. It's just, you have to. You have to have for me that personal. I'm sharing who I am, what's going on in my world. And I resonate with you as a host for me to never miss an episode of your show anymore.
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B
Yeah, I think that. I mean, that's always been true. That's one of the best parts of Podcasting from the very beginning, and it still is. And that's the performative nature of a podcast. Being real, but being able to elevate yourself a little bit so people can understand who you are on the other side of it, and then the good content as well. And. And so the discovery is the issue. So if you can find them and they resonate with you and then they're really. You'll stick, you'll stay. We've had people listen every single day to me. Other people, I'm a hot mess. They hate me. But, man, some people love me because I. I really do stay. Right. I try to do what you're looking for. I try to be who you expect me be when you show up, I elevate. I get myself ramped up a little bit. So I know right to land right where I need to be, and I'm going to hit it every time, best I can, and then I'm done. And I think that's who people listen to now. And I think if you want to stand out right now in podcasting and YouTube, whatever you want to do, you hear this, you got to be real, got to be transparent. You do. But it's an elevated version of you. And the people that can do that, they end up with a really good following because it's a little theater, when you think about it just a little bit.
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A
You know, I definitely understand what you're saying. There's a part of me, Scott, that when I hear just a slightly elevated performative nature to it, there's a part of me that says, but do I really have to? But the truth is, is I know that I would be boring and I would lose people if I didn't.
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B
You better believe it. Never be yourself.
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A
See, that phrase seems to have two different meanings. And so I guess what I'm trying to get at, for the nuance, for those who might be struggling and have resistance to what you just said, for example, never be yourself. It's like, no, be yourself, but show up as yourself with a little bit of oomph, with a little added energy to it. So I do. I do have podcaster voice, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, I'll go out with the family, and every now and then I'll start. I'll get really. It's like, oh, gosh, Dad's talking with his podcaster voice again.
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B
Oh, yeah, yeah. Listen, I. You know, I've been a radio since I was 18 years old. I can't not have it. I can't pretend to Be a podcaster. You know, I'm a broadcaster and when I open my mouth and I go, and I'm a high energy guy anyway, I have to dial back because I will naturally go over the top. I was a top 40 shock jock for a lot of years. I've got that built in, in my personality. When I get the biggest compliments. It's, it's when I run the whole spectrum, it's when I use the soft, when I go over the top, when I give you a little more than you expect. And most people say when I'm up on my podium just giving it to them, that's when they know it's real. Because I've turned off the filter. Yeah, I'm not saying any bad words, but I've turned off the filter. That is. Is really kind of causing most people hold back on that. I just let it go and that's when they hear it and they. I get all kinds of emails when I do that. Not being mean, not being over the top, just. Just getting inside my head to hear how I'm thinking. I think to me podcasting these days, and I think in general where we are right now, there's a. You almost have to make the. You got to see how I came to a conclusion. And so whether I'm energized and up over the top when I'm studying, like right now, I'm exploring a thought. If you see me on camera, you see me thinking, trying to put my thoughts together, you're seeing where my conclusion is coming to. And so you're getting the authentic me, trying to figure stuff out. And yet I'm very much aware there's a wall between me and you. And make no mistake, it's an artificial wall. It's called the fourth wall. It's been their film and TV forever. If you don't elevate enough to break through that wall, you're a boring regular person.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So you need a little bit. A little bit. Otherwise you're boring regular person, as we all are.
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A
So, Scott, this first show that you did with these daily 60 second bits, Monday through Friday, was that your first show you said, and what was the name of it that you gave it?
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B
That was called the Motivation to Move Minute.
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A
And that started in 2005, right?
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B
Yeah, I think we launched the first ones in March of 2005.
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A
Is that show still going today?
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B
No, no, we stopped that show. Although, interestingly, because we were very much involved in fitness. That's where this all started.
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A
Okay.
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And I kind of Moved beyond that as I got older and didn't want to do push ups anymore. But that, that was a good show. But what I ended up doing was, and I've actually considered this a funny side shoot here is that these days, that 60 second format, I could follow scripts today and make them into a reel and go boom, boom, boom, boom. And I have considered doing it.
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A
That would be very cool.
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B
Yeah, it's come back around. So what I did back then was this was, I think, some of the genius of this, if I had any genius. I was just a radio guy recording, talking, having fun. That's all I was doing. Yeah, I, I recognized that I didn't have any community connection, that the 60 seconds got me emails, but it didn't give me a chance to connect with people. And so I said, well, on the weekend I'm going to do a weekend show and I'll call it the Motivation to Move show. And on the weekend I basically recapped the five days up until that point and did a 30 minute show and produced it with music and I read listener letters. I did all kinds of cool stuff. That was the beginning of the business. When I did that, when I connected to that level, that built the community. It built the first courses, it built the first membership sites, it built everything. When I went on the weekend and brought the community into what I was doing, that was huge. And, and to this day that's still the thing that works. I just did it last week. A thousand comments on Instagram last week. All I did was reach into the community and start engaging them. That's all I did. People, they so want that. But that's where the next step was into that 30 minute weekend show.
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A
So it was basically a six day a week podcast feed, is that correct?
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B
Correct.
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A
All right. And it became weekly and it was still called Motivation to Move. How long did you keep that show running?
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B
I'd have to remember that show in some way, shape or form. Probably ran for, I'm thinking maybe 10 years.
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A
Okay.
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B
Now we had brought in another show underneath that, that was part of it, which is the one I still do today. And it came fairly early on because I recognized that the Motivation to Move show. We didn't have ads back then and I. We've got agencies and we've run ads all these years. And although back then you really couldn't read ads, you got in trouble if you ran ads. But tell me more about that.
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A
What do you mean?
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B
Oh, nobody, Are you kidding? A podcast is. No, they're pure. You can't run an ad on a podcast back in 2008.
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A
Interesting.
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B
Like them.
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A
So you. So let's talk about that for just a moment. So you were running in the crowds where that was the prevalent message, is that correct, in 2007, 2008, not to run ads?
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B
That message, yeah. Oh, yeah. People hated it.
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A
So it's fun because there were, I think, three different distinct crowds of podcasters, and I happened to be right in the middle. So I certainly had people who were in my network who are Internet marketers. It's like, how can we squeeze every penny and get the greatest return on investment for every single second invested in anything that I do, let alone a podcast? But if I'm going to do a podcast, by golly, I better get paid for it. So I have people who are in that crowd. I had people who are in the crowd. Exactly like what you just said, huh? This is a pure medium. We are going to avoid screwing this up just like they did with radio and everything else. We must. So that was another. It was like the. It was the purists. It's like, we've got to protect this. And then there was people who, like me is like, listen, I just got into this cause I wanted to serve people. And right now I'm at the place where I've got a big enough audience that wants me to consistently create lots of content every week. I have a desire to create all that content, and I would love to leave my day job. And for me to do that, I've got to find some way to earn income and to dabble around with some ads here and there. And for me, I had shows like, devoted to the TV show Lost. And my wife and I were podcasting about Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives.
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B
Oh, I forgot about that stuff. You went down that road. I forgot about those shows. Yeah. So we had Big time, man.
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A
We had hundreds of thousands of subscribers and Time Warner Cable and DirecTV and Expedia.com and all of these other national brands said we would love to pay you to be sponsored in your podcast, to be spoken about in your content. And so, yeah, I did ads in 2006, 2007 and 2008. I did lots of ads.
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B
Yeah, let me clarify. I was not against them at all. And. And I was certainly ready to go after them, but I. I wasn't chasing them. To me, I had other things in mind where I could make a better living. The ad space has paid really well over the years. And then some years, not hardly at all. I Mean, it goes up and down. You can't trust a brand. They're. They'll. They'll fire you in a second. Yeah. So I, I never leaned on, on brands at all or ads. I just. It, it's, it's done well. I mean, it's, it's bought a couple of motorcycles in a house and a motorhome or so, and it's fine. But I had different ideas, so I was, I was open to it, but there was a very militant crowd out there that if you ran an ad, they didn't. Yeah, you remember them, right? They were not nice.
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A
Oh, they, they. And it was, it was like a turf war. I mean, I've never been in a city where they have gangs, you know, and the, you know, the Crips or the Bloods or. I don't understand that world other than what I've seen fictionalized on television about it and in movies. But, but I very much saw it in the no ads purist podcast people and the people who are like, no, let's all agree on the official ia. I don't even remember the iab, the Internet Advertiser Broadcast Consortium. Let's all agree how we track ads or downloads and let's bring this in, get standards involved here.
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B
And boy, it was a mess then, It's a mess now.
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A
I saw people who, I'm like, I am really good friends with this person. I'm really good friends. And these two people hate each other and do not have anything nice to say. It was interesting back in the day,
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B
it was interesting that. I mean, even podcasters, because we didn't have the. We were on what podcast Alley and things like that, guessing our downloads. We would hack each other's feeds and we do. And we could, we could, you know, I could go get every single domain I could around somebody else's podcast to steal their traffic. And we, yeah, it was pretty. Eventually we grew out of it, I think, but it was, it was the wild west for sure. But I think I was like you as well. I had to pay my bills and I was already freelance at the time. I had my own company and, And I didn't want to do what I was doing anymore, so I had to get paid. And, and the ads weren't going to pay the bill back then. Yeah. And honestly, I never wanted to be in the ad business. I still don't want to be the ad business. I do what I do because I like to do it. And when you're, when you sell ads, you're in the Ad business. And if you've ever been in the ad business, it's not a nice business. It's a very ruthless cutthroat business. I just didn't want to do that. So I went kind of the route like you did. I went the more of the membership and course route. That's kind of how I did it.
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A
Yeah, I eventually did the membership route. We created something called the GSPN TV plus membership. You pay $10 a month and you would get password protected feeds that are your user ID and you could put it in all your podcast directories and podcasting software and we'd give you all this extra content that's not available to the public. So we dabbled with all of that. Eventually though, for me, my own journey is when people started saying, cliff, can you teach us how to podcast? I'm like, okay, this was my first foray in a product or service that I could offer online. And I realized, wow, I'm making a whole lot more money teaching people how to podcast and doing coaching at first one on one and then in group coaching. Then it's like the amount of time and effort spent managing the PHP software that I personally created to do the membership. Because this is back in 2007.
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B
I know, man, we did it too.
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A
It was all hand coded stuff. The amount of time working with advertisers, like I just shut down all the ads, shut down all the membership and gave all of our content away for free. And I just started to monetize through my own products and services as a coach, consultant and, and stuff like that.
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B
Yeah, so once you learn to do that and you get that figured out, I mean the dollar figures is so much higher. It's so much more satisfying, it's so much more consistent. I mean I always had a. From the day one. I said, everything's always. We used to call it continuity. It's now mrr. We all know that now. Right. So I said, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to make it a membership. Which was, you have to think about nowadays. If you see a premium podcast now that offers, you know, you pay them 3 or 4 bucks a month for that. I mean, we were charging 20 bucks a month, but I was probably one of the first to do it. I used the company, I think it was called, I forgot, I think it seems to be called Amember. I think, I think it was.
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A
Oh yeah, I remember Amember.
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B
And I shot him an email one day. I said, can this protect the podcast feed? And they said, no. And I looked at it, I said, I don't know that much about coding, but I think it'll work. And I ran for the next 10 years on that software and I could protect my feed. So my ability to not be a coder, but to look at it and just get it online and get it working. And let me tell you what happened. That made us a. That's how I made my first. I got to 150k a year on that software. Yeah. And that's what happened. And I launched a. It was an interesting time when I decided to go that route when we turned this into an actual money making machine. So. Yeah, but I remember all that. It was, it was quite crazy. Quite crazy.
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A
You threw out a term there that maybe not everyone is familiar with, but you said, mrr Monthly Recurring revenue. So that's where you were doing your membership. And your membership. What did it include back in the day when you first launched it? What were the benefits of membership?
- [25:58]
B
It was interesting. The Daily Boost podcast that I have now that still runs today started as a. It started really for one reason. Well, I guess two reasons. The first one was I recognized that doing the fitness podcast, that most people needed some mindset work and that I only had them on the fitness. You know, they're at the gym, what, three times a week maybe, but they were living life the rest of the week. So I decided to do the Daily Boost. And I started on a Monday, and I think I just did Mondays for a while, which is really weird to call it the Daily Boost. But one day I said, well, let's make it five days a week, but I'll sell the other five and I'll put that in there. That's what we had there. So you'd get Monday for free, a freemium product, then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you get it for paid. Well, I had to have some. Something else in it to have it make sense. So I said, well, okay, let's make a. Let's make a course. And this is a little behind the scenes. Let me, let me, let me, let me tell you the whole story of this because it's a neat story and I think there's a lot of lessons in this. When I finally launched it and got the Daily Boost going and decided to launch this thing, this was a very particular day in 2006. It was Labor Day of 2006, and I launched it. I was moving out of my house that day and my wife had been sick. And that evening after moving out of the house, we Launched the podcast. I think I had maybe 30 people gave me 20 bucks to do the monthly thing. I just launched it. I put everything in a box and was moving to a new house. That evening, my wife got sick and dehydrated in the hospital, and overnight we found out she had terminal cancer. And she had had it before, but it had come back and she had a very limited time to live. It turned out to be 100 days. So this arrives that day. And so I'm trying to figure my life out and everything is crazy. And I made a kind of a key decision. First one was, okay, I can't do this podcast. I can't charge you. I'll give your money back if you want it, but I'll be back. She's basically, she's going to die, so I'll be back. And. And the other thing was I decided to keep doing the weekly podcast and keep them updated from what was happening for free. I decided to do that. So the Saturday show always showed up, and I was here. I was in Costa Rica. Wherever I had to go to get her treatment, I took my microphone, I did my podcast, and I shared it all over the world as I tried to save her. And. And it was just really kind of a crazy moment that went on for 100 days until she passed away. And I shared the last little bit of information about, okay, she's gone. Celebration of life, Give me a couple weeks and I'll come back. And my wife had told me at the time, she had said, you know, what are you going to do when. When I die? And I said, I guess I'll do what I was doing. And she said, well, do what makes your heart sing and go do the podcast. And so I took a little bit of a break and I got. Got my head together and I launched. I launched in 2007, first day of 2007, the daily boost, full time. And then I had an issue because about five or six weeks later, this is really bad. Please forgive me on this one. I. My. My late wife's best friend called and she's checking on me. And she was on eharmony that night. And I said, hey, what are you doing? She's on eharmony. And. And I offered to do her personality profile to help her get a man, which got her married, by the way. But when I signed out, eharmony said, get your free personality profile myself. I wasn't thinking about a woman at all. And so I filled it out, and I met like a hundred women over the next week. Including the one I'm married to today. But I met her way too early, way too soon. But Cliff, I had a problem. Now, I now didn't have a business. I had 30 people who gave me 20 bucks. I had given up most of my work. I had a bunch of equipment, I had a concept, I had a bunch of fans waiting for me to get my act together. I've been sharing my story for 100 days. The most emotional and vulnerable I could ever been in my whole life was out on the podcast. I was connecting in ways that you couldn't pretend to do that. I didn't know it, I was just doing my thing. But I had a problem. I had this beautiful woman. I had to figure out how to keep her. So I was honest with her. I said, listen, I don't have any money now, but I think I'll make money, I'll be fine. And I got to it. And as we got more serious, I said, I need to make some money out of this thing. And so I decided to turn into the, the program into a membership site. But the way I decided to do it was a little bit different. There's a guy, he's still around today. I think he was Alex Mendozian is his name. And so I looked at that. I didn't buy anything from him. I just stole all the free stuff like everybody else does. But I figured out something. I figured out that I can make. I, I needed to make a course or something. And so I made something called the Start Moving Stay Moving program. And what that was was a 30 day fitness program. That was a morning, midday and evening, about an eight or nine minute program throughout the course of the day. I do about nine minutes at a time. Nothing for me to do that. I took a couple of years for the podcast and simply reformatted them into these shows that I needed and rerecorded them. And I put a price of it, about $49. I said, when you join my Start Moving Stay moving program, it's 49 bucks if you can buy it. But if you'll just join my membership site, it's only 1995. So over two months you just pay that. And. And the psychology behind it was, well, it's a 30 day program. I'll just pay them 1995 and cancel. That was the psychology. So they thought they were getting a deal. We had a thousand people come in about three days at 20 bucks a month, instantaneously, just like that, we were rolling. It never went back. We were 10k a month that fast. And I think that's how we paid for a wedding, as I recall. I think that's how we did that.
- [30:56]
A
Wow.
- [30:57]
B
That's how the business got going and how it actually became commercially viable. And that original membership site, we just shut it down. It's had a different variations over the years. It began to slow down during COVID when podcasting became a bit of a bit of a commodity and I just decided not to go that route anymore. So I shut it down completely about a year and a half ago, walked away from it.
- [31:15]
A
What's the business model look like today if that's not the primary thing or one of the key ingredients anyway.
- [31:22]
B
Yeah, these days it's a. Yeah, it's not a key ingredient at all. We still have the bit of the ad model that goes on, but again, I don't count on that much. We, along with ads, we also, we take advantage of the Spotify network and let them insert on us and we don't have to work for that. They just put the ads in for us and we make money on that. On the actual coaching side, I do very limited but very high ticket private coaching. Yeah, you know, when I say high ticket, it's going to be probably. I think the lowest I have is about 2, 500amonth and I don't carry too many people, about five. I've got a lower, lower tickets, $297 a month program called Face youe Passion that we run about 30 people in that one and that's really nice and that's really consistent. And then I have an inner circle that is running. I think, I think it's 12 a year, 12,000 a year. And I run anywhere between 18, 20 people in that depending on how many people are, you know, it flows, it goes in and out depending on when they come in and out. That's the model. And when I put the model together, all the pieces together, you know, it's a nice living. I've never been a guy that had to make, you know, a million bucks a year. Never. Always been a nice mid six figure guy, which makes me kind of happy and comfortable. I'm good there, but that's what I do. So it gives me lots of free time, lots of flexibility. I'm scheduled to work on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Everything else is a day off. I never work more than about five hours a day. That's the game right now.
- [32:32]
A
Who are you hosting your files with these days?
- [32:37]
B
I'm Megaphone right now.
- [32:39]
A
What is it that you like about Megaphone that made you choose them over the others? Is it dynamic ad insertion? What other features do you love about Megaphone?
- [32:49]
B
Well, Megaphone is enterprise. They're a little bit of a mess right now, I think with their Spotify integrations because they are Spotify owned. So there's some changes going there. So the answer question I've been on about six years now. Mike Carruthers, who does this, something you should know podcast, is a buddy of mine and they were on Megaphone and he said, dude, you got to go to Megaphone. You can make a lot of money. And so I went on Megaphone because at the time I could go enjoy. I. I had so many downloads anyway because we do about 3 million a year and I could go on Megaphone and flip the switch and. And Spotify starts giving me money. So that's why I went there initially. And a lot of the major agencies are going to be on Megaphone or, or Simplecast or. Art 19 is pretty heavy right now. Art 19 had some issues over because they shut down Art 19 and put it into Audible these days. So there's been a bit of a change in ad flow there. But I went basically to Megaflow because of that. But at the end of the day, they do everything I need them to do. It's very consistent. There are some. We can go to Tech Stack and how the ads flow. And we're running not only direct sell ads, running network ads, vast tag ads, Vastr, we've got those as well. And Megaphone throws up some problems with that. You have other choices now. You've got Red Circle and a lot of others that I think do just fine. What are you using?
- [33:57]
A
Believe it or not, I'm actually hosting all of my podcasts. There are just over 55 different shows, all of them hosted on Kajabi.
- [34:05]
B
I believe it. I looked at that too. Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, you know what, it's pretty captivating.
- [34:12]
A
The only thing with Kajabi is they were so hyper excited about this product when they brought it in. It was one of their development cycles. And I don't know, something was going on in the leadership behind Kajabi because out of nowhere the development of the actual product of podcasting completely stopped. And so you can't put an image inside of your show notes, you can't design your podcast page to have a sidebar, no email opt in form embedded in it. It is crazy. And I told him, I said, I can't even use this unless you put the 301 redirect in they did actually go in and pull a developer off of another team and put that in.
- [34:53]
B
Yeah, I checked it out. We came off. I was on infusionsoft stack for a long time. I was running everything off of that and decided to get off them when they were sold and that meant I had to go in the marketplace and find a new place to put my stuff. I checked out Kajabi and there are just a couple things in there that just stopped me that I, I'm not a big course guy. I do mostly live and so I'm not going to make a course. That's, that's. I, there are very few things I hate so much as making a course. I'll talk to you all day long. I'll coach you all day long. I'll teach you a ton of stuff. And that's my gift. My gift is not sitting down and making stuff for you. And so I look at Kajabi and then I look at the podcast side of it too. And having been in the business for a long time, I saw a lot of the same trips that you saw that if I get in, I'm going to be stuck, I'm not going to be able to make it work. So I didn't go. So that's why I stay where I am right now. I'm on for my, my private stuff. I'm on hello Audio and they're great.
- [35:42]
A
I just developed a really great relationship with both co founders of RSS.com they've got a pretty interesting business model that is incredibly affordable for the indie podcasters out there. I have a good relationship with Buzzsprout and looking into what they're doing. Of course, Mark Asquith has Captivate, which is very good looking as far as the options. The options that are available today are awesome compared to what, you know, we had back in the day. We. Well, if you had anything back in 2007, 2008, I think we had Lipson was the only option and Blueberry.
- [36:19]
B
So I was on both. I was on both. Yeah, I was on them both for a long time. I, I, you know, this day, typically there are so many good options now and I'll check them out occasionally. That's not where I don't do a lot of that. Anyway, I'd probably call you and say, what do you use? Yeah, because I just don't do that. If I had a client asked for it, I have one right now that's going to be asking. I don't know where to put them. I'm not going to put them on. On megaphone. A lot of times, what I will do if I have a client just getting going, and my clients that are doing podcasting are actually more business clients, and we're kind of stitching the entire thing together for them, and the podcast is just part of it. And a lot of times I'll put them on megaphone with me. I'll host their podcast right there and just get them going. It's easy. They don't have to worry about it. We're up and running. And then, you know, six months down the road, when they want to move, they just move it.
- [37:00]
A
Yeah, just do it. Three hours.
- [37:01]
B
That's been really easy for me to do. Hmm.
- [37:03]
A
Just do a 301 redirect when they want to move it.
- [37:06]
B
Yeah, yeah. And it's just. And a lot. Sometimes people fight me on it and say, why would you fight me? I can have you set up in 15 minutes and we're good. We'll deal with it later. Yeah, that's. That's what we do there. But. But, yeah, some of the other ones out there, really nice setups, really nice embeddable players. A lot of them are embedding ads in there. Some of the programmatic stuff that they're embedding in terms of commercials, they just don't pay a lot of money. And I'm not. If you don't give me a reasonable amount of money for an ad, I'm not going to bother my customer with it. You give me enough money, I guess I'll bother my customer. I guess that's what I'm saying. But, you know, right now, I heard they just read it today. The average true crime podcast is 34% ads. Now, that's way too much.
- [37:44]
A
I just saw that. Yes.
- [37:45]
B
Way third of the show is ads. Way too much.
- [37:49]
A
Yeah.
- [37:50]
B
It's going to kill podcasting if they're not careful.
- [37:52]
A
One minute of advertising for every two minutes of audio. That is ridiculous. Ridiculous.
- [37:58]
B
Crazy. Crazy.
- [38:00]
A
Of course, the person who did or the person who wrote that article, they created Earsay this morning. So it's E A R S A Y. The Earsay app, $7.99. And I already paid the premium because there's a handful of podcasts that I do want to listen to from time to time, and I love it because it uses the iPhone's onboard intelligence to find ads in the show and it automatically skip the ads.
- [38:27]
B
It skips the ads. Yeah. I love it, dude. You're just going to help bring down the whole Industry.
- [38:33]
A
Yeah, that's great.
- [38:35]
B
How do we get paid if you don't run ads? You know that one in the, and the other one I saw the other day, it's called Podbrain, where they're taking the top 100 podcast and doing basically Cliff Notes, if you will. And you pay a 15 monthly subscription and so you can listen to get all of Huberman stuff every four hour show. You just read through it.
- [38:52]
A
Yeah.
- [38:52]
B
And I know they're not getting paid for it. I'm looking at the whole thing, the whole world just, it's harder and harder to control your ip, that's for sure. And particularly when you got, you got a guy who teaches podcasting and talks about ads and he's skipping ads. I don't even like you anymore.
- [39:05]
A
Well, I don't, I don't. Haven't done an ad in, in my podcasts in 15 years. So ever since, ever since I learned that I could earn an income far greater than ads could ever do, I haven't touched an ad inside of my podcasts.
- [39:20]
B
I'll be honest with you. I've been, I've been very, I've been very close to pulling the ads off mine. Very close.
- [39:25]
A
And I look at the revenue at
- [39:26]
B
the end of the year and it's like, you know, it's, it's good. I mean, it's not my wife's like, you do know how much we pay with that, right? I said, yeah, but you know, it's kind of a pain just to manage that revenue stream in the business.
- [39:36]
A
Yep.
- [39:36]
B
It's just when you're, again, you're, you're in a different business, you're in the ad business and, and sometimes if you want to be in the coaching business or heaven forbid, you want to make a good podcast and spend time promoting or producing your podcast, because my podcasts are longer these days. It's taken me a little bit more time to do them now than it has for a while. I'm kind of iterating right now into something a little bit different, a little more modern, that's working really well. And so it's taken me more time to produce a great show. It's like, I don't, I, I want to focus on that, not ads, you know?
- [40:04]
A
Yeah.
- [40:05]
B
So I, I, so giving you enough grief. I pay to get rid of a lot of ads. Not on podcasts, though. I, I take the podcast ads largely. I like, I take ads on YouTube. And the reason I do is I, it keeps me informed about what's going on in the marketplace. I see the ads, and so I'll go along with that. So it's a. It's a decision. But no, I'm like you. I will. If I really want something, I'll get rid of them. I listen to my own show without ads. It's awesome. A lot of people don't know this. When you're a. When you're one of my, you know, inner circle or private client, you're in that level a little bit. I get retention there, too, because I have a commercial free Daily Boost feed that only they get. And if they stop being a client, they lose that. They start getting commercials again. So it's kind of a little bit of a painful disconnect. So, you know, but it works. I do it because I really don't want my guys having to listen to two minutes of ads just to get to me.
- [40:48]
A
So, Scott, you're doing this Daily Boost. Are you batch processing these?
- [40:53]
B
I did. I've done both over the years. Yeah, I could batch process. I've done up to three or four weeks in advance. I got all my notes. I have my notes all the way back to 2008. I don't do really scripting, but I've got great bullet points and all the way back. And so, you know, it's kind of cheating if I want to, I can just go pull some from 2015 and make a new show out of it if I want to. But I just recently began to change. I wanted to change it up. I changed my theme music. I was feeling. I was feeling trapped. I was not happy doing the show. I was very much stuck in a certain kind of show. And what I didn't know was my audience was feeling it as well. They felt me being trapped and. And. But they wouldn't say anything. They love me. They're not going to tell me. Scott, stop it. So finally I kind of hit the wall. I said, okay, guys, so here I go. This is about a month ago I started doing this. I changed my theme music. And I got really mad at. Because nobody told me they. They liked it or hated it. Nobody got back to me. And so one day I said, guys, I'm sitting here in this little studio. You got to reward your podcaster. I'm not going to sit here and talk to you. And you had not talked to me. And I went at him, and I had him come at me and tell me if they liked the music or not. Predictably, it was all over the place.
- [41:55]
A
Yeah.
- [41:56]
B
Ultimately, I kept what it. People don't actually know what they want or like, they really don't. You know, it's like, like they say about Henry Ford, if they knew what they wanted, you know, they'd want a faster horse, not a Model T. So I don't typically go out and survey a lot of people. I tend to pay attention, you know, on kind of a very macro level and kind of see what I'm feeling out there. At some point, the creator has to trust the creator and trust to create for the listener. And I just knew it was right. But then I did a show. I went from six, I. I went from nine minutes to three minutes, six minutes for like a week. And I said, well, heck, I'm not gonna. Because everybody's telling me, hey, you're talking about yourself too much. You're taking too long to get to the hook. You're not getting in fast enough. You're not. You're not. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And finally I said, I don't want those people anyway. I'm sorry, I just don't want them. Scott does a show. You're gonna get to know Scott. So I didn't like six minutes. So I came back the next week and I did one. One was 27 minutes and I was playing theme music in the background. It was kind of cool stuff. And I had a good time, good show. I came out of that and went bad. I don't know, that's not my thing. But by the next Monday came around, I hit a format that I liked and I arrived at about 15 minutes. And what I found, 15 minutes was it was enough for me to get in to have a nice upbeat open, to be friendly, to connect with you, have a little coffee, break bread as we get in to tell you how to contact me, to start my thoughts into it. And that left me about maybe 12 minutes of actual teaching and story time. And I found for me personally, in the words that I have and the way I tell stories, 12 minutes is about when I run out of words and I have to start a whole new. A whole new section. 12 minutes is about where I. You know what I'm saying when I say that? Yeah, I just, I could. A television show, it's. It could be like six or seven minutes, which is. The original format I did was based on like a 5 1/2, 6 minute segment on a TV show. Enough for a beginning, middle, and an end. But as I wanted to go deeper and in podcasting these days, if you're too superficial, it's not going to work. People want to know how you're thinking, and they want to learn from it. And the reason is because ChatGPT and Claude is out there and they can get these answers anyway. So if I don't give them enough time and attach it to story and emotion and take them through the process and really just get into them, they're not going to like me. My number is between 14 and 15 minutes. The audience loves the length. And I honestly, about 14 and a half. I just kind of run out of words. And I used to have a big closing to the show. All right, come on, check me out here. Now I just say, actually, I think the other day I said, I think I'm done. See you tomorrow. Yeah, that was it.
- [44:14]
A
I like those.
- [44:15]
B
Yeah. And so that's what it's become. And the other thing that I made is I actually went back to doing the shows, producing the shows within usually about 12 hours of release. So I release at midnight every night and, you know, about 12 hours, a little bit more than that. Sometime 9, 10, 11 o' clock in the morning, I'll record the show. And the reason I do that is I went back to my radio roots because when you pre produce, you're like a Hollywood game show. You're producing a year in advance and you have to pre produce everything. You got to plan it all out. And that's just a ton of work. And you're missing the gold of a podcast. The goal of a podcast is hearing from your audience is topically seeing what's happening. Oh, it's cold here. There's politically something going on. When you can tap in 12 to 15 hours before the show is recorded and be right there with them. Yes, you're really relevant and topical to them. And I. I've learned that in personal growth, which is what I'm doing on this show. I mean, come on, it's all over the place. Every TikTok channel is motivation. So for me to actually score a win, I've got to go a whole lot deeper and be right in their life every single day. And this week I've been going so cold from all the weather, and people are sending me pictures of them in the snow. Yeah, they're connecting with me again. So that's what I'm doing every day now. So I do. I do two on Thursday, but I have been known that if I miss the mark on the Monday show, if, like, I recorded on a Thursday and the Monday's not quite where I wanted to be because something changed over the weekend, you'll see me here at three in the afternoon on a Sunday, rerecording the show because audience wants that feel that I can give them.
- [45:38]
A
I love that.
- [45:40]
B
That's what I've been doing. So yeah, my joke these days is particularly now I'm recording like 15 hours in advance. I mean, if I never show up, you'll probably figure I died 15 hours earlier. Probably what happened.
- [45:53]
A
That's hilarious. Scott, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience over these 20 plus years. It is an honor to reconnect, tell folks where they can find you and the Daily Boost and anything else you want to share with them.
- [46:08]
B
Yeah, pretty easy stuff. I mean the best way is go check out the podcast and listen to the darn commercials. Okay, so go to dailyboostpodcast.com or search anywhere you get your podcast Daily Boost. And Scott, you're going to find me someplace. I'm on Instagram these days at Heyscott Smith over there. You want to email me scottdailyboostpodcast.com I think it's a great place to start. You can find me from there. And if you decide you want to do something else or have questions, just reach out through one of those channels and I'll get back to you pretty quick. I like hearing from people.
- [46:39]
A
Well, you heard Scott, he loves hearing from people. And so I'm going to put all of that contact information in the show notes. But also I told you at the beginning, I'd remind you here at the end. Do make sure you take some time look at the show notes because I compiled a list of insights that came out of this conversation. You probably probably picked up on most of them, but there might be one or two that you didn't think when you heard it. It's like, oh, I should really think about that. So much gold in that conversation. And I look forward to many more conversations with Scott and other OGs in the podcasting space. Those of us who have been podcasting 15, 20 plus years now. I hope that you are enjoying the podcast Answer Man. I always love hearing from you. I want to let you know that a brand new offer is available to you now if you are a content creator who is on the entrepreneurial path. I just recently relaunched my next level, Mastermind for Entrepreneurs. We just started last Tuesday and just today added our second member to the new group. If you have not heard of Mastermind groups before, I would encourage you to take a look in the show notes. I'll put a link to my Upgrade youe Peer Group podcast. There are only six episodes in there. Its only purpose is to introduce people to what a mastermind group is and how it can benefit you personally and professionally. Again, that's over@upgradeyourpeergroup.com if you listen to those episodes and by the end of it you would like to participate in a mastermind group that I I facilitate. I want to encourage you to go over to next level mastermind.info that's.info next levelmastermind.info, link also in the show notes and make sure you apply today. I would love to invite you into this group of other entrepreneurs who understand what it's like to operate a business, all of the decisions that are being faced, sharing the resources that we are discovering to help us become more efficient and more effective in sharing our message, getting the word out about our products and services. There is just so much about being on the entrepreneurial journey that goes smoother when you're not isolated, feeling alone, trying everything out on your own, trial and error. When there's a group of people who could share with you what they they've already found that has worked for them, that might just be the answers that you are looking for. Head over to nextlevelmastermind.info apply today podcast and.