Today on the Book More Show, we're talking with Mike Tassone, a seasoned producer and editor with over a decade of experience in content creation, about his new book, But What Should I Talk About?
Mike has a diverse content creation background, and his current podcasting business always starts with the same question from clients... But what should I talk about? His book is the perfect example of addressing client questions head-on & using it to start conversations with people he can really help.
We had a great conversation about this approach and exploring the synergy between podcasting and book marketing, especially how they support each other in the journey to engage and keep potential leads engaged until they are ready to take the next step.
Mike's approach is in tune with ours, and the real win for the majority of business owners is not, how many listeners the show gets, but the opportunity to use if for all the authority, engagement, and door opening opprotunities it provides.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
Mike Tassone, an experienced producer, shooter, and editor, discusses the potential of podcasting as a tool for maintaining long-term engagement with an audience.
His diverse experience in content creation across different industries allows him to offer a unique perspective on how businesses can leverage podcasting.
The importance of direct audience communication and brand understanding is emphasized, as well as the challenges in educating others about the power of podcasting.
Mike explains how podcasting and book marketing can create a self-perpetuating machine for content distribution.
The principles of Jim Rohn's pinwheel of marketing can be used to drive a podcast to success and stimulate audience action.
He highlights the real value of podcasting for business owners, stressing the importance of setting realistic expectations for success and return on investment.
The significance of working with the right producer, treating oneself like a media company, and creating a body of work, even if imperfect, is discussed.
Even if a podcast only has a few hundred listeners, it can still be successful, demonstrating that no niche is too small to explore.
Listeners gain a deeper understanding of the power and potential of podcasting as a medium through Mike’s journey in broadcasting.
The podcast episode is segmented into different chapters, each discussing different aspects of podcasting, making it easy for listeners to digest the content.
LINKS
Mike Tassone - LinkedIn
But What Should I Talk About book
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TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Book More show. It's Stuart Bell here and today super excited podcast expert is in the house, Mike Tassone. Mike, how are you doing?
Mike: Awesome Thanks for having me today. It's a pleasure.
Stuart: It's a pleasure. This is going to be an interesting show because we've often talked about before this idea that a book is a fantastic lead captures, all that part of the beginning of the funnel, but then people struggle a little bit in the long term. Engagement with people, and therefore podcasts, have come up as a conversation in the past. Obviously, it's something that we're super excited about. We hear a lot of them across the group here, but this is something that you can help people with directly. So I'm really interested to get your take on the bridge between books and podcasts and then really how people can leverage the podcast opportunity into this idea of staying in front of people all the time. So let me start with a bit of background to introduce who you are and what the organization does.
Mike: Perfect. So my name is Mike Tasone. I've been a producer shooter editor. I'm based in Toronto, ontario, but I've been, I've kind of been able to go all over North America. I've been Western Canada, bahamas, all kind of encompassing the left side of the map, if you're looking at it out of map. So producer shooter editor, which means like the internet calls it it's a funny word but the internet calls it a predator. So, like I said, producer shooter, editor, and that means I've just kind of taught myself over the years how to shoot, how to edit, how to produce, how to create content. My experience spans about a decade. I started doing it. I was always a hobbyist. So since I was like seven or eight, my dad always showed up to birthday parties with the big RCA. You know the boombox camera.
And you know, with the VHS tapes and he had a little Fred Flintstone sticker on it. So it was, and I had like an obsession with cameras for as long as I can remember. But I was also a big sports guy, played hockey, football, everything kind of growing up. So those two loves were kind of like this for a really long time. And then when I got to Toronto I'm from a really small town in Northern Ontario close to St Marie, really rough went like a lot like those Philly winters, really rough winters. You know some hearty people will call them real in Northern Ontario, type, you know, type people.
And so when I moved to Toronto, it created this whole world. There was this entire new world that I just had no idea. I was used to, you know, going to football practice and then coming home making stupid little videos with my buddies. And then you get to Toronto and it was about 2010. And there was a little bit of an industry here which you can make money doing it. And I was pretty naive, I had no idea how to you know the internet remember Instagram was still like a photo sharing app, no tick tock. Youtube was still kind of you know, working itself out. So there was a lot of work in nightclub photography, which is a hilarious. You know, I don't even think it exists anymore.
Stuart: I would call it as a niche. Yeah, he was that. The promoters, the club owners, were using that as their mock. The punters wanted that picture taken.
Mike: No, it was. So what would happen is you would get hired to come in and do like a photo album or make a video of a DJ at a club, Right and yeah, and I had no idea, I just thought, oh, you're getting paid to play with your camera. We're cool, I'm all right with that. I'm trying to put myself through. I'm make money on the weekends, you know, supplements, some cash for those ever important textbooks that I may or may not have bought.
So I did that for about two or three years and that led me to some really cool spots. I was able to cover some really cool I mean, I'm not a big electronic music fan but, like I was able to cover a lot of really cool DJs that now are mega huge, that back in the day they were just, you know, at silly little nightclubs. But that got really boring really quick because it was the same it's the same thing over and over again, right, but the type of edits I was doing. It was really high, intense. You know I had it. I developed a skill set that was different than a lot of editors and a lot of shooters right.
Stuart: It wasn't the best niche because of the way that you kind of came up in my environment. It was very kind of your style match there Like EDM type.
Mike: Yeah, very, you know big crazy, you know edits that kind of made no sense, but they were loud and they looked sexy, and so so I played football at my university and when I stopped playing, the head coach a couple of years later had, you know, had approached the, I guess, the media department and he wanted to make like a I don't know if you've heard of the series hard knocks.
Stuart: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah, he wanted something like that and me being an alumni of the team, sort of. I mean, I was around, I was.
Stuart: Overconnection and need the background.
Mike: Yeah, a little bit of a connection there with the background and knowing the sport inside and out. So I was like, well, I've got the skill set. I showed them my portfolio. It's not exactly sports, but I know sports in it inside and out. Right, created my own job at the school for three years. I followed the football team around. After that it kind of once again starving artists type stuff. I landed a contract at a bank here, kind of just making bank videos, and then the big my Mount Everest was. I got a job as a producer, shooter and editor at Canada's number one sports broadcasting company.
Stuart: So it would be like our.
Mike: ESPN and I was the first position of their kind. I shot, edited, whatever. And that's when I really I mean, I covered the Raptors when they won the first championship here in Canada, which was a highlight of my life. I have the thing right here, that's my media pass, like that was it for me, right? And then to bring it back, that's when I started getting introduced to podcasting and I was involved with three really big shows that were national number ones, number twos, you know, top 10, top fives.
And that's when I sort of under then COVID hit and the work from home phenomenon started happening and I've realized, wow, I can do podcasts from anywhere and this is a really cool thing to kind of be involved with. So, with you know, I got taught by some really good producers and then after that I started kind of going off of my own and that's sort of where I am now. I'm taking this experience and I created podcasts for a few people and it's kind of getting going now and but when you have that big time experience, you want to, like you know, help people out and make the most of it Right, particularly when you see that there's a desire out there.
Stuart: people want to do this and want to get there, but sometimes it's just the technical steps or the hurdles to get started that hold on the back. As we kind of sat here with knowledge in our heads. We just want to share it as much as possible.
Mike: You want to share it. It's funny because I've, over the last, it's been really picking up over the last three years. Obviously, right, everyone's like I need to get out there. And the types of conversations everyone's always afraid to just start it. That's number one. It's number one. Everyone's just afraid to start. And then they're afraid to start and they have no idea what to talk about. So that's where the book kind of thing came from. Or I'm like well, everyone keeps saying the same sentence what do I talk about? So I go well, let's dig into that. And then you know, through experiences and all that sort of, how I landed with this idea to do the do the book.
Stuart: So who are the target audience for? Is it mainly business owners or personalities or people who've got like a passion project? Is it one particular niche or is it just the niche is people who are interested in broadcasting?
Mike: I personally found that businesses can. There's a return not immediately, but there's a better opportunity for a return for a business to start something like this. Because I think if you're a personality, you know it's not that you can't, everyone can and it's a beautiful medium to do. But unless the goal is to become a comedian or a podcast, or you know the divorce lawyer that knows everything and you're the authority in the space, it's obviously incredibly difficult. It's like becoming a pro athlete. It's the same kind of thing, right.
But with businesses, the point isn't necessarily to have 10 million downloads. The point isn't necessarily to make money doing the podcast. The point, if you have a business, you already have an audience. You already have a bunch of people that like your product, like your service. So the point of it for a business is to create a perpetuating machine that you can just get your content out to people and speak to people directly. I don't think people understand how important it is to touch their audience directly. Right, we're doing. You know we have the newsletters and all that, which is great. That's what you should turn the podcast into. But the point of the podcast isn't to make money on the podcast. It's another marketing effort.
Stuart: And trying to get people to understand that.
And it's the same conversation as with the books, as the assets themselves. It's the conversation and the opportunity to, as you say, talk directly to the person who's reading it. That's where the real opportunity comes in. Nothing to do with book sales or podcast downloads or the likelihood of getting advertising revenue from it. All of these things are secondary. If the main job of work is keeping engaged to people who are going to become your clients and give you the hard to get money for the work that you actually do not get paid for, the advertising, for the opportunity to keep in conversation with people that idea Is that something that more people are starting to catch on to? It's not such a heavy lift to get people to understand, or is it still? People come and start the conversation with you thinking that this is advertising wherever you'll make money from the podcast itself and you've really got to educate them into their bigger opportunities.
Mike: All of the conversations are trying to get people to understand what their podcast is going to look like. Because, if you think about it, the only podcasts that we know of are the super successful ones. I don't even want to say the names, because it's podcast. It's a podcast full pop. To say the names of the big dogs, right, but everybody just knows the famous ones and the big ones.
So when I say to an owner of a car dealership or a real estate agent, oh, a podcast would be a great idea, they seem to not understand. Well, what would I bring? What would my podcast even look like? I only know of XYZ podcasts. So what would mine even look like? It's like well, the point is, if you're a real estate agent, you're a highly localized, that's a highly localized sector for you, especially if you're a real estate agent. So if you show up as the authority in the space in your area by talking about it every day, by giving people tips, tricks, interest rate, you know mortgage, whatever people are going to come to you when it's time to get a mortgage, because they know, oh, this guy talks about it every day. I'm going to go to. I'm going to go to Stuart. Stuart talks about mortgages every day. Why wouldn't I go to him when it's time to get him Right, so that it's trying to get people to understand? You don't have to hop on and talk about nothing. Your podcast 10 minutes, right? It doesn't?
Stuart: that is. It's such an interesting point, isn't it? Because when you think about one of the traditional broadcast type of where the show is the product, they have to be a certain length and the delivery is the entertainment within the product itself, within the show, because the show is the product, the product is the show. If the show is the excuse to share something of value, but broadly stay in touch and give people a clear call to action of how they can engage more, take that next step, the level of content. It takes the pressure off so much because you're not trying to produce something that's entertaining.
So right, hopefully it is entertaining so right turned off by it, but it doesn't have to be. It just takes away a whole level of pressure. We had an example with. It was a real estate example which brings to mind. So part of the real estate education piece that we teach in that space is this idea of a flagship broadcast, a regular communication, and for real estate, an easy way of doing it is what we call a market watch report. So just every week talk about what's come on the market this week and just bring some engagement to as the market's changing. So this idea of market watch. So there was one real estate we worked with I mean over 10 years now, up in the northeast, up by main, manchester, boston. So he had been sending out the market watch every week. He decided I'm going to purchase the list Anyone who hasn't responded or opened it or whatever criteria we had not anyone who hasn't done that in two years, I'm going to take them off the list.
I'm just going to send to the people who have engaged In completely pointless why you'd make him some of the necessary judgment anyway.
And then about six months later got a call from a picked up a voicemail and he was at one of our events and played the voicemail and it was well read Hi, it's Bob here. I've been on your list for five or six years but I guess something must have happened with my email. Anyway I stopped receiving it. I had to phone around a couple of other agents in town to get your number, but anyway I've got it now. Hopefully this is you. Give me a call. I've got two beach properties to list.
Mike: Oh, wow, so okay.
Stuart: The properties were worth like $4 million across the two off and one of them was like how long was the site? The guy had to call other agents. I can imagine how that called went. Hi, it's Bobby. I'm looking to list my two beach properties. Do you have Kenny's phone number?
Mike: Yeah, I want this other guy, not you. I want this other guy, yeah.
Stuart: And then for Kenny to purge that list, thinking that someone wasn't engaged. But to bring it back to your point and the conversation we're having here, I can call it already when they're ready, and our job is to stay engaged with them until that point is for them. We can't tell when it is. They're not going to send us a letter ahead of time saying I'm going to be ready in a month or two.
We just need to keep being there, and it's a challenge as business owners Because you've got the day-to-day business to do. But doing a podcast where, if you've been in business for any length of time, it's easy to talk about your subject, you can bridge it into points of interest if you feel we need to do that as well. But this opportunity to create weekly or fortnightly unique content that can then be, which can multiplied in a whole host of other ways, it's by far the easiest and highest value thing that you can do, and even if no one ever listens to it, it doesn't matter because you're still an opportunity.
Mike: It doesn't, and that's another funny thing. It's funny that you say that because it doesn't matter really if anyone's really listening to it, because you're not trying to be a top five podcast, you're just trying to constantly have your hands out there and say listen, I'm here if you need right and if you want to buy that house, I'm here. If you want to join my gym, I'm here. Today we're going to talk about nutrition, but if you want to join, we're also here. And I mean I'd like to say that people are starting to come around to that. I'm still.
There's still people out there that are just like well, who's going to listen? And they want to get the ROI and get into the stats and the minutia. I understand ROI and I understand investment and people want to get the return. But when you have something like that, that you can piece one episode let's say you do for 20, I think I say this in the book but if you have a 20 minute episode, that's potentially 21 minute pieces of content that you can fire off and that's almost a month's worth of stuff that you just have to sit down and do once for 20 minutes and talk about something you love or like, at least right.
So it's very valuable. But I think people are still looking at the vanity metrics, the stuff that doesn't really matter. But if you can, if you just get out, get outside of that and understand you're just constantly out there massaging your audience. That's where the juices are with a podcast.
Stuart: The opportunities as well. So we talked about this in the book sense that there's a lot of additional value from having a book, this kind of societal value that's placed on the book as a product, which is maybe more than it deserves knowing how the, the sausage is actually made.
It's not rocket science, but there's a lot of presence from it, and I think the same goes for podcasts in the sense that it gives you a way to open doors with people that you wouldn't otherwise have opportunity to talk with. So if you are looking at establishing yourself as a stick with a real estate example because it's easy for everyone to conceptualize as a realtor if you were trying to talk to the, to talk to the planning committee, to talk to the restaurant owners, to position yourself as the not even so much as a trusted expert, but as the person who's bringing the trusted experts to the audience, opening those doors and having those conversations with people outside of podcasts is going to be a little bit tricky because people are busy. There's an element of people wanting to be guests on podcasts. There's an element of kind of people love being guests.
Yeah, tickles the parts of them, the ego part of them, that allows them to just turn up and take some pressure off and turn up as the expert and be presented that way, but you as the host being the person who's doing that, connecting quite a different story than trying to recreate that same amount of energy and content and goodwill through any other medium. I mean trying to write that type of stuff or go out and video it like a news news segment. All of that stuff is much more difficult than in a podcast. And then, of course, we get into the technological advances over the last 12 months of the distribution side of things. So the ability to create it in the first place is somewhat easier. Obviously, there's a slide in the scale there, but what you can do with it once it's created and people looking for a business based ROI, I mean, where else, like you say, would you be able to create 20 individual pieces of content from one seed piece? And that's just the first blush like loan code drilling down even further.
Mike: So yeah, this side sorry yeah, just on that point, because that's a great point you just made and it's not even the audio side of just having the chunk. It's like you can turn that into your. If you're a business owner, you know how important your email list is.
That's lifeblood for a lot of business owners, right, being able to tell the people that love you directly. Now, those 21-minute shorts yeah, that covers your TikTok and your Instagram and all that kind of stuff. But let's not forget, you can create an episode into a newsletter, which I think is we. I ran a podcast with I've talked about in the book, but I ran a podcast with a couple of guys who turned every episode into a newsletter and it was more in depth and the author of the newsletter drove in a little harder. You know what we can only cover in an hour. He really condensed it in, so, but it was about the episode as well. It was taken from the episode.
And then let's say you know, on a podcast you can only talk for so long. You can even turn that into a blog. And now you got another thing and throw that up on your website. So it's a great point that it's so juicy in what you can plug it into. It's just getting over the hump of like you don't have to be the next superstar comedian to start a podcast. You don't have to be. You just kind of have to be a brand that loves what you've got going on and throw a couple layers deep.
Stuart: I'm passionate for the subject. It's so interesting as well because once you separate the idea from okay, I've got to be. I'm competing with Joe Rogan, yeah.
Mike: Oh, you said the bit, you said the word, you said the word you said, the demons all come down again.
Stuart: Yeah, once you separate that, it's like books. I mean, no one's suggesting that it makes sense for a business owner to think that the only benefit they'll get from a book is competing with Tom Clancy or JK Rowling or Steve Walsh. I mean, it's the same delivery mechanism and you get some of the shined light from the medium, but the actual thing itself is completely different. One of the other things I like about the podcast idea and it ties in with the newsletter follow up, the mentions is that it ties in with books so well. So this idea of this kind of synergy, of having all of the individual assets that tie together into something much bigger. Again, sticking with a real estate example, you can imagine the real estate. What was the name of the little tenure from?
Susay Marie, so you can imagine being a real estate in Susay Marie and having the show that talks about living in Susay Marie and we're doing a highlight on the school and highlight on restaurants and there's a planning committee development going on over here. So bringing all of the local knowledge but then having the book that ties in with it, the living in Susay Marie, the guides living in Susay Marie, so on the podcast, then you can. A call to action on the podcast would be to get the book and then the newsletter or the blog post or everything that's created downstream links back to those two assets as their way to find out more. We often talk about the call to action on the back of the book covering the three groups of people the IHIC is one of the best and the people who are still in the gathering phase, the people who are interested to move forward, but aren't quite yet ready to reach out and engage you fully.
And then those people are ready to go now.
Three assets of the podcast being the perfect way of just gathering more information and passively following along with the journey until you're ready to move to the next stage. And then the book is a way of generating a little bit more interest or habit as the leading into the overall world and then the easy way to get started. It's such a collective, as I said, the synergy of collected assets bringing together and your book. Then, I guess what do I talk about? This first question that everyone's got that really solving the problem and getting people to think about it in a different way. That ties together perfectly with this kind of synergistic idea. Once you know, once you accept this idea of what you can talk about and that is relatively open-ended, with a small amount of effort up front to think about it, then the world just opens up. That was a long way of getting to the next stage.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, a long way of getting to the next stage.
Stuart: This idea of bridging people into okay, what do I talk about? And then helping them think about that slightly bigger picture. Is that relatively formulaic, in that there's some things that anyone can think about, or is it very much? People have to think about it case by case.
Mike: I got this example I believe I think it was Jim Rohn and he was in one of these marketing books. I forget. This stuff just pops up and it sticks in the brain. But he was talking about the pinwheel of marketing. So the pinwheel of marketing looks a little bit. Obviously it's not podcasting, but I was looking at it going.
Well, this kind of works with a podcast, because if you think of it like a pinwheel, the middle of the pinwheel is the thing you're trying to sell. That's the thing that you're selling, whether it's gym memberships, whether it's houses, whatever. The core competency of your business is the middle of that pinwheel. That's why you're in business, right, and Jim can't run without membership. You need membership dollars, you need someone to keep the lights on right. But then the ancillary thing is on top of it, where you get your momentum, because momentum in a podcast is more important than probably anything. Everyone fades it's a pod fading thing. Three months, everyone, 90% of them, go away, like because you get bored, you get tired, you go. Why aren't I famous yet? Why isn't Spotify here? It's, you know what I mean. So you need that momentum. So when you start adding so I sell memberships, well, it's a gym. So who comes to my gym? Well, people who are into nutrition, people who are into mental health, people who are into wellness.
When you think of a couple layers deep, you can start thinking about how I can get that pinwheel spinning so at least I get some momentum. So you have five topics and maybe you're on a weekly schedule. Now you have one topic every week for at least five weeks. That's about two months. That's about two months of podcasting that you can get through. You keep doing that enough times. Well then you're spinning and you're spinning and you're spinning, and then at least you can get up to cruising altitude and you can be consistent, because everybody quits when they don't want it to slog, and it will be a slog. It's always going to be a slog, but if we can just get people to that three month mark of like I've been doing this for three months, it's now part of my. So let's say, you're a manager and you do weekly meetings, it's now part. It's that ingrained into my habit.
The habit is formed and now you're just going to keep doing it and then you kind of don't care, because then you start going well, I'm having fun, so who cares? I'm having fun now. And maybe a six months down the road someone goes I really love that podcast, you do. I'm in the market to buy an apartment building you were talking something about. I know in the States there's like FHA loans and things like that. You were talking about that. You know, let's do some business right. It's that it's. I say it's that simple, it's not that simple.
Stuart: But it's right.
Mike: I think I say in the book like it's a simple execution wrapped in kind of a convoluted marketing effort. But if you can get your habits you know good habits built, then it's a self perpetuating machine that will keep going and going as long as you have energy for it.
Stuart: Yeah, that model. Actually it's a great way of thinking about it as well, because I think, thinking about a year's worth of podcasts of what we're going to talk about, this, like 50 new episodes that seems like a lot, but if you can break it down, so I love the idea that you were talking about there, the gym has four or five key components.
Mike: Yeah.
Stuart: That's only 12 in a year 12 nutrition podcasts, 12 fitness bodybuilding, 12 weight loss 12 case studies, client transformation stories.
That's much more achievable and not such a daunting prospect going into it. Once you start breaking it down and again, I'm a big fan of kind of like systems and frameworks and just defining the model and then just having to repeat it. Once you've got that broken down, then the people on the other end start getting used to what they're listening to. The model becomes familiar. There's an expectation of a familiarity of what they're about to expect and get from you, and then backing that up with the emails that have been sent out relating back to the shows, taking those chunks out and here's where you can go and find more. It just breaks it down into each piece. Being so much more by its side is then trying to visualize the whole kind of podcast marketing success.
Mike: And people get freaked out when, oh man, I've got to do all of this stuff. And, yes, you will eventually have to do talk the Instagram, the shorts, the YouTube shorts. You will eventually have to do that. But if you can get into a groove of rotating your topics and then what happens is you'll start to get good at rotating your topics and you'll slide in maybe a special episode or you'll in the gym example I gave in the book I was talking about how like a gym has you know this particular gym I was thinking of when I was writing?
It has about 400 members. Well, if you take all of their stories, that's 400 episodes that you can talk about and people will appreciate. Someone in there will have the same story as maybe 50 other people. Oh, you know what? I was a you know what? When I was younger I was a great athlete and then I just fell out of shape. But then I found the gym and you know the guys at the gym are so great. Well, there's probably 50 people out there that might have that same story. Oh, I remember when I used to. You know bench 260, whatever. I want to get back into it Now. You're the gym with the cool podcast that supports its owners or supports its members, and now you have this thing going again, right?
Stuart: no-transcript and it makes it so much more crystal. Like you were saying before, it's a connection with the audience. It's difficult to achieve through any other medium and if you can do it in a way that's sustainable and manageable, it's. We were on the show a few a couple of months ago now. We were with Paul Ross. He was a podiatrist, so he wrote he's written a couple of books actually, but one of them was called my Damn Toe Hood. So he was saying that people will come in and they're excited to see him because he's the person that wrote the books.
There's an element of connection and celebrity that's associated with it, and the same with podcasts. I listen to, I consume quite a lot of podcasts and there's definitely a feeling of knowing. It's a very one-sided relationship, but there's definitely a feeling of knowing the people. I mean we can get it with this show. People will come on board as clients, having listened to and done with the shows, and know the frameworks that we talk about. So not only is there a personal connection there, but they're also educated customers in the sense of they're on board because they resonate with the way that we do it. You're right.
In a specific way and it just makes the whole downstream connections and seamlessness of the rest of the relationship so much smoother, which wouldn't have happened without booking the podcast.
Mike: Right, it's cool because, like you can have, you can line up 10 other producers, 10 other shooters, 10 other editors, 10 other podcast guys, and they'll give you their own story or template and how they do it. And they're going to sit there and say I'm the, mine's the best because we get you to 10,000. Listen, what, like at some point, it's all commodity, it's whatever at some point. Right, you go with the person at this point because there's so many. I mean, I think I said there's about 2 million active podcasts right now, which isn't even that many If you consider there's like I don't know 10 billion websites, but there's 2 million active podcasts.
Like there's a lot of room there to to mess around and there's a lot of room to experiment. And when you realize what the execution of a podcast like you can only do it so many ways, you really can only flip on the mic, you can really only do. Like you can only do it so many ways. Nowadays, it's who's going to climb the mountain with you, who's the producer or the host or your social team, who's going to say you know what, we're going to put in one to three years and we're just going to go and we're going to see what happens. Like that's what you're looking for, more so now. A couple of years ago you were looking for who's the hackier guy who can hack the algorithm. If we post on Wednesdays at 2pm, we get more. You know what like that now I think it's irrelevant now, because it's irrelevant now.
Stuart: Yeah, it's such a move on space and, for the most, it's like SEO to a certain degree. Yes, there is some. There's some things that you can do wrong which would damage it.
Mike: Sure.
Stuart: But for the most part there's not that much that you can do. Extra that moves the needle a massive amount, unless you're willing to just bubble down completely down that route and really go very hard and then you can move the needle at the top end. But that thick middle of not doing anything wrong, a thick middle of we're all in the same ballpark and then it's expensive up at the top, like you say, that middle is where things naturally whether that bell curve type diagram it's that's where the thick middle is. And now you're not looking for tricks and tips, Now you're looking for how does this solicit can tie in with whatever else I'm doing and how much?
time I've got and the personality and the finding the people who you want to work with. It's not just one person you could work with. You could work with a number of people.
Mike: So you could work with many.
Stuart: Yeah, so find the person that you resonate with the best and really enjoy the process.
Mike: And that's the like if you could sit every business owner down and go. One rule of podcasting you have to enjoy this. This has to be like a fun marketing effort that you're doing to get your business out, to get your whatever out to the world and have some fun with it. If you don't like this, if this doesn't, if this isn't enjoyable to you, don't do it, because it's going to be brutal. It's going to be like I mean these, a lot of business owners. You've started something from nothing and you've started a business. It's the use that muscle with the podcast. If you can't connect that and you're you know you're pissed off after two months and you're like oh man, like 10 listens it's and then you want to quit doing it and you know how there's more of those people than people who are actually doing it. You're going to get frustrated, you're going to hate it, you're going to think it's useless. Why am? Why are we not making money off of it?
Stuart: The mindset has to be a little bit different these days across the board, right, it's a great point, because it's not the right fit for everyone Like we can come on here and talk for three hours about podcasts and books and the time the pod just fly by.
But if you're turning up to something that's a hassle, every time you're going to be looking for. Your brain, either consciously or subconsciously, is going to be looking for all of the reasons to quit and, I guess, not showing up missing a week. The download numbers aren't being what you want it to. No one's kind of reaching out and knocking on the door and giving you awards. All of those things are going to prove evidence to yourself that this isn't right, because you've already got that mindset.
Mike: Right.
Stuart: If you really love writing, you can't think of anything you'd rather do. Then just write. Don't try and force it into a podcast unless there's a passion there. Yeah, I think for most people it is the easiest way of getting seed content out there, because most business owners can talk about the thing that they're interested in and passionate about easier than anything else.
Mike: Yeah, agreed, and I think it's a lot more genuine to coming from a business owner, let's say, because you are the guy, you're the one who created the business, you're the one who you're already making money on. You're making money doing something that you like or love or good at it's like, why not talk about it and get other people stoked on doing it as well? Right, that's, it's only natural.
Stuart: Yeah, the other element to that is as well. It's surprising how no niche is too small, like when you start drilling into some of these random esoteric things that you even imagine had an audience. But in today's day and age there's a thousand people out there who are passionately engaged through it and you would be the person who kind of dominated that space because you're the person who's talking about it. I think as well in if you're of the mindset that this needs to be a top 10 podcast with 10,000 downloads every episode, that's a high bar to hit. But if you instead think, okay, this is my business or this is a part of my business, and I know that there's only 100 people out there in the world and only half of them ever listen to Pog, but if I'm talking to those 50 people, then that's success because that's who the audience is. It's not a comparative audience to something bigger. It's how much of the pie am I getting and engaging with Again, it just changes the dynamic so much.
Mike: And also, too, like, think about this right, If you have I don't know, let's, we'll call it 400 listeners a month. Right, If you have 400 listeners a month, imagine how cool it would be if you went downtown Philly and every Friday at 4pm, 400 people showed up to listen to you talk about something.
And it's no matter what 400 people, you're not going to notice the next week. If 410 come and 30 come, you're just going to show them go. Wow, I got. Look at this crowd, I got 400 people every week. That's that right there in itself is like 400, you know, 410 million, sure, huge disparity, huge disparity.
Stuart: It's so irrelevant to.
Mike: But it's irrelevant.
Stuart: Yeah, I think that's the. It's the blessing in the coercive where we are in technology and the access to markets. Like if you said 20 years ago that we could get you a full of 400 people, people would be ecstatic because they were. 20 years ago that volume was that was a decent number of people, but now, in a world where you just see headline numbers and Instagram, famous people and their followerships are kind of pushing people's faces that top tiny percentage is so disproportionately skewed to numbers and people's thinking of what success is to the long end of the spectrum.
Yeah, I think. One interesting way of thinking about it, though, as you mentioned before, is this newslet. Right there, I think we are going to see 150 episodes in.
I'd be better at my technique, so I was going to make a very certain point. Then that's completely gone out of hand. I was going to talk oh, you were talking about the newslet, so this idea of return on investment. So with the books and the clients that we're talking to, with the podcast and the people that you're talking to, it's majoritably business owners with the main job of work of engaging more clients. There's some people on the edge that don't have to read, but the main chunk of these are the people who we're talking to.
And if you could say to someone if from having a conversation once a week with someone, it translated into three clients a year, would that be successful? And most people would probably say yes, because the majority of us are in slightly higher ticket. We're not in commodity businesses where it's very low volume, low cost, high volume, turn out and stuff. We're not selling candies at a checkout and just need volume. It's slightly higher. So three people a year. You would probably accept that if you were joining like a, not a, mentoring a community, a network.
Yeah, yeah, networking. If you joined a local networking group in Toronto then and they said, well, you'll probably get an average three clients a year comfortably, you probably think that was successful. And a podcast is easier to do, it's more convenient, reach, far more legacy and longevity than something like that. Not so equal, but it's different. But this real expectation of the kind of softer benefits and not nothing to do with download numbers, but turning into real connections with real people, I think, like with the book, the same, all of these same conversations we're having or arguments we're making, applies to a book as well and, like we said, in fact the synergy of both of them together it is even better. But yeah, this idea of a more realistic expectation on what success looks like and what is a good, realistic return, it's very easy to take the case that a podcast is a valuable, valuable thing to do.
Mike: I would say so simply, and I mean, you know, as a podcast producer, to people like, if I'm working with someone, right, it's obviously a long-term relationship, and with long-term relationship comes the long-term cost, and I know that and they know that and everybody knows that right. So there's producers out there who understand that, oh, this is a long-term thing, right, that is where it's the producer's job to take someone after six months and go hey man, you know what, this podcast may not be a good idea for you, it may not be the best idea. Say, you're doing something and not only the numbers are bad, but maybe they're not the best podcaster, they have low energy, they clearly don't want to show up. It's also producer's job to be like hey man, I love the ongoing price structure, but I got to tell you this probably isn't helping you as much as it should be.
So I would caveat yes, it is a long-term thing, but as a producer and also as a host, kind of have to have that buffer of like is this actually working? Hopefully I'm working with someone that has my best as the host, my best interest in mind as a producer. You got to have the show in mind as well, because it's very easy to go. Oh man, I got this guy on the hook for a year, for two years. You have to also have a governance process of. Is this the best thing that this person could be doing?
Because at the end of the day, it's a marketing effort. Really it's just a fun marketing effort.
Stuart: And that actually is a great point, as people are comparing who they could be working with, given that there's choice the idea of picking someone to work with who sees it as a marketing effort and not sees it as an entertainment effort. They're not working with a producer who's excited about twiddling the knobs and getting the sound right and putting in a music bed and trying to NPR it to maybe win some awards. That's not as valuable as someone who sees it as a marketing tool and is telling you hey, listen these, looking back at the shows, these particular types of guests have had way more. They've been received much better than these other types. So maybe they've doubled down on that.
Or I noticed that you're not sending the email out about the show. Do you really need to do that? Or here's some clips that we've extracted from the show, some sound bites from social media. Push those into the channel and have those as more market tools. So not all producers are created equal in terms of not only their skills and what they bring to it, but the positioning and the job of working, the outcome that you can be trying to get as a marketing effort as opposed to an entertainment product effort.
Mike: Right, and here's where everyone's going to turn off the podcast right now. Your first hundred episodes to be garbage anyway or your first 50 episodes are going to be bad anyway. So it doesn't matter if your audio is tight, it doesn't matter. You know, try to obviously make a good effort.
There's something to be said for making it look at least like you care a little bit, but you don't. You can't get too caught up in like man. I got to have this particular mic. I got to use this one. I got to have this mic arm. I got to make the background look. Yes, make a solid effort. Obviously, make it look like you're putting life into it, but once again everyone's hitting the stop button. Your first 50 episodes at least are not going to be that fantastic. And that's just. The sky's blue, the grass is green. It just is what it is. And if you can get over that you'll have.
If you can get, if you can understand that you will have a lot more success than thinking I need the five hundred dollar mic, I need the ten thousand dollar set. It'll be a lot easier of a process as we get going.
Stuart: Yeah, and that's it. I mean, you see, we see it with the book business, our competitors out. There's a number of competitors out there who are very prerative. They're very high prices and for the job of work, of what someone has out of the marketing tour, that's a big long return on the investment. If you're spending thirty thousand dollars on a project as opposed to three thousand.
And yeah, yeah the same with you. If someone's spending five grand on equipment just to even put the first show out there, that's a big hurdle to overcome before it's even moving. Before you even see anything, yeah, before you even see any type of anything.
Mike: you have a fifty thousand dollar set up and now you're getting angry because you're like oh, in a month, hey man, I've got all this stuff. Why is?
Stuart: it only a hundred downloads.
Mike: No, it's not going to knock and no one wants to sign me. How come? Well, hey, man, you got to get, get fifty on your belt and then we'll talk about it. Yeah, or you know what I mean?
Stuart: Good thing, I mean the whole marketing conversation around it makes the numbers make so much more sense. So so, understanding that, even if the downloads are zero and all those fifty episodes, the website content of having fifty hours worth of unique on topic content on the website, the fact that as someone goes back and listens to the fifty percent, they're entering something in there, seeing the credibility of fifty previous ones, whether or not they listen to it or not, as you try to invite guests or open doors, this credibility of body of work that you've created already, even if the quality is not where you want it to be, it's it has a very definite marketing benefit, even if it doesn't have an entertainment benefit, if the show was the product, it's positioning as a marketing tool just makes all of the numbers make so much more sense in a much easier and an accessible way for people.
Mike: Yeah, they want to know that you love it. So they go to your YouTube page and they go oh wow, he's got four hundred episodes Like I've never heard of it. But that's great. It's visual confirmation, right.
It's just always treating himself. I say this in the book because I think it's. It's. It rings true, but as a business, you should look at yourself as a media company first, but media company one, and then, whatever you're selling, one be right. You can do that and position yourself as a media company, which means you have all of the things. You have the YouTube set up. Everything is populated. You look like you care about your social presence. People are going to initially it's just by Osmosis go. Oh, they obviously care about their product and their way of doing things. Let's see their story, let's talk about their, or let's come into their ecosystem and see what they're about.
Stuart: I think, like I said, understanding that it demonstrates that you care, both the minimum amount that you care about the thing that you're doing, but also right about the subjects and willing to put it out there, it goes a long way.
Mike: Yeah.
Stuart: I would say to people as we start the shows that I will go for half an hour.
Mike: And then we just keep going.
Stuart: Yeah, we're about 15 minutes in, so people appreciate their time. I want to make sure that people can get access to you and the book and more about what you do. So what's a good place for people to go to find more?
Mike: You can come to the website. So right now, I'm wrapping up the book now, so it will be for free. It's free, by the way. Everyone was listening. I don't want to make money off it, whether you work with me or not, it's just good information to get people in the mindset of you don't have to be Joe Rogan, you can, just you can be you and do what you need to do, so you can go out.
It's talkaboutbookcom. The name of the book is. What Should I Talk About? The website is wwwtalkaboutbookcom. And then I'm a casual. You know I'm a casual user of social media. I'm not a big social media guy. My Instagram handle is Mike the Mike the dot shooter. As in like shooter. I have a website, wwwforbokecom. That's sort of an old portfolio If people want to check out my more creative stuff. And then my LinkedIn is just Mike Tussoni, t-a-s-o-n-e. You can find me there. But if anyone's listening, go to the website. You can find me a lot easier there. If it's podcast related, that's probably a better place to reach me.
Stuart: And I think that's about it.
Yeah Well, we'll make sure that we put links to your LinkedIn profile and the websites as well on the show notes so, as people are listening, they can just click into the podcast player and the link will be there.
We'll check it out on their website, but I highly recommend going across.
I've obviously seen the book, the inside version of it, so well worth looking at if you've got any, even if the thought of having a podcast has entered your head, because it really does a great job of kind of getting over that first hurdle, as you mentioned. I don't know if you're going to be able to do that, but what do I talk about? So there's a lot of great advice and anecdotes and stories there with people who have kind of made that transition and, as I said, the link will be in the website link will be in the show notes so people can check out you and the services we offer and kind of follow up the conversation there. But, mike, it's been a pleasure, really good, to talk about this for hours more. It'll be interesting to get back on the show, maybe give it six months or so and see how the book lands and then how you've been using it and what that's translated to in terms of more conversations, that we can follow up with people and check them back in on the progress.
Mike: Perfect. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.
Stuart: Fantastic Cheers, Mike. I appreciate it. Everyone thanks for listening, as always. As I say, check out the show notes and we will catch you in the next one.