The Innovation Hubs

Taking the plunge into entrepreneurship can be intimidating, but the Toronto Public Library has you covered. There are a wide range of resources like reading lists and free programs to help get you started.

The library also offers panel events for niche areas, like the business of podcasting.

Transcript

Amanda: Hi! I’m Amanda Cupido and I’m the Podcasting Innovator in Residence at the Toronto Public library. I’m also a podcast producer and the author of Let’s Talk Podcasting: The Essential Guide to Doing it Right. Recently, I had the chance to moderate a discussion about the business of podcasting at the Toronto Reference Library. For those of you who missed it, I’ve conveniently pulled out some of the best parts for you to take a listen to. But first let’s get to know the panelists. We had Martin Waxman, a communications consultant who is one of the hosts on the podcast called Inside PR.

Martin: I’ve been podcasting for *gulp* almost 10 years.

Amanda: Martin also teaches social media and public relations at Seneca College and University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. Also on the panel is Geoff Siskind, an executive producer with Pacific Content, which is a Canadian company that makes branded podcasts.

Geoff: And how I got there is I spent about a decade working at CBC radio making doc for a number of different shows and at the same time being a show-runner in reality television.

Amanda: Now, he works on several podcasts including Trailblazers, a show by Dell and Hackable – a podcast by McAfee, which he also hosts. He starts off with talking about the types podcasts he produces.

Geoff: Certainly at Pacific Content we have different types of podcasts. We have some podcasts that have a very broad audience and some that are certain niche. There’s an opensource software company called Red Hat that we do a podcast for that’s specifically for open source software developers – which you would think there wouldn’t be very many of them, but the podcast does gangbusters. It’s truly amazing. There are 550,000 podcasts out there so one of the things we do is, not only make your podcast sound good but – this goes for branded or unbranded – what’s your superpower? What’s your unfair advantage? What the thing that you have that no one else has?

Amanda: Martin talks about what that looks like for him with his podcast and how he’s able to leverage having a niche audience.

Martin: A lot of PR and communications and journalism professors around the U.S. started recommending our podcast to students so we found we have a niche student audience. I’ll be at a conference somewhere in Dallas or Austin and someone will hear me talking and come up to me and say "You’re Martin Waxman aren’t you?" because they’re a student that recognizes my voice. I don’t get that anywhere else. It shows you the power of grassroots word-of-mouth promotion to build an audience. We don’t get major downloads. We get approximately 2,000 downloads per episode – mostly from Silicon Valley of all places and not Canada which we thought – but that’s good enough for us. It’s appealing to what we want to do, which is position ourselves as thought leaders and out of that, it helps boost our profiles in search and it means people can find us through another method, really like content marketing.

Amanda: Which brings us to return on investment. Although Martin says he hasn’t monetized his podcast, he sees great value in it.

Martin: We’ve seen more requests for speaking engagements. Organizations will call me and say they’ll want me to speak and if I speak at a conference and there’s a good chance that I’ll come away from that event with one, two or three client leads. And if I can close one or two of those, that’s a really great return on investment for me. It means I don’t have to go out and sell things, but instead, they’re coming to me based on something I’ve said. The podcast is kind of a backhanded way of referring people. I did get one big client based on my podcast who called out of the blue one day and said "I heard your podcast so I thought I would call you," so there’s that return. But it really depends what you want out of it. It may be that you just want to build a community around something that you’re passionate about or something that you’re interested in and you’ll be able to build a community and that’s great, you can achieve your goal and you’ll get a great return on investment. It may mean you want to make some money at it and in that respect, you need to figure out what you need to do to commercialize your idea so that advertisers or sponsors will find a good reason to pay for it because they know you’re a good intermediary to reach the same audience that they want to reach.

Amanda: Geoff adds that it’s all about strategy

Geoff: I think in terms of ROI [return on investment] if, you’re thinking is "If I spend $1 on this podcast, am I going to make 1$ on this podcast?" Maybe. Maybe not. It’s absolutely impossible to tell. But what is tangible is, will people think about you or your brand differently or in a new light? And will being associated with something that’s cool or smart – are there others things you can do with it? Even if just blasting it out on your Twitter feed that the new podcast is out, does that do something to your profile?

Amanda: Now a key piece to having your podcast impact your profile is getting people to listen in the first place. Geoff talks about one tactic that’s becoming increasingly popular in the podcasting space, which is ad swaps.

Geoff: You look for a podcast that has a similar sensibility and similar numbers and you approach them and say, "Hey, you talk about my thing for a minute and I’ll talk about yours for a minute." We’ve started doing this at Pacific Content and it’s hard to tell what the result is but it potentially taps you into a new audience and it’s an audience you know that you want because you can'tell by the show. I know CBC does a lot of ad swaps and NPR. Even if you just have 500 listeners you can find a similar show and my guess that you’re not going to have the same 500 listeners. So even if you get 50 new people tuning into your podcast, it’s awesome and always worth doing.

Amanda: Martin talks about a different tactic he’s used, specifically when targeting niche audiences.

Martin: We partnered with the Public Relations Society of America, which is the largest industry professionals group in the United States. We said "Look, this is who we’re reaching, if you give us a gold sponsorship we’ll come to your conference, we’ll pay our own way there and we will create content for you and use it on our podcast." And they said yes. We did that for a couple years and had a really great time doing it. That’s another way of doing it – partner with an organization that has the same type of audience as you.

Amanda: But even with all of these tips, Geoff says there’s a very specific sure-fire way to grow your audience.

Geoff: Still the number one thing is to get a juicy placement in some podcast app because that’s where you’re about to make your decision. There are three ways we’ve learned how to do that. One is to have a brand-new podcast, in which case you have something very promotable. The second is to have a new season. A lot of podcasts just go on forever. Just stop, take a break for a month and then you’re on season two and then you can promote it again. Apple Podcasts really like a new season. And then the third way, which is hard to pull off but awesome to do it to have an episode with a high profile guest. So if Martin has Obama on this podcast, Apple Podcasts is going to promote that. And if you look at their top spot, it’s full of Oprah is a guest, Julia Roberts is a guest. It’s a power guest that can bring you right up and ultimately put you in a different category.

Amanda: We capped off the session with a question from the audience about what’s missing in the podcasting landscape right now. Here’s Martin…

Martin: I would say what’s in your imagination. It’s so hard and it’s so personal. I know that’s a big clank canvas but if you look at all the content hats being created out there – all the podcasts, all the TV shows, all the radio shows, all the movies and all the books you go, "Why bother, it’s been done." So, it’s like how can you give it that original spark of creativity based on your perspective and your individuality? What is that spark that makes people want to listen? Otherwise they’ll go,"‘I’ve heard that." There’s nothing really new… it’s really the way you do it that’s new. And one more thing. I can’t remember who said this to me but it’s something I’ve never forgotten: creativity is a renewable resource. You can always come up with something new and I think knowing that means you don’t get stuck on one idea if it doesn’t work the way you want and you need to pivot.

Amanda: That sums it up. Thank for listening. Now go forth and podcast!