The Science of Success Podcast

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How You Can Build Your Audience From Nothing with Joe Fier

Lace Gilger
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In this episode, we discuss how to get started building your network and traffic online. We learn exactly how to build an audience from scratch, insider lessons about the best content marketing approach, how to get your content to go viral, a mind-blowing facebook advertising strategy and why email is still one of the most important marketing channels with our guest Joe Fier.

Joe Fier advises businesses on marketing strategy and sales conversion to increase revenues. He consults and creates long-term selling assets for clients, which has generated over $50 million in revenue online. He runs a marketing and tech consulting company and full-scale content marketing agency. He and his Co-Founder at Evergreen Profits, Matt Wolfe are also the hosts of the Hustle and Flowchart Podcast and authors of The Evergreen Traffic Playbook, hosts of the Hustle and Flowchart Podcast and Evergreen Wisdom: Daily Habits & Thoughts To Optimize Your Business & Life.

  • Producing the best possible content was one of the inflection points for Evergreen Profits

  • Content Creation & Development is the cornerstone of their growth strategy

  • “It starts with content - that’s the inflection point"

  • Attracting the right people to your content hasn’t changed a lot in the last 10 years in the online world.

  • When Joe kickstarted his podcast, he went to his network and got it front of them

  • How do you build up a network or seed your initial traffic?

    • Places like Reddit, Facebook groups, Quora - get involved in a community, get involved in a bucket of an audience, interject or inject value with the content that you produce - and be consistent. You have to be consistently involved in the community.

    • You have to build your own “credibility” in the community before you post your own content

    • Go into the community and spend a few weeks JUST answering questions

    • Just keep adding a ton of value and get the other people to start self-promoting for you

    • Get to know the OWNER of the subreddit or the MODERATOR of the subreddit (same strategy Sol used) that’s the KEY

      • Invite them on your podcast

      • Give back to them

      • Create win-wins for them

      • Help them with content or monetization

      • Build a relationship for them

      • Hop on Skype with them, ask what their needs and desires are, and help them solve it

  • Spend a minimal budget to kickstart a piece of content

    • Reddit Ads

    • Quora Ads

    • Facebook Ads

      1. Dennis Yew’s Strategy

      2. Target the audience of your podcast guests, and spend $1/day for the ads and have a show notes image/link to the podcast

      3. Target their name, their audience, their company, or a related audience, and then sync that up to a piece of content that that audience will love

      4. Promote every single episode with a direct target on FB - promote their show notes

    • Google Ads

      1. Find niche keywords that no one is bidding for

      2. Sync the content to that keyword

      3. Run a low budget ad to an initial piece of content

    • The target goal of the ads = join our email list

      1. Then have retargeting ads after they’ve visited the site

  • Email Opt-Ins for a new audience

    • Run these $1/day ads targeting Brene Brown on FB and point them straight to the show notes page

    • There’s no commitment on their part, and you’re selling them on the podcast

  • Retargeting

    • Warm approach “Exclusive notes on this Brene Brown interview - click here to get them absolutely free"

    • Driven by FB retargeting after they’ve already visited your page

    • Start low and work your way up as you see it working / frequency getting higher

    • They will have a pool of 10 potential ads and they will assign a budget to the pool, and FB will pull the various ads - let FB’s algorithm do the work for you

  • Repurpose episodes into something more visual for FB / Instagram / Ads

  • They try to do the opposite of the “Launch” model

    • Have a longer-term mindset and know that the content you’re putting out in the world will live there for a long long time

    • Create amazing valuable content that will pass the test of time

    • Always try to follow up, the money is made on the follow-up

    • Don’t try to rush the sale, don’t be too pushy, lead with value

  • Homework: Start an email list and create a good opt-in freebie + pair it up with a checklist or short opt-in guide

    • Then set up retargeting + simple FB ad strategy to bring people back to what you’re doing

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 4 million downloads listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we discuss how to get started building your network and your traffic online. We learn exactly how to build an audience from scratch, share insider lessons about the best content marketing approaches. Talk about how to get your content to go viral. Share a mind-blowing Facebook advertising strategy and discuss why email is one of the most important marketing channels you could still be using with our guest, Joe Fier.

I was recently closing a big software deal and I was thinking about how the lessons and themes from the Science of Success have been so valuable to me as an investor and business owner. I realized that I'm leaving a lot of value that I could be creating for you, the listeners, on the table. I believe that many of the things that we teach on the Science of Success are some of the biggest and most important business success factors today.

To that end, we’re launching a new Science of Success segment focused on business. These episodes will air every other Tuesday and will not interrupt your regularly scheduled Science of Success programming. Everything we teach on the show can be applied to achieving success in your business life, and now we’re going to show you how to do that along with some interviews of the world's top business experts.

So with that, I hope you enjoy this business-focused episode of the Science of Success.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we’ve put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on their along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That successpodcast.com, or if you're on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word SMARTER. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

Have you always wondered if the law of attraction is real? In our previous episode, we dug into the science behind visualization. Manifesting and much more to find out what really works and what doesn’t. we shared strategies for accessing your intuition and aligning your emotions, your intuition and your rational thought processes to super charge your brain. We talked about how you can beat impostor syndrome and much more with our previous guest, Dr. Tara Swart. If you want to attract the things that are most important to you in your life, listen to our previous episode.

Now, for our interview with Joe.

[00:03:04] MB: Today, we have another interesting guest on the show, Joe Fier. Joe advices businesses on marketing strategy and sales conversions to increase their revenue. He consults and creates long-term selling assets for his clients, which has generated more than $50 million in online revenue. He runs a marketing and tech consulting company and a full-scale content marketing agency. He and his cofounder at Evergreen Profits, Matt Wolfe, are also the hosts of The Hustle and Flowchart Podcast and authors of The Evergreen Traffic Playbook and Evergreen Wisdom: Daily Habits and Thoughts to Optimize Your Business in Life.

Joe, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:03:37] JF: Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me here.

[00:03:39] MB: Well, we’re super excited to have you on the show today and dig into a little bit more kind of business-focused content than we typically focus on the show, but I think this is going to be a really insightful conversation for the listeners and I think we can pull a lot of really good insights out of this.

[00:03:54] JF: Yeah, we’re just doing that pre-talk and there’s a lot of overlap.

[00:03:57] MB: Yeah, might have to release the preshow conversation as a little piece of bonus content or maybe we’ll play it after the credits roll for those of you who want to stick around.

[00:04:06] JF: Right on.

[00:04:06] MB: But I’m curious, I mean, it’s such a fascinating skillset. I mean, obviously, we spend a lot of time thinking about digital marketing kind of on the backend of Science of Success as well. But I’m curious, what was the, or was there, kind of an inflection point in your career where things really started to click or you really started to figure out what actually drives growth online. What actually makes companies or businesses scale in a digital way?

[00:04:32] JF: Yeah, that’s good question. It took a while. Ironically, we started with it, but then I kind of diverted a little away from the core thing. I believe it’s content is producing the best possible content, like you guys are with this podcast. We do that with our show as well. We started off blogging just in different niches and kind of learning, and we always shared our results, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with the podcast still, and I know you guys do the same thing.

Giving that value in terms of a good piece of content there and then putting it out to the world and then doing that. That’s our focus, is content development and creation and using that around all of our marketing. Then that just pairs up and then allows our network to grow. Again, the podcast is a perfect part of that as well. But I believe it starts with content. That’s kind of the inflection point.

I diverted a lot into one-on-one stuff, consulting and kind of agency work, and we’ve moved more into like, “Hey, the foundation needs to be content,” because that’s going to attract the right people that you want to work with. Kind of weeds out a lot of the tire kickers that might not be the best time for them to take an action with you. But to the content, at least there’s value that they’re going to get from there and they might tell some of their friends and refer the qualified folks you’re with.

That’s really the key, is producing a great content that really flows from you, not something that you should try to force yourself into. Podcasting is great. We love to talk and that can get produced into videos, and transcripts, and notes, and newsletters, and all sorts of cool things. But that’s where I believe it starts for us.

[00:06:15] MB: I think that’s a piece of advice that you hear a lot and I feel like many people create content that may not be high-quality content, which could be part of the problem and probably is. But I feel like there’re so many content creators out there who create a bunch of content. They think it’s awesome. They kind of put it out there and a lone tumbleweed blows by and nobody really sees it. It’s almost a chicken and the egg type of situation.

If you have great content or you think you’re creating high-quality content, how do you actually get people to start listening to it, start paying attention to it? How do you get it in front of folks? Because I know growing traffic is obviously a huge component of what’s made you guys so successful. You realized that content was super important, and then how did you start to really get distribution for that content and get traffic and get it in front of people?

[00:07:02] JF: Yeah. We started off, and this is where we kind of began. Back in the day, we started about 2010 marketing online and the blogging days. To be honest, the modalities have changed a little it, but attracting the right people on the kick-start content hasn’t changed a lot. We started in for-marketing. Actually giving value, responding to people’s questions, and there we would drop a link to a post that we might have written or maybe it’s in our footer. Something that link to our property where the content was housed.

When we kick-started our podcast, let’s say, we went to our network and we went to all of these different places that we know we have some influence or at least we can attach ourselves to a community that is talking about the similar topics. Today, we’re actually starting to experiment a lot with Reddit. In the podcasting space, that’s something we’re starting to morph more into as podcast marketing. We’re doing some different things in that regard.

On Reddit, Matt’s kind of – My partner, Matt Wolfe, is kind of ahead in this stuff a little bit more, because he just nerds out on that stuff, is giving value in those communities. Reddit is great for that. Quora is amazing. We’ve interviewed a bunch of content producers, and one of the daily actions that a lot of these folks do is hit Quora, give value on there, answer questions and then have a link back to a piece of content that you produced. It could be anything, YouTube videos, podcast, blog, whatnot.

Facebook groups are amazing. If you can create these relationships and these groups that really value good content, and especially on these Facebook groups, people are very protective over the type of stuff that’s posted. Reddit definitely. Quora as well. As long as you can find these buckets of audiences, it always starts with audiences, and then just figure out how to interject some kind of – Or inject some kind of value in there with the content that you produced and then just keep the consistency up. You can’t do like a one shot and then just kind of hope that it’s going to take off.

The idea is to always kind of make it a daily checklist, something on that list that you’re just ticking the box, post something in Reddit, or you just answer someone’s question. That’s really a great way.

Then once you build up a network, so that’s great for someone starting out. The network, for a podcast or if you tag someone in something, always getting someone to share that whole virility factor, it’s extremely valuable. Again, it’s not going to be a massive push. But if you can pair that up with some paid traffic – So that’s what we really love to do. There’s a lot of different strategies you could do on all these places where you can spend a pretty minimal budget just to kick-start a piece of content.

Even with Reddit, there’s Reddit ads, Quora ads, Facebook ads of course, do a lot on Google as well. You could do these for as little as a dollar or $5 a day to kick-start a piece of content. From there, you can kind of just compound your efforts with more content or maybe more ad budget and more value to give to these communities.

[00:10:12] MB: That’s really interesting, and there’s a couple different things I want to understand about that. I definitely want to dig into kick-starting content with a small paid spend, because I think that’s a topic that’s really, really interesting. But before we do, one of the struggles, and this is just something personally that we’ve encountered along our kind of growth trajectory is when we were early on, we haven’t done a lot of kind of Reddit and Facebook marketing, but I’ve spent a huge amount of time on Quora, which we got a lot of traffic from.

But when I would go to a place like Reddit and go into some of the Subreddits that we’re affiliated with, things like Science of Success, and maybe I just didn’t understand the Reddit kit or whatever of how to do it appropriately. I would post something that I think is super valuable. I mean, I truly believe in the content we’re creating. I think it’s amazing. I think it’s really life-changing and we have tons and tons of people who email us and tell us that, and yet I would come in and say like, “Hey, you should check this out. This is a great interview with this world-class expert about this thing. Here’re the things you should do.” I got banned from like three Subreddits for self-promotion.

After that I was just like, “Fuck Reddit. I’m not going to waste any time on here.” I mean, have you ever had that experience or how do you kind of thread that needle to where you don’t get banned from self-promoting, because I feel like some of those communities like Reddit and some Facebook groups are so edgy about like you can’t post the link to your own content, and yet it’s like, “Well, what if it’s actually really good content? What if it’s directly relevant to what you’re talking about?”

[00:11:35] JF: It’s true. Reddit is – That’s probably the most difficult place to self-promote, and that’s where you have to really – It’s interesting. It’s like these are all little communities. You have to build your own cred before you start linking to something of your own, or really anything at that, because you never know how you’re tied in to that piece of content.

With Reddit, definitely every Subreddit has its own rules. Knowing what those rules are. I believe on the right side, if you’re on the browser online, they always have all the different terms that that Reddit owner or Subreddit owner is kind of looking out for in all those other – People who’ve joined Reddit, they’re going to support that. I mean, these people are by the book rules. They’re rabid, man. If you piss someone off, yeah, it’s very highly likely you’re either going to bet booted or downvoted, which screws up your karma on Reddit. That’s kind of how they judge things there.

With us, we’ll go to the podcasting Reddit and just purely answer questions and without any links or anything like that. Really, if you just do that, I would say for just a handful of weeks, and some of that content, the answer should come from your other content that you produced. That’s typically what we do. It’s a weed or repurpose what we’re already creating.

But overtime, we have definitely noticed people start sharing it or they’ll start upvoting it. So it gets a little bit more traction. Some people, we’ve seen now starting to post to other Subreddits. The idea is to kind of get other people that do that work for you, but there’s not a lot of shortcutting, the self-promotion, or you can’t start dropping links left and right. Same with Quora as well.

Facebook groups, same with Reddit groups. I mean, all these things. If you can get to know the owner of some of the moderators and really create a relationship there, because whoever owns that audience, that’s the person you really got to get in with. Of course, you can create your own groups. You can create your own Subreddit and all of that stuff, but then you got to actually work to build your own audience.

If you have your own Subreddit, I mean, you own the rules. We have our own for the podcast and it’s a slow growth, but definitely anything goes if you hold the rules to that group. But I would say there’s a lot of opportunity on Facebook groups for this and it’s probably a little easier than Reddit if you’re just starting up.

[00:13:59] MB: That’s actually a really, really key point and something that I hadn’t thought off from a strategic standpoint, which is targeting and getting to know the moderators or the owners of those, whether it’s a sub or a Facebook group or whatever. I mean, if you’re somebody who has credibility in your space. I mean, if we were to email somebody who has a personal development Subreddit and be like, “Hey, here’s what we do. Here’s who we are. Here’s who we’ve interviewed,” etc. It’s probably pretty easy to have a conversation and just talk to them on Skype for 30 minutes. Build that relationship. Start adding value. Then suddenly, when you get engaged in that Subreddit, they’re way less likely to be like, “Who the fuck is this guy?” Banned.

[00:14:36] JF: Yeah, exactly. It’s all about relationships, and that’s where – Or you can invite some of those folks on the show. We’re always trying to look for win-wins, ways to give back to them. If they’re struggling to make money, which a lot of these group owners are, they don’t know how to monetize, or they don’t have their own content, you can be that content arm for them, or somehow figure out a red split on whatever it might be you bring to the table there.

Any kind of win-win, you’re always looking for. They have the audience you want. That’s your win. You just got to figure out what is the win that they’re really going to freaking jump over, jump backwards over for. I think you nailed it, man. Hop on Skype for just a few minutes. You could bang that out and figure out what are their desires. Then from there, it’s just all about giving value to their people.

[00:15:23] MB: Super smart. I want to come back to the paid ads to content piece, because I’ve heard some previous rules of thumb or ideas around if you spend X on a piece of content, you should spend Y promoting it. What is your thought process or strategy? How do you typically kick-start a piece of content with a little bit of paid promotion? How do you think about budgeting that and what platforms have you seen to be the most effective?

[00:15:46] JF: Let’s focus on Facebook first, and we interviewed a guy named Dennis Yu. This is kind of his strategy, and it’s been morphed around by a bunch of people, but this is kind of our perpetual strategy to target ads to an audience that’s really going to sync up well with the piece of content. So case in point is, our podcast, we have a lot of guests who are targets on Facebook, or their companies are. What we’ll do is we’ll have Roland Frasier, we talked about him on the pre-talk here.

I believe now, he is a target. But prior to that, Digital Marketer was the target that we were using. In Facebook, you can target that audience. So Digital Marketer, or Roland Frasier, and for a dollar a day with these ads, you can put a link, or for us, it’s basically just the show notes image, and that will target their audience. For a dollar a day, Facebook is going to try to squeeze out as much of those impressions for that dollar a day.

Facebook wants you to be successful with their ads, as does any other platform out there. If you could target perpetually a dollar a day for someone or their audience, it could be their company, the name or even a related audience if you can think a little laterally, and then sync that up to a piece of content that those folks are going to love. For a dollar a day, you can kind of appear that you’re everywhere to that audience.

So that’s why we get a lot of messages about like, “I found you from Facebook, because I just saw you kind of stalking me on there.” But that was a strategic target. We’ll actually do that for every single one of our guests who has a direct target on Facebook, and that works really well.

In addition to that, we’d do Google Ads as well. This is a little bit more of an elaborate strategy, but we’ll try to figure out what keywords people are searching for around our piece of content. So we’ll kind of start with a broad keyword, run some ads just to get clicks and then we’ll figure out what keywords are starting to come in a little bit more consistently. Ideally, it’s not going to be a broad keyword, because those are competitive. Spend about $100 to get this data from Google. Then from there, we’ll take some of the keywords that are maybe a little bit more niched down. They’re a little longer. Folks aren’t typically bidding on these keywords, but that’s where we can really shine a light on running ad, and usually we’re the only ones there and our content synced up perfectly. It usually has a similar keyword. We’ll title the piece of content almost identical to the ads so it’s super congruent. You always want to do that with all of your ads.

What I described there on Facebook and then also Google, those are our two biggest strategies. Everyday we’re running low budget ads to kind of like an initial piece of content. If they don’t take an action, which we’re always looking for them to join our email list at a very minimum so we could do our follow-ups. But if they don’t do that, then we have all of our retargeting ads running, again, to very targeted – If they touched our website in any which way, they’re going to see maybe some videos from Matt or I, some other contents, some podcasts.

We’re just trying to grow that trust. So it’s a multi-touch process until we kind of get that conversion or whatever we’re trying to get them to do, either buy a product, or join the list, something like that. I would say those two are like the 80-20. That’s the 80% of where we’re focused on right now.

[00:19:14] MB: Yeah, that’s so smart and it makes total sense. I mean, we’re talking in the preshow I think about a recent guest we had on our show, Brene Brown. She’s obviously a target on Facebook, or I would assume she is, because she’s big enough. If we were to just take our Brene Brown show notes, and I’m curious how you would think about this. Basically, if I’m describing this correctly, you basically take the show notes for the Brene Brown episode, you make sure – I want to unpack a little bit kind of how you sync that up with an email opt-in. Then you basically run a dollar a day Facebook ad targeting Brene Brown, people who like Brene Brown, and, “Boom! Boom! Boom!” You’re there. You’re omnipresent, and obviously those people are already going to be predisposed to liking your content.

[00:19:55] JF: 100%. You nailed it, and that’s what we do, is we now we’re starting to do more of the – We call them cheat sheets, but yeah, you can do show notes. Anything that’s going to grab that audience’s attention, and it’s even better if, yeah, you’d show them, “Hey, here’s an exclusive interview,” or maybe it’s a transcript or some kind of notes from Brene talking about X-topic. More than likely, you’re going to get a lot of people from their audience start to – It’s not a flood. It’s a trickle approach, which is good, because that allows you to test and to kind of optimize your conversions. If you’re trying to get them on an email list, which I would definitely want them to do. If you were to do that, I would definitely suggest doing that.

[00:20:35] MB: Yeah. We had a big, and I don’t mean to interrupt you, but we had a big strategic shift probably two years ago with the podcast where we basically realized, before that, we’re going to conferences and events talking to people and we’re like, “Hey! We’re a podcast. We want to get more podcast subscribers. Build more listenership,” and we basically had this complete strategic flip of the way we perceived it. It was like, “No. we’re a media company and what we really need to do is get email subscribers.” Currently, the way we deliver content and value to them is through primarily a podcast, but not exclusively. So we completely shifted our strategy and went from having maybe sub 2,000 or 3,000 email subs to having almost 50,000 email subs by just pivoting our strategy towards focusing on that.

[00:21:18] JF: Dude! That’s so valuable, and you nailed it. You said a media company. That was actually a shift that Matt and I took maybe two years ago, I would say, because in the podcast, like it is for you guys, that’s at the top of the media company. If you think in media companies, someone’s like, “Oh! How do I have a media company?”

Well, any content is a media thing. You can be on all these different platforms. If you’re leveraging podcast, cool. There’s your media platform there. YouTube, Facebook, Google, all of these things, collectively, they have this reach. Then with that reach, if you could just figure out how to kind of funnel them into with value – We’re always leading with content value, but bringing them to the email list. That’s where all of our money is made, is on the follow-up.

We were talking about – You asked me how we monetize our podcast. That’s exactly it. It’s not usually right there on the first tough. It’s maybe the third seventh touch, and that sounds like a lot, but you can automate a lot of those touches. Just bringing them back to more content, and then sooner rather than later, if you have all of these different entry points on your show notes pages, on the landing pages, anywhere out there on your podcast as well with a special URL to a landing page, that just optimizes your opportunity to capture these folks on a list.

Retargeting is all another bucket too. We call them owned audiences. Anything that you have control and can follow-up with folks, it could be email list, chat bots even, retargeting. Podcasts are great, or even PushCrew, push notifications on browsers. All of these are things that you have control to follow-up with. It’s just going to increase the opportunity for you to convert them into a sale of something, whatever you’re looking to do.

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[00:24:24] MB: I want to unpack a couple of pieces of this and get super granular for a second. When you’re thinking about the ad that you’re running to, let’s say, a show notes page, is that actually straight up the show notes page or is it a landing page that the number one thing is you’re trying to convert them to an email opt-in in order to get access to a guide to the show notes or whatever, or is it, “Hey, here’s the show notes page, here’s the episode. You might like it. By the way, join the email list.”

[00:24:50] JF: Yeah. There are two steps there. Let’s get back to the Brene Brown example that you said. If you wanted to attract new people, these are people who have not listened to the show yet and you’re just trying to attract and a new audience to come listen and then go down the wormhole with you guys. That would be where I would run these dollar day ads, target Brene Brown on Facebook and then use the dollar day strategy and point them to a show notes page. Because there’s no commitment on the person’s part and the new person that you’re attracting there, they have the opportunity to check out show notes page, maybe read it, listen to the episode. They could join the email list if they choose to. They probably won’t off their first touch, but you never know. There is a percentage that will take you up.

But then to bring them back, you have the whole retargeting phase. You want to make sure that you’re following up on anyone who lands on one of your properties, and that’s even clicking an ad if that ad goes to anywhere else, even someone else at site, you could retarget. What I would do is to the warm approach. The cold approach was to use the dollar a day and send to show notes. But a cold approach, what we would do is run an ad that if you wanted to get super targeted, you would do something like, “Here are the exclusive notes.”

This is what we do, is typically we took the notes on this Brene Brown episode for you. If you click this, you’ll get it for absolutely free, and what that would direct them to is to a landing page. Now, only option there is to join our email list to get that thing for free. That would be the warm approach with retargeting on Facebook. You could do that on Google as well, and I believe Reddit, even if you want to experiment with that, it’s starting to come out with some retargeting ads. Those are the two approaches I would take for those.

[00:26:39] MB: Basically, you start out, you drive cold traffic to a dollar a day to the landing page for the general show notes. Then for the people who haven’t joined the email list, you’re retargeting them, “Hey, here’s an exclusive guide, checklist, whatever, show notes, etc. Click here to get them completely free,” and then that’s where you’re sort of hitting them after they’ve been warmed up a little bit. They’ve at least clicked to your landing page previously. That’s when you’re driving specifically for the email opt-in.

[00:27:06] JF: 100%. Yeah. What you could do, and this is a more elaborate approach, but if they’re not taking you up for a certain period of time, there’re a lot of things you could do on Facebook. For certain time periods, run this ad. So let’s say in the first week or so, if they landed on the Brene Brown show notes page but didn’t join the email list, you can run ads with retargeting to just get them with the objective to actually join the list.

But maybe after that point, they don’t take an action. Now you could just kind of follow up with other episodes that you guys released, and those are all retargeting ads. They could point to other show notes pages. Maybe there are some videos that you have you can upload on Facebook. There are a lot of ways to repurpose your episodes and make a good visual around it on Facebook and Instagram, because they’re all connected.

Again, it’s like repetition. The more and more they see your brand, your face, your name, the different guests you’ve had, your podcast logo. Over and over, we hear it all the time, like, “Man! I see your stuff everywhere. You guys are video machines or whatever.” It’s like, “No, we just have a bucket of about maybe 10 to 20 assets and these ads that just rotate in these pool of people.”

If they haven’t taken the desire to action, they’re just going to see our brand. So maybe that one thing didn’t resonate, but maybe one of these other 20 things do, and each one of those things have a low budget. So it’s not like we’re spending $100 per ad. It might just be $2, let’s say, per ad, or even a dollar an ad, and they’re just rotating around. You’re just increasing your odds. That’s really all you’re trying to do.

[00:28:45] MB: So what are you targeting for kind of – I mean, you touched on this a second ago, but what are you aiming for from a retargeting budget standpoint? If you’re spending a dollar a day on the cold traffic, how much are you allocating to retargeting?

[00:28:57] JF: That’s totally up to you. The minimum you could spend on Facebook, for example, is a dollar per day for your budget. We always suggest to kind of start low and then work your way up as you see. Maybe the frequency is getting higher or you’re just not getting the desired action. It’s almost like a pool of ads and you can – For us, we’ll have about 10 at a minimum of any time and then we’ll essentially assign a budget to each one of those ads. So call it a dollar a day to start.

Facebook is just going to kind of rotate around depending on what – In that pool, they kind of decide what ad to show depending on the frequency that it’s been shown and the budget you have allocated. You kind of just let their algorithm do the work for you on the retargeting plan, which is kind of nice. So you can – It’s kind of up to you, again, for ramping up the budget. The more budget you increase, of course, your ads are going to show more.

Yeah, that’s kind of it. There are definitely a lot of nuts and bolts to it. But at a good understanding level, I’d say that’s kind of what you want to be thinking of, is there are these pool, and Facebook, give them enough kind of ammunition to work with or budget to work with, and they’re going to squeeze the most results that they possibly can out of what you give them.

[00:30:13] MB: This is maybe a hyper-specific question, but are you personally executing going into Facebook doing this stuff, or do you have a consultant, an outsource or somebody that you bring in to actually execute the ad setup and everything for you.

[00:30:30] JF: Right now, Matt is the one that heads up all of that. Yeah, that’s what I like in the granular details. He’s going to be the one to really go into the weeds on it. He manages, I would say, about 60% of the ads, but we get direct consulting from a good buddy of ours, Kurt Moley. Kurt Moley out of Austin. He advices a lot of large brands.

Every single week, we’re getting kind of told what to do with the latest things happening on Facebook like, “Hey! Test this video 15 seconds or less. Use it in in-stream ads. This is really killing it right now. Go try this out.” We kind of take direction from them, him and his team, but we’re always experimenting as well from people on our podcast. Like I mentioned, Dennis Yu. Our episode, he pretty much lays out that entire process for the dollar a day ads.

A lot of these stuff is simple enough to just set up yourself and you don’t need to get too crazy. I would say if you could just figure out a dollar a day ads, anyone can set those up and set your targeting and make sure your budgets are right. You’re not going to spend way too much for whatever result you’re trying to get, and then set up some simple retargeting to just follow up and, again, set a budget you’re comfortable with and then let it run for a week or two.

That’s kind of like, again, 80-20. That’s usually what businesses should be doing at a minimum, and most every business owner can kind of learn those basics and do it themselves. But we are starting to transition away from Matt doing the ads, because, yeah, that’s not his best use of time, but he just loves it so much. He has that mind. He just nerds out with it.

[00:32:10] MB: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I’m just curious. I’m always curious about how the actual tactical concrete implementation of this looks on the backend.

[00:32:18] JF: Yeah, he’s definitely – In our partnership, I’m definitely more the visionary. Strategy, him and I both do. But I’ll kind of do more the experimenting, the ideas, the networking and kind of figuring out the general landscape of things. Then once we have something we agree upon, Matt’s the one that has the systems, analytical brain, and he’ll just freaking go down the wormhole. He’ll come up with the strategy, step-by-step. My brain isn’t the sequential thinker that he is. That’s why we make I think a pretty damn good partnership, and others have said that actually.

That guy, Dennis Yu, he’s like, “You guys are like a two-headed dragon.” One can go run away and do this kind of thing while Matt’s over here behind the computer, freaking busting out a crazy automation that we can then replicate and send to our team to kind of manage the day-to-day. That’s kind of how we split up our duties and how we can – It seems like we do a lot, but a lot of it can be automated once you set up the system. That’s usually Matt, the one who do that.

[00:33:21] MB: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So you touched on this a little bit, but from a high-level standpoint, how do you think about monetizing the podcast audience. I mean, this is sort of a multi-pronged question, but is the podcast the primary driver of leads and opportunities for the entire economic engine that you guys have developed, or is it just a piece that’s sort of a plug and play or a satellite that sits on top of a larger business infrastructure?

[00:33:49] JF: Yeah, good question. The podcast definitely has become our number one driver for all content, traffic, all of the above mainly because it can repurposed in so many different ways. Our podcast, like we’re saying, it’s two times a week the show get released, and they’re about an hour-long on average. From that point, we always have a note taker taking notes on every single one of these things. I don’t know if you ever saw the trafficking conversion notes that get released. We basically took a note taker that used to work for that company and she now works for us to take these notes. These are like four-page notes. These things can get repurposed into all sorts of different content on social media, shareables and repurpose with all these different apps. Transcripts are part of that as well.

That then turns into – From the podcast, we’re always trying to direct people who listen to our show notes page and sometimes we actually send them to just the companionship, kind of starting to experiment with that. It’s tough to track from podcast, which I’m sure you’re very well aware. It’s kind of an interesting space where we’re always experimenting and figuring out what works best, but at a minimum.

We’re always trying to direct people from the podcast to our show notes page, because once they land on the show notes page, they have the opportunity to opt in to our email list. They can click on anyone of the many links of resources we mentioned on the show. But also it allows us to retarget those folks, and that is the number one way we get people on an email list to then follow up with them with affiliate offers. We also have a membership that’s a monthly reoccurring product, 15 bucks a month.

We’re trying to do a very low-level subscription so we’d get some reoccurring income for ourselves that we control. But then on the backend of that, there’re all sorts of different affiliate offers, which we typically average about $100 per commission, a little bit more depending on the actual offer. That is kind of our monetization right there. That’s kind of the process. We have the podcast all the way into show notes with a call to action on the podcast that directs them to the show notes. Them from there, the idea is to get them on an email list, and that’s kind of our traffic. That’s our content generator. That’s our machine right there.

[00:36:17] MB: If you were to say, and if you’re comfortable sharing this, it’s totally fine. But I’m curious at a very high-level, what percent of your monetization is affiliate offers, versus sort of house offers, versus consulting and work outside of offers made to the list?

[00:36:32] JF: Yeah. No, that’s a great question, man. I’m happy to answer. For the longest time, I’d say for two years when we’re kind of starting the show and figuring this all out, affiliate income was about 80%, which is cool, but also scary as hell, because we’re kind of building someone else’s business and we’re at the whim of if they change an offer, that conversions could tank, meaning our income can tank too. Luckily, that never really happened. We get some little blurbs here and there. But right now, it’s about 50-50. We’re actively trying to, like I was saying, dip people in this membership dip, which allows us, and this is what gets a little interesting and this is something we’ve learned from Roland actually, is if we can create all these different buckets and control attention more or less starting with the podcast, now we’re bringing them into a membership site, which we can follow up with just our customers. Show them exclusive content, maybe some affiliate offers, and it also allows us sponsorship opportunities. If we’re going back to the media company concept, we now have the opportunity to get a sponsor for not only the podcast, but we have banners on our sites that we can rotate and we can limit the amount of impression. So if we’re guaranteeing a certain amount, we can say that and we can actually show them proof of it as well.

But then we also have our membership area. We can create a sponsor to area, which we have with the piece of content and a special offer. The same with our physical newsletter that we send in the email. We can give inserts in there or they can even purchase a spot to mail that list with our endorsement. It’s interesting, because we can create now sponsorship packages and show the value, and the results are much better than if someone just bought ad space on the actual website with banners, or even on the podcast. The results are much, much better with all these different buckets that we have influence over.

It’s really cool. The idea is with this media set, we’re creating all of these different opportunities for us to essentially monetize without us needing to do a lot more work than we’re normally doing. It’s kind of found money if you set yourself up for that kind of opportunity. The idea is to get away more and more of the affiliate. That’s more of a byproduct is the idea. We want it down to probably 25% ideally of our income.

[00:39:01] MB: That’s really interesting. So the print newsletter, that’s kind of encompassed in the – Sorry, how much did you say per month? 15, 25?

[00:39:08] JF: 15 a month.

[00:39:09] MB: $15 a month. What is the value proposition? Because we haven’t done anything like that with our audience, but I’ve always been fascinated by that kind of model and whether there’s actually value in it. What is the value proposition to the audience and is the print newsletter included as part of that?

[00:39:25] JF: It is. It started off with just the print. So we know our cost is about – We ship all over the world. So it’s one flat rate. So it’s around $8 per person. Obviously, not a lot of profit there. The idea is to get folks to really see the repetition and set ourselves up with the affiliate income, sponsorship income and all of that stuff.

The value prop is typically the folks hearing our offers, seen the offers, hearing us on our podcast and they want to just dive deeper. They want to get a higher touch with us. We have a whole community in there. They can ask questions of us or other people. A lot of our guests will actually go into that community as well, because their content lives there. So they have the option to dive deeper with them, with their training. Actually ask them questions.

Maybe purchase their product if they want to. But all the way from – I mentioned that we take notes and all of our podcast episodes. What we do is we compile all those notes into a monthly booklet more or less, and this thing ranges from 24 pages to 30-ish pages. Essentially, it’s a way that a lot of folks really love the physical aspect, which is crazy, because there’re a lot of magazines from startups now. They’re starting to get made. It’s almost like this.

We’re seeing a little bit of a shift back into physical mailings of newsletters and magazines. It’s just to take people away from the distractions that we’re all getting, the phones ringing or another notification on our computer. A lot of folks really love that physical. They can highlight stuff, dog-ear, and it’s just a time savings. The idea is to save their time but also allow them to dive deeper with us.

Is the value prop mainly to the listeners? We have monthly calls as well with extra training and experiments that we’re up to and what others are up to on our show. It’s a way for folks to really just stay tapped in for a low dollar amount. From there, it opens up all sorts of opportunities for us, of course, like I was mentioning. Yeah, it’s an interesting model and we’re still tweaking little things here and there.

If you kind of compare it to, say, Blinkist for reading books, or all these summary guides you see on Amazon. Everyone is just trying to save time. They’re digesting content. They want to be in the know, but maybe it’s just like a handful of things they want to take away from an episode. Not listen to a full-hour or the thing twice a week. That’s a huge commitment. We’re trying to kind of bridge that gap there.

[00:41:57] MB: Yeah, it’s really fascinating, and I don’t know if you follow Tim Ferriss or his stuff at all, but he just recently in the last couple of weeks rolled out a similar test of his monetization. He actually I think is going no ads and he’s doing pay what you think it’s worth starting with $10 a month kind of model and testing that for a couple of weeks to see how that compares to his monetization strategy of just sponsorships.

[00:42:19] JF: Yeah. It’s super smart too, because the podcasting world – CPM, it’s basically the earnings per download. It’s around $20 of the sponsorship opportunity came your way as a podcaster. I just heard earlier today, it used to be $60. So it keeps going down unfortunately for podcasters. But the way they circumvent that is to create buckets of your own and a value prop to sponsors, like we did, where a software company came to us and they just wanted podcast sponsorship.

But what I did, I kind of flipped it. I’m like, “Hey! Well, we have these other buckets. I know they’re going to return, give you much better returns than just podcast sponsorship,” and they agreed to it and I was able to take them away from the CPM model and then give them just a one flat fee for that period of time, the sponsorship. It’s way more profitable for us, but I know the benefit to them is going to be much higher as well. It’s interesting, and there are a lot of things you can kind of manipulate. Once you have this media company in these different little buckets that you have influence over. It’s just another way to create value. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

[00:43:31] MB: How do you think about the – What is the audience that you guys are targeting or serving? Did you intentionally set out to serve a specific niche or a specific set of customers? How did you select that and begin to focus around targeting that niche and who is it?

[00:43:47] JF: Yeah. It’s interesting, because we’ve started off with just talking to mainly digital marketers, people in our circle. That’s kind of the crew that we’ve always had and had influence over. We did that just because it’s kind of the language we spoke and that’s the network that we can leverage to kick-start the show.

Now it’s starting to extend into – Because I think it’s really the guests we’re bringing on. That’s going to attract the different audience. So now we’re getting a lot more high-level companies. It’s interesting, a bunch of lawyers. There are different associations. I mean, the target is essentially any business who is around a million dollars a year who has a team, minimal team as a starting point. But they’re looking to take action. They want to not only get the tactics, but they want to see what’s behind the hood and really dig into like the stories and the why and the struggles even. We’re trying to always pull out the shit that every entrepreneur has to go through.

Our idea is to try to unpack stories and things that are really making our guest tick that aren’t normally seen on the stages or on any other business podcast out there. It’s almost like we’re shooting to try to be like the Joe Rogan approach of business, which is interesting. It’s long-form, which most business shows, marketing shows are not. They’re usually very tactical, which we kind of start it off that way, but we quickly got bored of that

We wanted to kind of like what you guys do, is get to the root of what is it that makes this thing work or tick. Yeah, there are always some practical things that people can apply, kind of like what we’ve been talking about here. Also, what’s the why behind all of these stuff? It’s interesting, man, we’re now getting – We do some independent shows too. Matt and I, my cohost, we’ll do these things called therapy sessions. It’s just the two of us and we’ll just lay everything out there, the good, the bad, the ugly. We don’t care. There’s no censorship. We don’t edit anything. We’ll talk about experiments we’re doing, what we failed, what we succeeded, all that stuff, future plans. People absolutely love them.

I feel like those have really helped us grow a better brand. It may not attract more people. I think the bigger names in our show, attract the audiences that we’re serving now. But it’s the ones that really key people are these therapy sessions, because I feel like it’s almost like it’s therapy for us. That’s what we named it, because we’re all struggling with similar things. We just lay it out there and then people email us all the time. They’re like, “Do more of those things. More of you is what we want.”

We feel like it strengthens our brand. That’s what get people’s reaching out, asking about partnership or advising deals. We do a lot of those now. That usually comes directly from the podcast. I mean, you guys reached out straight form the podcast after listening to Roland. That’s kind of proving point right there.

[00:46:45] MB: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. I’m curious, what’s one of the most common pitfalls or mistakes that you see people making when they’re getting started with generating traffic or beginning with digital marketing?

[00:46:59] JF: I would say it goes back to content for us, and then also trying to get the conversion, like a sales conversation or whatever that end result way too quickly. The traffic process that we have, it’s a longer term process and it’s kind of what I mapped out with the dollar a day strategy and Facebook and also that Google strategy where we’re trying to mine these keywords.

The idea that we’re trying to do is we have a long-term strategy. We don’t like the launch and then the drop-off, because I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Launch Model, but that was prevalent maybe about 6+ years ago, and it was very good. It raised a lot of money for a company, but then right after that, there’s no strategy to retain that attention with something like retargeting fronts even follow-ups in an email. It’s kind of two things. Have a longer term mindset and know that the content you’re putting out in the world will live there for a very, very long time. Every piece of content you ever put online. Do your best in terms of creating amazing, valuable content that will last the test of time, even if it’s tactically. You can always go back and update that.

But then always try to follow-up. It’s all about the follow-up. Most of our money is made on the follow-up in all those different ways that we’re talking about. A lot of folks just try to rush it, man. They try to rush the sale or whatever it is they’re trying to do and they become too pushy and they’re not leaving with value. That’s where people kind of start going away, looking for other options, because you’re not quite resonating with where their needs are at.

[00:48:40] MB: What would one action item or a piece of homework be that you would give to listeners if they wanted to implement some of the things we’ve talked about today?

[00:48:48] JF: All right. A couple of ones. I would say if you don’t have an email list, definitely start an email list and create a good opt-in freebie to capture those folks. Figure out whatever it is that audiences you have and the intentions they’re seeking. Figure out their pains, their struggles, all that stuff and then try to come up with a good solution to at least poke them a little bit in the very beginning to give them – It’s all value obviously. You’re not trying to give them a little portion and then upsell them on the rest. That’s kind of – That’s not the best way to approach it.

Grow an email list, pair it up with a great valuable piece of content. It could be a good checklist, template, whatever it is, that’s easy to digest. The eBook thing, it’s not the best kind of opt-in freebie. So capture your folks with an email at minimum. If you do have that, set up this retargeting. I would say that’s the lowest barrier to entry to add is to set up simple Facebook retargeting and just bring people back to a landing page or maybe even just back to a sales page on your website if they visited anyone of your pages on your site.

There’s a lot of ways to learn that stuff. It’s just simple Facebook retargeting. You could set that up in – I don’t know, 30 minutes or so, an hour yourself even when learning. Those two things I would say to start with.

[00:50:12] MB: Well, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show, for digging into all these insights. Lots of great strategies, tactics and tools for people who want to grow their businesses.

[00:50:20] JF: Awesome, Matt. No. It’s been really fun. Thanks for having me.

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