How to Get 20,000 downloads in 10 Days with Your Podcast with Billy Murphy

Owner of Bluefire Poker – Billy Murphy

Podcasting is on a rising trend! I get asked constantly how to have a top podcast. Well today we bring millionaire Billy Murphy back on the show to dive deep into his recent podcast launch. Do you want to know what is working right now in podcasting? Listen in! You’ll also learn a crazy tactic that Billy tried, and things he WISHED he had a chance to do before the launch. We go into depth and hold nothing back!

Check out this link to find out more about the contest: http://foreverjobless.com/podcastlaunch/

Go to ForeverJobless.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show I'm here with my good friend Billy Murphy. He's been on the show, I think, twice before, which is actually more than anyone.

Billy: Only once so far.

Jaime: Well this is the second time, I'm wrong. It's in person - this is actually his place, I'll show you the cool view maybe afterwards. But today we're going to be talking about his podcast launch. He has an amazing blog called ForeverJobless.com and he recently launched a podcast. Everybody keeps coming to me asking me about podcast stuff so as he just launched I want to talk him about his. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Billy.

Billy: Thanks for coming over and doing this.

Jaime: I know, I had to drive 25 minutes!

Billy: In person - this is my first personal one, I think.

Jaime: It is' Boom! Hopefully it doesn't suck. So what I want to talk about is a little bit about Forever Jobless. I think we talked about it in the very first interview a long time ago but tell everybody why it's cool.

Billy: Forever Jobless is basically just a blog about how to make money. Obviously that sounds very generic but it's more specific. A lot of people are pitching ideas on how to make money but they're not necessarily backed up by anything so most of the stuff I do is backed up either by math, the millionaire's math stuff, or key studies of my own life or companies I'm investing in that we've already tested and tried it out and we know it works, or we know it doesn't work and we've lost money on something, so we can talk about what we've learned from that, or if we've made money on something we can talk about what we've learned from that.

Jaime: Which is awesome because, no offence, but online people just talk about what is supposed to be working right now and nobody actually knows real, hard numbers because nobody wants to talk about it, which is why I think it's really cool. I liked your first post on your income report, where you were like "Forever Jobless is making nothing!", actually being honest about that, which is really cool. So why did you start the blog? What's the point behind it?

Billy: I've always enjoyed, almost as a hobby, teaching people entrepreneurship, how to make money, so it's just kind of been this side project for a while, I just want to help people. I've always been on internet forums chatting about this stuff anyway,and going to conferences, I just like it, almost like somebody would go play golf, I like teaching about making money and business, it's just what I like doing. It's been up for probably 18 months now, just this part time, for fun, on the side project and now I'm going to turn it into more of a full time, spend my time on it business. That's why I launched the podcast, to give it a full time effort.

Jaime: I met you through MJ DeMarco who I've had on the show before because you were on their forum and everyone was like "You should interview Billy, this random poker player guy who has a membership site." I was like "Oh, that sounds really cool." You were on that forum helping so many people, MillionaireFastlane.com I think. It's insane that you would just randomly take your time to help people anyway so you might as well put it on your own blog under your own brand.

Billy: I had been doing that for so many years. I used to be on the Rich Dad forums eight years ago or something like that. At that time I was more learning about stuff but I've always enjoyed talking about business. At one point I figured "Why don't I do this on my own platform?"

Jaime: Which is awesome. So tell me about the podcast - why a podcast? Besides the fact that I told you it was a good idea! Why the podcast? I really want to dive deep into that and how it's going to help you.

Billy: The podcast is basically to give me a much larger platform. What I mean by that is that a blog is great, a lot of people have blogs, but it's not the best platform to use. What initially got me really interested when I talked to people who were doing podcasts, and these are not name people, just a random friend I have who launched a podcast, is that they would say "We just launched and we're getting $500 a day," and it didn't make sense to me because they were not known, they didn't have lists, they just put it up and all of a sudden people were listening to them, and on my blog all of my stuff was getting ridiculous exposure and response, a post would go out and get a bunch of traffic for a couple of days and then it would just dive off. I think now, on my off days, traffic goes down to 200 people a day. These people who had just launched a podcast, and their stuff was just a normal show, were getting $500 a day so I figured I was probably missing out on having a bigger problem. It makes sense, though, right? Because, for example, WordPress doesn't have any reason to promote me - like if they say, "Look at this awesome blog, Forever Jobless," if I'm WordPress, I have no reason to go and promote that. However, iTunes does. They promote shows that they think are good that people want to hear because they want people to stay on iTunes. So it's just different - there's more exposure for less work. Also the blog posts that I was writing took 20 or 30 hours, a lot of them; I write really long stuff, so doing a podcast allows me to create the same type of stuff in a much shorter time, so instead of one blog post I can maybe do maybe five to ten podcast episodes. So not only does it have a better reach but it's a lot easier to do for me, to create a lot of content. I can potentially reach 10-20 times as many people using this strategy.

Jaime: I appreciate that because I took forever to write blog posts and I was like "This is really annoying. Talking is way easier." Which is funny, because it doesn't mean that you can just talk and have it go well - you did a ton of research before you launched your podcast. What did you learn when you were going through all of that?

Billy: A lot of things. Numberone - everyone is creating the same shows right now. It's the same problem in the blog space, everybody's doing and talking about the exact same thing so there's a huge gap in the market that nobody ever notices or talks about that is very high value - an entrepreneur show that is not the same as everybody else. I can't start a podcast interviewing millionaires because you already do that, that gap is filled, but a lot of people are doing exactly what someone else is doing and expecting the same result but they don't understand why that result is happening. It's a huge flaw with anybody in business and entrepreneuring and podcasting and blogging - they all see something working and they copy it to a T and they don't understand why that works. A lot of times it's number things, a lot of times it's that that person was the first person doing something so now they're that person so you can't just do that and replicate their success, it's not going to happen. Another thing is just that there were not many people podcasting, similar to blogging, it's just not competitive, it's very crowded - and people get those confused. Saturated and crowded are two different things. It was very crowded, there are tons and tons of podcasts and blogs, but there's a huge gap in the space. There's not a lot of super high quality shows and so it was just an easy platform to hit to get exposure really, really quickly. If you can have a decent marketing push in the early stages, as long as you're behind that, your show will compound and you will grow insanely fast.

Jaime: I also want to talk about the results that you've had. I know you launched four days ago so it's not like you have tons and tons of results but I think it's interesting to tell people what's working now because a lot of people come to me and ask "What did you do?" and I'm like "Well, that was three years ago," so I'm pretty sure some things are similar but I've helped a lot of people launch in between and some things are different, especially in the interview space. Like you were saying, it's kind of a crazy world - it's a jungle out there. So tell me what your results are and we'll go back and talk about how you did it.

Billy: I've been up for probably a little less than four days right now. I launched Monday, late afternoon, so just less than four days ago. I think I have about 9,000 downloads so far. The first day I got to number one in my category, which was Business Marketing and Management, and number two in overall Business, behind Dave Ramsey. Obviously a lot of this is iTune's algorithms based on a combination of downloads, ratings, subscriptions, all of this stuff within a certain period of time, because obviously 9,000 is not a lot, I don't think, from the things that I've heard, but I think based on the fact that it was brand new and being able to get that many downloads and high ratings and high subscriptions in a very small time period I think is what helped raise my ranks. I don't know if you want to talk about the plan.

Jaime: I definitely want to talk about that but before I jump into that what's interesting is that a lot of people have been saying once you hit the New and Noteworthy list that's where all your numbers come from, but I've been asking people who have hit the New and Noteworthy list, especially in Business because in each category it's a little bit different,but it's been around 300 a day - which is good, don't get me wrong, that's better than launching and having crickets, but it's not what it used to be. When I launched three years ago I got 1,000 to 1,500 a day as soon as I hit New and Noteworthy. It was different back in the day. But now, hitting those numbers that you're hitting is really impressive, especially because it wasn't just the New and Noteworthy that gave you the numbers, it wasn't just "Hit this and you're done." So tell us about the backup plan that you went through and how you came to that.

Billy: I heard similar things - a lot of people told me "Just get in the New and Noteworthy and you'll be fine. Get ranked and you'll have a decent show so people will watch it from New and Noteworthy and you'll grow," and that seemed really flawed to me because everyone was telling me that, so if everyone is doing a certain thing, for example if there are a hundred new business podcasts launching and they're all in New and Noteworthy, then mathematically that can't work. I either talked to you about it or read something you've put out about it that said you're not seeing the same thing anymore and I couldn't imagine that the same thing was happening anymore considering that every month there's a hundred people that want to do a new business podcast so clearly that strategy does not make sense anymore so my goal initially was not to just be in the New and Noteworthy list, I think that's probably relatively easy as well. I had to be at the top of New and Noteworthy or hit the top ten list to get the exposure that I needed and I didn't know enough of people's numbers to know what I need. I do a lot of research when I look into something and I had everything from people who were on the Top Ten list with 1,000 downloads per day in a small time period with high ratings, all of that stuff, to some people who I didn't see on the Top Ten list who were getting over 10,000 per day. So clearly I couldn't do it based on the downloadnumbers, I don't know how many downloads I need. I knew I needed downloads, I knew I needed high ratings, I knew I needed high subscriptions, so I basically put together a plan to do that. Do you want me to talk about my plan?

Jaime: I do. It sucks that it's not cut and dry. What we all want is for it to be cut and dry - what do you do, how do we do that and how do we replicate it? Even if the numbers were similar, like you said, it's been a huge change - you can talk to someone who has a popular show and they have this much, but a brand new person can get a heck of a lot less and still rank higher. It's really interesting, there's really not much correlation, which sucks.

Billy: It does suck, but it's really good for some people, though. Because of the reason that it sucks, nobody's going to actually have a plan.

Jaime: We're all going "Come one!" and you're a poker guy so you're good with this.

Billy: Yeah, I liked the fact that it was hard to figure out because that means less people are going to try to jump over that hurdle to try to figure it out so it was relatively easy to do. Not to make it sound simple - it was hard work. Over the last week I've done 16 hours a day, it's not like a four hour work week or anything like that, but it was easy to do because of the fact that nobody was trying to do all of the things that would make sure that they hit it because it was too hard to figure out. You couldn't do it based on downloads, you couldn't do it based on ratings - it was a combination and nobody knows the algorithm so I had to make sure I hit each one of those areas and I'll tell you how I did that.

Jaime: Definitely. When I chatted with someone last night, one of my friends who has a podcast, who has millions of dollars? worth of revenue each year, and I told him your plan, he was like "That is such a good plan. That idea is brilliant." So everybody else thinks it's really good, too, so go ahead and share the plan with us.

Billy: The plan, in terms of hitting the New and Noteworthy or Top Ten list was that I knew I had to get the results I wanted. What happens is, if you can get there, asides from the marketing plan, you will take whatever numbers you're getting and compound them, especially from what I've heard from other podcasters. For whatever reason, your downloads keep going up. I guess iTunes has such an audience - I mean we're in kind of a podcast bubble so it will change, but as long as I can get some huge traction in the beginning I knew I could compound it to get pretty insane numbers within the first couple of months, riding those lists. So I knew I had to do that or it wasn't going to be worth my time. If I launched a slow podcast it would have made more sense for me to do other things. I knew I was going to put a marketing plan together to have a highly viewed podcast right out of the gate and so, knowing that, I basically approached people and asked if they wanted to sponsor the show, and I told them I wanted to give them sponsorship space for free. It seems like a ridiculously offer but the way it works, and obviously you know this as well as anyone, you can't launch a podcast and make any money in the first 36 days - no one is going to sponsor you. Nobody's going to be like "Great, there's a new brand of business podcast, let me just throw money at it and hope for the best." It doesn't work like that. So I approached people and said "I know how to get eyes on things. I know how to make sure I have a successful launch," and I could show them other things I've done, "So I want to give you sponsorship space on my show for free and all I want you to do is push audience towards my show." I didn't want their money; I was not trying to monetize it at all. The response was tough - a lot of people don't want to e-mail, their lists are locked up, they're selling all sorts of things of their own, so it was difficult, but people realized the value. I had an asset that was going to go to waste if I didn't use it so basically I was able to work out deals with people who wanted exposure to a new audience. Obviously I looked for audiences that aligned, people who had an entrepreneurial audience, and basically exchanged exposure. Once I got the first couple of deals it became a lot easier because then it's not me with some small list on Forever Jobless that I haven't spent a lot of time building up, it's my audience, it's this audience and this audience, and all of a sudden I was getting exposure to all of those audiences and so it became a lot easier. Once you get the first couple it's like dominos; it's a much better deal.

Jaime: They're like lemmings! But it totally worked on me because when we had coffee,

Billy: I think that was the day before or something, yeah.

Jaime: And you asked me two days before it was supposed to launch, which was funny. But total action, it's kind of insane the way you do stuff. It was interesting because you went "I have so-and-so, so-and-so and so-and-so," and I was like "Okay, let's talk." Because normally I don't e-mail - everybody listening, they probably got an e-mail a couple of Tuesdays ago because Bill is launching. Number one, I know he's producing amazing content so if you like my show you're going to like his show anyway so it's huge value for you just in general but, yeah, why would I not help?

Billy: That was part of my pitch - you can look at my blog for the content. Because a lot of the people I didn't know, so I would approach people and they didn't know who I was.

Jaime: So you did it cold?

Billy: Yeah, I did it cold.

Jaime: That's impressive.

Billy: Spencer Hawes was one of them, obviously you were one of them.

Jaime: I saw Dan Franks e-mail for you in my inbox, too, from WP Engine.

Billy: Really?

Jaime: Yeah, you did an interview with him. You don't even remember. That's funny.

Billy: I didn't know he e-mailed it. You're talking about after the interview?

Jaime: Yeah.

Billy: Okay. I did the interview yesterday or two days ago. I didn?t have time to approach as many people as I wanted to.

Jaime: Because you?re doing it so soon.

Billy: Yeah, it was last minute. I thought about doing it, I was literally a week out.

Jaime: Tip number one - don?t do what Billy did and do it two days before!

Billy: Honestly, the launch went as badly as it could have so the numbers I?m getting should have been a lot more and I?ll tell you why = number one, I got some bad advice that, initially, you?re going to get approved by iTunes in 1-3 days and then I talked to you a couple of days before and you said "Have you got approved?" and I said "No, I'm waiting," and I wanted to wait because I wanted to get the whole eight weeks of New and Noteworthy so I waited until that three day mark and then I talked to you and a couple of other people and they said "No, it could take one or two weeks." So I had this launch plan for the 1st and we actually got rejected the first time because there was a feed error - I don't do the tech stuff, someone else does it and there was an error with the feed, so I got rejected. Long story short, on the 31st I spent the entire day trying to backtrack all of the marketing that was supposed to happen on the 1st and then set it up for a day which I couldn't tell them because I didn't know when it was going to be. It ended up being the 7th but we didn't get approved until the 3rd or the 4th and then I was scrambling to get people back onboard, I had to resell people to get them back onboard so we lost a number of people so it's probably only half as big as it could have been. Most people don't know this but we were about to launch and the feed that had been rejected, I had initially tried to get it approved and they said "You can't do that, you've got resubmit it," and Apple support is slow to say the least and not coordinating with each other so when we looked and I was ready to launch they had now approved the other feed and I had two Forever Jobless podcasts in the iTunes store. Then we ran into a problem where, if someone searched for our show, only 50% of the people would be going to our show and you can't delete shows you have to wait for the feed. I was like "No way!" So not only did my launch initially get chopped in half it basically got chopped in half again because people might search for Forever Jobless and go to the wrong one and that one would be getting downloads but it wouldn't be counting for my real channel that I wanted to rank for. But even through all of the crazy stuff I was able to get to number one. I had never used iTunes, I don't use it so I didn't even know where to go. I was trying to see how I was doing and other than ratings, which I couldn't anywhere.

Jaime: It's silly, there's no rankings, you don't get e-mails, you don't get anything.

Billy: I finally figured it out and had a look and I was number one. I was like 'Really' Already''

Jaime: Screenshot!

Billy: Yeah, I didn't know how to take a screenshot, though. You know how I am.

Jaime: You're so not technical!

Billy: I asked people "How do I take a screenshot? I want to post this." That was my first day, I was just a mess. But it clearly worked despite all of the problems. If things had gone well it could have blown up. I guess it's done well for a new one but I don't understand why no one had tried that before, because of the fact that it's just so obvious - if you can have a halfway decent launch you have a valuable asset for other people who need exposure and you're essentially just throwing it away, unless you monetize. I don't monetize Forever Jobless; if I monetized I could put one of my products in the sponsorship space, but for the people who are launching and don't monetize anything yet, as long as you can market well - because if you're launching and you don't know how to market it's different because you don't have an audience but if I can say "I know I can market this - I've done this, this and this," and I can show them my content so they know it's good quality, so I showed them my blog posts and I would say "If you're unsure and you want to hear an episode let me know and I'll shoot you a couple of rough episodes," so people who hadn't heard of me looked at the episodes and said "Yeah, we'll do it, based on that." I laid it all out, I didn't just throw out an idea, it was like "Read this. Any questions, I'll send you audio clips so you can hear what I'm going to be doing."

Jaime: Can you send me a template of one of the e-mails? You can leave off names and all of that stuff but I'm really curious to have that so that everyone can have that too. Because people are scared of cold e-mails - "I'm never going to get a response, why should I bother?" All of that stuff.

Billy: I 100% agree. I get a lot of cold e-mails but they're not good, they just want you to do something. The way I pitch it is "I want to expose you to my audience," which is true, and "I'd like to do that if you show them the new show that I'm doing. By the way, I don't sell anything." It's a little bit easier because I'm not pitching anything, I'm like "Let me help your people for free," so it was an easy pitch to make.

Jaime: It was a win/win. I have a couple of questions on marketing too. How many reviews and downloads did you get?

Billy: I'll grab my laptop.

Jaime: Oh, good, we'll go over data right now. I hear a lot of people say that the best things that work is to get reviews from your friends and family. I remember when I launched my video podcast - I e-mailed my list and said "Give me reviews!" but the thing that worked the absolute best was personally e-mailing my friends and family and saying "Hey, would you give me a review?" Which is so sad. Well, not that it's sad, but I had this whole list and not many people did it.

Billy: This is funny because I did the same thing - I sent an e-mail to my parents after it was up for however many hours. I think we talked about this before but I don't tell anyone, unless it's business friends, what I'm doing until I do it, so they didn't know I was launching a podcast.

Jaime: Your parents don't know what a podcast is? My parents don't.

Billy: I e-mailed and I gave them specific directions about where to click, what you do and everything, I sent it to my parents and said "Hey, I've just launched this podcast, I'm trending at number one, I thought you guys would want to know. Here's the link so that you can check it out and listen if you want. If you could leave a review it would help me a lot because of the way they do the rankings." So my dad calls me and it was funny, he was asking where to find the show, how to do the ratings, I said "Dad, if you look, it's all there - I lay it out." So we were walking through it and we probably spent a couple of minutes on "Okay, do you think I should say this for the review? What if I say this? Because we don't want them to know it's me, right?" I'm like "No, dad, it doesn't matter. As long as I get the ratings, it counts."

Jaime: It's so cute. "Hey, I'm Billy's dad. I really like this show."

Billy: I think he called me back a couple of minutes later and said "I think I'm going to say this. Shall I put it under my own name? Are they going to know we're related?" I was like "Dad, that stuff doesn't matter."

Jaime: My dad left a review for my book. That was so cool.

Billy: You can put "from dad", it doesn't matter. So I did get a review from him.

Jaime: Tell us, if you remember, how many reviews you got.

Billy: I'm looking at Libsyn and it stops before the end of the day so the first four to seven hours, at the end of that day, I got 1,044, so that's not even a half day. On my first full day I got 869 downloads. Second, 2,073. Third full day, which was yesterday, 2,579. So it's on an uptrend and so far today I have 1,363 but it's like 1pm.

Jaime: That's awesome.

Billy: And the ratings, I don't know, I think in the first 15-20 hours or so I had 15-20 reviews and currently I think I have 58.

Jaime: What did you do to get them, besides calling your dad?

Billy: Which wasn't all 58 of them! Basically what I did was I ran a contest. Obviously the strategy of the sponsorship idea, to give away sponsorships for free, that was the download portion of my strategy. The review strategy was that I had a contest on Forever Jobless, and I'll just pull that up here.

Jaime: I remember you talking to me about this - and it was the day before!

Billy: We had not even planned this out. I knew this would work, I just wait until the last second for everything. If I had planned this out it could have been five times the size, but basically I ran the contest, and the link, if you want to check out what I did, is foreverjobless.com/podcastlaunch. It basically said "I've just launched a podcast, here's a link to the iTunes, here's a link to the podcast page if you just want to look at it on my site." I don't know how much this helps but I don't offer it on Stitcher or in other forms right now.

Jaime: It's just iTunes - you're just focusing on this one thing.

Billy: I assume the total downloads would be a lot higher but I didn't do that. Part of the reason I didn't do that was because I forgot to get approved.

Jaime: Is it on Stitcher now?

Billy: No.

Jaime: You didn?t even put it on Stitcher?

Billy: No.

Jaime: You should have asked me - it takes two seconds!

Billy: I think we might have had a feed error on that too. So I think the download numbers should be a lot higher right now but they're not. Basically the idea was to have a contest where people could win a grand prize or three runner-up prizes. It's still running; I'm probably going to end it within the next couple of days. The grand prize is a ticket to the small mastermind conference I'm going to run. I've had this idea for a while that I want to do an invite-only thing. When we go to conferences, the people that we go to see, I want just those people in one room, at a private event, so it's very small, 30-50 people, and there's no speakers - everyone in the room could be a speaker - that type of event, or everyone's presenting on something that they know. I've always had this idea that I want to do this so I thought I'd give away a spot to that. It's hard to explain to people what it's going to be because I haven't done it yet so I don't know if people realize the value of something like that but I offered that and then I offered three consultations so people can hop on a call and maybe we can put it on the podcast but basically I'll just break down their idea for 45 minutes. So three people will win that and I gave them the steps, like "Here's what you need to do - click this link, click this link," and lead them through iTunes. I think Andy and Dane from Foundation have done this before and it worked well for them.

Jaime: Andy gave away a ticket to Eben Pagan's event which retailed at $10,000 and he shot in the ranks from having that be his first podcast, which was really impressive. Apparently people really like free stuff, so use that to your advantage as much as you can.

Billy: It was tough because I didn't have a money amount product. I could say "This is a $1 million ticket!" I could make it up but I didn't want to falsify it, I don't even know if I'm going to change for that event, it might be friends only, I have no idea. It's not going to be some $10,000 event.

Jaime: It's hard because it's probably worth that and people don't understand how cool that could be, so you could probably get even more out of it.

Billy: I could have said it was a $10,000 event but then I have to charge that when the time comes but if I'd said $3,000 I would feel like I'd lied. For the contest, to qualify, you have to subscribe to the podcast and leave me a review and that was basically it.

Jaime: How do you verify that? Because that's one thing that's a pain with iTunes in general, there's no back and forth.

Billy: I think maybe I had the subscribe and reply to my welcome e-mail to say that they'd actually done it, so it was kind of their word, but you hope if someone has taken time to e-mail back and say that they did it, it only takes two seconds to do.

Jaime: So hopefully they have a conscience and aren't just like "Hey, I did it!"

Billy: Obviously it is just people's word but it doesn't take a lot of time so hopefully they're not skipping that 30 second process. I don't know if there are any other stats you want but those are the podcast stats.

Jaime: I want to talk about the marketing piece a little bit more. What made you not do paid traffic? Because there's a lot of other things that you could have done. I know it was last minute but did you ask anybody how they launched it? Did anybody launch with paid? Tell us about some other opportunities or things we could have done.

Billy: I thought about doing paid. I didn't personally know how to run a good campaign - like if I was to run it myself I wouldn't have done that - so I could have either done it myself or paid someone to do it but not knowing any sort of ROI that I would have got.

Jaime: It's just throwing money at it and hoping it would work.

Billy: Right, and I would basically be, to some degree, paying people to go to the iTunes platform. It would help my iTunes ranking but it would potentially be not so good of an ROI for me, personally, for Forever Jobless, but I thought I had enough firepower in what I was doing to get to the Top Ten or at least the New and Noteworthy without doing that. My theory was that, at least if I could get there, the value that I'm offering in the podcast would be enough to give me exposure for a long enough time for me to build a big enough audience. If I said I would put $5,000 and do this huge, paid launch I don't know if that would give me a huge difference.

Jaime: You could still do that now, too. I think that's interesting. I know Neville Madora from AppSumo comes on your podcast so if anyone likes Neville they should listen to his podcast too, but it was interesting because we were talking about if downloads are so important to people why aren't we using Amazon Turk? Not that you should do that! You don't want to get slapped by iTunes, but in general it's really interesting - downloads are these coveted things and if you can actually know the value of a download and then get them it's kind of interesting.

Billy: That's the thing - I feel like the podcasting sponsorship space is flawed because I could go out and get fake downloads and say "Look, I have a million downloads a month." That's worth $50,000 or $100,000 a month to a sponsor. But if you're not buying the stuff it doesn't matter.

Jaime: Well, exactly, so it's only short lived. I had Sean Malarkey who launched a podcast, Money Pillow or something like that, it's an awesome podcast too, and on my Insiders group he told us some tactics for promotion. It was really interesting because his whole goal was to try to get everybody in every country just because he thought it was funny and then he realized that clicks for podcasts in other countries are ridiculously cheap so he just went crazy and tried to hit every country but then he was getting a whole bunch of cheap downloads while he was doing for marketing purposes for fun but really it changes your rankings, or I'm assuming it changes your rankings.

Billy: That's like James Altucher - his Facebook page is just people in India or wherever, it's very, very cheap, so he's built up this huge Facebook page but if you look in the comments it's all people speaking different languages.

Jaime: That's really interesting. There's a very big difference between engagement and just having numbers.

Billy: I think the unique thing, too, on the other country stuff, and I haven't even tried this yet but it gave me ideas - a couple of guys I've done interviews with were not in the US and I would be in a different ranking when they were on. It made me think it's probably very easy to rank very high in some of these other countries because they don't have anybody targeting it, so if I was to go and look at Sweden or wherever and just say "I'm going to crush that market," it probably wouldn't be very hard for me to be number one by tomorrow.

Jaime: My client recently, a month ago, launched a podcast. She's in the same time zone as me but she's in Canada and she said "I'm number one," and I was like "It doesn't look like you're number one on mine," and she said "Oh, it's in Canada." That's crazy - she's totally killing it in Canada. No offence, but people in the US are like "We didn't hit number one," but we don't know where our listeners are coming from, which is kind of interesting.

Billy: I wonder about that too. Like my goal is I want to be at the top spot overall but if someone was like "Okay, I don't have any audience, I don't really have a marketing plan," a decent idea would be to go to a country that nobody is focusing on and you'd be the person for that country. Like go to Sweden.

Jaime: Crush Sweden!

Billy: Because nobody's launching them thinking "I'm hoping to be number one in Sweden," unless there's a Swedish entrepreneur who does that already but there are probably some opportunities to pick up some easy wins.

Jaime: Especially in English speaking countries. I want to touch on the sponsorship stuff, which I know we don't know too much about but I want to let people know some things about that, but I also want to talk about how podcasting is not a business, so we'll do that in just a second. For the sponsorship model, it's insane what I'vebeen seeing from people trying to go after the sponsorship model and the differences between them. I know someone like John Dumas who everyone loves has a daily show so he's getting huge numbers but then Pat Flynn, on the other hand, only has a couple of shows, or Abel James from Fat Burning Man only has a couple of shows, but they're getting way bigger numbers per episode, but that doesn't really matter that much to sponsors, or not that it doesn't matter but you can't track a unique download at all, which is insane to me. You can track unique visitors on websites but you can't track unique downloads, so if you have one person who downloads 30 episodes it still counts as 30 downloads, which is really interesting.

Billy: The model is flawed. I promised I would do it daily for at least the first 60 seconds - I dedicated myself to doing that and part of the reason is because the model is flawed, because of the fact that iTunes algorithms plus sponsorship and all of this stuff is really flawed right now, in my opinion, just from a mathematical point of view. If I do one show a month and get half a million downloads that's ridiculous, that show should be worth a lot of money, but if somebody does 50 shows a month and they get 500,000 downloads, someone, right now, is paying us the same amount of money, which wouldn't make any sense. I think it has to change. It will change. If it doesn't change, that's great, I will keep finding the flaws.

Jaime: "Let's do that every single day."

Billy: It kind of reminds me of SEO, like when you can just do something and get to the front page of Google.

Jaime: The wild, wild west.

Billy: I think podcasting is at that bubble point where people are finding these gaps and it's relatively easy to, I don't want to say gaming, but that's essentially what it is - people are gaming to get certain things from it and at some point people are going to look and say "Oh, wait, we're paying too much for all of this stuff."

Jaime: Exactly, and I think some sponsors are realizing some of that stuff now. They're really valuable right now, supposedly, but long term, I don't know. I think that also turns into the whole business model of podcasting - there's a lot of different models, there are lots of different reasons to have a podcast. Podcasts, in general, are a marketing tactic - I try to tell everybody this - unless you go with the sponsorship model, then it's all about possibly gaming the system. But you tell me your thoughts, because I know you're using it as a marketing tactic for your business. What do you suggest? Because I see a ton of people starting podcasts and hoping to make businesses out of it and sometimes the audiences just aren't there or whatever. What do you give them for advice? Because you're a business guy - you're starting a podcast but you're a business guy first. A lot of people are starting a podcast first and hoping to pull up the business side.

Billy: I think a lot of people are confused about why they're getting into it. They see other people making money and they didn't understand why they're making money and so it's very different in terms of what they'll be able to do with it. Let's say, theoretically, someone started a podcast to make money - they want to do it as a business, get sponsors on their podcast, that's their whole business plan. Number one, they had better know that they can get an audience for that and if they were able to get an audience then it's flawed because of a lot of things - if they were able to get a lot of business or a lot of traffic to that, the sponsorship route is probably the least profitable, eventhough it's a flawed model right now and they're probably paying too much for sponsorships - if they were going to try to make $10,000 or $20,000 a month on sponsorships, they could probably make double or triple that creating a valuable service for their audience who they know better than anybody else, so that wouldn't make a lot of sense. However, you also always want to be in control of your destiny. If you're banking on some sponsor paying you $10,000 or $20,000 a month and, by the way, they figure out the model they've been using to pay sponsorships is too much and all of a sudden they say "Instead of that $20,000 we're going to give you $4,000 a month," all of a sudden your plan to have a profitable podcast based on downloads is going to be totally flawed because now you can only make this amount of money and you don't want to have a podcast anymore. So the idea of monetizing it based on X number of downloads where any time they decide it's flawed and/or iTunes stops promoting your podcast, because we are 100% in a podcasting bubble where there's going to be more podcasts and they will potentially stop promoting certain podcasts, maybe it's certain to Google, maybe they'll only start promoting a couple very heavily, so if that happens and all ofa sudden you put a podcast on iTunes and you start with zero downloads a day instead of 100 or 300 a day or whatever you're going to say "Oh, shoot, what happened?" You're not in control - as much as people think that they're in control in that they own their podcast, a lot of people doing it are not doing it in a way in which they actually control their future and their future profits and so there are going to be a lot of disappointed people trying to go into this whole podcasting game where they're getting info or outsourcing and paying all of this money to get a podcast set up and then marketing or marketing it themselves, buying course to teach them how to do it. That stuff doesn't matter if you don't understand the business or why you're doing it, so that's a big struggle that I see with people - there's going to be thousands of people launching podcasts where they want the gold at the end of the rainbow but they don't have a plan to do that. They have a plan to launch a podcast and that's where their plan stops but they don't know that that's also probably why the money is going to stop and that's probably why they won't make any money.

Jaime: I love people taking action, and if starting a podcast is something that they can do which is awesome and take action on and build an audience, I think that's great, don't get me wrong, I just feel bad because I see people without a business background or without a business plan at all putting so much effort and energy into something that might not come out because they didn't run the math on it and it's kind of hard to see. I'm actually keynoting a conference called The Podcast Movement in Dallas in August. Are you going to that?

Billy: I don't think so. Maybe, I don't know

Jaime: You should, I'm keynoting.

Billy: I keep hearing about it so I'll think about it.

Jaime: You should. It's in the middle of August; I have to come back from Maine for it. But it's interesting because my talk is all about the future of podcasting because that's what I'm really excited about, so I started asking Soundcloud and other big names. I need to get introduced to someone on iTunes - so if anyone knows anyone on iTunes I can ask them about it too. But I'm really interested to see what this looks like in the future. I talked to a futurist and he said podcasting is going to be in every single car, which is insane - this would be a huge market if we could have that. Other people, though, are saying iTunes is going to be going away because Soundcloud wants to come up and there are all these other things coming up too. Of course we can't predict what's going to happen but what you're saying, in general, is we can't predict what's going to happen so the best you can do is go with the best plan you possibly can so that, moving forward, you own as much as you can. We have a friend, Jayson Gaignard, who runs Mastermind Talks, he had his podcast just taken away from iTunes, just gone, and he didn't even know why. That stuff sucks.

Billy: A lot of people are giving iTunes their business and hoping iTunes helps it grow but at any time they can wipe you out. It's the same with Google. A lot of podcasters are not doing a good job building their own platform - for the Forever Jobless podcast I'm sending a lot of people back to Forever Jobless to sign up so that I've always got a certain number of them signed up. Obviously nobody can predict where podcasting is going and I think it could potentially grow a lot, which is good, but there's still the same problem that there's so many people coming in without a plan to be these podcasters because they hear about the money. A lot of people are going in for the wrong reasons - they're going in to try to make money as a podcaster, not because they've found a certain gap that they can fill to add value in new areas. They're totally missing the boat, from a business perspective. A lot of people say 'I hear this guy is making money so I'm going to do that too." Okay, but there's no reason for you to exist in that space unless you're offering some with new value.

Jaime: It's tough. You do this too, but I have a wait list of over 50 podcasts that I've been asked to go on, which is awesome and I'm really excited, they're amazing people and I think that's awesome, but almost every show is sort of the same. Now some people are different, they have a little bit of a different spin or a different niche or something like that, but it's insane to look at the list and go "Wow, that's a lot of people," and a lot of them are new. You would really have to stand out ' the best production, best whatever, knowing other people, whatever it is - to get above that list of 50. But of course it's more than just that, too. It's kind of insane. What tips do you have for people about doing that? I know you tried to stand out but did you do anything else? Do you change your niche? What do you do?

Billy: Mine is not an interview show because everybody is already doing entrepreneurship interview shows - if I launched another one it would just be another entrepreneurship interview show. I didn't see anybody doing this in the market - I looked at all the podcasts and I didn't see a lot of things. I could have outsourced the podcast - I could have given someone else the idea to do it for Forever Jobless but one thing is that I didn't see a lot of people in business like I am actually talking about their own experiences on podcasts so I went into it knowing there really wasn't a lot of people doing that. I do a lot of solo shows talking about concepts from the businesses that I run or certain deals that haven't gone well or have gone well. I'll just tell stories or talk about ideas and then, on some of the shows, like Neville's been over here and my buddy Sal is on Shark Tank, so some of the ideas are either open conversations, like Neville will come over here and we'll just openly chat about stuff, we'll ramble like we would in a normal conversation. The goal is for the audience to feel like a fly on the wall - and people have e-mailed me and said that that's what happens, like "Was I supposed to be hearing that conversation?" and that was the goal. I'm telling you things that you wouldn't hear. The one with Sal, he wanted help with marketing ideas for after Shark Tank. I think that was episode six or something. We're basically, on the fly, just thinking of random things to help him go viral, marketing ideas - and that was another thing, nobody's actually done actionable stuff on the fly. If I was to do a consultation with someone I would just let everybody listen to the advice I gave Sal, his feedback on it, just brainstorming on the fly. I never saw any of those things so I'm filling a gap that wasn't there - I'm the only person in that space doing it and it's a huge need, entrepreneurs want that stuff. The reason I know that is obviously testing it on some forums and my blog. I know what people are looking for and it wasn't out there.

Jaime: We go to a ton of conferences and when you get speakers or high level people together, that's why I'm there, I want to hear all of that stuff, so if I can get that without having to go somewhere. I love listening to you and Neville talk about cool stuff anyway so being able to listen to it on a podcast where you guys would otherwise not have access to that at all, because you have to be good friends with somebody to hang out and talk about this stuff in general, that is super cool and definitely an angle that I'd never heard of. I talked to some of my friends about your tactics because I think that's really cool, doing something differently, putting a spin on it. So you know this stuff works, you've researched, you've figured stuff out, how you can do it better, faster, which is really awesome, so I appreciate you being here to be a fly on the wall. What I'll probably do, because this will go out in a couple of weeks, is try to get an update from you.

Billy: I have no idea what will happen. Ideally it will grow a lot. I wouldn't have done it if I didn't think there was a way to do it on a very large level, very fast. An update would be cool just to say whether it worked or didn't work. iTunes is constantly changing so I can only guess what will happen.

Jaime: I think it's interesting how many huge goals you have - you want to hit 100,000 in one month. "Come on! Why can't I do that?" I don't know anyone who has. I think Andy Drish from The Foundation might have come really close. But it's good to have really cool goals and to go back and say "This is exactly real life; this is what happened to him right now," and I think that's really awesome for everybody to hear too. So thank you very much for coming on the show, I really, really appreciate it. Where can we download? Give us that link again so that everybody can review and check out that conference because I'll be there too.

Billy: The link to the contest is foreverjobless.com/podcastlaunch, the blog is at foreverjobless.com and it's Forever Jobless on iTunes.

Jaime: Go download, review and all of that fun stuff because now you've heard the poor guy working his butt, trying to get people like his dad to review it, so if you do maybe you can win the contest and we can all meet in person. Thank you so much for coming on, Billy, I really appreciate it.

Billy: Thanks for having me.

Jaime: I hope you learned a ton about podcast launching and how fun that goes. I checked in with Billy again - he said he's had almost 20,000 downloads in the past 10 days. I asked him if there was anything special he did and he said "No, nothing else since the interview," but he said that he hasn't even signed up for Stitcher yet. So it's really interesting to hear his story and current information right now on what's working and not working for going up in the iTunes store. So I hope you really enjoyed that. Check out eventualmillionaire.com and we'll have a new interview next week. Take care.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

 

Tags: Billy Murphy, millionaire interview, podcast, podcasting

Categories: Action Plans, All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

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