Listen to the full interview here ( 49:09 minutes)

 

Full Transcript

The ray edwards show, episode 2:59, how to build a big list and a big business fast.

The Ray Edwards show your destiny design. Start, run and grow your own Internet based business and create the life of your dreams. You can do. This is the Ray Edward Show. James, Watch your business grow. Well. This is a special edition of the Ray Edward Show. It’s an interview addition. Sean has the week off and we’re going to get right to my interview with Tom Schwab. Tom Has a unique plan for building a system that will help you create a big list of prospects and a big business quickly, but this is not a get rich quick scheme and it’s not something about getting something for nothing. I think you understand that by the time you hear what Tom has to say, so let’s get right to the and now our

juror presentation. My guest is Tom Schwab. Tom knows how to build an online business and he’s got what I consider to be the go to answer. Now, when people ask me, well, how do I build a list? Because that’s at the heart of every online business or online marketing heart of any business. How do you build that list and I believe that Tom has a really great answer, possibly the best answer to that question. He has helped small business owners, burners solo preneurs. He’s helped him to get featured on leading podcasts that their prospects are already listening to and then he shows them how to turn those listeners who heard the interview into customers. It’s probably no surprise that he’s the author of a book called podcast guest profits grow your business with a targeted interview strategy. Tom, welcome ray. I am thrilled to be here.

Great to talk with in detail. Uh, the only way it’d be better is if we were live together like we were at, uh, at Tennessee a few months back at a copywriting academy live. It was a pleasure to spend some time with you and at, with Aaron there. And, um, I, I should have also mentioned that you’re the founder of interview Valet, which is a. we’ll talk more about interview valet and about the book, but I want to just dig right in because you’ve got the goods, the what people are looking for. I mean not, I can’t tell you because I haven’t kept track how many people have asked me a question that used to vex me. I used to have to give them a complicated answer or I would have to give them a short answer that I knew would not satisfy. But now when people ask me, well, how do I build the list? How do I start getting customers for my coaching business or for my online business or for my online marketing efforts? I, I tell them all the same thing. You get interviewed on podcasts. That’s, that’s so true. And it’s, to me, it seems so fundamental when look at what is

marketing at its heart, you know, marketing is starting a conversation with somebody that could be an ideal customer. And, you know, if there is a lot of ways that have done that over time, you know, uh, you could buy a billboard, you could do an interruption like on a television show or by, uh, by some media. But really, you know, as people say, well, how do I break through the noise? If you look around, there’s no noise to be broken through anymore. Now people are filtering things out, they’re filtering out ads. They don’t look at them anymore. The best thing to do is just getting in part on the conversation that’s already going on. Um, and really there’s no better way to do that more easily, no easier way, um, or no more fun way to do that than just getting interviewed on the podcast that they’re already listening to.

You know, I used to be in the radio business. I did that for over 30 years and for a long time getting interviewed on radio and TV was the way to get your message out to a large mass number of people. And that has begun to shift. I mean, it’s already shifted in 2001. I knew that I was going to have to get out of the radio business because it was dying and that business has progressively every year since then, the revenues has gone down for radio and the red, the listenership has gone down every single year since then. And the reason is all the best parts of radio are now available on demand on the Internet in the form of podcasts. You know, don’t worry you, you hit on a word there that is so right. Revenue. The revenue has gone down. And I’ve had people ask me, well, witness strategy work on radio or television.

And I’m like, sure it would work, but you know, if I called right now the local television station and said, Hey, I’ve got this great information for your audience. And uh, uh, you know, this is how I could help. I’m sure it’d be the sales department that called me back and they would say, if you want to buy this much advertising, we’d love to have you on at 5:00 AM. And if you buy this much, it could be at 5:00 PM. And with podcasts now, it’s amazing that sometimes you can be on a podcast and that content can be picked up by a local radio station months later. So really it’s, it’s merging and it’s really the idea of how can you get in front of your ideal buyers? Well, that’s exactly right. And as somebody who was on the other side of that transaction, I can tell you that’s exactly how interviews happened in radio and still do you.

You may think that the hosts just pick the most fascinating guests. That’s not how it works. It’s who paid the money to get the spot. That’s who gets interviewed. And now I want to be clear there. I mean, there are a few people who are still radio stars who are doing quite well, but they have audiences made up of millions of people. So Dave Ramsey comes to mind, is one of those individuals, um, but he built that empire when radio was still thriving. And so his listeners are very loyal to him and I think that underlines one of the principals about why this works. So I’m, I’ve got my own opinions, but I would love to hear from you why you think that podcasts interviews are so powerful at converting listeners into customers. I think it goes to, if you look at how it’s built and if anybody has ever done guest blogging before, I think some of the same principles are with that, right?

So if you come in and nobody knows me now and you don’t know Tom Schwab, but you know that if ray Edwards invited them on the show that he introduced him, there’s, that. He must have something to say. So there’s almost that, you know, an immediate authority. There’s that credibility from the very beginning. And the other thing too is that it’s a very niched audience, right? So podcasts are the people that, that listened to a host typically listen to them religiously. They trust them, they like them, they’re there. That type of people. It’s not that they’re just listening to a show because it’s the only thing on now, uh, when we were growing up as kids, we, we might’ve listened to what kc k, some on Sunday night, you know, uh, the top 40 because it was the only thing on, but now people are intentionally listening in to podcasts and they’re doing it when they want, how they want, at what speed they want.

And so really they’re choosing that content. So once you get on there and get to, you know, basically introduce yourself, right? You get to know, like, and trust when people hear your story for 30 or 45 minutes, they’ll either resonate with you and say, yeah, that’s somebody that, that I like that I respect, that I think could help me. And then they move onto the next stage. So it’s almost like a, a, a 30 to 45 minute conversation where they’ve checked you out beforehand, uh, as opposed to if they just click to your website through cold traffic, like a facebook ad. And you know, ray, not everybody listens to you on a podcast and, and instantly goes to your website and starts to convert and I think that’s a good thing because a lot of times people will say, well how do I grow my list?

You know, I remember being under panel last last year and somebody said, you know, you need to be adding 50 people a day to your list. And I just looked and I said I couldn’t deal with 50 new customers a day. And the person said, no, you just want names and leads. And I’m like, well if they can’t become a customer, why would I want them? So, so I think with this, not only are you getting better leads, you’re getting leads that are more educated, more a more ready to close on that. So to me, you know, you’re serving people better with that. Yeah, that’s. I totally agree with that. And all the best parts of local radio

are transferred to podcasting only magnified because as you said, as you pointed out, people are searching, they’re searching out the shows they listened to intentionally. And when they find the ones that they are attracted to, they become a fan. They are super loyal and they will listen to a podcast that’s an hour long, once a week, and he’ll listen to every word. I’ve. I’ve had people, I’ve done 200 and at the time we’re doing this interview. I’ve done 256 episodes of my podcast and I have people who have discovered me in the last year and have listened to every episode. Now I don’t. I couldn’t even do that. I couldn’t stand to hear me that much, but it just tells you how attached people become to the shows they listened to. And if you can get involved in that conversation and talk about your business, then it just makes sense that you’ve suddenly you’ve bypassed all the gatekeepers and all the gates and safeguards we have in our life to keep you from talking to people you’ve. They’ve invited you in.

And in some ways, you’ve even gone beyond the time a barrier because they can listen to when they want a, you know, ray talking to you or when I talked with the live, it’s always weird because when I listened to on the podcast, I listened at one and a half to two point. Oh, so your voice sounds a whole lot different on a podcast, but I think that’s amazing because if you don’t want to listen to it an hour, you can get it done in 45 minutes. And it’s amazing that we’ve had clients now that have been using this strategy almost three years and you know, they still get traffic from interviews they did three years ago because somebody, if they heard that interview with the first time when they were binge listening or just stumbled across it, it’s new to them and you wouldn’t see that same thing, you know, if I was on television or radio three years ago, um, there’s no way that somebody is going to stumble through that. Uh, and just listen to it again.

Yeah, it’s, it’s totally gone. So we’ve kind of teased around this subject quite a bit. Now let’s talk about a real world example of somebody who has taken your idea and decided, okay, I’m going to do podcast interviews and build my business. Who would be a good example of that?

Well, I’m going to use the example of our friend Aaron Walker from view, from the top. Uh, he’s, he’s a great man. And, um, a lot of people would say, yeah, I’ve heard him on a podcast before and really that’s how he grew his business. And, uh, uh, I was honored he wrote the foreword to the book, but when I first started to work with him, you know, my background was in inbound marketing and he’d built businesses over the last 30 years, brick and mortar, but he’d never done it online. So I have to admit when he first came to me and said, you know, uh, how do I do this? How can you help me do this? My answer was, well, content is king. You know, you got to put content out there. And, uh, he’d write a blog. It would take them three hours to write a blog.

It was painful for him to do that. And at the end of the day, Ray, you know what, I’d read the blog, I’d be like, Yup, that’s a blog and you know, it converts it the one to two percent and it was hard to tell them, yeah, just keep doing that for the next year or two and you’ll get some traction because anybody that knows Aaron, um, he’s got a voice sorta like Zig Ziglar, you know, he’s got this southern charm. He’s got great stories, but they just wouldn’t, they wouldn’t translate, um, in the blogs. So we, we, uh, looked at a bunch of different things and one of the answers was, well, he could start his own podcast and at that point we weren’t really sure. And you know, anybody that tells you that doing a podcast is easy, has either never done it or never done it. Well, you know, that’s, that’s a whole lot of hard work.

So I, I looked at it and said, well, we could guest blog, but we still have the problem of, you know, writing blogs, so why don’t we try the same thing and just be a guest on other people’s podcasts. And Ray, I was amazed that the traffic that came from that, the conversions that came from that, you know, a good blog, now we’ll convert one to two percent visitors to leads. What we were seeing from the traffic, from blogs, or excuse me, from podcast interviews, it was converting at 25 percent, 50 percent. We had some interviews that would convert at 75 percent white. And we were just amazed by it. And the other thing too is that the sales cycle was so much quicker because people felt like they already knew him from, listened to him. And so he started off with just the idea of, hey, I would like to fill out my one on one coaching spots.

Well that, that happened very quickly and he raised his prices and they filled up even more. And he said, I still want to. I still want to help and serve these men. So with that, started a mastermind groups and currently he’s got seven mastermind groups with 10 men each and knows and he still kept getting more and more people then started an online community with it. So he, over the last three years, he spilt his business just that way through podcast interviews and he was sort of the Guinea pig. And uh, you know, my background, I’m an engineer by training and my first job out of out of college was running nuclear power plants. So now I’ve always said I, I’ve run nuclear power plants and I’ve run a small business and one of them was easy because it came with an instruction manual. So I was always trying to figure out what’s the instruction manual for this, how can we test it? And Re honestly, when we first started, I was thrilled with the results, but I was a little bit worried because I thought, is this just a onetime magic thing, you know, is it his personality? Is it his industry, the coaching industry, or would it work for other people? And so to me, that’s where the test really started after that. To really define the system and to build that process and validated that it is something that can be reproduced.

That’s really amazing to me. That you just brought up what would be probably the number one question in the mind of a skeptic about this because I had those thoughts when I first heard Aaron’s story. I thought, well, yeah, sure, you’ve got this big personality. You, I mean, you walk into a room and you command the room suddenly, so of course it’s going to work for you. And you did a huge number of podcasts. I didn’t know that there was a, an engineered system behind what he was doing at that point. Um, so why don’t you share a little bit about that? How, I mean, for the average person listening who says, okay, I get it, I could get interviewed on a podcast, but how do I make it turn into leads?

Right. And that’s the thing is we’ve had clients that come to us. One of our most successful ones had been on almost two dozen podcasts and I’m Matt Miller from school spirit vending. He came to us and said, well, it doesn’t work, you know, I’ve been on two dozen of them and I’ve never gotten leads from it. And so when we started to talk through it, it was clear that he was missing parts of the recipe.

No, hold on, I got to interrupt you. He’s, what’s his business

school spirit vending. He basically helps. It’s a franchise and he selling franchises, but they help schools, um, with fundraising by putting stickers machines in the school. And so for him, he wants to get out there to people that are looking for a side business for, uh, for some passive income. And uh, he’d seen a errands results with it and he tried it himself and just really wasn’t getting the same results.

So I just wanted to point out that this is a very different kind of business than what Aaron does. And I think that’s important to understand. This works in different industries. So. I’m sorry I interrupted you, but I wanted to make that point.

Oh, not at all. And the way I look at this is that the podcast interview is fuel, right? Content is the fuel that drives our online sales and marketing ancients, but if you have all fuel and no engine, just think about if you have a gallon of gasoline and you like that, you’ll get some heat, you’ll get some light out of it, but it’s going to flash really quick and be gone and indigo wellhead that didn’t do much and if you just do a podcast interview, that’s what will happen. And the other thing is that, you know, right now there’s 350,000 podcasts out there. Getting on a podcast is not hard. You could get on one today. The question is, is is it the right one and will it drive your business? So really, you know, what we look at it is, it’s really a six step framework.

Really. The first one is, is prospecting. Making sure that you know exactly who you want to talk to and what podcast they’re listening to, you know, for, for me to to spend five minutes talking to the super bowl in front of tens of millions of people will get me zero because they’re not there to listen to me. It’ll, I’ll, I’ll annoy them, right? But get me in front of a thousand, 5,000 podcast listeners that want to know what I, I’m, uh, what I’m talking about, boy, that’s where you’ll make your conversions. So prospecting is the first step. Now the second one is pitching. You know, how do you approach a podcast host so that they say, yes, I don’t know, not do it. Oh,

I have a dozen examples of that and in my inbox right now,

someday I am going to, I’m going to post those and I can tell you what those dozen examples are right now. Somebody that you’ve never heard before. And it says, Dear Ray, I would love to be on your podcast so that I can grow my real estate business or anything. And it’s a business that has nothing to do with your industry. Tell you what a mutual friend, one time forwarded a pod or a pitch onto me. And, uh, somebody was pitching his podcast and he doesn’t have guests. And you could just tell it was just a robo. It was a cold call. So with that, you know, in the pitching we talk about, nobody likes a cold, a cold call, nobody likes a, a spammy email. So do your homework, you know, I tell you what, if, if you want to get on a podcast, listen to the podcast a few times, make some comments, follow them on social media, leave them a rating and review, um, share the content.

Then after you know, what they are, then approach the host and say, Hey, you know, um, I’ve been, uh, listening to the podcast, uh, I think I could add value to your listeners with this content and it’s always about what’s in it for them and you don’t, don’t try getting on the biggest podcast from the very beginning, you know, work your way up and, uh, and, and really master the craft there. So there’s an art to the pitching there so that it makes it easy for the host to say yes to you. So that’s why Tim Ferriss hasn’t had me on his podcast yet. I, I, he was like one of the thousand emails that I sent. It’s just the law of averages. If I just keep sending them emails, I’m sure he’s going to say yes.

Yeah, I’m sure that I want everybody to know we’re being sarcastic now. Confused. This is so important. And for me, I don’t know how this sits with you, but I’ll just tell you that the only way people become a guest on my show now, I’ve learned the hard way not to have strangers on my show is I either know you or somebody I trust recommended you to me.

Right? Because think about it. What’s, what’s the host? I’m the downside for the host. Either they’re going to waste their time and the episode will never go live,

right? And I’ve got a few of those in the hard drive. Yup.

Or um, it would be an insulting their, their, their audience. So why would they put it up there? So you’re asking for a, a big favor really to be on the show. So you better, um, you know, really know that you’re bringing things. When people say, what’s the goal of being on a podcast? I said, your number one goal is to make the host look like a genius for introducing you. Yes. Yes.

So we’ve got prospecting, figuring out who you want to talk to, pitching. We’ve talked about how not to do it and what the goal is to make the host look like a genius. What’s the next

are the next. The next one is preparation. You know, you wouldn’t talk to an audience, uh, unless you know who they were, right? So before you get on that podcast, make sure that you listen to a few episodes so you know exactly who the host is, what the podcast is about, who the audience is, what typical questions they could ask you. You know, there’s nothing worse than hearing a podcast and there’s the same questions they asked maybe at the end and they asked the guest that and he’s like, Huh, I’ve never thought about that. And basically saying that, I’ve never listened to your podcast before. So you need to prepare, but you also have to prepare the host for who you are. You know, they’re not going to read your entire book to get ready for it. They’re busy too, so make sure that, do you give them a, a preparation sheet with some maybe questions to ask some bullet points, make it easy for them, um, because if the better prepared the host is, the better the interview will be.

Yes. And you know, just to underline the importance of you preparing as the guest. Whenever I’m a guest on a podcast, I always make it a point to listen to half a dozen episodes because I want to know what kind of questions are going to be asked, what’s the tone, what’s the emotional tone and the atmosphere of the show. Is it, is it jokey or is it really somber and serious? And like I was on John Lee Dumas’s show and I listened to a half dozen episodes of his show and I was like, Oh, I’ve got to crank up my energy level a little bit and speak to these people in a language they’re going to understand and he’s gonna ask me all these questions so I’d better be ready for them. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to serve your host really well and be ready to give them. What their audience needs and wants

regular. So right on that picture yourself as a comedian going into a crowd. It’s, you better know whether or not you’re going into, um, do a comedy act at the Sunday Bingo, uh, at, at the church or if you’re going into a, you know, I’m a bachelor party, different, different audiences, a totally different audiences and you may have great content, but if you don’t have the context right, it’s not going to work. The next part is really the performance and that’s being on the show. And a lot of people have been on radio and television before done public speaking and they’re familiar with that, but we found that there’s different things in podcasts that, that really can make or break an interview. Um, so much of this is, you know, it’s, there are video podcast now, but most of them is just audio. And people when they, um, when they listened to the podcast, they’re multitasking.

So as you’re giving them different tips, make sure that, that you, uh, give them a reason to come back to your site. So you know, if somebody asks you, you know, the six secrets of getting booked on a podcast, well just don’t list them all off. You might be able to say, Hey, I’ve got an infographic, it’s back on my, on my website. If you’re interested, just go to interview valet.com, forward slash re, and everything we’ve talked about will be there. Okay, now I just showed you totally behind the curtain because I’ll put that page up. And so anything we talk about is there. So your interview, you want to make it. So the next step, uh, you know, sometimes in, in blogs, people will say, well, I’ve been blogging for for years and never got any leads out of it. And you say, well, what was your call to action?

What was that next step that people could take? And they’re like, well, sign up for my newsletter. It’s like, no, that’s not, that’s not compelling. And one of the things we teach all of our clients is to give, you know, um, three different ways for them to say yes. So a little yes, a medium yes and a heck yes. Now, what do you mean by that? Sure. So it’s different levels of commitment. So if I say, if you’d like to come to my website, I’ve got a six hour training, uh, that, that you can do. That’s a big, that’s a big commitment and most people would look at is like, you just gave me homework or if I said you don’t come to the website and you can sign up for a, a, a one hour free console, man, that’s a big commitment. I don’t know you that well in order to do that.

So you can give different, like a small. Yes, a medium and a larger. Yes. So maybe the small could be, like I said, here’s an infographic. There’s um, uh, you know, six ways to get on your first podcast. Maybe the medium, yes. Could be a, a three are free, 30 minute training, you know, just a, a recorded training there and people would be used to, okay, I’ve got to, I’ve got to put my email address on to get the video. They’re used to that. The big yes could be, hey, here’s a personal evaluation, you know, would podcast interviews work for you and there’s some more questions that are asked there and you don’t follow up with that and you know, there’s a free 15 minute consult with that too, and you’re going to see that some people will just want to go there and kick around the tires while other people after they hear you or they’re like, heck yes, you know, this is why, how I want to grow my book or Grow My coaching practice or, or grow my, I’m a speaking business.

So if they’re, if they’re ready to, to fully engage, don’t slow them down. But uh, give them different ways to say yes. And that’s a little bit different than most digital marketing or online marketing that says send them to a squeeze page and only give them one option. I just love the feel of that terminology. Don’t you squeeze page. I, I re, I hate you. I hate the idea of squeeze page or landing page or sales funnel. People are not objects that are supposed to be put through a machine. They’re supposed to be helped through the buying process. So really when we, when we tell you or teach you to send them to a welcome page, that’s what it is. It’s a, uh, it’s a custom welcome page because right now we’re recording this in late 2016 and I guarantee you right now there’s somebody in 2020 that’s listening to us array and they’re like, this is great.

If they went to my website in 2020, I guarantee you it’s not going to be the same, um, and you want to make sure that they have the best experience possible and that really sort of goes into the next step, which is progression, you know, how can you help somebody go from listener to visitor to lead. And we’ve done a lot of testing on this and uh, when we sent people just to the homepage, it didn’t convert as well when we sent them to a landing page. It didn’t convert as well. And from my experience with ecommerce, one of the things that I realized is that we need trust seals on the page. So. Okay, here’s another behind the curtain. Okay. So when you go to interview valet.com, forward slash Ray Edwards, what do you think the first thing you’re going to see us? It’s going to be a picture of Ray.

I was going to guess I haven’t seen this page, but I would guess you would see a picture of me and my name would be on there somewhere. Yep. So it’s the, it’s the artwork for, for your podcasts, you know, if your picture wasn’t on the artwork, we put that up there too because when somebody hears me on the, uh, on a podcast, they don’t know. They don’t know what I look like. They don’t know what my website looks like. So when they’re first getting there, they’re thinking, is this the right spot? So if you have a couple of those trust seals, they’re going to say, oh, okay, yeah, I’m on the right spot. And there’s my friend Ray, I trust him. So he’s there. And then from there, you know, uh, it’ll just be, you know, if you’re on this page is probably because you heard, uh, ray and I talking on his podcast.

I hope you had as much fun listening to it as, as I did, uh, talking with ray and then some more verbiage in there. And at the bottom there’ll be a picture of me. So if you, if you’re interested for no other reason than to figure out, I wonder what he looks like. We’ll go to the site and see. Unfortunately it’s, it’s a picture that’s like four years old. I got a little bit more gray hair than that, but it’s a way for people to connect and really that progression to have. Um, uh, too often people at the end of interviews, we’ll say, well, how do you get in touch with them? And they’ll say, well, you can email him. He that this address, you can find me here on twitter. You can find me here on facebook. People are listening as the running, jogging or working out, cooking, multitasking. They’re not going to write down all of these different things.

I’m hanging my head in shame because I’ve done so many interviews where people ask me that question at the end and I just say, Oh, you just go to ray at [inaudible] dot com and now I realize, I mean, I, I’m a big enough man to admit I have made a big mistake in the past that I’m not going to make ever again. There will always be a welcome page for me to send people to from now on

at, you know what the other recent to do that Ray is? Do you know what your best podcast interviews are? I mean, definitively with data. If you had a welcome page, I would know he would know because you can track all the analytics there. So often you get on a show and you think, oh, this is going to be a home run, and it turns out to be a base hit. So with that, you think, hmm, what, what wasn’t right? Um, what can I learn from this? Was there something that we could change? But other times you could be on a podcast and it could be a home run. And with that, you’ve got to say, how can I find out more, find more podcasts like this, how can I be back on this podcast? You know, sometimes people say I want to be on the biggest podcasts.

And unlike, no you town early because I’ve been on a podcast one time and they had about 50,000 downloads. I was thrilled to be on it. It was early on probably before I had my message down in the system down fully. But I was hurt by 40, 50,000 people and I got two dozen leads and I was thrilled with that. But then shortly afterwards I was on a podcast and the host said, uh, before we recorded, she’s like, yeah, I get about 300 downloads an episode. And I’m like, oh, I probably wouldn’t have been here right now if I’d known that. But you know what, I think it’s a good show. I want to talk to them. So let’s do that. Ray, do you know, I was amazed. I got 150 leads from that. And this is a while back. I was selling a product. I sold $25,000 worth of product on that podcast alone, and so as I looked at that, I’m like, yeah, there’s more fish in the ocean, but if I can find a barrel that’s full of the fish that I want, I’m going to go there every time.

Oh yes. That is beautiful. That is fantastic.

Now the, the, the final p, the final step is promotion. And uh, this is the one that, that I liked the most because as I said before, uh, my first job out of college was a run a nuclear power plant. I’m an engineer at heart. I, I joke around that English is my second language and I really don’t have a first language. So when I write blogs it can be painful. And so one of the things that I love to do is come up with ideas and I’ll dictate a blog and that will get the majority of it down and then I’ll have somebody else cleaned it up to make me look like I’m semi-educated before I actually publish it. And the promotion on a podcast interview is just amazing because think about it, you’ve got audio content now, so what can you do with that so that more people see it, right? So of course you’re going to, when the interview comes out, you’re going to share it on your social media, you’re going to put it on twitter and facebook and linkedin and not just one time, but on a continual basis so that you’re always promoting that interview because like I said, somebody in 20 slash 20 just found this interview and it’s just valuable to them as it is to somebody that found it four years earlier.

I’m going to tell you something that you probably already know, but this was a shock to me. Uh, can you guess who is the only person I’ve ever interviewed? And I’ve interviewed many people on this show who’s the only person who continuously still promotes that interview. I’m going to guess Aaron Walker. You’re absolutely right. And not only has that made me smile every time I see it happen, but it keeps him on my radar and it makes me remember that guy, I interviewed him on my show and he’s given me back much more value than I gave him by giving him an interview. I mean, he’s really made me feel like a closer, like I know him better, like he’s done more for me just through a simple action that really is in his best interest in the long run. But I’m telling you that’s a very effective technique. And you know, I bet you if we looked back through the analytics,

we could probably see bump ups every time you mentioned him on a podcast like right now. Okay. So we’ve mentioned him a few times in here. There’s people that are going to go back and look for that episode again. And even though it was a year ago, boom, that’s traffic there that they’ll get from that. So it does, it is by continually putting that out there. Um, it helps everyone. And you know, the, the truth is, is that it’s probably an automated system. You know, there’s a social media jukebox box out there, there’s meet Edgar, there’s all kinds of ones where you can set it and forget it.

Well, and I know that, but it didn’t, it doesn’t make any difference to me because he loved doing it and I feel I feel a debt of gratitude to him because he didn’t have to do that

exactly. But he, he’s doing that. So that helps other ways to promote it too, is just to repurpose this content. So like I said before, that um, uh, I, most of the time will dictate my blogs first. Well, you know, when we talk it’s about 150 words a minute. So if a blog is 600 words every four minutes, we’re coming up with a different blog. So you could take this content and put it through something like rev.com for a dollar a minute and get the transcript. So now take that, figure out how to get different blogs out of it. Maybe highlighted, you know, if I talk long enough I’ll get 140 characters of genius. That could be a tweet. And so highlight those, maybe there’s some that you could make a word swag out of, um, you could even make some, some images out of that.

You could take a small clip of that, run some b roll footage over the front of it and now put it up on, on youtube or facebook. And so there’s so many ways that you can repurpose this content that you just made. And it’s, it, to me, it’s magic. Well, you’re absolutely right about that. So now I’ve got a question as, as we’re listening to this, I’m sure there are people who are getting all excited all lathered up because they’re like, I’ve, I have found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I’m going to get an, a bunch of podcasts. And of course it’s not that simple as we’ve already discussed, but who will this not work for? Surely there’s some people that this just won’t work for. Yeah. And with this, um, we’ve, we’ve worked with over 100 clients from two different industries over 3000 interviews.

And we went back and we looked and said, okay, who got the great results? And who didn’t get, you know, who may be at good results are fair results with it. And really we looked at it as there was three different foundational parts and ray, they, they sort of multiply on each other. So if you’ve got a zero in one, they’re all going to be zero. And the, it’s really the message, the market and the machine. So the message is, do you have stories to tell and not just a product to sell, you know, do you, are you engaging? Um, do you have something that would offer value to people? And you know, if you just want to do a quick transaction, there’s better ways to do it. You know, if you’re selling, um, uh, uh, uh, certs or tic tacs, this is not the medium for that.

Maybe if you, maybe if you want to, if you’re the company owner and tell the story behind it, maybe that would work, but you really want to be focusing on not just a transaction, but how can I get a lifelong customer here? We’re really more of a longterm, a lifetime value of a customer. So messages, the first part, market is the second one, and there’s two parts to this. First, do you know who you want to talk with because I can remember. We, uh, we were talking with an author that wanted to work with us, great guy and everything, but I asked them, so who is your ideal buyer persona? Who’s that person that you want to talk to? And he says, I want to be on every podcast. I, you know, I want to be on any podcast where they’ve got somebody that wants to buy a book and has $20 in their pocket.

Oh boy. And I just, I just scratched my head and I’m like, you’re going to be annoying. 90 nine point nine percent of the world. You have to know who that person is that that you can thrill and b will, will be thrilled by you. And the second part of that is with the market, you have to have something that can help them. All right? So we’ve had people that come to us and say, I just want to do it for a brand awareness. I have never known what that word means or how to measure it, uh, but I just want to do it to get my name out there and, and to me, that does disservice to the listener if you don’t have something that they can say, yeah, he can help me and then give them the next step. It’s not, you’re really doing them a disservice.

So some customers, we’ve told them, you know, if they like, yeah, I’ve got a book coming out next year. I’m like, well great, you know, when you’ve got that book out, come to us three or four months beforehand and we can start working that. Or they may say, I’m working on a product right now. That’s great. You know, when that product is ready to launch, come back to us and, and we can talk about that and we can help promote that. But you gotta have something that you’re marketing. You know, it’s, I love how a rabbi Daniel Lapin calls it certificates of appreciation is money. You know, when you do something for someone that they appreciate, they’ll give you certificates of appreciation. So with that market there, you need to have something that can help them. The final step, we had message, we had market and now machine machine is really, do you have an online presence?

Do have an online system that can move people from being listeners to visitors to leads. So after you get off this, listen to me on this podcast, you’re like, okay, Tom Schwab, Kalamazoo, Michigan, I need to figure out more about this guy. You know, if you go to my linkedin profile, you’re going to see stuff that builds up my credibility. Same thing, you’ll find me on Linkedin, you’ll find me on twitter and facebook. So people have to have that machine. And then also you have to have a website that builds trust and can also help people, you know, move them from being a visitor to a lead to nurturing them. You know, the days of just saying, you know, just email me at, people won’t do that. So if you’ve got the message, the market and the machine, this will work for you.

Brilliant. So you’ve given us really an outline of a system that will work if somebody wants to go through all the steps and will take action on them, they naked take what they heard in this interview and make a huge difference in their own business. And so, and you’ve got a business where you help people do this, like one to one, you, you help them set up the system and get everything in place and get the interviews and so forth. So my question to you is, Tom, why in the world would you write a book and give away all your secrets?

To me it’s like, it’s not a secret. I mean there’s, there’s no, there’s no magic. Um, you know, I’ll pull the curtain back and show you exactly how it works. And I honestly believe that we’re all work better together when we share ideas. Um, that what’s ordinary to me is amazing to other people and what’s ordinary to them is amazing to me. So I think we need to cross pollinate with ideas here. And when I first started with this system, um, you know, I, I would tell people this is how you do it. And if you listen to any of my interviews here, I’ll tell you exactly how it goes. If you want to spend all the time to, to listen to the interviews, the, the blogs, everything. You can piece it together. It’s not magic. It’s a recipe. Right? Same way a chef could put out the recipe there and you could spend the time following that.

And so I want to this available to people, um, so that they can grow their business because I think it serves everybody. The customer, uh, the, the person that’s, you know, the business owner or the coach, the author, the speaker, and also the podcast are. And what we found is that when we first started this, I put the course together. And when I said before that I had sold $25,000 worth of product, that was an online course that we had. And we were teaching how to do this in a, a video course. And people would come back and say, I understand it, but I don’t want to have to do all of that. Yep.

Because that’s exactly what I’m thinking when I have a confession to make. When I agreed to have you on the show. I mean I know what you do, but I figured, well, I’ve been podcasting for a long time. I already know all this stuff, but this will be great for the listeners. So I’ll have tom on. He can explain how people can do this. And I’ve been taking notes and I’ve been thinking there’s a lot of stuff here. I’m not doing myself. I should be doing it. He’s told me how to do it, but good grief, I don’t want to do it. I should just have them do it for me.

And, and that, that’s, that’s the thing is because if you skip steps, you’re not going to get the same results. And we had people, you know, I always say rate the best copywriters for me are my customers. I just write this stuff down. And we had one client that came to us and after he had gone through all this and, and understood it, he said, I understand it, but you know, Sinatra only saying. And I’m like, okay, what does that mean? And he said, well, Sinatra could have done all of it, but he only performed. He had other people do all of that. He says, I want to do what I can only do, I can share my story, I can perform. He says, I want to be the guest. You guys do all the rest. And I’m like, oh, that’s a good tagline. You’d be the guest will do the rest.

Okay. So that’s really what it is. And so there’s no magic here. Uh, you know, it’s like a recipe, right? So, uh, if you’ve got a recipe for your favorite meal, well you could try making it yourself and you know, some people would do that or you know, you could go to a restaurant and have your favorite chef make that. And that’s really what we’re doing. So you know, there’s all these steps, there’s the prospect in the pitching, the preparation, the performance, the progression, the promotion, the only one that you can’t outsource is the performance. So with that we help you with the performance as much as possible, but we, we key you up for everything else. And really that’s how I’m able to do all of these interviews. You said before that you listened to, you know, three or four podcast interviews before you ever go on it for me, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll tell you straight out I’ve listened to your podcast.

I know you, I know the flow of it, but for a lot of podcasts, if, if I’m not as familiar with them 15 minutes before the show starts and I get the email reminder from my team, my interview valet, and it gives me the brief sheet that says, here’s the host, here’s the audience, here’s my background, here’s questions that they could ask you. I go through my checklist to make sure everything’s set. Then have the half hour, 45 minute interview, give some feedback and boom, I’m onto the next one and that’s our best clients. Do that so that all they want to do is come up for that performance, knock it out of the park with that, and then we take care of everything else.

Well, I really believe that people who follow this strategy, whether they follow it and they follow the recipe exactly on their own or whether they have you do it, they’re going to be successful in the coming year. And this, uh, this interview will publish on the 21st of November. So that means your book will be out. Tell us about the book.

Yes, it’s been a long time coming. It’s called podcast guest profits. And really it’s the story of what we learned and the system that we put in place. There’s a lot of stories of different clients in there. You know, our, our, our first clients everywhere from somebody trying to franchise their business to somebody trying to do a kickstarter campaign, the coach, the author, uh, the small business software service companies, all these different ones we tried and really what we learned from them. And it’s a, uh, it’s a step by step framework that tells you how to use targeted interviews as a strategy to grow your business. And, you know, tactics, tactics have an expiration date, but strategy don’t, doesn’t. So with that, you know, we tried to teach you why it works, not just, hey, this is what worked for us. And a, at the end there, there’s know information and knowledge is useless unless you put it into action.

So at the end, there’s a 30 day plan that you can follow along so that you can start doing this. Also. Um, there’s some online resources that didn’t make it into the book, uh, but we’ve got those. They’re also so that you can get the checklists, you can use the forms, everything that we use so that if you’ve got, if you’ve got the time to do this, that you can do it on yourself. You know, there’s that continuum. I’ve either got lots and lots of time or I don’t. So if you’ve got lots of time, you can do it yourself. If you don’t, you can hire us to do it or someone else to do that. So, um, it’s really actionable book and uh, we’re really excited to have it out there. I say we because, uh, uh, I wrote it, but I always say that was my clients that had provided the content and I was so thrilled and honored when Aaron Walker, uh, wrote the forward for it

hot diggity dog. So it’s called podcast guest profits. And where can people get it? Sure. Uh, they, it will be on Amazon and uh, it’s also if you go to podcast guest profits.com, you can get it there and some of the extra materials that will be there also. And what was the address of that other welcome page that you mentioned earlier? Sure. So with that, I’ll, everything that ray and I talked about will be at the interview

Valet Dot com forward slash ray Edwards. And boy, I just, you know, ray, we’re all learning on this because I just violated one of my rules. I just sent listeners to two different sites, right? So anybody that’s listening and multitasking, I am sorry that I just made your life harder. Uh, I should have combined them in one, but I tell you what, a race got great. Show notes. If you go there, I’m sure that all the links will be there also. That is absolutely correct.

Tom. This has been a delightful conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you. Right. I told you, you going to love Tom. Hey, if you found this show helpful, do us a favor. We would like to get the word out so more people can know about the program. So how we do that is you subscribe to the show in itunes and you use the apple podcast app to do it. That gives us higher rankings, especially if you’d give us a rating and review in the itunes podcast store. Make sure you put your real name and website in the text of the review itself, and we’ll mention you on the show at some point in the future, you can get the show notes and the transcript@RayEdwards.com slash two, five nine. Until next time, I pray that God will continue to bless you and do more for you than you can ask or even possibly imagine. Thank you for listening. This has been the Ray Edwards show. Find the archives@thisweeklyshowatRayEdwards.com slash podcast or on itunes. ContactRay@RayEdwards.com. This podcast, copyright by Ray Edwards international incorporated all rights reserved. Each week we bring you a message of prosperity with purpose and freedom, and remembering that true freedom is available to all through Jesus Christ.