I am a podcast junkie. Which is a little odd, since I really only listen to one podcast.
Just this morning I was working my way through Episode #486 of the Tim Ferriss Show. I’m listening nine months behind real time because I have never skipped an episode, and I’m not about to start now!
The average Tim Ferriss show episode is over two hours long, which means that since I started following the show with Episode One back in 2016—at which point I was already two years behind real time—I have listened to just about a THOUSAND hours of Tim Ferriss’ content. Folks, that is FIVE YEARS of four-hour work weeks! 🤣
In that time I have consumed about 100 hours of promotional material: ads, sponsor messages, that kind of thing. But the REST of it? Meaning, about 900 hours of my time over the past five years?
I spent it listening to podcast interviews.
And I’m not alone. Tim Ferriss has about 2 million listeners who have performed over 500 million podcast episode downloads, totalling well over a billion hours of downloaded content. Yah. He’s a download billionaire.
Ferriss does two product spots on each episode that take a few minutes each and cost the advertiser $54,000 apiece. The rest of each show is devoted exclusively to the thoughts, story, and message of the podcast interviewee, for which exposure the podcast interviewee pays: NOTHING.
Let’s just sit with that for a moment.
Today’s guest speaker was Tom Schwab. Tom is a 1987 U.S. Naval Academy graduate who spoke about this very topic at a RINGKNOCKER Virtual Meetup a couple of weeks ago.
Tom is the CEO of Interview Valet, and his business is to put YOU into the hot seat, to be interviewed on the podcasts that YOUR customers follow just as obsessively as I follow the Tim Ferriss show. Over the last few years, Tom and his people have placed hundreds of thought leaders onto thousands of podcast episodes, and this morning Tom made the case for podcast interviews as a VERY interesting way to build relationships with podcast listeners at scale.
Just to set the table, here’s a key fact I apparently missed at the RINGKNOCKER Meetup a couple of weeks ago: over HALF of US adults are regular podcast listeners! I still find this to be an astonishing statistic, which I guess speaks both to the power of the format and the rapid pace of improvement in the listening experience.
Tom walked us through this and other arguments in favor of podcasts as an ideal platform for reaching a niche audience in a high-trust context. The numbers are the clincher: conversion rates from podcast listeners are an order of magnitude higher than even highly-targeted paid web advertising. It isn’t even close.
The early hour, vacation season, and Zoom fatigue conspired to give us a fairly small group, so we took full advantage by pinging those present and asking Tom to work through several podcast-guesting scenarios. We heard from:
- A gentleman in the early stages of standing up a real estate investment fund.
- A representative of a B2B hardware technology company.
- A process-engineering consultant to the power-generation industry.
Tom was able to outline a podcast-guesting strategy for each of these.
At the end, we heard from Josh Emison, who won a free month of the Tribify service at last month’s drawing. Josh was blown away: in four weeks of promotion, we were able to get over 250 people to register for one of his online events!
We held another drawing this time around, and the winner was none other than this month’s guest speaker Tom Schwab! We’re excited to test the Tribify platform against the podcasting industry, and we’ll tell you all about how it went next month!
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