179 | How to Get Listeners to Buy Your Stuff

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Swedlin. I am your podcast growth coach. And today we're going to talk about how you can record CTAs, aka calls to action, that convert your listeners into buyers of your stuff, so your products or services. And this episode is for all you business owners out there who have a product or service to sell, and you have a podcast that has at least some listeners, but few to none of those listeners have actually become buyers and bought your stuff. So my goal for you today is to make it easier for you to get an ROI from your podcast by converting more of your listeners to buyers of your course, your coaching program, your services, whatever it might be that you sell. And before I get into that, I want to tell a story. So several months ago, I was at a mastermind with a bunch of really high levels, 7, 8, and even 9 figure business owners. And I was talking to a business owner who has a sizeable podcast audience. We're talking about 10 to 20,000 downloads per month. Now this podcaster was considering giving up on his show because he is a logical, thinky business owner and he saw no financial ROI from his podcast. And in fact, he was spending tons of time making episodes and he was paying an editor, or maybe it was an agency, I'm not sure, and a VA for help producing his show. So he's spending tons of his time, he's spending money on the show, and he's seeing no ROI. Now as I said, this podcaster was also a business owner and he had a high ticket program that was the main revenue driver for his business. He mainly got his new clients through referrals, his email list, and a little bit of Facebook ads. So as we were there, we're sitting at this table at this mastermind and he's telling me about how he didn't see how the podcast was going to generate ROI. He went on to say that it would never get an ROI because he didn't have time to grow the podcast to the 50 to 100,000 downloads per month that's required to make a profit. Now that's, there are two limiting beliefs there that I want to call out. Number one, he didn't realize that he could get sponsors where he currently was, which was at 20,000 downloads per month. He didn't need to go to 50 to 100K. And number two, the big belief that was holding back his podcast ROI was that sponsorship was the only way to generate ROI on a podcast. And that's what a lot of podcasters think that sponsorship is the only way to monetize. So either way, after he was done telling me how he was probably going to give up the show, I asked the big question that was on my mind the whole time that I was patiently waiting till he was done to ask, which is, let me ask you this. Have you talked about your program at all on the show? And immediately he squirmed, which I see all the time. And he was like, no, I probably should. And I was like, yeah, man, you should 100%. There is literally there are no hotter leads on the planet than those who listen to your podcast every week. Think about it. They listen to you for an hour every week. You can literally cannot ask for hotter leads than that. So he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I get it. Now what's cool about going to big time masterminds like that is that the people that you interact with, those seven, eight and nine figure business owners, those folks tend to be really good at taking action fast. And that's, you know, what got them there to that point. So sure enough, about two weeks after that mastermind ended, I heard back from that podcaster and he told me that he talked about for the first time. He talked about his high ticket program on his show and guess what happened? In one week, he got 10 new clients, $50,000 in one week, just from one CTA, that one CTA gave him an ROI on an entire year of podcasts and he made a profit in one week. And I see now that's an extreme example, but I see examples like this all the time. And truthfully, I'm consistently floored by the number of times that this type of thing happens. I'm talking to a business owner. They're sad because they don't have any revenue or ROI from their podcast. And I asked them how many times they've talked about their product or service and they face palm and they say that they never have. I get it though, there's a lot of resistance and fear involved in talking about your own stuff, especially when it's your own stuff, right? So it's a lot easier. There's, there's sales resistance already, like it's already, you don't want to be sleazy, you're afraid to sell stuff on your podcast, but it's even harder when it's your own stuff, right? Compared to when it's somebody else's stuff, which is really all that sponsorship is either the way the factor remains that if you're not telling your podcast audience about your paid offers, they are not going to buy them plain and simple. Actually, that is mostly not true. Just yesterday, I spoke to a podcaster where that actually wasn't true. She has a great show and, but she's never talked about her product or services. And there were a couple listeners who basically did some crazy detective work and discovered her paid products and services to which that entrepreneur said was really impressed and couldn't believe that they even found it. And again, I was like, isn't the goal here to drive clients and customers to your products or service? Like, why did they have to become private investigators in order to become your clients? So that's what I want to solve today. In almost all cases where a business owner is not satisfied with the ROI from their podcast, yet they have listeners, it's because that business owner is not effectively plugging their own stuff on their shows and they are cheating themselves of the most obvious and likely form of ROI. In my opinion, this is, unless you have a huge massive audience, this is by far the most profitable form of monetization. And actually, even then, by selling your own products and services, I mean, it's just how you make the most money. Look at all the big celebrities, the rock, Carly Jenner. What do they do? They create brands. They sell their own stuff, right? So what I want to do today is provide you a framework for how you can talk about your stuff on your show so that you can cash in on the pent up demand that is likely right under your nose. But before I do that, a couple of caveats. Number one, if you've been doing this for a while, if you've been podcasting for a while and you have not talked about your products or services yet, you haven't made any asks. You can reasonably expect to receive a pretty big response from your audience. And that's what happened in the story I just told, that entrepreneur that I met at the mastermind made 50K in a week because he had a whole year where he was giving value to his podcast audience without asking for anything back. He had tons of pent up goodwill to cash in on. When you do this, it's easy to expect, you know, when you make that CTA for the first time and the response is huge, you get a massive, massive burst of, you know, dopamine. And it's easy to then expect that every time you make that CTA from then on out, you're going to get a huge payoff like that. And that's not true. It flattens out with time. And so you want to keep in mind that if you're somebody who has never talked about your products or services, you have an opportunity in front of you. But after you do that, you know, don't expect it to keep going that way and just be ready for the next CTA to not be, not get as big of a response. Like there might be a little bit of a let down there. Fortunately, there's actually two situations where business owners are cheating themselves of podcast ROI. One is like we've talked about so far, they are never talking about their stuff. But the second one I see quite often is that they do talk about their stuff, but they're actually talking about it too much or they're talking about it at the wrong times. And so we'll talk about that in a minute, how to make sure you talk about, you make your CTA at the right point in your episode. And then finally, I guess there is a third situation. If you're somewhere in between, so you haven't never talked about your stuff and you don't think you're talking about it too much, but you're still not getting any clients or customers. That problem is a little bit more harder to diagnose out of the gate, but it's usually either that you're called to action copy. So what you're actually saying isn't good enough yet. Or I see this a lot, your funnel might not be effective. And I see this a lot where a podcaster sales funnel is just too complicated. It just doesn't work. There's too many offers, too many pages, too many steps. So that one is a little bit harder to fix because you got to understand how to create a funnel that works. Like I said, if you are making regular CTAs and it's not working, the problem is your funnel. People are not getting to the sale. But today we're going to talk about how to make great CTAs. So consider what's of those three situations you are in and you can apply what I'm about to share to hopefully get yourself some more customers from your audience. All right. So let's dive in. Two things that I want to cover here quickly with you. Number one is when to put your CTAs within your episode. And number two is what to say in your CTAs. So let's start with the one. There are two guidelines to remember when deciding where or when within your podcast episode to put your call to action. The first thing you want to remember is that you don't want to put your call to action until after the hook point of the episode. What is the hook point? Well, the hook point is what I call when your listener just gets hooked, right? When they decide, ah, yes. This is the episode that I want to listen to today. Pat Flynn calls this the magic moment, which is I think a better way to do it. But I'm not going to steal his phrase. I say hook point. And the hook point usually happens if you're doing your job right within the first 60 to 90 seconds of your podcast episode and it's achieved when your intro does the job of selling the rest of your episode to your listener. You've got more episodes of this podcast in development now that will be in your ears within a few weeks that'll help you to make a better intro. So we won't dive into that here, but just remember that you want you don't want to put your CTA until after the hook point of your episode, okay? So that's that's the first guideline to remember. You can CTA your stuff pretty much at any moment of your episode after the hook point. But if you CTA before the hook point, there is massive, massive risk that you are going to turn listeners off, especially new ones because they will have clicked on your podcast episode and they clicked on it to get the whatever value your podcast episode title conveys. And the first thing they hear is you trying to sell them something and that just doesn't come off well. People leave. They feel bait and switched. So you want to save CTAs until after the hook point. You can sometimes put CTAs before the hook point and those are known as pre-roll ads and I would save those for special occasions like if you have a big launch or maybe a limited time offer or if a sponsor makes you an offer that you can't refuse, shout out Riverside. So the first thing is when thinking about when to put your CTA in the episode, don't put it until after the hook point unless it's a special occasion. And the second thing to remember is that the longer you wait to make the CTA, the fewer people will hear it. And you can actually see the exact percentage of people who will hear it depending on how long you wait by looking at your retention rates. The higher your retention rates in your episodes, the longer you can wait to make your call to action and still reasonably expect the most people to actually hear that call to action. So if you have high retention rates, you can hold your CTA to the end. If you don't have high retention rates, number one, you need to learn how to fix that because your show is not going to grow. But in the meantime, until that's fixed, you'll want to place your CTAs early in the episode before you lose people, right? Now as far as how I do it, I usually place my main CTA right after the hook point for guest episodes of Grow the Show because my guest episodes and just guest episodes in general have naturally lower retention rates. Usually for guest episodes, I expect between 75 and 85% retention rates. And so because of that, now that's very high. But I still put my main CTA either right after the hook point of the guest episode or sometimes in the middle of the guest episode, I'll take a break and make a CTA. My solo episodes on the other hand have 85 to sometimes above 100% retention rates, which means that people listen on average more than once. So for those episodes, for these types of episodes, I can hold my CTA till the end because I know that virtual everybody who presses play is going to hear the CTA. And just in general, the longer you can wait to make the CTA the better because while you're waiting to make it, you're just giving value, giving value, being useful, being useful. And so by the time you make the CTA, people have hopefully gotten tons of value. So hopefully that's true with my solo episodes. You're my very, but those are the two guidelines that I invite you to remember when deciding where to put your CTA for your products or service in your episode. Number one, put it as early as you can so that more people hear it, but don't put it before the hook point or it'll actually have the opposite effect that you want to have. So that's the one. Now let's talk about the what to say. Now I like to use a tried and true copywriting framework for my ad copy, but with a twist that I added specifically for podcast ads. And like every useful framework, it has an easy to remember abbreviation, which is pass P-A-S-S, which stands for problem agitate solution. And by the way, that's the standard copywriting framework. If you are a copywriter at all, you have heard of P-A-S. But I added another S at the end, which stands for sell the next step. It's not one word, so it's not as catchy. But basically it's problem agitate solution, sell the next step. And so explain each of those before I give you an example. So the way that you start your CTA is by calling out a specific problem. Now I've heard P-A-S also phrased as pain agitate solution. Either way, you call out a problem or a pain point that your listener has that what you're about to tell them is that your product or service can help solve that problem or pain point. So you start with the problem, talk about it, maybe ask the listener if they experience this specific problem, and then you agitate the problem. What does that mean? But when you agitate the problem, basically what you do is just talk a little bit about how much it sucks to have that problem and how much it'll suck even more to keep having that problem. So problem, you state the problem, you state the pain, then you agitate the problem, make it clear to the person listening to you how much it sucks to have that problem, and then you present the solution, which in this case the solution is your product or service. You talk about how your product or service will solve that problem that you have just agitated, right? So basically you state a problem, you agitate it, and then you present your product or service as the solution. Side note, I've also heard people say problem vision solution instead of agitate. So that takes up a more of a positive approach rather than agitating the problem and just really digging into the pain of that problem, you propose a vision where it's like what if you didn't have that problem and your life was like this instead. So you can do that if you want or you can also do PAVS, which is problem agitate vision solution, which would really, really go the whole nine yards, but you might not have that much time in your podcast CTA to do all of that. So I either use either problem agitate solution or problem vision solution, but either way, whichever one you use, you want to add this extra piece that I've added for podcasting, which is sell the next step, and this is the key. When you sell the next step, basically what that means is the purpose of your call to action is not to convince the listener per se to buy the thing, right? So you are not asking them to decide to buy right then and there. You are selling them taking the next step in the process of buying your thing. So let's say you're an online coach whose next step to buying your coaching services is a discovery call. Well, instead of selling them on deciding to buy your coaching on the podcast ad, what you're selling them on is booking the discovery call. And instead of talking about how great their life would be, you know, if they buy the thing and telling them how much it costs and all that stuff, you simply mentioned the solution, mentioned your coaching and what your coaching would provide generally. And then you start selling why the discovery call is the best next thing to do. So something like, you know, all you have to do is book a 30 minute call with me and we will dive into your specific situation. I will let you know exactly what I see as to how you can solve that problem. If that involves working with me, I'll let you know what that looks like and see if you want to do it. And if not, you don't have to, right? So that was me basically selling the discovery call rather than selling the coaching services on the discovering call is when I sell the coaching service. That is when I want, you know, I sell them on deciding to buy that thing. If you don't have a call within your process, maybe you have an application. So if you've heard me at all for the past three years, I've talked a lot about my growth show accelerator program and applying to that. So I would always sell the application. It only takes five minutes to apply blah, blah, blah. Or if you sell something that just gets sold, you know, via a sales page, you would basically sell the landing page or you would sell the sales page. You would sell why getting more information from the page is the best thing for them to do. So in summary, problem, agitate or vision or both solution, sell the next step. All right. So that's what you want to do when you craft a great CTA. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go into deliver to you today's CTA, which is a new one that I guarantee you haven't heard me say before, since the first time I've ever making it. And so I'm going to read out the entire CTA that I for myself that I have written for today. And then what I'm going to do is briefly break down how I implemented PASS for this CTA. And then that'll be it for today. So without further ado, here is today's call to action. Now listen closely to how I implemented PASS here. All right. Ready? Okay. So before we get back to the show, I want to ask you something. Have you managed to implement everything that you've learned from me so far on how to grow and monetize a podcast like everything? Are your podcast downloads growing each and every month? Are you satisfied with the revenue that your show is generating? Well, if your show is not growing or generating revenue, then that means that you're not doing what you need to do to achieve your growth and monetization goals. You're not taking the right actions. And if you don't change what actions you're taking, there's something else that's not going to change the results that you're getting, which means that without change in action, you're going to continue to not see your download numbers grow up, and you're going to continue to not generate the revenue that you want. Your podcast won't grow, it won't make you enough money, and that will rinse and repeat for each and every month until you finally give up and tell everybody in your life that you stopped podcasting because you didn't like it. But that won't be true. You loved it. You just didn't get it to work. So what needs to happen for you to finally see the growth and monetization that you want? Well, it's not that you need more information. Maybe a little bit, but as they say, if information was enough, we would all be billionaires with six packs because we have access to the internet. You've already gotten at least some of the information that you need from me, from the internet, or from another podcaster. What you and every other growth craving podcaster needs is better implementation, aka action. And that is why I created Grow the Show Pro. Grow the Show Pro is my brand new membership that will provide you three things. Number one, it's going to give you access to my entire library of over 90 course videos and workshops, which contain information, yes, but more importantly, they walk you through the step-by-step implementation of how to take action on the information. Number two, it's going to give you direct access to me and my top podcast coach and other podcasting experts via weekly office hours Q&A sessions, regular live workshops, and expert AMAs in addition to member hot seat sessions. And the third thing is, most importantly, it's going to make you a member of my private community of over 200 growing podcasters, many of whom who have already been there, done that, and have already solved the problem that you're stuck on now. You're going to be able to steal their hard one lessons, skip the trial and error, and start seeing growth and monetization probably faster than they did. All of those three things combined are there to help you implement a podcast growth strategy that's right for you and that gets results, and overall to help you maximize the revenue that your show generates. And the best part of all this, you can access Grow the Show Pro for a monthly payment that is far lower than I have ever charged for access to my paid products and services. You get a seven day try before you decide money back guarantee and you can cancel anytime. On top of that, for the next 50 people who join between now and August 4th, 2023, I am offering an additional discount of $50 per month for the lifetime of your membership. To learn more about what's included and to take advantage of the special launch discount, just click on the link in the show notes and there's a whole page that will walk you through the nitty gritty of what you get, what you'll learn, and what others have been able to do with the implementation that they got inside of the community. So once again, the link to learn more about Grow the Show Pro and to decide if it's right for you at this stage in your podcasting journey is in the show notes. I hope to see you inside the community. Okay. So in that CTA, I utilized PASS. So the problem that I talked about was that your podcast downloads were not growing every month and you're not satisfied with the amount of money that the show is making and you're not taking the right actions. And I agitated that problem by saying, look, if you don't change the action that you're taking, you're going to keep getting the results that you're getting. And eventually what that means is you're going to quit and you're going to have to lie to everybody and say that you quit because you didn't like it because you don't want to tell them, yeah, I just wasn't good at it. I couldn't actually make it work. And that's going to suck because you actually love podcasting, right? So that's agitating the problem. Then the solution that I present that I've created to solve that problem is grow the show pro. So I talk through what the solution is. I talked a lot about the features of the product and also tied benefits to those features. So basically said here are the three features mainly. And here's what they're going to help you do. And then I sold the next step in the process to you, which is look, the number one thing you can do right now is check out the page that walks you through exactly what you get, what you will implement and what others have achieved by implementing that, right? So P A S S. Now there's one more thing that I did there that you might not have noticed. But I want to share with you because it's really effective, which is I gave you a decent amount of information on what on the benefits and features of the product. I gave you some risk reversal. So I said, hey, you have a seven day tribe before you decide money back guarantees. You can cancel any time, right? So I gave a risk reversal. And I also gave a limited time offer of $50 off per month for the rest of this week. So if you're hearing this solo episode, the week that it comes out, you'll be able to take advantage of that $50 discount if not sorry, but it gave some urgency as well. So that's going to make you want to check out the sales page and take advantage of that discount if now it's the right time for you. And then finally, the last thing that I did is that I have not told you what the monthly price is for membership. And you want to know what that is, right? So what are you going to do? You're going to click on the link that gives more information and then tells you what the price is. So that is a key piece and I say it's kind of weird saying that to you as I just did it, but hopefully it's valuable and useful for you so that you can implement it on your own podcast. But that's a key piece. If you give the price of the thing in the ad, the person that hears it is not going to take the next step because they will feel that they have all the information that they need. So that is why I'm not telling you right now what the price is. I'm telling you that it is way lower than I have ever charged for access to my paid stuff. So you should probably check out the page and see how much and take advantage of that $50 per month discount. But the fact that you don't know the price and you really want to know what the price is means you're going to check out that sales page. So there you have it, my friends, today's episode about CTA. Hopefully my goal for you is to understand better where to put your CTA in your episode and also how to make that CTA, hopefully the PASS framework serves you and brings you some money. And so if you do implement this, if you are one of those podcasters who is a business owner and has not made any CTAs and you do using this framework, please, if it works, tell me. I want to make you the next story that I tell on how effective this can be. And I'd love to hear how many clients or how much revenue you were able to generate by finally making a CTA. And so please, you can DM me on Instagram or Twitter or wherever the heck you find me in the links from the show notes. And I'd love to hear it. So that's going to do it for today. Thank you all so much. Get out there, make those CTAs and I'll see you in the next one.