BONUS EPISODE: Podcasting Master Class With Gary Arndt

Hey, Kevin here. This episode of Grow the Show is going to be a little bit different than usual. You may have noticed when you clicked play that this one is way longer than most other Grow the Show episodes, and there is a reason for that. Because today we're going to give you a sneak peek inside the Grow the Show Podcast Accelerator program, and we're going to give you full access to a Q&A session that we held a couple weeks ago with podcaster Gary Arnt. Gary is a world renowned travel blogger and podcaster. He started his latest show, which is called Everything Everywhere in 2020, and today he has amassed over 3 million downloads and is fully monetized. Gary was also one of our 2021 podcast guests, and in that episode he explained exactly how he approaches the monetization piece of his podcasting business. More than that, Gary has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all things podcasting, blogging, and entrepreneurship. He's really, really something else. That's why when I was looking for a podcasting expert to fill in for me in my coaching sessions with Accelerator students, while I was on vacation, I knew I had to ask Gary. In this episode, you're going to hear questions that the Grow the Show clients asked Gary, and you're going to hear his responses in full. You're going to learn where he's found success investing in paid advertising to grow his podcast, how he's amassed his large social media following, and more. I do not expect you to listen to this all in one go, but like our clients who attended the coaching session, I do think that you'll find value in every single minute. Even if you have to do so over a few days, I highly recommend listening to this whole thing and using it as a reference going forward. There's a very special thanks to Gary for agreeing to guest coach our clients. I also have to thank Catherine Nails, Grow the Show's content manager and producer. She emceed this coaching session, so you'll hear her chime in with her own questions and commentary throughout the episode, and actually you'll hear her voice first. Finally, I wanted to give a shout out to our Grow the Show clients for allowing us to share their questions and for being vulnerable and allowing all of our listeners to get value from being coached. Without further ado, this is the guest coaching session featuring Gary Arnt with the Grow the Show podcast accelerator students right here, right now. Let me know what you think. For those of you who don't know me, I'm not Kevin Schmidland. I am Catherine Nails, the Grow the Show content manager, and Kevin is taking a much-needed vacation this week, so I will be moderating this coaching call and with us today to actually answer all of your questions, we have the amazing Gary Arnt. Gary is a world-famous travel blogger and podcaster. He launched his daily podcast called Everything Everywhere, right around the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, and today the show has over one million downloads. Actually, it's close to three now. A close to three. Alright, so that's an old number that we pulled from when Gary was a guest on the Grow the Show podcast. I believe it was in the fall. So Gary is here to answer all of your questions. Clearly he knows what he's doing based on those numbers. So without further ado, Gary, do you have anything you want to say before we get started? Let's just go right into it. I'm glad everyone's here and I'll be going to answer all of your questions and I'll be going into a level of detail on some things that I've never really done before with any other podcasters. You guys, to understand this stuff, you really have to get into the weeds. So yeah, and we're really lucky to have you here less, so thank you for joining. So we're going to start out, Jess Lorayan, forgive me if I butcher your last name. And Jessica, ask for your question yourself. Thanks, lady. Hey Gary, so nice to have you and thank you for being here. So my question essentially, and then I'll give you just a touch of background. My question is, how important do you think it is to have a business plan, so to speak, ultimate long vision goal for your podcast, especially when it comes to monetization and growing? And the little bit of background I have and the reason I'm asking the question is, so my podcast is called Mama's in training. My mission is to give aspiring and expecting moms guidance and community from moms who have been there. I'm actually not yet a mom. I'm a mama in training myself, and I started the podcast back in 2019, but did a whole rebrand through with Kevin. And about nine months ago now or eight months ago, I did start a premium membership. It is very, very small. And it got to the place that I brought up with Kevin and he said, you know what, I would hold off on advertising the membership until we really get your numbers up, because my numbers have been on a real big standstill for a while. So I stopped advertising that and I really just have been focusing on trying to do target the engagement, getting my numbers up there. But the other day I was at work and someone said to me, so what's your long term vision and plan for this, for this podcast and how are you planning on making money? And this is where I resided on this question because I bounced a couple of ideas around in my head, but I just would love to see what your professional opinion is with this. If you want to make this a business, then you absolutely need a plan. I mean, that's when I, so when I started my current podcast, I had this other life that I had as a travel photographer and that just blew up. So I had the kind of the benefit of 15 years of content creation. I had a successful website, I had big followings on social media, I did all that stuff. And it was kind of half-assed because I was doing it, I used to have two million followers on Google Plus. So every time a new social platform came out, I worked it, I grew an audience and it was all kind of half-assed. So when I started this new thing, this was like, okay, I can start from scratch in a whole new area and I really treated it like a business. So the first thing I thought of is, what's my release schedule going to be? And I decided to do a daily show. Most people don't do daily shows. Most people do a weekly show where they interview someone. That's like almost every podcast and I wanted to do something that stood out. So I said, okay, I'm going to do a daily show and it's going to be a scripted show. And the reason I'm doing a scripted show is because my favorite podcast were all scripted. There were history shows. I certainly listened to some interview shows. Then I sat down and I was like, okay, and I had a friend who had a daily podcast and I met him at a conference we were both speaking at a few years earlier and he was doing this massive in-person event. He had a conference that he did that had thousands of people show up and he was going to stop doing it because the podcast was so successful. And he said, doing a daily show was the best thing he ever did and it comes down to simply the frequency, the number of ads, the number of times you're in someone's ear. And my original plan for the show was I was going to do like one episode every two weeks, really long in-depth episodes. And then I realized that just isn't going to work number wise. That if I did the opposite instead of doing bigger infrequent shows, if I did smaller more frequent shows, okay, that's going to be at least seven opportunities for ads a week. So if you listened to the episode I did with Kevin where I broke through everything, one of the hard things that they had was explaining the math behind it. But the math is real simple. The more opportunities you have, this is just for advertising. There are other ways you can monetize as well. The more opportunities you have to serve and add, the more money you will make. So there's the three factors are your CPM, which you really can't control. I mean, that's kind of a market rate. Obviously, if you can get more of the better, the number of ads per show and the number of shows per year. If you're running a daily show, then you're going to do more than someone who's doing a weekly show. A good example of this was, I was going to do a conversation between Jack Rites, who does Dark Net Diaries, very big podcast. It's about hackers and stuff. He does a show once every two weeks. Jordan Harbinger, very successful show, does three shows a week. And they were talking about differences and I realized that what they were both missing was the fact that Jordan is doing six shows for everyone that Jack was doing. And that made a huge difference in terms of revenue, and also in terms of the value per subscriber. If you're simply making, doing six more shows, you're going to be doing six times the ad revenue, which means that a subscriber is six times more valuable. So yeah, you need a plan. And I don't know what your publishing schedule is, but I would think about maybe doubling it, doing two episodes a week. If you don't know what you're going to do, well, you know, maybe you do one episode that's an interview in one episode that's just you. And it's like, here's some advice, let's talk about this today where it's just your thoughts and it doesn't have to be as long of a show, but it's another opportunity to reach people. So business plan, yes, you know, one of the things I now was just talking to Katherine about this before we got in the air, because I have a travel background, I'm going to be running tours for my listeners. I can do a two, I'm going to be doing a tour for Italy later this year. It'll cost $5,000 per person. We're going to spend 10 days in a room. You'll get your hotel and everything. But it's anyways, but the cost to me for the hotels and for the getting the tour agents and everything is about $2,500 per person. That means I can net approximately $2,500 per person for a 10 day trip. So that's 25 grand for running a 10 day tour. So that's part of the business plan as well. But a lot of it's just kind of getting to that point. So yeah, I would definitely think about all your different revenue opportunities. I'm not a big fan of subscription podcasts, because I really, they do have a place. I haven't heard of a lot of people that have done really well. My goal is I want to reach as many people as possible. So that's that's kind of what I want to do. Just interrupt really quickly. We do have a really good follow up question to that as you're going maybe just to think about and somebody Joel asked, would you recommend making your episodes more frequent if you're not planning on running ads? I don't think it makes as much of a difference, but I also do think it probably will still benefit by developing that extra touch point with your listener, even if it's a shorter episode, that the great thing about podcasting as opposed to blogging, and I did a blog, I still have it for many, many years, is that they develop a connection with you because they hear your voice. And the more they hear that the more you are in their head, you know, if it's twice a week, I think that's great. I do think there's a limit to the amount of time you can expect from someone per week. So my shows are about 10 minutes a day, so that's about an hour. So the same is about like a one hour weekly show, but they're hearing me every day. So yeah, I do think there can be a benefit. You just got to figure out what that is, but you need, I mean, it needs to be offering something of substance. It can't just be all I'm going to do another episode because I, you know, someone said to do another episode and you don't want to waste someone's time. Yeah, thank you so much, Gary. I think those are really great answers. Do you have any thoughts for Gary before you move on? No, I think I'll wrap. I mean, I could talk about this forever, but I think I'll wrap it up and cast it on something. Thank you, Gary. Love to see you. And, you know, for, for, I can't say to know a lot about the niche you're in. I've met a lot of people like from the blogging days that had like, mommy blogs that I know some of them are very successful. I also know it's very competitive because there's a lot of people that have those websites not as many that have podcasts. I think there's an opportunity for you to grow your show with some of the stuff I'm going to be talking about later with using some of these outlets to promote your show and to really be reaching out to some of the top YouTubers and bloggers in that niche to help you promote your show because I, again, I don't, I don't, I'm not a mother to be anything, but I know back in the day, like, Deuce, she was like, she had the original mommy blog and stuff and on YouTube, there are, there are some of these people who are like celebrities. And I think that would be a great opportunity to, to help grow your show and as well as paid promotion, which I'll be talking about in a bit. Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Gary. Sorry, I was trying to make sure I wasn't on mute there. Next up we have a question from Jen Rogers and Jen, I think you wanted to ask the question yourself. Yeah, thanks. Hey, so I was curious, Gary, thanks for joining us today, by the way, really nice to meet you. Can you tell us a little bit more about your influencer marketing, like outside of the obvious that you help promote a brand? What does that relationship with you look like? Oh, what do you mean? Well, you talk, when you download your media kit and take a look at that, you offer influencer marketing. So people connect with you to have access to your audience. That's the way I'm understanding it. So that's what I'm asking about how that works in partnering with you in that way. What media kit did you download? Because I have like an older media kit that I did for like Instagram stuff. I don't know. Was it vertical or horizontal? Yeah, yeah, I kept scrolling down the page. Were there nice pictures on it? There were nice pictures on it. Yes, there were. Okay. You got my other media kit and I'll be happy to talk about that. So like I said, they should hit the fan with the pandemic hit for me and I like lost everything I was doing because I was in the travel space. So what I was doing and where I got most of my income at the time was working with travel brands, primarily destinations. And the unique thing about the travel industry is that countries and cities and whatnot, they all have these tourism boards and their commission was spending money to promote their destination and none of them have to show a profit. So they all have to spend this money. And so what a lot of the top travel bloggers and influencers would do would be campaigns where you would do a tour of their place, take some photos, share X many photos, write a blog post, stuff like that. That's mostly what it would consist of. And to be completely honest with you, it's a bullshit business. Like the whole influencer thing, and I think people are waking up to it. I'm so much more confident with what I'm doing and podcasting right now. And just to give an example, like I mentioned, I'm going to run a tour from my podcast listeners. I've run tours in the past. I did tours to Italy, South Africa, Galapagos, Western US, and this is all from my blog and stuff. Being people interested in my tour through my podcast is so easy. Like I had a hundred people interested for the wrong tour within 48 hours. But my other tours was like pulling teeth and it's like night and day. So if you have a following on Instagram or whatever TikTok, you can certainly, if you're putting a package together, you can bundle that with what you're doing with your podcast. I don't think they need to be separate things. And you can say, okay, I'll give you a podcast ad. I'll give you a mention on Instagram, we'll give you a link on the website. And you can certainly do a package. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The difference is with what I'm doing right now with the podcast, I'm just trying to, I'm just focused on the podcast. If you look at my Instagram account, I haven't posted, I've posted I think three photos in the last six months. I'm just not doing anything with it. Okay. So would you say that the influencer marketing and affiliate marketing, would you draw distinctions between those two things or are they a huge difference? Okay. Influencer marketing or I'm sorry, affiliate marketing is based almost entirely on SEO. And I have come to a point in my life where I simply despise SEO because it's a zero sum game. If you rank number one for a keyboard, I can't rank number one and vice versa. So there's, no matter what you do, there are 10 things on the first page of Google, right? And so it's like crabs in a bucket where everyone's just trying to capture the same big keywords and you're up against very big companies that are all there doing SEO and it's very hard. I have literally more people listening to me every day now than I did after 15 years of running a blog. My best month blogging, I had a half million page views and that was because I was exploiting a loophole in stumble upon back in 2010 when they tried to integrate it with Twitter. Now just through plain old marketing, I've got more people listening, I've had more downloads to my podcast and I did page views to my website and I just, yeah, I just feel so much better about it. And also with respect to affiliate marketing. So for the first year, year and a half of my podcast, I ran, I ran ads every single podcast, but I didn't have the audience yet to get real ads. So I ran affiliate ads for every and I would do Audible, I would do CuriosityStream, brilliant.org, things that fit my brand because it's an educational podcast and I went out and made sure to get affiliate accounts and I just made up my own ads for them. Just so they would fit and so my listeners would be accustomed to the fact that I had ads on my show. So when I did start running ads, it wasn't dropped out of nowhere. And those ads converted poorly, really poorly. And the weird thing is I get people saying, oh, I bought a Scotty Vest, thanks for your ad. It's like, well, you didn't use the frickin' affiliate code, you didn't, you know. So they don't work great in podcasting. It might be better than nothing, but it's not great. Affiliate stuff is fundamentally an SEO game. Okay. All right. Thank you. Sure. Fantastic. Our next question is from Alejandra. And she asked, what has been a game changer while promoting your podcast? It's a great advertising. So when I launched my show, I'm the kind of guy that needs to know how everything works. And so I reverse, I looked at some very successful shows and I tried to reverse engineer, well, what did they do? And then I looked at things like, wondering, and I heard media. And it's like, well, what did they do? And when I saw what they did, I was like, well, no one is telling me to do this stuff. And basically what they do is they promote their shows, just like you would promote a restaurant or anything else. Movies, even if it's the Avengers, right, up to 50% of a movie's budget. When you hear that, like, oh, they had a $200 million cost, half of that, or maybe a third, is going to be marketing and promotion. That's where a lot of the money for movies goes. Now, why wouldn't that be the case for a podcast? That's what recording artists do. If Taylor Swift or Beyonce releases a new album, they're going to have a marketing budget. But podcasters, they want to do it for free. And there's certainly a lot that can be done for free. Social media and target engagement definitely works. But the thing I did is I started investing money in promoting the show to just let people know about it. And that has worked extremely well, like extremely, extremely well. And I now understand why these big companies don't talk about it. Because if more people did it, they would compete with them, jack up the price. And so they kind of keep quiet about the whole thing. But yeah, that's, well, do I do ads on Facebook? No. I do zero ads on Facebook. I did a test once and it was horrible. This is what I found growing any platform. I got a six figure audience on Twitter. I do it on Facebook. I did it on Instagram. You grow an audience by targeting people on that platform. So you want to grow a podcast. You target people on podcasts or who are using podcasts. That's how you do it. And I have talked to many people that have talked about, oh, a Facebook advertising great for podcasting and they talk about clicks. And it's like, okay, and how many of those clicks convert and they don't have that data. And once you factor in that data, it just doesn't work. So what I found is you advertise on podcast apps and on other podcasts. All right. So let me, let me, let me get into this now, because this is a good opportunity, because people are asking what number, whoever asks, what should you start slowly? Yes, you should start slowly. You don't want to throw a lot of money at this, only to find out that it doesn't work. There are a couple of places you can go to, to start advertising right away at a smaller level. So I'm going to do the screen share thing. And I'm going to be putting some links into the chat. So you might want to see it. So can you see my screen? Okay. So the first one is overcast. And if you go to overcast.fm slash ads, and I'll be posting this in as soon as I get done with the screen share, what every single podcast player has a different way of doing this. And I literally had to go to every single player to figure this out. And you will often hear people say that the number one podcast apps are Apple and Spotify. And that is true. I don't deny that. However, you can't promote directly on those platforms. So what you're going to find is that the top shows, and I'll give you some evidence of this, have a disproportionate number of listeners on third party podcast apps, simply because they can promote on those apps and they can grow their audience that way. If that makes sense, and let me show you some data. So I'm going to start with overcast because it's very simple. Overcast, what you can see is they break it down by category and they have a dynamic market. So if you come here tomorrow, the prices are going to be different. And it's all based on supply and demand. And rather than trying to see it on my screen, maybe just go to the URL yourself, but it's overcast.fm slash ads. And what you can do, so I advertise in history, usually. And you can see I can get a one month ad now for $390 and there's one slot available. $390 is okay, but normally I check this every day and I usually wait and I will buy when it gets down to like $320. And I've seen this as high as $700. So this can fluctuate, this has a lot of variation. So depending on what it is, so I've tried family and kids, that's one of the cheapest categories, but for me at least it didn't have as good of a return. So let me show you the actual data of all the ads that I've run. Okay, so here's the current ad that I'm running. This is the one that's live. I spent $320, it expires on the 31st, and so far I have 165 subscribers that I've gotten. I have a 0.9%, so 189,000 people plus saw the ad, little under 1%, clicked on it, and then of those that clicked, it's about a 10% conversion rate to subscribers. And here are all the other ads I've run, mostly in history. Here's the kids and family one I did, I did an education one, and I'm normally getting into the high 150 to 190 range for subscribers. This overcast is probably the simplest way to get started. It's a one month by you're looking at maybe somewhere in the range of $200 to $400, depending on your category, business podcasts tend to have the most expensive. So if you look at your business category, that's $1,100. That's because there are so many entrepreneurship podcasts out there. But everything else, depending on, again, what it is, is a lot cheaper. And I just check the price every day, and then I'll wait and wait, wait, and then I'll buy. So it's not like I'm doing this all the time. So overcast is a very easy way to get started, and it's a relatively small buy for one month. The other one that you can do is podcast addict. So with podcast addict, if you go to podcast addict.com, and you click on ads up at the top, and then it says, what they require you to do is to put in your RSS feed. So if I do that, and then you'll see, they do one month at a time. Starting with the first of the month, so it's a calendar month. And I've done a lot of podcast addict ad buys, and you'll notice, so history, if I do it for April's $400, but if I do it for May, it's $300. And this is the way they always do it, where it's cheaper if you buy in advance. And that's what I normally do. I stopped doing podcast addict in January, just because I had been running it for like six months straight, or maybe it was like four months straight, and I just wanted to give it a bit of a break. But you'll, I don't know what the prices are for the other categories, because the main categories for my podcast are education and history. But I can't show you. Here's the performance that I've had, and not quite as good as overcast in terms of the number of conversions, but still I'm getting into, you know, over a hundred, and the prices were usually less. I can usually get a history category for about $250, and maybe 300. So the cost, and if you go back to the episode I did with Kevin, the cost per subscriber for my podcast is about $10 to $14 a year. So I factor in the number of ads I run, the CPM, number of ads per, number of episodes per year, I can calculate how much a subscriber is worth to me. So at $10 to $14, I can then acquire them for somewhere between $1 to $3, depending on the app. So I'm basically buying something worth $10 for $3 at the worst way of doing it. So overcast, podcast addict, are two of the best ways to do it, and then the other one that I've had, I personally had great success with, that a lot of people ignore it's podcast or public. And you can see the stats I've gotten 4,700 subscribers here. And the way they do it is they don't do it by category. Instead, you buy a slot up here in the top, and I think the top six, it's $400 a month and below that it's like $300 a month, and there's different options. And the thing is, having done this for over a year, it's the same podcast, like young and profiting with Hala Tala, she's, she advertises everywhere, and she's gotten a really big audience as a result, and she's up here constantly, because she's always buying ads. And again, I stopped doing it after running an ad here for like a year, but it was real successful. So overcast, podcast addict, podcast or public, are the three places to get started where you can buy a monthly spot, and you're just going to pay a couple hundred bucks. There are other really big places where you can invest as well. So this is cast box, cast box, if you want to, so this is my cast box page, 80,000 subscribers, 165,000 plays. This is huge, but the trick with cast boxes, you have to have a thousand subscribers in before they let you buy ads. And when they let you buy ads, it's a bigger ad buy than podcast addict overcast or podcast or public. It costs like 3,500 bucks, but they will guarantee you get 5,000 subscribers. So that works out to 70 cents. So it's a much better deal, but it's a much bigger buy. And I, and I'll be very honest with you, I've paid zero dollars to cast box so far. This is all organic. And if you go to the cast box home page and look at top shows, that's my podcast, Ben Shapiro, New York Times, Bill Mar. And so this is the last few days since they put me on here, I've been crushing it. I've just been getting like 2,000 subscribers a day. So cast box is something aspirational now. If you, here's what I recommend you do today, you can apply to be featured on cast box for free. And I've done this every month and I'll, again, I'm going to put this link in the, in the chat. So you can apply to be on cast box for free. And all you got to do is you have to claim your podcast and then you fill out this form, leveling to it at the bottom. And I did this every month for the first 18 months that I had my show every single month. If they didn't feature me, I just did it again and I did it again. And this is the biggest way if they feature you, you'll get that 1000 subscribers, which then means you'll pass that threshold where you can then buy in if you want. And everyone should be, should be applying to be featured on cast box and just follow all the rules. One of the things they have is send out a tweet with a cast box link. All right, fine. If you go to my website, be my embedded player for my podcast page, cast box. If you go to my Twitter account, what am I using as my link? Why? Because I wanted to suck up the cast box so they would promote me so I could get a shitload of subscribers. I'll probably change this when I want to suck up to a different player, but as of right now, that was my plan with cast box. I'm going to do my thing and interrupt you again. There's been some really, really great info, but I want to make sure we get a couple of other questions in. Okay. I'm just saying this, when I was showing you who these podcasts were, these are, look at these are all huge lab brands, right? ABC, radio lab, New York Times, NPR, and freaking Gary aren't. No one is talking about how many, I don't know how many of you have heard of this before until right now, but name a popular podcast, Jordan Harbinger Show, very popular show. He's an indie podcaster. What does he do? He spends half a million dollars a year promoting a show. Where does he spend a lot of it? Boom, cast box, $337,000 subscribers, $7 million plays. That's because they're all putting money into this. Rant over. Okay. No worries. So I mean, that was so much good, like, talk full of great information. I think everybody would agree, we have a couple of quick file apps before we move on to our next question. So we had a couple of questions regarding your, how you write the copy for your ads, do you use your trailer, somebody actually asked you could play an example? Oh, so the ads on the podcast apps are not audio. They're just banner ads that are in the podcast app. So while people are scrolling and searching, the ad will appear. No, do you provide the art for that? The art is primarily your show artwork. And the, like for overcast, you can change it, but the default is just whatever the description of your show is. And you get like two lines that you can edit. I've tried around with different things, but basically keeping the, you know, learn something new every day, podcast for curious people. That's the one that is, that's worked for me so far. One of the questions was, why did I stop using podcast for public? No, it's not that it was ineffective. It's just that I had been running it for like 10 months straight. And the effectiveness was kind of decreasing a little bit. I was getting like 450 subscribers a month from it. And it was getting down to like 370 and I figure I'll just kind of give it a rest. But what I didn't realize, I kind of should have kept doing it because the demand is so great that they have like a six month wait list. And so now I'm just kind of waiting to, to get my, my ad backup on it. So that I was probably stupid to have, to have stopped doing that. Other places where you can do it as well is pocket cast. What they do is they have one ad, one show that they promote for the whole app at the same time. And they chart 1700 bucks. So again, it's a bigger buy. But the people I've, I've heard that have done it have gotten about 2000 subscribers. And the other big one is player.fm that a lot of people use and they don't even have the information. I had to do a conference call with them. And again, I'm on a wait list. So in June, I hope to be running a player.fm ad. So you look at the people who are advertising and they all have, you know, north of 10,000 subscribers just on that app. That's fantastic. Thank you. Okay. This is what the big boys do. This is what the big brands do. And it's an investment. I understand that. And a lot of people when they start a podcast, it's like, I'm going to use anchor fm because I say five bucks a month. If that's your concern, this is probably not a strategy for you. You can certainly try to get promoted on cast box and stitcher and Apple podcasts. I would do that every month, but if this goes back to the whole having a business plan, what am I going to put in and what am I going to get out? Amazing. But we're going to move on to another question just to make sure that everybody gets a chance to ask theirs. And then afterwards, I'm sure Gary would be happy to talk a little bit more about these paid ads. So our next question is from Barton. And Barton's question is what would be your recommendation to help me engage my listeners more and hone in on the specific type of listener I want to attract? And Barton, I know you're here right now. So why don't you tell Gary a little bit more about your current listener base? Yeah, Gary. My first of all, excited to be on with you. You know, I've been in the program for about six months and have kind of tried to create a niche for myself in that kind of mindset space within fitness. But what I feel like I'm realizing, because I'm not getting the growth and the listenership that I was, you know, the listens that I was expecting, is that I'm still too vain or I'm still not an expert at one thing I'm kind of trying to be an expert interviewer interviewing a lot of different people in the world of sports and fitness. And so my, my ask of you is like, how minute should I get, I mean, I know there's billions of people out there listening to various things like so how minute do I really need to get or, or is there other questions you might ask me to kind of help, I need to kind of get myself the right direction. And I think I just not being minute enough and I'm not love to hear your thoughts. You probably know more about that niche than me. But based on what I have seen and there are, if people kind of put themselves in a community, there are yoga people, there are cross fit people, there are keto people, you know, they, they're part of this diet, they're vegan, whatever. And podcasts that cater to that already existing community tend to do pretty well. Okay. So that is, if it's just general fitness, I don't know if you're going to be able to tap into one of those things. The certain dietary and fitness things that I followed in the past, they all tend to be of that type, if that makes sense, that they're tapping into one of those communities. And I think that's kind of the key. Just general fitness is hard to, you know, like the cross fit people are basically a cult. And that's not even necessarily a bad thing, but they're really, but they're really into it. Right? Yeah. And so if you had a cross fit podcast, for example, you're going to be able to tap into that energy that's already there. And I think that's going to do a lot more than to head, just do something generally about fitness or whatever. So I don't know if you have a particular thing that you focus on, even if it's like, you know, they're people that do boxing as their thing, as a workout, whatever it is to just focus in on that thing. Yeah, that's based on what I know about that industry and how it works is to just tap into that community or to create a brand or a community around whatever it is your method is. And then find people who can, you know, provide testimonies to that effect. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm not seeing that as I'm not tapped into a specific community. And, and I think for good reason, like I'm a personal trainer, I think, you know, I really, really ask myself, like, who is my, who is the, who are the people I'm connecting with or I'm reaching out to it's, it's, you know, guys and women in their 40s who are trying to get in the gym or who get in the gym, they work out, they don't have an issue getting in the gym, but they're looking for like ways to level up, get stronger, like hit their goals, get more muscle, that kind of stuff. And it's not about like, how do I, I'm going to listen to this podcast so that I can go to the gym and be motivated. It's like, how do I get 1% better every week by listening to this podcast, showing it up at the gym and adding these ideas that can help me to better. Here's something to think about. Most of us when we're doing a podcast, me included, we have like kind of open-ended podcasts, right? Every week we're going to have some else. A lot of the big networks do these limited run shows. It's like six episodes about some dude who murdered someone and that's it. And they're kind of there to be evergreen. One of the things I've noticed is like, if I want to personally go to a gym and get started, how do you get started? Like no, tell me what to do when I go to the gym day one. Just tell me what to do. I almost wonder if you could do a limited run that's designed to be evergreen. So it'll be valuable 10 years from now. That's just like, because the great thing about a podcast is opposed to YouTube channels, I can take you into the gym with me, right? So it's like, all right, here's your first time going to the gym. And I'm literally going to walk you through it because I'm in your ears right now. And we're going to go to this machine and we're going to do this, all right? Now we're going to go to this machine and we're going to do this without knowing the physical fitness level. It's like, okay, if you're a little bit more fit, maybe you do this many reps. If you do, if you're not physically fit, just try to do one, right? Let's just find out what your weight is at. And then the next episode, all right, we're back at the gym. This is what we did last time. We took a day off for a restaurant ever. Now we're back. We're going to do this. I think there would be value in something like that to create something evergreen to just, because like I said, podcasts are the one thing that you can take into the gym with you. You can't do it with a YouTube channel. That's a really good point. Yeah. And that kind of limited episodic, you know, formula could be really effective that somebody could search for that or they could hear my another later episode here about that thing and go find it. Yeah. And then think of it like, you know, like with an outrigger canoe, you got your main canoe, which is your main podcast and then create this separate thing that's like the outrigger for it that people can find and then come back to your main podcast for a steady stream of stuff. I would listen to a podcast like that, because I think this notion of how you get started, gyms are intimidating to people if you're not in that culture. If you're, if you're overweight now to shape, it's, it's not only just intimidating, but you don't know what to do. I think there would be a huge market for that. Awesome. Thanks, Gary. Appreciate it. Sure. Thank you so much, Gary. We have one more question from Jen Morris, who I believe is not here yet. So I'm going to hold that. That however concludes our submitted questions. So I'd like to open up the floor and invite anybody who has any other questions for Gary and wants to pick his brain to raise your hands. And I see Joel immediately put his hand up. So Joel, what you got for us. Gary, I appreciate what you're bringing to us today. Thanks so much for coming on here. And I've thought about doing one of these like sidecar podcasts where, you know, it's evergreen content, very limited run addressing one particular area. And the people could come back to the content years from now. My question is, I'm working so hard. I'm building my main podcast. How do I draw people over to this other thing without it becoming cannibalistic or a distraction from what I'm trying to do here? Like I could do probably six or seven of these short run companion shows. How do you manage that? Well, like I said, the short run shows will be like a limited time thing, right? It'll be five shows however many you do. The title of that podcast should be something that is really like, it's an SEO term. And I've noticed this with history. The biggest history shows are like the history of World War II, the history of World War I because that's what people are searching for. So for a sidecar show that's designed to help people with a specific topic, just do how to do this. And that's literally the name of the podcast. That's all it is. Make it super simple. You can have a more branding type thing for your main show. And then for this kind of sidecar podcast, it's very easy. You can do dynamic ad insertion and you can do that for your main show. So you can have a dynamically inserted ad that's not an ad, it's just an ad for you. So your outro could be, you can just update that frequently. It's like, hey, if you enjoyed this show, come check out my other show, Rive's New Stuff every week. And my latest guest was such and such. And it's something new and up to date, even though you may have recorded it years ago. Cool. So make that like Kevin's always telling us to put a call to action at the end of our show. Yeah, absolutely. So that could be our call to action. Hey, if you like this, you want to get more in depth, come check out this, this other sidecar podcast. Yes. Yeah. And great. What's it was I'm going to say, oh, so I'm thinking of doing a second show at some point. I'm not going to do it yet. I'm not going to do it until I have enough money to start hiring writers for my current show. But I can tell you what the next show I'm going to do is going to be. It's going to be the Roman history podcast. That's going to be the name of it. Because one, I know Roman history is really popular. And two, do you like the other popular podcast ended 10 years ago? And it was the history of Rome. So I'm just going to do the Roman history podcast because I know that's what people are going to be searching for. And it'll just be an easy sell. So cool. Yeah. Cool. Well, I might have to start a podcast on the history of the early church. The only problem is that my podcast will slowly infiltrate and overtake your podcast. And I don't want to I don't want to do that. That's right. There are some podcasts on early Christianity. I can't think of the name of it, but I think there's a big market for that. There, you know, the Christian podcasting community is quite large. They have their own conference I know. And I forget who the guy was. It was a priest. He started a, he did, he read the Bible in like one day over the course of a year. You probably know what I'm talking about. I know the show. Yeah, I'm not a Catholic, but I know it's like the top podcast. It was like one of the top tap in the world is like through the Bible in a year or so. Yeah. And that's all he did. He's just read the Bible over the course of one year. And so there's, there's a lot of things you can do. And then I know there's a lot of churches that like there's sermons online in the form of podcasts and things like that. So I again, it's just tying into that. And you know, one of the things I haven't talked about, I've talked about pod ca advertising on podcast apps, which it works, you know, I'm very pro that. But I'm also thinking of other things because one of the things I didn't realize with my show when I started it, I did my show for adults. But it turns out I get a lot of people listening with their kids and I keep it clean. I don't, you know, I was I say it's as clean as history can be. So I realized if people are listening with their kids, there's probably an opportunity here to maybe target homeschooling parents or other groups where people are going to want to use it as an educational tool. So I'm thinking of buying an ad on a homeschooling newsletter that goes out to 100,000 people. And if I can get a 1% conversion, no, it's actually more than 100,000, it's like 300,000. But if I can get like a 1% conversion on that or even less, to be honest, that, because I think it was going to cost me a thousand dollars to buy the ad. And again, going back to what is it, what's the value for me? I think it may turn out to be a really good deal. I haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, but I'm thinking of doing it soon. Well, the number of homeschooling families has doubled in last year, year and a half. Yeah. So it's a huge market. It's a, you know, I've had, I've had people say, like, to their nine-year-old kid, my show is their favorite show. Wow. And like, that's a nerdy nine-year-old kid, because I'm not talking about nine-year-old stuff. I'm talking about the Byzantine Empire and other things like that. So, yeah, there's some sort of, I think there's something there. Thanks. That's some great advice, Gary, as pretty as I know, I keep saying that, but this whole call has been full of some of gems for everybody. I live to give. Exactly. So our next raise hand, we got Joe Martin. Thank you. Hey, Gary. This is my first call, and I got to tell you this has been worth it. I just joined and just listening to you because it goes along with my question. I'm six years into my podcast called Real Man Connect, and we have it with 2.2 million downloads of our podcast, and we get about 45,000 to 50,000 downloads per month. But we're growing at a snail's pace. I can imagine what you would do if you had a six-year start on your podcast. So we're doing well, but not as well as I think we should, and I would want to know your best suggestion for throwing gasoline on our growth and for monetization. Well, if you're getting 40 to 50 downloads a month, there's clearly a market for what you're doing. So I would very much look into starting to invest in promotion and advertising. I think you're a perfect fit for it. And like I said, just dip a toe in first, try overcast and podcast at it, see what the results are. Is it a weekly show? Yeah, we do two shows. We just like you suggest. We do a 10-minute show, it's just me sharing my devotions with God. And then we have an interview with guys and experts who come on authors. Check out the sites I mentioned. And then also check out whatever is in your field if there are popular newsletters. One of the things that I'm also thinking of doing, and I can do this really cheap, is I have an educational podcast, and I'm also a member of Mensa. So Mensa has a magazine that goes out to all its members. And I'm going to be putting an ad in it, and I get a discount on the ad if 50% off, because I'm a member. And I'm sure that there are probably other associations, magazines, newsletters that already are reaching out to the people you want to reach. If it's in print, the thing I recommend doing is getting a QR code for your show. There are different ways you can do it. One of the URL that I always send people to is podfollow.com. And what they do is if somebody comes to that URL from on an iOS device, it will send them to Apple Podcasts. If they come from something else, you can send them to Spotify, like a Android device, you can send them to Spotify or to Google Podcasts. And if they come on a desktop browser, it will just show them the page with links to all the various different podcast apps they can subscribe on. So it's a way of kind of routing people. And if you're looking like, well, where do I send people? I've been using podfollow. Chartable used to have it, but they just got bought by Spotify, and they're not going to be offering it anymore. So yeah, that's what I would recommend. And people have become very used to using QR codes now, since the pandemic, because, you know, restaurant menus have always been putting QR codes. So they've been a bit more effective. And one thing else I even tried is, I printed out flyers with my podcast URL and a QR code on it, a really big QR code. And I went to all the cafes and everything in my area, and I just tacked it up. And that's another approach you could take. If you want to go to local churches or get people to do it for you, if they have a community bulletin board, and to just put that up, that's a really cheap way of doing it. And I even went and checked, and at one cafe, I put it up over a year ago, and it's still there. No one ever takes the stuff down. But yeah, it's kind of a cliche, but you really need to almost spend more time marketing than you do on the podcast at a certain point, to really to get it to grow. Thank you, Gary, I appreciate that. All I say is just, I haven't done any of them. I mean, I think you definitely, if you're getting that many downloads, you definitely have got a niche, you've got a community. And so I think you've proven the concept, so it's just a matter of then growing it. Thank you. Yeah, and that's great advice. And I think, you know, just from the girl at the show, standpoint, we do so much work on marketing. And so that brings true, you know, across the Gary said all shows. But next up, we have a question from Dennis. Hey, Gary, how you doing? Good. All right. My question is, so I started a podcast called Generation of Manuvers. Initially, it was just focused on talking to entrepreneurs here in LA. And then I did an episode with my wife, which took the podcast off to the whole different type of growth. And she was talking about us, about me having a woman's voice on the podcast, encouraging me to look for a woman host. And I'm like, I think you're the one to be that. So we started doing episodes together that have been doing really well. We joined Grow the Show and just started reevaluating a few things because at first, we was just kind of just freely creating. Then we started thinking about actually doing it the right way. So we kind of took a halt a bit. And I just had a question about how do we strategize on reintroducing ourselves? Because I did have like a different type of audience when I initially started, which was a lot of creators from different industries. So I'm into sneakers and streetwear and all that good stuff. So I had a lot of those people following me. And now our podcast is more focused on married couples who are wanting to build generation of wealth and entrepreneurs. So it's like a whole different arena, which we want to stick with. So just kind of had a question of how do we reintroduce ourselves? And we kind of did halt a little bit on even putting some stuff out. So we're thinking about doing like many podcast stuff that we want to put out. And just wanted to know what your thoughts are on that. And how do we move forward correctly and most effectively? That sounds like a very different show. You and your wife talking about generational wealth versus sneakers. So there's two ways to do it. One, you keep the same RSS feed that you have. And you just rip the bandaid off and you just start doing what you're going to do. And you might lose some of your original listeners. But if that's the new focus of the show, that's the new focus of the show. And you do that going forward. Other options, you just start a new show on a different feed. I don't know what's going to work best for you. But it depends on the size of your audience. But if this is the new plan going forward, then it probably doesn't make a difference. I would actually just keep your current RSS feed and just say that this is what you're going to do. And go forward from there. So is the new show, is your focus going to have an LA focus or is it going to be broader? That's going to be broader. The thing for us that we don't mind doing is like traveling and talking to different couples or just people who have a, you know, give great advice about building generational wealth. So it's going to be, you know, broader. Yeah, just start doing it. You know, how many downloads were you getting before you made the change? Not many. Then don't worry about it. Right? I think there's always a, and I understand because I've been in the same boat myself where it's like, well, you know, you don't want to abandon these people that initially followed you. But at sometimes you just have to make a business decision. It's like, look, if you didn't have that many, like if you had under a thousand follower or downloads per episode, don't worry about it. Because where you want to go is bigger than that. So you're just going to have to make that decision and move on. I think having your wife part of it is probably a very good idea. And yeah, just go for it that way. All right. Thanks, Gary. Yes, thank you so much. Next question is from Maynard. Hey, Gary, how's it going? Hey, everybody. New year to grow the show and my wife have a podcast, dang discussions and the cannabis industry in a couple of years. And I guess, you know, one of the reasons why we joined here, and it's also my first call or first call, right, is, you know, had a lot of the momentum probably getting, you know, at least a few thousand downloads per episode, you know, somewhere around 15,000 downloads a month, some like that. And then we took a few months break and then came back. And it was like starting over again, right? All the numbers just, the hundreds, right kind of thing. I guess what kind of advice you have here? That is that pretty normal. You stick a break or something. Yeah, so that happened to me. I had another podcast called This Week in Travel that I started in 2009. And when the pandemic hit, we stopped recording it. And we went from 7,000 downloads a show down to two. And we just lost a lot of that audience and bringing it back was really hard. And we just, we kind of just pulled the plug on the podcast and I'm doing a different thing now. So then, and I think you've discovered the hard way why it's so important to be consistent and to always be there. Because people, and here's the other thing, it's not just that people might forget about you, but programmatically, the way the like the Apple podcast app works. Is it will automatically download shows that you have listened to within like two weeks. But after that two week period, if you've not listened to that show, it will stop auto downloading it. A lot of people might still be subscribed, but they're not going to see your new episodes. And that's why it's so important to kind of have the consistency. And now I'm doing a daily show. And I got to admit, it is hard someday to get out of show because I have to research and write and record a show every single day. And sometimes if I'm really tired, what I'll do is I have enough shows now where I'll just run a rerun and I call it an encore episode. And so if for whatever reason you can't get something out, even if you put out something that says, hey, everyone just wanted to let you know, I can't record this week because I'm going to be doing something but something and so basically there's something in their feed that will stop that programmatic thing from happening where people stop downloading your show. And it will also kind of just, hey, I still exist. And you're just notifying people that this is not a permanent thing and they shouldn't think that you ended the podcast. But yeah, you kind of discovered the hard way why, you know, don't do that again. Is it something you think is just start from scratch again or it's good enough to, you know, to kind of build back up? I think there's a lot of people haven't reached yet, right? And I think I'm sure there is. You should. I mean, I still am working on the belief that I'm nothing yet, right? Because there's people that have 100 times more listeners than I do. So you're, I'm always in that mode of there's more I got to do. There's more people I can reach. So you should always be doing that. And yeah, that, that happened. But clearly, if you had those downloads, you can get those people back or you can get other people within that niche. You clearly have proven the concept that it can be done. So you just need to roll up your sleeves and kind of do it again. And I'm guessing it's going to be a lot easier this time because once you, once you start, you know, putting out regular shows again. And I think that, you know, with your industry, it's a growing industry. There are unique problems that people in that industry have to face. Are you from like the, the business side of it? Yeah. And we talk about a lot of stuff and there's always more topics to talk about. And when someone does find us, they're like, wow, this is great. There's so much information here. How about now? Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't know a lot about your business, but I know that it's tough because they have, there's difficulty with banking and money. And all that is good. Yeah, so I would, I would just, you know, get at it again. And also for, for something like that, because you're targeting such a, such a specific business niche, I think there's a wealth of people you can talk to. Plus, there's also, you could, you know, you could do a two-show week one, where maybe it's an interview plus advice or maybe news updates. You know, when I did this week and travel, a big part of the show every week was just, here's the latest news that happened this week. And I know there's like pod news, which is a podcast about podcasting news. And it's just like a four-minute-a-day thing. Here's the headlines that there's ample opportunity for something like that as well. And that, again, would just give, bring you top of mind to people. Yeah, yeah. That we're putting up a two, two a week that's what we've been doing. And it's, we have plenty of people in the interview, they've been interviews on, you know, so just got to just build it back up and just because it's like we're at the beginning, we know just get back at it. But I mean, I understand where you're coming from because I got hit by the same thing. And it taught me a really important lesson. And that's why with this current show, I'm just never going to let that happen again. Oh, and someone says no hiatus between seasons. I'm a big believer that you should only have seasons if the seasons are actual seasons. So if you're going to talk about a different subject. So it could be like for a true crime. It's like, okay, we're ending the season. We're going to talk about a new mystery in season two. Or we're going to talk about a new subject like there's a, there's some sort of content difference between the seasons. If it's just, I'm going to not do the show for a while and come back and call that season two. I'm not sure the seasons really make sense. You can take a hiatus and look, obviously, people go on vacation. There are times when that's going to happen. I would recommend recording it in advance, more shows that you can put while you're, so there is no hiatus, or make sure to let people know that you're going to be on hiatus. And even while you're on hiatus, record a small five-minute update that you can still put out during that hiatus. Just so it's like, hey, we're still here. Don't, don't, don't subscribe. We're coming back on this date and make sure to give them a specific date that says, this is one of three starting again. Because otherwise, it just seems kind of flaky. It's like, oh, we're not doing it now and maybe we'll do it in the future. It has to be on September 1st. We'll be back with new episodes and to let them know. That's fantastic. Thank you so much, Gary. And I actually have a submitted question from somebody. Let me know that they're unable to make it today. So this is Jen Morris' question. And unfortunately, something came up, but she'll be watching this recording later. And her question for you is that she's seen you post about having some success on TikTok. And she would love to learn some more of your top tips on that. Sure. Let me share the screen again. As I've mentioned, I've had pretty good success on social media with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, even. I did not have a TikTok account before I started this podcast. And I do nothing about TikTok. And I thought, oh, well, it's what the kids do when it's just a bunch of people dancing. I never bothered with it. And so I started a TikTok account just for the heck of it. And what I did is the way I do my show is I have a 30-second cold open. And I take that intro and I slap a Pinterest-type image on it. And I use headliner. And every day, I just put it on TikTok. So this is the... I don't know if you can hear it, but so I have now 8300 followers. And this is all I do. I never show my face. And this has gotten 700 views. And I posted this just before we started this session. And it's really spikes. Sometimes I'll get just a few hundred views. Sometimes I get thousands. Sometimes I get tens of thousands. And the spikes in followers come like that as well. So this is what I have found to be very... And one of the things also is that TikTok is so full of people that are trying to do comedy. And they're trying to do dancing and entertainment. There's a lot of that. There is, I think, a demand for content that's not like that. That's informational and educational. And I think if you can provide some of that, you can develop an audience. And you don't need to be Charlie Domingo and have 100 million people follow you on TikTok. Okay? You can just have... If you can get 10,000 people and those people can convert to your podcast, mission accomplished. And the other neat thing about TikTok and I haven't done this yet and I'm going to start doing it as soon as they let me, is they've expanded the length of a video to 10 minutes. Which just coincidentally happens to be the length of my podcast approximately. And I can easily edit it down. I get rid of, you know, the outro and some other stuff. And so I'm going to start doing that I think once a week. I'm going to post an entire episode to TikTok. I don't know what's going to happen, but it's an experiment. And then I'll also put a call to action. It's like, this is a complete episode of everything everywhere daily. If you want to get this every day, go subscribe, click on the link in my bio. And we'll see what happens. So, but I've literally also had people on TikTok that are like, how do I listen to this? What's a podcast? And you just, I don't know what to tell them. It's like, it's an app you can put on your phone or they can listen to it online. But yeah, I'm a big ble, I will, I will say this. As someone with large followings on many platforms, I have had more, I've seen more success on TikTok translating to actual podcast traffic than I have on any other platform. And I'm very confident in that and I'm very surprised because I wouldn't have believed that when I first started. But that's true. And that's why I'm putting all my effort as far as podcast promotion on social media on TikTok right now. Yeah, that's fantastic. And I know we recently did an episode on TikTok with Cara Newhart who has a large following there. And she said the exact same thing. She doesn't even mention her podcast at the time and people are are flocking to it from the apps that definitely checks out. And I'm seeing we have another question from David Armstrong. Hi there. Thanks for being with us today. I think I'm the only history podcast in the group. And I do my show is called Broadway Nation. It's about the history of the Broadway musical. So it's a niche. It's a small niche. I've been thinking about doing what you just suggested, which is adding a second episode during a week. Mine I do half hour to 45 minute episodes with mine, which is about, and usually it's taking half the subject and cutting in half and doing a part two on each one. So that I get sort of with the theory you were talking about before. But only once a week at the moment. So my thought is to do a this week in Broadway history 10 minute kind of thing. Have you done that kind of this week in history, this today in history kind of content before as an extra? That is kind of my whole show, except that I'm just not focusing on that day. But I know there are podcasts that do it. But I think that's a good idea. Especially if it's something short and digestible. I will say this and I didn't realize this when I started my show. Shorter shows are listened to first. So if I have a bunch of shows that are in my podcast queue and I find myself doing this and I've seen this in my numbers, people will listen to the shorter show first because they can get it out of the way. I'm going to listen to the five minute 10 minute show, get it done, and then the hour and a half interview, whatever, I'm probably not going to be able to complete that anyhow. So I'll wait to do that. So there's a definite advantage to doing a shorter show like that. And do you think there's any rhyme or reason to release my show on Thursdays? Should the short one be on Monday, Tuesday? You know, does it just spread it out? Monday or Tuesday, that's probably fine. I don't here's the other thing I found having a daily show. It doesn't matter. The biggest thing is for downloads are Mondays. But that doesn't mean that Monday shows get more downloads. It just means that people weren't listening on the weekends and they just downloaded on Monday. But the number of listens is still the same. So it really doesn't matter. But just yeah, spread it out. And so is yours a monologue show or an interview show? It's the first season where the first 50 episodes were monologue show because I basically told the entire history of the Broadway musical in that season. Then the season two, which is now I'm 60 something in how many episodes? I mean, 60 something episodes is, I've done a lot more interviews with authors because we've got a whole bunch of books have come out this past year. So it's mostly been interviewing authors of books about Broadway history. And now I'm going to go back. I have a new subject I'm going to do that I didn't do the first season. It's going to be sort of a mini series is probably going to be like 12 episodes of a very specific aspect of the history of Broadway. So to answer your question, it bounces around a little bit. I would also look to get like one of the, are you familiar with the Bowery Boys podcast? Yeah, I love the Bowery Boys, yeah. I would get one of them on your show and talk about, you know, because they have a big podcast and to talk to them about how, you know, how did Broadway influence the city? How did the city influence Broadway? They have a very good Broadway episodes as well. Yeah, so that's on my list to do. That's great. Thank you. Good to be reinforced on that. My, there aren't very many other Broadway history podcasts out there. And most of them are not very serious. So I'm sort of in a niche by myself with taking them more. It's my show's still fun, but it's not, let's get drunk and talk about Broadway kind of podcasts. So I'm trying to find, it's hard to find other, the Bowery Boys are great because they're sort of in a similar style to my, to my podcast. It's just been a little bit of a struggle to find other people to collaborate with. Yeah, I think there's a huge, you know, potential for, you know, interviews that you could do, historically, people who have been involved with, you know, shows, promotion producers. That I'm all over. I'm very well connected. So I've got top, top people on my show in that regard. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, cool. Thanks so much. You can't wait to. I haven't, I'm surprised I have not listened to your podcast, but I will now. Are you, do you live in New York? I don't anymore. I did for 25 years. Live in Seattle now. If you're, here's something to think about. I don't know how well it would work. To put in a small ad with a QR code in, in like the play bill. In a play bill for a show that's interesting. And see what happens. And if that works, you mean, you could put that in like a bunch, you know, yeah, that's a really cool off check. And I have no idea what the price is against for that. But what kinds of that? Yeah, I mean, you know, don't dump your retirement fund in it. But, you know, if you could do a small one, that'd be interesting. That's a really good idea. Cool. Well, thank you. Sure. Fantastic. Thank you so much. And David's podcast, because somebody is asking, is Broadway Nation, correct, David? That's correct. Fantastic. Our next question is from Jennifer Wallace. Hi, Gary. Thank you so much for all of this greatness today. I'm curious with your recording and production and editing, like, what does that look like? How are you recording foreign advance? Or you jump on there every day and go live? Or how does that kind of work as your production line and schedule release stuff? Not only have I not recorded tomorrow show, I don't even know what it's going to be about. Hmm. Okay. So I am literally, my sleep schedule is incredibly screwed up. I woke up an hour before we began recording this today. I will write until I usually end up recording it like four in the morning. And then as soon as it's done, it gets uploaded. So I do not recommend what I'm doing to anyone. I don't think it's great, but that's I just stay up until it's done. And sometimes it's easy to get a show at the door and sometimes based on the topic, it's hard. And so my I don't want to keep doing this forever. But my so my plan at some point is I want to hire writers. So then I can start getting ahead of things. And the recording of my show is super easy because it's just me. There's no guest. It's short. I simply am reading a script and that's that's no problem. The recording is easy. For me, it's the writing and the research that takes all the time. And that's where that'll take me hours. And then the recording maybe takes 20 minutes. And you do all of your editing and everything. You're doing this is a one man. Are you like a one man band? Okay. But I will also say the production and editing part of it is super easy when it's just yourself. I literally just use GaragePand. I'm using this microphone. And I read the script and I talk until I screw up or I want to say something differently and put a different emphasis on it. I just take the waveform and I go back to a paragraph break and I start again. And then by the time I'm done, it's a fully edited show. So it's not like I'm just recording the whole thing and I'm recording all the scripts and all the bloopers. I don't do that. So it's a pretty simple process. Yeah, cool. Cool. Thanks for sharing. Sure. Fantastic. And our next question is from Joel. Gary, forgive me if you've addressed this. I didn't hear it. Is there a good time of day to release your new episodes so that you pop up first and somebody's feed? Is that important? The only advice I would give is you're probably going to want to target it such that it is in people's feed when they go to work in the morning. So and you're going to probably, because the East Coast, you know, they're to the East. So if people leave for work at say 6am, you probably want it to be in their feed around there. So normally, and I don't usually do this because it's taking me longer and longer to get the show out. I was shooting for 4am, central time, 6am or 5am Eastern time. But I don't think there's, I don't think it's that big of a deal because if they don't download it, they'll just get it the next time. And I think that's one of the things people don't realize with podcasts. It'll just be there whenever they check. But if you want to hit that commute, which is when a lot of podcasts are listened to, then yeah, that's what I would shoot for. Okay, cool. Thank you so much, Gary. And our next question is from David. How's it going, Gary? Really good information. My question is, do you see any trends in podcasting that you will suggest people get in front of? Like, is there anything that you're seeing in terms of trends? My other question, hopefully, which is like super unrelated. But in terms of like these deals that podcasts are getting, do you have any insight on what their downloads are monthly? You know, that is super attractive for these multi-million dollar deals. Are you talking like the Joe Rogan call her daddy these million dollar Spotify things? Yeah, but there's other like smaller million dollar deals going around too, you know what I mean? They're going to have audiences like in the millions to multiple hundreds of thousands per episode. So the numbers I've heard thrown around for Joe Rogan show is that he gets 11 million people listening each episode. Adam Curry, who I know, he does no agenda. They've been doing that for over 10 years and they get, he said they get about a million downloads per episode. Other good sized podcasts that I know of that are independent, who've done a lot of, you know, marketing and advertising, they're getting, you know, over 100,000 per episode. Some of the history podcasts I know that are pretty successful are getting like, you know, 20 to 50,000 per episode, I think, revolutions, which is ending soon is going to get to gets about 200,000 per episode. So it's kind of to get to that range. There is such a wide, wide range within podcasting and one of the things that's so screwed up about this business is that almost all the money goes to like the top 1% of the shows. It's not even an 80-20 rule. It's a 99-1 rule and it's really just a function of scale that unless you have a huge audience, it's really just not effective for a lot of these advertisers to be reaching out. And to get that size audience, you either need to be lucky, you need to have been doing it for 10 years or you need to spend money on promotion. And I think that's kind of where we're at right now. And the discussions I've had with people at major audio companies, you know, it's even hard for them and they have to have a pretty big marketing budget when they launch a new show. Now the difference is they don't tend to promote their shows once it's launched. They just sort of do it and forget it. And I think that that can be a differentiator for the indie podcaster. But as far as like what those shows are getting, yeah, it's a very big audience. They're buying years. Fundamentally, that's what it's all about. Yeah, I'm looking for, I think I'm looking into like the network model. I have a pretty nice high show, but like it's I want to get to like that, that next level. So so it's very helpful. I was thinking of the numbers. I didn't know what to expect. I too, if you want to get in a network, you're looking at 10,000 downloads per episode. That's the number that pretty much everyone is looking at. You can do stuff with advertised cast, which is kind of automated. They'll let you in at about 5,000 downloads per episode. But that's the threshold. And everyone is trying to compete to get that 10,000 download per episode podcast. And that's kind of the holy grail as far as trying to get into a network where they will do advertising sales for you. Do you suggest anything? Because I'm well over like those numbers. That's like our average, well average episode is like like 16,000. So I but I want to try to get behind a network that can essentially push the show past where I'm pushing it. Then I think you're in a really good position. I would start researching the various networks that are out there. Some of them have particular niches. So there are like religious networks and sports networks and things like that. Find out who they are and apply. And I think that if you have the numbers, then they will probably be more than happy to have you. Because one of the problems right now to be completely honest is that there is not enough inventory to sell a lot of ads because people are so are focused on this on the top one or two percent that there's just not enough of those podcasts to go around. So I think you'll find a lot of luck if you if you reach out to some of these groups. And then as far as promotion, that's just something you need to negotiate with them. So I got in a network in January and they contacted me and I'm able to run trailers for my show on other shows in the network. There's a fair number of history and educational shows in my network. So it's a pretty good fit. Plus I'm reaching out to individual shows in my network to do feed drops. And I've had pretty good luck because they're kind of like in the same family. And they've been happy to do it or happy to sell space for a feed drop as well. So they may not necessarily do it for you but they may open up doors for you to to get that done if that makes sense that they'll make introductions for you to other shows where you could be a guest or you could like I said do a feed drop or run an ad with them. Got it. Okay. All right. Thank you. Oh, my next question is did you see it? Do you see trends coming that you just kind of see just being in the space that you know we may need to get in front of? The biggest trend is that there's a lot of consolidation going on in this industry right now. And sadly it's becoming harder for independent podcasters that this idea that you can just you know grab a microphone with some friends and start a podcast and be successful I think is kind of going away that it's becoming more lean on this happens to every market. It's becoming more corporate. The Spotify's and the Amazon's and everyone else are kind of taking control of things. There was a stat that just came out this last week that a few years ago if you wanted to reach half of all podcast listeners you would require buying out all the all the ads on all the podcasts of seven different networks. And today that number's down to four. So there's a lot more consolidation happening and most people when they listen to podcasts they don't even know about a lot of independent podcasts right. It's New York Times and serial and these wondering podcasts and I heard media because that's all they see because those are the ones that are being promoted to them. And even on you know when I went through a lot of the different podcast apps and I was showing oh here's me next to the New York Times and everything well I'm the anomaly and I'm not going to be there forever right. I got a couple of week run in that spot and but these apps they promote the big players and so it's becoming harder for us to to find a niche in that ecosystem. So that's that's the trend. I don't think it's necessarily a good one but yeah you got to if if you really want to grow an audience and get into that that 10,000 is the number that you need to be shooting for. Thank you. Sure. Thank you so much Gary and I don't think we have any raised hands at the moment but a question I had for you is because I think everybody here is at different stages of their podcasting career. What's like the one thing that you didn't do when you started podcasting that you wish you had? I wish I had started promotion and advertising sooner. I waited before I did that and then as soon as I started doing it I was like this works and I wish I had factored in the cost of doing that sooner because it it does like once you like I said once you figure out the value of a listener of a subscriber then you can start doing calculations for what you can spend to acquire a subscriber and that's really really important and like I said what goes into it is not only the just looking at ads is the number of ads per episode and the number of episodes you create so if you do more episodes more revenue opportunity but once you figure that out then you can then say okay and the other thing is you're going to have to spend money before you maybe see a return on the investment and that may take a year or a year and a half before that happens and this is no different than what Amazon did they they didn't make any money for like 10 years they lost money lost money lost money and then they said okay now we're going to be profitable and then they just stopped losing money and went and became super profitable because they just stopped that investing and the same I think it can be true of the podcast if you if your goal is to get 10,000 subscribers so you can get into a podcast network and start selling ads you're going to have to get to that 10,000 point and that you're probably going to have to promote yourself and you're going to have to spend money doing it and you're going to have to spend that money then you hit 10,000 then the ad spigot can get turned on and you can start bringing in the revenue but you're going to need to have the funds to to be able to do that yeah absolutely and I think you kind of covered this in the episode that you did with us but the whole concept is you know podcasting like business you have to spend money to make money to just integrate with it yeah I mean if you're doing a network television show you're right it's a business we're going to have a production value of this we're going to you know bring in money this way movies albums same way podcasting is media same thing yes the barrier to entry is less and it's easier to start a podcast but at the end of the day it's kind of the same thing it's a business and treat it as such this is my production cost this is what's going to go into it this is what the marketing is going to be and this is what I want the end return to be and so whatever it is marketing is a part of it and like I said it's a huge part of the budget for launching an album launching a movie launching a TV show and so I don't know why podcasts are exempt from that yeah absolutely um and I'll just remind everybody we have Gary until six so please feel free to ask your questions I know I was limiting everybody at the beginning um there are no limits now go nuts yeah I'm I'm happy to keep asking for my own questions um and it might be worth going into because I know some of the folks here are a little bit newer to the grow the show community um it might be worth going into a little bit of what we covered on the episode as far as how you go about tracking your numbers and calculating what you can spend per listener actually looks like we'll hand up so before we get into that uh Joel what you got for us all right so Gary I don't know if you'll be able to speak to this or not but um you know I'd be curious to to hear your thoughts on my situation so my wife and I are missionaries with a nonprofit organization the podcast is is part of our ministry which we run under the umbrella of this organization so up until up until now all of our funding has come as is typical for missionaries through back end funding uh we'll we'll meet ministry partners we'll meet with people and we'll say this is our ministry um we're supportive I like minded individuals families churches would you like to support us and then they send us and we go do our work what I've been working on is trying to uh transition get us to the point where a portion of our funding is coming from the front end meaning people who are directly benefiting from the work that we're doing like primarily the podcast right now and so we've taken some steps in that direction but um there's all kinds of implications because we're a non-profit so I'm working with our organization on how to make sure that we're compliant but in the meantime the way that we're set up is our funding comes in the back door from people who you know like they go to our giving site and they say we'll sign up for however much a month do you have any thoughts on how to monetize the podcast with that model like sending people do we send people to our giving site I mean I'm I'm sort of starting this podcast subscription plan but I'm running it all kinds of snags because it's there's compliance issues so like any thoughts on how to make a strong call to action and make it easy for someone who enjoys the work that we're doing who believes in it to go to our giving site and sign up as a ministry partner I don't know if this is applicable but this is the first thing that I think of is that there is a very long history of like televangelis who were able to make fantastic sums of money off of television and getting people to send those guys well you know what you know what I'm saying though right yes I do yes I do now it's obviously not the same thing right but it's a similar thing in terms of if you're if you're looking to get people to money to donate and maybe you're using patreon or or something else but yeah I think it's it's kind of a common thing and then the world of religious media to just ask people to to send you money as far as the the taxes and everything I don't know anything about that you'd know that better than me but okay so so um start yeah so just you know that could be a call to action I suppose at the end of an episode as well as just hey you know if you're um you know you believe in this ministry you want to learn about more do you like a 501c3 or yes it's a 501c3 so I just think I can't be the only non-profit podcaster that's out there I'm sure there are there are others in the use it further support raising so okay I'm guessing there there've got to be Facebook groups out there for religious podcasters as well that probably people have have dealt with this um but yeah I would I guess that's what you know you would just do okay cool thanks absolutely thank you a question that I had is you know you talked a little bit at the beginning of this scary about how you are bringing a group of your followers to Rome right yeah now in order to go to Rome with somebody I've never met I must be a big fan I must really trust them so what that shows me guys that you've built a really really strong community around your podcast I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to community building um you know and that eventually leads to monetization people want to buy your products and all that so my thoughts on this are a little bit I think it depends on the show I don't think my show is really a community show it's an educational show you listen a few minutes a day you learn something interesting but it's not like it's a um you know you know I gave like CrossFit as an example that's a community of people we're all doing the same thing it could be a church we're all doing the same thing or it's it's something we all have in common my show really isn't kind of like that so I don't I don't really have a community there's no Facebook group and I don't know what they would talk about because my show literally is about everything um so it's a and I do have a discord channel and I'll talk there are some people that ask me questions about stuff it's like oh you know what this episode but it's not it's it's more that I've earned their trust or I have a following than it's a community that makes sense and I think that so there are some shows that I do think a community makes a lot of sense this show that Kevin does it's a community we're all podcasters we all have similar problems we all are facing similar things and that makes for a community but my show really isn't a community type show to be honest and I think a lot of the larger successful shows out there are not necessarily community type shows they're just entertainment or whatever it's something that you listen to but it's not necessarily something you want to talk to other people about maybe one will develop I've I've but I haven't put a lot of effort into it to be honest but I think that if you have a smaller show maybe that you're if your business model is selling a product or a service a community is probably going to make more sense around something like that than it is for a show like mine yeah absolutely and do you think then that because you said yourself your your listeners still have to trust you in order to want to kind of oh sure like them so does that trust come simply from publishing when you say you're going to publish being consistent with the quality of your views show is that sort of thing yeah and they and they know me and that's the other thing you know they when they hear your voice there is a you know they just know who you are there's a familiarity involved with it that doesn't exist in in other forms of media that I can say something sarcastic and they know it's sarcastic because of the tone of my voice whereas if you write it or something you know there can be a lot of confusion are you being sarcastic or did you really mean that and that's that that's just inherent in podcasting I think and you know maybe that also exists in video as well with with people with YouTube where there's this familiarity that exists and but yeah so with with being able to sell the tours it's worked really well and I think not just a tour but having an event it could it doesn't have to be like a tour to Rome like I'm doing it could be we're going to do a meetup or we're going to do a mastermind session or we're going to do you know we're going to go get a big house at a beach on a Airbnb and for a weekend I'm going to be able to you know help listeners to the show we're going to do something something like that I think those event type things are things that podcasters often overlook and they can be very very profitable and you can make you know many thousands of dollars in a very short period of time doing events like that oh yeah I mean I don't think he's still here but Barton are a fitness podcaster you could do a meetup rate as a personal training session for ten of his listeners or yeah and I I like I said I've seen people that have have done full blown you know woodstock type conferences that have gotten extremely successful I have a friend who's a web cartoonist I've known him for 20 years and if anyone here knows video games there's like packs east packs west and these get like tens of thousands of people attending these are like the huge video game conferences and that all started from penny arcade webcomic no way yeah that's where packs comes from and they started this as an event and eventually sold it because it was getting so big that they couldn't manage it anymore and they just made a killing off of it so if you can tap into you know I think people if you do have a community a real community then it's just one more step to actually do a physical in-person event that you can really actually monetize and depending on how big that gets maybe that becomes your business and the podcast is simply a way to you know promote your annual event that comes up yeah absolutely I think that's great advice and I don't think we've talked too much about meetups or live shows just yet at least on the grow the show podcast although I know Kevin has done them before for his old show Philly Hoon and I know that well you know for a for a show that is around a certain geographical community like a city it's a lot easier to do meetups it's a lot harder to do when you have a global audience or a national audience and if the show gets big enough then maybe you might be able to do you could go on a tour hey I'm gonna be appearing you know I'm gonna show up at this place this place this place and just have people meet you you meet at a restaurant depending on how many people are there or you could have people who are fans of the show run those events for you that you could have other people run it and I've seen people do that as well with varying degrees to success oh yeah there's what there's one called and I cannot think of the name of it but it's like somewhere like a podcast book club where there are a bunch of factions all around the country and they all listen to a podcast and all these discussions I've thought of doing that with my show of doing a nonfiction book club I'm just not sure how to do it but there's a lot of great nonfiction books that fit into to what I'm doing that I think would work really well like you know Mark Kerlansky's book on salt and it's just the history of salt and looking at the world's history through salt and that sounds boring as hell but it's actually really fascinating that there are these objects and different things that we can look you know through the history through the lens of this thing and there's different ways to do it I think that would fit with my show I just don't know anything about running a book club so I don't want to do it and screw it up so I'll just have and pull the trigger on it yeah it's a really cool idea hopefully you'll be able to figure that out because that sounds like something I'd be into but it looks like we do have a hand up and that is Larry's hand hello Gary hello Katie as well it's good to see you guys thanks Gary for being here um you talked a lot about the advertising which is something I've looked into before so just to give some background in my situation and I'll ask my question at the end I did my first season of my podcast which frankly I'm not really gonna be branding it as a season anymore because I've always gotten so much advice about how you know for the season framing devices not really necessary for a show like mine which is mostly a discussion interview podcast but once I join grow the show I put my podcast that I ate it so I could rebuild it and rebrand it but I do have 10 episodes of the podcast that I already produced that are just on the feed right now that have been occasionally getting getting downloads during this hiatus period and I've been working on my podcast right now and I have a plan right now to release the to officially start this schedule going next month now would you recommend that I just start investing in the advertising now and let that advertising drive to the 10 episodes that are already there or do you think I should wait until I relaunch the show get a few new episodes going on the feed which before it was a biweekly show now it's gonna be a weekly show should I get a couple of weeks in on the new branding and then start advertising or do you think I should just start advertising now if if I am a listener and I click on an ad and I go to your page and I see that there hasn't been a new podcast updated in weeks or months that's gonna make me suspicious so I would wait until there's something brand new so I can see this is a currently updated show that if I'm gonna make a commitment as a listener I want to see that there's something there so I would hold off okay do you have a how long do you think I should be holding off until just whenever you start doing it again just so long as I can see that the most recent show has been within the last week is fine I don't think you need to you know have x number of shows or anything I just need as like I said as a listener I want to know that this is not a dead show yeah and what you see this gap I don't know if that that's the only information I have I don't know if you're coming back or not that that's actually a great thing that I did not consider I'm only I and but just something that I always look at when I'm looking at podcasts I want to do guest swaps with and stuff you know if the show is alive then I'm gonna go for it as opposed to obviously if that's been an episode in like a year you know it's likely a dead show you know and and put yours you know when you look for a podcast put yourself in that in in the mind of of listener when you're looking at a show like when I look at a new show I'll often look at it in the Apple podcasts and I'll always look at like you know I do look at like what their rating is if it's anything less than like a 4.8 or 9 then I'll look down to see what the negative reviews are and negative reviews like one star reviews they're always about two things someone inserting politics unnecessarily or too many ads and you know sometimes it's about some other weird quirk or they'll complain about the person's voice or you know someone but you can at least get an idea quickly as to what that is and so use those same things that you look for on your show make sure that you have good reviews one of the things I do at the end of every show is I read a five star review so guess what happens people leave five star reviews because they want to hear about in the show and I've even like the last one I read some dude did it in Italian even those on the American site and they're always trying to screw me up by mentioning things like a one person they would put in a reference to the Canadian motto of C to C and how it should really and I knew it there is kind of to trick me and I always got it and I'll say something funny or sarcastic about it and so that is kind of a feedback mechanism but basically it encourages those sort of reviews and I even have a review hall of fame for people that leave abnormally long or glowing reviews and I'll I always just put them in the hall of fame if I really like it it's an informal thing to actually keep a list but but basically I want to encourage people to leave those sort of reviews and so I do everything in my power to make sure that that happens that's actually that actually brings up a question that I that what you just said made me think of in terms of ad insertion like where where would you say is the is the best place to put your ads in your show well if you talk to an advertiser they're going to want you to put it right in the middle those are the ones that are the that pay the most in my show because it's only 10 minutes long and it's so short I put it I have a 30 second cold open my intro music then I put the ad then I have the the body of what I'm doing and I call that a a mid roll ad even though it's not technically in the middle middle of the podcast and I had an advertiser that came back that was questioning it and I was like well for starters it's not a pre roll because it's not the first thing you hear but second I only do one ad a show so if you're complaining that it's not in the middle the middle my response is well you have exclusivity and I could put it in the middle and if I run two ads then I'm just deluding it with something else and they never came back and I don't think they have a problem with it so I think it's something you just need to figure out one thing I would recommend is wherever you put your ad and mid roll ads are obviously going to be the the the the the the most expensive ones make sure you plan for it as you're recording because a lot of people they do an interview and you just talk through and then later you you stick the ad in somewhere so at least when you're doing the interview have a point where you sort of stop for a little bit and and no okay this is where I will put the ad and then start with another question or something after that so just so you know kind of and you have a little clock going all right 30 minute mark we're gonna put an ad in here so on the back end then you know at least where to put it so it just doesn't sound awkward definitely and how long are the ads that you normally are doing your normal ads are going to be 60 seconds long there there are some advertisers I think they're there used to be this thing that if the longer the ad the better I don't think that's true anymore you can ramble about something for three minutes I don't think that makes it a better ad 60 seconds is kind of the the spot where most people are buying but you know depends on what your advertisers want and with with my show uniquely what I've done is I've sold entire episodes so I did a series with the tourist office of Spain and I would do you know you're 60 second ad but then the whole show would be something about Spain and they didn't even really care so I did want you know I've done them on the history of the Canary Islands I've done them on a biography of Picasso or Salvador Dali or Queen Isabella and so on as it was something Spain related just to keep it a top of mind and there was you know there's always be some sort of geographical reference so there's a thing that you could visit if you're interested in this topic and they were quite happy with it but that's not something a lot of shows can do especially if it's an interview show right definitely cool and Gary thank you so much for for that advice I appreciate it yes thank you so much for all of your advice and we are starting to approach six o'clock so I just kind of want to make one last call raise your hand now ask questions do it now or forever hold your piece yeah I'm never going to answer a question again after this I no especially not if they tag you in the grow the show Facebook group the main one not the inner circle because I know you're you're hanging out there oh I just posted something to the chat this is the equation for it's a lot easier to do on this than it was a podcast you did such a great job how you can figure out the annual value of a subscriber and it's it's a pretty simple equation but it's basically your cpm times the number of ads per show times number shows per year but divided by a thousand and the divided by a thousand part simply is the compensating for the fact that cpm is the per thousand so yes and that is really and we Gary talked about this earlier but really valuable to know is you're looking at what you might want to spend on advertising and that'll help yeah I formed risk with your money you you don't want I don't want people to spend money to just throw it at to grow a show when you're not going to see a return on your investment and if you can figure out this equation and figure out the value of your subscribers you can then tweak the the variables on your end right either putting in more ads per show or running more shows to increase that value to increase the value of a subscriber so you have some room to play with so it isn't like why I have my show and this is what it is now you can do a second show a week or you can put in a second ad or whatever it is to increase that number yes absolutely oh my goodness sorry I have a desk that you push a button it goes up and down I actually hit the button here um I guess to wrap things up is there anything that uh somebody didn't ask you that I didn't ask that we didn't talk about like you think is really important to touch on really quickly I think that you have to understand that as you grow a show there's different phases you're going to go through so like uh targeted daily engagement is great for when you're when you first launch your show right for what you so your first 10 subscribers that's your friends and family head to your mom and dad your close friends that's you 10 to 100 okay you're gonna have to branch out a little bit 100 to a thousand that you're really looking at your social media your targeted daily engagement that can get you to that point a thousand to 10 thousand now you're talking about a different problem I'm at the point now where I'm looking at the 10 thousand to a hundred thousand and at each step along the way you're going to encounter this thing of like well well how do I go beyond here and this is something I I'm dealing with all the time like I've had this recent big huge increase in growth and now I'm like well now what the hell do I do and so you're always going to encounter this thing where it's like you've grown it now what and what you did to get to that point may not scale to take you to that next level so you're going to have to change your strategy a lot and like I'm working on getting I want to get a hundred thousand people per episode within the next three years how do I do that I don't know but I know to get a hundred thousand I first have to get 20,000 once I get to 20,000 then maybe I'll work on incremental things along the way so I don't know that number but I know I'll figure it out and I know that other people have done it so it's doable and I know that shows like mine have done it so it's very doable but but yeah so you're kind of always have to be putting yourself in a position where you don't know what you're going to do and you have a new problem to solve and it's going to change through your journey as you're growing your show so it's not like you just do one thing now and you do that forever it's going to have to change that's fantastic advice and it's funny because it actually ties into tomorrow's girl's show episode which has to do a lot with burnout and how setting those incremental goals and you know not just kind of flailing and not having any direction where you're going how that can really help remember that's you know personally that's what I do you can drive yourself mad if you look at some other podcaster that has a big show and you'll say all I can never do that what I do it's like I remember when I first started first month it's like okay I want to get five thousand downloads this month I have a daily show right so it's not weekly so divide whatever year is number by seven and it's like okay I achieve this threshold can I get 10,000 downloads all right then I did that all right so I want to keep doubling it and so I always have these like incremental goals that I'm trying to achieve and then you get it it's like okay what's the next goal and to try to just keep doing that and that's a way that you can keep motivated but if you get you know I know in the back of my mind I want to have this goal of a hundred thousand downloads in episode but I don't focus on that every day I'm worried about just hitting the next milestone because if I can't do that then that goal is going to be impossible and I think that's what everyone should focus on is these incremental steps because that'll keep you going and don't worry about what other people are doing because that will drive you insane yes absolutely I think that is a great place to wrap it up because we are just about at six o'clock uh eastern time so I want to thank you so much Gary for coming on I know everybody in the chat is saying it's been so helpful so insightful I've had people asking me you know make sure you upload this recording to our course website so that I can go back and take notes and and listen what Gary had to say um I'm gonna give one more chance I feel like we kind of everybody asked what they had to ask but we have like three more minutes if anybody has any quick questions just how about and ask them and if not we will see you all on Thursday Kevin will be back on Thursday and running coaching as usual and Gary where can they find you on social media if they want to connect you all can find me from the Facebook group and you can see me on Facebook you can send me a direct message if you want other than that I don't want you to contact me on social media just listen to my podcast fantastic so make sure I really respect that thank you so much I don't care if you contact me on social media I'm just kidding I'm just promoting okay I gotta be sure I gotta set those boundaries especially on social I know I can be annoying to get a ton of DMs but uh Gary's in just to make the differentiation for everybody he's in the free Facebook group because as much as we love Gary he's not a student um so if you're looking for him just make sure in the free Facebook group and on the inner circle group uh other than that thank you so so much Gary I really appreciate it Kevin really appreciates it everybody that showed up today really appreciates it and we'll see you around the internet