Courtesy of the Smart Passive Income podcast. Pat Flynn: Many of his listeners use iTunes as a search engine.
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Pat Flynn lost his job as an architect in the fall of 2008. Four years later, Mr. Flynn, who is 29, has one of the top business podcasts on iTunes. It’s called the Smart Passive Income Podcast, and it offers information and advice about online marketing and sales strategies.
Introduced in July 2010, the podcast has been downloaded more than two million times and its listeners have given it more than 500 five-star ratings. Mr. Flynn consistently ranks in the top 10 business podcasts on iTunes, including, at one point, earning a second place spot behind The Dave Ramsey Show (iTunes doesn’t explain how it ranks podcasts).
There are far too many self-proclaimed gurus of online marketing, but Mr. Flynn seems to have figured out some things that could help just about any small business.
It was early in 2008, before he was laid off, that Mr. Flynn first experienced the power of the Internet. While studying for the LEED exam, which certifies knowledge of green building practices, he created a blog where he posted charts, cheat sheets, and notes from reference guides. Months later, he found out that more than 10,000 people were visiting his site each day.
With that level of traffic, he decided to turn the blog into a business to help architects and other building industry professionals pass the exam. After adding more content to the Web site, he wrote and published an e-book study guide for the test and started selling it to his Web visitors. After 30 days, he had taken in $7,905.00, and he was starting to think that getting laid off may have been the best thing that had ever happened to him. In his first year running his online business, he says he made $203,219.04 (as he reports in his annual passive income report). “I was amazed that a real business could be created by just providing helpful information,” he said.
And that inspired him to start a new Web site, called the Smart Passive Income Blog, in which he explained how he had built the business. “It started out with me creating a site to tell people about how I made passive income with my LEED exam Web site,” he said, “but then I started to explore other ways to make money online and share my experiences.”
For example, he built a niche Web site for the security-guard-training industry and wrote a 20-part series of blogs explaining how he did it. One of his lessons is that he gives his content away free and makes money by selling ads and training courses. When it comes to selling on the Internet, he said, “the best sales pitch is no sales pitch at all.”
As his traffic grew, he decided to introduce a podcast to reach even more people. He had been listening to podcasts for more than three years. “The idea of learning as you go really intrigued me,” he said, “and so each week, in the car to and from work, at the gym, and even on train rides, I’d listen to 15 to 20 hours of audio, and I was always learning something new.”
In the summer of 2010, Mr. Flynn released the first session of The Smart Passive Income Podcast, as an extension of his then two-year-old blog, which, at that time, had about 7,500 subscribers. “It’s a bit technical to set up a podcast,” he said. “It involves first recording an episode, tagging it with the appropriate data — such as show name, host, episode number, category, etc., uploading it onto a server and then publishing it onto a Web site and directing that feed to a particular directory or player. What’s nice is that once you set it up, all you have to worry about is creating new shows. The directories, such as iTunes, will update automatically when you publish a new episode.”
Anyone can post a podcast on iTunes, Mr. Flynn said, but it’s imperative that you stay focused on your audience. “It all comes down to producing a high-quality podcast that provides some sort of value to its listeners, whether it’s entertainment value, education, whatever.” Not surprisingly, he has created a free podcasting tutorial, complete with six step-by-step training videos to help anyone get a podcast up and running.
Early on, he says, he spent about $400 on podcasting equipment, including a microphone, but beyond that he had everything else he needed. He uses Garageband software, which came with his iMac, to record his episodes. “If you’re on a PC, you can download free audio-editing software called Audacity, which works just as well as Garageband,” he said.
Today, Mr. Flynn’s shows run between 45 minutes and an hour and are posted twice weekly. He introduces himself at the beginning and provides the show number. An announcer gives a short intro with music, and Mr. Flynn offers a brief summary of what he’s going to cover. His guests have included well-known entrepreneurs and bloggers.
To promote the podcast, Mr. Flynn has syndicated his show through Stitcher, a popular podcasting directory that is available primarily on mobile platforms. But iTunes drives most of his traffic. “Itunes is also a search engine,” he said, “so if the title of your podcast, the description, and the title of the episodes are similar to what keywords people are typing into iTunes, you have a good chance of being found. You can easily find my podcast, for example, by typing in ‘blogging’ or ‘online business’ in the search field in iTunes.”
In part because Mr. Flynn often tells his podcast listeners to go to his blog for additional information, links or show notes, the blog now has more than 50,000 subscribers. The podcast has helped build an audience for Smart Passive Income videos, an e-newsletter and an e-book.
“I just enjoyed the process and made sure that I put a lot of care into every single minute of my podcast,” he said. “They say that time flies when you’re having fun, well, results happen much faster when you’re having fun, too.”
Melinda Emerson is founder and chief executive of Quintessence Multimedia, a social media strategy and content development firm. You can follow her on Twitter.
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/how-pat-flynn-uses-podcasting-to-build-his-business/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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