05 - Amie Carter's Live Strategy Session - Starting a Podcast

It's a STRATEGY SESSION special!

Today, I guide Amie Carter through some guidance and steps of starting her own podcast tailored to propel her network marketing business.

In this episode, we delve deep into Amie's questions about the initial phases of podcasting, from overcoming technical overwhelm to strategic content planning.

I break down the essentials of crafting a podcast that not only educates but also engages and converts. We cover everything from the importance of choosing the right podcast title to leveraging audio content for building a stronger personal brand and deeper customer relationships.

If you're contemplating a podcast for your business or looking to refine your approach, and want to be on an upcoming strategy session episode, then click HERE.

To stay updated with our latest episodes and gain access to exclusive content, be sure to subscribe to the Making Digital Real podcast. Visit our website at https://vault.makingdigitalreal.co.uk/

Transcript

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So welcome to a brand new strategy session from the Making Digital Real podcast. Today, I'm speaking with Amie. This is a one hour long strategy session, which I've actually cut up and I've just thrown some really cool little bits from the conversation to stitch together to a nice bite-size episode for you. So I hope you enjoy. And remember, if you want to be on a strategy session with me simply go to vault.makingdigitalreal.co.uk and you'll find all the details there. All right, here we go. Anything you want to go through in particular with me today or is there anything on your mind that you're really hoping I go through? I think for me, it's when it comes to podcasting, I mean, I'm sure you're probably going to go through this because it's like, it's the basics, but it is really like how to get started. Like it feels quite overwhelming thinking about it all. Business is main thing that I really want to take forward. Okay, so just tell me a little bit, and I've read your form, but if you tell me a little bit about what the business is and who your target audience is and what's on your mind regarding thinking about progressing with a podcast and using audio, what are you thinking about it? Okay, so my business is that I'm partnered with Arbonne. So Arbonne are in the health and wellness space. They have been going since 1980, so they're very well established brand. For me, I came into it last June. So I've been doing it for a year now. And I have always been wanting to run a business. I've always had this thing in me that I just knew I was meant to be self-employed. I've always wanted freedom and flexibility and the desire to help and support others to have the same. I spent, like my first business was 14 years ago when my daughter was two years old and that was selling vintage clothing. And I think I've spent my whole life just looking for this, what's this thing that I'm meant to be doing? Like I've known inside me that I've meant to be doing something bigger with my life, but I just hadn't found it. And then Arbonne found me last year and the products came into my life at a time when I needed them. So I've been suffering with certain health issues like low energy, bloating, cramping. I'd had IBS for like 20 years and various things from the doctors, nothing had really helped. I didn't know that all the things that I've been suffering with was linked to gut health. So I didn't know any of that. So then I've kind of been on this journey then of health. And what I did last June was decided to learn about network marketing as an industry in itself. Like I didn't really understand the industry. Like most people, I was like, oh, it's a scam. No one ever earns any money. Like it doesn't work. And I did a lot of my own research. I did a lot of reading. And I was like, wow, like this is actually, like I've got something in my hands here that could change my life and not just change my life, but give me the opportunity to help others change their life, which is what I've always been passionate about. And I quickly realised like, I just had the one of the, I just, I went to an event and it was one of these, it wasn't like a really big event. It was just little, it was something quite small. And I heard some of the people talking and I just realised three weeks into my business, I was like, ah, this is the thing I've been looking for. Like it just clicked and it just landed. And from that point, I was like, okay, how do I do this? How do I make this work? What's the best way to grow this business? For me, the thing that I'm really passionate about is supporting women with their health and their wealth. Because to me, they go hand in hand. And I feel that for us, for women, we put ourselves to the bottom of the list. We don't prioritise ourselves. We don't prioritise our health. And if you are building a business or you want to create some kind of impact in your life and other people's lives, you've got to take care of your health. And that's where it's all sort of landed for me. What I would really love to do with the podcast is change the narrative around network marketing. People don't understand the industry and how life-changing it can be. So for me, what I would really love to do is use the podcast as a way to give network marketing a voice and allow people to see all the other people's, or the way that it's changed other people's lives. Not just in Arbonne, I'm talking about across different industries and other people that have made a success with network marketing. Because ultimately, most people give up. They go, oh, I'm going to try it for a few months and just see how it goes. And therefore in their mind, it doesn't work. And then they go around telling everyone else, well, I tried this and it doesn't work. But I really want to speak to those people that have committed to it as a real business and given it that chance to change their life. And I want to give those people a platform and I want to give network marketing a platform as well. Brilliant, brilliant. So for outsiders like me, and to maybe a lot of people that are listening, is network marketing a more modern way of saying something like an old-fashioned term like pyramid selling? No, and this is where the misunderstanding comes from. So it's completely different things. So what happened is, I'll just give you like a brief history of network marketing. So network marketing originally was born in, was the 1920s. And well, actually direct selling was the original form of network marketing. And Ava was actually born in 1886. And that was the first original, what we would call like direct selling with the catalogs. And now like Avon is huge. Like they even sell their products in Superdrug. Like it's massive. And so the original, what we would know as a network marketing company started in the 1920s. So it has been going for around a hundred years. That model, that business model has been going for around a hundred years. And then what happened in sort of like the 70s was companies that created pyramid schemes basically stole the network marketing model. So the difference with a pyramid scheme in a network marketing company is, with pyramid schemes, you would give money for products or services that you probably wouldn't receive, or you wouldn't receive in its entirety. Whereas with a network marketing company, you pay for the products and their products turn up. So it's not a scam, like the products are there. And obviously with network marketing as well, one of the things, one of the key things to look at is the longevity of the company. So Avon has been around for, since 1980. That's when it became a network marketing company. It was a company before that in the late 70s. And then it became a network marketing company. And this is where people get confused. They go network marketing, pyramid scheme. They're two completely different things. Okay, so let's just say you've got this great idea for a podcast and you're going to be talking about things like demystifying the world of network marketing, having conversations with people who are the leaders in their game when it comes to network marketing. So you could have a whole bunch of different episodes. So in a month you might have your conversation with somebody, a guest episode. Are you also thinking about, well, I'll put it another way. What would be your main goal? What would be the call to action for your listeners? Where are you wanting to take them as they're listening or at the end of the episode? Oh, that's a good question. Okay, so I feel like it would potentially be a couple of things. So it would be that their call to action would be, so on one element it would be that they understand network marketing and could look at it as a way for them to create additional income, passive income, or ultimately completely change their lives and become multimillionaires. Both things are available to them. But also for people to have a practical understanding of the steps that you could potentially take to start a network marketing business and to make money in it. So that there would be, so the people that would be interested in, you could have their potential story, but you could also have tips given, advice given on how to actually do it. Because I think that's one of the things that hold people back. Because you might look at somebody online and go, oh, well, I don't wanna do that. Like I don't want to be really visible online or I don't want to do events, but there's multiple ways that you can run a business. And for somebody to have those practical steps in front of them of actions that they could take, it's something that they could then go away and put into practice themselves in their own lives. So you're giving away valuable information, brilliant. It's helping you with your personal brand, tick. You've got people on a worldwide scale, hearing you like they've already known you. How else, or what else is in it for Amy? Are you taking them to a course where you're training them on things like this? Or is it at the end of the day, are you hoping that they come to you and purchase Arbonne products from you? What else have you got in your armory that you're gonna be doing for these people? So obviously the products, that would be great. But ultimately for me, my biggest mission and aim with this is that I can help other women create a life of wealth so that they could potentially decide that Arbonne is the business for them. And that they want to, they're passionate about health already. And they're like, that makes so much sense to me. I wanna be a part of Amy's team. Right, okay. And is this gonna be through some type of course? Is there something, are you gonna have a landing page where you can grab their name and email address? So you've got them to nurture that relationship. What are you doing to grab their attention just so that they don't listen, love your content and then disappear? And then disappear, yeah, exactly. So I am in the process of building a landing page. Obviously with network marketing, I don't have to build a website to sell products. Like that's all done for me, which is another huge benefit of partnering with a brand like Arbonne is so much of all of that stuff is done. But for me personally, I want a way to grow and capture my own audience. And so I am in the process of building a landing page. And what's the lead magnet on that landing page? What are you giving them in exchange for their name and email address? So I've got a free gut health, like a PDF gut health guide. So it's packed full of like how to take care of your gut health, tips, recipes, smoothie recipes, recipes that are really good for your health. So it's packed full of things like that. So I've got that as an offering for email addresses and names. So what's going through my head right now? And we'll come back to the podcast in a minute and we'll talk about your title and how you can create it and the keywords and things like that. But this is an area which I get quite excited about. So you've got this amazing lead magnet, which is like everybody else, it's a PDF. Or we need to find a way for you to stand out from the crowd so that your lead magnet doesn't land in the PDF graveyard with everybody else's. And what I'm thinking is, if you are utilizing the power of audio for this fantastic podcast, which is publicly available around the world for everybody when they're searching on Spotify and Apple, if they're already consuming your brilliant audio content in the form of a podcast, it means you've captured that audience and that demographic. So I'm thinking what could be a great idea for you is to create something called a private podcast as well. So a private podcast is exactly the same as a normal one. You can listen to it on Apple, Spotify, there is no difference whatsoever. The one difference is you can't find it. It's not searchable and it's not publicly available until you give somebody the, what we call the private RSS feed. It's like a link. So if I was to give you my private RSS feed link right now, you would press on that on your mobile device, for example, and it will open up in Apple or Spotify or wherever it is you get your normal podcasts and a fantastic new beautiful feed of episodes will appear for you. That's a private podcast. So what I'm thinking is, your call to action is great. Go to this landing page where you can get this, what was it? Five benefits. Yeah, so it's got health benefits, a guide, got health guide. Yeah, excellent. And that guide can not only now be a PDF, but it can also be a private RSS feed. So you've got two amazing marketing channels still asking for just for their name and email address, but you're giving them two options to consume your content. Option A is the PDF. Option B is consume this guide wherever you want. Listen to me, feel like you've already, you already know me, whether you're driving at the airport, on the plane, but it doesn't matter. It's gonna stop them having to think, where did that PDF go? It's with all these 101 million other PDFs that people have given to me for free over the years. Yeah, I didn't even know that existed. Yeah, so I think that would be brilliant for you because when I'm speaking to clients at the moment and they've got a great following on their podcast and people say to me, oh, it's great, we've got 10,000 listeners now every month. That's brilliant, but who are those 10,000? Where are you taking them to say, by the way, listeners, we've got a bonus episode that is only available to subscribers and it's 100% free. So head over to whatever the landing page is, give us your name and email address and we'll give you access to these bonus episodes or this private feed. Yeah, that's a really good idea. So if you're creating your content that's going onto your free podcast, would you then just record and create separate content for that then? Is that how you would do that? Yeah, so you would set up another podcast and you can use the same distributor that you already use. However, my personal favorite is to use something like Hello Audio, which is a specialist platform for private podcast feeds. So I use Hello Audio for my private podcast and I use Buzzsprout to distribute my free podcast. So I've got two RSS feeds using two different platforms. One is designed for private, behind a subscription or a paywall. And the other is free to anyone, you can find it and it's our job to get that found worldwide using all the clever strategies. Okay, that's really interesting. I didn't even know that that was an option that people did. I just assumed all podcasts are free. Yeah, no, absolutely. So there are private ones as well. Okay, that's really interesting. Yeah, that's a really good idea. Cool, so going back to your standard podcast, have you thought of a name for it? No, I haven't thought of a name, but a friend has shared one with me. And the name was, so Amy and then Diaries of a Network Marketer, Diary of a Network Marketer. And I thought that was pretty clever, but obviously it's a play on a one that's out there that's already well known. So first things first, when we look at that title, how many words in that title are people going to be actively searching for when they are in Spotify or Apple? That's what we need to think of. Okay. So the first word is Amy, they're not gonna be searching for that, but it doesn't matter. We can still have it in there. We still got room to play with. You've got network marketer. However, I think that if anyone's gonna be looking for that topic, they're gonna be putting in the word network marketing. I think there might already be in network marketing as well, because I, and this is just speaking of my personal experience, I never searched for a podcast about network marketing until I was doing network marketing, because when I was doing network marketing, that was when I was like, well, I just wanna learn as much as I possibly can about this industry. So are people going to be searching for it before they know about it, before they know about network marketing? Absolutely. So the one thing that you need to do when it comes to the title of the podcast is don't get all caught up on making it quirky that sounds amazing to you, because you need to make it about the audience rather than you. So I'll give you a real life example. So back in the day, mine was called the Making Digital Real Podcast. Nobody was searching for the words making digital real. Okay, it sounded great and fun and quirky to me. And it was like, yes, that's my brand. No one else has got it. That's incredible. But the fact is nobody was finding it because the search terms are not in there. I kept making digital real when I changed it, so what I did was I changed it to what people were looking for. So I put, I changed my title to Podcasting and Digital Marketing Growth Hacks, the Making Digital Real Podcast. So when someone's searching for podcasting or digital marketing or growth hacks, which is a great modern term now when you look at Google Trends, suddenly the downloads shot up because I started putting in the right keywords into the title. Okay, that's interesting. So in your title, it's got to have those. I suppose that does make sense though, because even social media platforms, Instagram, it's all changed now to having those keywords, even in your title, because that's what people are searching for. Absolutely. And also have a think about the different apps that are out there as well, because not everybody listens to podcasts on Google, Apple, or Spotify. There are still millions of listeners out there that use special apps, which are podcast related apps for what they need it for. And there's one out there called Castro. And what it does is it allows you to advertise, which will put a banner of your podcast on your listener's device as they're listening to the show. So for example, if you said to me, my demographic is women in their forties to fifties who want a better life, whatever it might be. We might think that lifestyle is a great demographic. So you could go to Castro and say, this is my podcast. I want to advertise my show to anybody that is listening to lifestyle podcast episodes. And Castro will say, no problem at all. When do you want to have your banner appear? And you choose a time slot that nobody else has taken. So you can have the full day for a small amount of money. So anybody listening to any show, which is in that kind of format, your banner will appear. So there's some great advertising and you don't, and the thing is, it's literally pick a time slot. That's my podcast, pay, done. It's nothing like Facebook ads. You don't have to have some type of university degree to figure it out like with a Facebook ad. Yeah, it is like that now, isn't it? Yeah. So just a question then on the title, does it matter if it's long? Because I think I've got a background in social media and I feel like what I've been taught in social media is short, snappy, grab their attention really quick. So you're trying to find the shortest possible sentence that's gonna grab somebody's attention either in your caption or on your reel, on your post. So with the title of your podcast, it doesn't really matter how long it is. It doesn't need to be short and snappy. No, some of the best podcasts out there are quite long. And I'm not talking about your superstars with your millions of downloads. I'm talking about the middle demographic. It's because what they've done is they've created a title, they've added a colon or a dash, and then they've carried it on with more keywords. Right, okay. Okay, that makes sense. That helps, yes. I feel like it's really interesting having this conversation because the bits that you've covered to now, obviously I have thought about title, but I haven't got very far with it. But I felt like the bits that you've covered so far, I haven't even given that much headspace to because the how, the technical how side of it is probably what's holding me back more. I don't know where to start on what equipment you need to get. I know you don't need to have a whole big sound booth and have all of this all singing, all dancing, all equipment to get started, but it's like, where do you start with that? What's a good amount to spend? You don't want to go two cheeks and it's not going to sound very good and it's going to be rubbish, but you don't want to invest thousands to begin with. You've got to start somewhere. And I feel like that's the thing that's been holding me back, which is probably a really silly thing that's actually holding me back, but it is that, the technical how side of things that's making me go, oh, I don't know what to do. Yeah. The only cost to you should be only three things. 27 pounds for a Sennheiser headset on Amazon, 12 pounds a month for Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is the platform where you upload the audio and it goes to all the different platforms and a small cost per episode to your editor. And that editor should be saving you money by saying, don't go spending money on recording platforms, use mine. And just trying to save you money where they can by saying, utilize what we've already got, because as editors, we have all this great online platforms, which we should be allowing you to access and share. Oh, wow. Okay, that's so interesting. Yeah. So it's just useful to have that beginner's knowledge because even just deciding to do something like this, you can spend hours researching, where do you start? What software? What equipment? And before you know it, you still haven't made a decision, but you've spent three days just reading and researching. And I think a lot of the times when you run a business, that's what puts you off because you're busy. We're doing all the things anyway. So just having that beginner's guide to or cheat sheet, that's so helpful. Thank you. And the other thing is you can use that speak pipe to get audio reviews from your listeners as well. So in every episode that you do, you should be saying something like, folks, if you've really enjoyed this episode, we would love to hear from you. If you head over to podcast.makingdigitalreal.co.uk, you'll be taken to a page where you can leave us a voice message. Feel free to give us a review, tell us what you thought about the episode and which episode it was. Happy for you to give a shout out for your business as well. And we may use that on an upcoming intro, outro, or middle bit, because you've got the intro, the middle bit, and the outro as pure advertising gold space for whatever you want, and you are your own sponsor. And what I especially like about your adventure and what excites me a lot is the fact that you do have this lead magnet that you're sending to people, which means that not only are you gonna have a nice listener base, but you're gonna have their details, which means you've got more armory to go to other podcasters or people, let's say, and say, we've got 2000 people on our database. Would you like us to promote your podcast show over here to our listener base and sponsor this episode for 500 pounds, let's say. So for 500 pounds, all you have to do is do a marketing email campaign, one email about this person's podcast over here, because you've built up that database, so you've got so much opportunity. Yeah, that's so interesting as well. And it's learning about, so my background, it's been in social media, so I've learned how to use social media in that respect, but for a podcast, it's completely different. So like I understand lead gens and how that all works when it comes to social media and marketing campaigns, email campaigns, I understand all of that and I've utilized it and used it throughout for many years now. But when it comes to podcasts, it's like, it's the same, but it's also kind of learning it in a different way. And there's lots of different, it seems that there's more unique ways of you being able to promote yourself, but also helping other people to promote themselves, their podcast, their business, which is ultimately what I enjoy doing as well. I think that's what it's all about, we're in business, we support one another and that's what I really feel, I just feel passionate about doing that as well. Yeah, you and I are so, so similar in that respect. That's brilliant. And then obviously you've got all the things like LinkedIn and all these different amazing tools to promote it and get it out there. And yeah, I'm really excited about it. And I'd love to have you back on the show once you've got your first four or five episodes out there and see how it's going for you. Yeah, oh, definitely, 100%. This is actually, because this has been an idea for I would say almost a year. So the fact that I'm now in a place where I'm like, okay, I just need to do it, just do it, get started. Don't allow all these little things to keep holding me back, just get on with it because imagine where it then could be in a year's time. And I much prefer speaking to people. I love, I prefer that interaction. I know obviously people aren't gonna interact back with me whilst they're listening, but I feel as people, you just come across so much better when it's either someone's listening to you or they're watching you. That's how we do, that's how we build our network, that's how we build our business, it's person to person. And I much prefer that to even some social media platforms now, I feel like business is changing so much and we are finding ways of going back to that personal connection, but it's in a different way, isn't it? Rather than everyone's going out to meet face to face, podcast is such a brilliant way of doing that with people and having those connections. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Making Digital Real podcast. Until next time, keep innovating, keep growing and keep making digital real.