CHAPTER 5

EXPAND YOUR PLATFORM

In my opinion, there are two sides to expanding your platform. There is the technical nuts and bolts side, which we will cover in this book’s production-related chapters. There is also the content side, which we will cover in this chapter. The quality of your content, and your intention for creating the content in the first place, are key ingredients in determining your ability to expand your platform. Expanding your platform is not about spending large amounts of money on Facebook campaigns, buying email lists, running Google AdWords campaigns, or investing in the myriad other ways you could buy traffic to your website. Instead, it’s about having an intentional strategy for creating and delivering valuable content to your audience (your nation!) in such a way that a relationship is formed with an audience who loves you and what your platform represents.

Expanding your platform through your podcast will give you the opportunity to attract an audience who will ultimately become your nation of true fans (Chapter 6) if you execute and expand properly. The more and better-qualified traffic flowing into your platform, the better your revenue opportunity will be.

This chapter will take you through the definition of what a platform is, why expanding your platform matters to your business and your audience, and how your podcast represents an excellent content marketing and platform expansion opportunity all rolled into one.

Let’s begin by defining the term platform. My good friend Wendy Keller is the author of the brilliant book Ultimate Guide to Platform Building. In it, she shares a practical and tactical definition for platform that in my opinion is spot on for every business owner:

Platform = traffic

Traffic = money

Therefore, platform = money

Get a platform, get money

Wendy also shares several helpful criteria I recommend you consider as you evaluate whether to expand your platform:

You want to grow your business by attracting new customers and clients.

You have a new business you are trying to launch.

Your sales are slumping—or never got off the ground.

You want to introduce a product or service to the market.

You would like to attract investors or partners.

You yearn to expand your brand.

You are searching for new streams of revenue.

You want to distinguish your career.

You are being eaten alive by the competition.

You are a speaker, coach, or consultant (or want to be) and you are putting your game plan together.

You just want to make more money.

I suspect most business owners who review Wendy’s criteria would agree that expanding their platform as a means to achieving all or a portion of that list would be a worthy pursuit. So to take this platform discussion deeper, I sat down with Drew McLellan, top dog at the Agency Management Institute and host of the podcast Build a Better Agency. Drew is also a three-time alum on Onward Nation. (If you go to OnwardNation.com and type the word Drew into our search bar, all of his episodes will appear so you can listen.)

During his third visit, I asked Drew to share more about why a business owner ought to build a platform as a means to serve and add value to others, not just to drive financial results—and why a person’s intention should come from the right place. Here’s what Drew had to say. It’s masterful.

Any platform I have, whether it’s a blog or if I’m speaking, and certainly the podcast is one of my critical platforms, but for me every platform should be a place where I am being helpful, where I am using my expertise, my connection, my experiences to teach someone how to do something better. Ultimately that’s really the whole point of Agency Management Institute—helping people run their businesses better. That’s very much my mindset; plus, when you think about all of the information that’s out there in all of the different platforms, blogs, webinars, podcasts, videos, or whatever it is, it’s not like people don’t have choices. So why in the world would they choose to give you their time over someone else?

They’re only going to do that if (A) you’re super entertaining, which I’m not. Or (B), you are helpful and you add value so that hour is an investment on their part where they get more out of the hour than it costs them to give you the hour, or whatever the time of consumption is.

When I add that kind of value and when I stay super focused on delivering, it comes back to me business-wise in spades. In marketing we often talk about how it is whoever is trying to sell something who is the one who has to provide value first so you have to sort of demonstrate your commitment to the audience.

You have to help them get where they want to go so that they can know, like, and trust you. Really that’s what platform building is about. Giving people an opportunity to get to know you and over time because, as your listeners have experienced, they do get a sense of who you are and what you are about.

So for some listeners they gravitate toward that, and they, like you and other listeners probably on my podcast, go, for whatever reason, “I don’t really love him so I’m going to stop listening.” After you get through the know and like, then over time when you consistently deliver value and good advice and good counsel, then they become ready to trust you and when they’re ready to trust you, not only does that mean that they will keep consuming my content. It also means that they are going to be open to an AMI workshop or one of the other things that we do that we actually make money at. It’s all part of a continuum, I think.

Ultimately, you’re doing it for a business purpose, but I think you’re doing it with integrity. I always want my clients to feel like they get more from me than they give me, whether it’s money, or time, or whatever. I’m modeling that all the way through my content creation. I always want to give more than somebody is in essence paying for because then whatever I’m charging them feels like a bargain and to them it is a bargain; the value proposition and the value transfer falls in their favor. To me that’s smart business and so, yes, I’m doing it because it builds my business but I know that probably 90 percent of, for example, my podcast audience may or may not ever buy anything from me and that’s fine.

A lot of my current customers who were customers before I started the podcast are avid podcast listeners, so now that’s added value for them. Because they’re part of the AMI family they knew about the podcast and they listen and for them that’s like bonus value. For somebody who’s never bought anything from us or doesn’t know who I am, or doesn’t know how we can help their agency, this is a way for us to introduce ourselves.

The other reason why I think everybody should have a platform is because especially when you sell something and you say you’re an expert in something, saying you’re an expert is one thing, demonstrating week after week that you’re an expert is a completely different gig.

Again, it’s critically important for you to understand that your skill in expanding your platform is not about mastering tech but about building a relationship with your audience. And that relationship deepens based on the value of the content you deliver on a consistent basis. The value of the content you deliver is high when your intention is in the right place. Your audience will know if you are solely focused on conversion rates and revenue. Consequently, you will not grow your revenue and you will likely fall short of your goals.

Earlier in this chapter, I mentioned that your podcast represents an excellent content marketing and platform expansion opportunity all rolled into one. I am going to share several content marketing ingredients you should consider, but first, let’s bring in Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), to define content marketing. CMI defines content marketing as “the practice of creating relevant and compelling content in a consistent fashion to a targeted buyer, focusing on all stages of the buying process, from brand awareness through to brand evangelism.”¹

Joe and his team at CMI have been the leaders in content marketing education and training for nearly a decade. This chapter is not intended to make you a content marketing expert. Instead, it will provide you with several tangible examples so you can see how you can get more value and content distribution mileage out of your episodes beyond just an audio file that’s available for download inside iTunes.

Ingredient #1: Build Your Email List

One of the best ways to build your email list is by offering visitors to your podcast website what I like to call a “screaming cool value exchange,” or a freemium. Something your website visitors consider to be so amazingly awesome and valuable that, when they see it, they exclaim to themselves, “Heck yeah, I want that,” and happily share their email address with you to get it. You will know you have the value proposition correct when between 6 and 13 percent of your website visitors opt in to get their hands on your value exchange.

Ingredient #2: Increase Organic Search Traffic to Your Podcast Website

Google loves content pages that are at least 500 words in length but typically not longer than 1,000 words. An efficient way to boost word count to your Show Notes pages (Show Notes are covered in detail in Chapter 12) is to add the full or partial transcript below the Show Notes for each episode—and then optimize the entire page for search.

Ingredient #3: Put Podcast Interviews on Your YouTube Channel

Lewis Howes is a business owner who has mastered all three vital priorities in this book: growing revenue, expanding the platform, and building a nation of true fans. When Lewis talks strategy and execution, I really pay attention. Recently he began to conduct his podcast interviews on video in his studio and then air the content as a video on his YouTube channel before sending the audio-only version out to iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, etc. as a traditional podcast. It’s a smart strategy for creating compelling and valuable content for your nation of true fans. You can find Lewis on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/user/lewishowes.

Ingredient #4: Turn Your Audio into Video

Kinetic typography is an outstanding visual strategy for converting short snippets of audio into video that can be shared on YouTube, Facebook, or other social media. The downside is that the time investment to create the typography is significant. For example, if you go to http://bit.ly/2eHJD7d you will see a short clip that my team produced following my guest appearance on EOFire with John Lee Dumas. This clip took about forty hours to produce, but it created an interesting twist on the lesson I shared during the interview with JLD.

Ingredient #5: Send Weekly Emails to Your Nation of Fans

Not everyone in your audience (your nation of true fans) will download and listen to every podcast episode as soon as it airs. Sending a weekly email summary of the highlights is an excellent way to keep your audience engaged and informed. You will also begin to build a reputation as a valuable curator of high-quality content. Kelly Hatfield, host of the Absolute Advantage Podcast, sends a weekly email similar to what is shown in Figure 5-1. Within the first several weeks of sending the emails, one of Kelly’s Dream 50 prospects replied with a new business opportunity for Kelly and her firm. They successfully closed the deal, and the project generated nearly immediate ROI for the investment Kelly had made in launching her podcast. Rock-solid awesome!

Ingredient #6: Write Your Book with Your Podcast Episodes

Writing a book tends to be a common aspiration of most business owners, but the thought of investing all of the hours toward writing the book seems incomprehensible to be able to fit into one’s schedule. Is writing a book one of your vital priorities? If so, I encourage you to let your podcast create all of the content for you. Onward Nation guest John Livesay did exactly that. He had ten of the best interviews from his The Successful Pitch podcast transcribed, then he edited them into chapters, and they became the core chapters of his book, The Successful Pitch: Conversations About Going from Invisible to Investable.

These six ingredients represent a small sampling of content marketing strategies you can employ to leverage each of your podcast episodes into more value for your audience and a platform expansion for your business!