Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The people you're talking about are the most dangerous thing for an entrepreneur. Seeing that LinkedIn bro or that Twitter personality talk about, you know, this thing and you're like, oh, I can go do that. And like, that's just not a podcast. Is hard to grow and hard to convert from. Goal of the podcast is to deepen existing relationships.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Anyone can spin up an agent, a Claude, a ChatGPT, whatever it might be, to write up 100 blog posts on a topic and publish them over the next six months. The stories, the anecdotes, the experience, the. Here's when I tried it, here's what I thought of it. I think that really makes something like that stand out.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: The job of a podcast is like never converting, I don't think.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Hey, folks, and welcome to another episode of Rogue Startups. Honored to be the co host of a season here. I'm Colin Gray, joined as always, of course, by Craig Hewitt. How you get on, Craig?
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Hey, Colin. So we're talking marketing this week.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Indeed, indeed.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Everyone's favorite topic.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: I think we threatened it for a couple of weeks, haven't we? We've mentioned it in the last couple episodes, but we're gonna actually get down to it this time.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: You and I were having a conversation, like, offline, just about business and stuff, and you said something like, in the end, it always comes down to more money.
Like the thing that everybody buys, right? Whether it's software or coaching or consult, whatever. The thing everybody wants to buy is more money.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so are we coming at it from that point of view? Because marketing, there's a whole bunch of different angles, isn't there? The marketing we've both done more than anything else is marketing software. But then I suppose, would you argue both of our platforms have been advertising themselves as helping people make more money, like podcasting.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, we. So within the realm of Castos, and I think this applies to most marketing platforms. We. We have a, you know, tagline of like, you can directly monetize a podcast or you can indirectly monetize a podcast. I think it applies to like a Twitter thing. I saw this thing from Peter Levels this week. Or a YouTube channel or a newsletter or whatever. Directly is like ads and sponsorships and stuff, and indirectly is like selling your stuff through the brand and the content and the lead gen that you have. You and I have both lived in the content world as the main drivers of our businesses.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: I think that was always the hard part, wasn't it? It was like podcasting was a funny one to Work on with that, I found. And it'd be good to dig into, like, how this differs across different industries. But like podcast in particular, being it's a total mix of. Well, tell me what you think. Is this the same in most. In a lot of industries whereby you have a lot of people who are hobbyists? So, like a bunch of the people we were selling that they didn't really want to make money out of it. I mean, they would have been delighted if they covered their costs. But actually, really, the marketing was to help them get their voice out there into the world. For those hobbyists, it was to help them make an impact. It was to help them get their message out there into the world. Whereas, yeah, you're right, there was a whole bunch of people who wanted to either turn it into a business.
So we're advertising how to help them generate revenue, generate an income through podcasting or to grow an existing business. Like, we had a lot of them. Like, did you. So there's that kind of level as well, isn't there? The podcasting or the content or the thing you're marketing is the business.
Or maybe it's the thing that helps you grow a separate business altogether.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: I don't know what the split is for us, I will say, I think unexpectedly maybe, I think typically you would say, oh, business to business customers, like real businesses are better customers. They churn less and pay more and stuff like that. They definitely pay more. But I also think for us, they churn more because a podcast is not an integral part of growing.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: A large business, if you're a coach or consultant, I think it is if you're a sheet metal manufacturing company or, you know, of $5 billion, you know, professional services company or something like, it's just not. It's just not the thing. Whereas, like the guy that talks about his favorite football team or, you know, TV show or band or something like that, he's going to keep doing it forever. And it's like it's a passion project. So, yeah, I think that's pretty specific to, like these creator niches. So, you know, it's podcasting, it's social, it's YouTube, it's email. Maybe it doesn't apply to the kind of broader B2B SaaS world, probably.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: And those, those sheet metal manufacturers, they're doing it because they feel like they should.
Which. Which is probably the trouble with a lot of these kind of products, actually. If you're. So if you're marketing any kind of B2B thing, you somehow have to either make people enjoy making it or get them a return and fast and prove that return as well, which makes your marketing way easier.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: And interestingly, and I know this doesn't apply to most folks, so we'll move on after this. But like, it often is not the financial part of it, even with our professional services, it's just not that expensive compared to what a big company pays for a marketing campaign.
It's the CEO's time or the marketing manager's time that is the objection. And so, you know, I guess that's maybe something we all should take is like we all spend a whole bunch of time doing things that aren't effective.
Maybe, maybe we shouldn't do that and we should vote with our time as much as we vote with our wallet. Because I know myself like I'll waste time more than waste money and that's probably not effective.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Easier said than done. That's when the FOMO kicks in, which has been probably one of the biggest stories of my marketing career over the last 15 years, is, is trying to fight FOMO.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Yeah. In what way?
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Like, I think that, I think it's two pronged, isn't it? There's part of it is I. And I think you're maybe similar. I'm a bit, I'm a nerd, I'm a geek. I love technology. I like trying new things. So I'm kind of naturally drawn to new marketing platforms, new marketing approaches, new whatevers, you know, new platforms altogether, like the Facebooks, the whatever that comes out. And you think, you know, I want to try this because it's new, because it's shiny. But then the other side is as well. You then see all of the other early adopters on the more established social media saying, oh, this is working a treat for me. I'm making like 10k a month out of, you know, trying this Little technique on LinkedIn or whatever. So. So the FOMO comes from both sides where it's. I like playing with the tools, but equally you have other people that seem to be claim to be doing well with it and so you want to jump in anyway. But I don't know, do you, do you fall into that trap or are you more circumspect than me?
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I do, I do a bit. I think that like within Castos at least I will say, like, at this point, we kind of know where we need to do marketing. We've, we've kind of tried a bunch of things that haven't worked. And so like definitively crossed many of Them off the list, where we're down to just a couple of. On the personal side. Yeah, I try new stuff all the time. I think the people you're talking about are the most dangerous thing for an entrepreneur is like seeing that LinkedIn bro or that Twitter personality talk about this thing and you're like, oh, I can go do that. And that's just not.
I do think that something you're getting at, though, is really interesting, which is like, a lot has been debated around the concept of a personal brand.
It's maybe not a great term. It's like, it's not a great term. Let's. Let's not say personal brand. Let's say founder led marketing on a social channel. I think the difference, to me, the difference between the two is like, personal brand is like, I take pictures at the gym, then I take pictures of my food and all this crap that, like, nobody cares about, you know, Founder driven marketing on a social channel. We should come up with a name for that.
Is that social? Is that social selling? I don't know. I mean, there's a ton of people that are extremely effective at this point. And I think it sounds like a really good marketing channel these days, as a lot of other marketing channels kind of are really hard. That's not easy either, but I think it's less hard than some other things.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: My feeling is this is. Yeah, it's always been around, hasn't it? So I think people have always. It's the old cliche isn't that people buy from people. So the personal brand concept, I think certainly is how my company started off. And I was the podcast host, I was the guy who was the face on the website. I was the one that was talking about. I was one doing all the teaching, I was in all the videos, all that kind of stuff. And it was a bit of a personal brand. There was nothing personal in there, though. I would kind of push back on that slightly. And there was. I feel like my approach to a personal brand was. It was all just my approach to podcasting, my personal views on podcasting. I didn't really do any of the, you know, pictures of food or trips or I didn't really put anything personal in whatsoever. And it was just kind of my opinions on what makes for a good show, how, how you might create a good show, all that kind of stuff. And I think that did work really nicely. It was the kind of you build a personality around it. It's having a human behind this product that you're going to buy. It's the trust, isn't it? You build trust because people buy from people and it's an actual human rather than just a company.
So I think that was always, it always has worked. But equally I think it's going to become more and more important going forward because it's going to be more and more people buying from people as opposed to AI. So I think the stuff that's going to stand out is when it is actually more personal brand and less company. And you know, you'll have so many more companies which are just a faceless name on a faceless thing which actually is run by 100 agents behind the scenes, which is fine. There's going to be some good companies that run like that, but there's going
[00:09:38] Speaker A: to be a lot of people that
[00:09:39] Speaker B: don't want to buy from companies like that or would rather grow some trust with a human, I think. Yeah, but I don't know. What do you think?
[00:09:46] Speaker A: How do you think about. Because like, I know you've said previously, like you haven't had much like social media presence or social media presence. Like how do you think about that as you're in this transition phase, you know, like having just exited your company, looking at doing something else. Should we call it, should we just call it personal brand and just like the non cringe version of personal brand?
[00:10:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: How are you thinking about developing a personal brand?
[00:10:10] Speaker B: I think the way I'm thinking about it is trying to figure out right now what makes me different. And this is something that I kind of figured out in podcasting. Like there was a bunch of stuff I said which was a little bit different from a lot of other people.
But right now I'm not sure I've quite figured out yet what actually makes me different as an advisor, a consultant, a coach compared to everyone else. And I'm kind of honing in on it. I've got some ideas and I'm hoping that there is something as opposed to I'll come up with nothing that I can actually sell that's different. So I'm still kind of, I think that's the main thing. I think it's the same as product, isn't it? It's the same as content. It's the same in anything. What's your unique value proposition? What's your usp? All these things.
So like, do you, are you doing a lot of that kind of growth on social media? You've, you've always been better than me at that though. You do, you've done a lot of Twitter, a lot of you know, you've built a Fair bit on YouTube as well now with a lot of your AI content. Like how would you think about it?
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Maybe like your fomo. Like I've, I've had a lot of zigging and zagging, a lot of, a lot of detours. I have several channels that all are quite different actually. Yeah. Which is probably like not good. But Twitter is.
I have done like pre produced some ghost written even stuff on Twitter and that's just that that like never works and that's not like what I want. What I want on Twitter is like, you know, it's like a giant slack channel to me of like, of my friends.
Yeah. Like hey, I'm doing this thing. This is interesting. Or hey, I have this question. I ran into this thing like what do you guys do you guys think? And I get a lot of ideas and inspiration from it, which is maybe like the most valuable part of it, I guess. I do also on YouTube get a fair amount of like inspiration, but both from like, but on YouTube it's like it's all AI. So like a video coming out today that's all like testing the three big like model companies for content marketing.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Okay. Yep.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: That's like very specific words like how to use voice mode or how to use you know, cursor agents or what like that. That's how to kind of stuff. Even within that there's a lot of nuance that like I've gone through and I can talk about kind of how I think about it today, but it's been like how specific or how broad do you get and how like how effective is the broad stuff at converting something, you know, attention to like leads and prospects and customers and stuff like that. I think that probably each channel is a little different like that. I don't know how much in building, I'll say a personal brand we should use like data from other channels or other people to influence your content direction. That feels like to your point about like this thing should be unique. Like Colin should be the only person talking about this thing. If that's the case, you shouldn't listen to anyone else. Really.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
I think part of the trouble is that you see, you can see evidence of people who have taken that other approach, haven't you? They take the current in trend approach and they do go at it really systematically and they create like five LinkedIn posts a week on this kind of certain format. Tackling this angle on a topic, copying that on trend like bullet point A. Ask the question at the top type of approach. It's almost. You get the frameworks, like the art framework or something like that, whatever they stand for, and then you try and follow through that every single time and you see them work. It's really annoying. That's where the FOMO comes in. But it's total survivorship bias, isn't it? Because five people have made it work out of 5,000 that have tried it, which is really annoying.
But yeah, I'd love to dig into that. You mentioned before, like, the, the way you think about actually building the wider sort of system around it. Because I'm kind of curious how you build a personal brand these days. Like in the olden days you could try all sorts. Like you could make it work with podcasting, blogging, email, you could do it all. And a lot of that still works, I think. But is it a different mix now than it was 10 years ago? How would you start? Like, somebody's coming to you brand new or even it's just us, we're just saying, yeah, we're starting something new. How would you start? Where's the first place? Because my starting point would always have been a blog.
Do you still start with a blog, Craig?
[00:14:19] Speaker A: Right, Yeah. I mean, that's probably like I. Well, in the kind of like marketing world, the two guys from like ship 30 for 30, Nicholas Cole and Dickie Bush, they, they're like the writing online guys. And I think they're the writing online guys because it probably started from blogging and now it's like writing for social and writing for substack or, you know, medium existed for a moment. I think if you were to start and you wanted the written medium to be the medium, because that's kind of one thing is like you have the medium choice first, right? It's like, I want to do audio, I want to do video, I want to do long shore or short form video, or I want to do written.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: And there's like, I want to do short form there too, isn't there? Yeah, right.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Longer, short form written. If you're like, I want to do written blogging, I would probably just do substack. Because like what, what I think is, is very true is like this personal brand, like founder led content on a platform.
It has to be on a platform. Like that last part is the most important. It has to be on a thing with a feed that feeds people, even if they're not looking for it.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: Do you just discount search altogether nowadays then Google search for this stuff?
[00:15:30] Speaker A: I do, yeah, yeah, yeah. But also substack is public. So even though you don't own it, it's public. You could argue like Beehive is a similar thing. I have some real issues with how they run their company, so I wouldn't do that. But yeah, I think Substack is. If you're, if you're doing written, that's fine. It's nice that it automatically emails. You could say the same for Patreon or school. Like from a community perspective. For me, YouTube is the choice. I think the nice thing about it is like it has a longer lifespan. Like I get a bunch of views on videos that are months old. Even on a topic like AI that is very time sensitive, I still get views on old videos and it's probably the best. Like that.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: It also pays you well.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, true.
Although that's if you're going the sponsorship route, I suppose, isn't it? Because it's harder to convert people. Well, my impression is at the moment it's harder to convert people off YouTube into external services or products. Or am I wrong in that?
[00:16:33] Speaker A: Do you think I don't focus on that much? Like I should, you know, if, if you know, selling AI services or coaching or whatever was my full time job, I would have a, I would have a system for it. Right now it's just a link in the description of like, hey, if you want to work with me, I will say I think, I think the system and it probably applies everywhere is like talking about like broad versus narrow. I think the, the play is probably like be as broad as you can. You get, you know, brand width and you get exposure and notoriety. You get subscribers and followers and oppressions. You kind of juice the algorithm and then let folks take the next step if they want. And that can be like a more targeted piece of content, which is probably the right step because like someone's never heard of Colin. Unlikely you're gonna go from like, I've never heard of him to like, I want to pay him a bunch of money for a thing. More likely like, oh, I want.
That's interesting. Oh, I see this link to this other thing that's like pretty specific that that's basically like a vsl, you know, video sales letter or a sales page that actually is a blog post, but it really is a sales page, you know, like trying to convert someone. I think you need that like next organic piece of content like linked or embedded in, in the wide piece. And this probably kind of fits on most platforms.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're spot on with that being probably the wisest approach in terms of substack. So if you want to create the modern equivalent of a blog, probably does come down to someone like substack or Beehive, like you say. I just so rebel against building that on somebody else's land, isn't it? It's like it's the old building on quicksand because it can just change, I think, my view on it at the moment. So I remember, like, we talked a previous episode about selling the company. So I can't see the stats anymore. But my old company, the content had certainly declined over the last few years, but it was still doing well. It was still drawing in like tens of thousands of readers, still sending people to the software, to coaching, to all of those kind of things. Like, the blog was still performing, hadn't gone to zero, as some people's had. So, I mean, that's like, certainly there were cases where you had seen businesses just fold altogether because blogging had just kind of. Their blog had kind of folded. But I think, I still think there's a place for it. I wonder if it fits in. The way I'm kind of looking at it at the moment is anyone can spin up an agent, a Claude, a ChatGPT, whatever it might be, to write up 100 blog posts on a topic and publish them over the next six months. But it's the.
The stories, the anecdotes, the experience, the. Here's when I tried it, here's what I thought of it. I think that really makes something like that stand out. And that's the kind of thing you get in podcasting and in video, because it's a conversation, because it's like this. We're telling each other about experience. We're telling each other about something that happened six months ago, 12 months ago, recommending things, all of that kind of stuff. And the way I've been experimenting with creating newsletters these days is just from podcasts. So anytime I want to create a newsletter, I start with a podcast. So I'm recording. So, for example, I'm doing a lot of golf content right now, and I record a podcast every week with my co host, Ross. Both sides bar, if there's any golf fans out there want to check out.
So we record a show on golf every single week. And I take that. It's like in a variety show. So we do four or five topics every week, and I take that and I break it down into the topics, and each of those topics becomes a candidate for a separate piece of Content. And I'm creating newsletters from this just now. Sometimes it's a newsletter with three or four topics, sometimes it's just one that goes deep. But equally I think I can create blog posts from that, which is my plan in the next little while from that to actually create a blog. And I realize it's not as powerful as it used to be, but I think they still have power. I think they still have. I mean the LLMs, that's where they're getting a lot of their content. They still need written content out there on the web to look from. And yes, they're getting that from substack and the like. But I think owned traditional websites in the form of a blog will still do well in that sense. But I'm not sure I'm going to spend that much time on that individually. So yeah, it's going to come from my conversational content that is the trust builder and then the blogging, the newsletters that come from that is going to be the. Maybe the kind of wider funnel at the top.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: I think it's a good workflow. I mean, I think we think about like starting with the highest fidelity form we can that typically is, you know, audio and video and then, and then kind of consolidating down to long form, written and short form, written and short form video and stuff like that.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that works as well because I maybe didn't make this point well enough. Because you can again, anyone can have an LLM spin up like blog posts and social posts, but when that LLM is quoting, it's distilling your actual voice, your quotes, the words that literally came out of your mouth, out of your brain into that short form and written content. That's what actually makes it look a bit different. That's what makes it stand out a bit because it still has a lot of that humanity to it. I think.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I think about last episode before this, or maybe two before this, my conversation with Jason Cohen, his blog is unbelievable.
Unbelievable that he is such a smart dude, like writes about stuff that like I can barely understand.
I think that that's an example of what you're saying, which is like super deep, super personally identifiable. Like it's obvious. Like if you just read an article and it was, you know, not. You weren't sure what website it was from. Be like, oh yeah, it's definitely like that looks like a Jason Cohen thing. So you need that kind of, you need that kind of. Maybe it's a format or it's a how in depth it is. It's not just the topic, because the topic can be covered by, you know, Claude or ChatGPT is smart enough to write about anything. You have to have a style, like an identifier, I think, with it.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. Or do you know something that one of the guys on my team. I'm not sure. Did you ever talk to Jacob, one of my team podcast host Anality. He was experimenting with a blogging style, which I thought was really good. I thought he did a really good job with this. It was really entertainingly written in a sort of narrative style around basically an experiment, like talking about having done a thing. So here's a thing I tried, here's what I did, here's what went wrong, and here's what went right. And those things are like, that's gold dust for engagement because it's a real human story of something that you've tried. And even if it all went wrong, you still learn a few things from that. But he wrote a few like that, and they were brilliant. I thought they were the kind of thing that's going to survive the LLM writing apocalypse. Because again, it's experience, it's a story.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: It's.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: I mean, I suppose maybe you could get people that make that up, like LLMs could make that stuff up, but I think it'd be pretty difficult and I think you would see through it quickly because there's a real human there, like posting elsewhere as well, that you might get to know. And so I thought that was a really good format as well. I suppose it kind of comes back to the old case study format really, but it was written more in a kind of story experiment. It's an experiment type of format, really. I thought that was really good. So where are you. Are you doing any long form writing just now?
[00:23:37] Speaker A: No, no. The only long form writing, I, I don't. I don't create new stuff long, Long form. All the stuff I create are this podcast, YouTube videos, and then everything else is derived from these long form pieces or, or for like SEO content at Castos. It's. It's all AI generated. Now, I will say it's all AI generated with often a lot of that personal context. So, like we want to write a new article. I might just flip on the recorder and talk for five or 10 minutes about how I think about this thing and that's like an additional bit of context. So maybe that's kind of like what you're getting at. It's like we're creating a long form SEO content, but with My, my kind of personal take on it as. As like an item of context for it. That, that seems to help quite a bit.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
So the stuff you are doing is mostly YouTube and podcasting and the kind of the old. The advice we've probably given to hundreds of people and never taken it ourselves. Well, not never. Sometimes taken ourselves is you should be spending like 50% of your time creat 50% of your time promoting the stuff you've created. What do you do these days to promote your YouTube videos and your podcasts? What do you think works on that these days?
[00:24:48] Speaker A: I don't do a ton. I should do better when I'm organized. I'll tweet out, you know, podcast episodes so our team makes like a video clip. And so I'll tweet, you know, the video clip with, with like a little caption and tag people. I think that's helpful primarily on Twitter, maybe on LinkedIn for YouTube. I'll send a newsletter when a new episode comes out or a new video comes out that's you know, just written from the transcript of the video. And then like I have a very specific way I like to write my emails. They're all kind of a story. And so like I have a, a project that has a skill and examples and it actually does really, really good. But like, like you're saying it takes the raw context of like my voice and just kind of formats it into how I like to create that stuff. Yeah, I don't know, like what, what do you do to promote like your golf podcast?
[00:25:38] Speaker B: Yeah, not dissimilar.
We're recording in video just now, so we're getting the full video. I've. I've still been messing around with creating short clips. So there's a few different levels. The short clips are kind of one element of it. I think the kind of automatically generated short clips are still pretty useless, honestly. There's just such a slew of them around, isn't there? Like it's something that everyone feels is easy because you can chuck it into opus clip or use the Riverside pre made ones or whatever, but they just don't really work very well because you know, a 60 minute conversation is never meant to be consumed in 60 second sound bites. So I'm not doing a lot of that. The one thing I am doing there actually, which I have found works quite well is doing dedicated short clips. So after a podcast episode I'll just hit stop on the actual recording and then I'll open up. I use Filmora for it I don't know if you come across that it's a video editing platform. No, pretty easy one. It's like relatively low cost, but it's got loads of nice simple effects and transitions and stuff in it and just make it really easy to make a nice short clip quickly. And I'll just take two or three of the topics from the podcast notes and it'll still be a bit fresh in my mind because I've just talked about it and I'll give a couple of the takeaways. Just do a 60 seconds try and think of a hook pretty quickly. Usually that's pretty easy. Just ask the question, something like that. Then give two or three of the takeaways and then say for the full conversation, go and watch blah blah, blah over at our URL. And I find that works a lot better because you can obviously design it as a self contained short clip.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: And do they get more traction than if you were to do a clip from Opus or something like that?
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Yeah, they do. They do because I put even just 30 seconds of thought into the first sentence or two. You know, like it's really hard to get a good hook out of a, a short clip taken from a long video because you don't, you don't talk that way in a 60 minute conversation. But it's even 30 seconds or a minute of thought gives you a decent enough.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: And where are you publishing those?
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Those are primarily Instagrams, the main one we're trying to grow for the golf show, but I have been putting them on TikTok as well.
It doesn't really suit for LinkedIn, but actually I was going to try and apply this process to this show. I was going to try and promote a few of our episodes here with the exact same thing.
So probably LinkedIn might apply more to this. So try it here.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I have heard that approach for like long form YouTube too. Like I just, I just, you know, video coming out today on, you know, three, three models and writing like I should condense down what I learned from that into a couple of short clips.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: The other thing I'm playing with and I'll try it on, I'll try it with this year as well. So if you're out there listening, you can maybe go and check this out. I'll put a link, well, we'll put a link in the show notes if I, if I do it, we'll put a warning, he didn't do it if we didn't.
But I've been doing it with the golf show and it's been working really nicely, which is I built a little tool just in Claude code to take my full episodes to basically chapterise them, which is pretty standard, but then cut those chapters into videos. So automatically just create me a shorter video for every topic. And I've kind of grown it over time actually to let me edit it a little bit and let me take out some of the pauses, all that kind of stuff. So I've created a whole workflow around this. They're still long form, so they're not YouTube shorts, they're landscape format. They go into proper sort of five, ten minute YouTube videos. I've used, what's it called again, Remotion, to actually put in some text effects as well. So I put a nice like written hook on the start of the videos too. But automatically this all just goes in automatically.
Text hooks, maybe every 30 seconds or so automatically puts in some edits. So these things look kind of polished. They're not like perfect by any means, but they're kind of polished up versions of a 5, 10 minute segment and they're just published automatically to YouTube. And I found some of them doing actually really nicely because it's taking just a question from a long form podcast. Like, you ask me a question, I do an answer, I ask you a question, you give an answer. We chop those questions up separately, post them with that question as a title. And because this is the kind of show where we're our own target audience, it automatically starts to target the right people. And I'm finding that working really nicely actually. So that's something. I don't know if you done anything similar.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Yeah, we do this for some of our customers at Castos Productions. We call them segments. Yeah. Because they're not shorts, you know, they're not like short shorts. They're not. They're not long. We just call them segments. You know, Joe Rogan, like I think did this or does this really well, like that's a lot of his growth. Like his. I don't think he publishes his long form videos at all. Even maybe to YouTube. It's all segments really. Yeah, that. That probably is wrong, but it's interesting. Like I've. I've played around not with Remotion but with Hyper Frames.
[00:30:22] Speaker B: Yeah, basically the same thing.
[00:30:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I find it. Yeah, I like. I'm just not that good at it. I found it to not work amazingly well.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: It took me a while. There was a lot of iteration. Like I've been working on that thing for.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll have to. We'll have to deep dive on sometimes.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Be good. Yeah. But yeah, the style, particularly the style of the titles, pography, all that kind of stuff, it's hard to get right, but it's. Yeah, you can hone it in. It can get quite good.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: So you mentioned YouTube. You're not necessarily. I'm thinking about the kind of promoting YouTube videos as well. The other way you mentioned newsletter, like posting them on you on a newsletter. One of the things I've been thinking about as a really nice little kind of growth flywheel is trying to get those working together actually both ways. So YouTube sending people to the newsletter, but then the newsletter sending people to YouTube as well and then having them both kind of combining. Have you figured out ways to persuade people to sign up for a newsletter from YouTube?
[00:31:20] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I think the one thing I'll say about all this is like I have a conversation later today with someone who, like, this is their full time job and they're one of these personal brands and it's their job to figure that like it's their whole business. Like this is the product, you know, and this is the marketing and this is the kind of everything I think for us, like this is a side quest. For me, it might be the most important thing for you since you sold the business. But like, I don't have the time and energy to be dedicated to how this should be done. Yeah, is what I'll say. And that's, that's lame because it's not that hard. I mean, what, what like if I, you know, I think, I think that the obvious thing is like you have something that's like a lead magnet and it can be a single thing like, hey, I did this, you know, I talked to John Collison for three hours and it's not anywhere except for if you signed up for this, you know, my newsletter and you can get it there like that. That's one. The other one would be like, I've done this two or three times with Claude and I just keep forgetting to actually use it and implement it is like on a topic, you have several lead magnets you could use. And so like every video has like an appropriate lead magnet. You know, it's, you know, golf, it's, you know, chipping and putting, it's driving, it's mindset, it's gear. And you have four lead magnets you make. And then every CTA is like. And since we're talking about short game today, make sure you sign up for the, you know, Crash course on how to, you know, get up and down. Yeah, like I think that's the easiest and probably the best. And then you only have to create those four or five or eight or whatever it is. But like, I think what we don't want to do is like create a new job for ourselves every time we create a piece of content to have a specific lead magnet for that piece of content. Because that just sounds horrible. That sounds so horrible. And I surely wouldn't do it.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Yeah, no. When I start, when I, I think that's a great approach. Yeah. When I first started trying to do this more with YouTube, I, I created a little table in notion and I listed out two or three lead magnets that we had already for pod. This was for podcasting.
And I kind of copied in the links for those lead magnets. I copied in the first line. The way I was doing it, the way I found works nicely. And I talked to a few people that knew this, that had experimented with this a lot as well, was simply, and I'm sure many people out there have seen this on YouTube these days. It's like a get your seven day podcast bootcamp here colon and then it's a link and that's the first thing in your po, in your YouTube description because then it shows up and the link is literally clickable right below the video really obviously put in a little emoji maybe to draw some attention to it as well. It works quite nicely. And yeah, they worked really well. I found they were great, actually. I even tried a couple of times and I, I worried this was a wee bit cheeky, but I had a few times when I didn't have a suitable pre made lead magnet, but I had a blog post I was really proud of and I just linked to the blog post. So I said, read how to monetize your podcast in seven steps. And I had a blog post that took people through that and there was no pretense that it was hidden behind a paywall or anything, but it did take them to the newsletter sign up first and then they went to. There was a landing page basically that described the blog post, sign up here and I'll send you right to it. And it just took them to the blog post on the site and, and again I did feel like, I wonder, is this betchiky? Like it's free anyway. But I was still sending them to a really valuable thing and I didn't get any complaints. So.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: And just as a caveat, I think that like, if you're talking about like this, you know, kind of fortuitous circle of like the content reinforcing the list growth. I think that is where a platform like Substack is really nice because like email capture is fundamental on those platforms.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's the one thing that hasn't changed though, isn't it? That the people that do well, the people that grow are the ones that grow, the ones that develop a process whereby every bit of content and every type of content sends you to three or four other bits of content and or at least one place that captures some detail. So email list is generally always number one, isn't it? But if not email, then send them to another podcast episode, send them to the YouTube companion version, send them to a couple of YouTube shorts even to grow some engagement, that kind of thing. There's always is systematically, you know, built in a next step to go to directly. And that's something that we did well, I think in our content with the blog and the email. So we always had that flywheel between the written content and the email. But I didn't necessarily. Slightly ironically, given we were a podcasting company, I never quite buttoned down the podcast to be as good as it could have been for converting for CTA is for really always having like tracking in it, all that kind of stuff. And similar with video as well, I think.
[00:36:10] Speaker A: I mean, I think the reality is like a podcast is hard to grow and hard to convert from. I think the goal, like what we tell folks is like the goal of the podcast is to deepen existing relationships. It's not to convert cold audiences to prospects or customers. Like, I just don't think that's, you know, we say like every piece of content has a job, you know, and the job is, you know, reach or virality or nurturing or conversion or whatever. The job of a podcast is is like never converting, I don't think.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's the trust. It's the trust factor. It's way down the funnel. It's way down that engagement funnel. Like you're kind of capturing the cold people with the short form, with the written content, with the social media, all that kind of stuff. And. But if you can get them to watch a 20 minute YouTube video and then you can get them to listen to a 60 minute podcast episode, then yeah, they're so far down the funnel that they're easy to sell at that point for sure.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: Yeah. How do you think about like in person events and I'll do like a marketing, I guess. Right. Like how I know you And I have met up in person a few times, but I mean, it's hard. We work in like online worlds mostly.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: I went to those events. I went to podcast movement, I went to PodFest, I went to Inbound, I went to tons of marketing Ones Pro blogger. I went to ones for just about any kind of. The one thing I didn't. Haven't managed to find actually is a good set of YouTube or video conferences. I know a few exist, like VidCon and things like that, but never managed to get to any. But point is, I always went to them more for collaborations and partnerships than anything else. So it was similar to this. Like, I think there's so much difference when you've met somebody in person. The fact that you've met only two or three times in person I think makes a huge difference to being able to do stuff like this online from now on.
And people.
Maybe this is another thing that's going to be even more and more important in the coming five, 10 years because you'll get AI avatars. Just seeing somebody in the flesh confirms that that person isn't verified human, and it means they're not an AI avatar. So if you can speak at events, then suddenly you're a real person on a stage that people have seen in the flesh that maybe you trust more because of that. I think unequivocally that's the case for me, certainly. And if you get to talk to them as well, then that deepens that even further. So I've never found. Are you asking, though, a little bit about like, marketing at events? Because I've tried taking stands and booths and things like that at events in the past, but I never found that.
[00:38:44] Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, not. Not like conventional, like getting a booth or whatever. I guess, like both of us are. Is like, I don't expect to close individual customers at events. I would go to events to network with other folks in the space to present.
Most of the time I go to an event, I will want to speak.
Sounds so cheesy and. Or like increase my thought leadership somehow. You know, like host a happy hour or do a thing or, you know, like. Yeah, I don't want to just go as a participant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're the highest form of leverage opportunity that there is because. Yeah, I mean, like, you go, you know, have a coffee or a drink or a meal with someone. Like, you're in like, so, so good. My previous world was in the medical field and we were doing like these experimental procedures and like clinical research. And every time before we did one of these procedures. We would take the doctor out to dinner the night before.
[00:39:44] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, really?
[00:39:44] Speaker A: And I would always ask, I was like, why are we taking this guy out to dinner? He's like, because we would have, like, other doctors come in and mentor these. These doctors. And, like, the mentor doctors would say, like, because tomorrow I'm gonna have to say something to this guy that is challenging, and I want to have this, like, rapport built up so that he doesn't look at me like I'm an idiot or he feels threatened or whatever. And I think that's the same because, like, you're trying to close a coaching client or consulting or a partner or whatever, you're gonna have to, like, you've built up this credit balance with them, and you're gonna have to borrow from that. You know, like, hey, I need you to go to the cfo. I need you to close this deal. Here's the. Here's the price for my services. Whatever.
If you don't have those credits built up, that's harder. And. But by far, the best way is just like, being in person with someone.
[00:40:33] Speaker B: Yeah, agreed. Absolutely agreed. I've always thought it was an underrated way to grow a podcast. Actually, I often recommended that as a growth tactic because I think it's. It was never a good way to grow a blog, let's say, because, you know, converting one blog reader into a sale is very, very, very difficult. Like, you maybe need a thousand blog readers or 10,000 blog readers. Similar with video. Maybe you need a thousand YouTube watchers to turn into a conversion. But with podcasts, you know, you can. You know, you have a hundred listeners in a show. You can convert 50% of them because of the amount of time they spend with you, the trust you get. So if you can turn somebody you meet at a conference into a listener, they come along and list. Maybe they come and listen. Maybe they become a customer. But equally, podcasting grows really well through word of mouth as well. So they tell somebody else in their, you know, their local group that covers the same topic, and they become a listener too. So it's a really. It's a really great way to grow a show. Yeah.
[00:41:25] Speaker A: So, like, specifically, you're.
You're working on, like, whatever your next thing is besides the golf thing. Maybe the golf thing is your next thing. I don't know. But. But let's say it's not, like, what's your kind of immediate. I know you're. You're taking the rest of the month off, and then when you hit the ground running. What's your plan for like, creating content and starting to build, like, so momentum?
[00:41:46] Speaker B: The top priorities right now, and I feel like we've kind of skirted around this already in the last 45 minutes, is video and newsletter together. I think the video, though, I'm thinking about starting at least primarily through podcasting, so conversations with other people. I think I'm fine with creating stuff on my own, and I will do some of that as well. But actually, I think just that regular routine, there's something really powerful about the regular routine of just getting on a recording every week. Having a podcast like this that you do every single week, pick out three or four topics, turn that into shorter segments. That kind of approach we talked about earlier, I think that is a great way to build up a YouTube channel. And at the same time, you've got a podcast that goes alongside it that you can point people to as well. And then from that, creating the newsletter. And the newsletter is the kind of that, like we say, that kind of circular flywheel that really drives both of them. And I'm going a bit further here. It wouldn't certainly be the first priority, but turning that into blog posts, turn that into LinkedIn posts, turning it into short form Twitter, all based on your own voice, I think that'd be the next step. So that was kind of my plan, like, I think probably, well, something I definitely want to do next is do a bit more consulting, coaching, advisory. I love the idea of working with three or four, like, startups or something like that to like a few days a month type of thing and helping them with that type of stuff, setting up workflows like that with them.
And the way to get that would be to do more talking, like we're doing right now, just to talk about, you know, modern business, that kind of stuff. So applying that process to rogue startups here over the next month might be fun.
[00:43:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, this show has been underserved from a marketing and repurposing perspective, for sure. Like it's the cobbler's kids have no shoes kind of thing, for sure. The one thing I would say about that, I love the approach. The one bit of nuance I would say about, like, it's a video or it's a YouTube channel, or it's a, you know, video podcast or whatever. Like, very fuzzy lines. It being a co host show like this or a solo, you know, I think in this format or in a solo show, each of us get to share our expertise a lot In a guest interview type show, I think it's harder.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: Yeah, totally.
[00:43:55] Speaker A: Even though that's where you learned like I love, like I had Jason Cohen on. I'm working on a couple other really big guests. Like that's great. But I don't know how much that helps people perceive me as an expert. Maybe that's not the goal, I don't know. But it's just an observation. Yeah.
[00:44:09] Speaker B: There's an element of benefit though to growing the channel as a whole, isn't there? And so we've been thinking about this with the Golf Channel actually in that it's mostly a co hosted show. That's how I like to record. I don't like doing interviews, honestly I don't enjoy them that much. I kind of get stressed out about them and kind of worry about asking the right questions and then following what they are saying while also asking the questions. I've got written down all of that stuff. It's a real skill to be a good interviewer. So I like co hosted much better. But we've done a couple of interviews and they've done really well because we've got reasonably well known names, not these super famous, but even people that tens of thousands of people have heard of makes a difference in a smallish industry.
And the segments from them have done quite well on the YouTube channel too actually. So interestingly, the YouTube channel definitely doesn't require it to be me or to be Ross, my co host. And they have grown the channel subscribers overall who then hopefully see obviously the stuff from us as well. So yeah, I think you're right, the interviews don't. But I think mixing them in can be a bit of a growth lever for sure.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: And I think that that'll be the format of this show. You know, you and I will chat a lot, have a couple of guests planned. It's once a month or one every three episodes or something like that. I think that's a. That's like a reasonable cadence.
[00:45:28] Speaker B: So yeah. What's your first go to? If you were starting a brand new one just now, what's your first one or two channels?
[00:45:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it has to be video just because it's so AI proof, you know, it's not entirely AI proof. The generative stuff is very, very good. But I think that you know, it's the highest fidelity so you can distill down to other forms and distribute everywhere else. You can't go from short form to long form, written to audio and video very well.
With the exception of what I know Some people do is they use short form written as kind of the hypothesis testing ground. So they'll just put a bunch of stuff out. If they get a winning topic, then that's the video for the week.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Yeah, interesting.
[00:46:08] Speaker A: So again, like, you know how organized intentional are you about about it, like maybe short form and the signals from short form inform the long form and then it gets distilled back down like that. That's reasonable. Yeah, yeah. For me it actually is all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. Like the YouTube and the YouTube channel is really great and is a really great asset. I don't know what is unique about me in that respect, you know, and it's all about AI. I've kind of flirted back with like business and marketing topics. Those have done very bad. I think the biggest challenge I have is what I don't want to be is kind of shackled to the news cycle of every new product release.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: And so how do you make an AI channel that is evergreen I think is kind of hard because a lot of it, all of it changes. And so the thought of like planning AI YouTube video out a month away is challenging.
Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. It's an open question. And then that drives everything. It drives, it drives leaves magnet and the rest of the content and the sponsors and monetization and all that kind of stuff.
[00:47:16] Speaker B: So do you know the thing that I'm most interested to look into brand new actually over the next few months and I'm going to spend a bit of time on this. I've never really spent that much time on it in the past. Is paid. Nothing new. Obviously paid advertising has been around forever, but in the past it's usually been the realm of people with funding. Takes a lot of money. Once you get it running, it can pay itself back obviously. But it often takes quite a lot of money either to get it set up, like you burn quite a lot to kind of hone it in or you have to hire an agency for fine or 10k a month or whatever. But building an AI agent or a tool workflow of some sort that can actually handle that for you is very interesting. And equally, I think there's plenty of inklings from like meta, from all the rest whereby they're going to try and make it so that they have their own agents. It's in their interest to make it super easy for us and to make us our money as well. So might be that even a budget of like 30, 40, 50 quid or $50 might actually be quite effective in the near future, too. So, yeah, I'm quite interested to look into that. Not something I've made work in the past.
[00:48:21] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it sounds like a good bridge. We'll talk about that next time maybe. I think paid is a fantastic way to grow a business. Not something we've done much of either. So, yeah, I'd love to talk about maybe kind of like what you feel like needs to be in place to make paid work. Because I do think that's, like, I think where a lot of folks fall short.
[00:48:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:40] Speaker A: Cool. Colin, this is fun. Thank you.
[00:48:42] Speaker B: Yeah, same, same. Absolutely. Looking forward to more.
