Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now it's Jeff Umbro. Jeff, you are the CEO of Pod Agglomerate. You are on the web at Pod agglomerate.com. lest anyone worry about the spelling on that, not to worry at all.

Speaker 1 00:01:20 You just click around in your podcast app, click on the show notes information icon, cover art. You just click around your podcast app. You'll find a direct link to Pod agglomerate.com. Jeff, it's great to have you here.

Speaker 2 00:01:31 Thanks. It's great to be here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:01:33 Well, give us a bit of an overview of who the pod agglomerate is.

Speaker 2 00:01:38 Sure. Yeah. So we're a podcast services company. we produce, market and monetize podcasts. It's all we do all day, every day. we've been around since 2017. We work with a lot of really, really big clients like Netflix, Freakonomics, PBS, MIT, Stanford, Harvard. and yeah, I can dive into each of those little pieces, but, in addition to like the the big ones, which are fun to put on to like, social media posts and stuff. we also do quite a bit of work with like small and medium businesses, think tanks, universities, just individual people who are trying to get their show out there.

Speaker 2 00:02:16 and, and. Yeah, happy to take that in any direction you want.

Speaker 1 00:02:20 Yeah. Well, you know, to, and this is what I was suggesting. If someone wants to see all of the shows that you have your hands in. it's it's a pretty good roster. including, such shows, as, Freakonomics. one of my favorite. but, yeah, a lot of, like, PBS oriented shows and PR, PR, you know, those types of shows. bedtime stories with Netflix Junior. How cool is that? Okay, so, given that this is what you do, you've been, you know, in the podcasting space here and, you know, really developed a pretty strong, professional Reputation. I would love just to kind of hear it from you regarding where we are with podcasting today.

Speaker 2 00:03:09 Sure. Big question. but podcasting is a growing medium. every metric is pointed to year over year growth for, I think, 16 years straight. there's a really great, program called the Edison Infinite Dial Report that anybody can download for free.

Speaker 2 00:03:27 They updated every March, and it shows you kind of the year over year growth of the industry. of all social media and audio in general. But like specifically, they have a benchmarking report for podcasting. you can see that more people than ever are listening to shows. I believe that there's about 132 million people who are listening on, on some kind of recurring basis every month. they averaged about seven shows, simultaneously. There's a lot of kind of, upheaval in the industry in the last few years.

Speaker 1 00:04:01 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2 00:04:02 Yeah. I mean, it's been exciting and it's grown so quickly. And with the pandemic, like, everybody was moving to like, any kind of, like streaming audio and video. and because of that, there's a lot of, like, M&A activity in the space and consolidation and, you know, Spotify, SiriusXM, iHeart radio, Apple and many others have all really tried to cement themselves as like bigger players in that space. And and they're doing that in many ways.

Speaker 2 00:04:29 But one of them is by bringing in other companies under their umbrella and other publishers. And, and with that consolidation comes like, different panels and different ways of operating those businesses. And the result of that is kind of a shift in, the kinds of shows that are being produced, to optimize more for, like ad sales and listener engagement as opposed to kind of what we had grown accustomed to in the industry in the last decade with shows like serial or anything that gimlet was producing, which would be like these really beautiful long form narrative shows. they they were really expensive to make and they weren't making a lot of money. and that's why we're seeing kind of a shift towards more of the Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO type shows that are generally just like a couple people in front of microphones talking. because they're much easier to produce every week. You can do a lot more of them, and you can sell ads against those a lot easier. so so, yeah, I mean, the super high level details are more people than ever are listening.

Speaker 2 00:05:31 There's, like a lot of innovation in the space over the years, but in the last couple of years, it feels a little bit stale in a lot of ways. And, and the thing I didn't touch on is that, there are a million studies out there that are showing that advertising on podcasting is, more effective than advertising in any other digital medium. And you're seeing a lot more brands coming into the space because of that, because they want their own piece of the pie. So.

Speaker 1 00:06:00 Yeah. so the I'd like to hear just a bit about Pod Agglomerate where you came from, and how have you gone on to produce just so many shows? My suspicion is that you, are, like these types of shows. I bet that, you are pretty big in the, the podcast movement, conference space. these are podcast movement shows right here. Man.

Speaker 2 00:06:30 I love it. Thank you. yeah. Well, we actually have three different business lines. So, like, while we do produce podcasts, like, we're never actively working on more than 4 or 5 shows at any given moment.

Speaker 2 00:06:41 we've just been around for about a decade. we have ten people full time on staff, so like that helps a lot. Like, we're able to do a lot more than just one person is able to do on their own. but we, are producing currently, I think four podcasts that are active out in the space. and we have a couple more in development right now. some of them are owned and operated. I have a show called Podcast Perspectives where it's very similar to this, but I'm talking to people in the podcast space every day. I guess every week, and then we produce a bunch of shows for like, universities and small media companies and that kind of thing. and that is really fun. although, with that shift that I was talking about before in the industry, like it's becoming a little bit more of like, it's a different equation when people are trying to decide, whether they should be investing in, like, the podcast space in the future. and something I really like to talk about a lot is like, should you be making a podcast? Should you be prioritizing guesting on other podcasts to talk about your idea? or should you be prioritizing buying ad space on other podcasts with whatever budget you would put into, like, your own show? And, and it is, you know, kind of like the idea of renting versus owning.

Speaker 2 00:08:02 and, and I have a different answer to that question of whether or not you should try and rent versus own based on who I'm speaking with. but but yeah, we produce a lot of different podcasts. We also have a very robust marketing arm where we're running like PR marketing, cross promo app pitching and paid acquisition campaigns on behalf of, you know, at any given moment, a dozen different podcasts. and we represent as well, about 30 shows in the monetization front. so we we assist them in selling ads, you know, directly. Programmatically. or like broader partnerships. we've been doing that since 2017. And I actually got into the space, because I was formerly a book publicist, and I was creating my own podcast on the side for fun. And one day it just one day it just clicked and it was like, that's the thing that I love doing, and I have the most fun doing. So I'm just going to do that forever. And here we are. so, so we do a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2 00:09:04 You can check it all out at the com, and we have, Yeah, we have a lot of different clients that we work with and client profiles. Yeah. And, very happy to chat with anybody about whether or not a podcast would be a good fit for them.

Speaker 1 00:09:20 Jeff, you were kind of talking a bit about, growth. what are best practices today? Let's see that you're speaking with an independent podcaster. they may even have limited budget to work with, but they know that they really want to grow the audience size of their show. What do you generally recommend, as you know, kind of best practices for that? you know, probably the first is, you know, have a decent show. Yeah. Have some, some decent content to, to, to impact the world with. But I'll let you kind of take it from there.

Speaker 2 00:09:53 Yeah. That's step one. have something that's worth sharing. Dan Meisner, a company called Bumper has this great line where he talks a lot about like, does your show need marketing or marketability? And, and that's the first place that you should start is like figuring out if your show is something that people would want to share on their social medias or like that they're really getting something out of.

Speaker 2 00:10:14 And there's a lot of different metrics that you can look at that's available for free for anyone to like, try and figure that out. the big thing that people usually will gravitate towards is just like the number of downloads. but that's not really the best way to look at like, how effective your show is. you should probably be spending more time looking at, like the consumption of the show and like other, kind of like indirect metrics, like, how many times you get quoted on social media or how many emails you get from listeners, or how many times your guest tells you that they, like, loved the experience? there's a lot of different ways, and everyone's going to have a different idea of like what that KPI is. But assuming you have a good show and that you like, understand what your metrics are telling you about it. you, can can do a lot like the two easiest, lower, lowest lift, initiatives would probably be like, are you utilizing your owned properties, like your website, your newsletter, your social media in the proper way? a lot of people, like, are not really doing that.

Speaker 2 00:11:20 I don't think social media is the best way to grow an audience organically. it just shows that in the metrics that, like, there are very few shows that really can drive like downloads from like a post on LinkedIn or Twitter or something. they can get clicks and attention, but it it's different from like getting a listener. and then,

Speaker 1 00:11:42 Why do you think that is?

Speaker 2 00:11:44 Well, it's just an overcrowded marketplace and, it's it's very saturated. I think a lot of people who are on LinkedIn, like, are not necessarily in the mindset to listen to a podcast. there's a million reasons. but overall, it's just like these are platforms that are built for people browsing. And yeah, they are not necessarily platforms that are built for, like long term engagement. and even, by the way, like YouTube shorts or like TikToks and stuff, like there's really not that much data that shows that you can drive people from short form to short form to long form, you know, really effective manner. what does work really well is what's called a cross-promotion.

Speaker 2 00:12:25 so partnering with similar shows and advertising one show on that property and then advertising your show on that property. So, for example, like, you know, if I'm going to, like run a swap with you, I would put an ad for your show on my show podcast perspectives. And I would, like, say, hey, this was really great. I did an interview. I had a ton of fun. You should all go check it out. And then you would do the same for me. and there are ways to track, like pixel attribution tracking for audio to audio swaps. And you can really see, like, how effective these promotions are. So, you know, total number of impressions, conversions, downloads, listeners, etc. and like how people are engaging with the show at that point. and and it's free, you know, you own the real estate so you can do that as many times as you want. You can do that with multiple shows on on every episode. You can use dynamic audio insertion so that you're putting it across your entire catalog.

Speaker 2 00:13:21 there's a lot of ways to do that really effectively. and, you know, there's a bunch of tools like re phonic, we'll build out like a podcast neighborhood map to show you similar shows in the space. pod chaser has email addresses that are pulled from RSS feeds that are on those shows, or attached to those shows. And then, even if you just pull up your podcast and scroll to the bottom of the page on Apple or Spotify, it'll give you a list of like, recommended podcasts which are pulled from their algorithm. It's showing like if people are subscribed to X show, then they are also usually listening to Y show, and you're able to actually just build a list based on that. And then you can just shoot an email to everybody and say like, hey, I'm interested in a cross promo. so those are two ways, like really doubling down on your own properties and running some cross promos, that are proven time and time again to be really effective at growing a show.

Speaker 1 00:14:14 Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:14:15 That's great. I appreciate the the insights on that. regarding monetization as well, what do you see as kind of the current state of that side of podcasting, things healthy or, you know, are there new considerations?

Speaker 2 00:14:33 healthy is in the eye of the beholder. there's a lot of conversation right now about like, the the 1% of podcasting. and, and it is true that, like, you know, there probably a thousand shows that are commanding, like, more than half of the total ad market that's out there right now. so there are a lot of shows that are doing very well that are bringing in millions of dollars based on their size. and you see that in like, the headlines with Alex Cooper and Joe Rogan and Smartness and Dax Shepard and everything else. there is a very, very strong middle class of podcasters. I would say that, like, often go under the radar and, you know, if your show is doing 50,000 downloads a month, then it is like very easy to be honest.

Speaker 2 00:15:20 Well, I don't want to say easy, but it's very achievable to, to find people who are interested in that audience. You sell those ads at a CPM. It's a pretty easy like, you know, back of the envelope math problem to figure out, like your CPM times, the number of ads that you sold, times the number of ads that you put on every episode. and you can figure out how much money you're going to make if you work with an agency, like they're going to take a cut. but I would say that. And then on top of that, there's a programmatic marketplace that's available at this point for most of your hosting platforms like megaphone, Simple Cast, Omni, that that really does drive some decent money. Like you're not talking millions of dollars, But if your show is of like a substantial size, like you can be talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars every month that you get in your pocket from doing nothing but hitting a button and turning it on. so all of that to say, I would say that the industry is, I don't know.

Speaker 2 00:16:19 I don't, I don't it's healthy for most, unhealthy for some. And overall, I think it is more sustainable than it has ever been. which is a really, encouraging thing for me.

Speaker 1 00:16:34 Jeff, your website, pod agglomerate.com. who should be reaching out? Who do you work with?

Speaker 2 00:16:42 I work with a lot of people, who are kind of like, I would say middle or top tier publishers. so and I mean that in terms of like, size and budget and that kind of thing. we're not the shop to go to if you're looking to spend, like, you know, 100 bucks an episode and have your show produced. But we're also not going to charge you, you know, half $1 million to make your show. so we work with a lot of think tanks, nonprofits, universities, media companies and individuals who, like, might be using, their shows like a tool for lead generation. those are the people that I think would be most happy with the services that we provide.

Speaker 2 00:17:23 and, but we're happy to talk to anybody. We have a form on our website that you can fill out with your information and really, really happy to, to hop on a call with anybody to talk about podcasts.

Speaker 1 00:17:36 All right. So your website again pod agglomerate.com. when you just pull that up you'll certainly see the roster shows. It is impressive. PBS, HubSpot, Netflix, Expedia, NPR, History Channel, Freakonomics, to name a few. again, that's pod.com. there's a button right on the front page. You can click work with us and and certainly get in touch that way. Jeff, Umbro, you are the CEO. Thank you so much for joining. And this has been a great conversation.

Speaker 2 00:18:09 Thank you.

Speaker 1 00:18:10 Really appreciate it. Producing great shows out there.

Speaker 2 00:18:12 I'll do my best.

Speaker 1 00:18:20 Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence. Com and click on podcast.

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