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James Schramko and Dan Andrews discuss the ins-and outs of successful Podcasting + the difference between affiliate promotions versus true market leadership in the coming years. Dan has a popular podcast called LifeStyleBusinessPodcast.com with his co-host Ian Schoen which has had over one million downloads.
Dan Andrews and James Schramko
Highlights in this episode:
- Lessons learned from Dan and Ian who have had over a million downloads since 2009
- Setting up a a weekly schedule for podcasting
- How the Comedy intro gets created
- How do you come up with the content
- The power of having a super clear structure
- Forcing yourself through a really tight funnel
- Dans special 8 part show structure
- Why 7 days is easily long enough to create a quality show
- We take a look bend the scenes
- Frameworks are essential for creating productivity
- My favorite app for creating frameworks
- Dans ‘Sam Carpenter + James Schramko’ Cocktail
- The 6 Point Checklist for audio quality
- Can you use someone else’s music in your show?
- The amateur / pro distinction in podcasting and content creation
- See the Chocolate Waffle
- The Ferrari episode behind the scenes stats
- Focus on growing your business
- Tradtional entertainment outlets suck
- Dan the traffic poacher
- Use customer driven requests to rule the business
- Very low friction for getting into tasks
- Habit to make things simple
- Rapid posting technique
- My SnapWorker concept
- Do it right the first time get things done
- Doing it right now can increase your capacity
- Keeping a clear schedule
- Getting an incredible amounnt of things done.
- Email management is a mindset shift
- When you create – hold your feet to the fire and take
- Dan on writing a book
- Affiliate versus authority market leadership
- Why you only need to please 100 true fans
- The problem with the affiliate distribution
- Long term sustainability
- Dan Norris
- The high priced info product circle of marketing that sucks
- Bonus affiliate marketing
- James on making the decision to stop promoting guru products
- TrafficGrab was the start of fair value products
- Adsense Flippers
- Tim Conley
- Brendan Tully
- 25% – 15% to 5% affiliate marketing squeeze with my own marketing system
- LPB Episode 1
- The difference between selling opportunities versus results
- Why biz pop people are always launching
- The anatomy of the Internet Marketing Gold Rush
- Stop buying Crap
- Just deliver a good product that solves the problem rather than bonus stacking
- Don’t target the down and out $2000 products
- How my new business model is helping people build their own business
- I am betting my success on the success of my customers
- Duh – when you empower an entreprenuer you can be rocketing your business
- Keep customers for two or three years
- FreedomOcean.com
- Framework for show notes
- OwnTheRacecourse.com
- Why intro music is overrated
- Dans rip sheet for the LBP
- Focus on the result
- Narrative section in the podcast
- What is going on with SuperFastBusiness
- Who better to equip than your best fans
- People have timing signals in their life
- Public deadlines help you publish
- Shout out to listeners
- Adam Carolla
Transcription:
James: James Schramko here, today I’m talking to another podcaster who has been making his way into my iPad mini. One of the very few podcasts that I listen to every single week. Welcome to the show Dan Andrews from Lifestyle Business podcast.
Dan: Thank you James.
James: Thought it’d be good to catch up because we’ve been crossing paths a little bit lately. We both have podcasts. We’re both doing our own thing out there creating communities and content. So we have a lot of things in common. And I thought it’d be good to just catch up and talk about, at this time of the year, some of the things that we’re doing for next year, and some of the things that are influencing our business. I thought it’d be a great discussion for our listeners to catch up with. So welcome to the show.
Dan: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
James: I might just start off by just doing a little bit of an introduction. I’m sure that many of my listeners have picked up on my Facebook alerts and tweets that I’m following the lifestyle business podcast show, but if you could just give us a little bit of background on that so that just in case any listeners aren’t already listening to it, it’s on my high recommendation list. Tell us all about it.
The Lifestyle Business podcast
Dan: Yeah. Thanks a lot for that by the way. That’s obviously very flattering and it works, so let’s put it out in the open. I did join your SilverCircle because I wanted to learn from you and I found you vis a vis a podcast. So before we get started with any kind of podcast marketing evangelism, that is proof in the pudding right there. So anyway, thank you again for having me on the show.
So, the Lifestyle Business podcast, I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2007, being inspired by stuff like The 4-Hour Workweek. I started travelling while I was running my business. At the time, I was really the only guy I could find on the Internet that was travelling and having a traditional hard goods business with a warehouse, a sales staff and everything like that.
So I just started putting out a podcast talking about it. That was in late 2009. I really could not have predicted sort of what happened. We put ourselves on a schedule. We started putting out shows every week. Over a million downloads later, we have an amazing community of passionate entrepreneurs who are interested in growing great businesses and travelling while they do it.
James: Tell me about your co-host on that too.
Dan: Yes. No mention of the show would be warranted without bringing up Ian, my best friend and business partner. So we do everything 50/50, including the podcast.
James: Now each episode, you have some comedic introduction of Ian. Who comes up with that stuff?
Creativity through structure
Dan: That’s me. You know, a lot of people think that, “How do you come up with the content?” It’s really simple, if you have a super clear structure. I call it creativity through structure, forcing yourself through a really tight funnel. There’s really only eight parts of the show, and they are super elemental. I just have to come up with a simple little joke every week, and I’ve got seven days to do it, so it’s not really that hard as long as I know for seven days that I need to do that.
Same deal goes for the quick tip at the end. I need a final one interesting thing, and I might even pick that up by following you on Facebook or with the “meat and potatoes.” It’s a list of five items every week. So I only need to think of one interesting list of five items every week. So I think as a third party, it might initially look complex and difficult. But when you look behind the scenes and look at the creative process, it’s actually very simple to create.
James: I call these frameworks, and they’ve been powering my business. In the beginning, I didn’t even know that I had them. But I just made them habit. But lately, I’ve been pulling out this reminders app on my Mac, which synchronizes with the iPad and the iPhone. So wherever I am, I can just add a new framework. I actually have a codec. It sounds kind of geeky, but I put F, then a space, and then a hyphen, and then the name of the framework.
At the moment, I’ve got a framework I’m looking at called “interviews.” That means if I’m going to interview someone or will have a chat with someone, I can pull out the framework, and it’s just got the basic stuff like “Tell me your biggest challenge” or “What does next year look like for you?” or “Put a plug fish show.”
So I’ve got a framework that is a checklist, the same way that a pilot would run an airplane, the same way that a doctor would be managing a hospital. If you have checklists to fall back on, then you can actually free up and focus on that creative stuff.
Can you tell us what the eight points are? I love about your show, I like the little pre-intro, where you take something from within the show and put it before the bumper. I like that little music transitions and stuff. I’ve been meaning to ask you how that comes together but you’ve explained it. There is actually a template.
The 8 parts of the show
Dan: Yes. So this is fascinating because I’ve been making sort of a Sam Carpenter and James Schramko cocktail in my own life. I don’t know why I’ve resisted doing things like you’re talking about, like these frameworks. They make so much sense, I think part of me really resisted them because I thought they might have been cheesy or overwrought. But then I realized some of the most successful parts of my business rely on this stuff.
Just the other week, we had a problem where, you know the biggest part of our podcast audio is ensuring that the need of recording is quality. We were really letting our editor down by giving him crappy quality audio every week. So now, Ian and I have a six-point checklist like a pilot before we start a podcast.
We actually walk through it in earnest. I don’t know, maybe a year ago, I would have thought that was cheesy, but now, I’m listening to guys like you and reading Sam Carpenter and thinking, I’m going to work this system. This is a system that has been proven to deliver value to people. I’m not going to screw it up with my momentary lapse of good judgement. So you know, just as an example before we get on our podcast, we say, “Flip on the task audio or the audio levels between .5 and .7” If you don’t talk, “Is the audio level completely flat?” And we do confirmations back and forth like pilot co-pilot.
In terms of the show notes, it’s a shared document with my team. It’s developed over the course of every week. It’s really simple. There’s an intro, there’s a title, there’s a joke, there’s a tease if you stick around to the end of the episode, there’s a news section, an iTunes shout and shouts around the web, questions from users. So you can see if you just put one piece of content under each structure or piece, you can really start to build out a pretty robust show. Then we have a meat and potatoes, which every week is 5-point list. Then we move on to just the tips, and we outro to music. That’s really it. So that’s a pretty simple list to fill out, given that we have seven days to do it.
James: Are you allowed to use sample music from an artist? Like a little grab of it? Do you get in trouble for that?
Dan: So fair use says that you can’t directly profit from the usage of somebody else’s copyrighted music. So my interpretation of the rule is if you mention the artist and use it to reference the artist, then it’s fine. But if you were to use an artist’s work every single week as a critical element of your show, then it would be copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer by the way.
James: Love it. See I don’t listen to your show just for that piece of music, but it does add a huge amount of value. For me, it’s a little window into your personality, what sort of music do you like. I’ve started adding little piece of music to the backend of my videos each week with B-roll. I’ve been out roaming around my property here with my camera shooting B-rolls because I want to make it more interesting for my listener.
I’ve directly taken that inspiration from your podcast because I think that’s what makes your podcast good, aside from the fact that we seem to have a great alignment in values and a tremendously aligned business philosophy, which I’d love to dive into around this whole affiliate, authority marketing thing that the transition I’ve been going through lately.
And in part, it’s your community that have influenced me a little bit there through some of the crossover people that we’ve had that have come across and joined us up so to speak. It’s the actual scenario. I do want to talk more about podcasts. One thing you said before is it works.
So you’ve joined SilverCircle. I guess because you must have discovered me through one of my podcasts.
Dan: Yes. FreedomOcean. I spent a week bingeing on FreedomOcean, a quiet riding week in Vietnam. This is a magical thing, to be able to have a week by myself in Vietnam and to have a great book, and then to have found this new podcast, and to walk around. You wouldn’t even know it, but I’m learning a lot from you, and I’m getting used to making value out of the kinds of knowledge that you have. So I’m pretty trained by the time that I get to talk to you on the phone or get to engage with some of your products, and I think that’s pretty magical.
Amateur pro-distinction
One quick thing I want to say to you about a topic you mentioned earlier, which is adding some of your personality to the content. I think there’s an important amateur pro-distinction. Amateur content generators tend to indulge their content with their personal quirks. So they’ll take time in their show to kind of talk about irrelevant personal issues before they’ve earned that trust or attention.
I think it’s much more of a pro move to actually be delivering value that’s sort of colored by your taste rather than ticking people’s attention to display them your tastes. Does that distinction make sense?
James: Yeah, it’s a good distinction. If anything, I’ve often been thought of as being too dry or direct or just completely business focused. As I’ve sort of put a little bit more personality into my material, I’ve been getting this huge response, probably the most notable was when I was travelling Europe.
Dan: I know already. I know already. You shoved the thing in your mouth. Yes.
James: The chocolate waffle.
