John Lee Dumas
John Lee Dumas is the host of Entrepreneurs ON FIRE, an award winning Podcast where he interviews Entrepreneurs 7-days a week. With over 1800 interviews, 1.3 million monthly listens, and an annual revenue of 7-figures, JLD is just getting started on his Entrepreneurial journey.
How do you create a million dollar podcast funnel?
John Lee Dumas averages 1.3 million listens per month with over 60 million downloads to date. His podcast, Entrepreneur on Fire, is one of the most successful entrepreneurial podcasts available.
How did he amass such a huge audience?
By creating his own marketing funnel, called the Fire Funnel.
A funnel’s purpose is to take the avatar from the moment they experience a brand to becoming a customer, client or evangelist of it.
There are two funnels within the Fire Funnel, the funnel up and the funnel down.
Funnel up starts at the top with an idea.
This first step is the difference between podcasts that succeed and fail. The
podcast idea has to marry two qualities:
- Your curiosity
- Your passion
This is the zone of fire, when curiosity and passion co-mingle. The idea is
the seed, planted to grow, hopefully, into a massive sequoia. The sequoia of podcasts occurs when passion and curiosity fit into a niche. Amateur podcasts attempt to resonate with everybody.
Million dollar podcasts niche down.
Niching down automatically creates a podcast designed for a very specific avatar, also called the perfect listener. Who is the podcast’s perfect listener and what do they want to hear?
After asking who the perfect listener is, the key in all of marketing is to ask where they are. Since podcasts are mainly in iTunes, Soundcloud and Spotify, putting each episode on these platforms brings the perfect podcast to the perfect listener.
Create the content that a perfect listener wants to hear, place it in front of them and then do what every smart content creator does.
Repurpose the content.
Take the podcast and repurpose it for other channels. For example, a Facebook live video can be repurposed as a podcast and YouTube video or an Instagram video. How can each podcast be edited to suit different platforms and grow a wider audience?
All of these different platforms have different influencers that are happy to
promote a podcast, given it’s within their niche, to their audience.
Investing in the content produced is essential to growth. Organic reach is only
a part of the Fire Funnel, influencer marketing is also a major player.
Once the podcast is placed in front of people, just like any other type of content, engagement is going to be the reason it succeeds. How can you increase engagement on the podcast?
Audience engagement needs to be part of the plan all the time, regardless of how busy or popular a content creator becomes.
The founder of LinkedIn, Reed Hoffman, credits his success to sometimes doing things that don’t scale. Having a 15-minute Skype call with somebody who comments on a social platform about how much they enjoy it doesn’t necessarily scale but it creates genuine engagement.
These Skype calls are to show gratitude but to also ask questions. Find out how listeners are finding the content and where they are listening to it and then amplify these channels.
This provides solutions to any problems the podcast is facing. Want to increase listeners? Ask the people listening how they found the podcast. Want to increase engagement on repurposed content? Ask the people engaging what platform they like best.
It also shows the podcast owner what the listeners want to hear more of. What areas within a niche do people want to learn more about?
How can you answer these questions and be the person these listeners come to for their answers?
The Fire Funnel Up is the first step in podcast curation. It’s the foundation of
the multi-million dollar podcast. The second step is the Fire Funnel Down.
Funnel down starts with lead generation and aims to end with a transaction.
Lead generation is the content created. This content can be podcasts, photos or videos. Each piece of content has a call to action at the beginning, in the main part of the content and at the end of the content. These calls to action can rotate per episode. For example, in the Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast there are eight call to actions rotated from episode to episode.
Motivating listeners to partake in a call to action like subscribing to an email list involves a value point. This email exchange opens up a direct communication line between podcaster and listener. It is followed by some type of delivery.
Funneling Up told you what problem the listeners wanted an answer to. This answer is a call to action. For example, delivering free courses via email with
ways for a listener to fix their problem motivates them to give away their email address. The audience continues to consume the content from the podcaster and another call to action is placed within the beginning, middle and end of the content.
One of the best sales techniques is in live webinars. Live trainings create a relationship between audience and podcaster. It gives the podcaster a
chance to shout out the people watching and the people watching a chance to ask their questions.
Live trainings coupled with live question and answer videos are the best place to put a premium offer. The people watching are the ideal customer of the podcaster and the product being offered is the ideal product for them.
Using the Fire Funnel, the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast has grown to amass a community of aspiring entrepreneurs ready to put their time and money towards whatever John Lee Dumas tells them too.
The Entrepreneur on Fire podcast has courses, webinars, and Kickstarter help for aspiring podcasters. Visit eofire.com to learn more about creating a million dollar podcast.