Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:06 Hello and welcome back to the audience podcast. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt from cast us this episode. I'm joined by Jeff Umbro from pod glomerate pod glomerate is a podcast network, something we've talked a lot about here in recent episodes, and I really loved this interview with Jeff where he talks through a lot of kind of how the network works and how it came to be and how they serve the podcast within their network. Jeff and pod glomerate offer three different kind of services to podcasts, and we dig into each of those in this episode, but pay particular attention to the five ways that Jeff likes to think about distribution of podcasts, whether they're from shows within their network or for services they offer to podcasts outside of pet glomerate. I learned a ton from this episode about thinking about distribution and promotion of podcasts and new ways. In particular, Jeff has five methods or a framework of five tools that he uses to help promote and distribute the podcast, both in their network and as a service. They provide four independent podcasts. I hope you enjoy this episode with Jeff Umbro from PUD glomerin.
Speaker 2 01:14 Jeff, do you mind sharing with folks, kind of who you are and what you're up to these days? My name is Jeff Umbro. I am the founder and CEO of the pod glomerate, which is a podcast company based usually out of New York. I'm currently up in New Hampshire during quarantine. We do mainly three things at the pod, glomerate, production, distribution and monetization. So production means we make shows both internally and also white label productions for third parties. Distribution is our version of marketing, publicity, cross-promotion, merchandising, that kind of thing. And we run that for all of our internal shows. Plus we operate this as like an agency model. So if a third party would like to hire us for that, that's a service we offer. And then lastly, we have a number of partners where we help them monetize their show, mostly through ad sales, but occasionally with things like premium content, live events, upselling to different media types, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 02:14 So generally I refer to that as a podcast network, but as I'm sure we'll dig into, there's a lot of different definitions of that. Yeah, and I think that for me that's one of the most interesting things about quote podcast networks is there's a lot of flavors of it and there's a lot of different angles that people can take based on where they are and where they're coming from, maybe what their audience and their demographics and the topic is. But I would really love to kind of start by hearing about kind of how pod glomerate came about. Like how did you guys kind of get started? What was the impetus to launch this? What did the those first kind of couple of shows or customers look like? So you know, along with most other people in podcasting, I think we've gone through a lot of different transitions over the years.
Speaker 2 02:58 This whole thing started, you know, my whole life I wanted to do something with book publishing. I worked in bookstores growing up. I read a lot. I got a job right out of college in publishing. I worked at a book PR firm in New York where we worked with kind of all of the publishers. It was like a boutique firm that would get hired out either because the authors were so large that they needed some extra help or because they were brand new debut authors and they also needed some extra help. So I did that for five or six years. And one of the things I did during that job was I started a podcast. I would interview authors about their careers and one story that they've always struggled to tell for one reason or another, it was called writers who don't write wasn't very good, but I had a lot of fun doing it.
Speaker 2 03:44 I did it with a couple of friends and we used it as lead generation. So every time I brought an author and I would also make sure that they knew that I worked over at this publicity firm and we worked with all of these fancy authors and if they have a book coming out and they needed some help, you know, they could hire us and I would get a small commission from my boss. So that was kind of my first introduction to podcasts, or at least podcast creation. I had been a pretty avid listener for years. A friend showed me this American life when I was in middle school and I kind of never turned back. But after five or six years at this book, PR firm, I just got really bored and an opportunity came up to go and work at a startup out in San Francisco.
Speaker 2 04:25 And I did that. And then very quickly realized, you know, startups are, are fickle things. And I decided that wasn't for me. So I came back to New York and, and I was lucky enough to be able to decide what I wanted to do next. And you know, I had been having a lot of fun with writers in it, right, which is the podcast I had done with the book PR firm and I'd been doing nothing but reading things like hot pod for years. And I thought that I could take a go at starting my own network. And to be honest, I just didn't really have a good sense of what that meant. I literally went into it with the idea of I can bundle a bunch of shows together and monetize them and these shows can't do it on their own because they're so small that nobody's going to want to do it, which is a problem that we had run into it.
Speaker 2 05:09 Writers who don't write. And I pretty quickly realized why people don't do that more often, or at least if they do, they're doing it at a much larger scale than we were. So we kept on kind of transitioning the company to focus in on other aspects. Uh, at first it was production because that paid a lot in, gave us work and then it was you know, monetization mainly because we had matured to a point where there was real money there for us to sell ads on behalf of our shows. And third and most recently is the distribution arm. It's something that I think a lot of people in the podcast world and in general are really interested in because there just aren't that many people doing it or doing it well. And it's the same with any other medium. You know, you don't want to launch something out in the world and then not have anybody listen to it. So that's a the longest short version of the journey that the company has taken so far. Happy to dig into any specific piece of that.
Speaker 1 06:01 I have two things I very much want to dig into. One is is you mentioned this bit about kind of the business getting kind of big enough to where the monetization started to make sense and you realizing kind of why people don't start small networks maybe is because, because it's just tough to make some of the math work of you know, CPMs and things like that. For folks who are just starting out or even people that have been podcasting for a long time but don't have tens of thousands of listeners a month or an episode, what does that look like for you? Like when you're talking to a show that that might be kind of coming into your network or you guys are looking to launch a new show that is relatively young. What does monetization look like for a podcast that has a thousand downloads an episode?
Speaker 2 06:42 There are three main ways that we look at monetizing a show through advertising. There are many more ways to monetize the show beyond advertising, but you know, most people do think of advertising when you're talking about making money on a podcast. The first is really simple. It's called programmatic advertising. And there are a lot of hosting platforms like megaphone or art 19 or a cast or a handful of others that will run programmatic ads on your behalf, meaning they have all of the ad relationships somewhere else in a database and your show happens to meet some kind of demographic audience that they're looking for and they can serve ads on your show's behalf based on a CPM model that you'll negotiate directly with these hosting platforms. So you know, for example, we host a lot of our shows on megaphone and we can tell megaphone like we want to sell ads on the show, but we don't want to do it for under $20 CPM.
Speaker 2 07:36 And you know, there's the distinction of a mineral or pre-roll postural. A lot of other pieces in each of them are valued a little bit differently. And then megaphone will go out and they'll serve ads based on these certain demographics for the price that we've pinpointed. But they're doing it with a thousand different shows at once. So our show might be a tiny fraction of this, but you know, because they're able to bundle everything together, they're actually able to do that thing that I said that you know I wasn't able to do in the beginning and that's generally what programmatic advertising is. And then at the end of the month you've got to check for, you know, how those ads are served. I think it's a lot like YouTube advertising, which most people are really familiar with as a consumer. They're not necessarily ads that are read by the host of the show.
Speaker 2 08:21 They're just injected into the audio at like a predetermined space using an ad marker. Next up would be selling ads to an agency. There are a handful of main agencies that do this in the world of podcasting, like ad results, performance bridge, baritone one and a handful of others. And basically, you know, they will represent a number of people in the advertising space like Bombus or dollar shave club or Casper mattresses. All of these shows that you've heard many or these ads that you've heard a bunch. Each of these companies have an agency rep and a media planner and basically you'll go to these agencies and say, I have a show that has X number of downloads. It hits this demographic. Do you have any clients that you think would be interested in this? And then you know, if they think that it's a good situation for their client, they'll purchase X number of ads as a trial basis.
Speaker 2 09:13 You know, maybe it's one ad per month for three months or something like that based at the CPM that you've set, which is cost per thousand downloads. And you know, it's a simple math problem for them. If they get X number of conversions based on that ad, then they're going to renew. And if they don't, then they won't renew. And then the third way of selling ads is basically going directly to the branding question. Maybe you have a show about basketball and you go directly to Spalding and you say, Hey, we have this show about basketball. Like I think it will help you sell basketball equipment. Would you like to purchase some ads? You know, that's a super random example, but you get the idea. If you can build up those relationships directly with these brands, then you can have a little bit more flexibility in the way that you sell the ads because they're not working on these agency models.
Speaker 2 10:02 So there are a few different ways to go about doing it. And my recommendation for like a show that might only have a thousand downloads is to go to these various brands directly that you think might be a good fit and explain to them why you think it's a good fit. Give them kind of a a fair market price. And you can do that by digging into the research of, of whatever's available, which you, I don't have a good destination offhand, but you know, generally speaking of podcast CPM for a pre or a mineral is going to be somewhere between 20 and $30. So again, cost per thousand downloads. A lot of organizations, you know, smaller, large might also be interested in what's called an affiliate advertising where you put the ad on your show and then they don't pay you unless they get a conversion from that ad.
Speaker 2 10:50 It's a little bit shakier ground because there's a lot of potential issues with transparency as to like how many sales were made, how they're tracking it. Is it like a vanity URL or that kind of thing. But you know, the positive side of this is that you can really make the argument that your show is doing a lot of like good on behalf of that brand because they can see like a direct correlation between the ad and then sales on the other side. And you know, if that number ends up being positive, then there's no reason for them not to do it. But yeah, ultimately everything just boils down to a math problem. And it's your job to convey that math problem to the potential advertiser. And you know there's a hundred different ways to do it, the ways that I'm conveying or what worked for us, but it's not necessarily something that you know is the only way to do it.
Speaker 2 11:34 How do you guys sell ads for your shows? Is most of your advertising revenue coming through megaphone and programmatic ads or do you go direct to some companies or do you work with agencies as well? So we do all three of those things that I mentioned. Whenever we have a new show that we're launching, we will reach out directly to a bunch of brands that we have existing with and and we'll try and develop relationships with new brands that we think would be a good fit for the show. We will also let all of our agency reps know that we're launching the show and if they would like to test it with any of their clients. And then with any unsold inventory we'll use programmatic advertising, which is definitely a portion of our ad revenue. I can't really say like exactly how much of it, but it is probably less than a third of our total revenue.
Speaker 2 12:19 Is there something that makes megaphone cause I mean when I think of programmatic ads, I think a megaphone when someone asks us about it because we don't offer this at Costos. When someone asks us about programmatic ads or dynamic ad insertion, I say just go to megaphone there. Amazon for this space. What is it about megaphone that makes them such the kind of big player in this space? Is it just their inventory? So I do want to clarify. I personally love megaphone. I use megaphone. I would recommend megaphone but there are a lot of options here. Spreaker Omni art 19 megaphone a cast several others that I'm sure I'm missing. It really is just all about what works specifically for you. All of these different companies have different inventory. They have different clients, they have different fulfillment rates, meaning like how much of the inventory they can actually sell as opposed to how much of the inventory they have.
Speaker 2 13:10 They have different ways of working with their partners, which would include, you know, paying them out, setting the platforms up, customer service, all kinds of things. Cause these, these things should be considered like a relationship that you want to build on. You're not going to want to continue to work with megaphone if they're doing a bad job of serving ads for you or if they're not responsive or something like that. And the same thing applies to any other company. So there are a lot of different options to know, to consider. And honestly the number one consideration for the pod glomerate was cost of each of these platforms. How much does it cost us to host the show on each of these specific platforms? And you know, we literally spoke to all of them and just built out a big spreadsheet that would really dig into that.
Speaker 2 13:53 And then also what can we get in return both in terms of like the actual sales data that they could present us with the capabilities of the hosting platform and the analytics analytics model. You know, there's really a lot of considerations that you all need to make and that's something that you have to just figure out what works specifically for you. The reason that we went with megaphone was because of what we thought they could offer us and the cost of what that was. When you say cost of kind of hosting the show or running the show, I guess I should say, to me that means like, you know, cast us, we have plans to start at $20 a month. And that's it. Is that what you're talking about is like hosting and distribution of, of your show or is there more that goes into a cost of working with someone like them?
Speaker 2 14:39 Yeah, it does have to do with the cost of hosting the show. You know there are outlets like Casos or simple cast or Libsyn who offer like a flat fee for hosting and sometimes you can upgrade that hosting service to include other dynamics and other capabilities for the platform. Like for example, it's simple cast. They do offer dynamic ad insertion, but you have to pay extra per month in order to use it. Megaphone, you know, and this is different for everybody, I'm sure. So I'm not gonna like really get into the details on it. But with megaphone, traditionally you were paying some kind of flat fee in addition to some kind of bandwidth cost. So if you're getting a million downloads a month, you're usually paying some kind of CPM based off of that total download number. When I think about small shows, especially shows in a really tight, well-defined niche that going directly to these brands is what I always recommend.
Speaker 2 15:32 And what we see works well for young or small podcasts just because they're able to make the argument to these brands so much more clearly. Like, Hey, I'm talking exactly to these thousand people every day and you might have a hard time as a brand identifying where those people are and getting in front of them for an hour every week. And yeah, I see some people selling what equates to a CPM of like several hundred dollars. Uh, you know, they're selling an ad spot on a show that gets a thousand downloads for $200 an episode. More power to them if they can do it. Yeah. And any me as, as someone who runs a business says, yeah, $200 to get a thousand impressions on my target audience is really great. You know, like, I don't know what the conversion looks like, but you know, thinking about buying a Facebook ad or something like that, I don't know that it's, it's that much better and targeting you could argue either way I guess.
Speaker 2 16:25 But, um, so that's good to hear. That's where you guys go first I guess is what I was getting at. Yeah. And that's something that's super interesting and what we actually will do when we're either running a paid ad on behalf of our campaign or when we're trying to explain why a client should purchase an ad is we'll help them actually look at that math problem and it will say, you know, yeah, you are paying $200 for a thousand impressions, but if that turns into $10,000 of new business, then it's worth it for you. And a lot of the direct response advertisers that operate in the podcast ecosystem, you know, we'll actually have like a big lifetime spent. If GoDaddy, for example, and this is a totally arbitrary example and not a client of ours, but if GoDaddy wants to, or at Squarespace I guess I should say, you know, wants to run an ad on one of our shows and they sell a domain name, they might be making $8 a year for the next 20 years on that one ad.
Speaker 2 17:17 And you know, they might be getting a lot more conversions that would really make that worthwhile. We, not to continue to harp on this, but we had a, an advertiser once who came to us and you know, spent $10,000 or something on one of our business shows, but we had an advertiser who came and spent, you know, say $10,000 on one of our business shows. And after the campaign I got on the phone and I just wanted to go over like the results. And I think he told me that he had three conversions and I was sitting there apologizing and saying, Oh, I'm so sorry, like, let's figure out a way that we can make this right. And you know, I didn't realize it, but he was ecstatic because he had gotten three conversions of people who were paying $500 a month to use their software. So that math problem is really different for everybody.
Speaker 1 18:03 No, and I think that's just a, you know, for folks out there listening who don't have 10 or 20 or 50,000 or a hundred thousand downloads an episode, doing a little bit of extra work, putting on your sales hat and go into these companies is really like a valuable thing. If you find that right match between your show, what you're talking about, your audience and their interests and the thing that you want to have sponsor your show, it can be a really great deal for everybody. But it does take a bit of work. And I think some people, I think a lot of people get scared or intimidated by having to go sell something. It's easier to go sign up on art 19 and just put your credit card in. And,
Speaker 2 18:38 And I should also know it because I think you were hinting at this, but speaking of networks, whether you're joining a network or you know, you, you're starting your own, it does make a lot of sense to launch something that really covers like a similar vertical. Like you know, relay FM is all tech shows. Whereas Deere media is all shows that are, you know, talking about like influencer culture, celebrity gossip or something because then you know, you'll be able to continue to go back to the same advertisers time and again because you know, you already have that kind of demographic hit with, with some other shows that are on the network. So you know, it does make it easier if you're considering joining or starting a network. You know, that's something to consider is to launch a lot of shows that have like really similar themes because it'll help you. When it comes to the ad outreach,
Speaker 1 19:25 Is that what you guys are doing right now or I mean I'm looking at your homepage and it looks like some of these shows fall in the same vertical, but maybe some don't or are they pretty well grouped at this point?
Speaker 2 19:37 Honestly, that was something where that was a, a goal of ours. We didn't totally succeed in that because I really love to sign on new shows of, of all different kinds. So we're at the point now where we have a lot of kind of like mini networks within the pod glomerate network. You know, for example, we have four business shows that really hit a lot of the same audiences and we have a handful of shows that would fit in, like what I would call, like our mini comedy network. And you know, I kind of group everything else in, in what I call our culture network. Um, it's mostly like lifestyle shows and that kind of thing. So the short answer is yes, but we kind of worked backwards to get there. If I could do it again, I might go about it a little differently. It just makes your life a lot easier if you do work that way. And you can see that that's a big method that companies like wander used where initially they were launching and still they're launching a ton of true crime shows and they're, you know, kind of working their way into sports and entertainment and that kind of thing. Barstool sports is a good example of mostly shows that focus on sports culture. So there are a lot of examples where you don't, you don't really have to look very far to see other people doing that.
Speaker 1 20:43 You mentioned, I think you kind of alluded to it just now, but, but you distribution
Speaker 2 20:48 As kind of like the third arm that pod glomerate gets into. I think I know what you mean by distribution, but if you could kind of define that a little more clearly. So we all know what we're talking about here. So this probably came from my world of doing this for books. A lot of people will launch a podcast and you know, they'll spend months actually making this thing and then they don't really have any method or idea of how they're going to go and turn around and find an audience for it. The simplest version of distribution is just finding an audience for your podcast. We operate on kind of a five tier plan when we're running this and we were on this for all of our original shows. And then we also will run this as kind of a paid service that people can hire us for.
Speaker 2 21:33 And you know, we've worked with all kinds of folks in that regard. Um, daily dot. Li, uh, NBC universal, uh, CoinDesk, Dax global pod people, handful of other companies that I'd be happy to send case studies and stuff. Y'all want to just check it out on the pod glomerate.com but the five tier plan consists of publicity. So generally that is trying to find interviews for the talent of your show. Reviews of the show on various websites, newspapers, magazines, getting your show listed in some kind of list, like you know, the best podcast for father's day or example or for example, next up is marketing, which consists of generally like leveraging your existing social media platforms, email newsletters, web properties, that kind of thing to like really push the show out for like conversions to new subscribers and listeners as opposed to just like announcing that the show exists with no clear call to action, which is something that we actually run into quite a bit.
Speaker 2 22:35 The third tier is cross promotion. So, you know, getting your show featured on other podcasts, uh, which seems kind of like a no brainer, but a lot of people don't realize that that's one of the best ways to get new audience for your show because you're finding people that like don't have the barrier of having to learn how to, you know, use a podcast. They already are listening to one. There are three main ways that we do that. Uh, the first is getting the talent of our show to the host or the producer or something interviewed on other podcasts. The second is running what's called a feed drop, where you can convince somebody organically or financially incentivized to actually run an episode of your show on their podcast feed works the same way where you're convincing a bunch of existing podcast listeners to check out your show.
Speaker 2 23:21 And then the third way is to run what we call cross promos. So you know, you pitch other shows to like trade ad advertisements for your show and they'll do the same for you. Then the fourth tier is what we call merchandising. So in the same way that you're pitching like the New York times or a V club or something to write about your show, you can pitch Apple podcasts and Spotify and tune in and Castbox and pocket cast and every other app out there to consider your show for like editorial curation through new and noteworthy top picks, top fantasy football podcast to listen to ahead of your draft, all kinds of different ways that people will try and editorialize this on their app. So basically you want to take your show and explain why it would make sense for them to do that in. Then the fifth tier is just paid advertising so we can help you take your existing budget and you know smartly use that to promote your audience through paying for spots on other podcasts like audio ads or feed drops, paying for placements within certain podcasts.
Speaker 2 24:21 Apps are a few that offer that, you know, helping you promote the show on social media or paying for space within email newsletters. So anyway, we take a holistic approach of all five of those things and we use that to try and drive up audience of existing shows of, you know, newly launched shows. And so that's something that we, we started offering like really concretely about six months or so. And you know, knock on wood, it's been going really well so far. There's several new approaches there that I haven't heard before and I guess I've heard about them in other industries, like especially like the pay to drop one, I hadn't heard driving seen that even as like a consumer before. But it makes sense. I mean it's like a renting an email newsletter or something like that. Same kind of idea. Yeah. And maybe you've seen this with certain shows or maybe your listeners have, but like wandery for example, is kind of the King of that.
Speaker 2 25:10 Every time they launch a show, they'll release an episode of that show on every other show on the network and they'll, you know, title it, something like introducing Joe exotic or something like that. But that will actually be put out on like the business Wars feed. So that's called a feed drop for that kind of method. Are those pretty much only on other shows within your network or do you go outside of the network to try to do that? We go outside of the network. You know, it's in addition to the network. There's a million ways to approach this and there's no right or wrong way to do it, but generally you want to just find somebody or a show that has like a nice audience fit for your show. So, for example, we're launching a show in a couple of weeks called live from tomorrow and it's a podcast musical about tech and innovation, which is a motto, but it's a really great show.
Speaker 2 26:00 We're helping to distribute it. We didn't produce it. Um, I wish that we had, but a really, really creative show has a ton of like thought provoking elements to it. It'll be published throughout the month of June. It's called live from tomorrow, but the show has a ton of elements of like comedy fiction, tech innovation. So you know, for each of those different elements of the show, we're able to go to, you know, other networks or other producers and say to them like, Hey, I think this would be a really good fit for your audience. Like if we give you X number of downloads on our show, meaning like we advertise your show for X number of downloads, could you do the same for us? So you know, for example, we, with this show, like we've reached out to like the Harvard business review, HBR, they have a ton of podcasts that like really dig into innovation and business.
Speaker 2 26:48 So you know there's a lot of kind of like no brainers there. I hope anyway. We were short waiting. It makes sense at least, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so these are like really specific examples but you know they apply to everything and you don't have to reach out to like these massive publishers. Maybe there's, you know, a show out there with a few hundred downloads a month that would love to do this with you. This is really available to everybody. I don't want this to sound like it's a huge lift cause it's really not. It's just about being smart about it. Not to continue to ramble, but one thing I suggest is that you open up like Apple podcasts or whatever app you use and you open up your show and then you scroll down to the bottom of the app. There will be like a recommendation algorithm that will tell you listeners of this show also subscribed to X, Y, and Z.
Speaker 2 27:34 And that's as good a place as any to start. You can dig in and say like, Oh this show is is perfect. It's, it's exactly like what I talked about. But they're doing it a little bit differently so maybe their listeners would enjoy my show and then you can Google those shows and see like which journalists have been writing about them and you know there's a lot of really exciting ways to discover this information. You just have to start thinking about it differently. Of the kind of five ways that you all approach distribution, is there one that you see work better than others? Typically? Yeah, I mean I think that like if you get the show merchandised in these podcasting apps and it's probably the fastest way to grow an audience, it's not necessarily going to be like the stickiest audience or anything like that.
Speaker 2 28:19 It really depends on the show. But generally speaking, when somebody is on like the discover page of Apple podcasts or Castbox or something like they're already looking for their next podcast. So if you can put it in front of them, then like that's probably the point in which there's the lowest barrier to entry to getting them to listen. That said, if you're advertising a show, like if you have a true crime show and you advertise it on another true crime show, like you have a really good shot of collecting that listener. There's no way that's really better than others. There are ways that are are faster and more effective, but you know, if you have an ad for your show on this American life, then it's probably going to be just as if not more effective than getting new and noteworthy on, on Apple podcasts.
Speaker 2 29:00 You know? I mean if you like somehow get an ad for your show on this American life and you know, which would be very expensive and that's something that you should go to Apple and tell them that you're doing because then maybe they'll say like, Oh, this guy has really invested in getting a show out there. Like, let's help him out. You know? It's still a really small community regardless of what's happening with Joe Rogan right now, there is a lot of people that are willing to help you get your show out to a lot of different audiences. There's a lot of different ways to go about it, just you want to think creatively about it and just jump in from there. I love the concept and I love what you said about, you know that look for another say true crime show, but one that's talking about something slightly different or maybe catering to a slightly different audience to where you're not directly competitive because I would imagine like if another podcast came on that was talking about exactly the same thing we are and our target audience was exactly the same, I would probably say that's just competitive and that maybe doesn't help me as much, but if it's slightly different and not directly competitive and we can kind of swap an episode kind of back and forth, then yeah, I think it sounds like a win for everybody.
Speaker 2 30:05 It's interesting. I haven't seen this, but I, I liked the idea a lot. Yeah. I mean it's, it's kind of all over the place. Now that I've mentioned it, you'll probably hear it every day. You know, it's something that that really does pop up all over and interior point. Like I, there are obviously exceptions to this, but for the most part, like I don't think that there is really a negative side to, you know, promoting this to a competitor because at the end of the day like quality is gonna win out and you know, if they don't discover your show or, or your competitors show here with this cross promotion, like maybe they'll discover it in a few months somewhere else. So I think that just getting it in front of as many eyeballs or ears as possible is probably going to work out in your favor as long as you believe in the show.
Speaker 2 30:48 And I've listened to it and it's great. So unlike other mediums, I think the average number of podcasts that people listen to every, every week is like seven. So you know who's to say that they're not going to listen to your show. And another kind of getting back to the network side of things, I really like this concept, especially like in the same niche or vertical. You mentioned sports. That's the one that I have seen a lot. I think you know, politics, maybe tech, you know, health and wellness and foodies being kind of some of the more popular niches, but for folks who kind of hear this and say, wow, Jeff knows what he's talking about and this sounds great, what is like a reasonable first couple of steps for somebody to say, I want to get together with a couple of other shows that are complimentary in my niche and put this together.
Speaker 2 31:37 I think that step one with any initiative ever is just figuring out what your goals are. Do you want to increase your audience by teaming up with a bunch of partners? Do you want to use that in that growth in order to sell some ads? Do you want to set up a bunch of live events? Like do you really just want to grow awareness about a particular subject? Every time you answer that differently, you're going to have to approach it differently. I think that assuming that, you know, your goal is to just expand the knowledge base around a similar subject, you know, I would find these people, you know, I would talk through what these goals are and make sure that everybody's aligned. I'd figure out a plan and I would act on it. So they're obviously a million specifics that would go into that, but you just want to make sure that everybody is aligned in their thinking and then, you know, they're able to use their, their pooled resources to really advance that goal.
Speaker 2 32:28 One of my favorite networks to watch, they call themselves a collective, but it's called multitude and they're just really, really inspiring. It's a group of, of guys and girls who have, uh, you know, they all have shows surrounding similar subjects, um, role playing games, Harry Potter ghost stories. And they have come together to offer their services to other podcasters to help, to co-promote their shows, to help sell ads on behalf of each other's shows. And they've really turned it into like this really amazing community and they're putting out some really cool stuff that's very inspiring. And they actually have a really great blog. I don't offhand know their website, but if you Google multitude productions, you'll find it. And you know, I encourage everybody to check that out because regardless of what level you're at, there's a lot of cool resources there. I was just Googling multitude, so it's just multitude.productions.
Speaker 2 33:20 So productions is the top level domain. We'll include a link for this in the show notes for folks to check out. And I should also, you know, plug myself, there's a, I run a newsletter on LinkedIn, it's called podcast perspective and I've been trying to do a lot of the same thing. If you, if you dig in, um, you know, four or five months in and every week I'll write up a little essay about how to promote your show, five ways to monetize your show. I did something called, um, how to publicize your show in the middle of <inaudible>, which, which did pretty well. But in any case, you know, there's, there are a lot of resources available. So I encourage people to just check those out, subscribe to a bunch of podcasts, newsletters. And you know, whenever you find a link that's relevant to you, just click follow.
Speaker 2 34:02 We'll include a link to your newsletter in the show notes. For sure. So Jeff, kind of, so to wrap up this bit about networks, is there something you've learned from kind of your experience putting these groups of shows together and the whole kind of put glomerate business from a distribution standpoint that you think folks could take away? Just generally if they're looking to get started here, like is there, is there, has there been a gotcha that you still feel the pain from so many? Yeah, it's really hard. I mean it's a ton of fun and I wouldn't go back for the world. I've had a blast doing this. I've been doing it for about four years at this point. It's really hard. And the number one thing that I've learned is just, you know, work with people that you enjoy and that you like and that you respect.
Speaker 2 34:44 There are a lot of opportunities out there that are going to come to you and some of them might not feel great and if they don't then just skip it. Because there's always going to be another one. And so I guess my, my number one piece of advice is just go with your gut, you know, if something feels good to you, then try it out. That's great advice. I'm not just for podcasting but just generally I think, yeah, sorry I didn't, I know I'm being very broad and giving you all kinds of weird answers for everything. But yeah, that's the number one thing. And if you want something like super concrete that you can walk away with, I have backups for everything, extra batteries, extra SD cards, you know, record on two different devices. If you can always have a backup plan, that's great. And that the general advice is really good cause I think everybody hears that differently and says, Oh it's like a fortune cookie.
Speaker 2 35:29 Right? Everybody sees what they want to see in it. And so that's really great. But the backup thing is great too, cause I've definitely had quick time just crash on me when I go to save a file or something. And that's just the worst. But yeah. Jeff, this was really awesome. Thank you very much for sharing all of the kind of insights and knowledge you you've had over the years with conglomerate. For folks who want to check out kind of more about you and what you're up to. Where is the best place? The website is the pot glomerate, T H E P O D Glo, M E R a T e.com. You can find all of our shows and if you go to the show page we have it broken down by distribution production originals partners. On top of that I have the LinkedIn newsletter which has been eating up more and more of my time every week.
Speaker 2 36:11 And then we are at pod glomerate on all the social medias and I'm at Jeff Umbro on all of the social media is, I would be really happy to answer anybody's questions cause I know that you know, I could keep going further on a lot of these things so just reach out via the website or social media or whatever and I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, for sure. My pleasure. We'll have to back you and have you back on for a version two here soon. Sure. Happy to do it.
