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Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the agency trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Lee, and today we’re going to be chilling and catching up with Mr. Mark Asquith. He’s sharing what’s going on in his world and we talk all about podcasting. So if you’re interested in starting a podcast or you run one right now, this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Before we kick off the show, here is a word from our sponsor.
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Lee:
Welcome to a conversation with me and Mr. Mark Asquith. How are you today?
Mark Asquith:
I’m all right, my love. You.
Lee:
I’m all right, sweetheart. It’s really good to be chatting again.
Mark Asquith:
Always a pleasure, sir. Always a pleasure. No, it’s good to be back. I’m glad we’re able to do this.
Lee:
Well, we did a little Disney podcast last time on that little side podcast I had going. I’d done one season and haven’t revisited. But we got to talk Star wars and all sorts of just really geeky stuff, didn’t we?
Mark Asquith:
Yeah, we did, actually. It was pretty cool, actually. It was a good do to be able to do that. I enjoyed doing that. It’s not really. It’s not often that you can talk about stuff on podcasts from my side. That’s not work, you know, so that’s awesome.
Lee:
Exactly. Might do a second season at some point, but just too much going on, man. Perhaps you can help me with this. We’ll talk about podcasting later on. But first of all, folks, I just want to give you a reminder of who Mark is. He’s a good friend of mine. We kind of bump into each other a lot. We have this constant kind of flirt thing going on. Spit Strange. I know, but he is the genius behind podcast websites. You’ll remember him from a previous episode. We will make sure we link and you’ll find out the entire story of how he launched that concept to help podcast owners have amazing websites. And he based it all on a WordPress infrastructure. So that was a super geeky episode. Found out loads. I drilled you, didn’t I? For loads of information and it was really, really good fun. And you are back for a catch up because you’ve launched something exciting and new. I want to ask you loads of questions about it to find out selfishly for myself and also to get some top tips for people are either thinking of starting a podcast, are about to like, literally about to press the magic button, or are already committed and doing it.
Lee:
So first of all, could you tell us about the podcast? Well, no, let’s do it this way. First of all, can you remind people who you are and some interesting facts about you? And then can you tell us about the new podcast success academy?
Mark Asquith:
Yeah, definitely. So, you know, to put everything into context, I was an agency owner. You know, I’ve been an agency owner for 10 years at the point that I decided I didn’t want to be anymore. And, you know, always enjoyed kind of helping people, enjoyed WordPress, enjoyed just helping people to do better with technology because, you know, it’s one of those things where, when you, when you’re involved in technology, and this is something that we found when we entered the podcasting market, when you’re involved in technology, everyone assumes that everyone else is. So it kind of frustrated me that, you know, you had a lot of media hosts out there and a lot of people in the podcasting space saying, well, yeah, look, it’s easy to have a website, isn’t it, for your podcast. You just get WordPress, you instal it, you set it up on Bluehost, you put your theme on and you do all of this stuff. And that’s, that’s just said from a perspective of knowledge. So when I quit the agency and I just got bored of agency life, it just wasn’t for me anymore. I just got tired of it and I decided to focus on podcast websites, which at the time was a bit of a side hobby.
Mark Asquith:
I built it with Kieran and John from Entrepreneurs on Fire. We built this thing up as a little tester and we started to do it full time only a year ago, actually. We’ve grown from me and Kieran and John and Kate as the US partners to US four. We’ve got Jess Kupferman on board, we’ve got Ramona Rice, we’ve got Izzy, we’ve got Hannah, we’ve got James. You know, we’ve built a solid team. Lester and Hannah on the dev side. And the reason that we existed there was to build really just a SaaS version of WordPress that kind of just brought everything together. For podcasters and we’ve just relaunched a pile of stuff for that as well. You know, we’re really making personally branded audio influencer websites easy to make. So if you want to be a podcaster, you know, it’s easy to create a podcast that’s becoming easier every day. But there’s kind of like this tipping point where you become this influencer in your niche and that’s what we help people do as a business. Our aim is to help podcasters to become successful audio influencers and we’ve just relaunched a load of other stuff.
Mark Asquith:
So we’ve now, we’ve launched a lot of personalization. So what I mean by that is when you join podcast websites, you know, we’ve had to stop thinking like web people and start thinking like membership people and SaaS people and we’ve relaunched our onboarding people get personalised launch plans. You’ll answer three or four questions when you join podcast websites and you will get a launch track that will take you from nothing to a just an exceptional looking website in a very personal way. We’ve got some waypoints along the way that helps you with personalised one to one call cheque ins, some strategy calls, some Bonjoro, some welcome videos and just this entire personalised process for becoming an audio influencer. So yeah, it’s something that I’m passionate about. I love, I love taking people that are scared of this kind of thing, you know, whether, you know, a lot of people want to create a podcast and they’re like, well I can publish it, it’s fine, I can do my audio, but what do I do then? That’s what I really enjoy is taking people who are scared of that knowledge and have always worried about it being too mystical for them and helping them with that, you know, so that’s, that’s what we do at podcast websites is it started out as the business, now it’s one product within the business, which is, which is a lot of fun.
Lee:
Yeah. And with that as well, you, from what I understand, it’s almost like WordPress.com as in I can sign up for my website, but this is, this is for podcast websites. I will sign up, I will be able to launch my podcast. But the difference is as well, you guys are adding that extra service, actually helping me do it because like you said, we do assume that, oh, I’ll just create a WordPress SaaS and everyone will log in and they’ll build the website. But actually most people who do that haven’t got a clue and they need the help, they need those strategy calls, they need the guidance, et cetera. So that’s what you guys are doing, all within the context of podcast websites.
Mark Asquith:
Exactly. And it’s really good because, you know, when we entered the market and even now we get people coming and saying, well, we can do this. We’re developers and we know about podcasts, we know they exist. Or I did one once. We get a lot of people kind of cropping up and doing this thing. But it’s interesting because what you’ve, what you’ve really got to learn is what people actually want. You know, people don’t want what we think they want. And it’s taken us three years to refine what people want from us. So it’s a very interesting space to be in. It’s a very interesting space. The cool thing about it is that model can be replicated. You know, we can do that in any niche. We’ve got the, we’ve got the infrastructure, we’ve got everything that runs alongside it to do it in any niche, which is, which is very interesting. So I’m, yeah, I’m always excited about podcast websites. It’s a product that’s, you know, it was always the first part of the puzzle for the business and that it’s at a point now where it’s running well and we’re able to focus on some other stuff because that is running so well.
Mark Asquith:
You know, we’ve got James, who’s our head of podcast relations, who runs that business day to day now. You know, he joined us a couple of months ago and he’s responsible for the day to day of it so that we can focus on building the product suite out. You know, it was quite a big distinct change. We had to stop thinking of ourselves as podcast websites to business and start to think of ourselves as a podcast software company that just happened to have its first product which was podcast websites. You know, that was quite a big mind mindset shift for me this year.
Lee:
I presume as well, you had to think as well beyond WordPress because you are agency background, you’ve built WordPress sites. I know this is a WordPress powered system, but you just said a podcast software provider. And you can’t just think therefore in the box of WordPress.
Mark Asquith:
Well, WordPress is only powering podcast websites. You know, it’s not powering anything else that we do, you know, the hosting, the podcast hosting component of podcast websites because we integrate our own media hosting and download stats. Like none of that is built on Word.
Lee:
So you’ve actually Built all of that out separately. So you’ve not used a third party. You’ve actually built your own.
Mark Asquith:
Yeah, we’ve built our own.
Lee:
We’ve just freaking a man. That’s awesome.
Mark Asquith:
Yeah, I mean, it’s just relaunching as well. We’re relaunching our stats. You know, we’re going to be IAB version 2 compliant. We’re just testing that this week, and that’s going to be. It’s going to be having a lot more added to it. I’m doing something quite interesting in the hosting space, which I’m very excited about as well, which I’m not going to mention at this point. We’ve also got two.
Lee:
I was going to get an exclusive then.
Mark Asquith:
Sadly not, man. And we’ve also got another product as well, productivity.com.
Lee:
I’Ve heard of that.
Mark Asquith:
Yeah.
Lee:
Because I was going to write to you. You spelled productivity wrong. Oh, wait, there we go. How many emails you’ve had of that?
Mark Asquith:
Zero.
Lee:
Oh, okay. You would have had me.
Mark Asquith:
No, no, I’ve not had any because it’s. It’s within podcasting. And that’s. That’s a. That’s a pure SaaS business. It’s a. It’s a tech business. It’s a tech product. And it’s, you know, it’s one part of what I believe to be the podcasting ecosystem that. No, I mean, there’s a couple of people addressing it, but no one addressing it like we are. And again, that’s kind of top secret. We launched it at podcast movement to 1500, 2000 people and didn’t tell anyone what it was. And we got 400 signups. We got, you know, almost 10. Well, actually, we got more than that. We got about 15% of the entire Podcast Movement audience signed up to the beta without knowing what the heck it is. And we just flat refused to tell people. And it’s. It’s interesting. You know, we’re learning all these things, learn all these tactics. We’re working on these two products behind the scenes. And then, of course, we launched the Podcast Success Academy in actually February this year, which was. Which was interesting. So that’s, you know, it’s all part of this ecosystem that we’re building. I think there are. I think there’s sort of four or five different pillars of the ecosystem for a podcaster.
Mark Asquith:
You know, there’s the host in the media hosting download stats. That’s pillar number one. There’s your kind of web presence. You know, you want to become an audio influencer. That’s the set. That’s the second sort of pillar. There’s what productivity will do, which I believe is the third pillar. And then there’s the podcast success academy, which I think is the knowledge and support pillar that everyone needs to be a podcaster. Whether, you know, whether you’re just starting out or whether you’re growing your show from 500 downloads to 10,000 downloads, or whether you’re growing from 10,000 to 100,000, whatever, you know, you need the knowledge and support of a community and weekly resources and everything that goes inside that. So I spent a lot of time working on this product ecosystem and, you know, really thinking strategically about the business towards the end of last year into the beginning of this year and saying, actually, what do we need to do as a business to be able to hit all of these targets and have products that fulfil these pillars? Because ultimately, you know, people can do one part of their podcasting journey with us and they can do another part with someone else.
Mark Asquith:
I’d rather they did it all with us. I’d rather they did the hosting and the website and the productivity stuff that that’s going to do, plus get their knowledge and the learning from us as well, you know, so it’s, it’s just, it’s kind of the strategy, you know, it’s a. It’s been something that I’ve been working on behind the scenes for a while. You just gotta, you know, everyone says you get so busy running things, you kind of just got to stop a little bit and take a little bit of time out.
Lee:
So you’re basically going all in on podcasting right now. And that’s like you said, every single pillar. You’re not just providing that software as a service. You’ve got these different things you want to provide the strategy, the education, etc. I think as well. Just for people who maybe haven’t heard of you, can you just let us know what you are doing in the podcasting space or have done in the podcasting space as well? Because a lot of time, let’s face it, people put themselves out there as experts in podcasting or experts in this, and we’re all just like, oh yeah, there’s another person telling us they know all about podcasting. So could you just tell us about things like the seven minute mentor and the other stuff that you’ve had going on over the last few months and years in the podcasting space?
Mark Asquith:
Oh, yeah, definitely. And I think you’re right. I think, you know, everyone that starts a podcast up, it’s like, you know, think back to 2008. Everyone became a social media expert because they knew how to log on to social media. And, you know, the fast movers got there and they did what they did, and that’s good. You know, there are social media experts just like there are podcasting experts. And this is kind of the reason that we set up the Podcast Success Academy, but also the reason I do my own personal branded stuff, the seven Minute Mentor, and so on. You know, actually marketing, marketing a podcast is not that much different to marketing a product or a tool or a service. So if you’ve got background knowledge in that, it’s applicable. A lot of the podcasting experts out there just simply don’t have that. You know, they’ve created a podcast. Some of them do, and they’re wonderful and the space is big enough for everyone. But, you know, it’s. It’s just something that I’m, you know, me, I like, I’m quite straight talking. I will always kind of cut through the crap. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
Mark Asquith:
And if I’m right, then that’s brilliant if it helps people. But if I’m wrong, I’ll take some opinion, I’ll listen to it and I’ll learn and I’ll become right and just figure out what I’ve done wrong and what I can improve on. So I’m always on this journey of personal development and self development. So through the 7 Minute Mentor, which is my daily podcast, five days a week, you know, Monday through Friday, every single, every single day of the week, you know, you can listen to seven minutes of wisdom from me, and I discuss everything from building a SaaS business to having burnout, to having two weeks off work and what the impact that is to, you know, some of the personal relationship issues running a business can cause because it’s not easy. And you know, everything, all the whole range of things. And that’s my outlet for people that are saying, you know, I either want to be a podcaster or I want to be a business person, or I want to set something up. And the big focus at the minute is helping people out their lifestyle prism, which is where you’ve built a business in the past that you used to love, like an agency that created you this wonderful lifestyle that, you know, you’ve become accustomed to.
Mark Asquith:
And there’s nothing wrong with your lifestyle. You love your lifestyle, but the job is now boring. You don’t like anymore. You’re not fulfilled, but you’re trapped by the lifestyle that it’s given you. Yeah, you know, so I’ve kind of coined this term lifestyle prison. And I’m, you know, focused on a series of content to help people transition out of their lifestyle prison whilst maintaining the lifestyle. Because no one’s talking to that audience. Everyone’s saying, well, if you don’t believe in your plan A, you know, then you shouldn’t really be doing it. You can’t have a plan B. You’ve got to just. You got to quit your job and you’ve got to dive into something new. And I’m like, well, wait a second, that’s all right. If you’re 21 or 25, what happens when you’re 40? You got two kids, you got a lovely car that you really actually like and you enjoy your two holidays a year. Like, no one’s catering for that set of people because it’s just, well, if you don’t believe in it, then you shouldn’t do it or you’ve got to quit, otherwise you’re a loser. And I’m just like, what are you talking about?
Mark Asquith:
This is. There’s gotta be. That doesn’t fit for everyone. You know, some people just want to do something they enjoy doing, but keep the lifestyle as it is. So that’s that. You know, I do a lot of content on that.
Lee:
You do a lot of content folks. But before you carry on, mate, just go to Google, type in 7 Minute Mentor for the you guys in the States. Rather than mentor.
Mark Asquith:
Mentor. I always say that and people are like, what? I’ve actually started saying mentor. You’re right. I’m like, welcome to 7 Minute Mentor with me, Mike Askworth. And brilliant.
Lee:
Go cheque that out is. As of this recording, you are on episode 486. So this guy knows podcasting. And if you loved that monologue that Mark just spoke in, because he does speak in monologues. That’s one of the reasons why I love him. Then you will get 486of those nuggets of wisdom to go and listen to. And five days a week, you can go and enjoy that as well. In fact, on the thing where you said you think you’re wrong, I seem to remember maybe 100 or so episodes ago, you flat out shared something that you were completely wrong in and kind of unpack that a little bit. I could be dreaming it, but I feel like you did. Yeah, that sounds like. Yeah, you called yourself out and explained why and you know, and you changed your mindset. What it was. I have no freaking idea to be Honest. But that was, like, a lot of episodes ago.
Mark Asquith:
Yeah, I could probably find that at some point. But, yeah, I’m the same. I can’t remember what it was.
Lee:
I listened to a lot of content. That’s the problem. Yeah, no worries. All right, well, that’s good. So we understand, you know, the backing, etc. Now I’m interested, obviously, in talking with you for selfish reasons. I run a podcast. I want to learn how to get more listeners. I want to know how to grow it. I want to learn how to monetize it. I want to learn how to give good value. But equally, I also kind of want to find about your podcast academy, not just on that side, but success academy. Sorry. But I also want to find about it with regards to how you’ve launched it, because I’ve got my own membership community, and I would like to understand what you’ve done. You’ve adopted a more of a freemium model where there are some upgrades, et cetera, whereas I’ve just gone all in on the payment model. So would love to find out, first of all, what is involved in the community that you’re launching. Well, that you have launched, and also, what was the thinking behind the, you know, the freemium model? And how successful has that been for you?
Mark Asquith:
Yeah, it’s a good question, man. And congrats on what you’re doing with the membership as well. Obviously, we share a lot of mutual friends and people in the industry as well, so I’ve seen what you’re doing inside, like the member, the membership guys, community with Mike and Callie, and, you know, you’re crushing it. So congrats on that. I think what you’re doing is bang, right? Ours was a slightly different approach. So when we set up podcast websites, we knew that we wanted to give knowledge to people, and that’s just exponentially grown, you know, everything from our workshops to our downloads to our support system to our launch plans. I mean, these launch plans for the launch plans, you know, you tell us your experience in building websites or working with websites, and we will give you the right launch track for you. It’s not a cookie cutter thing. We’ll give you the right launch track. So all of this stuff we were already doing, it was. It was kind of part of the academy as we had it. We just had the podcast websites academy that was for members. Now, what we found was that we actually.
Mark Asquith:
There were two parts to this. There was, number one, this idea that, you know what, in the back of my mind, this might be able to make some Revenue, even though we shouldn’t put too much time and attention to it, because the unit cost of podcast websites is far greater and the revenue is better and so on and so forth than the Podcast Success Academy. But ultimately, with podcast websites, you know, you have to want media hosting, you have to want a full site through us. You have to want the full thing from podcast websites. So in the back of my mind, obviously, we’re creating more products that cater to people that don’t want everything from podcast websites. But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, well, we kind of owe our members so much more. We’ve got this kind of academy model at podcast websites, which was integrated into people’s dashboards inside their WordPress dashboard, the click Academy. And they get a load of workshops. That was it. There was nothing else. And it was. It was in the back of my mind for a long time. You know, I’d say like a year and a half that we could do something better with this.
Mark Asquith:
So at the end of last year, around November, I decided to just stealthily build this thing out on my own. I didn’t really have anyone helping me to do it. I did the whole thing myself, kind of on the quiet, on an evening, on a daytime, and the only person that knew about it was the designer, because I said, look, man, I need to. I need. We need to brand this. It’s got to look podcast websites, but it’s got to also stand alone. So we worked on it, and the reason that we chose freemium was very, very simple. It was because this is not our end game. The Podcast Success Academy doesn’t matter if that doesn’t make money, because what we’re trying to do is bring people into our ecosystem as podcast websites. We’ve got the new productivity product launching. We’ve got a couple of new things launching, kind of more on the media hosting side of things. And ultimately, we just want to guide people up a value ladder where they’ll start with the free version, and they’re just like, okay, look, there’s no risk to. There is no risk to this. If I log in, I don’t like it.
Mark Asquith:
That’s cool. But they actually. They’re our customers, then we can market to them. And actually, we’re covered on GDPR because we’re allowed to market to our customers. We’re allowed to. That’s the way that GDPR works. So we thought to ourselves, well, look, let’s get on top of that. So we launched the free version, and I’d built in three Tiers. I’d built in the free tier, the growth tier, which is 37 bucks a month. And I’d built in this extra level, which is the podcast website’s premium tier. So if you’re a podcast websites member, the full kick ass member, then you get access to this like the highest possible level of the Academy. We already had a pile of content, so we just, we just popped that in now. We segmented it out, decided what was going on, what tier, and that was that, you know, we added the payment gateways, that was that. But what we do is that, you know, our main lead magnet now is the Academy. It’s not like, go and download this ebook and give us your email address. It’s just look, everything that we do, every piece of content, I’ve developed a content development process.
Mark Asquith:
So any idea that we have for content, we run it through this content development process. And there’s kind of, there’s elements of Dan Norris Content Machine in there, there’s a couple of bits that I’ve added from my own experience in there. But basically we’ll take one piece of content, turn it into three pieces of content, one of which will always be an Academy protected piece, whether it’s on the free tier, the growth tier, or whether it’s on the podcast website premium tier. All right, so we then are able to just say every single piece of content we do. Every single piece of content we do. It’s easier for us to say go and join the podcastsuccessacademy.com for free because there’s no risk. Go and get this free. Like we did a sponsorship post last week on podcast websites. We were able to say, there’s a pitch letter for sponsors here. There’s a pitch letter, go and take the pitch letter, go and have the pitch letter. It’s in the academy, Just go and join up. It’s free. And the cool thing with that is that the way we work with podcast websites is we’re very one to one oriented.
Mark Asquith:
So we’ll book people on calls to help them with, you know, his podcast websites, right. And we can get them through that process. So I wrote a full one year onboarding process. So you come into the podcast success Academy, you are going to get one year’s worth of content on email and it’s going to be, you’re going to get a pretty heavy set for two months, then you’re going to get a slightly watered down set for the next five months. And then, you know, over the course of the next six months or Four months, sorry, you’re going to get, you’re going to get slightly less, but it’s all going to be very poignant and pointed stuff. So we worked really hard to make sure that we could nurture people up from free to the paid tier or from, you know, this perspective of, look, if we were to just advertise podcast websites, we can do that and we do do that, but ultimately people aren’t in the right space in the buying cycle or they don’t know the value of becoming an audio influencer. They don’t understand, you know, they don’t understand the value of their small yet really engaged audience.
Mark Asquith:
So we can teach them that. And at the point that they’re then ready and really receptive to do, you know what, maybe I do need my own branded web platform. That’s when we become the obvious choice. So that’s why we chose the freemium model, because we, this is not necessarily a saleable revenue generating product for us. It’s actually, it’s our biggest lead magnet and it’s such high value that it rivals the best paid things out there, the best paid memberships. You know, it’s so good value. So it’s. No, it’s been an interesting one because, because we’ve got the team there to be able to create the content. So it’s very low risk for us to be able to do that. Which is why, you know, I think that freemium model might not work for people where it has to generate revenue straight away, but at the same time it’s really, really good to be able to say, look, here’s five bits of content and this other five pieces of content actually you’ve got to pay for. There’s a real nice feeling in someone clicking on something and being, you know, being sent to this. You know, you kind of need to upgrade for this because it’s, that’s going to happen when you’re asleep, that’s going to happen when you’re not working.
Mark Asquith:
That’s going happen when on their terms. You know, it’s not, it’s not. Yes, sure, you can blast an email out to them and say, look, we’ve got Lee Jackson from Agency Trailblazer on the, on the, on the Academy. Go and cheque out his content. It’s paid for content. So if you’re on the free tier, you are going to need to upgrade. Here’s a discount coupon. You know, that’s great to be able to do that, but on a weekend, Sunday morning, you’re out with the kids and you get a stripe membership pop up. Oh, we’ve got a payment coming because someone at their leisure have clicked on it. So it is quite a nice way of doing it, I admit.
Lee:
And they’ve been able to at least get in and see what’s going on, consume some of the content. I like how you say it’s your biggest kind of lead magnet. It is your marketing, as it were, to channel people into the relevant places. So I had a look around earlier and I could see that there was some content that I wouldn’t be able to access unless I was a client of podcast websites or I wouldn’t be able to access unless I was part of the growth accelerator group, et cetera, which is another thing that you’ve got going so well.
Mark Asquith:
That’s the second tier, that’s the paid for tier. So there’s the free tier, there’s the growth accelerator and then there’s the podcast website’s premium tier. And you’re right, you know, we very carefully select of what goes in which tier. You know, you want access to our monthly mastermind group. Well, that’s only for podcast websites members, you know, that is. That is it. It’s only for podcast websites members because that’s high value access and there’s a load of other stuff that we’re launching into that at any given tier. You know, we’re gonna. I’ve got a complete spreadsheet in front of me now that’s got a massive list of things broken down by tier, when they’re launching, who’s gonna be running them and exactly what value they bring. And there’s so much on there. You know, I did the same with the forums, you know, using IP board. I linked it in with WordPress like, you know, like Mike and Callie recommend over a membership and. But we did some quite advanced stuff with it. You know, we set it so that if you’re on one tier, you can’t get access. So if you’re on the free tier, you can’t get access to the mastermind discussion.
Mark Asquith:
If you’re on the free tier, you don’t get access to the monetization forum. You know, if you want access to the monetization forum, you’re gonna have to invest a little bit in yourself and access that on the growth tier. So you can do some quite advanced stuff with it. But in quite, you know, someone like yourself or with a bit of an agency background, it’s not that difficult technically.
Lee:
To do with regards to podcasting then in general because a lot of People would be wondering why on earth we’re talking about podcasting, but there’s been a whole load of people inside of the Facebook group talking about this. They’re looking at starting a podcast or they’re thinking about it. You and me, we’ve run podcast now for a few years. We’re both bought into it. But why do you think an agency owner should start a podcast?
Mark Asquith:
The reasons are innumerable. And, you know, some of the stuff that we’re going to be doing, there’s.
Lee:
A few good ones.
Mark Asquith:
I’ll give you more. And just a bit of a. This is definitely just a plug. But the hosting work that we’re going to be doing, and this does tie into one of the tips and one of the reasons is, you know, we’re going to be launching a white label hosting platform. So any agency will just be able to white label the hosting. And the reason I mentioned that is one, I want to get in front of it. But the key thing is that you’ve got a world of people that are trying to do content marketing. All right, you’ve got plumbers in Barnsley paying yellow pages money to try and get to the top of Google for, you know, one handed plumber in one, well near Barnsley. You know, that kind of silly keywords that. And they’re paying good money. They’re paying good money to do it. You know, whatever, 50, 60, 100, 150 quid. A keyword is stupid. But they feel like they have to do something and they don’t know what to do because they’re not marketers. What we can do as agency owners is we can very easily start to create branded and sponsored content for people.
Mark Asquith:
So we can take Joe Bloggs, who was the plumber, I’ll take my mate Birdie. All right, Birdie, if you’re listening, this is free. Okay, so M3 Plumbing Services in Barnsley. Fantastic guy did my bathroom. What he can do is rather than just going out there and advertising, okay, I am a plumber in Barnsley. No, what you do is you can create a pile of audio content based on the fact that, you know what, here’s how you do self improvement on your house. Here’s how you do diy, here’s how you do your own bathroom, here’s how you know there’s so much content inside of there. And it’s this. It’s kind of proxy marketing. You’re marketing through your knowledge. You’re not marketing to your audience, you’re marketing through your knowledge to the potential audience. And you’re Just giving them value. Now they don’t know how to do that, nor do they want to do that. Birdie does not want to turn up and do all of this stuff. So he’s probably never going to join the podcast success academy. What he’s going to do is go to his mate in marketing or go to his agency that gets recommended if he’s got more of a budget.
Mark Asquith:
He’s going to say, look, as part of my marketing, I’ve heard about this podcasting thing. What do you think? And as an agency owner, you can say, right, great idea. We’re going to create a Barnsley specific podcast that is only for DIY enthusiasts in Barnsley that are over 30 years old. And, and it’s going to be seasonal based. In summer, we’re going to tell them summer stuff. In winter, we’re going to tell them how to prep the pipes and prep their houses and prep everything ready for winter, and we’re going to do all of that and we’ll take care of it for you. Okay? So you can sell that, whatever. And it will work. I will almost guarantee you that it will work. Because the UK is now catching up to the us The UK is, in my opinion, and based on what I see is where the US was five years ago, maybe four years ago. When it comes to podcasting, there’s a buzz around it in the uk. The, that was the same kind of buzz in the US four years ago. So that’s reason number one. But the second reason as well is that, you know, creating your own podcast.
Mark Asquith:
I am tired of turning up at networking events, man. And everyone being an agency or a designer, like 80% of usually three or.
Lee:
Four in a room.
Mark Asquith:
Every time I go, oh, yeah, innit, there’s only four people as accountants. Yeah, an accountant, that’s the thing. You’ve got a solicitor trying to sell you some legal stuff and he’s trying to sell it to the accountant who’s trying to sell it to 10 web designers. That’s networking. Think it, think this through. Who’s gonna, who’s gonna have the best chance of securing any work from that room? Is it the person who says, I’ll get back to you, or let’s jump on a call? Because that’s like, that’s the age old thing. That’s the game. That’s what people have been doing forever. Everyone knows what’s going on with that. Or is it the person that says, do you know what? Actually, I think I talked about this a hundred episodes ago on my podcast and I’ve got a solution for that. Do you mind if I send you a link to it or can I just send you some takeaways from that? Go and listen to that. Who’s the expert in that room? It’s the person that puts themselves out there as the expert. So as an agency owner, you don’t have to talk about, oh, look at me.
Mark Asquith:
And, you know, this is my agency and we do valid HTML5 and we do amazing CSS3 transitions. Like, no one cares about that. Get out of that mindset. Instead, start talking about, actually, here’s a podcast episode on the Top five reasons why Solicitors in Sheffield Cannot Get More Work from the Building community. And you suddenly you’re like, oh, wait a sec, that person’s the expert. If I’m a. If I’m a Persimmon Holmes, who am I going to trust? That person. So that, you know, they’re two really good reasons that all agency owners should be thinking about podcasting. It’s something that I’m really passionate about, actually. I want to help more agency owners. I’ve got no interest in helping them produce podcasts. I’m too busy for that. There are people that are better at that than me. But, you know, with the hosting platform, I really want to make hosting and building podcasts for your clients easier. You know, I want agencies to be able to do that without the responsibility of, you know, or even the pain in the ass of hosting through. Okay, we’ll have 10 different logins or we’ll put all our shows under our login.
Mark Asquith:
You. I want to make it easier because I think it’s in the UK in particular. I think it’s going to be massive. I think it’s going to be huge. If you. If you’re an agency owner and you’re not doing it, get ahead, you know, own your niche. Because someone else will let us know.
Lee:
As soon as that’s available, mate. Because I’m sure a lot of us will be really interested in checking that out. I’ll just back up what you’re saying as well before we come into land, mate. With regards to when you’ve got that sort of content, I’ve now lost count, literally the amount of times that either someone in the community so has reached out and said, hey, I’m struggling with pricing this, or I’m struggling with an awkward client, or I’m struggling to know what to say to this company who’ve got a terrible website and that. And I can say, you know what? I create a blog about that here. It is. Or we did a podcast about that several episodes ago. Here’s the link. And it saves me a whole lot of time, but like you said, it absolutely sets me apart as the expert, someone who did this several hundred episodes ago, or, you know, several blog posts ago or two years ago, or whatever it is. And I’ve even done it in networking as well, being able to just say, yep, we’ve already covered that inner content gdpr. I’ll forget about that. We did a mega post over there.
Lee:
It’ll tell you the essentials that you need to do and then you forget about it. And that has allowed us to generate leads, to have great business, et cetera, just by being out there and putting out that sort of information. I’m really excited about your hosting platform, though, and that kind of potential source of revenue for agency owners. I mean, there’s a lot of agency owners who are doing all sorts of different services and this is something, I think, that sounds completely unique. I’ve never heard any agency saying, hey, we’re going to help you get a podcast.
Mark Asquith:
Oh, man, wait until you see what it’s going to do as well. Oh, you know me, I don’t do things that are normal. I’m not just going to do what Libsyn and what everyone else are doing. Wait until you see the way that.
Lee:
It’S going to do libsynipson. Well, I’ll be moving over because I’m getting annoyed with Pippa.
Mark Asquith:
Oh, I’m curious about Pippa, actually. We should talk. Do you know what? There’s a lot of. This is one of the frustrating things, and we’re going to. This is a very slight tangent, so I apologise, but let’s do it. It’s one of the things that he’s starting to kind of annoy me in the podcasting space is the hosts are just cropping up and doing the same old stuff. And this is something that we’re really. I’m really keen on combating that. You know, it’s like anyone can host media and serve it back. I know there’s a unit cost, there’s computing costs, there are costs. You need. You need revenue to be able to do that. That’s not the point. The actual act of building IAB compliance for a developer and a team of developers is not that hard, you know, and serving files back is not that hard. Most people don’t think about what podcasters actually need. Now, coming at this from an agency owner perspective, with a marketing background, a branding background and a product dev background. Plus, you know, I’ve released nearly 700 episodes of my podcasts. You know, this is. There’s a real nice set of things that we’re going to do for people.
Mark Asquith:
So it’s just, it’s kind of a bit of a bugbear of mine. So I’ll bring you on as a tester and you know, try and get as many people, honest testers from your audience as well. Because I really want to test that feature set out that white label stuff, but also also some of the more exciting stuff that we’re going to be doing in that space.
Lee:
Well, I can’t wait. I mean just some of the simple things. Any post podcasting host I’ve used, it’s just been difficult to find out how many downloads that a certain episodes have got. What’s the most popular, popular episode, those sorts of things, Even those sorts of simple things. Or it’s been that buffering is really slow or really poor.
Mark Asquith:
That’s changing actually. That’s. So with the IAB version 2 stats, one of the core metrics to measure whether or not a download is valid or not or whether it will get countered is measuring the byte range. So what that means is trying to figure out whether someone has listened to a minute or streamed a minute of the episode or so. If your host quite slow, that could be a factor. But it’s also your file sizes. You know, if you’re creating a 70 meg file for a 15 minute audio piece, which a lot of people do, they’re encoding it wrong. You know, if it stops streaming because of the buffer and someone bails and they don’t listen to the minute, you’re going to lose that download. It’s not going to count.
Lee:
Yeah, and we’re finding that on our stream on the website as well. It’s actually taking a little bit of time to kick in, which is really frustrating.
Mark Asquith:
Yeah, it is. That is a challenge.
Lee:
Yeah. Right. Proper geek time, right mate? How can people connect with you? You’ve got like multiple websites. Where’s the best place that people can follow you to find out all the cool stuff that you’re getting up to. And obviously I’m looking forward to having you again on in a few months time when all of these magical things are out there.
Mark Asquith:
Yeah, thanks for having me buddy. It’s always a pleasure. I’m sure we’ll bump into each other over a beer. You preneur summit or something as well.
Lee:
Better add soon, but yeah.
Mark Asquith:
So the easiest thing is cheque out the podcastsuccessacademy.com that is free for anyone that wants to start a podcast, has already got a podcast and wants to step the game up. Podcastsuccessacademy.com My stuff. I do free coaching every week. Every single Friday at 4pm UK time. I’m good, you know, literally just do you do. Yeah. You turn up to some of those as well. So I appreciate that. Just come to that, everyone just come to that. Just go to just search for me mark, ask with our excellence expected and click free coaching and just come along and see. It’s free.
Lee:
It’s really good. And we’ll make fun of him. And he takes it on the chin and then he gives some amazing advice.
Mark Asquith:
I gotta take it on the chin when my chin’s like this.
Lee:
Which chin? No, I’m joking. You’re a nice mate. Thanks ever so much for being on you’re a legend. I love in hearing everything that you’ve shared. And thanks as well just for the advice that you’ve given us, either starting podcasts offering a particular service and the advice for people who own a membership site like me of some good ideas to help use that as more of a lead magnet, grow it and add more value. So you’re a legend. I love you and thank you so much.
Mark Asquith:
Thanks, brother. I love you too. Cheerio. Thanks for having me.
Lee:
And that wraps up today’s show. If you are not already subscribed to our YouTube channel, then we put out the hashtag agency life content on there and we have a load of new content coming up over the next few months. So head on over to agencytrailblazer.com YouTube and finally, if you’re not part of the Facebook group, then head on over to agencytrailblazer.com group where you will meet all of us crazies in there. Until then, have a great day and we’ll see you in the next episode.
