Picking a Podcast Name - Making Money with Audible

David Jackson  0:00  
SOP 278. Today, I've got a tool that'll help you pick your podcast name, and we're going to talk a little bit about Audible. And I've got a very important question to ask you. It's the School of Podcasting's morning announcements. Here is Dave Jackson. All right, podcasting since 2005. I am your personal podcast coach, Dave Jackson. Thanking you so very much. Really, seriously, thank you for tuning in to listen a little of me talk about everything podcasting, from planning to promoting to monetizing to getting the word out everything podcasting. It's theschoolofpodcasting.com. Thank you so much, and if you'd like to contact me, trust me, I got time. Send them on in. It's dave@schoolofpodcasting.com. You can call in your comments 885633228, or you can leave a comment like Hugh did, or is it you? I'm gonna really butcher that poor guy's name at schoolofpodcasting.com. The newly redesigned schoolofpodcasting.com. We're doing a lot of things, and you know what? Let's just start right there. I'm going to move my mic a little bit here because I want to talk to you just a second, okay? Then we'll get into all the podcasting stuff. But here's the thing that I love about podcasting because it's it's just me and you, right? And especially all my Stitcher buddies. Let me give you a little tip on that. Then we'll get to my question. Stitcher's really cool because people listen on their phone, and I'm finding that about 30% of my feedback is coming from people on Stitcher. So if you're listening to us on Stitcher, a little whoop whoop, and you know, raise your hands in the air like you just don't care to all my people on Stitcher.com because you guys are sending in their feedback? Why? Because you got your phone in your hand. It's a pretty cool thing. Now, if you want to sign up at Stitcher, you can go over to stitcher.com, and when it asks you for an activation code to put it on your phone, please use Dave J. But I got some some feedback and things like that. But here's the thing: you know, there are people right now that are charging hundreds of dollars for a single podcasting class. There are consultants that are charging upwards of $300 an hour for consulting, and I'm charging right now at the School of Podcasting. I'm charging $40 for all of my classes for a month. If if you're new to the program, I've been a corporate trainer for about oh going on 20 years, and recently, like many Americans, lost my job, and so I'm doing the podcast consulting thing full time. And you know what? Right now, things are getting a little scary, and so I needed to ask you something. Here I am. I'm I'm thinking of changing the way I do my business, and have one membership part where you get like a stream of consciousness from Dave, but the rest, like you would have a planning your podcast class one time fee, you'd have a recording your podcast, kind of producing it one fee, then you'd have a promoting your podcast class. Then you would have a monetizing your podcast class, and then room for other things. But it would all be one-time fees. And my question is: Here, I'm thinking that you all may be afraid of joining a membership site because really, you can cancel any time you can. And I never asked anybody, specifically you. Would that make you start a podcast? What is stopping you from starting a podcast, or more importantly, what is stopping you from joining the school of podcasting or from hiring me as a consultant? Because I can sit here and make the world's best cheese straightener, and it turns out that nobody has crooked cheese, right? So I really am saying that very seriously right now. I'm working on some things for the school of podcasting, and it dawned on me: I never asked you, "What do you want? Besides, I want it all for free, because I would love to do that, but unfortunately, they don't take smiles at the grocery store, and you know I got kids to feed and things like that. So please let me know if you think that's a good idea, like one class, and and that way it's not a monthly thing.

David Jackson  4:37  
You don't have to worry about because I am finding people that sign up and then like halfway through getting through all the tutorials, life happens, and I thought, well, maybe that's it. Maybe they're worried about having that monthly thing, even though you can unsubscribe anytime. I don't know, so that's why I'm asking you. So, if you please, pretty please, sugar on top, Dave at schoolofpodcasting.com, or call in your comments would be even better. 888-563-3228, and I would love to hear that. So thank you very much for your help in that. Speaking of feedback, and speaking of Stitcher, got a note here from my new buddy Diana. She said, "Hey Dave, thanks for your School of Podcasting podcast, which I listened to today through Stitcher. See what I said, people. I'm writing to answer your question. My last question was why you should be able to answer that question. Why you want a podcast? So she says I've determined to create a podcast about music theory. Music theory sounds boring. Come on, intervals. No, no, no. I think is a minor third, right? But it's actually quite fun and key to understanding how to learn about music, whether on musical instruments as a singer or a songwriter. She says I have several private students and others that I met from abroad. They're asking me to teach them how to read music. Currently, I have several private piano students that I'm working with a community choir and teaching a group of young people about singing, hopefully to get them through a national qualification for singing that is equivalent to a GSCE. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds really impressive. Eventually, I hope to offer an online course. The idea is to share my love, better known as passion, an understanding of music with more people than I could sing any other method. Short, catchy, informative to the point. Still developing my theme music, which is really cool when you're a musician. But I plan on doing this on my MacBook Pro using GarageBand. I'll write again soon, Diane. I'm looking forward to that next email. But here's the great thing about it. Remember last week I said, "Why do you want to start a podcast? And who are you? Not like, "Hey, who are you? But who are you? Listen to her background. She's got a whole different slant on the music business because there are a lot of podcasts about the music business. I know because I started the first one, and I've seen a lot of them come. I've seen a lot of them go, and I'm looking forward to hearing Diana's on there. So, Diana, thank you so much for writing that in. I really do appreciate it. While we're doing listener feedback, I'm gonna guess it's just you. It's U W E. So when I say you, I don't mean you, you, but actually you, you. The guy I think I believe was in France. A lot has been said and written about Steve Jobs in recent days. I really liked your thoughts in the last edition of the School of Podcasting. Just one little correction, which I love corrections. I really do. Seriously, the forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson is just called Steve Jobs. I Steve is another book on Steve Jobs by another author. So you, thank you very much. By the way, the public, the publication of the Isaacson biography has now been anticipated to be October 24th. Shocking that they would move that up with the death of Steve Jobs, right? Thanks for a great podcast. You thank you for writing in, buddy. Really do appreciate it. All right, next up, want to talk about Audible? You're like Audible, Audible. Yeah, here's the thing. I wrote about this on my blog a while ago, and it was funny because I thought I'd already talked about this, and apparently I have not in the podcast. You can actually sign up. Let's first of all let's do a little affiliate marketing 101. Affiliate marketing is where you sign up for a program; they give you a specific link. So, for an instance, in my case, if you go to audibletrial.com forward slash Dave, you can get a free audio book. Do I have to put the radio voice on for that? You can get your free audio book. Choose from 85 million titles to choose from.

David Jackson  8:30  
If you don't want a subscription, which is only $15, you can cancel your subscription and keep the book for free. Now realize you don't have to talk like a radio weenie to to do an advertisement, but you can sign up for Audible, and what will happen is if somebody goes over and signs up, like I'm going to try to entice you to do this here in a second. I'm going to explain how I did this, what I do, and why it's working. Number one, put your put your shoes put your shoes in Audible's feet, or if you want to, it might work a little better if you put your feet in Audible's shoes, and what that does is Audible is like going. Look, we need people who like to listen to stuff because we have audio books. We have people that you know you can listen to audio books on anything on a iPad, on a on an iPod, on a Droid, on your computer, pretty much anything. I think even a BlackBerry, maybe you know you can listen to audiobooks on anything. Who's listening to stuff? And they went, "Oh, I know all those podcast listeners. So they created this incentive program. And if you go to right now, if you go to schoolofpodcasting.com forward slash audible, that's a u d i b l e. That's schoolofpodcasting dot forward slash audible. You can sign up. Now they are going to ask you some questions like, "What's your social security number? And the reason for that is, when you make money, Uncle Sam's going to want his share of that. And you're like, "Really? Like, what kind of money are we talking about here, Dave? And I'm going to say, the first month I did this, I can't tell you exactly because of the contract stuff, but I can say I made not one. Not two, not three, but four figures on the check. Yeah, ching, right? And I just checked. I haven't really promoted it much on my other podcast, and I'm getting a two-digit check at this point. It's August, or I'm sorry, october 14 here, so I'm halfway through, so that'll probably be again another three-digit check, which I got last month. So how do I do this? Well, here's a couple things. Number one, when we're talking monetization, the reason for this, I'm getting all ramped up on monetization. I'm going to PodCamp Cincy next weekend, and I'm going to be talking about this. So that's kind of ramping me up for this. But here's here's how this works. Number one, if you want to make any money with affiliate marketing on a podcast, I recommend it's something that you use. Don't go looking for something to just pimp. Find something you like and see if they have an affiliate program. For instance, I have a Fitbit that I just love. It's this little pedometer thing. You clip on your pants, and it wirelessly transmits my steps to a website. I just log in and say, "Wow, check it out! I've got 6000 steps in for the day. It's really, really cool. I talk about that on my weight loss podcast, and if somebody buys it, I make 12 bucks. So affiliate marketing-you sign up for a program, they give you a special link, and when somebody clicks on that link, the company goes, "Oh, this client came from Dave, or insert your name there. This client came from insert your name. Let's give that person a commission. That's affiliate marketing. So Audible has a program where if somebody signs up, you get 15 bucks, $15. There's your hosting bill. You get one person to sign up. So I am an Audible subscriber, and one of my books that I listen to, and I'm going to play you a little clip from it here. You've probably heard a lot of podcasters talk about this. Gary Vanderchuck or Vanderchuck is this guy wrote this book, Crush It, and I've heard all these people talk about how great the book Crush It is, and I was like, really, is it that cool? And so I went over, and I downloaded the Crush It book from Audible. Yeah, because actually somebody had sent me the book, the audio book, and I went, okay, I like it. And I'm I'm not really into that whole file sharing thing.

David Jackson  12:16  
And since I like the book, actually went out and bought it because I'm a musician and I've had people steal my files right in front of me. So when I got through like the first part of the book, I went, you know, I am going to enjoy this book. So I went to Audible and downloaded their version of it. I just want to play you a thing now. Even if you have this book, listen to it. And here's why I like this book. So here, here comes Gary V.

Speaker 1  12:35  
It's so that they will click on one of these several buttons. If you tried getting people to friend you or follow you via Facebook and Twitter, you'd come across a spam. So I'm going to jump off the script here a little bit and go a little bit detail into this stuff because this is

David Jackson  12:49  
and that's the great thing about this book. Gary is all about passion and such, and he must do this about seven times. He almost has another book in the audio book because every time you turn on, he's going, "Okay, I'm going to jump off script here. So pull over and stop the car because you need to write this down. So here, descript you

Speaker 1  13:04  
a little bit and go a little bit detail into this stuff because this is important. The UI and having these call to action buttons is so imperative. You know, having follow me on Twitter, fan me on Facebook, you know, is such a big deal. And then things like you see on GaryVaynerchuk.com, like buy the book or check out seminar, or check out this. It's so important. It's like the end caps in a retail store. When you go to Walmart or Target, it's just so important that you guys recognize that those end caps-they're not there for you know kicks and giggles. There's a business initiative behind it, and you need to look at your blog that way as well. Above the fold, you need to be able to be followed. You need to capture data, capture their email. Such a big deal.

David Jackson  13:46  
So there you go. Little here's what I love about that clip. Did you guys notice that he said um, and he said you know, and so it's a really great book. And if you've already got the printed book, I highly recommend getting the audio book-it really got me pumped up to thinking about how can I market this and what tools I can use. And if you'd like that book for free, go to audibletrial.com/dave, and you can sign up. And yes, you can listen on an iPod, an iPad, Droid-you name it-it's there. And if you don't want a subscription, now if you bought that book, it's probably around $20 as an audio book, and an Audible subscription is only $15 a month, and you get one book a month. Really, a cool thing. I'm a big Audible fan. Now, if you'd like to sign up to have Audible, where you can use them as a sponsor, like I just did, AudibleTrial.com forward slash Dave. If you use that, I'm going to get your 15 bucks, and I would deeply, deeply appreciate that. By the way, seriously, if you're thinking about it, do it. Even if you don't want it, do it, and then unsubscribe. I'll get the 15 bucks. And if you're thinking about doing this for your podcast, go to schoolofpodcasting.com forward slash audible and give it a shot. Worst case scenario, you go, yeah, nobody's buying anything. But the key is, you've got to find books that people like. So let me tell you how I made money with this program. I lucked out. I do a podcast. In fact, it's nominated, the Jillian Michaels podcast fan cast. If you go over to podcastawards.com, we are nominated. And I know this is not the Jillian Michaels podcast, but if you you know if you're bored and you're over there at the podcastawards.com, put a little check mark next to that one. I would appreciate it. But Jillian came out with a new book, and that's got a lot of subscribers. That's one of my most popular podcasts, which is hilarious because I'm not that passionate about Jillian Michaels. I like her; she's inspiring. But I don't live and drink and sleep Jillian Michaels. But nonetheless, Jillian came out with a new book, an audio book read by her, and guess where it came out? That's right, Audible. And I went over to my audience and I played a sample of it, which you can get from their website. I said, "Yeah, if you want to listen to Jillian's new book, it's here. And if you don't want this book, she also has Master your metabolism. Cha-ching, cha-ching, ching, ching, ching, ching. I went to my musician's cooler podcast now, marketing musician, and I said, "Hey, did you guys know that Stephen Tyler, you know the guy on American Idol, he's he's got a new audio book out? And then I said, "Oh, by the way, the next month, did you guys know that Sammy Hagar, you know the lead singer, Van Halen, he throws Van Halen under the bus. Now, why do I know these? Because I'm listening to these books. I'm at least listening to the samples and things of that nature, and I'm I'm not hyping stuff I don't know about. And I go, this would fit this audience, and you know what adds up to cha-ching. Now, am I going to retire on this? No. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had that question at the beginning of the podcast. But it's working for me, and if you want more information about this, you can a come listen to me talk about it in Cincinnati, or you can go over to morepodcastmoney.com, where I've got examples like this and many more in my book called More Podcast Money, which you can buy via PayPal, or if you hate PayPal, you can buy it via credit card. All right, want to talk about? Hey, a lot of people are coming to me now. Okay, where do I start? I want to start a podcast. I go, okay, what's your topic? I want to talk about this. Good. Okay. Good. Got that. Now, the next thing you have to figure out: what are you going to call it? And it usually needs to be something that is obvious as to what your podcast is going to be about.

David Jackson  17:31  
I always give the example that this podcast is horribly named the Morning Announcements, and that's why I had to go back and change it to the School of Podcasting's Morning Announcements because nobody knew that the morning announcements was about podcasting, so you want it to be obvious. But more importantly, you want it. We start thinking branding here. You want your podcast and the domain name to kind of match, and to check and see if it's available. You can go over to schoolofpodcasting.com forward slash domain check, and that'll bring up a little GoDaddy screen, and you can just type what you think the domain name that you want to use is in there, and click on I think it's Go, and it'll show you if it's available or not. I don't really know that you need the .net and .org and all that stuff. And also with GoDaddy, just get the domain name. Don't buy the hosting or the 87 other things they're going to offer you. Just keep saying no, thank you, no thank you, no, thank you. And then the other thing is, if you find the domain name, if you say, "Hey, we want to call it the I Love Cheese Pizza Podcast, I don't know where that came from, but I love Cheese Pizza Podcast, and you go over and you type in I love Cheese pizza.com, and it's available. Buy it then. I have had more than three people now say, "Yeah, I've checked the domain name's available, right? Did you buy it? No, I'm gonna wait till I get my website ready, and then they go back later and it's not available. Buy it now. It's $12 a year. Got that? So that's how you can check to see if your name is available. And there are a lot of times when that domain isn't available, and you'll type in other ones, and you go, oh, okay. Well, this is available, so now it's not the I love cheese pizza, it's Cheese Pizza Lovers podcast because cheesepizzalovers.com is available because you want those to kind of be coinciding with each other. So that may be something that will help you pick the name of your podcast, if it's in a if the domain name is available, if you want to go uber geeky with this, Google the phrase Google keywords, and there's a free tool for Google, and you can see what words are popular. In other words, what people are playing with. And I always make the joke that while your mother told you to to never go play in traffic, the idea with a podcast is to go play in traffic, so you can find words that people are searching for and see if those fit into the name of your podcast. Does that make sense? Because if people are looking for it, you're more than likely to get found. So that would be another thing you could do in terms of figuring out what are we going to call this thing. I know I want to do it. What am I gonna call it? Then the other thing, two other things on picking your name. Number one, does it roll off the tongue? My podcast consulting originally was called Podcast Fast Pass because my brother went to Disneyland and they got a fast pass and got to run to the front of the line. I'm like, oh, what a cool idea! I'm going to start podcast fast pass, and every time I said it, I had to say podcast fast pass because it always sounded like podcast fast pass. People like, what fast who, what? So that was that was done. It looked good on paper, didn't come good off the tongue. The other thing you want to see is you want to avoid words like two, because that can be T O T W O or the number two, and if that's in the name of your podcast, you want to buy all three domain names with T O T W O and the number two, because again they're only $12 a year, and you also want to make sure what do they look like. So if you said I want to be happy yesterday.com. You would have H A P P Y Y E S T E R D Y, and the 2y's in the middle might make it look a little funky.

David Jackson  21:09  
So you want it to come off the tongue easily. You want it to look like you don't look at it and go, "Is that spelled right? You ever had those words? You're like, "Is that? It looks right, but it doesn't look right. You don't want a domain name like that, and also if you have to spell it, those are some ways to help you pick the name of your next podcast. All right, last up, want to remind you that I am doing a webinar this Monday, which is why I'm putting this out today, right before the weekend that's going to go over RSS feeds and iTunes, which is really the biggest hurdle for podcasters. They're like, okay, I got the audio thing, but what's an RSS the iTunes with the who, and the feed what? Yeah, I'm going to explain all that with no jargon and lots of stick figure theater. So if you like stick figure theater, I'm telling you, come out. Nobody draws stick figures like I do in my webinars. They're awesome, they're cute, and they're award winning. Check that out. You can go to schoolofpodcasting.com forward slash webinars. I thank you so much for tuning in. What do we talk about today? If you want an Audible account to try it out, go to audibletrial.com forward slash Dave. If you are looking to become an Audible affiliate, go to schoolofpodcasting.com forward slash Audible. That's A U D I B L E. We talked about if you want to see if a domain name easy for me to say a domain name is available. Go over to schoolofpodcasting.com forward slash domain check and the other thing I want to mention I love the fact that Gary V said um and you know if you want to hear a lot of um and you knows now I myself am not a drinker was married to an alcoholic for 10 years of which the last three were pretty much hell and so I'm not a big fan of the booze but if you are a person that is likes. I've always heard about these drinking games. Here's one. Go over to thepodcasterstudio.com. My buddy Ray Ortega interviewed me and broke it into a two-part series. In the second part series, if you take a drink, let's say of Mountain Dew, every time I say, you know, especially is insane or um? Not as bad, but definitely annoying. You know, off the charts. You will drink a 12 pack of Mountain Dew by the time it's over. It's amazingly annoying, but it's a great interview, and I really thank Ray for having me on and and for especially breaking it into two parts as opposed to going. Ah, we're going to have to cut most of the stuff and leave it on the editing floor. So that's at thepodcasterstudio.com. Put a link to that out at the show notes. So thank you so much. Don't forget that because you're a listener of the podcast, you can get 30% off. Use the coupon Listener 30 when you sign up@theschoolofpodcasting.com. And last, the big thing I hit at the beginning of this, I'm thinking of changing my business plan from a membership site where there'll still be a small membership area, but having classes where you just pay for each class separately, is that a good idea? Because I'm doing this for you, and I ought to ask you to see if you want it before I hand you a cheese straightener, and you go, "What is it? And I go, "It's a cheese straightener. And you go, "My cheese isn't crooked. And I go, "Oh man, I spent three months working on that cheese straightener. And let me know, Dave, at schoolofpodcasting.com. Call in your comments 888-563-3228, or leave a comment on our website, which is schoolofpodcasting.com. Thank you so much for tuning in. I really do appreciate talking to you, and it's always great to hear from you. So I hope all is well with you. Stay away from all that Halloween candy, and until next week, class is dismissed.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai