It’s said that having a podcast or a blog series does not have a good return on investment. But that’s wrong.
It’s all about leverage.
Leverage is what helps you lift boulders. It’s how you can buy businesses and own your own home. It’s also how you can have a conversation with an impactful person, someone who noticed your podcast while you were off doing something else.
A Podcast ROI Story
We only had one microphone. It sat in the middle of the wooden table in our conference room plugged into my MacBook Air via a USB input. In early 2017, we hosted guests on our podcast either in “studio” or virtually through Skype or Zoom. It worked okay. The quality wasn’t great, but it was improving.
(Today, the quality is a million times better, but we had to start somewhere.)
It was a spring day here in the Carolinas when a special guest came in, the CEO of a large company headquartered in Charlotte. For two hours, we talked, we recorded, we learned, we connected. He had questions for us, and he offered us advice and the names of other like-minded CEOs we should talk to. But we hadn’t called him to set up the talk—instead, he called us.
Why?
Because he’d heard our podcast and wanted to be on our show.
If I hadn’t known it before, it became obvious on this day – our podcast was leverage. Significant leverage. My business partner, a true numbers-guy and an excel-junkie (we call him The Strategy Addict), is still trying to calculate our ROI on that fine day, but it’s surely way above a thousand percent.
A Better Way to Reach Out
We’ve all cold-called, networked, and tried to connect with people, looking for new business. And we’ve all lost money and time in the process. But on this day, the CEO reached out to us. He drove to our office, spending his time and money to talk to us. And he wasn’t just doing us a favor. He came because we could offer him something he wanted and needed, the ability to talk to the public through our podcast.
And that’s leverage. Producing the podcast does cost us something in both time and money, but it’s easily affordable, and it’s a great deal, considering the value we can create for our listeners and guests, value that means them offering us their time is a great deal for them.
And when one CEO comes to talk, others follow. Some of them decide to work with us, becoming paying clients for many years.
That sure beats cold-calling!
And then consider all the other benefits we’ve received from hosting a podcast that we’ve discussed in our blog (here, here, and here) and on the podcast itself (here and here).
That’s leverage. That’s return.
No, Not Everyone Has a Podcast
As of January 2023, there were at least 3.02 million podcasts. That sounds like a lot, but the population of the United States is over 334 million, meaning there is less than one podcast per hundred Americans (and many of these podcasts are not based in the US). And most podcasts never get to episode seven, so for long-running shows that have time to develop a following, the competition is even less.
Podcasting is available to most everyone. It’s available to you. And it actually has a ridiculously impressive return on investment.
Want to learn more about podcast ROI: Then let’s talk podcast ROI / we’re a podcast production company