0:00:00 A: I’ve been trying, and you know, I’ve been tested. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their w ealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 A: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast. Ain’t nothing gonna stop me now.
0:00:43 Ben Wright: Morning, Jemimah. How are you?
0:00:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, Ben, we’ve had a morning, haven’t we?
0:00:47 Ben Wright: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
0:00:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: I do. I very much know if anything could have gone wrong this morning, it has gone wrong.
0:00:52 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:00:52 Jemimah Ashleigh: This is the life of recording podcasts.
0:00:55 Ben Wright: Yeah. It’s fair to say you ducked off for an hour time being you came back.
0:00:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:01:00 Ben Wright: I was sitting in my happy place. For me, whenever I’m frustrated, I go sit in the steps, on the steps in the sun. And I was sitting there because we just had tech issues that even a hundred podcasts for me in I still have issues with and frustrates the anatomy, but I have to remind myself that its life
0:01:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: And there’s nothing that you can do about it in many ways. And so part of I think the approach that’s annoyed you the most is I’m just like, oh, well, we’ll fix it, but we should have been further ahead. I was like, we are where we are. Let’s just be where we are.
0:01:28 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. I set high standards on myself and you’re always your toughest critic.
0:01:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: You are.
0:01:35 Ben Wright: But it kind of poetic. It happened this morning because today’s scheduled topics. We’re actually talking about podcasting today. And to be. I would say we’re experienced at what we do, but to still have issues shows that doesn’t matter how much you’ve been or how long you’ve been in business for. Sometimes things go wrong and you just got to be able to chill out. For me, though, I’m always able to bring myself back quickly if I can get to my happy spot, which is the sun.
0:01:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: Which is good because I thought you were mad at me because I’d come back five minutes later than I said I would be because I had to record a podcast this morning, which was great.
0:02:02 Ben Wright: I can assure you that wasn’t it. So podcasting today, I’m going to hand the reins over to you mostly for this one today you’re g oing to talk about guesting, and we’re also going to talk about being a host. Yeah. So let’s jump into it.
0:02:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: And a couple of the benefits of that that goes with those things, because they’re the same benefits, different levels of work. Let me be super clear on this.
0:02:21 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I’ll add some flavor as we go, but let’s start with you.
0:02:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. So most people know me because I built a podcast, and that was really where I started to tease this whole visibility thing. So I was. And just a little background story for you guys. I started a jewelry business, which was my first business that I ever had, which sounds funny now to think that someone let me run Play with Fire a lot. That was pretty interesting. Anyway, I started a podcast because I had a learning about business, and I was a really good writer, but I’m a much better speaker. And I thought, if I can learn this much in this amount of time, surely other people are going to be looking for the same things. I was very new and very green to this business world. I was probably only 33, 34, and I’d had no entrepreneurial experiences. You know, some people have family, people I might like in business, and they learn from them. My family’s all cops and lawyers and, like, judges and stuff. Like my family, I’m the further thing from that.
So I ended up starting a podcast series just because I wanted to document my journey. And to say that changed my life is absolutely an understatement. It took my life to a completely different level that I truly didn’t think was possible. I went from having a positive vet security clearance for those who don’t know what that is. Security clearances, they trust. They trust you when you fill out those forms. The one that I had, they trusted nothing. So if I said I was born on a certain date, they went and got the documents to prove that was true. So I had this security clearance through the wazoo. It was crazy. And I ended up starting a podcast, which got a lot of traction. Very early on, this podcast started. It was a business experiment, still available now. It was before Spotify to show you how early we were to the curve. And to be very honest, a lot of the success we had from that, because not everyone was doing podcasts then. I think there were more stories like mine that we started this podcast and it got traction really quickly and quite early months in, we had thousands and thousands of downloads. We were in multiple countries within the first three months. It was sort of unheard of, numbers now, but there was A market for it, and no one was doing it.
0:04:23 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah.
0:04:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: So we started with $50 headphones from JB Hi Fi. We’re like, this is all we need. We’ll record through Skype. Zoom wasn’t even a thing at that point. I’d even heard of Zoom. Spotify is not on the scene. And within the first three months, we broke itunes records.
0:04:38 Ben Wright: Yeah. Cool.
0:04:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: Which was like, itunes call, and I start laughing and think it’s a joke. Phone call and hang up.
0:04:45 Ben Wright: 7 million downloads.
0:04:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. 7 mil.
0:04:48 Ben Wright: Not a bad run.
0:04:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: Not terrible. We backed that up pretty well. We had huge impact. We ran a couple of Facebook ads, but the one thing we got really early on was visibility. We got PR very, very quickly. So I want to talk about the benefits of podcasting as a whole, but also really acknowledge that, you know, starting a podcast is a lot of work. And while I think a lot of people think it’s a really good idea, we know the stats aren’t in your favor. We know that most people only get to four episodes.
0:05:13 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, we’ve joked about that.
0:05:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: 19 downloads. That’s it. Those are the current stats. And 19 of those, like, that’s not great numbers. But that’s your mom, your dad, your cousin, and your friend, and that’s your numbers. Right. And it’s because people don’t plan their podcast well, as a general rule. So if you’re gonna go into it, I cannot recommend it enough. I cannot, like, hand on heart, if you want to do a podcast.
0:05:33 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:05:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: Do it.
0:05:33 Ben Wright: I’m in that camp too. Absolutely.
0:05:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: Do it. Absolutely incredible. But you need to have a plan.
0:05:37 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:05:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: So what’s the alternative to that? And the other one is being a guest. I really want to focus in today about. They’re all benefits for that.
0:05:45 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
0:05:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. How many episodes do you say you’ve recorded?
0:05:49 Ben Wright: I’m north of a hundred. The strongest sales team podcast that I’m currently running. We’re into the 80s, I think. In fact, I think we’re into the 90s recorded. But we’ve got the 80s published. We’re sitting here at episode. What are we today? Episode 10 today. And I’ve done some guesting and some.
0:06:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: Work around it as well, for sure. And how do you find the guesting experience? Do you enjoy coming in to do that?
0:06:09 Ben Wright: Look, to be honest, I do like doing it if I can get the right target, but I haven’t actually set myself up to be a guest. I know that if I was to set myself up to be a guest, and we’ll talk about this today. There’s a few things in particular that I would need to do to become a guest on the shows I want to be on. But I actually focus in particular on having my own podcast for some very good reason, which we’ll also go through. I don’t want to steer your thunder on this. So do I enjoy guesting? Yes, I do.
0:06:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. It’s the same outcome for far less work.
0:06:38 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:06:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: It just sometimes doesn’t position you maybe truly as that expert. So I want to go through a couple of my little. Couple of tips. Why. And then get into my three reasons why you do this. The first thing is that 50% of people right now that you know. So we live in a society where television, no matter what you do here, is still king. That, you know, I know that we’ve turned the TV on this morning. There was a movie playing in the background at the Qantas Lounge, and I kept looking at it. I couldn’t hear it, but I was still sort of looking over and just watching. We are a society that does like the moving picture.
0:07:11 Ben Wright: Yeah. That’s what happens visual.
0:07:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: But we’re really moving away from that a little bit, where the people who. We are spending the same amount of time watching TV at the moment as a society and listening to audio books, podcasts. So if we’re doing two hours roughly there, on average, the average person’s doing two hours over here.
0:07:30 Ben Wright: Okay. We’re taking short chunks of content.
0:07:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely. 100%. And that 48% of entrepreneurs listen to a podcast every day.
0:07:39 Ben Wright: Wow.
0:07:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: And business owners. Isn’t that incredible? So literally half of our audience right now, half of the people that we know every day consuming at least one full podcast, which is pretty massive numbers. So people say it’s a really saturated market. It’s a saturated market. 1. Because it is absolutely necessary to be saturated because the market’s there. And when we go back to this whole idea of attention economy that I could talk for years about, you go where the people are.
0:08:03 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:08:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: Start paying attention to that. So what are the benefits of Dream Podcast? Number one, visibility that if you do a podcast, it goes onto Spotify, Podbean, iTunes, you’re going into multiple platforms, you record one piece of information, going to do this one podcast today. It’s going to upload to the cloud. We’re going to use that for social media tiles. We’re going to use that to go into our social media, our respective social media, which collectively, what, 50, 60,000 people across all our CRMs and stuff. Plus we’re going to push it out to our contacts to maybe to share that out. We have a guest on here, we’re going to hit their network too. You take one piece of data, there is nothing else that we create that is going to have that level of exposure that quickly and that easy of searchability.
0:08:46 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great. There’s some terrific reasons I use it. So that’s number one, visibility. Got it.
0:08:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Number two, more contact with your ideal client.
0:08:54 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:08:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: The one thing that happens, and I look at this as a bit of a, anytime you’re on a podcast guest or as a host, you are talking to your ideal client. Because I can guarantee you that not one person that doesn’t care anything about business is like, you know what, these guys seem interesting. I just want to hang out with them. No one is thinking that we’re great, by the way, you should totally hang out with us.
0:09:16 Ben Wright: Absolutely.
0:09:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: But what I am saying is that they’re not listening to a business podcast unless they’re that interested in it.
0:09:21 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah.
0:09:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I think what we need to be acknowledged here is that those contacts that we’re making, those people that we’re meeting in those moments, they’re the people that are going to buy from us. We’re suddenly having a one way conversation with them. We’re talking about. Now, most podcasts you are not going to be allowed to sell on. Let me be very clear. Podcasts will, to the end of days tell you come as a guest, talk about what you do, but you are going to get to do something called breadcrumbing. Have you heard of this before?
0:09:48 Ben Wright: I know breadcrumbing, but let’s talk through it.
0:09:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. So breadcrumbing, my favorite thing, where it’s something we say. So, Ben, I’m working with a client at the moment and I’m helping them grow and scale and get on television. That sounds like an incredibly innocuous statement, but I’ve told you a couple of things. One, I have clients. Two, I am capable of helping them get on tv. And three, I’m working directly with them. You get one on one attention with me. You get to be on television and you get to make some money and everyone goes, oh, breadcrumbing is one of the number one ways, particularly in podcasting, where you just get to kind of filter these amazing little bits and pieces across and people get to go, I understand what you do now that you work with clients, that you help people get on tv.
0:10:31 Ben Wright: So let’s just pause and break that down. So breadcrumbing is when you throw in examples through generally doing of what you do. So for myself, as a sales strategist, a great breadcrumb for me would be to say I worked with a business in January last year. We focused specifically around their sales process and their key behavioral cultures. And that business grew by 86% within six weeks. Right. So what I’m saying is exactly as you said. It shows what I do, it shows the results that I have, and it shows that people want to work with me. So whilst we’re not mentioning names, we’re not actually advertising our services. We are proving that we’re good at it. And I would have to say that for my podcast, and I call this part social proof. Getting in front of my customers more regularly. This is what I really use the strongest sales teams podcast for, is around showing my customers that I know what I’m talking about and that I’m a person with hiring.
0:11:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I think it’s so important with this type of example and breadcrumbing situation we’re talking about is that you have to recognize a lot of these people don’t understand what we do on a very high level. We often get distracted as business owners. Oh yeah, I help people get visibility. Well, how do you do that? What’s an example of that? We talk about this so often, Ben, that you can forget that the average person actually will have no understanding of the type of work that we’re doing. So that’s where podcasts can be really good. You get the time and, you know, especially in breadcrumbing scenarios of going, yeah, I really work with a client. This is what happened. And she had this result. It was really great. And she got the information result that she after or times of like, we got a client where, you know, we had one recently with a literal Four Corners expose came out and my client was kind of entangled in that. Negative PR is a real thing. It was like, how do we deal with this situation? And it was just going, this is the problem we face. This is the outcome we got. And then other people reached out going, oh, this is a case study. Without it feeling like it’s a real case study.
0:12:27 Ben Wright: Yeah, great, that’s good.
0:12:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: So, number one, visibility, number two, more contacts, number three, and this is the one that is really important for long term ROI. This is where you are going to do better on websites with SEO. This is going to make you so much easier to find. You’re going to have so many more eyes on you. So average podcast, sure, 19 people doesn’t sound like a lot, Ben, 19 people following you on Instagram isn’t a lot. 19 people following you down an alleyway, terrifying. It is relative. I am all about mass numbers here. And so when it comes down to it’s not only increased visibility, it also increases your likelihood of sales because you have increased SEO, increased searchability online, you have type in Jemimah Ashleigh, you know, a thousand things that come up, podcasts from years ago. And the other things of this is that when you have that, it’s always evergreen.
0:13:21 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:13:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: Very few people take their podcast down.
0:13:24 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. There’s no doubt that when we talk about networking, which we absolutely did, it was way back in episode three, we spoke about how it’s important to be easy to work with, which means essentially be easy to be found. So when you have that podcast and you’ve got backlinks and you’ve got content that spits out of it, and lots of short form content that comes too, then it just makes you so much more visible globally, which in a 24 hour news economy. Episode nine, we’ve just gone through the 24 hour news cycle.
0:13:55 Ben Wright: Really important. All right, let’s keep going.
0:13:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: Amazing. Those are my big three tips for these. I’d like to hear silver bullet from these. What were the big things that you would take away from this?
0:14:04 Ben Wright: Well, actually, before we go to silver bullet. Okay, can we go back to those three things?
0:14:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely. Number one, visibility increases, your visibility increases, your profile increases, your business increases, your ability to be in front of your agile client. Number two, more exposure in the idea you can get in front of your ideal client a lot easier. Your ideal client is going to be grabbing those podcasts. You are going to have a one way conversation, whether you know it or not with those.
0:14:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: And number three, increase sales because of increased SEO.
0:14:36 Ben Wright: Right, okay, got it. So for me, the silver bullet out of here is when we talk about engaging with our customers. And I mentioned this definitely once, if not twice across our journey so far is the pre Covid, we had customers needing on average five to six touch points with a business or an individual or it doesn’t matter who you’re engaging with. But they needed five to six touch points before they could make a decision. Post Covid, those numbers have jumped 11 to 13 depending on the survey you look at. The numbers are a little bit different, but the macro theme here is that more people need to have more engagement with a brand before they trust them now to bring them on. And that’s not only because there’s so much information available, but also it’s so easy to put fake information out there. So for me, the silver bullet here is that we need to make sure we’re getting in front of our customers in more ways than the traditional phone call, email, face to face or video call. Right. So we need to understand what are those modalities are. And for me, podcasting is one of those and it can be very effective depending on the industry you’re in. So my silver bullet here is to have a look at your broader content plan and say, okay, how am I getting in front of my ideal customers? 11 to 13 times. And if there’s a gap and podcasting is not in there, perfect way to slot it in. But if podcasting is one of those modalities, then you need to get moving because it does take time to build momentum. I personally think you are at least 12 months before most people will build momentum in podcasts. Some do it quicker.
0:16:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, for sure.
0:16:10 Ben Wright: Some do it longer. But certainly for the average person approaching it, it’s going to take you 12 months to get comfortable with being in front of a camera, to get comfortable with getting your backgrounds right, to get comfortable with tech issues, to have enough content to talk about, to have guests who want to talk with you.
0:16:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: And there’s still no guarantee you’re going to get any of that. Right. 100 plus podcasts. Absolutely right.
0:16:27 Ben Wright: And I mean, I’m 18 months in on a top 5% podcast globally. We will be that within a short period of time as well. We’ve had a terrific uptake early, but it doesn’t just come easy. So that’s my silver bullet.
0:16:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I think that that’s. It’s so incredibly valuable. And I think we probably see this more in the PR and visibility world. And you’re absolutely right. That 12 month ROI, people just go, what’s the guarantee here? And the hard truth is, especially with stuff like this, this is almost the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Yeah, it is. Every day chipping away at something that there’s no guarantees on.
0:17:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: And sometimes it goes early. We were really ahead of the curve there because no one had a podcast. We were just like, this is a fun project. This will be fine. I’m thinking my mom is going to listen to this. This will be fun little thing for me to do on a Tuesday when we record and then we’ll be done. This became the center of my universe very quickly. And that’s where at that point I would recommend people have businesses start. Like, once you have a business, then you can do a podcast.
0:17:26 Ben Wright: Okay, great. And that’s your silver bullet.
0:17:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: My silver bullet is really just going to be that. It is going to be a bit of a numbers game here. It’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back. I’ll come off the back of yours because it is that thing that we have to very slowly, over time, build that visibility. Being a guest once is great. Being a guest a hundred times is a lot better.
0:17:43 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, awesome. It’s actually as we talk about that it pops to mind and I think we maybe add this as a future topic. Is everything we can do with our podcast content once we have it. We need to do that. We’re not going to do it today, but we need to do that. Let’s write that into the agenda, into the forward plan commitment. If you don’t see it from us in the next 20 episodes or so, then you can hold us accountable. It’ll be there, but absolutely. Okay, so we’ll put that down. I think that’s been a really great chat around podcasting. Thanks for driving that one.
0:18:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, no worries, Jemima.
0:18:10 Ben Wright: We’ve been your friends in Business. Thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you same time next week.
0:18:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thanks, guys.
