An on air coaching call with Nicole Saunders of Saunders Say and Leisure & Leashes that dives deep into marketing your business as an influencer, blogger or podcaster.
IE 134: Marketing Your Business: On Air Coaching Call with Nicole Saunders of Saunders Says and Leisure & Leashes
My guest on the podcast today is Nicole Saunders of Saunders Says. Nicole owns a Pinterest management company as well as a dog blog, Leisure & Leashes and has recently launched a podcast for dog owners.
Asking for Podcast Reviews
When Nicole launched her recent podcast, she went to Instagram to encourage her audience to leave a rating and a review for her.
She had a plan to give away several gift cards to those who left reviews, and she used IG features such as polls and direct messages to engage with the audience.
It didn’t quite go as she planned though. Audience engagement was low and people weren’t leaving reviews.
What I have found as a podcaster for the past few years is that leaving reviews on podcasts is one of the most difficult things we can ask our audience to do.
Apple hasn’t made it easy or convenient to leave reviews and now that folks can listen to podcasts on several different platforms, such as Spotify and Google Play, it’s not as easy as just going to a link and typing a few words.
It takes effort to leave a review so your followers will need more reminders to do so and may even need you to show them how.
You could consider making an IG story showing your audience how to leave a review for your podcast.
Taking Your Audience into Consideration
For those of us in the blogging and influencer world, we can wrongly assume that the rest of the world understands the online space the way we do.
And I’m telling you, it’s not true.
Not everyone understands or even knows that podcasts are a thing.
Nicole got a ton of responses earlier this year when she posted on IG about her Pinterest account. People wanted the link.
But most people use and understand Pinterest. Podcasting has a much smaller audience and is still a very young platform.
Again, you can use the features on IG to ask your audience if they listen to podcasts and when they respond to your polls, connect with them in their DMs and answer their questions about how to listen and why they might want to.
Does Your Audience Know About Your Podcast?
I was over a year into podcasting and had a student of one of my courses, who was also in one of my masterminds, tell me that she had no idea I had a podcast.
She had seen in one of my emails that I mentioned the podcast and was curious about it.
That told me that I needed to be more intentional about promoting the podcast, even to my own students! This woman spent time with me on a weekly basis and still didn’t realize I had a podcast.
Does your audience really know you have a podcast? You know what I always tell you; you have to tell your people something an average of 7 times before they actually hear you and take action on it.
You may think you’re saying it all the time, and you very well may be, but you’re the only one who hears it every time you say it.
So promote, promote, and then promote some more.
Using Email to Promote Your Podcast
Producing a podcast is fantastic but you also want to focus on growing your email list through your podcast.
In the beginning, when you likely don’t have any sponsors, or even later if you take some, you can take a moment in the podcast to advertise your own lead magnet. This is a great way to grow your email list through your podcast.
Since I’ve been podcasting for a good long while, I have a ton of back episodes.
I recently began emailing my list 3 times a week, chatting with my audience about a specific topic and referring them to a certain episode where I discussed that topic.
Since I began doing that email series, my podcast downloads have gone up 150%. It makes a huge difference, again, to tell people repeatedly what you want them to do.
Turning Your Podcast into a Business
Most podcasters don’t start a podcast thinking that it will be a business. Rather, it’s either a hobby or something to support an existing blog or business.
But Nicole knew from her first episode that this is a business for her. She doesn’t currently have products for sale and as of right now, she doesn’t have plans to sell anything.
But plans change all the time. In the future, she very well may come out with products. In the meantime, she is looking to grow brand collaborations and her own email list.
Nicole is starting from zero with this email list so she will need to be 100% intentional with everything she sends her list. She has to focus on growing that know, like, and trust factor we talk about so often.
The people who get on this list now will be the people a year from now who will buy whatever she tells them to.
Narrowing Your Focus
If you’re thinking of starting a blog, I would strongly recommend you choose a niche that excites you and that you will never tire of talking about.
Nicole has built a highly successful Pinterest management agency that pays her bills. This new podcast and business she’s starting all revolve around dogs.
Nicole has 3 dogs who each have their own IG accounts. One of her dogs, Miss Storm, has over 13K followers on IG!
She is the first one to say that a service-based business takes a ton of time, not only to build but to run.
Nicole has several VA’s and account managers who handle the Pinterest services part of her business, for the most part, leaving her to oversee the business and time to focus on building this passion project that will become a new, thriving business.
3 Areas of Focus for a New Business
As Nicole builds this new business, she is focused on 3 main areas:
- Content
- Ad revenue
- Brand collaborations
Because she is building this “doggy empire” from the ground up, Nicole isn’t thinking about doing some kind of dog services.
No. She is focused on creating great content and getting that content in front of as many eyeballs as she can.
Once she has the eyeballs, her focus then becomes gaining more traffic in order to build up ad revenue and getting her content in front of brands that she can work with on sponsored content.
With Nicole’s Pinterest management business, she can only accept as many clients as she has time or employees to serve.
But there is no ceiling on ad revenue or brand collaborations. That is an opportunity with unlimited growth potential.
Seeking Work/Life Integration
If there’s one phrase I hate, it’s work/life balance. I simply don’t believe it’s possible.
Nicole mentioned in the episode that she is after work/life integration and I loved the term!
Nicole has built a business that supports her and her family by offering services. And now she has the opportunity to build a business around her passion. However, she also has to do the work to get this thing off the ground.
To get photos of her dogs doing things, she has to take them to do those things. Cute videos of her dogs hiking mean she and her husband had to take the dogs hiking. It’s still work.
Nicole’s goal, and I hope yours, too, is to get to a point where your passion becomes your work and it no longer seems like work but what you really want to spend your time doing.
And that, friends, is when you have achieved true work/life integration.
Have you managed to achieve work/life integration? Comment below and tell me all about it!
Action Steps:
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