New Era of Networking: Scaling E-commerce With Marketing Domination | EP. #116

Podcasting isn’t just for morning entertainment with your coffee and breakfast. On this 116th episode of The E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff sits down with Seth Greene, CEO of Market Domination. Seth offers a unique perspective into the world of podcasting and how sellers can leverage it to reach new and desired audiences.

With years of successful experience under his belt, join in on today’s episode, where Andrew and Seth discuss the power of audio and video engagement, how to turn listeners into purchasers, and the benefits of E-commerce sellers hosting their own podcasts.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Andrew Maff & Seth Greene

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Seth Greene

Seth Greene is a Nationally Recognized Expert in Growing your business with a direct response podcast, AND in Late Stage College Financial Aid Planning..

Seth Greene is the author of 8 best-selling marketing books, and his seventh book, Market Domination for Podcasting is on the shelves of Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, and Target now.

He is the only person in history that Dan Kennedy has nominated for marketer of the year three years in a row.

Seth has been featured on real media like CBS MoneyWatch, CBS news, Inc magazine, The LA Times, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, and the #1 morning radio show in New York City.

Seth has shared the stage with Steve Forbes, John Mackey of Whole Foods, Dan Kennedy, Jeff Mask (Infusionsoft), Dave Dee, Darcy Juarez, Sam Bell, Dustin Matthews, Dave VanHose, Perry Marshall, Brad Martineau, and many other luminaries.

Seth has been written about in three best-selling business books, the top industry trade journals, and in Dan Kennedy’s NO BS Newsletter.

00:03

I think if you get the strategy right, the rest doesn't matter as much because we've created a process where you could make money doing a podcast without getting more than you know 500 or 1000 listeners

01:08

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, as usual, Andrew math. And today I am joined by the CEO of market domination Seth Greene. Seth, how you doing ready for good show? I am fantastic. Thank you so much for having me here. It is an honor to be here for your audience. Appreciate it. I am already I'm also the CEO of East Fifth Avenue, a premier boutique affiliate recruiting and management agency as well.

01:33

Awesome. So we're gonna touch on all that stuff. I'm super excited today to talk about the podcast side of things because obviously I'm doing it right now. This is not

01:46

how I explained it. This isn't common, right? Like it's not a very especially for ecommerce. It's not as common as as I believe it should be. In fact, years ago, I had done this big talk and these events and all this stuff on how b2b traditional b2b marketing could really be leveraged for DTC e commerce sellers, one of which I kind of touched on the podcast side now I haven't gotten to it as deep as you have. So I'm very excited to touch on this today. But let's do kind of the usual thing. Let's pretend no one knows who you are. No one knows anything about market domination. Tell us a little bit about yourself your background marketing. We'll take it from there. Sure. So I'll do the short version of the brag book, right. Founder and CEO of market domination CEO BS Fifth Avenue, only person Dan Kennedy legendary marketing guru Dan Kennedy has ever nominated for his market of the Year Award three years in a row back to back to back the fourth year, they didn't have the contest anymore, so maybe I broke it. I co host the shark on our podcasts with Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank. I've written nine best selling books. I've been on Forbes I've been written about in Forbes and Inc been on CNBC, NBC, CBS, and on the Inc fastest growing privately held companies list. So I'll say that's the short version.

03:00

Beautiful. So you're doing okay, right.

03:04

So, tell us a bit about market domination, how you're leveraging podcasts. And let's start there. And then I'd like to obviously will specifically kind of cater to the E commerce side, for sure. So I believe podcasting is the greatest networking tool ever invented, and people aren't using it the way it should be. I think everybody starts a podcast who doesn't talk to us with the idea that it's gonna go viral, and they're gonna become the next Joe Rogan and make lots of money get sponsorship. And that doesn't happen, as evidenced by the fact that there's 1.9 million podcasts. And there's a couple 100,000 of them that are inactive. And it's such a common phenomenon. It's called pod fading when you don't get past the 10th episode. So we use podcast as a way in the door to start a relationship with someone that we either want as a client or that we want as an affiliate. So I think if you combined the get to know you power of audio and video, in this day and age, and you add on our ad, two step, direct mail follow up sequence, I can get in front of any impossible to reach decision maker, and I can get in front of any ideal client or any potential affiliate that might not otherwise respond to a cold email or a cold call, certainly from a client, right, someone they want that they can't get in the door in but if you do it our way, almost everybody says yes. Yeah. So from a b2b perspective, obviously that makes a lot of sense because you know, founders, CEOs, all that fun stuff. They like to talk about themselves and so they are more than happy to be interviewed and get the extra accolade but how do you kind of also leverage this for more traditional like d to c, e commerce? How can ecommerce sellers leverage podcasts? Absolutely. So it works incredible in the E commerce space. We've got a number of E commerce clients obviously, and it's all about who else has the audience you want. So for example, one of our clients is a is a barefoot sneaker company and they

05:00

A, let's say they want a relationship with a gospel method, which you might if you've ever been to a Tony Robbins event, you've seen the gospel guys come out and do a session before every session on how to sit, how to stand, how to stretch how to move, so that your body doesn't hurt, you know, for going 16 hours a day. So we were able to get them a relationship with that company from a podcast all the way to being an affiliate and a brand ambassador. And they're now telling their hundreds of 1000s of customers nationwide about our sneaker company.

05:30

Interesting. So that is obviously a great way for someone who's on the E commerce brand to join in on a podcast and be able to get in front of an audience, obviously, but are you what are your thoughts on E commerce brands, starting their own podcasts and leveraging it as the host themselves? And trying to get in front of their audience that way? It actually works better if you're the host. Because if you're just trying to get on somebody else's show, what are you what do you have to offer them to get them to be on a guest. And you'll look just like everyone else pitching them all day long on getting on their show. Because once you build up a halfway decent following on a show you get I mean, we get like 1020 pitches a day of people who want to partner with me and Kevin and I. So then it becomes how can you add value if you're the show host. And you can ask that person to be on your show, and shine a mini spotlight on them, it is so much easier to do a show swap or a Recep and say, hey, I'll be on your you want to be on my show. And then I can be on your show. Or you can even just lead with be on my show. And then at the end of the show, they'll say Oh man, that was great. We didn't talk about you at all, you should be on my show. So I have a layup from there.

06:41

What do you see is the is the more beneficial structure to really leverage these these podcasts and actually get them to be successful, because to your point, there's 1.9 million of them. A lot of people I believe the statistic is like they're only subscribed to like 10, maybe 15 podcast at a time. So getting into that that kind of small, like window of content to be able to provide them is difficult. So how are you kind of working with people to help them really scale up the visibility of their own podcasts? It's a great question. So there's obviously the normal stuff like promoting out onto your email list and your social channels and getting your guests to do the same thing. But we were finding that that wasn't moving the needle enough for our clients, which I think is a common struggle in the industry. So we've created new technology that's powered by AI that allows us to have your episode autoplay, after anyone else's show, and you only pay if they download your episode. So if you think about it, if you've ever been on YouTube, and you've watched a video, and at the end of it, a suggested video starts playing. This is not for audio, except it's pay per performance. So literally, if you wanted to pick up your episode play after NPR, or Paris Hilton, or whoever, and her fans don't listen to you, it doesn't cost you anything. It only costs you something if they actually download and subscribe to your show. So we've been able to scale podcasts from zero to you know, hundreds of 1000s of downloads in a short period of time, because we can buy the traffic. And because very few people have figured out how to do this yet as we're recording this. I'm sure people will other people will figure it out. But right now, barely anyone is doing it. So it's like Facebook and Google Ads back in the day when you could buy traffic for pennies. Like we're literally buying downloads for 10 cents 20 cents.

08:29

All right, interesting. Any any insight into how to structure the podcast? I know there's theories around like how you started off. And then once you get into this podcast, as you've already probably tell, like very casual kind of so you tell me how am I doing? You're doing good. So the we've done a couple of 1000 of them. So we've kind of gone through logically proven structure of not to say a script, you don't have to read it verbatim. But in terms of if you will follow these elements in this order. Your guests will love you more. There's some key questions that we require every podcast host that we produce to ask every episode because we need the answers for the follow up marketing to turn them into an affiliate for our client. Yeah. So from a DTC perspective, the E commerce side obviously pushing product, you know, you mentioned being on other shows and you know, obviously, the way you structure those podcasts be very interesting as well. But is there other ways that you think you can scale out having a lot of listeners without having to do as much guest hosting because at a certain point, you know, you got on as many as you possibly can? What's the theory around bringing on more higher quality guests like for DTC I've discussed with a lot of brands like Oh, grab some influencers, if you know, depending on the size of them, like, at what point do you then really start to promote your own podcast and push it just because of the content that you're putting out there? I'm biased. I think you should promote your own podcast from day one. You got to grow a fan

10:00

Have you got to grow a following on the podcasting platforms? I think you got to start small and scale up. So for example, when I started my first show when this was direct response marketing before Kevin got involved before it became shark for newer, you know, my first episode had nine listeners, and you know, half of them were related to me. So Tony, you know, the Tony Robbins, influencer of the world, he's not gonna take my callback that, however, obviously, celebrity co host helps. Now, given the numbers that we're getting, I can get almost anybody to say yes. So I started smaller with the influencers. And I know if you would even call them that back then the folks who might have a couple 1000 people on their email list or a couple 1000 people on social media following who didn't view themselves as a paid influencer. And then I gradually worked my way up. And oh, because this guy was on my show, and he has 5000 followers, now I can start asking more people who have more followers to be on it. And I kept leveraging my way up climbing the ladder to ultimately get to the point where again, now, you know, with millions of downloads, we could get anybody.

11:09

Interesting, but you don't start. Everybody starts from zero? Pretty much. Yeah. Do you think that that's what? Because, you know, you mentioned this statistic earlier about, you know, the podcast that kind of fade off after, like, 10 episodes, do you think that that's the purpose is a lot of people think they're just going to create like a handful episodes, and all of a sudden, it's just gonna be everywhere? Yeah, I think the most common mistake is people think I'll just have a podcast, and it'll take off. And it's like any marketing campaign, that doesn't happen, right, you actually have to put the marketing money in the marketing muscle behind it, and get it out to the right people. And going viral is such a buzzword that everyone thinks that, oh, I just have to watch some YouTube videos on how to do it and everything will take off. But that's not the way it works in real life. So I think it's all about, you've got to have the strategy right from the start, which is why it's funny, we created our done for you service, because I had regular clients who like a golf coach in a local market going, how is this going to work for me, I'm never gonna get a million downloads. And we created a process by which a local business owner, you know, who's never gonna get more than five or 10,000 people to listen, could make a six or seven figure revenue bump by using our strategy. So I think if you get the strategy, right, the rest doesn't matter as much, because we've created a process where you could make money doing a podcast, without getting more than, you know, 500 or 1000. Listeners, it's all about the strategy and the relationships between you and your guests, as opposed to, I'm going to get a million people to listen and start selling ads or sponsorships. It's just a lot harder to do than people think.

12:44

So that was actually a good segue into what my next question is, which is, what is your stance on advertising and sponsorship, whether it's on other podcasts or on your own podcast. So if it's your own show, you shouldn't be you have ads promoting yourself. If you're on other people's shows, obviously, the whole point of that is to get a chance to promote yourself. Our podcast marketing tech, obviously helps solve the problem of downloads depending on your budget. I think that until you made a significant amount of money from the relationships you've generated, you've got no business worrying about sponsorships or ad revenue or ad networks, because your following won't be big enough yet. I think people put the cart before the horse, and they think all about the following and the ad revenue. And I think they need to think about the overarching strategy and how am I going to make money even if let's say if I do an episode every week, that's 50 in a year, can I make money off of these 50 relationships without ever getting a single download? If I if they are the only people who ever listen? Like I had a podcast where 51 people if 51 Download it, I can still make money? I think if you get that strategy, right, then the downloads come later.

13:54

Interesting. So from a DTC perspective with that. So obviously, you know, we talked about being a guest on other podcasts, we talked about potentially bringing on more higher profile people. And we talked about, obviously, the messaging and how some of the extra gets structured the advertising side, the promotional side, though, like when you start to promote your own podcast, especially for DTC because, you know, their revenue comes from product sales. And at what point do they start to worry that they're muddying up some of their other traditional marketing for product sales with trying to push content that, you know, may or may not actually eventually be directly tied to an ROI, because that can sometimes be difficult to map out the ROI of a podcast since you know, it's a little bit more evergreen and things stick around and you know, it's kind of more fluid, what's your thought on that? So there's a way to so we're a direct response marketing firm, not a brand building firm. So everything we do is trackable. So I can track to the penny every dollar I've ever generated from a podcast, and anyone else should be able to do that.

15:00

You should be able to do that as well. Otherwise, why do it? So it doesn't, it shouldn't dilute other things. It shouldn't muddy the waters, it should amplify them. It should be a bigger megaphone to get your marketing message out to a bigger audience that might not be aware of you, at least on the podcast platforms until your show takes off.

15:17

Interesting. Any theories on running ads for the podcast in itself? Have you tried that? Anyone you're working with doing that? Yeah, absolutely. Because we got to get more ears to listen to the show. Right? That's the big thing is getting it in front of more of the right people. Obviously, our marketing tech works really well. We've run Facebook ads for shows, we've run video ads for shows, there are podcast advertising networks, where you can upload your ad, your 32nd spot to drive people to your show that work. We've also had a lot of good results. And there are a lot of email newsletter platforms, where you can advertise relatively inexpensively because someone else already has your target audience built right in small check in have them drive them your way. That's probably one of the fastest ways to scale.

16:02

Interesting. So for your podcast, specifically, how are you advertising that every single way I just listed in more we didn't have time to go into. So there are social media advertising running, running. There are it's an autoplay after other podcasts that we picked. We use email lists and email newsletters to promote it. We use LinkedIn ads, we use direct mail, if there is a form of media I can use where our audience will hang out. I bought the only thing I haven't tried yet is, you know, tick tock ads. But everything else will get you there. Yes, I'm sure. The direct response side obviously very interesting because ecommerce sellers love to be able to track every little thing that they do. What's the process there? Is it a coupon code you give out during a podcast? Is it a specific URL? Like how are you actually tracking the ROI that comes from those? Yes, specific URLs driving to a specific, you know, a specific place that is only advertised in that particular location so that we can track Hey, did they hear it on iTunes in the yard on Spotify? Did they watch it on YouTube? It's and how did they get into the funnel?

17:10

So the obvious thing, then, do you see sellers Okay, love this guy. Seth knows shit. Let's do this. I want to I want to start my own podcast. What do they need? What's What's your podcast platform preference? How are you getting the podcasts out there? Do you have like a like, here's like, the mics and lights and all that fun stuff that you know, some people like to have, which obviously, I got, like, what's, what's your preference on getting started? So we put all of that in a book that we have a special offer for your listeners. It's called it's my Amazon bestseller. It's called The Ultimate Guide to growing your business with a podcast how to turn warm fuzzy feelings into cold hard cash. If they go to ultimate podcasts book.com they can get the physical copy, you know, at a large discount off the Amazon price. And to answer the question, in addition to what's in the book, I think people get hung up on the technical details. What mic what headphones, what audio mixer, all of this stuff. When I launched our podcast, it was literally podcasts weren't as hot as they are now. It was on free conference call.com. And you literally heard crackling, the production was terrible. Our initial first reviews were the production quality is god awful. But if you get past that the content is pretty good. So then we made it a real show. So I think honestly, you could use Zoom and your built in mic and speakers and probably be fine. Will it be as highly produced in as high quality as Andrew show? Of course not. But you don't have to go spend the money right away. You could test out some free stuff to get it started and then when you start making money upgrade later. Yeah. Love it. Seth, thank you so much for being on the show. I'd love to obviously give you an opportunity to let everyone know where they can find out more about you and of course market domination. Thank you so much. Go check out the bucket ultimate podcast book.com. Our branded company website is marketdominationllc.com and East fifth avenue.com. And I'm on all the social networks you just have to find Seth Greene with an E on the end is opposed to Seth Green, the actor from Austin Powers.

19:10

Perfect. So thank you so much for being on the show everyone who tuned in obviously thank you as well please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer. or head over the E comm show.com to check out all of our previous episodes, but as usual, thank you all for joining us. Thank you as well. See you all next time.

19:30

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.