Doug: Hey, what’s going on. Welcome to the Doug show. My name’s Doug Cunnington and this is a impromptu type episode. I recently recorded a catch up episode and basically I talked about myself and what I’ve been up to. And a lot of what I’ve been up to is not working. So it’s actually been pretty fun. But. I think I left you with a cliffhanger about my other podcast, Ranking Revolution.
I think I did. If I, if I didn’t mention it in the episode, I’ll give you a quick little update, but I know I definitely wrote some emails and sent it out to the email list to let you know about Ranking Revolution. It’s a project that I started earlier this year, I think around January timeframe, the origin of the idea.
Was in place the seed was planted for a few months, but this episode is generally going to be an update about my options or at least what I think my options are and Highly likely that by the time this episode comes out. I will have probably made a decision probably started to execute on that and The decision will be made, or at least mostly the good thing is most of these things are not irreversible.
So if I change my mind, I could probably like change my mind to whatever I want. I mean, I’m making up all the rules. That’s the good part. I don’t, I don’t need permission from anyone to do any of these options here. So if you are not on my email list, you can go to niche site, project. com. I think it’s a green button.
Click the green button, enter your email address and you’ll be on the email list. So if you’re not on there, please join up to the email list. I’ve been emailing a little bit more recently. There are short emails and typically you know, giving updates, like what I’m working on, what I’m thinking about.
Sometimes I actually, a lot of times I point you towards episodes. YouTube or on the audio podcast. So sometimes it’s just like, Hey, new content came out. I am writing more of my short thoughts in there. Usually I’m not a very verbose writer, so it’s usually fairly brief, simple, simple words, easy to read and yeah, check it out.
So anyway, ranking revolution is My project where I thought, okay, I know how to podcast pretty well. I’ve spent about 10 years working in the SEO and marketing industry. I know a lot of people. I know organizers of conferences. I know the people that speak at conferences. I know owners of other blogs, other podcasts, agencies, and it’s a great network.
So, I thought, I should start a new podcast and I should interview these industry folks. The show will be for industry people, professionals in marketing or SEO or something closely related. And I’ll be able to put ads on there Uh that fit in the industry and the thing is you don’t have to have a very big audience if you have more b2b type listeners and audience or just again industry people and professionals because Let’s say someone is running an agency and Maybe they have two or three people working for them They work a fairly full time You number of hours and they want to add maybe digital PR to their, their product line.
And they want to offer like some pretty high end product. Well, maybe Linkify is someone that they get outsourced to. Linkify does digital PR. They get links over it, is it Connectively? It’s whatever Haro changed their name to. And basically they get some kick ass links. In fact, they just got me a link over on Ahrefs.
And, amazing link, they’re running a campaign for me. I am an affiliate, and I’ll put a link if you want to check it out. But the point is, an agency that wants to outsource some product line that they don’t have either the bandwidth or the skills to execute on, they could hire another company. So Linkify would be perfect to advertise.
And in fact, like podcasts are such a great way to reach people. I know that Linkify has a podcast. I know some other friends of mine started podcasts. So like I knew people were trying to start shows or agencies were trying to start shows, but they didn’t know how to do the podcasting portion. So I thought, Hey, if I have a platform, it’s the right audience.
I know the right people. I should be able to start a show without too much friction. Without a learning curve, and I could just start the show, get a following, and then sell the show. That was the idea. I’m going to start a show with the intent to sell it. I put the podcast, the audio format on Transistor, so I could dynamically insert ads.
Whenever I want. And whenever I transfer the show to the new owner, then they could put their ads in, they could advertise whatever they want. Or if a. individual wanted to have a podcast with sort of a whole set of systems and templates and a catalog of about 50 shows or so an individual, someone who wants to have a podcast could buy the show and then go find advertisers and put ads in wherever they want.
They could put ads in on my old episodes and they could put ads in. on ongoing future episodes. So I set it up that way on the audio side of Run Transistor FM. Great platform. I also was publishing on YouTube. YouTube is a great way to find new listeners, new subscribers, and just a new audience. On the audio side, podcasting is, it’s hard to grow.
It’s very slow, and it’s a little, it’s fairly sticky. You know, you, you hang on to a listener for a reasonable amount of time. I’ve heard people say about a year but it depends. Some people will listen for many years, but there’s always some churn, and If, if you’re lucky, you have a few more people finding you each month than are leaving you when you, you got a little growth.
So anyway, got video, got the audio side. I have both of those down. I also have the systems and templates. And the thing is I’ve talked to some people, some companies that started podcasts and they would hire a production company or someone would do the show for them and they’re paying from, I have to. Um, search back in my, my memory, I want to say the two stats, I won’t embellish this.
So I think the two stats that I heard from two people someone was paying about 1, 000 per episode and someone else was paying about 2, 000 per episode. That’s obviously pretty expensive, but the point is if it’s an agency that’s making a, you know, multiple seven figures or eight figures. They have a marketing budget.
They have a marketing budget. And if they can be top of mind for people in their industry, they can get some big deals by, you know, producing a show. Now, I think that’s a little expensive. And the thing is, podcasting is hot. I mean, people were talking about it. That’s why I was like, I should start a fucking show.
I should start a show and try to sell it. But If someone is hiring another podcasting production company, then that company has to make a profit. So there’s project management, there’s account management, there’s editing, there’s the equipment, there’s other pieces. Like it’s, it’s a thing you have to figure out.
So anyway, I was like, if I could just have a turnkey situation, I could sell someone a show, sell a company, the show, and it should probably work out. So that was the idea and I sat on it for a few months. I thought about it seriously and it was really taking form about a year ago. So October or so of 2023, it was taking shape.
I remember having beers with Matt Giovanissi and I was like, here’s my idea. What do you think? He’s a great entrepreneur and interested in podcasting and, you know, just creating stuff, he was like, this sounds interesting. I told a couple other people, I think Craig Hewitt over at Castos, uh, Castos is another great podcasting hosting company.
And I have two shows over on Castos. So I talked to Craig, he was like, Oh, that’s kind of a cool idea. Let me know how that goes. And. probably talked to four other people who thought that’s a cool idea. I haven’t heard of anyone doing that. Let me know how it goes. And an entrepreneur needs to be ambitious enough to start something and stupid enough to think it might work.
So I’m stupid enough to think it might work. And One good thing, I didn’t tell like my, my non entrepreneur friends, because you know, they’re my friends. So they would just be like, Oh, that’s a great idea. I think you’re going to do awesome at it. When you tell other entrepreneurs, they’ll be a little more critical.
They’ll be straight with you. They’ll tell you, yeah, I don’t know if that part’s going to work. Like you’re going to run into issues because if you’re hosting the show, Doug, what happens when you sell it to another person? Like you’re going to run into trouble. Now, there’s a couple of things that. Might happen with that.
And either I could continue on hosting the show as a, you know, a contractor for a little while to transition it over to a new host. It could be the founder of the company. It could just be the new owner if it’s a individual, or they could hire another host if they want to, and I could transition it over.
The thing is, again, I have all the systems and templates and I could say, Here’s how you can do it. I could train you. I have documentation and SOPs. Here’s how you could do it. You could change it up if you want to. And I could tell you the pros and cons. It could be a very quick transition. I could turn all this shit over, do the training in two or three days over the course of a week.
It probably wouldn’t even take that long, but people always have follow up questions and that’s expected. Or if it’s a company that I’m already Involved with, or I know of say like a software company, like SEM Rush. I’ve done some work with them in the past. Maybe they want me to continue hosting it for a little while and I can slowly transition it over to some other host.
So there’s options, right? Those are problems that can be solved. And. I could try to predict, right? I could have hired a host to host the show. So it’s really turnkey and I don’t, I’m not doing anything except setting it up and getting the host to do their thing. But, I didn’t want to guess to think about like what the new owner might want to do.
So this is the premise. And if you haven’t heard any of this before, you’re probably thinking, Oh, this is all a reasonable idea, Doug. And I think it is a reasonable idea. I still think it’s a damn good idea. So the other sort of secret marketing idea that I was going to do is interview people that have email lists.
If you interview someone, usually not always, but usually they will be happy to promote their appearance on some show, not always, but usually now, if it’s someone who produces like three podcasts a week, they send out two or three emails a week, and they’re just like pumping out content. Two things might happen, right?
Either they have so much stuff they’re already doing and they’re just promoting their own stuff. They really don’t have time to promote some other appearance or they’re pumping out a lot of content and like they need something to write about in their email list. So they would be happy to say, Hey, I was a guest on this show.
Go check it out. We talked about these things. So. If it’s a really compelling interview, something that they haven’t done before, or maybe they haven’t talked about before, then maybe they’re more likely to send it out. Some other folks are just, you know, they don’t want to, they don’t want to be self promotional.
So, one of my friends is a very prominent blogger and he was on a show that I do and I was like, Hey, here’s the link. If you want to, you know. I actually asked him, I was like, the most effective thing that you could do is send it out to your email list. And I would be very grateful if you did that, but no pressure.
If you, if you don’t want to do it, that’s totally fine. But ideal situation, send this to your email list, huge email list. It would have been a game changer, right? There’s, there’s rarely like some inflection point where something happens and then like you get growth, like exponential growth. This would have been one of those times.
Unfortunately, he said, ah, it seems self promotional. So I’m not going to send it out. I’ll just kind of, I’ll share it on X, which only a portion of the people see. And I was like, man, I was a little bummed out. I was like, the people sign up for your email list because they literally want to hear from you and you don’t send out many emails.
So like they want to hear from you. So even if you just say, Hey, I was on this podcast, here’s the link. They would, they would open it. They would check it out. A very short email can be quite effective. So, okay. That lays the foundation here. So here are the options. Here, here’s the deal. Yeah, I forgot. So the thing is, it’s not turning out like I thought.
So a couple of things happen. When my wife retired at the end of March. So I didn’t know she was going to retire exactly then. And I was like, ah, you know, I’m, I’m continuing to do some work and I’m, I’m able to produce a podcast in a fairly efficient manner. It’s not a huge time suck. And I was like, all right, I’ll start this show and it should be fine.
No big deal. I’ve produced a lot of podcasts over, over the years, but it, it turns out I’ve been doing a little bit less work. The other thing is I haven’t been executing to plan really well. So my idea was to interview people with email lists, which I mostly did. A lot of people weren’t sending it out. So, like I said, sometimes people send it out.
Sometimes they don’t. And it’s, it like basically didn’t help. So I think maybe 30 percent of the people sent out the appearance and it really didn’t get much traction. So I don’t have the stats open right here, but if you’re interested, let me know, and I could actually put the stats together, maybe like in the YouTube video where I’m like, I launched a show, like here’s where it’s at.
So overall. And I could generalize. Overall, it’s probably getting a hundred to 200 listens or views per episode. So it’s not nothing it’s okay. And depending on your industry, you might think that is horrible or that is okay, it’s not that great for what I was hoping for. I was hoping to be like in the, like over a thousand.
I haven’t thought about it too closely and I don’t even know if I wrote it down in my, my notebook. I even got a special notebook to write all the Ranking Revolution ideas, solo episodes things I was thinking about in a specific notebook. So, anyway, it’s not turning out like I thought. I was hoping to probably be, uh, you know, 1, 000 to 1, 500 listens or downloads per episode.
I’m at Like I said, a hundred to 200, that’s just kind of ballpark. And that might be a little bit of a high number, but what happens on YouTube, occasionally an episode will get a lot more views. So it’s sort of skews it technically I should probably throw out the outlier sort of high numbers on YouTube.
The other thing is I actually ran some ads for. A couple months or so to test things out. And it’s actually just shy of 10, 000 subscribers. The thing is the number of views that the videos get, it doesn’t correlate very well to the number of subscribers. So I ran ads to get more subscribers, which I got some, and it’s interesting because I, I mean, there’s some value to having a channel with 10, 000 subscribers, even if the views don’t.
Count for too much. So it’s not turning out like I thought I’m not executing that well. I’ve admittedly been lazier in the last six months than I was the previous six months, and it’s honestly just escalating over time as I’m doing less work. Generally, I find it. Well, I enjoy it. I enjoy doing a little bit less work.
I like what I’m doing, but it turns out there’s other options. that I could do and those other things are more enjoyable generally. So I’m still creative and still challenged in some ways doing work, which is good. I think that’s essential for happiness, but I’m doing other stuff as well. So it’s not turning out like I thought.
Here are my options. So like I said, I wrote some stuff in my email, but I actually thought about it a little bit more. So make sure you are on the email list. A couple of things I could do. I could keep going. Like I said, I haven’t been executing that well, and maybe I could do a better job. Maybe I could try to market it a little bit harder by pivoting a little bit.
Maybe I try to be on other shows, other podcasts to promote it a little bit more. Maybe I follow up more closely with the people that have already been on the show and encourage them to maybe share it out on their email list, especially if they didn’t do it before. Some people are nervous about that. If they email all the time, they’ll probably be happy to do it.
But some people are pretty timid. Like, Oh, if I already emailed about something, I don’t want to email it again. It turns out only you know, if you’re lucky, you know, 20 to 40 percent of the people are going to open your email and an even smaller number are going to read the whole thing. So depending on how you write your emails, there’s a pretty solid chance, the majority of.
People did not read the email. They did not open it. There’s an even better chance they didn’t click on it. So if you email kind of the same content again, if people remember it from a few months ago, I mean, they’re not going to get pissed off at you. They’re just going to. Not continue reading that specific email or they’re like, Oh yeah, I remember that.
I actually liked it. So if you’re writing content, they’re enjoying that. You don’t have to worry about it too much. Okay. So I could keep going, but try harder, follow up and try to market it a little bit better. Essentially try harder. I could keep going. This is a sub, uh, sub topic of, of the previous keep going.
market harder to work better on the execution, but only publish about half as much. So I’m publishing once per week, but maybe I go to twice a month instead. So that half’s the work that I’m doing on the production side. And then I can spend that other time. On marketing and networking and being on other shows.
So it’s one of those deals where it’s like, okay, I think my product is okay. I think that at the end of the day, the product is good, but people don’t know about it. So if just, if I work harder to let people know about it, then they could find the show. And I think it’s at least as good as what I do on the Doug show or Mile Hi Fi.
It’s just a different topic area for a different industry. I could also just quit cold turkey, shut the whole fucking thing down. And like, turn off the feed and just move on. So this, this is a tough one because there’s a sunk cost. There’s value that I believe is there. But as I, I’m getting older and seeing like, Essentially just seeing, like, if you make a, a difficult decision where you’re like, you know what, it’s time to move on.
Usually those decisions work out quite well. They’re hard to make. It’s hard to walk away if you put in time and money and resources. But when I’ve done that, I’ve usually turned out very happy with the situation later. So that’s a little bit enticing to just like cancel it and say like, you know what?
Fuck it. The time to move on. The other thing I could do. Okay, so that’s three. So I could keep going and try harder. I could keep going, but publish half as much, and then market harder. And the last one, which I think is probably the most likely. Is to quit and move on, but I could take those episodes that I’ve recorded and publish them on the Doug show feed.
So this one seems more likely it’s taking advantage of the content that is already there, the value that I believe is there. And I could publish it on my existing channel. Now. Then, then it doesn’t go to waste, but I also take advantage of like acknowledging the sunk cost and that that’s sort of a burden and I can move on and it’ll be okay and how I still think it’s a good idea.
I think there’s an opportunity here. I think someone else could do it, but. I’m just, apparently I’m not willing to put in the time. Cause, cause the thing is like, if it was a priority, I would have fucking done the work already. Right. I would have done it. I wouldn’t have just scrolled on Instagram or whatever.
I mean, I didn’t, that’s not why it didn’t work out, but like, I literally probably didn’t do anything work related as the alternative to working on this. So that’s the thing. Like if I, if it was really a high priority, then I would have done it. And I don’t. Like, as I’ve worked on many different projects over the last 12 years or so, the ones that worked out pretty well, they kind of started working out pretty well from the start.
Sure, there was, there was a little bit of a learning curve sometimes, but generally, If it was going to work out pretty well, like there was some clear momentum from the get go. Now things are different now. Maybe that’s not a good metric to look at, but I could feel. The sort of the resistance of the growth.
The other thing is it’s not like I have one podcast and I’m, I’m like, you know what, I’m not going to do podcasting anymore. I’m publishing three different shows per week. So ranking revolution, the Doug show, this one, and then mile high five. So I’m literally producing like three. Roughly one hour long podcast per week on different shows.
Right. So that actually is like more work. So essentially if I quit producing new ranking revolution shows and like bring that content over to the Doug show, I haven’t lost any of the content and it still kind of works out. I’d record like a new intro. And say, Hey, this is from my old show. If you want to hear the story, listen to a couple of these episodes, but they’re good interviews.
There’s interesting information and it would probably, they would probably get more views and more traction. And from a, you know, one thing with YouTube, you get a ton of metrics and all that. Generally, if you publish more videos. Regardless of the quality, but if you publish more videos, you’re going to get more views and stuff.
So there’s a chance by me pulling ranking revolution, throwing it on the Doug Cunnington, YouTube channel. There will be. A little, um, a little growth because of that. It’s a little bit of a different topic area. I could divide the episodes into like a few videos. So people actually like watch this, the series of videos and it would all kind of fit together.
So I think that’s kind of where I’m leaning. If you are interested in buying the show, let me know. I mean, as you could hear, one of the options was to just quit cold Turkey. If I sell it, then there will be overhead, right? There’s overhead of like me transitioning the show and, and all of that stuff. So if you have, I think the best candidates for purchasing the show is an agency.
That’s making some good money. If you are an individual. That loves this topic area. For example, if you’re an avid listener of the Doug show and you listen to like authority hacker, you listen to a niche pursuits, I’m trying to think of some of the other show, Oh, Olga show out there. I mean, if you’re listening to a bunch of SEO related podcasts and you’re kind of in the industry, or maybe you’ve attended conferences and you’re like, I love these conferences.
Maybe you went to Estonia, SEO or. Shit. I don’t know all the SEO conferences. I was just top of mind because I talked to Kyle roof on ranking revolution that too long ago. So anyway, if, if you are in the industry and you’re like, Hey, I like talking about this stuff. I talk about it all the time. I know people then.
You might be a good candidate to buy the podcast because you can continue on with the conversations. And the thing is like, if someone bought the show for me, like I want it to be successful, I would help you with introductions and all that stuff and like interviewing strategy. And I have a list of questions that.
You know, usually they’re fairly universal and you could ask these kinds of questions to almost any guest, but if you have an agency, if you’re an individual who is a little bit obsessed with SEO, you could be a good candidate. And finally, if you have a SAS or some software, probably perfect acquisition, and ideally I was hoping like someone like SEMrush would buy the or yeah, really any of the keyword research or.
Search engine marketing companies, they would be perfect because they, they have the product and they, they want to get in front of new audiences and just kind of be out there. There are shows out there, but you know, sometimes. I mean, I, I haven’t heard of most of them is the thing. So if it’s a company that doesn’t have a podcast yet, you would probably be perfect.
So anyway, the other thing that I didn’t do that I probably should have is just like worked really hard to get those companies on the show, because then I would have a contact in there actually interviewed someone from SEMrush and interviewed someone from the Hoth both of which, like, really I thought could be good folks, good companies to acquire such a podcast.
So anyway, those are, those are my thoughts. If you have comments, let me know. This is somewhat of a rare episode. I wasn’t planning on recording this one, but I was thinking about it. And it’s one of those times where like, I, I don’t know the conclusion of what is going to happen, but I’m sharing the story along the way.
So.
Usually I don’t do that. Usually I want to have the story done so that I can encapsulate things and, you know, go on the journey with me. But this is like mid, mid journey right now. So I, I will let you know what happens. Well, you’ll know, you’ll know what happens, but if you have any thoughts, if you want to buy the podcast, Doug at nichesiteproject.
com. That comes directly to me and, uh, we can see if it’s a good fit or maybe I’ll do one of the options that I mentioned here. All right, that’s it for today. Have a great day and we’ll catch you on the next episode.