S3E08 S.A Grant.mp3 – powered by Happy Scribe

Boss Uncaged is a weekly podcast that releases the origin stories of business owners and entrepreneurs as they become uncaged trailblazers. In each episode, our hosts, as a grant and guests construct narrative accounts of their collective business journeys and growth strategies, learn key success habits and how to stay motivated through failure, all while developing a boss Uncaged mindset. Break out of your cage and welcome our host S.A Grant.

Welcome back to Boss Uncaged Podcast. So this is a bonus episode, and as you can see, I’m playing with the technical aspects of the new setup. So today what we’re going to talk about is 21 tips to help a new podcaster get 10,000 plus downloads, right? And just to start off right off, that like the audio intro that I was just playing. It’s just a quick tip. Again, all the examples that I use in that intro audio are essentially royalty free. They’re public domain, right? So that’s the first tip, like right off the bat, that’s not even included in the top 21. If you’re looking for music, start off by either creating your own music or finding music that’s in the public domain that you can play all day, all night without having to pay royalties for it. Other announcements so far? I think I made the announcement earlier this week or the week before last, but the actual certificate has come in, which was really cool with Kick Ass. So those that don’t know, there it is, Guinness World Record Official, right? So it’s pretty cool. And this one was for back in March 2021, and all credit goes to Podfest and Chris Krimitsos for this one. The largest attendance for virtual podcasting conference in one week. 5816 participants, right? And so I was a speaker at this event, which was very, very cool to be a part of this. Again, shout out to Chris and the podcast family for making that happen. It is a great thing to have that on my resume for sure. So let’s dive into these tips. And again, these are going to be like overview tips. I’m not going to deep dive deep into them. If you want more insight and more step by step on how to do it, feel free to send me an email at info@bossuncaged.com. That is info@bossuncaged.com.

So I want to just kind of talk about this 10,000. 10,000 is kind of like a landmark thing, right? And when you hear 10,000, you think, oh wow, that’s a lot. Some people may think, oh, it’s small, but if you’re familiar with the rule of 72 compounding interest, this applies just like that does. I mean, again, being that I used to hold a series six and I was in that industry for a period of time, I understand those strategies. So why not use those strategies that they’re using on the market and use it on podcast? Use it for podcast downloads. Use it for video downloads. So in the compounding effect of the Rule of 72. You just have to really understand that you divide the numbers. And again, I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible without going into the science behind the Rule of 72, but look at it as 10,000 downloads, right? Divided by twelve months, that’s essentially 833 downloads. Then you divide those downloads by four. Let’s say you do four episodes per month, that’s 208 downloads. So 208 downloads per episode is not as hard as it may sound when you break it down to that number, right? So like how do you get to 208 downloads? And again, this is just the tip of the iceberg, right? So this, look at like the general stats about downloads. If your episode gets 124 downloads in 30 days, you’re in the top 50% of podcasts, right? So there’s like cringe on 3 million different podcasts out there in the world right now. So you will be in the top 50% if you just have 124 downloads. And then as it continues, if you have 1000 downloads and this is not per episode, this is your total episodes within that 30 day span. Again, this is kind of what we’re aiming for, right? 208 downloads per episode times four, essentially around 800 or so. So then if you did that, then you probably be somewhere in the top 25% of podcasters. Continuing down that path, 2900 downloads will give you top 10%. 6700 downloads gives you 3% to kind of show you where Boston Cage is. Right now we’re at the top 5%, so we’re averaging somewhere between twelve, zero to fifteen, zero downloads per month. And again we release somewhere between four episodes every month. And this is the bonus episode. So this month essentially it’ll be five episodes. So essentially if you divide that five by the 15, that’s 3000 downloads per episode, give or take, right? And then last but not least, the grandfather of podcasting essentially at this point would be Joe Rogan. And he’s at the top .01%, not top point one, but his average downloads right now are about 11 million per episode, which is crazy when you think about it. But when you think about the compounding effect, it definitely works, right? So talking about the compounding effect, right, so you could have one person that could listen to your podcast, and then that one person then, you know, refers your podcast to someone else and now you have two people, and step and repeat, step and repeat. And over a period of time that one person may listen to more than one episode, they may go to your backlog of episodes and listen to those episodes as well. So one person times another person times another person. You can easily see how 208 becomes really, really easy once you look at it from that bird’s eye view. So talking about like your three core assets, right? And again, we haven’t even touched on the 21 list yet, but your three core assets would be your listener, your guests, and your creative thinking, right? So again, your listeners are the ones that are essentially doing your general downloads. Your guests on the other hand, could potentially be listeners as well. They’re going to have some guests, I’m not saying all guests, but particularly good guess or a high portion of good guests would at least listen to an episode or two before they get on your show so they don’t know exactly what they’re getting themselves into. So think about it, the more people you have on your show, or the more guests or the more panel boards or the more discussions or the more collaborating with other podcasters or other visionary people in your industry, by default you’re compounding the interest or in this case, you’re growing that audience of listeners and then being creative and the creative part, I say that the last because I’m going to jump into the 21 Tips and again they’re going to be overview and I’m going to be fast and furious with it because again, it’s Friday and I know that some people are heading to work and some people are kind of like now waking up. So if you have opportunity to listen to this right now, hopefully this kind of motivates you to kind of get things rolling for your day and take action on what I’m going to tell you. So thinking creatively essentially is like, okay, I’m going to tell you things that we’ve done that has worked for us. But I’m not saying you need to do it verbatim. You can take what I’m talking about, put your twist on it, make it work for you, figure out however you want to take these pieces and components and recreate your own puzzle, your own masterpiece. So the first one, first and foremost, and I think this is something that I would say it’s a reason why the percentages are so crazy. Like 50% of podcasters are essentially only doing, what was that number?

50% are only doing 124 downloads, right? And there’s a reason for that because the other 50% are probably not doing anything on this list. If you’re not trying at all, then pretty much you’re going to get the results for not doing any activities. The first one would be systematizing your guests onboarding or systematizing any of your onboarding again, guests, meaning that you have an interview podcast that’s to me, the easiest way to get more downloads is to have guests. Now there are many other formats. You can have a co host, right? So cohost essentially is a longtime guest, right? It could be your show or it could be John and Mike’s show, right, with John and Mike. Now you’re splitting the responsibilities between two people and again, every time I have a guest on, essentially I’m splitting the responsibilities of some of that marketing for that particular episode as well. So systematizing that guest onboarding is key and you’re kind of like, what does systematizing the guests onboarding really mean? So the next one, number two, first and foremost, if you have a podcast and you’re interviewing anyone, you have to have an online scheduling platform.

This could be calendar, and there’s a dime a dozen of them out there. For Boston Cage. We use book like a boss. It may be the branding, I don’t know, but the system works. And obviously the name of the company obviously helps as well because it’s kind of like, it’s Boston Cage and we use Book Like a Boss. It makes sense to me. Right. But systematizing that, right. Making sure that you have something that can say, hey, I have an hour block or a 30 minutes block. And I have it routinely on these particular days and this is what I have available. So there’s no back and forth email, there’s no discussion. You don’t have to waste all this time communicating back and forth through email when you can just send them a link and let that individual or their assistant pick the time slot that works for them. Right? That’s done. Next is then after you get them booked, is setting up automatic reminders. Automatic reminders are king. And I’ve got smack on the wrist and I’ve got to compliment from automatic reminders because I’m like not going to say devious with it, but I sent out at the minimum five automatic reminders, right?

And again, it’s because I’ve been doing it long enough to realize if I don’t send out the automatic reminders, people schedules are highly busy. If someone books an appointment 30 days out coming into the week of, if I don’t send a reminder and again, I can tell you the reminder I have said, but if I don’t send a reminder, potentially they may stand up the show, they may miss it. Oh my God, I didn’t realize. Oh my God, I’m sorry. Can I rebook? Well, that time that you took that hour block that I set aside to interview that person now is wasted time because at least you’re going to sit on a call for a few minutes, right? My cutoff point is somewhere between five to ten minutes max. Someone doesn’t show up for five to ten minutes, I’m canceling the episode and I’m moving on to that time slot is now officially gone. And that extra 50 minutes is going to be allocated to something else. And I really don’t care who that person is. If they missed that time slot, they missed that time slot. And I’ll give them a second opportunity to update it or revise it again because I understand real world things happen.

So not everyone is being malicious and not everyone is being overly forgetful. But in adding the automatic reminders helps. So I set an automatic reminder. Once it’s booked, I set out an automatic reminder an hour before the show, a day before the show, five days before the show. And if it’s longer than a month out, I do two weeks before the show. So that way they can’t say they didn’t get anything. And if it ends up in a junk folder, that kind of falls back on them because again, they are the ones setting up the appointment and they should be looking for a response from that appointment next after that. Something that we’ve been highly successful with is creating an intake form. And again, we’re talking about downloads, but we’re talking about systems that are going to help you get more downloads. And these are like the bedrock, the building blocks of podcasting, that once you have these elements in place, it’s going to help you itemize what you’re doing and not have to think about it. And as we progress with these other steps, you can kind of see how they all work with each other.

So intake form, right? And I think this is probably like the biggest thing that we did in season one that kind of changed everything for us because before we had to kind of search and find Facebook and Instagram profiles and people use multiple different names and different variables. So it pretty much it was a time suck. So imagine you interview five people in a week, right? And again, you’re not going to broadcast episodes right then, but you interview one person per day at scale. Then you have to go in and find all their information, find their LinkedIn profiles, find their website times five, maybe an hour each. That’s 5 hours of time. That’s essentially time that you really can’t get back and you can’t really put numbers to it to say that you’re doing it for a reason. So I was like, it’s got to be an easier way of doing this versus doing the concept. Creating an intake form. An intake form can be as simple as using Google forms to then get data. And when you get data, you want to think about the data that you want, data that’s going to be useful, data that you can use on that podcast episode.

So the data that we intake on Boston Cage is obviously the name, the email address, every single one of their social media platforms. So that’s YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Tik, Tok, Instagram, literally, we have a box for every single one of them, right? And I’ll tell you why we do that as we progress. In addition to that, getting their headshots, it’s going to save you a lot of time. BIOS. Again, it doesn’t mean that you have to write a bio. Now if you’re interviewing someone that has BIOS, they don’t, they’ll see that question and nine out of ten people will write something quickly because again, that bio is going to be using your show notes or using your description for your Facebook Live, so forth and so forth. And then ideally another question that we ask is kind of like what region are on because we went from a US based podcast to an international podcast. So now I want to give credit where it’s due. If I’m interviewing someone in Malaysia or someone in Australia or someone in Japan, I want to give credit to the region as well. So that’s an additional thing that we ask.

So again, you can ask whatever questions that you want that you know that you’re going to be able to amplify and talk to during a particular episode. So that’s golden again, and I’m building these building blocks up. So we’re going to get to downloading as these elements are starting to be created and developed and you’ll see why shortly. Then after you get your intake form, then you want to connect that intake form. Again, Google Forms, I would connect that directly to Google Sheets. So Google Sheets becomes your database, it becomes your inventory. So before I even get an episode and this is why I have like a 24 hours policy, if you do everything on this form 24 hours before the episode, it gives me enough time to section out an hour of my time to go in and review that content. So I get to review YouTube channels, review Instagram accounts, review BIOS. So when I have that due diligence done, when I get on a podcast, I know as much as possible about this person’s history based upon, like, the Internet, right? And again, some people, they add on an extra 30 minutes block or an hour block to do a pre interview, right?

And again, I know people time is money, so I do my due diligence. I’m hoping that they do the due diligence. And again, we’ll talk about systems of how I help them know who I am and what they’re going to be talking about and how to communicate when they get on the show. But before that, that 24 hours window gives me opportunity to read that form and know the nuances of that person. Prime example of that, like earlier this week, I did a Live with the Clarity Boss. And during the podcast, like around, I think probably the middle of the podcast, I brought up a little thing that was on his Facebook page and it was about him being a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training and a drummer. But that was a question that I would not have known to even insert or ask if I did not do my due diligence before yesterday, I had another episode as well. And looking at his bio, again, I asked them the question about his workout regimen because his TikTok channel, he does workout videos, but again, he’s more so of a mindful coach on the front end.

So again, not only does this tell the guests that I know a little bit more about them, I’m not just waiting for the show to start and then asking them questions. I’m doing my background check. And again, this is going to help with your downloads as we progress. Then after that, you want to go to number six, which is connect to all the guest channels. So now you can see why the intake form is hell of useful because now I don’t have to search for anything. So once I do my 1 hour session, within that 24 hours before that episode airs, then what I’m going to do is I’m going to dive into their social media profiles, like I said earlier. But in addition to that, I’m going to then friend, connect and subscribe to all their channels. And the reason for doing that, as you progress and see, well, if I’m doing an episode with John, and I have all of John’s social media platforms and an essay grant, as Boston case, has all the same social media channels, then when we do a share of that content, then we’re going to connect the dots.

We’re going to connect the dots. We’re going to connect the dots from if I post on Facebook, then I’m going to say, hey John, your episode is on Facebook. Or I’ll just tag John in that episode instagram. The same thing. I may do a story and in that story, I’ll tag John in that story as well. And then same thing for like, Twitter. Again, all these systems are all integrated and they all work. But again, I’m using them to increase my downloads. And these are little tips that, again, going back to compound interest, it will add up. So imagine you interview 100 people, and for each one of these 100 people, you do that. Well, by default, each one of them are going to do what they’re going to share to their community. That’s why they were on your podcast to begin with. So if John shares with ten people and I have 100 John’s, you can see why the downloads multiply quickly. And then it’s about scaling. Like, once you get this system downpack and where it’s running now is like, okay, the other elements. And I’ll talk about some other elements when we get things like the bonus out of the 21 other steps.

So after you I think that was six connecting. So seven is essentially sending guests and email when the show’s air, right? So again, I’m capturing the email and I’m sending them to social media. But in addition to that, hey, your show just aired. Here is the link to your show. Here is the COVID art to your show. Or just send them to the link and if they want to, they can download the COVID art. Right? I’ve been on shows before to where they send pretty much a prescott they’ll send you multiple different images of the show, things that they’re going to use, Instagram. Again, you’re doing this to make it easier for the guests, right, to then share that content without having, you know, without them having to think about it. But also you’re creating the artwork that you’re approving because you have a brand to stay on as well. So that’s a golden nugget that if you’re not sharing episodes as they ear, you’re just expecting the person to know that the show airs, you’re not doing yourself any justice. Going into number eight, sharing the episode with the guests on social media platform, sending the guests on, that was number seven.

Number eight. So I think I already went over number eight a little bit when I was talking about connecting on the channels. Then number nine, right? So this came in, and this is something that I’ve always been a big believer of, but it just so happened that this morning when I woke up at 04:00 this morning, this email came in. So the web address for this email is Pod News net article all Dashpodcast directories. And this came in from being on the Podfest email list. And it’s about connecting your podcast to as many syndicate directories as possible. And to describe what a syndicate is, think of it as Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcast, or itunes, Google Podcast, just to name a few. Off the top of my head, those are like the big wigs in the game. But obviously there’s so many other micro versions of those large ones and there are hundreds of them. So again, each one of them, they may have their own particular listeners that listen for whatever reason, that you may not get on Spotify, that you may not get on Apple, that you may not get on Amazon, that you may not get on Google.

So why not set up your feed or set up your podcast on as many syndicate directories as humanly possible? So that article that I just mentioned, and if you missed it, I would just say rewind the video back and type it in and go to and that article kind of gives you an itemized list of like a hundred different directories, including the normal ones. Like, for example, Boss of Cage’s think we’re syndicated on maybe like 2025 of them. Now that I read that article and realize it’s 80, what the hell do you think I’m going to do next? I’m going to go from 100 to 80 overnight. And by the by doing that, then my downloads potentially will increase as well because I may capture new listeners. And again, that’s what this game is really about. It’s capturing new listeners and also giving a lot of value. It’s not just about putting up random crap out there. It’s about doing the value add collectively. So then going into number ten, right? In addition to the syndicate directories signing up for guest directories as possible, one that we use, and we use maybe about ten of them is Matchmaker.

And I’m just calling our Matchmaker because Matchmaker is a pretty it’s a beautiful platform visually, but systematically done. I like the fact that they send you weekly emails, so they’ll send Boston Cage weekly email and say, hey, we have some people that would be great for your show. And then the other email would be, hey Grant, you be great to be on this show. Cuts down on my time management. I don’t really have to work. I can wake up in the morning and look at the list and say, okay, you know what, I like this person. I like her, I like him. Let me send them an email and invite them to be on the show, right? Or on the other hand, I can be like, hey, I would love to be a guest on this show. Let me send them an email, send them a message to matchmaker to get me on their show. And again, each connection point that you make and each reference to your podcast that you make, then your podcast downloads will potentially grow. Again, you have to mention you have a podcast. And again, if you’re on someone else’s show, then you want to direct traffic back to your podcast.

And obviously someone’s on your show, you’re going to share that content with them like we said in the first few steps and they’re going to bring more people back to your show. It is a step and repeat process. It is not an overnight thing unless you have millions of dollars to sit down there and go through the coal market and do a huge ad spend, which doesn’t make sense because podcasting is a longterm play. You have to build and establish these relationships now and continue to grow them over a period of time. And I’m going to talk about those steps as we move forward. Then after that is going into number eleven. So number eleven, if this was not part of podcasting, I don’t think I would even be in podcasting right now because I’m a systems guy. The Rs feed, okay, the syndication fee that all podcasts run on. And I think some people, they miss this. They miss the hell out of shit and it frustrates the hell out of me. If you have a podcast, your podcast is a syndicate. That syndicate is then related to an RSS feed. That Rs feed is golden.

And here’s why, right? I can take my RSS feed and I can put it into multiple different systems, like Hootsuite, for example. And I’m just using more household brand names of services that do updates and they syndicate and push out content to multiple different platforms. So think of it from this standpoint. Every single time Boston Cage publishes the episode, that episode gets syndicated on everything. Like we publish a YouTube published on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. But do you think that I’m manually sitting down and posting these damn episodes? Hell no. What I’m using is the power of the RSS feed. And then I’m using automation. So what the automation does, it will suck. The RSS feed. Oh my God, there’s something new. So the automation gets excited when there’s something new in that RSS feed. And again, I don’t have to do anything but post the episode. Then the RSS feed says, hey, I got something new for you. I have a new title. I have a new MB three file, I have a new image, take my content and do something with it, right? My automation then is going to suck the RSS feed, suck the title, suck the image, and then it’s going to propagate that throughout the internet.

That’s why RSS feeds are your friends. Think about it. From this standpoint, podcasts have RSS feeds, right? Shopify stores have RSS feeds. Amazon has RSS feeds, YouTube has RSS feeds. So think about all these different platforms that all have RSS feeds. And if you capture these RSS feeds and put them into automation, all this stuff about social media posting and content creating becomes ten times easier to where you’re posting content. Like literally I’m posting so much damn content, half the time I’ll log in and be like, oh shit, there goes an episode from a year ago. That’s not me. It is. The RSS feed resendicating itself and I have it set up to where it’s going to go in and pull, go in and post, go in, pull, go in and post. It is on its own treadmill and as long as I don’t get no notifications that something is broken or somebody says, hey, something showed up blank, sometimes an image may be missing. All I have to do is log in and fix it or get my team or talk to my VA and say, hey, we got an issue with this particular automation system.

Fix it, tweak it. So again, RSS feeds are your friends. Don’t fight it, use it. Next is being consistent. So consistency is multiple different things, all right? Consistency is the quality of the guests, right? The quality of the audio, the quality of the video, your visual representation, the way you carry yourself. I’m a hand moving guy. Like it’s like always on. Like I got bit by a damn rabbit infested Rabies rabbit. So again, I have to be like that all the time. Even when I’m down, I have to amp myself back up because again, I have to be consistent and being inconsistency then the audience is like, look, I may have a rough day but I know if I listen to Essay that dude’s going to bring me out of darkness, right? Or if I’m going to listen to Susan. Susan is going to make me laugh every single time, no matter what’s going on in Susan’s life, that she’s going to make me laugh. That’s the part of the consistency. And we’re going to talk about psychology in a little bit. But being consistent is key to make sure that your downloads are increasingly growing over a period of time.

You have to be consistent. You can’t be sad on Tuesday, happy on Wednesday, and then jump. And do them backflips on Friday, your audience is going to be like, what the hell is wrong with this person? They need to be medicated versus you have to just be crazy all the damn time. Then you’re consistent. It works. Number 13, research your guests to make the interview more in depth. And it goes back to that intake form that I said about earlier. If you do not have the intake form, you’re doing yourself a disservice when you’re doing podcasts, right? So in that intake form, and I said earlier, we do some research, we go into the LinkedIn profile. So the first thing I do when I go to LinkedIn, I don’t even look at like the career path. I go into like their hobbies. What did they publish? Were they a Boy Scout? Den Leader. I want to dig deep. So when we’re talking on that show, I think it was like maybe a week ago, I had an episode from Israel with a rabbi. And through doing this process, I found that his wife was also like an internet person and she was doing motivational speaking.

And through her channel, I found out that they went to South Africa on vacation back in 2019 in December. Think about that. If I didn’t do my due diligence, I’m not saying be a stalker, but I’m saying do your due diligence. Go down the rabbit hole, spend an hour block and go down the rabbit hole. Because now when you’re talking to that person, you could bring up things about their past, things that you’ve seen here that’s relevant to that topic, but it also assures the person that you’re interviewing that you know them to a certain extent that you are willing to expose and give up some of your time to become part of their world. And if you’re not willing to become part of the world, then obviously podcasting is probably not for you. Because when you get to the psychological aspect of podcasting, it’s not about taking, it’s about giving. So giving your time and giving the opportunity to review who you’re going to be interviewing only makes logical damn sense. And if you ain’t doing that shit, you’re wasting your damn time going down to I. So we just went over research to Guess always.

This is one of my favorites and this is one that I do. 24/7, right? Always wear your brand, be on brand. Twenty four seven. And I’m going to talk about synchronicity for a little bit. And that kind of goes to the laws of attraction, the Rules of Attraction psychology. And if you ever seen that movie by Will Smith, I think it was called Focus. Essentially, he was a con artist. And I’m not saying that podcast is a con artist, but again, in that movie, there was a scene near the end, like I said, the middle of the end of the movie to where they did it. Long con, right? And before the guy got to the football game, he was seeing this number, repetitive number 57. I think it was 57 or 59. Again, my photographic memory is kind of short right now, but 57, right? He was seeing this number over and over again. He would see it on a T shirt. He would see it on a billboard. He was sitting on a bus. He would see it on people’s hats, cars, hours before the event, right? So it becomes subliminal. It’s ingrained in this thing.

It’s the same exact thing when you come to brand awareness. So why do you think I rock the brand? 24 damn seven. So you may not be a listener right now. You may scream through your Facebook feed, but I guarantee you, if you scream through your Facebook feed, one, first of all, you see me. Second of all, what’s right above my head, that’s like product placement. That logo is there for a reason, right? And then to the side of the logo, what else is there? If you look around, everything that I’m having, I don’t even know the count. I lost count. But there’s at least probably 40 subliminal logos of the Boston Case brand behind me. That’s why my backdrop is set up the way it does. Because if you’re listening to me and your eyes start to stray, then you may be going to yoda, what’s directly behind? Well below yoda. The damn logo. If you go on the right hand side and you look at Vader, what’s below Vader? The damn logo. If you look at the books in the spine of every single book behind me, it’s the logo. My hat has the logo, the shirt.

Like, you may not be able to see the shirt, but if I work the shirt a little bit, it’s subliminal, right? Subliminal, subliminal, subliminal. Repeat it over and over again. So wearing your brand gives you brand awareness and gives you synchronicity. That I mean, you’re wearing your brand as a damage right off, first of all. Second of all, then you’re also giving someone the subliminal message behind the scenes. So once they see your logo again, right, you may see it here, but if you go out in the real world, you go to someone else’s house. If you get a link, if you get an email, you get a business card. If you get anything Boston Cage related, the first thing you’re going to see is the damn logo. And through Osmosis Synchronicity, you’re going to be associated to it by default because you’ve seen so many damn times. So again, if you have a brand, start rocking that brand, start putting that brand and everything. Start using that brand. Waterborne the hell out that brand. If you have a brand and you’re not using it in this way, you’re doing yourself a disservice. And again, all of this is coming back to downloads, 100% downloads, right?

So if someone sees a Boston Cage logo on something by default, they’re going to go do what? Probably click on it if they’re listening somewhere else. And if they’re seeing a new episode for the first time and it could be an episode from two years ago, guess what, that’s a new download for old episode. Even though they’re a new listener, right? Works. Next after that is going back to QR codes. Now, QR codes have been around for a while and they died down. And then because of Coba, they came back and now they’re getting way more tangible and asset uses tool. So use QR codes again, QR codes are your friends. If you want to market something, use the QR codes if you’re trying to do more downloads. And again, some of it was like, well, I don’t know, don’t think. Just put the QR code on it. Put the QR code on everything. Make it to where people don’t have to click and type in anything. They can scan a QR code and by default, by scanning a QR code, they’re going to go to your podcast, or they can go to your course or go to your YouTube channel, whatever it is.

So utilizing QR codes will be your friend all day, every day. Next Is Request listener Reviews So over the past three years of being a podcaster, what I realized is obviously downloads count to a certain extent. But even more than downloads, what people are looking for when they’re using bots and algorithms to find you as a reputable podcast is your review count, right? So that’s why in the last year we started paying more attention to our reviews. So we went from like five reviews to 20 reviews. And now I think we’re over 400 reviews or 400 ratings. Reviews and ratings, they work hand in hand. And think about it from the standpoint of Amazon. You can do a five star rating and you can do a comment and a comment as a review, or you could just do the five star rating by itself with the algorithms. What they’re doing is they’re just looking to see the quantity and the high quantity of the ratings and the reviews that you have. So the more that you have is the more you’re going to show up, right? So in the past year, Boston Cases went from kind of being in the dark to being in the light, to where we’re getting hands raised left and right and getting emails left and right because of our review ratings in addition to our downloads, right?

So think about it, the more higher your reviews, the more positive reviews you have increases your downloads through Osmosis, right? So think about it from the standpoint if you have listeners to act a listener. I’m actually right now, if you are a listener of Boston Case podcast and this podcast is giving you value, then please, by all means give us a positive five star review to help us increase our downloads and increase our reach to help entrepreneurs. I know it sounds like a sales pitch, I just made it up on the spot. But the reality is you have to be fluent on the drop of a dot. Opportunity knocks. You see the opportunity, and in this case, act for reviews, number 17. Be a good listener and ask additional unscripted questions that your listeners, they may not even expect you to act. And I talked about it earlier on about doing that due diligence and doing that research behind the scenes. Because this is when you really get into the psyche of who you’re interviewing. If you have an opportunity to interview, let’s say, Jeff Bezo, which will be a hell of an interview, right?

Everybody named mom is going to ask Jeff about Amazon because everyone knows about Amazon, but what would it look like to talk about Jeff more? So, like, okay, not even like, why did you create Amazon, but what kind of kid were you? No, seriously, I understand that you’re a multi billionaire. I understand all that shit. And obviously you’ve had a million views and everyone’s always asking about Amazon. How did you build and develop Amazon to stand and third or whatever. But let’s talk about your childhood because again, you may have Jeff Bezos living with you right now. Would that not be nice to kind of see some similarities and then be like, AHA, and then guide that kid in the right direction to where potentially they could be Jeff or they could be Bill Gates or they could be whoever, right? And I’m not saying these people as not necessarily famous people, but people that have been highly successful and then there’s pros and cons to that and baggage that comes with that as well. But understanding what Jeff went through in his childhood will probably be more beneficial for some people versus just talking about the rise and climb of Amazon.

So you want to kind of throw off questions. Again, other questions you could ask like fun questions, like if you’re dealing with like a nerd person, right, and they love Star Wars, then do some due diligence on Star Wars. Ask them a random question. If we were playing chess with Yoda and Tony Stark and Professor X, who would win some random off the wall question like that? But then it’s going to make that person interviewing smile. They’re going to have a smirk, and it’s going to identify you as being uniquely different than anyone else that’s only concerned about the facts, about how they made money and how they proceeded to become highly wealthy. And you’re going to talk about that through the episode, but again, you want to do enough research to find the indirect nuance of that person’s life and bring it into the episode, right? That’s also going to increase your downloads because not only if you have someone famous, but you’re also giving insight that nobody else is doing. So then your episode becomes more of a magnet. Well, Jeff is probably going to be like, this is a really interesting episode.

Like, you asked me questions that nobody else asked me, which is great because now you become the lead for that particular bit of content which everyone wants from Jeff. Next up is let me see. Just scrolling through my notes, guys. 18 shout outs. So shout outs. And you hear me do shoutouts from time to time. So shoutouts will be hella valuable, right? And what I’m going to be by shout out is kind of like, hey, this episode is Mike. Mike is the blah, blah, blah boss. That’s his nickname. Mike King way of Joanne, right? So I’m giving Joan a shout out saying, hey, Joanne introduced me to Mike. And that’s how Mike got on this episode. Well, by default, if Joanne is a listener, what do you think Joanne’s going to do with that episode? Oh, yeah, essay gave me a shout out. And hey, it’s also, Mike, my friend, is on the episode. So now not only do you have Mike sharing the episode, but now you also have Joanne sharing the episode. So again, multiplying by just saying the adlib of Joanne introduced me to Mike psychology, right? And again, it’s a compounding effect.

So every episode you can and if somebody gave you their referral, then shout them out. It’s free for you to shout the referral. And it feels good it’s for you, and it feels good for them as well. So again, that’s another way to increase downloads. Number 18 with shout outs. Number 19 doing live video requests. And I did education spot on this from a networking group. I think it was like last month or something like that. And again, if you’re doing live request, you want to look at live request as a particular thing, right? Hey, listeners, we have a new contest. If you do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you’ll get blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And by doing that increases your downloads. Another way of doing that is I always say it’s a soft ass. Like, I think we did it like last maybe a year from now, like last March, last February. And I did Live, and I was like, hey guys, Boston Cage was striving to get 10,000 downloads, which is crazy that now we’re getting more than 10,000 downloads per month. And back then, we were just driving to get to 10,000 downloads.

And I said, hey, if you don’t mind reaching out to your community, if you’re getting value from this particular episode, I want you to share this episode. Because our goal is to get 10,000 downloads this year by this date. So I set the date, I set the request, and then I told them what I wanted to do. I want you to share this episode with three people, and that’s it. And by doing that, maybe you get 10% maybe you get 20% of those people, right? Let’s say you do that and you get 100 new listeners. 100 new listeners over twelve months listening to multiple different episodes. The compounding effect of the rule of 72 happens there as well, right? So that’s like the first 19. And these next two are really like what we’re moving into. Because again, every single day I’m learning new stuff and every single day I’m applying new stuff and I’m like, okay, how do I increase downloads? How do I increase monetization? How do I increase, increase growth? Because again, I’m a growth strategy. So I’m always processing how to step it up to the next level. So the things that we’re going to be working on right now.

And again, if you have opportunity to take the first 19 and systematize them, or if you have any questions on those 19 or you want more inside, more information, again, send an email to Info at boston cage.com. So going into number 20, right, what we’re starting to do is starting to realize that we need to follow up more because we have so many input. Our pipeline is always full on the front end, but on the back end, right? Again, if you’re talking about consumers, your greatest conversion always comes from your active consumers. So again, we’re doing great, piping in, but what are we doing on the retaining or recommunicating? And some of the people I’ve interviewed, we’ve had like, friendships now and we talk or we send information back and forth, but I want to do that at scale. I want to at least touch bases with everyone that I’ve interviewed for a period of time. So the first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to figure out a system to do anniversaries, right? So imagine systematically doing it, doing a post saying Happy anniversary. This is the one year to two year, three year, the four year to five year anniversary since your podcast episode has aired, right?

What does that do? That’s going to be compounding because now that person that may have listened to the episode before, they’re going to really listen to the episode again or reshare the episode. Or they may then contact you and communicate with you again because front and side of mind, then you become relative and then communication pipes open up again. So in addition to that, I was okay, anniversaries are cool. And again, this is like basic business stuff, right? If you have clients, you may celebrate your anniversary. You may send your client a bottle of wine or whatever it is. Like, if you’re interviewing guests on podcasting, why not do something very similar? So the next part of that is like, I’m working on creating a system to do birthdays. Well, think about it. If everyone has different birthdays, and let’s say you interviewed 365 different people, or 100 people, eventually you’ll get to the point in time to where you would have a birthday every day of the year. What would it look like to then reinsert that episode but change the COVID art and say happy birthday to Joe Smith. Today is his birthday.

He was on an episode back in 2020. He’s a great guy, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you’re taking the information you got from the data intake. You may do like 15 minutes of due diligence to kind of see what they’re up to right now. And then you’re doing a new post for their birthday. It’s free first of all. Second of all, maybe it takes a little bit of time. Third of all, now that person not only knows that you’re a good interviewer, but your follow up is also relentless as well. Because again, you don’t know anybody you’re interviewing could potentially be a new lead, could be a new resource, could be a new partner, could be a new client, any one of them. So why not then set stuff up to where you can set up Happy Anniversaries and Happy Birthdays and make it global so that way they can repost that content as well. Right. In addition to that is just creating and this is number 21. And 21 is something that I’m just going to list out of. List out what I think that you should be doing. Some of them we are doing, but collectively an email series, right.

So the first part of the email series would be thank you. Right? Thanks for signing up. If you’re on our show and here’s your next steps, things that you need to do, whether it’s fill out the form, whether it’s write a bio, whether it’s listening to an episode, whatever it is, right. In addition to that, give me a general thank you email. Thank you for being a guest on the show. I think it was a great episode. We’re thinking about airing it on this time frame in this region of time, like for Boston Caves. Right now we’re about a year out. So if you record episode right now, we’ll do a Facebook Live. But the actual episode is not going to air on the actual RSS feed until a year from now. So systematizing that and to say thank you, but here’s your irritate as well. And I’m creating this based off of feedback because we got to the point to where we went from a month out, three months out, six months out, nine months out. Now we’re twelve months out. With twelve months is a long day in time for somebody to remember who you are.

So you’re going to have to stay in front of their mind. And then if you want them to share that episode, you have to make sure they know when it’s coming out. Right. Next is request a guest recommendation every once in a while after episode. And I can add to be more systematized with this as well. At the end of every episode, asking your guests, do they have any recommendations or referrals for other guests, other people that are like minded, like them? So when you get into like, the celebrity ring, if you’re interviewing Shaq and you ask Shaq for his recommendation, nine out of ten times the recommendation is probably going to be other superstar basketball players. Right? And if you’re on the show and Shaq does the referral or go from coal market to warm market to hot market by opening that door, by doing that connection for you, you’re more inclined and higherly, more better of conversions would happen if that lead referral comes directly from Shack versus you going to that person and say, hey, Shack was on my episode last month. Would you like to be a guest on my show?

How would that let Shack do the work for you, let that individual person you’re interviewing do the work for you by making that connection. And the only thing you have to do at that point in time is follow up. Again, it’s hit or miss, but it’s more likely to happen if that person gives you that referral next after the request, a recommendation is secondary emails. And these are things that I’m working on right now with Boston Cage, an invite to a guest for another interview on a secondary platform. So what does that mean? Well, there’s boston cage podcast. There’s also boston cage book club. Well, I always ask the question about what books have you read or what books are you reading and have you written any books? And usually, let’s say two out of five maybe have written books, but nine out of ten always read a book. So that two out of five. What would it look like if I communicate with them and say, hey, you have a book or you’re releasing a book? I have a book club. Would you like to be a guest on a totally different I guess you could call it a podcast or a totally different show?

That’s a spin off of the original Boston Cage podcast to talk about just your book. How did you write your book? I think I did one episode in the book club just to test it out, to kind of see how it would work and how could I systematize it. And, you know, we got like maybe 55 minutes worth of content. It was a good connection. It was with Stormy, and Stormy and I, we had this connection from the podcast and his book was a very helpful book. And he’s also a growth strategist as well. And he’s talking about finding the right persona, the right client persona. So taking that segmentation from the podcast and spinning it into a whole another hour episode in the book club will by default, what do you think is going to happen when people hear that live episode talking about his book and we’re referring back to the podcast? They’re going to go back and listen to the podcast. You see how that works. And again, it just takes an hour of time. And it’s me staying connected to Stormy and we’re staying in communication. And it also gives them another way of marketing his product.

It’s kind of a no brainer. Next is then inviting past guests right into roundtable episodes. I’m working on one right now with Javon and Javan and I. We went to college together and I reached out to dude, I want to do a new episode format. It’s a little bit different, but still Boston Cage, right? And he has a podcast as well. Like, let’s join forces and let’s both of us get on one episode on Boston Cage. And we’re going to co host it and we’re going to talk about a topic. So it’s going to be like an education episode like this, but we’re going to talk about a particular topic and give you guys tips and tricks. So what we’re doing right now is setting that up, right? But what would it look like if I do that at scale? What if I send out this email to everyone I’ve interviewed before to bring them back doing round tables? But these roundtables can easily turn into what? Summits? And in the summit, what we’re talking about, we all met on Boston Cage podcast. What do you think happened to download Increase Now? Not one person, it’s not two people, it may be five people on a round table that’s all communicating about their connection to Boston Cage podcast.

It’s kind of a nobrainer, right? Then it’s also asking your guests and this is kind of going still all 21 guest review forms, not listener reviews, but I want a guest to give me a review. It can be a written review, it can be a video review, it can be a review on Apple. It could be review, whatever. But again, a lot of times schedule so crazy, if you don’t act and make it easy, you won’t get it. So systematizing that put in the email follow up series and then last but not least is request reviews from the guests, right? So you have a guest review form and then you’re requesting the actual guest. And the guest review form could be data intake or then the requested review could be when they can go on a platform and give you an actual review on that platform and a rating. So I know that was a lot and it was fast and it was serious and there’s so many probably different questions and aspects of what I said. And again, if you have any questions, by all means put a comment in any of the videos on any of the channels you’re seeing right now.

I’ll definitely respond back. And if you have more detail, more insight to a particular question, write it up, send me email info@bostoncase.com. So again, this episode is a bonus episode and I think I haven’t done one, maybe. It seems like it’s been a while since I do these, and the goal is I need to do these at least once a month. If this was useful, this is helpful. By all means, let me know. If it’s helpful, let me know this useful so that way I can kind of increase the content and keep delivering the value that you guys have grown accustomed to. I appreciate you. Essay grant over and out. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Boss on Cage. I hope you got some helpful insight and clarity to the diverse approach on your journey to becoming an uncage trailblazer. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review and share the podcast. If this podcast has helped you or you have any additional questions, reach out and let me know. Email me at Ask at SA Grant.com or drop me your thoughts via call or text at 76223 three Boss. That’s 762-233-2677. I would love to hear from you.

Remember, to become a Boston Cage, you have to release your inner beasts. SA Grant signing off.

Listeners of Boston Cage are invited to download a free copy of our host essay. Grant insightful become an uncaged trailblazer. Learn how to release your primal success in 15 minutes a day. Download now at www dot boss uncaged.com prebook.