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✈️ How to Build & Monetize Your Audience

✈️ How to Build & Monetize Your Audience

Yong-Soo Chung
April 26, 2023

Welcome to First Class Founders, your favorite destination to learn proven strategies to start & grow your online business each week.

Here's what we've got for you on today's flight:

👂🏻 EAR$ Framework
🤗 How to Retain Your Audience
👥 How to Attract Your Ideal Audience
🤯 Why a Big Audience ≠ Monetization
📰 How to Get More Exposure For Your Content

Get ready — we're about to take-off!

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✈️ Episode Itinerary

Jeremy is the Founder of Podcast Marketing Academy, which is a podcast growth and marketing company helping scrappy podcast centric brands, networks and creators punch above their weight.

Today, I speak to him about the four key aspects of his excellent EAR$ framework: Exposure, Attraction, Retention, and Monetization. We also how Jeremy implements them for his own content, and how you can implement them for your content.

This framework is effective for all types of creators.

Get ready to take notes... let's get down to business!

The EAR$ Framework and Monetization Strategies with Jeremy Enns, Podcast Marketing Expert

Inside today's episode, you'll learn:

Introduction to the EAR$ Framework (6:11)
How to Get Your Content Exposure (7:04)
Using Newsletter For 'Exposure' to Podcast (8:31)
How to Attract Your Ideal Audience (11:41)
How to Retain Your Audience (15:22)
Why a Big Audience Doesn't Translate to Sales & Monetization (23:34)
How To Apply the EAR$ Framework (26:59)

🥨 Growth Snack of the Week:

In-flight service time! Here, I share bite-sized growth snacks (read: hacks) building my audience for First Class Founders. Snacks are meant to be tried and shared. If you do try them, please tag me on Twitter and let me know what you think!

This week's episode with Jeremy Enns highlights his brilliant EAR$ framework.

So today, I'm doing a self audit of First Class Founders via the EAR$ framework. I'll give a score for each portion of the framework, just like Jeremy did.

Curious to know how First Class Founders scores? Me too.

Let's dive in.

Overview:

I'll score each of the four categories: Exposure, Attraction, Retention, and Sales / Monetization from 1-10.

To use the EAR$ framework, first you must set your target goal.

For example, my ultimate goal with First Class Founders is to grow my podcast. My podcast is my main piece of content. It's the creative work I'm most proud of.

Some podcasters use their podcast as part of a greater marketing funnel to their higher ticket mastermind group. In this case, you'd set your target goal as the mastermind group when you use the EAR$ framework.

Why is this so important?

I'll explain in the next section, Exposure.

💡 Lesson: Gain clarity on your target goal for your audience funnel.

Exposure:

Once you have a clear target goal, you can proceed with the EAR$ framework.

Let's do a real example to demonstrate why it's so important to set this target goal first.

Since my ultimate goal is to grow the First Class Founders podcast, this newsletter acts as an exposure piece to the podcast.

In other words, I'm growing this newsletter to get more listeners for my podcast.

As Jeremy mentions in today's episode (8:31), he agrees that using a newsletter as the exposure piece to grow a podcast is ideal.

I stumbled upon this naturally. When I launched the podcast back in November, I was asking my audience to listen to my podcast instead of just entering their email to subscribe to this newsletter.

This didn't work too well. It was simply too much to ask someone to listen to a podcast versus asking them to subscribe to a newsletter.

Now, on the other hand, if your goal is to grow your newsletter, then your exposure piece might be the content you're posting on Twitter, LinkedIn, or wherever your audience is hanging out.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Yong-Soo, don't you need to grow your newsletter to grow your podcast?"

Yes.

Places like Twitter and LinkedIn are my exposure components to my newsletter, which is the exposure component to my podcast.

To grow my podcast, I'm growing my newsletter.

To grow my newsletter, I'm growing my Twitter and LinkedIn.

They're all connected.

Now, I could be doing A LOT more to increase exposure to the podcast. I could be creating clips and posting them on TikTok and Instagram. I could do a better job cross promoting with other podcast shows. The list goes on.

I plan to experiment with these in the future.

So what's my grade?

I give myself a 7 out of 10.

Let's move onto Attraction.

💡 Lesson: Identify and grow the exposure component to your main creative work to get more eyeballs on your work.

Attraction:

Attraction, in its simplest terms, is how you convert someone to becoming a listener, in the case of my podcast.

Podcast artwork, episode titles, and how I presented this week's episode with Jeremy Enns is all part of the Attraction equation.

If you're optimizing for newsletter sign-ups, then your landing page, or perhaps your Twitter bio, would be your Attraction piece.

You may want to experiment with using a lead magnet as part of your Attraction component. Every little bit that increases your conversion rate counts.

As for First Class Founders, I have received amazing feedback on the branding and name of the podcast. I use AI to create catchy episode titles. I'm happy with how I'm weaving in the podcast content with the visual, written content of this newsletter.

I'm still experimenting with my podcast description. But overall, I am happy where my podcast stands for Attraction.

Score: 9 out of 10.

💡 Lesson: Create an enticing reason for your audience to opt-in to your content through lead magnets, social proof, effective copywriting, and attractive visuals.

Retention:

Jeremy mentions retention (15:22) as one area that creators are actually pretty good at.

I agree. For most creators who have seen some level of success building an audience, they're usually pretty good at this.

But, we can take this a step further and take a look at each piece of content.

Does your content have an enticing hook to retain your audience throughout your entire piece of content?

For example, I had a pre-roll on my podcast for a couple weeks asking listeners to subscribe to this newsletter back in January.

I noticed a significant drop off of retention during this time.

I immediately removed the pre-roll and noticed an uptick in retention.

I also recently hired an amazing producer for my podcast, receiving comments like this regularly:

So, I feel pretty solid with Retention for First Class Founders.

Be sure to audit your content regularly so that the structure of your content is enticing enough to retain your audience.

Score: 9 out of 10.

💡 Lesson: Create high quality content with enticing hooks to keep your audience engaged.

Sales / Monetization:

I'll be brutally honest.

This is the area I am struggling with most at the moment.

The newsletter nor the podcast are big enough to attract sponsors.

The podcast is too new to build up a strong foundation of "1,000 true fans." Right now, I have 3 premium subscribers to the First Class Founders podcast.

And even though I've built 3 companies over the last 8 years to $20m+, I'm still building my reputation as a creator. And trust takes time to build.

So, where do I go from here?

I just need to keep going and allow my efforts to compound over time.

Score: 1 out of 10.

💡 Lesson: Build a high quality audience. Then, create a product that matches the needs of your audience.

Summary:

Let's see where we're at with each component of the EAR$ framework for First Class Founders:

Exposure: 7
Attraction: 9
Retention: 9
Sales / Monetization: 1

The obvious area I need most improvement is monetization. I do plan on launching my first digital product (it's a course!) soon. Before launching, I'll post more about it to gather feedback.

That's it! Try this out yourself and let me know on Twitter what you think! (And don't forget to share this snack with your friends!)

Hope you enjoyed this week's Growth Snack! 😋

🎛 Metrics Dashboard

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