TJ17 – Podcasting On Fire: Zero To 2 Million Downloads In 300 Days – John Lee Dumas

Hello! Welcome back! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, the show that teaches you how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website. I am super excited you can join me on today’s episode #17 because in the hot seat today is a very fiery entrepreneur who in just 11 short months has built from nothing the number one ranking business podcast on iTunes. The stats of this podcast are quite phenomenal – it has received to date 3 million downloads and that number grows at a whooping rate of 350 thousand downloads per month. When you consider that my guest’s podcast at the time of recording this is only 11 months old, the fact that it now has probably the largest audience of any business podcast in the planet is simply amazing. I of course am going to be pulling back the studio doors of this podcast to see how a successful podcast like this is built from scratch at such a phenomenal rate.

Of course in addition to the guest interview today we have the regular segments, they’re the same every week, we have the one minute traffic tip, we have this week’s news in traffic and of course we have the traffic jam jam to play out the show. The jam is of course chosen by my guest today, however the artist who performs this track is someone that I have personally gotten to meet; we hung out probably in 2000 and 2001 for a whole day when we were both photographing the same wedding. I am not sure if it gives you any clue as to who the artist is however they are also a talented photographer as well as being a very talented performer as well. So, I don’t know, does it give you any clues? Stick around until the end of the show to hear this week’s jam but coming right up now is a guest that I am super excited to have on the show, it’s John Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire podcast, a daily podcast show where John interviews successful entrepreneurs about their journey. I’ll be sharing my journey as a guest in John’s show very soon but today, John shares his journey to the #1 rank on iTunes in this week’s interview.

James: Okay, so this is Traffic Jam episode #17 and joining me on today’s show is John Dumas from EntrepreneurOnFire.com. John, 300 episodes, 3 million downloads, 145 countries; have you been surprised by the amount of exposure the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast has achieved in less than a year?

John: Absolutley! We are as we speak at the 11^th month mark James and it has really blown me away on a lot of levels as to how podcasting has taken off in general and specifically the traffic that has driven myself and my brand.

James: Yeah, well those numbers are pretty impressive. I was doing some calculations – I don’t know if you’re a numbers man before this interview but I’ve worked out- you’ve actually created somewhere near 147 years’ worth of spoken conversation when you factor in the amount of downloads you’ve had and the amount of episodes; that’s a whole lot of content! It’s a pretty phenomenal number.

John: Wow that’s really interesting! I would love to be able to use that data on my podcast because I am really impressed by that.

James: Yeah, phenomenal! I’ll share the numbers with you, you can pick holes in my math as well just to make sure I got it correct. John, what has been the business model for you? What’s behind Entrepreneur on Fire?

John: The business model James behind Entrepreneur on Fire is very straightforward- it is to build a massive audience and I knew without a doubt that if I could build a massive audience, if I could generate massive traffic to my sites, to my podcasts, to my brand on a daily basis then modernization streams are going to open up all over the place and that has definitely been the case; Entrepreneur on Fire has allowed me to open up diverse and multiple income stream so it’s been a very healthy business as well because my business model was from Day 1 to leverage the audiences of the massive and great and inspiring and successful entrepreneurs that I interview on a daily basis.

James: So was there a plan from day 1 or did you kind of let that audience build to the point of critical mass and then assess really what your monetization was going to be?

John: Really the latter; because I knew that my audience was going to tell me what they were suffering, what their pain points were- what they’re struggling with in life and then that was going to give me the key to the products and the services that I could create to solve those pain points for them so until I grew that audience, I did not want to spend a lot of time creating something that maybe nobody wanted to get. It really points back to one of my prior guests Eric Lease and the Lean Start Up Method where you really just want to create that minimally viable product; don’t spend much time, don’t spend much energy on it because you don’t really know what your target market wants until you get in there and you’re being exposed to them so until I was exposed to my audience, until I had an audience to be exposed to, I had no idea what they wanted so I wanted to wait until that critical mass happened.

James: And I guess now at 300 episodes, you’ve had a feedback loop to determine exactly what would be a viable monetization model that would also benefit that of your listeners too?

John: Absolutely! Yeah.

James: So what is the monetization now? From the outside looking in and I’m a listener to Entrepreneur on Fire, you have sponsorship on the show, what else is going on behind the scenes if anything?

John: Sponsorships is definitely a major revenue; that’s a five figure income source for Entrepreneur on Fire on a monthly basis. We have 6 sponsors, of which I have 2 maximum sponsors per episode; each of which pay $400 to sponsor Entrepreneur on Fire per episode- a total generation of $800 per episode when I do have those two sponsors. That’s been very steady going forward. All of my sponsors from Q2 and Q3 are continuing to move forward into Q4 so they are seeing results. Entrepreneur on Fire listeners are really resonating with the sponsors that I have so that has been a great model. Another one James came directly from what we talked about of listening to your audience. Once you do have that audience, what are they telling you? And a consistent thing though keeps coming back to me time and time again was, John, I am an entrepreneur but I have no entrepreneurs like me around me. I feel like I am all alone, I feel like I have no support, nobody to give me feedback, nobody to hold me accountable to what I feel and want to do. I want to be part of a mastermind. I keep hearing that over and over again. So just a month and a half ago, almost two months now, I launched officially Fire Nation Elite which is a mastermind for Entrepreneur on Fire listeners who are looking to surround themselves with energetic, successful, energized entrepreneurs who are really looking to support each other to take our businesses within this mastermind to the next level and that has turned out to be another phenomenal income stream because it’s a $165/ per month to be part of this mastermind. We’re currently sitting at 82 members so that’s another five figure income source per month recurring revenue which is obviously a very nice business model and we are very soon, probably within 15 – 30 days, going to be at 100 members which where we’re going to cut it off for Fire Nation Elite because we have decided as a mastermind, that’s the right number to be: #1 powerful enough and large enough a number to really impact each other’s businesses, but #2 not be so large where people within it are feeling overwhelmed and not really able to form business relationships. That has been a great experience James! I am involved with Fire Nation Elite every single day interacting with these entrepreneurs and it has been unbelievable and a great experience for me.

James: Congratulations for that! I have heard very good things about it on the grapevine but John at this stage let’s wind the clock a little bit – tell us a little bit about how Entrepreneur on Fire just 11 months ago, It seems probably to you quite a distant past isn’t it? Maybe after 300 episodes it seems a long time but in actual time it’s not too long ago, so what is the story? How did it all come about?

John: Oh it really does both seem like a long time ago and then like a blink ago at the same time because at this time last year James, I had not released my first podcast. I was still about a month away from releasing the first episode of Entrepreneur on Fire and like with all entrepreneurs, we never really know what’s going to happen when we launch that product, when we launch that service. And I had no idea! When we launched at this point last year, I had about 20 or 30 interviews completed but I had no idea if my kind of weird business model of a 7 day a week podcast was going to work, because going back to your original question, how did it all begin – it all began pretty simply. To be honest with you, I mean, here I was in commercial real estate, a very corporate type job, wearing a suit to work every single day, driving to appointments, meeting with different people for different real estate transactions. But the common thing there was I was always in the car, I was commuting all the time to different appointments and wherever and I was loving podcasts and I would listen to podcasts all the time but I ran out of my favorite podcasts all the time because they’d be produced once a week, once every two weeks, and they were great content but not just enough quantity so it was during one of those drives that I literally had my aha moment where I was like, you know what there must be other people like me James who drive to work every day, that hit the gym and love  consuming great content while they’re at the gym. I would love personally a 7 day a week podcast and I am sure there must be some other people out there who would as well. That’s the day the idea is born, and I did nothing, just put my heart, soul and all my energy in to that idea since.

James: Yeah. One question you asked on your show John that I want to kind of spin back to you if you like is – what was the biggest mistake, or failure or obstacle that you had to overcome when getting started because you did start from scratch. You had no experience when you first launched the show, you must have been faced with some challenges early on. What were some of those?

John: My biggest failure was truly my fear of launching. This is something I can point to very directly because here I was James, I have “given it all up”- I quit my job, I poured all of my time for months; all of June, all of July, and here we were in mid- August, and I just poured this last two and a half months trying to learn how to podcast, interviewing, all the stuff, and then I was having this fear of launch. I was supposed to launch August 15^th and I bumped it back, then I was supposed to launch September 1^st and I bumped it back. And looking back on it, it’s very easy for me to diagnose that I was terrified about launching than it not being a success because if that happens when I left my very comfortable, very solid job, I had invested a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of effort, and very public with my family and friends of this venture that I was doing so as long as I hadn’t yet launched, I couldn’t fail. So I kept pushing that launch date back to September 15^th. Finally, and lucky for me, I had a coach, I had a mentor, who was able to hold my my feet to the fire and say, John I will fire you as a student and as a mentee unless you launch today literally; and so I launched, and it was the best thing that I could have done. I wish that I had launched a month prior. I would have just accelerated the entire process that I was going through so that fear of launching is so prevalent to all entrepreneurs; because until you launch, you really can’t fail. It’s only when you get it out there, and we are all terrified of that, of failure, but you know what, that’s what it means to be an entrepreneur, to swallow that fear and go straight forward. It wasn’t a straight trajectory, I still face a lot of roadblocks and a lot of obstacles after I launched but I kept tackling those head on, and you were right James, as we sit today, in August of 2013, Entrepreneur on Fire is the number 1 ranked business podcast in all of iTunes, I have unseated the previously unseated Dave Ramsay, generally over 350,000 unique downloads per month in over 145 countries, none of which would have happened if I had let my fears which were taking over me completely take over.

James: Yeah, absolutely. I think as you said those things that hold any entrepreneur or business owner back is getting stuff out there. But unless you get stuff out there you haven’t got anything at all have you? So you have to overcome that fear if you want to stay in business. So tell me about the show. One of the big differences about Entrepreneur on Fire is the frequency of which you publish. You’re a seven-day-a-week podcast. There’s got to be some effort involved in building a show like that. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about the process? Because I am just sitting here thinking I am doing a once per week podcast and there’s a lot of work involved in that. How on earth does John get out seven episodes per week? What’s the trick? There’s got to be something in a way.

John: Well, first and foremost, Entrepreneur on Fire is my full time thing. I mean it’s all that I do, I am 100% focused on the podcast first and that’s really where I pour my heart and my soul in to so there is a lot of time for me to devote in to a venture like a 7-day a week podcast. With that being said, I really have developed some schedules and some systems that have really worked well for me. For instance, James and I are talking here on a Monday, today, I have 8 more interviews, all for on Entrepreneur on Fire, I batch my interviews on a one-day a week, every single Monday, I do 8 back to back interviews, all for Entrepreneur on Fire. It’s a very long day and it’s emotionally draining. You have to be really revved up for every single interview; it’s not that hard to do because the people who I am talking to are so inspired and so successful but it’s not an easy day but the beautiful thing about this batching is that there’s really no way for me to kind of let things slide like bang, bang, bang, bang! I just need to knock this eight out and be fully focused on to my game for one day- Monday. Then I wake up Tuesday morning and my interviews for the week are done. All I need to do now is focus on the other aspects of Entrepreneur on Fire, running my mastermind, dealing with sponsors, continuing to grow my brand, be interviewed on other shows like yours to continue to promote entrepreneurs in general, what we are doing both you and I James which is something that in this world 20 or 25 years ago. It’s a whole new crop of people like yourself, like me who can now truly pursue our passions and be authority figures in the world of entrepreneurship and continue to motivate and inspire others.

James: Do you have a team around you John? I mean is this a one-man show or is the people in the background also supporting you with the production of Entrepreneur on Fire?

John: I’m a big believer in teams and as soon as anybody can afford to bring on a team, it’s really important to. You want to do it very slowly because you have to have the right people, but as soon as you can, you really want to start looking to make those hires and to bring those people on so you can continue to leverage in your abilities within your organization so for me I have one at this time, full time virtual assistant. She’s based out of the Philippines, she works 40 hours a week, and she does a ton of the stuff that I now do not have to do. She takes it off my plate. A lot of my social media, a lot of my design work, a lot of repetitive tasks that just have to happen with every single business when it grows on the size of Entrepreneur on Fire has grown to. And also, I am very happy to say, about 4 or 5 months ago, my current girlfriend, Kate Ericson left her job as a full time account executive and joined Entrepreneur on Fire as a Director of Content Creation so now there is the three of us. She is working full time with the company, directing all the content creation and doing the blog post that we have and helping run the mastermind community and that has been incredible; and this team has allowed me to continue to focus James on what really is the bread and butter of Entrepreneur on Fire which is the 7-day a week podcast format in keeping those podcast high quality and packed full of actionable tips for every listener.

James: Yeah, first of all John props for getting your girlfriend involved in the business and making that happen- that’s a whole different point of conversation –

John: It wouldn’t work for every relationship and I can’t picture any of my past girlfriends being able to take this role but fortunately for me, Kate is the perfect person both as a partner and just mentally for this job and it’s been a great experience, it’s been very great.

James: That is good to hear. And of course you wouldn’t want several of your past girlfriends working for you all at the same time. That would just not be worth considering.

John: That is terrifying!

James: So let’s move on John. Let’s talk about Entrepreneur on Fire and really the podcast as a traffic source; we’ve preluded already to how to build an audience and Entrepreneur on Fire itself becoming a source of traffic to your mastermind, but I want to ask you first of all, how are people finding Entrepreneur on Fire? You’ve got such impressive numbers, download’s through the roof, where are you finding those people in the first place that just move in to listening to the show?

John: Entrepreneur on Fire truly is a great study piece for this because when I launched James, I had zero online presence – literally zero. I had never have a job prior that had me build any kind of an online audience or an online following so I did not even have a Twitter account, I had no Facebook business page, I had literally nothing as an online presence but my business model for Entrepreneur on Fire from the beginning was to gain traction by leveraging the audiences of my guests. So I would have these great guests on, they would share their life stories, they would share their failures, how they overcame those failures, they share an aha moment and how they turned that aha moment in to success then we talk about what they’re doing right now and then we’d finish with a lightning round of five really cool interesting questions and so these interviews were fairly unique because most of the interviews at the time were just talking about what these people were doing right now and for me as a listener, there always seemed to be this chasm that existed – this chasm of well, okay I know they are successful now but how do I start and how do I get to where they are and I want Entrepreneur on Fire to kind of bridge that gap so the point of me saying all that is that now all of these guests that I had on realized that this interview that they just gave was very unique and showed a side of them that most of their other interviews hadn’t shown. So when their interview went live, I reach out to them for first thing and said Seth Godin, Tim Farris, Gary, your interview just went live on Entrepreneur on Fire this morning, you shared an amazing journey, I would be honored if you would share this journey with your audience and 99 out of 99 times they would share with their audience. And so every single day, a whole new set of eyes, a whole new set of audience would be exposed to Entrepreneur on Fire for the very first time, and that was consistently happening again seven days a week. That’s one reason why the seven day business model worked incredibly well because instead of it just happening one day a week, it was happening seven times a week, and that snowball started a lot faster and gain momentum and because of that, then I started ranking incredibly well in iTunes, and iTunes is what Amazon is for authors, iTunes is for podcasts where we generate 85% of our downloads. There’s other places like Stitcher Radio that are amazing and coming in to the marketplace and taking some great market share, but iTunes is the king of the jungle. And so when I started ranking high in iTunes and there’s 45 million people that come in iTunes to search for content, people started finding my content organically, because there I was, you click on top business podcast and you look for the top rank podcast and as we sit right now, Entrepreneur on Fire Is #1 so everybody that is checking out business podcasts they’re finding that organically and even if they have not heard of Entrepreneur on Fire before, they’re giving it a try because of their ranking. That social proof is there – there’s over 700 5-star reviews. I have over 300 interviews and so when people are seeing these things they’re continuing to add to that snowball effect. So now I have the combination James of both my first email that still goes out every single morning to my guest who’s going live, and #2 people are organically finding Entrepreneur on Fire due to its ranking and placement in iTunes, so those two things are continuously working towards it and allowed me to take down Dave Ramsay – we took down the old guards my friend.

James: Good Luck! We’ll see if we can get an edit in there with some cheering in the background and some party poppers going off to celebrate that fact.

John: I never thought Dave Ramsay could move. He’s been stuck at #1 for like 4 or 5 years and it’s just beautiful to see him no longer there, even if it’s only for a week.

James: Okay, we’ll get that Dave Ramsay interview lined up next on Entrepreneur on Fire, let’s get his feedback.

John: I would love it!

James: So is that John is that literally all that you have in play now? You go after the big fish in your market with interesting stories and then get them to share. Are you doing anything else? Are you doing Facebook ads, are you doing Google traffic? Is there anything else or is it just really a complete organic content machine that you’ve created?

John: It’s a complete organic content machine. I am truly active on all social media channels. Very active on Facebook- we have over 3000 fans, very active on Twitter – we have over 15000 followers. In LinkedIn, in Pinterest – the same. However, I don’t have any paid search or paid ads of any kind. It is all organic, it is all content that I’ve created and it’s all been organic growth. When Kate came on she started doing first 7 days a week and now it’s either 3 or 5 days a week – she is producing a blog, an article on entrepreneurship area so that is creating more content on the site for entrepreneur on fire; we post show notes of every single interview that we have at the site. So the site itself beside from being an audio producing online machine is also producing a ton of content in all the social media channels as well as our website so that combination has really just made it a very natural and organic content machine.

James: Yeah and then it becomes self-perpetuating right? I mean with that volume of content out there being organically shared, one it’s hugely robust and two you don’t have to be reliant on any other traffic source really because it’s all happening so naturally out there in the market place.

John: Yes, absolutely!

James: Good. Well John I guess we’re probably getting some people excited about the opportunity of podcasting and I am certainly an advocate it. I love hosting this show and it is really paying dividends for my own business. There are going to be people I am sure that either have got some concerns of getting started, they are worried about frequency and technicality and all that type of stuff. What advice would you have to someone considering podcasting right now in order to get them started?

John: This is kind of another income stream I have been able to diversify with, albeit not on a massive one but it’s more of a brand builder. It will be a great resource for any of your listeners. So back in February of 2013 I kept getting those emails from people, John how can I start my podcast? What’s the first step? Obviously I can’t sit down and respond individually with a 2-3 thousand word email response because there are a number of steps involved. So I did sit down over one weekend, I wrote an e-book, it’s 38 pages, but then I also included 15 video tutorials with this ebook that takes you step by step through the podcast set up process which is really of incredible value. I published it on Amazon, it immediately shot up to #1 in Amazon for the word podcast with over 135 5-star reviews. So anybody who wants to check it out, it’s $5, Podcast Launch, that does come in 15 video tutorials. It’s in an audio form as well for audible if you are more of an audio guy like I am, but either one would be a great option.

James: Good stuff! Well you’ve kind of blown my close out to this interview John, because I was going to ask you what your internet resource, a little bit like an evernote is but I guess you might have come out with that anyway, so is there anything else other than that that you’d like to send our listeners to as a result of listening to today’s episode?

John: Well, I’ll just send them to a great internet resource in general which I think is phenomenal and which I think will give great value to anybody listening and that’s call Shedule Once. It’s a scheduler that I live and die by, it’s how I schedule all of my interviews and anybody that is listening that has issues or whatsoever with scheduling, it just does the back and forth email like how about Tuesday, 9AM? Oh, wait 9PM PST or GMT? Like if all of that would happen to me that would really plague my life for so long, Schedule Once truly did change the game on that, and James that’s how you booked this interview, I’m sure you are pretty impressed with the system because it is flawless and I just can’t say enough about that company, I actually talked to the founder I was so impressed. He may be a future guest of Entrepreneur on Fire, but that is a great resource. For your listeners, if they want to find out more about me, EOFIre.com is a really easy quick way to get to my website Entrepreneur on Fire because Entrepreneur is a pretty tricky word to spell James so I made it a little easier by shortening that up to EOFire.com.

James: There you go, EOFire.com, ScheduleOnce.com – You’ll find those in the show notes of Traffic Jam Episode #17. John, you’ve been a fantastic guest, thank you for sharing so much on today’s episode and hopefully we can do it all sometime again soon!

John: I look forward to it James, thank you!

This week’s news in traffic: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg has revealed that of all users who bought a product they saw advertised on Facebook, 99% of them didn’t click on the ad. Perhaps this revealing revelation has proved that optimizing for the click only in the Facebook advertising may be the wrong strategy for you.

LinkedIn continues to spruce up its platform and has now redesigned the look and feel of LinkedIn groups. According to LinkedIn the new streamlined look will give group managers and group members the ability to customize and visually differentiate their group space. For a full lowdown on how to use LinkedIn to generate targeted traffic and leads, check out Traffic Jam episode #6 with Los Silva.

Yahoo continues to make over its websites including Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Weather and others; the makeover though is not just including changes to its look and feel but it also includes changes to Yahoo Advertising with support now for stream and billboard ads and yet more to come.

I’d like to say a big thank you to Ryan Spanger for his iTunes 5-star review, and Ryan from Australia said. “this is a brilliant podcast, the research that James obviously puts in, the insightful questions that he asks and the caliber of the guests put this head and shoulders above most other podcasts. If you’re interested in marketing and driving more traffic to your website, this is unmissable.” Well thank you Ryan for your great feedback and your fantastic review there on iTunes. Ryan himself is a video expert and he himself has a great podcast called the Web Video Marketing Show so if you are looking to take your video marketing up a notch or two, I strongly recommend you go check out his podcast, it’s available on iTunes, and it is as I say called the web video marketing show.

I would love also to get your comments, review, and feedback. And you can do that in a variety of places here on Traffic Jam. You’ve of course got the option over at the site itself, TrafficJamCast.com where you can leave a comment on the individual episode page as well as a voicemail message using the speakpipe functionality which you’ll find at the base of the site, and you can of course, like Ryan did, leave a review on iTunes. Head on to your iTunes player, search for Traffic Jam and there’ll be an option to leave a review and a rating for Traffic Jam. The reviews, comments and feedback I get this week will be read out on next week’s show. so if you’d like to get yourself a little bit of airtime, perhaps leave your name and website URL along with your comment and I’ll read it out for you in next week’s show and let’s hope we can get you a little bit of exposure to the Traffic Jam audience.

The one minute traffic tip: This week I just want to tell you the little addition that we’ve done to our website, it’s called the DISQUS Commenting System. Disqus is great because it’s really widely used; currently over 200 million websites are using it; the comments themselves get picked up really easily by search engine so it’s great for SEO and from a user standpoint it’s really easy to use as well. Unlike wordpress you don’t actually logged in to place a comment or moderate a comment but from a traffic standpoint which of course is what we are discussing here, I love disqus because it shows other related posts after the comments section which helps to pull visitors away from the piece of content they’re reading to other posts on your website.  Plus it also follows up people once they’ve placed a comment when someone else places a comment to that post which of course helps bring people back to the site itself. So it’s fantastic in terms of ease of use and it’s great for traffic so I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out yourself. You can get it for free over at Disqus.com.

That almost rounds out Episode #17 of Traffic Jam. I’ll be back again of course next week with another episode and this time it’s going to be devoted to content marketing and social media so tune in again next week for that. In this coming week if you’d like to get more traffic training tips, you can head on over to Veravo.com where I publish regular 2-5 minute videos with training on all aspects of traffic but particularly search engine optimization and Google Adwords pay per click. This week, there’s training on how to do keyword research for SEO, there’s some fast acting adwords tips that take 2 minutes or less to implement and I’ve got a revealing look at an interview where Google’s Matt Cutts disclosed what still is the search engine’s still #1 ranking factor so if you want to find out what that is head on over to Veravo.com and whilst you’re there, you’ll also find a new addition – we’ve just introduced something we’re calling Traffic Toons which is a good funny comical look at traffic, SEO and social media in cartoon form so go take a look at that and let me know your feedback, that would be fanstastic.

Of course we are going to have our regular play out to an episode; it’s called the Traffic Jam jam. This week’s track of course is chosen by my guest today John Dumas and it is from the artist whom I photographed a wedding with. Okay, so drumroll, who is it? It is Bryan Adams and the track that John has picked today is Summer of 69, so enjoy the play out and I’ll catch you back here again next week.