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A smiling man with a beard, wearing a buttoned white shirt and a dark blazer, holds an open book with architectural images.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone dismiss email marketing as “old-school” or “not worth it.” Email marketing is the underdog in digital marketing that just never dies. You can’t beat an inbox for connecting directly with your audience.

If you’re ready to find out why this method still reigns supreme, keep reading.

In this lesson, I explore the power and importance of email marketing as a reliable tool in a crowded digital landscape. We start by discussing why email marketing remains a cornerstone of digital strategies, highlighting its ability to drive conversions more effectively than social media. I also cover how to set up a successful email marketing strategy, from building a targeted list to defining clear goals and KPIs. By choosing the right tools and crafting engaging emails, you can ensure long-term success.

Start Reading Foundational Guide

In this lesson, we’ll cover the essential steps to building a successful email list from scratch. I’ll guide you through the importance of email marketing as a direct and controllable tool for business growth, and explore effective strategies for rapidly growing your list. You’ll learn the differences between single and double opt-in methods, how to select the right email service provider, and create compelling lead magnets. Additionally, we’ll discuss segmentation, automation, and best practices to nurture your list and maximize conversions.

Start Reading List Building

In this lesson, you’ll discover how email marketing tools can simplify and enhance your marketing efforts. I’ll guide you through key features to look for, including automation, segmentation, personalization, and analytics. You’ll learn how to choose the right platform based on your business needs and explore popular tools like Mailchimp and ConvertKit. Additionally, I’ll share tips for scaling your campaigns and avoiding common mistakes, helping you create effective email marketing strategies that engage and convert.

Start Reading Tools & Software

In this lesson, I will guide you through the essential components of writing better emails that engage and drive action. We’ll explore why email marketing remains a powerful tool, despite new trends in digital marketing, and how to craft emails that feel personal and authentic. You will learn how to write compelling subject lines, strong openings, and effective CTAs, while avoiding common pitfalls. I’ll also share strategies for growing and segmenting your email list to maximize relevance and engagement.

Start Reading Copywriting & Messaging

In this lesson, I will guide you through the fundamentals of A/B testing in email marketing. You’ll learn how to optimize key elements of your emails, such as subject lines, CTAs, and design, to improve open rates, click-throughs, and conversions. I’ll walk you through setting up, analyzing, and iterating on tests, with a focus on avoiding common pitfalls. By the end, you’ll be equipped to make data-driven decisions to enhance your email campaigns and boost performance.

Start Reading A/B Testing & Optimization

In this lesson, we will explore how to effectively leverage email marketing as a reliable revenue engine. You will learn how to set clear objectives, build and segment your email list, and craft compelling emails that drive engagement. We’ll dive into measuring success through key metrics, discuss common pitfalls, and examine the balance between personalization and privacy. By the end, you’ll be equipped with actionable strategies to create, execute, and optimize your email marketing campaigns.

Start Reading Strategy
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Shane Barker
Digital Marketing Expert
A smartphone displays the Marketing Growth Podcast page on Spotify, showing episode titles, play buttons, and host Shane Barkers profile photo at the top. The phones clock reads 7:37.

Successful Podcast Secrets: An Interview with Podcast Pro Benjamin Shapiro

Podcast pro Benjamin Shapiro reveals his journey from door-to-door sales and eBay stints to pioneering dynamic ad strategies and scalable podcast growth on The Marketing Growth Podcast. Host Shane Barker delves into Benjamin’s unique approach to content creation, monetization, and balancing paid and organic growth. Discover his insider tips on leveraging partnerships, innovative tech, and storytelling to build a profitable, authentic podcast empire. Now available.

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A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.
A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.
Today's guest...
Benjamin Shapiro

Benjamin Shapiro is a marketing strategist, entrepreneur, and podcast host known for bridging brand development and demand generation. As Founder & CEO of I Hear Everything, he helps companies connect with audiences through data-driven marketing and storytelling. With 15+ years in business development, Ben guides brands toward meaningful, sustainable growth.

Alongside leading I Hear Everything, Ben hosts The MarTech Podcast and produces Voices of Search, where he interviews industry professionals on SEO, technology, and digital strategies. Through these platforms, he shares actionable insights on growth hacking, performance measurement, and customer experience, equipping businesses to adapt in an ever-evolving digital environment.

Recognized for fusing creativity with analytics, Ben advises both startups and established brands on modern marketing approaches. He speaks at industry events, offering fresh perspectives on audience engagement and brand building. By championing collaboration, experimentation, and creative thinking, Ben remains at the forefront of marketing innovation, helping clients thrive in competitive landscapes. He values measurable, tangible results.

Episode Show Notes

In this episode of The Marketing Growth Podcast, host Shane Barker sits down with podcast veteran Benjamin Shapiro to explore the secrets behind building a profitable podcast empire. Benjamin takes us through his unconventional journey—from his early days in door-to-door sales and pivotal roles at eBay, to launching his own ventures and mastering digital marketing. He reveals how his experience in business development and partnerships shaped his approach to podcasting, emphasizing the power of consistent content creation and innovative monetization strategies.

Benjamin explains how dynamic ad insertion via platforms like Art 19 revolutionized his revenue model, allowing him to repurpose old episodes with fresh sponsor messages. He also shares insights on balancing paid marketing with organic growth through SEO, community engagement, and strategic guest appearances, which collectively fueled steady download increases and exceeded revenue targets. With candid reflections on his career shifts and practical tips for leveraging technology and partnerships, this conversation offers invaluable guidance for anyone looking to elevate their podcasting game while staying true to effective storytelling and authentic brand building.

Brands mentioned

  • eBay
  • Art 19
  • MailChimp
  • CallRail
  • Intercom
  • Search Metrics
A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
00:10-00:48

Welcome to the podcast. I am Shane Barker, your host of Shane Barker’s Marketing Madness Podcast. In this episode, we’ll be talking about martech and podcasts with Benjamin Shapiro. He’s an entrepreneurial and data-driven marketer with over 15 years of experience in consumer internet startups and ecommerce. He’s a host of over five podcasts and is also a business coach. Listen as he speaks about podcasts and how to monetize them.

Well cool. So obviously, you were kind of talking about being in San Francisco, and obviously now you’re in Burlingame, correct?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
00:48-00:51

Yeah, suburb of San Francisco, about a half an hour south, yeah.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
00:51-01:24

so when you’re talking about Marina District and all that, I’m very familiar with the area. I was just in San Francisco last week where SEMrush had their Marketing Global Summit Day. It was like four days of marketing. They had five, six hours in Sydney, six hours in London, six hours in New York, and then six hours in San Francisco. We all went into the studio, which was kind of interesting—having everybody there and doing sort of a livestream-type deal. So yeah, it was fun being in San Francisco. Did you grow up in the Bay Area? Are you originally from the Bay Area?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
01:25-01:43

I did, yeah. I grew up actually in a small town called Hillsboro. But the house we just moved into was about three miles away from where I grew up. It was my grandparents’ house. We’ve been under construction for—this is month 29—and we moved in a couple of weeks ago, but the house is still being worked on.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
01:43-01:46

Gotcha, and Hillsborough is not like almost wine country, right? Hillsborough?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
01:46-01:53

That’s Healdsburg, where, which is a small town probably 10 minutes west of the airport.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
01:55-01:59

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Cool. So you guys, was it your grandparents house that you guys are rebuilding?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
01:59-02:05

It was had foundation issues, so we had to start from scratch. We totally new new construction. New everything.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
02:05-02:16

Well, I flip properties as well. In fact, I have a house in Dixon right now that we’re literally bringing up the foundation right now. So I understand your struggles and what that entails with engineers and all the other fun stuff to make sure the city approves it.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
02:16-02:20

it’s all about who your contractor is. That’s, that’s a lesson from this house.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
02:20-02:36

Yeah, it really is. It’s like, “Oh, you know the people there?” “Oh, we know him really well. That’s my cousin.” “Oh, yeah, well, there we go—you’re probably the person I want to hire then.” No different than the U.S. government, I’m sure, and any other contracts that are out there—shout out to the U.S. government, by the way. And then how big was your family growing up? So you ever seen the Bay Area? Do you have a big family?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
02:36-02:46

No, I mean, I have two older sisters and the the baby boy. You know you’re the baby boy until you have a child. Yeah, you’re the baby of the family until you have a child. But two older sisters, not a huge family.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
02:47-03:03

Gotcha. And what about any cool, fun, interesting facts growing up? Is there anything you’re like, “Hey, Shane, obviously we’ve been talking for 15 minutes, I feel extremely comfortable telling you this, and I haven’t told anybody else this in my life—I want to tell you this happened.” Like, “There’s actually four kids, but we killed one,” or something? Anything fun?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
03:03-03:53

The truth is, I don’t have a lot of great youthful stories that make me the most interesting person in the world. Most of my professional experiences are what I talk about. Honestly, my upbringing was a stable family home in Northern California, Silicon Valley, before people really thought of the tech and startup scene as the dominant industry here. I went back east for college, had a good time, moved around, went through the “finding yourself” era of my mid-20s, and then finally wound up back at home and landed jobs in technology and kind of took it from there. So no huge—I didn’t survive cancer or grow up in North Korea. I grew up in a stable place and just hopefully I’ve had an interesting enough career to talk about it.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
03:53-04:04

And I don’t want to say, “God, I hope you get cancer so we have something better to talk about next time,” because I think right now you’re going to be interesting. I’m not worried about it at all. And when you say you went to college on the East Coast, where on the East Coast?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
04:04-04:23

I went to Boston University. My hometown teams were the Red Sox, or my, I say my college sports team were the Red Sox and the Patriots. I’m a big sports fan. Yeah, they obviously, because there wasn’t a lot of college athletics at BU, but inner city school, and it was a good experience, lot different than northern California.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
04:23-04:45

Yeah, it’s funny—our paths could have been interesting. When I was looking to go to college, Good Will Hunting came out, and I saw that movie and I was like, “Oh my God, I want to move to Boston.” My mom’s like, “What? I thought you were gonna move somewhere in Northern California, somewhere close so we can still see each other every day or something.” I’m like, “I’m gonna go to Boston.” And I ended up going to Chico, California, which is not nearly Boston.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
04:45-04:47

Hey, my sister’s a Chico State grad—a Wildcat.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
04:47-05:06

Oh, really? Good old Wildcats. Speaking of growing up… But anyway, it’s nothing but a good time out there. But it’s interesting. When I went out to Boston after college, I think they were talking about how it has the most colleges not per square foot or per mile, something like that.

I think they said it has the most colleges per square foot or per mile—something like that. I think it’s got like hundreds.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
5:06-5:10

64 undergraduate universities in the greater Boston area.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
5:10-5:32

Crazy. That’s awesome. But yeah, I remember we went to Yale—actually Harvard—and some other places around there. We were in one of those little buses being tourists, and they were talking about how many different colleges there were. That’s awesome. I love Boston. When I was out there, I had nothing but a great time—just the people, and obviously crazy sports fans when it comes to anything Boston-related.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
05:32-06:25

It’s a religion. And I was there before the Red Sox won the World Series, so there was a lot of pent-up aggression from the curse. It’s an amazing town. There’s tons of undergraduates. Sports is really important in the culture. For me, coming from Northern California, going back east—the metaphor or story I’d always tell about the difference growing up here is: in Northern California, you cross the street and bump into somebody’s shoulder, and they say, “Excuse me, pardon me, have a nice day.” In Boston, they’re a little more aggressive. It’s probably “F you, what’s your problem? Get out of my way.” And it’s not to say both people aren’t meaning the same thing; it’s just the common reaction is “I’m walking here,” as opposed to “have a nice day.” That was a big adjustment for me as an 18-year-old kid.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
06:25-06:41

Oh, I can imagine. Yeah, because Northern California—obviously, I’m here, so I might be biased—but I feel like when I say hi to people, they don’t look at me like, “You’re a screw-off,” or “Why are you trying to pick up on me?” For the most part, yeah. But I think it’s always interesting, right?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
06:41-07:13

I think that there’s something to be said for the history of the area. Boston’s a lot older, relatively speaking, and people who are there have generally been there and have families there and settled, and I feel like there’s more of a transplant culture in Northern California, specifically San Francisco, than in, you know, Greater New England, where it’s more of like established families and people that have just sort of been in that region for a long time. I feel like we get a lot of the new entrants to the country, and a lot of people that are coming here for the tech jobs as well.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
07:13-07:28

Yeah. So tell us about how you were in Boston to go to school in Boston, and then you end up coming back to Northern California, but really, San Francisco area, right? So tell us about your career journey. I know you were at eBay for I think about seven years, or something like that. Was that your first job coming back out of college? Or what was your journey there?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
07:28-09:29

I bounced around a bit after college. In my early 20s, I was having a good time—I was in a fraternity and got pretty good grades, but wasn’t a straight-A student. I graduated right after 9/11, the job market was tough, and I didn’t have a lot of direction, and a marketing degree.

And so, without a lot of training and a lot of guidance and assistance, I became one of the top sales reps in the country for this company that did AT&T phone service or water coolers for businesses. And I got recruited by the vice president of the company to move from Boston where I got my job, to Newport Beach in Southern California, and then out to Dallas, Texas. And that was over a year-and-a-half period.

So I was moving around a lot, and I was doing sales and meeting a lot of people and having a good time. You know, I wasn’t really taking my career very seriously. And then I got tired, and sort of realized that the company was a little bit of a scam, and decided that I was going to try to get a marketing job. And I’m a huge sports fan, and so I was in Dallas, Texas.

Sports is very central to the culture in Texas, and Dallas specifically as well. So I got a job working in sports marketing, and I worked for an agency, and I was basically getting coffee and making copies for people for about a year, dating the wrong girl, and just kind of needed a life change.

And so I decided to come back to Northern California first, because that’s where home was, and kind of take my life a little bit more seriously. So I came here. I worked a couple of temp jobs – temp jobs for six months or so, and finally landed the job at eBay, and that was really the start of my career. But it wasn’t the first job out of college.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
09:29-09:44

Gotcha. And is it – do you think the reason you left Dallas is because there’s so many Dallas Cowboy fans? Because I’m a Niners fan, so I kind of have to talk a little shenanigans. I mean, I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I wasn’t talking a little trash about Dallas. I mean, shout out to the people that live in Dallas. Man, it’s awesome, but I’m just saying. I’m just saying it would kind of hold me back.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
09:44-10:35

You know, I’m a bigger Cal football fan than a 49ers fan growing up here. Yeah, the Cowboys were pretty terrible when I was there. Bill Parcells was the coach and Quincy Carter was the quarterback, but it was pre-Tony Romo. So they were really down, and so it wasn’t really that big of a deal.

And I don’t think the Niners were great that time. They might have been a playoff team, but not fantastic. Actually, they were probably pretty bad at that point. It was after the Jeff Garcia era. So the pro sports weren’t a huge deal. I am a huge Cal fan, and Cal was really good at the time, and I was trying to date a girl that went to USC that was from Texas. So all of my sports heartbreak was USC, DVD and Cal, even when we were good, and I was living in Texas, and college football is a really big deal down there. And yeah, just getting heartbroken left and right.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
10:36-12:01

Yeah, man, that’s a rough patch. Actually now, because I’m a 49ers fan. Seattle Seahawks are like—I just hope anything bad that can happen to them during a football season, I’m excited about. This used to be the Dallas Cowboys. I actually went down to Southern California in Oxnard, because that’s where they would have their training camp. And I actually went down there and filmed a video, kind of like I was talking trash about the Dallas Cowboys at their training camp with all Dallas Cowboy fans around me, I have a video.

And almost, yeah, I was like, “Why not put my life in somebody’s hands, right?” And why don’t I just, I mean, it’s all about, I mean, are you a 49ers fan? Are you willing to die for the cause? I guess I was. And so I went in there, did this video, and what I did is I sit into the 49ers and I said, “Hey, this is how badly I want to do social media or whatever for your company.” This is probably 12 years ago.

I don’t even know how many years ago – a long time ago. And so I did this video, and you can kind of see the Dallas fans like, “Hey, is this guy talking shenanigans?” Like, you know.

And here I am doing this video I put around like, “Hey, this is how serious I am about doing this now.” Now, you see, I didn’t get the job. I also didn’t get killed. I was very on the outskirts of dying, but I was able to escape it, because I’m like a ninja, so I got out of there. And so there we go.

And that’s kind of my story about the Dallas Cowboys and 49ers. I’ll have to – what we’ll do in the show notes is I’ll have to see if I can find that video, because it is pretty entertaining.

And my wife’s like, “So why did you do this down there?” She’s like, “So you’re trying suicide. Is this your kind of option?” I go, “Not really suicide. They would have to grab me.” Like, suicide is something where you do it to yourself. But I guess it’s kind of self-inflicted. Either way, I made it through.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
12:01-12:25

That time in your mid 20s, when you are, you know, sort of really finally discovering who you are, and there’s just so many hormones going through your body. And I don’t know, people just do dumb stuff. I feel like in college, you have an excuse, and in your early 20s, you have to figure out how to be responsible, and you have some disposable income. And you know, that’s, that’s when people get in trouble, and then you become old guys like me, and in that, settling down.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
12:25-12:33

I think I was the original YOLO, like you only live once. I think I was the one who maybe came up with that before Drake came up with that. And so, anyway, I feel like I was an original…

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
12:33-12:50

YOLO means two different things. There’s the under-20 YOLO: you only live once. You better hurry up and do whatever you’re going to do. And then there’s the You Only Live Once when you’re after 20 right? When you’re in your 30s and beyond. And then it becomes, “I probably shouldn’t have that last drink”, because you only live once, and I have to get up and go to work tomorrow.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
12:50-13:42

Yeah. And it’s a different deal. I mean, we have kind of this common theme of drinking on here, which I appreciate because I am Irish. But there is that, like, now, just, you just can’t get up like you used to.

I mean, I remember in college, I used to jump up and I’d be probably a little still intox – but then I’m like, I’m gonna go the gym drunk. That’s okay. I mean, it’s what we do.

And now, my God, if I have two strong IPAs, so if I have two strong beers in the morning, I mean, I still get up get my stuff done, but it’s like, “Man, this is not the same anymore. I gotta plan my life a little different.”

I used to own a bar in Chico, so that was a whole another conversation. And it was fun. It was great learning. Great learning experience, that. Man, it was, you know, when you’re the owner, everybody comes in and says, “Hey, let’s have a drink.” And you can’t be like, “Oh, the owners are watching me. I really shouldn’t, you know, have a drink with you then.”

So I had like, 50 groups of friends that would come in every night. And so you think you know how that story ends. It ends up on a driveway in San Francisco, right? And a buddy and somebody bringing you water. That’s how that story ends.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
13:42-13:43

I knew you looked familiar.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
13:43-

I didn’t want to bring it up. I was like, right? When you came out, I was like, “Oh, God, that’s him.” I was like, “This is going to be so awkward if you remember, because I don’t”. So there we go.

Well, let’s talk about the digital journey, right? Because obviously today we’re talking about how you’ve been doing podcasts for a long time, and you’re heavy in the martech space. How did you like the digital space? How did that, like – I mean, obviously you were doing the thing at eBay. Kind of go through that, and then talk a little bit about the digital thing, and then how you started doing podcasts, because I think that’s the premise of what we’re talking about today.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
14:06-16:23

Yeah. So the journey goes, I started at eBay after bouncing around and I was working in the internet marketing team, and so that taught me a lot about the ways to structure the different types of internet marketing relationships, what digital marketing was between affiliates, search engines, search engine optimization.

And I was working on partnerships, and learned a lot about business development, and spent five or six years just doing BD deals selling desktop icons to Hewlett Packard and any sort of fixed placement – something that wasn’t a variable unit. So I spent my time doing business development. Eventually I wanted to go work for a smaller company. I wanted to go work for a startup. And eBay was great, but the company was maturing, and it wasn’t the big sort of growth engine that it was when I started. So after five years, all the smart, talented young people were going to work for cool startups.

So I wanted to go work for Twitter or Facebook, and there was a handful of other startups that were interesting to me. And I had a lot of friends that were starting their own startups as well. And so instead, well, I couldn’t get a job at the early stage startups; because I just didn’t have a lot of  hands-on, boots-on-the-ground experience. I was being seen as a big company guy. And so I left eBay to start my own startup, because that was the only way I could really get this sort of bottoms-up, do-it-yourself education and experience.

So I launched a guitar lesson website called strumschool.com and that was really my first experience trying to kind of do everything on my own. Had to learn a bunch of new skills, and really I had to put not only the digital marketing sort of experience that I gained at eBay, but I also had to figure out how to run product operations, a lot of business administration as well, but it was a content business. So that was really kind of my foray into getting into what I’m doing now, which is podcasts.

But I think of podcasts as an interesting medium because it’s audio and it’s kind of a different format. It’s a growing industry. They’re still just content businesses, right? It’s about consistency of production, finding a niche, positioning yourself, figuring out what your marketing vehicles are, and getting a bunch of other people to invest in helping you create and syndicate the content. So a lot of what I learned that I’m doing now actually came out of the startup that I did close to 10 years ago.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
16:23-16:41

That’s awesome, yeah. And I think it’s really what it comes down to, is this comes down to content, right? No matter what your medium is, whether it’s podcasts or video or writing or whatever. It’s like producing that content, right? And then be able to produce it at scale, and then also taking those pieces and breaking them down and putting on socials, and driving traffic, and all the fun stuff that goes into that.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
16:41-17:47

Yeah. I mean, the podcast content production, to me, hasn’t been too terribly difficult. I have a USB mic. If you’re on video, you can see it now. I plug this thing into my laptop, and I record and I use Zoom conference, and I don’t do any special filters or a lot of audio editing. The real secret sauce is taking clean audio files, not having a lot of background, distraction and noise, and then handing them to a professional editor. Everything that goes onto the martech podcast goes through an editorial process. And so instead of me spending hours and hours and hours editing the content I record, I can go find someone on Upwork or other platforms where you can find freelance workers and pay somewhere between $15 to $25 an hour to have somebody else edit the content while I’m going and recording more content.

The secret sauce for building a content business is being able to consistently produce lots of high-quality content. So by taking the editing off of my plate and handing it to somebody else, that was something I decided was better to buy than to build. We’re able to produce a lot more content.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
17:47-17:57

So how did you even jump into the podcast? I mean, how is that like? You’re like, “Hey, you’re doing this”, and all of a sudden you’re like, “Hey, I heard about some podcasts and I want to start one.” And then you just jumped into it? Kind of give you a background.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
17:57-20:54

You know, I started listening to podcasts a fair amount. Serial became kind of a big thing, and the podcast industry had hit a tipping point, and there was a lot of interest in podcasts, but not a lot of people that knew how to do it.

And actually I had a couple too many beers, I went to a house party, and I was taking a Lyft home across San Francisco, and I decided I was going to sit in the front seat and talk to my Lyft driver. And I asked him where he was from. He had kind of a thick accent, and he said, “I’m from North Korea.” And I honestly didn’t believe him. I was like, “No, no, you’re not a native English speaker. You mean South Korea?”

He’s like, “No, I’m from North Korea.” You know, I don’t want to say the bad one, but the one that has the human rights violations left and right. So he started telling me a story about how he defected from North Korea, and how he escaped from slavery camp and went through multiple countries and almost died, and his family relationship. And, you know, it was just an amazing story. It was something that could have been a movie.

And I was so fascinated by his story. I was like, “Hey, do you want to tell this to other people?” And he’s like, “That’s actually why I am working in Northern California. I want to work in technology to spread my story: to help the other people in North Korea.” It just hit my heartstrings.

And I told him, “Hey, tell you what. Here’s my card. Shoot me an email, and if you want, I’ll record your story and I’ll make it into a podcast.” I’ve never done it before. It was totally an art project. So I came home from this party. My wife is seven months pregnant. I’m like, “I met this guy that’s a defector from North Korea. It was an amazing story. It was like a life-changing moment. And I told him I was gonna do a podcast, and there might be some guy sitting in our living room. I gotta go buy some microphones. I’m going to record this and I’m just going to make a show, and it’s going to be the next Serial.”

My wife looked at me like I was crazy and she was probably right. And then three days later, he actually emailed me. I went out and I bought some gear and recorded him and me having a conversation and getting his whole life story. It was about, I don’t know, three or four hours of a conversation. And I turned it into The Long Road Home podcast, which I did a couple seasons of. Which is basically, “Hey, there’s this interesting trend of you getting into a car with a total stranger. You don’t know who that person is or what their background is.” And I was trying to bring some humanity to the experiences that we have with strangers every day. It’s not just an app. There are people who are the service providers there.

And I made this podcast and tried to market it a little and learned a little bit about podcast marketing, and it basically whet my appetite for doing audio content production. And a couple of years later, I was running a marketing consultant business while I was doing The Long Road Home podcast, and I needed a lead generation tool, and I was thinking about other ways to expand my business beyond just my personal network. So, having done a podcast and already having understood some of the marketing vehicles behind it, I decided to do one that was a professional podcast, and that’s where the martech podcast came out.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
20:54-21:16

That’s awesome. I love the facts, because you’re a little crazy like me. Like, that’s something that I would do. I’m like, “Hey baby, just so you know, there’s a guy in the living room and we’re gonna do this podcast.”

And my wife’s like, “Okay, you smell like beer, and all I want is peanut butter, because I’m gonna have your baby here in two months, and you’re gonna go pick up some mics and stuff and go and record an audio thing in our living room.”

You’re like, “Yeah, that’s the plan.”

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
21:16-23:07

There’s this funny thing about being an independent consultant, and you know, my career has taken an interesting change in the last – it’s been almost five – years now, where I was working, J-O-Bs, right?

I had a career. It was a good one. I worked in technology. I’m in the suburbs of San Francisco. The money’s good. I was the VP of Marketing at my last startup, and I had a nice career path, but I just struggled with all of the pressure that comes with working for a small company and the balance of the reward system just didn’t feel right for me.

And I’m either an entrepreneur or creator or – you know. I don’t mind taking the risk and building something, and figuring out how to do it for myself and betting on me. And when you’re working at an early stage startup, those are great jobs. I don’t mean to say anything bad about them. It wasn’t the right fit for me, where as an executive at an early stage startup, the late nights for the “maybe you’ll pay me in a couple ofyears”.

That got real sour and real tired, and I was taking less salary than what I probably deserved. And so I said, “I’m going to step away and take on some short-term projects and start working for myself”, and all of a sudden I felt like I had more autonomy, more authority, and more respect when I walked into the room, and I got to work on a bunch of different projects.

You know, my career ADD was sort of satisfied, because I got to move from project to project to project. I learned about marketing at all these different companies and my network started to expand. And that’s where building the podcast sort of fit into my business plan. I was already building assets to promote myself as a business. And so building the martech podcast and being the host of that show was just a natural extension to me trying to promote myself as a marketing consultant, and it’s scaled to the point now where I don’t really do consulting. I just do the podcast, and it’s really my primary focus.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
23:07-23:20

And that’s awesome. That’s kind of awesome. Because the thing is, I think I don’t always podcast. I mean, because my podcast is fairly new in regards to when we started it. But for you, that’s what you do exclusively. That’s really where you spend all of your time: on your podcast.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
23:20-23:53

Even the consulting portion of my business is now 90% focused on, “How should you create a podcast?” or “What do you need to do to grow your podcast?” Most of the people coming to me aren’t saying, “I need a business development or growth strategist,” which is the work I did for about three years. They’re saying, “Hey, your podcast is hitting tens of thousands of downloads, reaching lots of people, and it’s monetizing. Can we do this for our brand? Can you help us promote our show? Or how can we have a relationship with the MarTech podcast, because we want to reach your audience?”

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
23:53-24:11

That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s awesome. I think it can be difficult—from what I’ve read—it can be difficult to monetize a podcast, right? And I think that’s where having somebody like you guys provide a consulting service—like, “Let me show you,” you know, and see what’s worked for you to be successful—makes it seem possible, right?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
24:11-28:00

I disagree, respectfully. For sure, my problem has actually not been monetization. We hit 10,000 downloads a month, which is not a small feat. It took nine months to grow the show from zero to 10,000 downloads a month. I think I invested $10 grand in marketing and $25,000 total. So, putting my money where my mouth is, I dropped 25 G’s on building a podcast. Never took $1 until we hit 10,000 downloads, then I said, “Okay, I think we can start selling advertising.” And we sold out our Q1 inventory after a month. We started selling in November, and I sold about $25,000 of advertising in one month without ever having sold an ad or done a sponsorship before.

So I didn’t think monetization was actually a problem. I think most of the industry is going about monetization the wrong way. That’s really where my experience at eBay, thinking about how companies work together, and understanding business models really helped. Most people—most podcasts—think about monetization from a CPM basis. They’re selling ads, selling inventory as if it was on Facebook. Every 1,000 downloads gets a $25 CPM on average. So at 10,000 downloads, what am I making—like $2,500 a month or something like that? I’m not going to do the math real quick, but it just wasn’t enough money to rationalize spending all that time on a podcast.

We’ve put a lot of effort into understanding attribution. When somebody sponsors our podcast, we really do three things for them. First, we create advertorial content—we’re not just creating ads. We actually have our sponsors as guests on the show, and we call out who’s a sponsor and who isn’t, but they’re helping us produce content. The sponsored content is actually consumed more than the non-sponsored content because those people put a lot of effort into recording a great piece of content. So we bring them onto the show and we have them as guests. We help them tell their whole story.

We do the same type of advertising the rest of the world does—host-read advertising where we’re talking about a promotion or a product. We’re building that into our service. But we also put a lot of effort into attribution and retargeting. So when somebody listens to my podcast, I can retarget them on Facebook or Google or Twitter and start sending them digital display ads. That way, the sponsor can say, “Okay, I want to retarget all the people that listened to my advertorial content.” If I’m going to create an hour conversation that’s going to last a week, I want to market to the people that heard it because they have a good understanding of what my brand is, who the people are, what my products and services are about—and I have some authority.

We help the sponsors retarget the people who actually listen to the show, and then, since we know the people listening to the show, we can create lookalike audiences on social media channels and programmatic advertising to find more people who look like our content consumers. It’s not just, “I’m going to sell you ads.” It’s: we create content, we sell you ads, we create an audience that you can re-engage and retarget, and then we give you attribution. We tell you, out of the people who listen to the podcast, how many actually got to your website, how many actually bought something. And those sponsorship relationships, instead of being, you know, 10,000 downloads a month for $2,500, it’s more like 25 grand a quarter.

We’ve had months where we’ve sold $50,000 of ad inventory, and we’re close to $200,000 of revenue in sponsorships for this year—and it’s our first year of selling advertising. So monetization for us hasn’t been a hard time. More about growing the audience and finding new people who are interested. But, you know, I think there are ways around the monetization gap that most people are facing.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
28:00-29:18

Oh, that’s awesome. You and I might be talking offline, because it’s funny—I didn’t start the podcast necessarily as a revenue stream. Really, for me, it’s because I enjoy talking with people. If I’m not doing a speaking event, I have a 36-person team, but they’re all remote, so it gets lonely over here. So I thought, “I’m going to start a podcast and just chat with people,” right? That was kind of the goal.

I’ve had a few people reach out and say, “Hey, we want to be sponsors of your show,” even though it’s a newer podcast. That’s awesome—I mean, some big brands. But just to be extremely transparent, I haven’t put anything like that together. I’m like, “Well, I could probably figure it out and put some stuff together,” but I love what you’re doing.

Because really, what a podcast can be for a client—done correctly—is like an advertisement, right? Not necessarily fully an advertisement, but repeat education, I guess—where you’re educating somebody on this brand. Then the fact that you’re going to go and market to them, or remarket to them, and they already know about the history, or know the story, or know what you do where —I mean, that’s brilliant. If you really think about it, it doesn’t get any better than that, right?

Throwing an ad to somebody who’s maybe heard something before—but now you know they’ve listened to at least part of the podcast, listened to the episode, and now they have better-than-general knowledge about the company. And now you’re advertising to them, they’re saying, “Oh, I did hear about this. Oh, I heard about it on Benjamin’s podcast.” Like, absolutely, this is somebody I want to reach out to or something like that, and you can attribute that back. That’s awesome.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
29:18-31:31

Yeah, there are so many ads put in front of people these days, right? Because of the digital experience—because mobile phones are everywhere you go—there’s always some sort of ad. Consumers are becoming more and more sensitive to being advertised to, so the trick to promoting your brand without being overly salesy is to produce content—to provide value.

To me, that’s why the podcast medium is so interesting and attractive. You can create content, introduce your brand, and introduce some of the people behind the company to the audience you want to reach, and you don’t have to put a banner ad flashing right in front of their eyes, right? You can actually provide value. It’s the only medium I can think of, outside of television, where you can engage with someone and really tell the whole story.

You know, the average podcast we publish is generally between 18 and 25 minutes—the average is about 22 minutes—and people listen to about 80% of each episode. So they’re listening to 18 to 20 minutes of each 22-minute episode. If you can tell me another medium where I can get a room full of, say, 2,000 people on average listening to me for 20 minutes— like, that’s a conference, and we do that every day.

That’s what makes the podcast medium so attractive to sponsors: you get a fair amount of time. You get a lot of depth by creating content. Being actually in the show is really, really valuable. Now, you also need frequency of impressions—so you need that recurring advertising. There’s something to be said for having host-read advertising actually happening. But the mix of depth that you get from advertorial content and the repetition you get from advertising is really, really powerful if you do it the right way.

We’ve seen some people have click-through rates—what we call click-through rates, where the connection between “I’ve listened to the podcast” and “I’ve gone to the sponsor of the podcast’s website” —of about 6% of the people. If you had a 6% click-through rate on Facebook, that would be astronomical, right? It can be a very powerful mechanism because you get so much depth and recurrence.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
31:32-32:09

Yeah, that’s awesome. I mean, once you said that when you were talking about that—”God, that’s brilliant.” And it makes total sense, right? Because you have someone that has obviously listened, you know—and 80% of them listen. So now you know they have a better-than-general knowledge of whoever this sponsor is. There’s that educational side of things, and now it’s just putting some ads in front of them for them to say, “Hey, I heard about this on the podcast—let’s do it.” So that’s awesome. I love that strategy and how you put that together.

I mean, we’re working on our monetization stuff right now, just because we’ve had some people reach out. But it wasn’t necessarily the original goal of the podcast. It was mainly just to kind of have fun, interview some cool people, and kind of tell everybody their story, you know, and be able to get that out there through the networks.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
32:09-33:38

There are two things we’re thinking about for next year. Our goal for this year—and I talk about this on the MarTech podcast once a month in our monthly recaps—is to go over what our goals are and how we’re tracking to them. We’re totally open-kimono about what we’re investing in our marketing channels, what marketing channels they are, how they’re performing on a month-to-month basis, and how they’re helping us monetize the podcast.

Our goal for this year was to go from 10,000 to 100,000 downloads per month. We’re going to fall way short—we’ll be close to about 50,000 downloads a month by the end of the year—but we’ve exceeded our revenue goal. I wanted to create $100,000 of revenue from sponsorships, and we’re probably going to get close to doubling that. So we’re half short in terms of how big our listenership, but we made twice as much money as we thought we would.

Now it’s like, “Okay, where do we go from here?” Well, there’s two ways to go. We continue to try to grow our show, try to get other people to create content for us, and create other podcasts. Or we work with guys like you who have podcasts but haven’t mastered the monetization piece. We say, “I’ll pay for your hosting, I’ll sell the advertising, and all you’ve got to do is record the ads. I’ll create all the copy for you.” And essentially, we’re going to serve as a podcast advertising network or an agency—I’m not exactly sure what the model would be, so let’s call it an ad network for business podcasts. We’re not totally locked in yet on which direction we’re going to go—creating the content ourselves or working with other people—but it’s something we’ve tossed around.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
33:38-34:25

Well, let me know. I might know your first client—potentially the guy who’s sitting in front of you with the red beard. Yeah, I think that’s the way to go, man. Like I said, it hit us out of nowhere, and I was excited about it—flattered that some big brands were interested. But then it was like, how do you even put that together? I didn’t want to email them back and be like, “Hey, we didn’t really think we’re going to make money any from this, but how much do you want to give me?” You know, I was like, “This is awesome.”

Another interesting thing—we’d also talked about it—I think it’s called Podium, or something like that. What they’ve done is they make it so you can put different ads on different past podcasts. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, so I don’t know if I’m new to that. So when she said that, I was like, “Oh, that’s brilliant,” because if you get a lot of downloads on an old one, how do you monetize that? Now you can put a different sponsor there or something like that. I think they’re in the beginning stages of doing that.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
34:25-36:11

It’s called dynamic insertion. Basically, what it allows you to do is set an ad unit when you record the content. So you could say, okay, the ad starts 30 seconds in and goes until 47 seconds, and now that’s flagged as an ad.

The technology we use is a hosting platform called Art19. It’s a wonderful tool if you’re trying to monetize your podcast. We went into Art19 and went through our entire content archive and said, “Okay, here’s where all the ads are.” Now, when we have sponsors, they’re not buying ads for a specific show. What they’re doing is they’re buying ads for a week or a month.

Right now, we have three advertising spots this week—Intercom, CallRail, and MailChimp—and whenever any of those ad placements come up, those three ads will be read in some order. I forget who’s first or last this week, but next week there’ll be different brands. So when someone comes on to the MarTech podcast, even if they’re listening to content from our first month of production, the ad is still a new ad, right? We’re changing them out every week. All we’re doing is telling our host, “Hey, these are the ad spots, and this is the ads for this week,” and then you cycle through all of the inventory and instantly insert whatever ad you want to play at any given time.

I love it because you can sell a lot more inventory. Instead of saying, “Hey, this episode we’re publishing today is going to get 2,500 downloads, and we’re doing five episodes, so you’re going to get 15,000 downloads – or I’m probably doing the math wrong again, 12,500 downloads.” We’re actually selling our entire content archive. So now we have something like 50,000 downloads—we’re monetizing all the old content as well.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
36:11-36:24

That’s awesome. That’s brilliant. Seriously, if you start the agency thing—joking aside—I’m ready to talk to you about that, because that would be interesting. There you go—look at that little fire, huh? You’re like, “We got a customer.” I think you’ve already got somebody lined up for it.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
36:24-36:56

I’m very goal-oriented, and we’re not doing anything until next year when we say, “Okay, this is going to be our goal—we’re going to increase monetization by going this route.” I want to be very specific. Right now, we’re still focusing on all the goals we set for this year, which were figuring out who our audience is, figuring out how to grow our show, and monetizing through sponsorships. We still have at least a month or two of work to do there before we course-correct and figure out what we want to do next. So, like I said, that’s next year’s problem.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
36:56-37:14

The way I look at it, though—of the two goals that you set—I mean, I’m sure there were more, but of the two you mentioned, the one you achieved would be the bigger one for me, right? I’m thinking, “Dude, doubling the revenue?” I mean, downloads are important, right? But at the end of the day, if I made twice as much money and didn’t hit 100,000 downloads, life’s still good.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
37:14-38:26

I mean—don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining one bit—but it’s chicken or the egg, right? You have to continue expanding your audience. I underestimated how much money we could make from the podcast with an audience our size, but if the audience doesn’t grow, it’s hard to grow that sponsorship. Even if it’s 200 grand in revenue this year, without audience growth, it’ll still just be 200 grand next year. So you need a growth strategy, which is the network, or different podcasts, or finding new marketing channels to continue to grow our audience.

We’ve basically hit a kind of softening in the MarTech podcast growth over the last couple of months, but it’s also in a time where we’re pivoting what our growth strategy is. We were doing almost entirely paid marketing to get listeners, and  now we’re shifting more towards an organic growth model. Because I don’t want to spend $30,000 a quarter on marketing forever, right? I want to able to say “Okay, I invested in organic channels, and next year, instead of me spending going from $30K to $40K, to $50k to $100K, I want to keep my spend consistent. And you need more organic growth to be able to keep your spend flat while still actually growing the bottom line.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
38:26-38:37

So when you say organic, are you talking more, like, in other words, SEO type things? You mean organic in the sense that your guests start promoting you more and then you’re having to do less paid ads? Or what do you mean when you say organic?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
38:37-39:18

Yeah, so all of those things are exactly what I mean by organic. By organic, I really mean some sort of a marketing channel, a marketing vehicle that you’re not directly paying for, an advertisement to drive a new user. So there is search engine optimization and creating written content. There’s app store optimization, there’s virality—getting the people that are my guests or my community to share the content. I’d put all of those in the organic growth bucket, as opposed to performance marketing, which are the channels where you buy ads.

And so we basically focused on paying to buy a user base for the first year, and now we’re trying to shift towards more of an organic focus.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
39:18-39:36

Do you think that was a big reason why you guys had such successes? I mean, it was obviously because you were putting quite a bit of money into the podcast. It grew a nice foundational base, and now you guys are going to try to not do paid, but you want to do less paid and get more of the organic type of thing where you’re taking on virally and people are sharing more of the content. You’re getting better guests, that kind of stuff.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
39:36-40:35

There’s two things that are happening. One, at some point with performance marketing channels, you just hit a ceiling. You either need to bring in more technology and experience—maybe hire an agency—or you need to find different channels. You can invest in spending more in terms of infrastructure and talent, but in the meantime, you can also invest in building out organic assets that will be growth channels.

So we’re kind of staying steady-state with our performance marketing efforts. We’re actually continuing to invest in them—that’s a little unfair. We’ve bringing in an agency, and they’re helping us do some programmatic advertising and figure out attribution a little bit better.

But in the meantime, what my team is focusing on —that we’re not outsourcing—is creating more content, optimizing it, doing a better job talking to our guests, building our community, and getting them to share and comment on the content. Because that’s going to help us get more free traffic and more free eyeballs, as opposed to paid eyeballs in this case.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
40:35-41:02

Yeah, that makes sense. I don’t know how many people are listening through their eyeballs, but I get your point. It’s interesting. So obviously, if you’re a budding podcaster, and we’re talking about traction and sponsorships—you guys got pretty quick traction. I don’t think that’s normal. I mean, you guys got up to like 50,000 —I mean, how many were you guys getting in a month?

And then you got to a point where all of a sudden, you guys took off. Were you surprised by how quickly that was? And what was your guys’ strategy for that?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
41:02-43:32

We kind of consistently had linear growth. It wasn’t exponential—it wasn’t the hockey stick, we’re not Facebook. But we grew about 20% month-over-month for the first 16 or 17 months of the show. So we went from zero to 44,000 downloads, which I believe was our peak. We’ve kind of hovered around 44,000 downloads for the last couple months.

There’s really four ways to grow a podcast: organic, viral, paid, and partnerships. By that, organic is content and app-store optimization. Like, when someone searches for a podcast, do I have the right topic and titles, and is it being put in the place where they’re actually looking, so do people find my stuff in Apple? If they Google it, will my content show up first?

Virality means having a bunch of people that are guests and a bunch of people that are listeners of the show. Can I get them to share the piece of content that they listen to? Paid is paid, right? Most of what we did—kind of our secret sauce—was investing our paid dollars into advertising where podcast listeners already were.

The marketing channel we used was a service called Knit (K-N-I-T), and you can do dynamic insertion of ads into any show on the CNN network. And there’s a couple of other networks that are there. One of my biggest growth drivers was when Anderson Cooper would finish his podcast and a couple of other shows on the CNN network, and our ad would play. It was my voice saying, “Are you ready to learn how great companies grow? Follow the MarTech Podcast.” Then we’d give a little sample of the content. We said, “Download the MarTech Podcast by searching for a MarTech podcast in your app store or go to martechpod.com.”

The moral of the story here is we were marketing toward people we knew were podcasters because they’re already listening to a podcast. And we didn’t just focus on targeting marketers—we targeted a big audience with a lot of cheap inventory.  We cast a wide net and had what’s called remnant inventory, but the cheap stuff, and we were pretty consistent and regular about using the same channels and the same shows that we were advertising on, so people were hearing our ad pretty regularly. That really helped grow the podcast. That’s probably the biggest secret sauce.

Then the last part is partnerships, which is this: meeting other podcast hosts and guests, being a good member of the community, our sponsorships working with some other podcasts and marketing channels to try to create content syndication opportunities.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
43:32-44:00

That’s awesome. Once again, congratulations. Like I said, I’ve been following your journey, and it’s been interesting seeing your growth. There’s a handful of podcasts I’ve been monitoring just in the sense that I’m excited about the growth that they’ve had and we want to do something similar.

Once again, monetization is something there, but it’s not the number one thing for us. I just think it’s been fun. It’s been fun to be able to interview people and get to know people, and you don’t have to come out, but if I come out to San Francisco—or at least Burlingame from heading out of SFO or something like that—I’ll have to come out and say hi to you guys and see what’s going on.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
44:00-44:09

Absolutely, I’d love to connect and I’m happy to help. If you’re thinking about monetization or trying to figure out podcast growth strategies, let’s do it.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
44:09-44:17

Yeah, I definitely will. So, I’ve got a few personal questions before we get you out of the podcast. Rumor has it you’re a runner—you like to do marathons?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
44:17-44:19

Half marathons are about where I tap out.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
44:20-44:47

Okay, so you and I are like two peas in a pod here, buddy. I’ve only done half marathons too, and that was about where some people were like,  “But you get so much higher when you go to the second half.”

And I’m like, “No, actually, I gotta rest. I gotta go lie down while you do another 16, whatever it is, God knows, 13.1 miles or whatever, yeah?”

And that’s when people are like, “Yeah, that’s where my leg went numb, and I started bleeding and I was coughing up blood, but it was so worth it.” I’m like, “God, that sounds awesome—oh wait, no, that doesn’t sound awesome, that sounds absolutely terrible.”

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
44:47-45:12

Everyone has their points, right? For me, I’m kind of a big dude—I’ve got to carry around 220 pounds for 13 miles. Getting to 26 miles seems like too much for my frame. I love running; if I could stay out there longer, I would. It’s something I’ve figured out as I’ve gotten older—how much I enjoy being outside and using my body. I wish I’d known that when I was younger.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
45:13-45:26

Yeah, that’s awesome. I have that on my website—I talk about the journey of marathon running, or at least half-marathons. And what about traveling? Are you traveling much for the podcast, or mainly staying in the Bay Area?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
45:26-45:50

I never leave the house. I’m totally a hermit. All of the podcast recordings are done digitally—we use Zoom to record our content. My wife and I have a three-year-old, and another baby on the way, so getting out of town is more and more difficult. I try to be an active dad, be there, have consistency for the kids, so I haven’t done a lot of travel—more domestic stuff than international the last couple of years.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
45:50-45:54

Trying to be a dad that’s going to be there, huh? That’s something new.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
45:54-46:01

We went to Bali this year. I’m not going to say that we never get out of the country. We went to Colombia last year, but the trips are shorter and they’re they’re less frequent.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
46:01-46:09

Yeah, I get it. So what do you do – you’ve got the podcast, you’ve got your family – what do you do to recharge? Is running kind of one of your things, or…?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
46:09-46:40

Yeah, I run. I’m a big sports fan, so occasionally I’ll get to go to a game with my dad. Honestly, mostly what I’ve done over the last two years is we’ve been working on our home construction project, until all of my spare time went to building our house. We just moved in two weeks ago.

You know, life’s been a little bit hectic between being a parent and having a remodel. So there hasn’t been one real way that’s a specific release, other than taking care of my family, spending time with them, and getting some exercise when I can, and hopefully catching a ball game every once in a while.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
46:41-46:53

That’s it. Well, sounds like the good life. You know, it’s a little different than it was 15 or 20 years ago, but that’s a good life, for sure. I wouldn’t complain about it. Yeah, that’s a good thing. So, you got any other fun projects, or is the MarTech – the podcast – where you’re spending your time?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
46:53-47:33

Yeah, the MarTech podcast is the core focus for this year. I launched a second podcast called the Finding a Job podcast, which is meant for those in the working world trying to figure out how to start their career. It helps them with basically having templates to follow and the tools and tricks they need to make sure that they’re putting their best foot forward.

And I do the Voices of Search podcast, which is a project that I work on with an SEO company called Searchmetrics – an enterprise-focused company. So they help big companies do search engine optimization and I partner with my buddy Jordan on that project. I have a couple of podcast projects in the works, and that’s pretty much what keeps me busy every day.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
47:33-47:44

Nice, that’s awesome. Well, once again, I really appreciate you being on the podcast today. If anybody wanted to get in contact with you to grow their podcast or they want to monetize their podcast—how can they get in contact with you?

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
47:44-48:17

The first thing I suggest you do is listen to the MarTech podcast. The website is martechpod.com—that’s M-A-R-T-E-C-H-P-O-D.com. My consulting site is BenJShap.com—B-E-N-J-S-H-A-P, the first four letters of Benjamin and the first four of Shapiro, and so that has a little bit more information on me, my experience, my background. It’s got a Contact Us form. So either of those websites, you can find me. And pretty much all of my social stuff is “BenJShap”, and all the MarTech podcast social stuff are “MarTechPod”. So if you’re interested in either, you can find us everywhere there.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
48:18-48:21

Sounds like a plan. Benjamin, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

A man with dark hair smiles at the camera. He is wearing a light-colored, button-up shirt and is photographed against a black background. The image is in black and white.

Benjamin Shapiro

Speaker 2
48:21-48:23

Shane, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me as your guest.

A bearded man with short hair, wearing a light-colored buttoned coat, sits with his hands clasped and smiles gently against a dark background. The photo is in black and white.

Shane Barker

Speaker 1
48:23-48:24

All right, bud.

00:10
Meet Benjamin Shapiro: Martech Expert & Podcast Host
01:55
Growing Up in Silicon Valley Before the Tech Boom
03:03
The Transition from Startups to Podcasting
06:25
Lessons from Building a Successful Podcast Network
12:01
How Boston University Shaped Benjamin’s Career
17:47
A Fun Story About Moving Back Home and Rebuilding
24:11
Balancing Work, Business Growth, and Family
36:11
Predictions for the Future of Podcast Monetization
39:36
Advice from Benjamin Shapiro on Martech & Growth
44:20
Final Thoughts and Takeaways from Benjamin Shapiro
This Isn’t a Sales Funnel, It’s a Partnership

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