In this episode of Runway, we welcomed Eric Melchor, the founder of B2B PodPros and host of Innovators Can Laugh. Eric shared his journey into the podcasting world – you’ll never guess why he got started! From his early days interviewing startup founders in Romania and Lithuania (including JJ herself) to creating a unique B2B podcast sponsorship model, Eric chatted with us on all things podcasting and how to become successful at it. Looking to start a podcast? Looking to spend on podcast ads? Then don’t miss out on Eric’s expert advice (we certainly took notes)!
Transcript
Julija Jegorova: Hello, everyone. Today we have Eric Melchor, who is the host of “Innovators Can Laugh”, and I was his first guest on his pod. He is also the founder of the first-ever B2B podcaster community, B2B PodPros. Eric, thank you so much for joining us.
Eric Melchor: Thank you, guys, for having me here. It’s such a pleasure. And finally, the tables have turned a little bit, right? You were my first guest. Now I’m one of your first guests.
Julija Jegorova: Absolutely, absolutely. Eric, before we flood you with all the questions about podcasts—what to do, what not to do—can you just briefly talk about yourself and your journey so that our listeners know that you’re the real deal?
Eric Melchor: I’m a mediocre tennis player, and I’m a Texan living in Romania. I’m the founder of B2B PodPros. We are a B2B podcasting network and community. We help SaaS brands reach new audiences and build trust at scale through podcast sponsorships.
Julija Jegorova: How did you start in this world of podcasts? What was your weak moment? Because when you and I had a chat, that was a couple of years ago now.
Eric Melchor: Three years ago, I was working for a startup, and during the weekly meetings, everybody was remote. This was during COVID, and there were people remote in China, Turkey, Hungary, Romania—just from everywhere. The meetings were boring, and nobody was really talking. For me, this was kind of awkward as an American, so I would get the conversations going and just ask these random questions, like, “Hey, what’s one of the worst disgusting dishes in your country?” People would talk about it and share images, and we would be like, “Oh, that looks disgusting. I don’t want to eat that.” Every week, people were looking forward to these meetings because I would just bring up this random question, and it got conversation going. One of the meetings, somebody said, “Man, you should have a podcast and interview just foreigners. I think it’d be funny.” It just stuck with me, and I thought, why not? I’m new to Europe, new to Romania. I don’t really know anybody here, and I think this would be a great way to start building some relationships and maybe some friendships. That’s how it all got started, and I’ve been with it for over three years. I’ve been lucky to have made a lot of new friendships from the guests that I’ve interviewed.
Mauro Battellini: You’re now doing PodPros, right? But it was a longer journey. It started with “Innovators Can Laugh”. How did you start in the world of podcasts? You had the idea, but what led you to where you’re at now? Because you’re quite a pro yourself.
Eric Melchor: I started out by approaching startup founders in Romania specifically because I live in Romania, and I think maybe one out of every three people I approached said yes. Who’s going to take a chance on somebody who’s got no reputation, no credibility, and it’s a new show? Plus, at that time, nobody really listened to podcasts, especially in Romania. It took a while to get started. There was a lot of rejection from potential guests, but finally, I think once I got maybe my first 15 guests, it became a little bit easier when I started to get well known in the Romanian startup scene. After I interviewed maybe 20-plus Romanian startups, I went to another country, Lithuania, and I interviewed about 20 Lithuanian startup founders. Once I did that, it was much easier to approach founders in other places because they knew that I was really focused on startup founders in Europe. Now I rarely actually go out and try to recruit. I get pitched all the time by different agencies, or people just reach out wanting to be on the show, or people make referrals. That’s how I got started in terms of getting guests. There are a lot of things that you learn along the way. I think in the very beginning, I actually had pillows around my laptop to help block out the sound. Now I just make sure that I’m in a quiet room when I record. I only record on two days between specified times. I use Riverside now instead of Zoom, which is a much better platform, and I use Buzzsprout now for the distribution. There’s a lot that you learn along the way, especially when it comes to the distribution and marketing piece.
Eric Melchor: To answer your question, how did I start B2B PodPros? A year ago, I thought, I’ve got an audience now, and I know that audience is valuable because they’re tech founders and CEOs who are deciding what tools their companies should be using. I started approaching sponsors and telling them about my show, creating these decks, and sharing information like who’s following me, and they’re all CEOs and founders, but they weren’t really excited because my show was only getting maybe around 300 downloads a month. That’s not exciting to a brand. It’s not even worth their time. I thought to myself, I can’t really get a sponsor, and I can’t really work with Spotify and some of the other large networks, because those large networks want podcasts with 10,000 downloads or more a month. I thought, there are a lot of podcasters like me in the B2B space who are in the same position. We want to monetize our show somehow. I started reaching out to a few that I knew, like Andre Zivkovic from Full Fathom, Sarah Block from Tiny Marketing, and a few others that I had gotten to know over the past couple of years. I pitched this crazy idea: I’m like, “Guys, why don’t we aggregate our data? I go out and try to find us deals. Instead of pitching one podcast, I pitch all of our podcasts as this group sponsorship.” I think it’s a lot more attractive to potential clients than if we were to try to do it ourselves. I said, there’s no risk to you. You don’t have to pay me to do this. You don’t have to deal with the clients. I’ll take care of everything, all the paperwork and agreements and the ad scripts and all that. Because there’s no risk, they were like, “Sure, why not? What do we have to lose?” That actually started in October of last year, and now we’ve been with this for a little more than nine months, and we have more than 30 podcasters on board now in the community. I’ve been able to get sponsorship deals for the majority of them, and for many of them, it’s been a fun new revenue source, but also a new community. In addition to the company aspect, there’s the community aspect. We all learn from each other. We share best tips and practices. We have this monthly meetup call that we all join. We have a private Slack community, and it’s just a fun way to network and meet other B2B podcasters too. I think that’s a fun part of it. It’s like I’m building this business, but I didn’t realize that it was going to be heavily community-focused. I’m also learning how to create and nurture community as well.
Mauro Battellini: Clearly, something is working. Really cool, how you aggregated all the smaller, perhaps than usual, podcasts and created a win-win situation for everyone. Maybe there’s also a good segue to talking more generally about podcasting and what companies can get out of it. You’re signing up more and more clients, and you’ve been doing this for around nine months, right? You’ve got clients that are sticking with you since then.
Eric Melchor: We got lucky with our first client. Somebody saw a post on LinkedIn and tagged him, and we did an experiment, a first campaign. I think it was a total of something cheap, like 2500 euros over three weeks. I think it was six podcasters. But in the second week, he said, “You know what? This is working. We see this high-quality traffic coming to our site. There are new accounts opening, new demos being requested, and they’re coming from your podcasters.” They extended the campaign for an additional three months. During that period, the same thing happened: this is working. Let’s do it another three months. Do you have any new podcasts we can try? It just continues to work. We’re optimizing, right? We’re finding out what podcasts actually work, that are generating good quality traffic, that are engaging with the brand, continuing to work with those podcasts, and then actually expanding on those services. Many of our podcasters have newsletters, or they’re willing to write a LinkedIn post about the brand, or maybe they have a YouTube channel. We continue to expand our services, not just through the podcast host-read ad scripts, but through other services as well. We had another campaign, and a client renewed. Same thing, they were really happy with the LinkedIn storytelling post that we did. They’re actually using one of those posts and licensing it from us and putting some paid media dollars behind that post. It’s great. This is like UGC content that you’re paying for, but it’s with podcasters, and you’re getting your ad heard on a channel that basically has no competition, because it’s usually one ad per podcast episode. It’s from a loyal audience. It’s from somebody that’s credible in the B2B space. They’re a professional, and they’re also talking about you on LinkedIn. It’s a win-win situation. Brands see the impact that it’s having, the qualified traffic, the additional reach, and they continue to renew their campaigns with us. My trouble, as a new business, is basically educating the market on what we do, what group sponsorships are, why they should be doing podcast advertising this way, instead of just doing one-off campaigns, and then also recruiting good, credible B2B podcasts into the community.
Mauro Battellini: In terms of the customer journey and how they find the podcast, or if they’re a loyal listener, how after the podcast they enter the journey with the company that’s advertising, how does that actually work with podcasts? It’s not a traditional ad where you see it online, click on it, and you’re taken to a landing page or something.
Eric Melchor: Yeah, each podcaster gets their own custom UTM tracking link. I then basically convert that into a bitly, so they each get their own Bitly that they use. They put that in the episode description and the call to action that’s for each podcast episode. Whenever somebody clicks on that, I actually see it through Bitly, and the client sees it through Google Analytics, or whatever they’re using to track visitors on their website. That’s the minimum that we do. The other thing that we advise our clients to do is on their sign-up form, have a question that just asks, “How did you hear about us?” Either have that field blank or as one of the options, they can just put “podcast ad” or just “podcast.” Some clients create a specific landing page for us. Landbot did this, for example. Landbot created a landing page called landbot.io/try. During the host-read ad, the podcaster would say, “Okay, if you want to learn more, go to landbot.io/try,” and then you can request a free demo or whatever. That landing page was specifically made for our campaign, for our podcasters, and they were able to track unique page views and visitors from this campaign and see how many of those converted into customers. That’s another way that you can skin the cat here in terms of measurability and tracking for podcast campaigns.
Mauro Battellini: How important is the ad that is spoken in the episode versus the description in Spotify or Buzzsprout or whatever, plus the LinkedIn post shoutout? How much does the ad that goes in the actual episode matter?
Eric Melchor: It matters a lot. What matters is the transition into the ad because a lot of podcasters don’t get this right. You hear a lot of podcasters say, “Okay, now it’s time for a quick commercial,” or “for a quick ad,” or something like that. That is the worst thing that you can say because it actually tells the listener, “Oh, this is not really part of the show. If you want to, you can ignore this or just fast-forward through it.” Whenever we bring on podcasters who have never done a campaign, I usually coach them and say, “Alright, don’t say ‘now it’s time for a commercial.’ Say something like, ‘we’ll be right back,’ or ‘okay, I want to tell you about blah, blah, blah,'” for some other kind of transition that seems like it’s natural and part of the show. I try to design an ad that basically skips past the listener’s BS filter. What I mean by that is that I actually try the product. I write down one or two features that I like about it, and then I’ll go to G2 and see what other customers have said about those same features and just look at the copy and the words they use to describe it. Then I’ll write the copy based on my own thoughts but also incorporating some of the words I see in real customer reviews. Whenever I send back an ad script to the client, and I tell them, “Okay, here’s a draft of the ad script I created,” in most cases, they’re fine with it because it’s actually words that the customers have said before, and it doesn’t sound like it’s all corporate writing. It sounds like this is authentic and genuine, and we want it to be genuine. That’s how we want it to sound. When I share it with the podcaster, they’re free to tweak it a little to match their personality and tone of voice, so that way, when they actually read the script in the podcast episode, it sounds like it’s coming from them and not from somebody else. A lot of people ask, “How many people actually click on links in a podcast?” It’s the same question for Google. I don’t click on Google ads. I usually click on the organic listings that pop up, but there’s a small segment of the population that clicks on the podcast episodes, and we know because we see them clicking on the UTM tracking links. So there is a small percentage of people that actually do that. It is important to have a good ad that’s read in the audio and then also to have that call to action with the link in the episode description, right?
Mauro Battellini: If we zoom out a bit more and talk more about podcasting generally, when should a company—it could be a startup, or it could be a more mature tech company—consider starting a podcast, and when should they consider investing in ads in podcasts? What is the difference?
Julija Jegorova: Maybe Eric, before you reply, can you also tell us whether there are too many podcasts and that not everyone should probably have a podcast?
Eric Melchor: You took the words right out of my mouth because the average podcast listener listens to six to eight different podcasts in rotation. The majority of them only listen to maybe three or four consistently, but then there’s another three or four that they’ll listen to occasionally. There’s just not a lot of shelf space for new podcasts. Unfortunately, a lot of brands are cutting these new podcasts, and they’re just being churned out at a rate that they’re never really going to get listened to or gain traction. Unless you’re a celebrity or somebody with a large audience already, you’re going to have a really tough time standing out. Unless you’re writing about a certain niche or podcasting about a certain niche where there’s not a lot of competition already, that’s where you have a chance. Unfortunately, brands that are creating and spending a lot of money on creating their own podcasts, it’s hard. It takes two to three years to build an audience. Any legit podcaster will tell you two to three years. If you look at Alex Hormozi, he’ll tell you the first two years of his podcast, he was getting maybe 20 downloads a month, not a lot. This is Alex Hormozi, with millions of fans and followers today. He’s legit. Everybody knows who he is now, but back when he first started, nobody was really listening to his podcast, so it takes a lot of time. Just to produce and distribute a podcast episode, if it’s an interview, takes anywhere from eight to 17 hours per episode. Do you have the time to do that? If you’re going to outsource that, easily, you could be spending $1,000 a month.
Eric Melchor: A lot of agencies, like in London—I know three of them are in London—they charge anywhere from 3,500 to 5,000 pounds a month. I think it’s worth it if they’re doing the marketing piece really well, but for the production aspect, I don’t think it’s worth it. I’m a solopreneur, and the only person I really pay to help me is my editor, because that’s the piece that takes up the most time. It easily takes two hours to edit an episode in terms of the audio and video quality, and I just don’t like doing that, so I pay him to do that, and I spend a couple hundred dollars a month for that. Pretty much everything else, I use tools like Riverside, Podpage, Buzzsprout, and then I market it on my own with my newsletter or on LinkedIn, and I always ask the guests to market it. For the brands that are coming out launching their new podcasts, I think they’re going to be in for a rude awakening at the end of the year. They’re going to say, “Hey, we spent X amount of dollars on this. How much revenue did it bring us?” They’re going to be really disappointed because unless they have a large audience already that’s just going to tune in, it’s just not going to happen overnight. Again, this is a long-term game, whereas if you do podcast sponsorships, you can see results in a couple of weeks. I’m still barely probably just coming to break even right now. But again, the first three years, I got no money from this, and every month, my expenses were easily around, probably close to 400 bucks if you factor in tools and freelancers that were helping me with the video editing.
Mauro Battellini: Having said that, there are a lot of brands that do it basically for PR. So I guess it’s a case of you either see the potential commercially or there are other benefits, right? If you have the budget, then you can still go for it.
Eric Melchor: If you’re in the business-to-business (B2B) space, I think it’s more about relationship building because what better way do you get a chance to know somebody on a personal level, other than meeting someone one-to-one and having lunch with them or something, than by interviewing them on a podcast? You really get to know who that person is, and you have their undivided attention. You get to ask them questions about their business, and by the end of it, they’re going to know who you are and what you do, so you have that relationship. I would approach it from a relationship-building aspect and focus there if you’re a business. That’s the number one reason that you should launch a podcast. People mostly tune in because they want to be entertained. A lot of people want to learn something as well. But a lot of those podcasts have already been established, and people are rarely going to take a risk and say, “Okay, let me put my AirPods in for 30 minutes and listen to a show and a person I’ve never heard before, only because I saw their LinkedIn ad.”
Mauro Battellini: I think now we can focus a bit more on B2B and perhaps B2B tech companies. You actually mentioned Alex Hormozi and entertainment. I think I did watch one of his videos where he said it’s all about entertainment and education. You can also be somewhere in the middle, but if we focus on B2B in general, would you say the priority should be on education, specifically speaking to experts in the industry, talking about the latest research, and so on? How should a startup or a tech company starting a B2B podcast, or selecting a podcast to advertise on, think about content, and what can they expect to get out of it?
Eric Melchor: I don’t think it should all be educational. A lot of people tune in because they feel like they’re hanging out with the host. That’s one of the reasons why I tune into some of my podcasts because I really like the host, and I’m not so much there for the educational aspect. Another good example is Joe Sweeney. He’s a podcaster in my community. His podcast is “Content Marketers’ Commute”, and he only interviews guests while he’s commuting. Usually, it’s during a walk, maybe they’re in a car, maybe they’re on a bus, maybe they’re riding a bicycle, and that’s how he interviews guests. It’s just very entertaining because if you’re watching it visually, or even hearing it by audio, you hear the background noises, the cars honking in the background, or you just see them visually, and you’re like, “Wow, these people are on a bicycle doing a podcast interview.” There’s an educational aspect from whatever the guest is sharing, but it’s more so about the entertainment aspect. Here’s the thing, he doesn’t get a lot of listeners. His podcast is fairly new, maybe around 30-plus episodes, and we did a campaign with him, and we saw that his listeners are so loyal that when he promoted a product, they actually went to the website, and some of them even did some demos. We were seeing that it was because of the loyalty of his audience, that’s why there were actually people visiting the sponsor’s website and checking out the product he was talking about. Regardless of whether it’s educational or entertaining, the main thing is how loyal that audience is. How qualified is it? Forget the numbers. This person didn’t even have more than 150 downloads a month, but he was driving high-quality traffic to the brand’s website from his podcast.
Mauro Battellini: So it sounds like if you’re a new podcast, or you’re considering a new podcast, forget the numbers. Look at the quality of the audience and experiment from there.
Eric Melchor: Yeah. Who are you attracting? A lot of it depends on who the guests you’re inviting onto the show are, and that’s a big key there. What type of guests are you having on the show? Be consistent. Think of who your dream listener is and what they will find valuable. Even if you don’t have top-rated guests with big names, but if your dream listener would probably find this guest entertaining, funny, or sharing their story, there’s something in there that’s valuable to them, then by all means, have that person on your show. One of the things I think, if you’re a podcaster, that you need to get right from the very beginning is: startups talk about the ideal customer profile. Who’s your ideal podcast listener? Think about that heavily. Once you know who that person is, every time you record an episode, you should think, “Okay, what do I want my ideal podcast listener to get out of this?” and try to steer the conversation that way. But a lot of podcasters don’t really know who their ideal listener is. They created it for themselves. They’re having a good time. That was me in the very beginning. It was only until later on did I really start to think more about my listener rather than myself.
Julija Jegorova: Obviously, there are a lot of people that want to start podcasts, no matter whether they’ll have five listeners, including the parents and family, or 500. I think also, before we started off with Mauro, we did not understand all the technicalities of what it takes, besides the time, to do a podcast. Is there some sort of basic toolkit for those who want to start a podcast? You need to have a good mic, you need to have headphones, be in a room without a wife, kids, and dogs. Do you have a set of things that a newbie should have?
Eric Melchor: Yeah, obviously a decent mic. You can get one for less than $100, probably on Amazon. That’s what I did. You want to make sure that you have earphones or AirPods for sound quality. That’s definitely a must. Then, obviously, do it in a room where you’re not going to be interrupted and hopefully it’s quiet. Those are the key things at a minimum. Lighting is something that only recently I started being concerned about. If there’s not a lot of natural sunlight, then you may want to invest in a ring light and put that behind the laptop. They’re not really that expensive. You could probably get one for around $25 or $30 on Amazon or somewhere similar. In terms of tools, you can record on Zoom. If you want to be a little bit more professional, there’s Riverside, because if the internet all of a sudden pauses, it will continue to record on Riverside’s side. That’s something that’s $13 or $14 a month. The other benefit of Riverside is that it automatically gives you the transcription and automatically creates mini clips of the show for you. You can actually do some little sound editing in there as well. Another basic is probably Buzzsprout or something similar, that can distribute your show to all the different podcast players out there once you upload it there. If you want to have a podcast website, you can use something like Podpage, and it just takes the RSS feed of your website, plugs it into Buzzsprout, and every week, it just populates automatically. You don’t have to do anything. You basically spend a little bit of time setting up the format and the outlook on how the page will look at the very beginning. But for the most part, it just updates automatically every week when your show is released. Those are the three main tools that I would use. I use Canva for my podcast episode artwork, and I created my podcast art cover in there, and then also my weekly episode art covers in there as well, along with my YouTube thumbnails in addition. Those are the basic tools that I use for my podcast.
Julija Jegorova: You also mentioned using an editor, right? So if you probably don’t have much time by yourself to cut and chop the recording, it makes sense to use someone externally.
Eric Melchor: Absolutely, there are a lot of freelancers. You can probably go to Fiverr, try to find a freelancer there. Somebody can always message me, and I can introduce you to my editor. I know a couple, but that takes the most time. In the very beginning, I wrote down every step and how long it took me to do each step, and the editing piece was about 25% of the total time. By far, that was the most, and I didn’t enjoy it anyway. So that’s the piece that I outsource. At one time, I had someone creating the podcast art covers for me in Canva, but that doesn’t really take a long time. That only takes me maybe not even 10 minutes a week, but I had someone doing that for me every week, along with the YouTube thumbnails. There are little things that you can outsource to different people that won’t cost you a lot of money if you don’t have a lot of time.
Mauro Battellini: We talked about content, target audience, and tooling. I have two more areas to ask about. One is the format. It seems that almost every podcast is an interview of some sort with a guest. But there are also a few where people go through the latest news, maybe with no guests, maybe with guests. Obviously, you need people to come to your podcast to listen to your episodes, but you need to put yourself out there as well as possible, right?
Eric Melchor: Yeah. I actually share this deck with new podcasters that come on board because there’s some low-hanging fruit that a lot of people miss. There have been countless times I see a LinkedIn post by someone, and they’re talking about their podcast, or there’s a clip of their latest interview with someone, and I’m curious. I want to learn more, and I’ll go to their LinkedIn profile page, but there is no link anywhere to their podcast, right? So at a bare minimum, this should be in their about section, talk about their podcast. Here’s my link, or in a featured section, have a link to a podcast. That’s basic, and a lot of people miss that. In terms of growth, some of the things that I always share with people are: make it super easy to get your guests to share it. There are a couple of things you can do. Everybody does this already, but on the day of the show, send them an email and attach the assets that you are giving them that they can share if they want to. I usually share one image and then one mini clip, and then I basically have a standard template, and it’s four quick things. Here’s where they can catch the episode. Here’s a link to my newsletter that promotes it. Then also, here are my links to where they can see it on YouTube. I ask them to subscribe to the show if they haven’t already or give me a review on Apple. Of course, I include the assets and let them know that if they can write about it on LinkedIn and tag me, I’d appreciate it. But then the other thing that I do too, is that when I know the date their show is going to go live, I will send them a Google calendar invite like a placeholder. This could be a few weeks in advance.
Eric Melchor: If I recorded today, and I know that show is going to go live in six weeks, then I’ll send my guests a Google placeholder for that future date and just say, “Listen, this shouldn’t really take up time on your calendar because it’s set to free, but I have a template I use, and on this day, here’s all the things that we’re going to do to promote the show. We’re going to include it on YouTube, in my newsletter, blah, blah, blah. I’m going to include it on my LinkedIn company page, and I’m going to talk about it on social media. Here’s a link to where you can get assets for the show. Right now, there’s nothing in there, but on the day of, you can find stuff there.” So they get two notifications. One is through email, but then the other one is going to be through their account. So it’s a simple reminder, “Oh yeah, I was on that show. Let me go ahead and talk about it and share it with my audience.” I think that’s the number one hack that I’ve used to really generate as much reach as possible, and it’s mostly through my guests. There are a few other things I do. I use Quora. I write a post about every show on Quora, but I actually write a post in terms of a question that I ask my guests. So I would write a question, “What was the next episode for Innovators Can Laugh?” It’s usually something like, “How can you leave a career at Microsoft and create a startup?” because that was the whole topic of one of my podcast episodes. Then I’ll write a description about the show in Quora as an answer, and then I’ll put a link to the podcast for anyone who wants to listen to it. I saw that over time I was getting not a lot, but I would say a sizable increase in new listeners coming from Quora. That’s something else that I do. There are other little things that I do too, like creating a LinkedIn company page for your podcast. Obviously, I talk about it on LinkedIn. There’s other stuff I’ve never tried, but I’m sure probably works for other people. But those are the things that have worked well for me.
Julija Jegorova: What do you think are the most common mistakes that podcasters make?
Eric Melchor: I used to make this in the very beginning, but publishing an episode that you feel is not going to be very valuable for your audience. In the beginning, I probably published at least two episodes where neither me nor the guest was laughing, and my show’s called “Innovators Can Laugh.” I felt, “Well, the show’s gotta live up to the name.” If at any point during the conversation, neither of us are laughing, the audience knows whether or not you’ve got good rapport with the guests. If it’s not living up to the name, then I’m just not going to publish it.
Julija Jegorova: Wouldn’t the guests feel offended for wasting their time or whatever? Does it make sense maybe to inform them in advance about that?
Eric Melchor: We have language during the sign-up form, the pre-interview form: “FYI, if this does not meet our standards, then the show will not be released.” It’s unfortunate if it does happen. I think it’s only been maybe three times where I didn’t release a show. Granted, I’ve published over 140 episodes, but there have been about three of them that I didn’t release, and only on one occasion I didn’t tell the guest, but only on one occasion did the guest reach out and ask me, “When is the show going to be released?” I just said, “Hey, it didn’t really meet our quality standards. The audio was really bad,” or whatever work, “and we’re just, unfortunately, not going to release it.”
Mauro Battellini: With regards to the format for B2B, should one stick to the guest format? It’s also probably the best one for growth purposes because you can share audiences in a way. Or are there any others to consider?
Eric Melchor: I think a co-host. I wanted a co-host a couple of years ago. I was trying to recruit a co-host. It just makes for light-hearted banter back and forth. One of my favorite podcasts has co-hosts. They could talk about new events or new trending topics, and it’s just so much easier because there may be questions that you’re wondering that are different than your co-host. So if you do have a guest that comes on, it just makes for a much easier and fluid interview. At one time, I had a guest co-host for a few episodes, and he was actually a guest of mine, but the conversation was so funny. We got along so well, and he referred a lot of podcasters from his community. I said, “Hey, because you know a lot of these various founders, why don’t you come on and be my co-host?” He was all for that. So he was a co-host during those interviews, and it was fun. A lot of the people knew him too. He was able to ask them questions that I didn’t think of. There was just a lot more laughter during those episodes. I would love for a co-host to be on my show. That’s the route that I think you should shoot for. It’s less work on you, less preparation on you. I just think it makes the show a lot more light-hearted and funnier.
Mauro Battellini: Eric, last question about going back to the ads side to give some practical insight to startups, marketers, or tech companies listening: how much should you expect to spend if you’re thinking about spending on a podcast? Is it a similar calculation to influencer marketing? How does that work?
Eric Melchor: If you’re spending on the production aspect or getting somebody to help you get guests on and somebody to help you with the content distribution, like I said, there are agencies that charge anywhere from maybe 3,500 to 5,000 euros a month. If you don’t have that kind of budget and you want to try to do it yourself, then you’re probably going to spend somewhere between maybe $500 to $1,000 a month. That’s either you doing it, or somebody on your team doing it. More than likely, they’re still going to need an editor to help out with the editing. They’re still going to need to use some tools that will help you with the distribution and recording. At a minimum, you can expect to spend at least $500 a month, and in terms of time, minimum 15 hours that person is going to be working on this, because there’s time to recruit someone to be a guest, coordinating the time you’re going to do the recording, research time for the interview, the actual interview, and then all of a sudden, you’ve got the design aspects, and then the copywriting, and then back and forth with the editor on editing the video, right, and then marketing it. There’s a lot of time involved too. So if you have somebody on your team who can do it, probably around 15 hours a week that they’ll be working on it, and then an additional $500 for maybe one freelancer and the tools that you will need.
Julija Jegorova: Perfect. This was an extremely insightful conversation. Eric, how can people get in touch with you?
Eric Melchor: I’m on LinkedIn, Eric Melchor. If they want to learn more about my B2B podcaster community, they can go to B2BPodPros.com, and if they want to listen to the podcast, InnovatorsCanLaugh.com. Like I said, I only interview startup founders from Europe.
Julija Jegorova: Perfect. Thank you so much, Eric.
Mauro Battellini: Thank you so much, Eric.
Eric Melchor: Thank you.
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