Salome Schillack:

Hello and welcome to episode number 77 of The Shine Show. And on today's show, we're going to talk about how to promote your podcast with Facebook and Instagram ads. Before we jump in, I wanted to give a huge shout out to Taryne Jakobi who tagged me in her Instagram story to tell me that she is listening to the podcast. Taryne is a food styling expert and she teaches aspiring food stylists how to reach their dreams. And I will tell you, when I went to her Instagram profile, which you can find @tarynejakobistyling, man, I just wanted to eat everything that is on that page. Go check her out. Taryne Jakobi Styling, T-A-R-Y-N-E Jakobi Styling. Oh my goodness. Do not go there if you're hungry or if you're a chocoholic, like I am, it is amazing.

Salome Schillack:

The podcast has been doing so well and I want to say thank you to all of you for listening. I have been seeing the rankings in Canada, New Zealand, the US, South Africa, Australia, and Germany go up and I would love, love, love it if you can go to iTunes and write and give us a review there, please. That is going to help us to reach more people. Without any further ado, let's jump into episode number 77, how to promote your podcast with Facebook ads.

Salome Schillack:

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host, Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is The Shine Show.

Salome Schillack:

For those of you who didn't know that I recently turned 40, and if you have turned 40, you will know that weird things starts to happen in your body when you turn 40. And so for the last couple of years I've been noticing that I can't quite eat as much sugar as I used to with gaining a few pounds around my waist. So I started running about a year ago and I used to hate running. I'm that person that always like it hurts and I would be complaining about it. And I was like, "What do these people think they are doing when they're running?" But a year ago, I realized that if I'm going to get in shape and Spain shape, I'm going to need to find some kind of exercise that I can do very easily.

Salome Schillack:

Where I live, I live in this beautiful environment. There is a cemetery across the road. Now I know it sounds really creepy that I live across the road from a cemetery, but this is... Picture Hyde Park in London or Central Park in New York, but with graves. It is beautiful. Right next to it is the botanic gardens and there is like a rain forest section and there's a Japanese garden and it is just stunning where I live. I absolutely love running around here because it's so beautiful.

Salome Schillack:

So I have started running and then my friend who also runs said she has now started swimming as well. So she invited me to come along to her swim sessions. At first I thought, "Okay, fun swimming." But then I realized, "No, no, no, no, no." These people are the triathletes training and we are swimming with the triathletes, which is not exactly what I thought I was signing up for. But the first time that I got there, I decided, "Okay, I'm going to fully embrace this. I'm going to do this." And when they asked me if I wanted fins or flippers, the stuff you put on your feet when you're swimming. If I wanted any of those, I thought, "Well, I don't think anybody else's swimming with fins, because isn't that cheating?" And I said, "No, thank you." And then we started swimming and we started swimming. We swam and we swam and we swam and I got absolutely exhausted. By the time I was almost dead, they shouted to everyone. "All right, everyone, warmups are over, take off your fins." I looked around me and I saw that everyone else had been wearing fins while doing this warmup, which I was just absolutely dead at the end of the warmup and I have not been wearing fins.

Salome Schillack:

First of all, I'm the fool without the fins in the warmup, then I'm the only one swimming with fins. When everyone else took their fins off, I was like, "Excuse me, can I have a pair of fins please?" Because I was so tired. First, I had no fins when everyone else had them on. And then I was swimming with fins when everyone was swimming without them and they were still lapping me. And then I started getting cramps and that was the first swimming lesson. I'm proud to report that I have now done three swimming lessons with the triathletes and I'm in the slow lane, but I am committed to swimming. It is good for my health and I'm actually starting to enjoy it.

Salome Schillack:

Today in the episode I want to share with you two ways that you can promote your podcast with ads and get that little bit of extra help, like what I needed when I was in the pool and I just needed to put the flippers on. So I hope that you're going to learn today how you can get some flippers for your podcast.

Salome Schillack:

The first way that you can use ads to promote your podcast is to run ads to people who only have iPhones and send them directly to your Apple Podcast page. Now, what you're going to do with these ads is you're going to want to run an ad, and specifically when you select the audience, you're going to say you just want iPhones. And when you select the creative, the placement for that, you are specifically only going to choose the mobile placement. The optimization for these ads are going to be traffic. Specifically you're going to choose traffic and then link clicks. The reason you want to choose link clicks is because you're sending them to your Apple Podcast page. You don't own that page. You don't have a pixel on that page.

Salome Schillack:

And so therefore, the best optimization you can choose is just traffic link clicks. So in other words, you're just telling Facebook, "Hey, Facebook put this ad in the newsfeed of people who have iPhones, who are going to see the ad on their mobile phone. And when they click, they're going to go to the page that I specify." And the page that you specify is your podcast page.

Salome Schillack:

Now what you want to do is you want to then keep an eye on your downloads for your episodes. That is literally the only way you're going to know if your ads are working or not. And it is a little bit of a spaghetti on the wall strategy. So it's not my favorite thing to do and I have heard mixed reviews. Some people say it works really well and other say that didn't work for them. What I've learned is that this is not a good strategy for you if you have not run enough engagement ads or list-building ads on your account to know where your best audience pockets are and to have seasoned your account well enough that you know when you are running ads, you've optimized your account and you are getting the best possible results you can. Otherwise, you could be spending money on these ads and not really knowing if you're getting in front of the right people or not. So this is not an ad I would use when I'm starting out. I would definitely first run engagement ads, definitely run some list-building ads, maybe get through a couple of launches of your online course or your membership before you start promoting your podcast.

Salome Schillack:

The second way that you can do this is the old awareness type campaigns that we used to run back in the day before podcasts became the hot thing, back when blogging was still a very big thing. Do you remember when everyone was still blogging? I feel like I don't even remember that anymore. So what we're used to do back then is we would create an Epic blog post. And this would be a blog post that shares a lot of really good value and tends to have a content upgrade. And with a content upgrade, what I mean is you would have some kind of a lead magnet or a freebie that you would attach to this blog post that your audience can then download if they want to take what they're learning to an even deeper level.

Salome Schillack:

What you're going to do is you're going to find something that solves a problem your audience is struggling with, and you're going to have to have a call to action in that podcast episode. So you're going to create an Epic podcast episode with a very clear call to action for something they can go and download, a freebie or a lead magnet that will help them get even bigger results. Really take time to create that page on your website then, because we are going to run the traffic to a website page, a page on your website. So we're not going to run this traffic to Apple Podcasts. We are going to run it as the trolley, like a blog post with an audio file embedded in there. So you're going to take your time to create this post. You're going to format it so that it reads easily because most people are probably more likely to read it than to actually listen and subscribe to your podcast.

Salome Schillack:

This is the thing here. Is if you have call to actions in this podcast for people to join your email list, that's great because then they're going to click and they're going to sign up to your email list. And once they're on your email list, you can invite them to subscribe to your podcast every single time you send out an email. But if you put too many buttons and too many options in front of them, when they're on this page, you're going to confuse them and they might end up taking no actions. So I prefer not to have a subscribe button anywhere near that page. I just want to send them to the content. I want to make sure that on the page they can consume the content in audio format and in reading format. And then I'm just going to have several strategic places inside that blog post, where I would put a clear call to action for them to join my email list.

Salome Schillack:

Now, when you start setting up this ad, you first want to create your retargeting audience. This is all of the who come to that specific page, but did not also opt in for your freebie. The rules that you'll use when you set it up, is you want to include people who landed on that specific podcast page, but you want to exclude people who landed on the thank you page for your freebie. In essence, what you're telling Facebook is, "Hi, Facebook. Create me an audience of all the people that came to my podcast page, but that did not also land on the thank you page. In other words, they did not opt in for my lead magnet."

Salome Schillack:

This time you'll set up the ad as a traffic ad, but specifically as a traffic landing page views ad. And this time you can do this because you own the page that you're sending the traffic to. It's on your website. You have your pixel right there, and you are paying to get people to go to a page on your website, which makes a lot better sense to me than paying to send someone to a page that somebody else owns. So I prefer this strategy.

Salome Schillack:

Everyone who comes to that page will also automatically go into your custom audience of people who visited your website if you set that custom audience up. And what I like to do is I like to give... Every name of a page that is a podcast episode page on my website has the same start URL. It's called shineandsucceed.com/tss for The Shine Show. So every page that is a podcast episode page in my website has the URL shineandsucceed.com/tss. And then we add in whatever the name of the podcast was or the number of the episode. I have created a custom audience of anyone who comes to any page that contains shineandsucceed.com/tss. So, I have a larger, broader custom audience of all the people who come to my website in general, but then I have a smaller, more specific audience of people who have come to any page that has that shineandsucceed.com/tss in the URL, which means I have created a bucket of people who have been to any of my podcast pages.

Salome Schillack:

You can get even more granular then, and create a custom audience of people who have just been to this specific page that you are paying to run traffic to. I recommend that you do this because then at least you can see how that bucket is growing and you can see how you're adding people to that custom audience every time you spend money. You will know that these ads are working if you can get people to click to that page for anywhere between like 30 cents and $1. If it's going over $1, it's getting expensive market wise, and if you can get it to about 30 cents, that's probably even better. That's the best.

Salome Schillack:

You're probably not going to see an immediate pickup in downloads of your podcast, but remember you can retarget all of these people with other podcast episodes, with videos, with lead magnets, you can get them on your email list and then you can build your relationship with them and get them on your email list. That's the most important thing. Once they're on your email list, you can do anything with them.

Salome Schillack:

You remember how I told you about getting in the pool and doing the warmup without the flippers on? That hasn't happened again. So running these ads are a little bit like putting the flippers on. You can't directly measure the results you have from running ads for your podcast, but you kind of start to getting a feel for the difference between when you do run the ads and when you don't. If you don't yet have engagement ads on and you haven't yet found at least three cold audiences that convert for you when you run list-building ads to them, then don't do this. It will be a waste of your money. But if you have run extensive engagement and conversion ads, and you know exactly where those pockets of audiences are, then you can add some flippers to your podcast and swim like your life depends on it.

Salome Schillack:

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I wanted to let you know that A-Lister, our course that teaches you the fastest way to build a lucrative audience online and make your first sale using Facebook and Instagram ads without wasting your money, selling your soul on social media, or getting a tech degree is opening on the 13th of January. 13th of January, you can enroll in A-Lister and start to build your lucrative audience and make your first $1,000 selling your knowledge to that audience. Enrollment opens on the 13th of January. And if you want to get on the wait list for that, just go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist. I will see you next week, my friends. Have a lovely week. Bye.

Salome Schillack:

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.