How to Drive Growth with Podcasting as YouTube Becomes the Top Platform for Podcasts

Eric Eden: 0:58

Welcome to today's episode. Today we are going to talk about growth, one of my favorite topics, and we have a growth architect as a guest to join us, Biat Shalet. She is an author, a podcaster, a speaker. She works with entrepreneurs to help them drive growth. Welcome to the show.

Beate Chelette: 1:19

I'm excited to be here. Let's do this, Eric.

Eric Eden: 1:23

Before we jump into a story about some of the best marketing you've ever done, give us just a minute or two of context, more beyond what I just shared, about who you are and what you do.

Beate Chelette: 1:33

Yeah, so I think that I'm probably most famous for having been a single mom, immigrant. $135,000 in debt overcame really 13 years of just one adversity after another. I jokingly say I'm an eight-time disaster survivor Fires, floods, riots, lawsuit, earthquake, september 11th, the tsunami. Now I've added a pandemic to my ever-growing repertoire. And I am really a queen of resilience and I always say resilience is the audacity, do not give up. And then I cracked the code. I sold my business to Bill Gates for millions of dollars and ever since I've been in service of others to take the lessons that I've learned, often the very hard way, and make it easy and simple to grow, build and scale a business, architecting growth the right way business, architecting growth the right way.

Eric Eden: 2:28

Awesome, we're ready to be inspired. Tell us the story of some of the marketing that you're the most proud of, the best marketing you've done.

Beate Chelette: 2:33

Yeah, I think that, with marketing, one of the things I really pay attention to is what is happening right now, and when we were in the green room just a minute ago, I shared with you something that I have just learned that is now becoming really a big marketing strategy of ours, and that is that we have learned that YouTube is putting an enormous amount of time and money into making YouTube the number one platform where people watch podcasts. Now, for podcasts like you and me, we go watch podcasts. Podcasts is an audio, is an audio marketing tool? Right, that's how we reach our audience with the audio. But what's happening is that there is a new target group that is listening to podcasts on video while they're watching on their TV, and it's very specific. It's a particular target audience 18 to 35-year-old men that are at home, that have no more subscriptions to televisions other than whatever the HBO or the Netflix or possibly Prime and they are now using this medium to get information that they choose to. So what we're seeing in marketing is that the audience that we are trying to find is looking for us very specifically the 18 to 35-year-old men on YouTube for video content that is intelligent, that will solve a problem that they're having. So let's say that we are assuming that they're having this problem of wanting to be in business on their own and figuring out how do I start a business, how do I grow a business, how do I scale a business, which are all my categories.

Beate Chelette: 4:16

Subsequently, I must figure out how this works. So, after I left the conference, I sat down and I had to go back and look at on my podcast. We are now in episode, I think, 130. And I had to look at what we've done over the past and how the podcast has performed. And then I realized that we had a tremendous opportunity by taking our previous show notes. So we're not reengineering it, it, but all we're doing is we set up a brand new channel. So we're abandoning the other channels that we've had that have been like splish, splashing along but not really made a major impact.

Beate Chelette: 4:54

Because we now know, if we start fresh, that we are hitting a very particular audience that we are after because I am after a younger audience that wants shortcuts to what I do, because that is part of the brand that I have built. And now we are releasing all these videos that we've done, one a day, to signal to YouTube that we are serious about this. All the show notes are re-engineered. We're using JetGPT to do that. We're doing all the things that they're saying. Hashtags we're looking at all the new hashtags and all the chapters and all the new tools that are available, because if YouTube puts billions of dollars into making YouTube the number one video platform, we want to be in the bell curve, the early adapter.

Eric Eden: 5:41

It's very interesting. I think I'm going to follow your lead and try to do the same thing with this podcast because, more broadly, youtube really rivals Netflix in terms of time watched, right? So I think that tells us a lot If they're pumping billions into promoting podcasts. I think one of the stats I heard is they're already saying that they're getting 100 million people a month viewing podcasts on YouTube, so that's an indication of what kind of audience is there, but it's a very different motion. There's a lot of really cool tools, like you were saying, but it's a very different motion than the audio side of podcasting, right, it's completely different.

Beate Chelette: 6:24

Completely different audience. Completely different audience. I listen to my podcast in the car, when I'm driving or when I'm hiking or when I'm outside or when I want to be in a world on my own, but it wouldn't even occur to me to watch on my TV a podcast, but I'm not the target audience for that. But if a trend like this emerges and this is what we're looking for in remarkable marketing really that's what we're looking for is what is a trend and when? I know that, when it comes to social media, the minute a company like Google, who owns YouTube, is putting that kind of money behind the largest viewing platform in the world, there's something here. And you also know from all the previous instances that we've seen you're not early enough. You're not getting those extra promotions because you are the part of the more limited content that's available. The more content that's available, the more democratized the search results are going to be. But if you get a larger market share earlier on, you can ride that wave for a much longer, better time. That's my assumption. It's interesting.

Eric Eden: 7:38

Beyond Google just putting a lot of money behind it, I've also seen they're doing some tricky promotional things that are going to work. You go and you search for things on Google. They are highlighting videos at the top of the search results much more than they have in the past. So that's also driving more to the videos just from Google search, not even more than people who are just searching for things on.

Beate Chelette: 8:05

YouTube. And why is that? Because marketing on the online marketing space has become a bunch of BS. So when we now go and look at the online marketers that are all using ChatGPT that overuse words like delve and crucial, everything sounds like it's been written by a very mediocre writer ChatGPT, and it all sounds the same. But on the spoken word, on the video content that's real and there's an actual transcript that can be run on the things that we say. So it allows AI to separate the BS from a real conversation very quickly. So you can fake it in text because you can pull text from all kinds of things.

Beate Chelette: 8:49

I think you're going to have a harder time to fake knowledge or expertise or authority in a video because there is a transcript that runs off what we're talking about. So the secondary strategy obviously has to be then you take all the shorts out and all the short formwork the whatever three to five minute videos and then you have to set up the cross promotions. What they've also done is they now have a function that you can link it to a relevant video. So if I have a short out of a podcast, I can make it a link to the relevant video, so they may come for the short and stay for the podcast, which increases viewer time yeah, the YouTube shorts which are one minute, those are like the fish food for the full podcast episode, if you will.

Eric Eden: 9:39

So I think that there are strategies there that are really existing that don't necessarily exist within, say, apple Podcasts, like you can't really create within Apple Podcasts like a short and then your episode.

Beate Chelette: 9:54

that drives people from the short to the episode, right, oh, I'm sure that Apple is afraid and a lot of the I can see in Buzzsprout.

Beate Chelette: 10:04

So we are publishing via Buzzsprout and we just left LipSync because we felt that Buzzsprout is much more up to par in the tools that they're publishing. But do I believe that others are going to catch on to it? One out of two things is going to happen, in my opinion. Either somebody else says, damn, at least we need to make a company, somebody needs to be competition to YouTube, because there's no way anybody can compete with YouTube at this time. But somebody may say we'll be the alternative. For people that absolutely dislike Google, that might be a possibility. Or they might just say we give up, we're just rolling over and letting them have the video piece of the content and get better on the audio portion of the content. And then exactly what you said is going to happen, eric, and they're going to have to come up with similar enticing tools to give us more tools to promote our podcast in different ways and versions.

Eric Eden: 10:58

And even within YouTube.

Eric Eden: 11:00

What I've been seeing is that they are saying we are going to give podcasts placements for different types of special promotion within the YouTube universe to get more views, and so that's the way that they're going to really drive it so that they can have those stats like 100 million people or 200 million people or a billion people a month are watching podcasts on their systematically, within their system and their logarithms favoring podcasts, which is, to your point, the reason why I think we should invest in figuring out all the nuances of how they do it, which is a lot like when I started the podcast channel, the YouTube channel for this podcast, I was going down a rabbit hole, because it's like you have to do things, like you have to have a really specific type of thumbnail for each episode created, then you have to do a really specific type of SEO optimization for each episode listing and you have to then do different specific things around the tagging and the titles and there's even, I think, a difference in terms of the videos are saying you can't really have an intro that is promoting the show.

Eric Eden: 12:21

They're like in the first couple seconds. You have to capture people's attention with what the episode's about. So these are just some of the examples in my mind of like why it's different. You can't just copy the audio side over, but you can definitely adapt it, like you're saying. When you have a huge library, like of 130 episodes, like you have, you can adapt it right.

Beate Chelette: 12:40

Yeah, what I'm finding is actually that the titles on the video, on the audio, are very different.

Beate Chelette: 12:45

So we purposely do different titles on the video than we do on the audio and for some reason, the video outperforms the audio version of the podcast by a factor of I think it's 300%, and that's really significant.

Beate Chelette: 13:02

We are still learning, because we are now what two, three weeks into a 90-day strategy to really figure out how it works, and that's why we do a release every single day to make sure that we understand enough on how it works, because the data will feed us back where we are at with how successful this is going to be. But I will tell you and we literally started from scratch, we started from nothing and we are adding subscribers and we are having more views on a new channel than we had on the other two channels combined in the end. And that's because sometimes on old channels you just cannot shake your history and it's almost like the bias is in the system and the bias will not get out of the system, like you can't shake it. If somebody said something mean about you once, you will never shake it, and it's the same with YouTube, for some reason, or on social media. Once you have that stamp, you may as well just start all over.

Eric Eden: 14:03

So you mentioned your 90-day plan. Are you willing to share what your 90-day plan is? Is that top secret or will you share with people?

Beate Chelette: 14:11

So the way growth architecture works is so we have a five-star success blueprint and in a five-star success blueprint we have this is our methodology and how we identify where businesses are, where they're stuck, what step they may have missed, what needs to come next. And then I look at where the things are. I always say the thing that you're stuck at needs to be resolved first. So if lead generation, let's say, is something that you feel you're stuck at, and we really made an internal decision and said we love podcasting, I love podcasting and I love having intelligent conversation with intelligent people talking about intelligent things, having intelligent conversation with intelligent people talking about intelligent things and so I said I really want to use podcasts for more lead generation than revenue I'm not really interested in that but for lead generation, for getting brand awareness and getting people to me. So we go and we say we have a year has four times 90 days, so one. What's our strategy per quarter? And then we focus on this one thing and then we make that one thing the main thing for the next 90 days. So the first 90 days is our YouTube strategy, because it's also summer, so it's good to get content out. People are going to be probably spending more time in the car, driving, going on vacation, sitting in airports, planes, whatever that might be. So we feel that there's a high opportunity for that, for the views to go up just because people have a lot of time, or more time, for doing things that they enjoy doing in their spare time.

Beate Chelette: 15:45

The next one is going to be that we are now planning out is to fix the follow-up and fix the follow-up. So we are on a CRM called high level. So we're now getting a hiring a high level CRM specialist because we need to get what they call workflows in order. What if this happened and that happens? What if this does not happen? Then what happens next? To really get the logic of how we are moving through our different products, because our previous strategy was to make sure that our products and services were lined up, that our lead generation pieces were up to par, that they were relevant for what our customers are experiencing right now, and now we're pulling it all together. So we have one right now, that's YouTube strategy. The one that's in the works is our fix the funnel strategy, and after that is probably going to be very heavily sales.

Eric Eden: 16:36

That's awesome. I love that focus, because it's hard to do all those things at once, and breaking the year-long game into four quarters and focusing on one thing in each quarter is pretty epic. Did you come up with a goal of what does success look like for that quarter long effort? Is it a number of subscribers? Is it a number of views? How are you thinking about it?

Beate Chelette: 17:08

I'm just curious per episode, because after this we're not going to be publishing podcasts every single day. Then we're going to start publishing shorts every single day, because then we have so much content that we are now repurposing via AI. Thank God for AI, where we can now take all the clips out and we have our video editor working on cartoon type of clips. So we're playing with what would my avatar look like as a cartoon? What would look my avatar like as a voiceover? So we are playing with different things to get away just from the talking heads. The podcast can be the talking heads and eventually we probably have to increase the production value on the podcast, but we need to first test the concept. So, yes, so to answer that, we are tracking, we are tracking. As long as the numbers are going up, we're happy.

Eric Eden: 18:04

Okay, and I'm just curious did you build like an internal team to do this? Are you hiring contractor helpers from like Fiverr or other places? Because there's a lot to do here, right, even though AI is helpful in making it more efficient.

Beate Chelette: 18:17

Yeah, the first thing is that I let everybody go. So helpful in making it more efficient. Yeah, the first thing is that I let everybody go. So I let the sales guy go, I let the YouTube guy go because I felt that we were dragging. And there comes a point when you realize, as a business owner, that there's a significant change in the market, right. So I think we're at an inflection point in business is really changing right now. I've been doing this long enough to know it's cyclical, but I know this cycle. It means that you got to get on it because something is about to happen, and so I let everybody go.

Beate Chelette: 18:46

And I have an amazing virtual assistant team in the Philippines who've been with me for many years, and so the first thing that we do is we figure out what's the workflow Like. How does this need to run through? I have an amazing video editor who is in the Ukraine and, believe me, that's the one bill I love paying is to somebody who's sitting in the Ukraine, who is night after night in some bunker trying to avoid getting killed and giving him as many opportunities as possible to build up his team in Ukraine with other people like him who need the work and need the money to survive in Ukraine, with other people like him who need the work and need the money to survive, and he's interested in the AI components. I'm going to let him play with that building that up, and then we'll see where they go and hopefully offer this to some of our other clients as an opportunity. But that's because I believe in spirituality and strategy are always really connected. You have to live in that purpose, and my purpose always is to help as many people to be successful.

Beate Chelette: 19:41

And then includes my own team. I want them also to be successful and have other clients and make a lot of money, and so we have the video editor. We have the virtual assistant team. Now we're hiring somebody who's specific for the high level, because we are now fixing the CRM and the workflows, because now we need to. Now that this is running, we need to run the other thing. I was looking into a YouTube optimizer and SEO, but the minute you put something out there and you're looking for an SEO for YouTube, it's like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I am the greatest, I'm the best and it's just me. So maybe, but I first need to figure out how it works. Then I'm building my system, and then I can hire somebody to run it.

Eric Eden: 20:23

That's awesome. I think it's definitely a time to be testing the new things. When this is happening, and some of the things like having good thumbnails and the SEO for the video descriptions, it's obvious that work needs to be done there in testing, but there's a lot of aspects of the testing that you've hinted at that I think you just got to try some stuff and and see ultimately if it is driving things forward. You also mentioned a number of the tools like I also use buzzsprout and stream yard. Are there any other tools that you really love that have some of the AI capabilities?

Beate Chelette: 21:02

Yeah, we love Minvo, and Minvo is an AI tool for podcasters specifically, where you take the podcast and you put it in and then it creates. It has the ability to create clips for the show and it does it within it. It gives you all the copy and the hashtags and all these things. It gives you all the copy and the hashtags and all these things automatically. So we really like Minbo. We are heavily into AI tools right now to test what the capabilities of these tools are and where the limits of these tools are.

Beate Chelette: 21:31

So far, I have found that JetGPT. A lot of people seem to be using JetGPT and it means that the results are becoming more and more mediocre by the minute, because a lot of people seem to be using Chetchy PT and it means that the results are becoming more and more mediocre by the minute because a lot of people are very mediocre, and I'm just going to say it as it is. So you put mediocre in, mediocre comes out, and the more bad marketers are using it to create really bad advertising and marketing materials, the worse it becomes. So some of the things are a telltale sign. I can tell what's written by AI and what's not, so I have a certain tolerance for that, but again, it always comes down to marketing, in my opinion is we make an assumption and then we are pursuing this assumption, and then we allow ourselves to either be proven right or wrong, and then we adjust be proven right or wrong, and then we adjust.

Eric Eden: 22:23

Biat is a virtuoso of YouTube video marketing, a virtual maestro. No, I love it. It beige-ifies you and you know where ChatGPT learned to be mediocre. It learned it from us as a human race, but most people do aspire to be mediocre. Unfortunately, they don't aspire to be remarkable, they aspire to be mediocre, which is why we like to celebrate doing cool things like what you're talking about.

Beate Chelette: 22:51

Yeah, that's why it's called the mediocre marketing.

Eric Eden: 22:55

I have to ask and I'm sure you've explained this on a lot of the other podcasts, but I have to ask.

Beate Chelette: 23:03

And I'm sure you've explained this on a lot of the other podcasts but I have to ask what was it like selling a company to Bill Gates? It's really a WTF moment when you go and you log into your brokerage bank account and you see that number. You go, that worked. Huh, that is a good day. You go and it's almost like this weight comes off your shoulder because you know that everything you put in, all the risks you've taken, the stuff that you did, the blood, sweat, tears, the desperation, the fear of having to declare bankruptcy, crawling under the carpet and feeling absolutely like a failure that I felt like for many years and all of a sudden you prove yourself.

Eric Eden: 23:47

That's what it feels like. To win is what it sounds like. That's great Congratulations. That's awesome and I don't think we have time to get into how you do growth architecting. I encourage people to go check out your website, your book and your podcast, where you share a lot of these great strategies, but maybe you could give a two minute overview of it for people, of what you do and how you help people architect growth in their businesses, because I've read some of it. I think it's really interesting.

Beate Chelette: 24:17

Yeah, number one. I believe that success lives at the intersection of strategy and spirituality. I think that if you're not in purpose, you're probably not going to be as successful as you could be. And we help really our clients in three different intersections of where they are at. They either have an idea and they realize that they need a business model and they need to figure out what is it exactly that they're doing, why are they the right one to do it and why would anybody buy it from them and what exactly are we selling? So that's our first step. That's what we call turn your talent into a business.

Beate Chelette: 24:50

The second part is people that have been in business, that have figured out their business model and now they go I'm a marketer, I'm a coach, I'm a consultant and they feel they sound like everybody else and they need to have their unique value proposition, the differentiation factor. We call it the unapologetic value proposition For them. I crawl into their heads, I pull out all their puzzle pieces and I create with them their signature growth system. The five-star success blueprint and growth architect is part that's our signature system and so I help people build that as a differentiation factor. And the third part is that people come where they have both. They have the model, they have the system and now they need to make themselves obsolete because they cannot possibly work anymore. Then we help them to develop growth strategies to scale and make themselves obsolete.

Eric Eden: 25:40

That's awesome, so I'd encourage everyone to check out Vyat's website. Get in touch If you'd like to learn more about that. There's a lot there to absorb Great stuff. Appreciate you being on the show today. Thank you for sharing your story talking about the YouTube podcast revolution. I'm loving it. I'm loving that we're in this moment. So appreciate you joining us to talk about that and really appreciate you being on the show, thank you.

Beate Chelette: 26:12

Thank you so much for having me, Eric, and for anybody listening. Make sure that, wherever you pick up the podcast, go there right now, subscribe. Leave a five-star review. Reviews are important for the algorithm. It tells the algorithm that amazing things are being said here and share this episode with one other person.