Matt Wolfe

One of the best ways to sell yourself and get people to pay attention and to build influence is to just point out all the flaws. We’re sharing all this stuff that we’re struggling with. We’re sharing the problems that we’re having, being affiliate marketers, we’re sharing the problems we’re having as course creators and sellers.

Chris Dreyer

When you’re sharing information and advice, it’s great to be positive, but sometimes being honest about the good and the bad can build a stronger relationship with your audience or customer.

Matt Wolfe

We’re constantly just sharing all of the downsides, but when you share all the downsides, I think it makes all of the upsides in the good things that you share just that much more impactful.

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to personal injury mastermind, the show where elite personal injury attorneys and leading edge marketers give you exclusive access to grow strategies for your firm. Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with Joe Fier co-founder of evergreen profits and co-host of the hustle and flowchart podcast. Well, this week we’re going to fill in the other half of that story. Matt Wolfe is a master of blogging. From deciding on topics to driving into, he’s sure to have some pearls of wisdom. And the proof is in the pudding when you take a look at the hustle and flowchart podcast. Matt and I got together to talk about how you can use your blog to expand your brand’s reach, as well as the importance of audience feedback and the impact of contacting podcast apps directly. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder, and CEO of ranking setup. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. Being at the forefront of marketing. It’s all about understanding people. So let’s get to know our guests. Here’s Matt Wolf, co-founder of Evergreen Profits and co-host of the hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Matt Wolfe

I worked at the family business. It was a shutter company. My parents started it when I was in high school. So throughout high school and college, I worked at this shutter company and my summers and after school and stuff like that. When I graduated from high school, I went in full-time at the shutter company and Joe and I got acquainted through bands. We both played music. He was a guitar player in a band. I was a guitar player and a different band. We were in the same circuit, right? We played a lot of the same shows. We played a lot of the same venues. We had a lot of the same friends, so we were acquainted through music. And my mom, he was actually working at a shoe store at the time and my mom was in this shoe store buying shoes, thought he was a really good sales rep at the shoe store, had a good personality and basically tried to swipe them away from the shoe company that I was working at and brought them over to our shutter com. So we were acquaintances before then, but when he started working at the company, we got to be really good friends. During our time at the shutter company, there was a, there was an employee there. His name was Larry and he was he was an installer for our company. He actually installed the shutters. But he was very entrepreneurial minded. He was a contractor. Our company hired his company. He had some other little side businesses going on and he had some real estate. He did all sorts of stuff. So we were always interested in what he was doing on the side. And he recommended that we go read a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, both Joe and I went and read rich dad, poor dad. At the same time, it opened our ideas to the possibilities. It opened our ideas to, you know, what assets are and you know how to make our money work for us while we’re not working. How to stop trading time for dollars, all that kind of stuff. That really opened our eyes and took Joe and I down the rabbit hole. In 2007, I believe Joe and I came across the book The Four Hour Work Week that sort of sets us even further down the rabbit hole. And it was around 2007 that we decided let’s get into this blogging thing. Let’s get into creating WordPress blogs on topics we’re knowledgeable about, and then you can sell advertising on these blogs. And that was the original start. We started a blog in personal finance and then a couple of months later, a blog in health. And then a few months later, a blog in a gardening blog, which totally bombed and only lasted like six months. But we started just creating all of these blogs and then. That was 2007, from 2007 to 2009. We were just growing those sort of in our side time outside of work. And they started making more and more money. And they got to a point where I think the site was making like 500 bucks a month, nothing that anybody could live off of. But we decided that meant the potential was there. We saw the growth, we saw the trajectory and we’re like, well, if we go full time on this, if we put all of our focus on this thing, then we could probably really grow it. So Joe and I both quit our jobs in 2009, making about $500 a month that was split two ways. So we really went for it. And that’s the Genesis, that’s the beginning. All sorts of businesses have happened along the way, different experimental things. We threw a lot of stuff at the wall to see what stuck. Some of our businesses lasted, multiple years. Some of them lasted months and then faded away. But yeah there’s all sorts of stuff that has happened over the last 14 years since we started that kind of stuff.

Chris Dreyer

That’s amazing. There’s so much there. You know, the first thing, you know, dad Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I hear that referenced on Bigger Pockets a lot. I recently, after reading probably a hundred plus business books, recently read that one. It was like, why would I read this one first? Because it totally changed my mindset on asset versus liability, owning a home versus rental property and all kinds of things. Of course, Tim Ferriss’s book really sets the groundwork for delegation and freeing yourself up in time. One of the questions I want to ask you about blogging and affiliate marketing is because our stories are really similar. That’s my background as well as you know, I was a teacher though, and then jumped into affiliate marketing and got this entrepreneurial bug. I think it was 2011 or 12, that penguin algorithm were just came in and just wrecked everyone. Did you guys experience any of that?

Matt Wolfe

I remember hearing about it a lot, but we weren’t big on SEO at the time. We’ve always been more paid media and email growth and then, you know, drive people back to our websites, through email lists, things like that. So, our websites now are pretty well SEO’ed, but that was just by accident and through just doing it for so long. I think we’ve just been putting content out there for the last 14 years and over time, some of it just started ranking and then ranking got easier and easier. And so, we only within the last, I don’t know, four, maybe five years really started to go, okay. Google is our number one traffic source. Maybe we should put some focus on this.

Chris Dreyer

Right. That’s fantastic. You know, and Joe’s experience is more on that, like visual design and I looked up your background, you’ve got a lot and, you know, WordPress and the blogging. When you hear people say blog, do you think that’s just like semantics? We’re just more talking about content. You know, how has that evolved in terms of your business?

Matt Wolfe

Yeah. I don’t know. I’ve never really put too much thought into the terms. I almost feel like it’s like a joke. Now, when you say words like blog or vlog, cause like everybody’s got one. Even podcasts to some degree it’s like, like pretty much everybody has a podcast these days, but you know, as far as like the actual terminology of it, I do feel like blogging has become the new media, right? Like when people go and do research on stuff, you used to go to like consumer reports or like a tech crunch, or, you know, some of these larger media brands. And now when you go to get reviews on a product or you want to deep dive on some information, You’re actually, people tend to trust the big institutions even less now and they’re going to the smaller bloggers, the people that you know, have done right by them in the past. If I go and see a review for a new digital camera on a website and I buy the camera and I really like it. And I go, Ooh, the review is good. And they led me to a good product. I’m probably going to go back to that site in the future to get future product reviews because they led me right in the past, you know? So I really just think it’s this sort of merging of the sort of media landscape right before you had radio and traditional TV and billboards and stuff like that. And now you’ve got podcasts and you’ve got websites and you’ve got YouTube channels and all of those kind of blurring the lines. Now they’re all, they all flow together. People that are big podcasters or big YouTubers are now going on as guests on Jimmy Fallon and you know, the late night shows and you know, you’ll see guys like Conan O’Brien started his own podcast because he has less restrictions and he can have a longer form and he doesn’t have to censor himself. There’s just this blurring happening of all of these various media platforms boasting the traditional and the sort of digital new media.

Chris Dreyer

Right. And yes Seth Godin is doing a blog a day and he’s written like 2000, you know, really intimidating. And then I wanted to play with the puns here. Cause you said blog so for the personal injury attorneys we play on words. So the bLAWgs. B. L A W G want to put out content and thought leadership. It’s a great outlet. I think to piggyback off what you’re saying it, when I read a blog, especially on a smaller site, you know, someone that’s like I can tell they’re a true technician like they’re they’re practicing. They are experiencing these issues. I seem to automatically trust them, especially if they’re a little self-deprecating or they’re struggling with certain aspects, because I know I’ll probably struggle with those same things.

Matt Wolfe

Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. We just interviewed Dr. Robert Cialdini who wrote the book Influence. And that was actually one of the topics that we talked about with him is that one of the, one of the best ways to sell yourself and get people to pay attention and to build influence is to just point out all the flaws. So for our example, when we’re blogging and we’re making podcasts, we do episodes once a week, where we talk about what’s going on behind the scenes, in our business and stuff. And usually we’re sharing all this stuff that doesn’t work just as much as the stuff that did work. Right. We’re sharing all this stuff that we’re struggling with. We’re sharing the problems that we’re having, being affiliate marketers, we’re sharing the problems we’re having as course creators and sellers. We’re constantly just sharing all of the downsides. But when you share all the downsides, I think it makes all of the upsides in that the good things that you share just that much more impactful. And that was something that Robert Cialdini actually confirmed with. A lot of his research is that if you can really get people to trust you through pointing out the negatives or has been settled, calls it, making the skeletons. You know, if you can point out all the negatives, people are going to trust you so much more when you point out the positives or make recommendations that it just builds that stronger trust and bond with the person there they’re listening to.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I was relistening to Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About The Hard Things. And the first time I read that book, I was in a different stage in my company. I just really didn’t get it, but he has that chapter in there about, Hey, explaining to the whole company about the bad things and how that’s important and not just always sharing the good because your company and individuals know the bad. You know, the other thing I was going to say with Cialdini, probably pronounce this name incorrectly. I apologize. I think what those set in your mind, you know, the it’s all about trust, right? The recipient, you know, even the reciprocation aspect. The reciprocity. So when you give something to someone it’s like, oh, that guy’s nice. I trust him. You think there’s something there in regards to trust as well?

Matt Wolfe

Yeah. I just think that when people see that you’re honestly sharing the good and the bad, that’s just going to build trust. Right. You know, how many times have you like Googled a product and then you get to a review and the product is just like, this is the most amazing product everybody needs to buy it. And there’s no actual comparison to the competition. There’s no actual negatives for the product. The review is just like, this is amazing everybody needs this. That’s become so common. And so when you’re actually truthful in your reviews, like, Hey this product is a product we’re using. Here’s what sucks about it, but also here’s why we’re still using it, right? If you share both of those that, that trust is just going to be so much stronger. Right? So I think being honest and transparent is actually a way to stand out, which is very sad.

Chris Dreyer

Right? The other thing on the review side, there’s so many personal injury attorneys, you only ever got 200 reviews and they. Oh, my God w I got a one-star review and they’re like, just they’re so ticked off. But as a consumer, if I go look at a site and they get 200 five star reviews, I’m like, wait a minute. Something’s fishy here. The first thing that I do is I go, I read the positives and see, all the business owners responding. And then I got read the negative, right. Even if there’s only five out of a thousand, I want to see what their problems were.

Matt Wolfe

Yup. Yup. I pretty much always skim straight to like the three and four star reviews, because those are the people that liked it, but are pointing out the downsides. Right. So yeah. Same thing. It’s like Amazon, it’s so easy to fake the five-star reviews. So if you see something that’s got a thousand five-star reviews and only two one-star reviews. There’s probably an issue here.

Chris Dreyer

The other thing I wanted to ask you about just briefly is one of the things you mentioned about having the two episodes where you and Joe get together and you talk you’re really transparent. And then you have your guests. And one of the things I’ve noticed where I am interviewing this guest, it’s like amazing. I have these amazing guests on. It’s all thought leadership, but then it’s like, well, I don’t have an outlet to share my opinion. So when did you guys start introducing this additional segment and kind of what impact did that have on your audience?

Matt Wolfe

Yeah, it’s interesting. Our first three or four episodes of our podcast, we didn’t have a guest. So like when we actually started the podcast, I don’t even think we knew for sure we were going to do guests on the podcasts for the first few. And then we started getting guests and then what ended up happening was we wanted to sprinkle it in. So like maybe every other episode was a guest and every other episode was just us. We always wanted to do that, but we had so much demand for guests after I don’t know, let’s call it six months into the podcast. We had so many people chasing us up to be on the podcast. And we had so many friends we still wanted to interview, that we got to a point where we were recording episodes that were coming out for four months. Right. So we would have a guest on, and then by the time the episode came out, the guests had already forgotten they’d even been on the show. Right. So we were running into that issue. So we just started going, okay, let’s just do all guest interviews. And so we started doing all guest interviews for a good year. We, I don’t even know if we did any. There was like a year where we didn’t have any without any guests. And then we started getting our audience going, how come you never do episodes where it’s just you without the guests anymore? We love hearing about the behind the scenes. We love hearing about how you’re getting the guests. We love, like, we want the journey as well from you guys. So we got that feedback from people. So then we started adding them in just once a month. It was all guest interviews. And then once a month it was just us with no guests. So we were doing that for a while. And then the feedback we were getting was people really liked our episodes where we didn’t have guests on people just kept on saying, you should do more of those. I’d love to hear more of those. Every time we polled the audience, they wanted more of that. So then it’s only been maybe the last three months or so, where we’ve we alternate. So every Tuesday, no guest, every Thursday, it is a guest. And I think it’s helped to build our own personal brands a little more. So people are actually thinking of us as thought leaders, as opposed to just the interviewers. I think there is that benefit there, but I think the long-term effects are still TBD. But, you know, so far it’s been a valuable outlet for Joe and I. We just, we love having those discussions. In fact, the funny thing is most of the time we sit down to record those and we’re like, let’s go for 15 or 20 minutes.. We hit record and we can’t keep them under 45, 50 minutes. We find out when we hit record, we have so much more to say than we thought we had to say on the various topics. It’s been therapeutic for us as well. Like we just really enjoy making them as well. So we’ll see over time, what we’ve started to do is more like predictions and more stuff like directly from us. Like these are our opinions, these are our predictions. Here’s what we think you should do and shouldn’t do. Whereas in the past, we’ve been a little more like toe the line, try to appease everybody. And now we’re getting much more like this product is crap, stay away from it, go buy this product. Here’s where we see things going in the future. Here’s what everybody’s excited on, but we think this thing’s going to die. You know, we talk about things like that now and actually make predictions that could very potentially be wrong predictions. But I think it also positions us more as like thought leaders that people are going to want to pay attention to not just our guests, but us as well.

Chris Dreyer

Podcasting can be a great platform to get your opinions and advice out into the world. But even when you know you have a large audience, it can be hard to get interaction and feedback. I asked Matt to talk about how he and Joe encourage listeners to discuss and engage.

Matt Wolfe

Yeah. So we’ve been getting feedback in multiple ways. So the easiest way to get feedback is we have a Facebook group tied to our, you know, our podcast, right. So we will shout out on the podcast from time to time. Hey, you know, if you want to debate us on this, or if you have any questions, you’d like us to answer on the show or anything like that, just go to our group and let’s get a discussion going in the group, you know, Work some of the time it’s hard to get people from an audio platform that they’re probably listening to in a car or out for a run or something like that over to a Facebook group. So we don’t always get people to immediately take action on that. It is interesting cause we’ll put out episodes and then like three months later, somebody will be like, Hey, I was listening to your episode from February of of 2021. And you asked us to do this and then, you know, the comments coming online, like six months later. So the other two ways is we leverage our email lists. One way. We’ll send out a survey we’ve done. We’ve done at least one survey a year ever since we started the podcast and the survey will ask questions, like, what’s been your favorite episode, what’s been your least favorite episode. What topics do you enjoy that we talk about? What are the topics you enjoy the least when we talk about. What do you wish you heard more of from us? What do you wish we heard you heard less of that? And we’ve done that every year for, since we started the podcast and gotten some really good feedback on it, what we find interesting is that our audience has been fairly split with the feedback. For example, one of our questions is like when it comes to mindset topics, do you want to hear more or less of that when it comes to tactical topics, do you want to hear more or less? And our audience was pretty like split down the middle 50: 50. Less mindset, more tactics, or more, more mindset, less tactics. Did I say that right? I dunno, but you know the opposite. So we’ve done a lot of surveys. And then we also just ask people to reply to our emails a lot. So we’ll send out an email saying, Hey, we’re we’re interviewing Robert Cialdini this week. Shoot a reply. If you have a question you’d like us to ask him, you know, w we’ll do stuff like that from time to time and just ask for the reply. So those are really the three ways that. Pretty good, consistent feedback, and constantly try to find ways to improve. What we have noticed though is like asking our audience what they want to hear more or less of is a futile effort because everybody wants different things. So we might as well just talk about what we’re really interested in and the people that gravitate to those topics will tune in and the ones that don’t maybe they’ll skip those episodes.

Chris Dreyer

So what comes to mind when you say all this is, you know, I’m a new podcast and I’ve got a hundred listeners, let’s say, hypothetically we have a decent audience on this one, but it’s, if you’re sending out this message, am I going to have enough people to even engage and side note for SEO, there are some individuals that want to do CRO and I’m like, You’re only getting 300 visitors a month. CRO’s, probably not a great, you know, tactic or strategy at this point, you need more traffic. So was there a point where, Hey, you had the podcast for three or four years, you guys are just banging out content and then it’s like, okay, we have an audience. Let’s then take that and get some feedback or do you just poll the a hundred people and maybe get some good feedback.

Matt Wolfe

Yeah. We, I think we’ve always pulled no matter how large or small the audience, the thing about this podcast, hustle and flowchart specifically is that when Joe and I launched it back in January of 2017, we actually already had a fairly significant sized audience. I had a product called Learn to Blog before with another partner Bradley Will. That product we had an email list of something like 120,000 subscribers on it. We had like 30,000 customers of that product. And so I actually sold Learn to Blog to my business partner, but when we sold that business, part of the negotiation was I actually got to keep access to the list. You know, I was able to mail the list and say, Hey, I’m moving onto this other company. Do you want to follow me along to it? So I was able to pull a big chunk of that audience over to the new thing that I started when Joe and I started Hustle and Flowchart. So that was a big kicking off point. And then also on the flip side, Joe had been doing a lot of like video work and artwork for a lot of big name, like entrepreneurs in the digital marketer space. So he was very well connected with a lot of those people prior to us starting the podcast. So when we started Hustle and Flowchart, I wouldn’t really say we were starting from ground zero. Right. You know, we had connections already. We were already fairly well networked and we did start with a bit of an audience. Our first podcast, we started in 2010. When we first started our podcast, our on, it was called the Online Income Podcast. In 2010, that one, we had no idea what we were doing. We weren’t surveying anybody. We were just putting out content. But back in 2010, that was the, if you build it, they will come days with podcasting, you know, there was a hundred thousand podcasts on iTunes. We put out one on marketing, the only other ones on marketing at the time where I think like Pat Flynn’s. John Lee Dumas’ podcast wouldn’t come for three years still. You know, Tim Ferriss may have started around that time. I think Tim’s, might’ve already been going by that point, but there wasn’t a lot of business marketing podcasts early on. So we would put out our first episode and it would go into the new and noteworthy and we’d get 800 downloads on the first day. And we’re just like, this is awesome. And podcasting is the future. Not quite as easy these days.

Chris Dreyer

Right. It’s really saturated. So, I’m curious with the first of all, Hustle and Flowchart, so side note, did you come up with that name? The, you know, the play on words? I was curious. It feels like you came up.

Matt Wolfe

It was a shower thought one day.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. So the Harbinger was probably on, I can’t imagine there was too many competitors. And did you just take that and rename it an apple? So you already had all this audience and to say, Hey, we’re relaunching as Hustle and Flowchart, or did you just go boom or starting at zero?

Matt Wolfe

It started back at zero from a podcast subscriber standpoint. We didn’t just swap out the RSS feed and bring people over because there’s a fairly significant gap between ending our first podcast in this one. So it would have been probably fairly confusing to the people that started getting the episodes. But no we, weren’t starting from scratch in the sense that we had an email list, right. So we were able to mail the list for the first few episodes and say Hey. We did a contest I think when we first started it, you know, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the email list and you know, invite three friends and you’ll be entered to win the contest thing. And I think we gave away an iPad or something like that. I don’t remember, but. We launched it with a contest and we leveraged our email list when we first launched it. And we probably bought some ad traffic to it when we first launched it. And we did all that too, to hit the ground running really fast, but we didn’t leverage any of our existing podcast listenership from prior shows.

Chris Dreyer

Got it. Got it. That makes sense to the planning, especially doing that big launch, you might show up in some of those featured areas on the new shows and get the visual audience attention there. Last week, Joe gave us some great tips for getting your dream guests on your podcast, but once you’ve succeeded and you’ve made a hit episode, you got to make sure people actually know about it. I asked Matt what the secret is to effective podcast promotion.

Matt Wolfe

Yeah. So when we record a podcast episode, we’ve got a couple team members that are working behind the scenes on it. So a whole bunch of stuff happens after we record it. So now we record both the audio and the video. The early days we were just recording audio. Video is only come in within the last year or so. We started recording video for every episode. So when an episode gets recorded, Joe and I record the audio and the video and we put them all in a Dropbox and then from the Dropbox. It gets edited down into like a a little more polished of a YouTube video. It gets edited for iTunes. It gets turned into an Instagram story clip. It gets turned into an Instagram TV clip. It gets turned into like a seven minute mini clip that we’ll put in like the Facebook groups and on Twitter. And on LinkedIn, we write a handful of tweets. We make some images for it that go out on Instagram. We follow up with our guests. We asked our guests to share on Twitter and we actually write the tweets and send them the Instagram images and all that kind of stuff to ideally make it as easy as possible to share. So that’s all the sort of basics that we do. We also try to SEO for our guests name. So we use a, the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. And we plug in our guest’s name as the keyword and let it optimize for the guests names. So we’ll follow all of the suggestions that WordPress SEO gives us to optimize for the name. So when we do have bigger name guests on, we rank on page one for some of those names. So like Roland Frasier, for example, if you Google him, it’s his websites first and then right after his websites, it’s us. Right? So we’re going and we’re ranking for those names. So if somebody searches out, they hear about Roland Frasier and they want to learn more about them. Ideally, we’re the first place they find that’s not directly his website. Nobody else is really trying to rank for people’s names. They’re usually trying to rank for terms, you know, affiliate marketing, or how to build a podcast or whatever we’re ranking for people’s names. That’s I think something that we do differently.

Chris Dreyer

That’s an amazing tip and being an SEO guy, that’s what we do as well. So we do the guest’s name because we found that if you’re trying to target a keyword, it’s just too saturated with like the transcripts and things like that to rank. And I think everyone’s trying to say, oh, what’s the keyword of our conversation. And try to jam that into the transcript. And it’s just like, no, use the name.

Matt Wolfe

Yeah. It’s true. And it’s worked. And in fact, it’s been interesting because we actually have one scenario where we ranked for somebody whose name wasn’t really, well-known. Still to this day, isn’t really well known, but they got in the media, they had a big news story published about them. So basically what happened was she came on our podcast. We interviewed her, she had this big goal that she wanted to donate a hundred thousand dollars to Virgin unite and she wanted to give it to Richard Branson’s charity. So she actually sold a business and then with a hundred thousand dollars of the proceeds, she actually flew out to the UK, visited Richard Branson in-person to hand him a hundred thousand dollar check for his charity. Well, Richard Branson then went and wrote a blog post. About the fact that this girl flew all the way, you know, halfway across the country, just to hand him a hundred thousand dollar check. And it was one of her big life goals was to donate this money. And Richard Branson wrote this article himself and published it to the Virgin blog. Well, this girl who was on our show, we ranked number one very first spot. Even about her own website. We were ranking for. And when this article came out, that Richard Branson wrote her Google searches just spiked something like 200,000 people search for her all on the same day. And we were the number one result. So we had like a week long period where her episode just skyrocketed. And it was like two months after we recorded it with her because everybody wanted to find out who is this girl who just gave a hundred thousand dollars to Richard Branson. So we’re SEO going for names, even if you’ve never heard of the name. Cause you never know that sort of long tail effect in the future.

Chris Dreyer

I like that too. And it also gives the guests an outlet to link back to your website for those back links. So if you just put the podcast out, you don’t put any article up on the site and it goes out on apple. They may have linked to apple or link to Spotify, but then it could give your website some authority. So that’s an added bonus and I bet you and Joe were like, holy smokes. Why is our traffic so high? And then you’d dug in and you’re like, you go to the news. Yeah. Oh, this is awesome.

Matt Wolfe

Yep, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, I mean that the SEO is one thing we put some focus on and then we do some media buying too. We actually do buy some traffic to grow the podcast as well. One of the ways that we do that is we buy traffic on the actual podcast apps. So there’s like, overcast is an app that a lot of people listen to podcasts on. Castro is another one. Stitcher is another one. All of these apps actually have the ability to promote your podcast inside of their platform and get them featured in front of more people. So, and a lot of them, it’s not publicized on the website. You just got to reach out to the founders of those apps and say, Hey, do you have a way to get featured in the podcast? Overcast and Castro I think both have actual platforms where you can buy ads on, but there was one that we did called podcast addict and another one called podcast Republic. And. We’ve done it with a whole bunch of these podcast apps where you could just reach out and say, Hey, is there a way to pay, to be a little more featured on your app? And most of them have some thing that you can do to featured on the app. And those have been some of our biggest jumps in growth has been doing that. And then also we’re running YouTube ads, too. So little clips from our podcast. We’re just running ads to those clips to try to get interest as well. So, we’re, we have a very holistic approach. We’re attacking podcast growth from all angles.

Chris Dreyer

I know the media buying when I tested it on Castbox and I went from like, you know, maybe a few thousand downloads to like 10,000 downloads just from Castbox box and saw that big spike on our hosting platform. And so it definitely works. I don’t know how targeted that is for our audience. How many are actually personal injury attorneys and they’re interested in this material, but it downloads a lot. Yeah this is fantastic. There’s so much gold. And I think we’re going to have to slow it down and go to that by step and sharing what you guys do to promote the podcast. But that’s incredible because you know, so much, so often everyone puts all this time in the research and the guest and this great conversation but then they don’t tell anyone. They don’t really go out of their way to, to let as many people know as possible. And again, like you said earlier, it’s not field of dreams. It’s not Kevin Costner out there building this amazing park and everyone comes, you got to promote the episodes.

Matt Wolfe

Yeah. And we’re guilty of that ourselves, you know, we’ll put out episodes and then just not even go and post on Facebook or Twitter about them. And we’ll just forget to share them on social media. You know, we’re constantly kicking ourselves for forgetting to share on social media. We have all the automation that’s happening, where our team is sharing them on Instagram and certain places. But you know, your personal profiles are probably always going to be the most engaged profiles you have versus, you know, groups and business pages and stuff like that. And That’s one of the things we constantly forget to do is just go share it to our personal profiles because that’s where the most people are paying attention.

Chris Dreyer

Right? Well, Matt, this has been fantastic. So final question, where can our audience go to learn more about you and your company and your podcast?

Matt Wolfe

So if you go to hustle and flowchart dot. That is actually our podcast on YouTube. It redirects over to our YouTube channel. We’re making a big push to grow the YouTube channel alongside the audio channel. We’re really polishing up the video. We brought on new video editors to make like really cool sort of documentary style videos out of our interviews. So really trying to ramp that up right now. And yeah, I the best way anybody can support us right now is go to hustle and flowchart.tv subscribed to that YouTube channel. We’re putting out four videos a week right now on that channel.

Chris Dreyer

It was so great to hear about the entire hustle and flowchart process, both in our chat today with Matt and last week with Joe. There are so many contributing elements to make it a successful podcast and mats expert, knowledge of blogging and promotion has helped it get the attention it deserves. I’d like to thank Matt from the Hustle & Flowchart podcast for sharing his story with us. And I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation. You’ve been listening to the Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you like this episode, leave us a review. We’d love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to master personal injury marketing.