Transcript: The Method Behind My Metrics Madness

Joanne Bolt (Intro)

The power of a podcast extends well beyond plugging in the mind. So if you're ready to learn how it can help you build a big business, then I’m your best friend, Hi, I'm Joanne Bolt and I am obsessed with all things podcasting, and creating an unapologetically big revenue business with it from podcast guesting to podcast hosting and everything in between. We're gonna dive into it all and show you step by awesome step how using a podcast can and will grow your business. So grab a glass of wine and pop your headphones on. Cuz, Girlfriend, happy hour has begun here on the B-Word.

Joanne Bolt 

There's a method to my madness. That is what I always tell my team when they start laughing at me over some of the things that I do here in the business. And so today, I wanted to dive a little bit in with you guys on the method behind some of the metrics that I track in my business, I get it, metrics may not seem super sexy to you. But let me tell you guys, when you start to track your numbers, and the ones that are important to your particular business, you can make some super smart decisions about how you want to run your business. So for me personally, I will also say there are a lot of great systems out there that you can subscribe to, or order, or use to input your numbers in and see how things go up and down and kind of get into the analytics of things. Personally, I'm a numbers nerd, like, Google Spreadsheets are my best friends. I have enough coding background from my college days and my days as a consultant with Accenture, that I understand the mechanics behind creating formulas and things like that. And so I don't use anything but a couple of Google spreadsheets to track my numbers. Now, I will also tell you, my spreadsheets have spreadsheets, that's how big of a nerd that I am. So if you're not really good with Google Spreadsheets, feel free to go and research and maybe get back to me, let me know an online system I should use. But if you're a solopreneur, or you're just starting out your business, and you don't have a lot of financial freedom to subscribe to some of those online systems get to know Google Excel spreadsheets, because you can pretty much look up how to create a formula or a tracker for almost anything that you want. And that's what I do here at the B word. So to get matter started, there are three pieces that I track almost every single month. That go into my list category,

I have two main things that I track one is my list. One is my episode downloads for the B word. So we're going to start off with the list. And there's three things that I track there, I track my email subscribers, I track my Instagram subscribers. And I track the number of people I have in my community text messaging. What I do with those numbers is probably a little bit offbeat and a little bit different from what other people use to measure their numbers. So I'm going to kind of give you a little bit of behind the scenes on what I'm looking at. Let's start with the email list. On my email list, I am looking for the net number of subscribers. That means and I do look at this on a weekly basis, you guys, that means how many people have subscribed and how many people have unsubscribed given me the net number of who is my available people to read an email that I'm sending out? It doesn't do me any good to have a database with 1000 subscribers, if 750 of them have unsubscribed. So what I'm looking at all times is if we're sending out an email, how many people are unsubscribing? If we're doing a freebie, how many people are subscribing? How are we growing that email list. And the reason that I'm diving into those analytics is for a couple of things. One, if I know how many people are unsubscribing, then I can start to look for patterns. For instance, if we're sending out too many affiliate type marketing emails, and people are unsubscribing, like crazy, then either that's the wrong affiliate for my company and brand, or my people just don't like me, you know, promoting other people. So stop sending those emails, if I'm sending out podcast announcements about the B word, and no one's unsubscribing, or a very small amount of people are unsubscribing, then that lets me know that that is an email that my audience responds to, and I can continue to send those emails. So I think it's really critical to have a in depth look at what you're sending, and how your community is responding to them in order to create the content that they like to get from you. And that kind of guides you in some of your content creation. It's the same thing with our freebies. If we are creating a freebie opt in, and almost no one is opting into it, then I know that that is not what my audience wants. But generally speaking, I can look at what we're sending out, see what they're responding to. And then I can go and create a freebie around that because what they're responding to on email is what they're going to respond to on a freebie opt in as well. So it kind of all cycles together. The other thing I'm looking at is my revenue per subscriber or my RPS. Now this pieces critical, because you probably all heard that an email list is worth a certain dollar per subscriber when you're selling something. And that is really true. When I first became my business, I kept that metric, I think it was like $46. For every email subscriber that you had. As I've grown the business, I've stopped looking at what the general marketing statistic is. And I've started looking at what my own is. So what I mean by that is your RPM is your revenue per subscriber, the way that you get that is, if you're going to send an email series out about, let's say, an offer, or a product or a launch that you're doing, how many of your active subscribers do you have when you're sending that email sinkewitz out? And how much in sales did you make? So it is literally the sales you made via your email sequence divided by the active subscribers that you sent the email to. And you can track over time, what your value per subscriber actually is. Now, that is really, really critical information to keep up with in your business, especially as you grow your business. Don't pay attention to what marketing statistic tell you pay attention to what your own statistics tell you. Because if I'm going to launch, say, I'm going to launch my accelerator mastermind here in a couple of months, I know how much I want to earn on that mastermind. And if I know of that my goal for that mastermind. And I know as of right now, what is my average return on investment for a subscriber, then I can also determine quite naturally how many people in my email list I need in order to have the best chance at successfully launching that mastermind to hit my goal. So if I reverse engineer that, I can then look right now and say, Do I have enough people on my email list? Or do I not? Because if I don't, then part of the launch for that mastermind needs to incorporate some really good ways to get people into the email list. And if I have enough people, plus 10%, I like to buffer it by 10%, then maybe that launch can focus more on some of the social media aspects or other ways to create a great launch and let the email list be what it is and let it funnel enough people into that mastermind based on where it naturally sits. And those are decisions that you can only make when you know your numbers. Now I told you, there were three things I like to look at with my list. And the other is, or number two, I should say is my Instagram, how many people are on my Instagram. But it's more for me than just my subscriber number. It is the engagement. If I've got 3000 People follow me on Instagram, but only two of them ever engaged with anything, then I know that that is not where I can go to try to launch a product, it's where I need to go to gain visibility. But I also need to up my game on engagement. And so that tells me a lot of strategy for the business on what I need to develop over the next couple of weeks, months. And even throughout the year. Now we are trying something new here at JoAnn bolt, and we just implemented mini chat, you can go to mini chat.com. And take a look at it. And I did that very specifically because I have a greater following on my personal account. It's Joanne boat than I do on the B word podcast account. So I I implemented mini chat into the B word podcast Instagram account in order to try to see if we are putting messages on things like, you know, comment below 127 to get a detailed explanation or a freebie or, you know, to hear this episode live and in person. Let's see how many people actually do that. Versus over on my personal where you still have to say hey, go to my Lincoln bio, and you can grab whatever it is, or direct people to an episode or whatever, you know, I'm trying to use Instagram for my suspicion is getting giving people the opportunity to just use a number like a mini chat where yes, it's a bot, but I'm setting up the bots. And so it's in my voice, it's in my brand. I'm responding to people in a way that they can, you know, get the material that they want pretty quickly and easily. I suspect that that will have a much bigger return than simply saying use my Lincoln bio. Now the Lincoln bio is free mini chat is not Lincoln bio, you don't have to constantly set up mini chat you do I mean for every keyword that you do, you have to set up a sequence for it. So it takes a little bit more effort, but I think that the return is going to be worth it. So stick around with me for a while and I'll let you know how that goes. Now the third metric on my list that I'm always taking a look at is my community text number. If you haven't texted in yet it is 678-736-8055 That actually has my I lowest opt outright. And one of my highest return on investments is hiring for even the my email list. And I truly believe it's because I treat that texting message a little bit differently. I treat it a lot more personal relationship, although I love my email list, and I personally write every single email that goes out, I don't have a copywriter for that, because I want to in my voice on the text message list, they're short, they're sweet. They're to the point. And I think that people who opt in for a text message are not the people who are going to read your emails, and vice versa. So a lot more people will opt in to an email list. Because say they want a freebie they want to download, they opt in to get it, they don't really want to be in your world necessarily be on the freebie, and that's why they unsubscribe on your email list, which makes sense, there's no hating there, I get it, I love it, it's fine. On the text message list, they opt in to be a part of your world, they opt in to hear from you and have you text them back. And so that is a smaller list for me than my email list. I mean, by far it is smaller. But it also is the most effective communication that I use. And oftentimes, when I'm going to launch something, I go to my email, I'm sorry, I go to my text message first, then my email. And finally I go to Instagram to launch something. So if you are someone who's looking for, let's just say a space and one of my roundtable events, you want to be on the text message list, because they're going to get an opportunity first, and by the time it hits Instagram, let's be honest, it may not even hit Instagram, because it may have filled up because we keep them to 15 people or less. So I think that's also why my opt out rate on my text message list is the lowest of all of my lists. And I track them on a weekly basis. Because I want to know where my people are, where they're coming from, and who's responding to what because that way I can keep a relationship going with people. Okay, let's talk about the podcast, the V word podcast, you're all listening to it right now.

That is the other major metric that I track. And I track it on a monthly basis, not on a weekly. I do that because during the course of a month since I dropped two episodes a week, and sometimes a bonus subscriber only episode, I'm dropping anywhere between eight and 10 episodes in any given 30 day time period. So for me, if I was going to track those analytics on a weekly basis, it would get exhausting just constantly checking it because it may not grow very fast from one day to the next. Or, you know, it may be that this week, a solo episode on metrics doesn't hit well. So that one doesn't grow a lot. But Thursday's guest episode will. Who knows? And you don't really know until you drop the episodes. So I like to look at it on a monthly basis. I am always looking for are we increasing? You know, are our numbers going up? Or are we trending down? And if we're trending down, then I because I've tracked it since the day we started the podcast, I can actually look back over the last year and a half and say, well, we trend down in the month of June. And so that's just normal for us. I can go to, you know the podcast industry take a look at things and see everyone turned it down in June. Why do I think that is? Well, I think it's because people go on vacation. And they're reading books. They're not listening to podcasts on the way to work. And so June is a lower trending month per podcast. In July, we start to rise again. Which is interesting because I used to track my numbers when I was a real estate agent. And they were very similar. Actually, June always went down and July always went back up. But in the podcasting world, that's actually normal. What I don't want to see is several months in a row that were trending down. Or that time last year we trended up. And if I do notice that I want to go back and see what were we talking about this time last year? Versus what are we talking about this time this year? Is there a major difference? Have we changed our audience? Have we changed our engagement with people via again, the list email, social media, text messaging? What's going on? Is it something that I can help? And I can adjust? Or is it something that I can't? Here's the other metric that I'm really tracking besides just download and this is where I'm not sure many podcast hosts are using their analytics in this way. I am looking for where my people are listening. Now. I use Buzzsprout. And so I can't really speak to every other podcast host platform out there but Buzzsprout will actually tell you the top 10 cities that people are downloading your episodes in and I will look at those whenever I'm about to launch again something like the X stellarator mastermind. So if I do the roundtables, they're always in Atlanta. Those are always in my home studio. They're always, you know, quaint and intimate and personal and small. And so I don't really worry about where my people are coming from on that one. When I'm launching the accelerator mastermind, it is a four month mastermind that culminates in a weekend retreat, and a studio on site that I change those locations. And so by looking when I'm about to launch the accelerator, and we do that two times a year, if I'm looking at the last 90 days worth of downloads for the podcast, and I noticed that they're coming from a really cool place, a place that will be, you know, good for a retreat, and I can find a studio in that we can all use. Well, that's gonna help me dictate where I need to have the culmination trip. Why would that be important? Let's put our thinking hats on here for a second. If I'm going to have a mastermind that you need to travel to, on the last week of the mastermind to do a retreat, and for right for instance, right now, we are trending heavily in Arizona, heavily in Scottsdale, Arizona to be specific. So if I'm going to plan, the upcoming accelerator mastermind, I will want to look at that and say, Okay, I have a huge amount of my listeners in Arizona. So why don't I plan my next accelerator mastermind retreat to be in Scottsdale, Arizona. That way, I have a greater chance of my listeners joining the mastermind, because travel for them will be easier to the end of the mastermind retreat. Now see, I got real strategic there. Just Did you see how that worked. I mean, I love Arizona, don't get me wrong. I love Mesa and Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona. It's also a great place for retreat. It has a lot of cool studios that you can use and a lot of really great resorts you can be at. So I don't need to plan it. For instance, in Mexico, like Cancun, where that would be fun. But everyone's going to have to fly to get there, versus have a huge amount of my listener audience is currently in Arizona, I just actually took down one of the barriers that they would have to join the accelerator mastermind by scheduling that retreat where they are. So for me, the downloads on the podcast are super critical not only for making sure that we're doing the right content, and our numbers are going up and our listenership is going up, not down or not stagnant. But also, I'm going to use my podcast to do what I always preach to everyone, which is grow my business. And if my business, a big piece of that financial revenue is the mastermind, then I can use the podcast to tell me where that mastermind needs to go next. Because, well, my listeners are pretty much telling me by downloading the episodes. So all of those metrics are things that we look at weekly and monthly here at the B word. And my team gathers those numbers for me, and then we have meetings and take a look at them. That is the method behind the madness for what I track for my metrics you that's just as you know, a suggestion for you and your business. You can use it however you want. If I've given you some info on trackability. And like why you should or how you could use it in your business, then I will call this episode a success. If nothing else, guys, even if your business is nothing like mine, track your numbers, track something, just start somewhere tracking something. And I promise you, you may not know today, how you're going to use what you're tracking. But in six months and seven months and eight months in a year when your business is a little bit bigger than it is right now. You may look at those numbers and be so thankful that you can see the trajectory of what you've done. Because it can help you make some really smart decisions in your business. So as always guys, thanks for joining and build your empire. Put a microphone behind it. And I'll see you here same time, same place next week.