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building an indie business in the center of venture capital I am Alex Edmonds also known as supremerumham on the inner and this is the building and Andy business podcast okay so today's episode is about in person events and promoting your podcast at in-person events I'm going to talk about how to promote your podcast and person events stickers hosting an event live podcast recordings doing an an online event going to an event a trade show or convention the benefits problems and I'm doing a new segment where I talk about comedians and comparing podcasters and comedians okay so let's get into it stickers so why am I talking about stickers because I believe that people should hand out stickers at these events instead of business cards why because stickers are better than business cards how many stickers should one bring to a event less than 50 and the way you can make it not look weird if you're going to just some random meetup is by having the stickers and separate pockets so like I always wear sweater so I could have 10 stickers and one pocket 10 stickers in the other pocket 10 stickers and the other jeans are in my left pocket and 10 stickers in my back pocket and the reason why is so there's not a huge bulge of stickers so it doesn't look like you're trying to promote your podcast at like a simple dinner meetup so yeah okay make sure that the stickers have the word podcast on them and the reason why you want to do this is so when you hand out a sticker people know when they get home that this sticker is for a podcast okay make sure okay the next thing you want to do oh wait so for a sticker the Holy Grail is for someone to put a sticker on their laptop and the reason why it is the Holy Grail is because it's an ad for the podcast every time someone goes out so in public let's say they go to a coffee shop and are working on their laptop people will see the sticker for the podcast and they might ask what is the sticker for what is the podcast and then they have to explain what about the podcasts and why they have a sticker for it the worst and the worst thing about the stickers is that you know you might not hand them out and you shouldn't hand them out you should only hand them out to people that really show interest in the podcast so they might stick it somewhere yeah so the worst case scenario is that you're left with all these stickers it's not that bad stickers never go bad you can always hand them out at the next event next meetup next conference or you can sell them to your current audience for just to break even so if you spend a $20 stick with stickers just try to make $1 off every sticker the stickers cost about 50 cents for each one I the stickers that I have yeah I spend like $10 on 20 stickers they were pretty cheap compared to all the other things that you could buy for your audience and try to sell okay hosting an event how you find people to go to these events is you create an invitation on your favorite meetup website I like Eventbrite and the reason why you want to do this is because it's validation for your meetup if no one signs up then you don't need to shell out a bunch of money for the meetup okay so where do you find out the location for this meetup one one thing you can do is you can find companies that would benefit from people at the meetup or becoming that have an interest in your your subject and you can ask those companies to for a space to host the meetup so like for example for the building and in the business podcast I am targeting are people that have have an interest in podcasting so I can find a podcast company and ask them for some space the next place you can have a meet-up is a coffee shop and you take a table and do you have your meetup there you have a sign that says bai be meetup ok you want to niche down on these meetups because you don't want too many people showing up so you get more one-on-one time with each person and you could convince them to join your community or listen to your podcast ok and you want to have them sign in so that you can send them a summary of the meetup you get their email and then you can also give them information about the next Meetup ok what kind of things you want to do with this meetup you want to ask them questions about their experience in the field so for me it would be do you have a podcast or type of podcast um do you have um what kind of podcast you want to start what's stopping you from creating the podcast and then I can be like hey here's my podcast listen to it for some advice then join my community and we can help you okay you can also do a live podcast recording so you can do a demonstration like just just like this and then answer questions bring a second mic and you can do those questions for an episode you want to host this at like a library where it's quiet and you're able to record okay online so you can do the same thing as hosting an an event in person you create an invitation and what you do the difference is that you give like the location is say your twitch account and so you give them a link to your twitch the problem with this is that like for me at the very least I don't have a set time when I record a podcast so I have to figure out when I can do a lot yeah when I can do a livestream when it's quiet in my house so ya know you might have that problem the good thing about the online event is you don't have to have stickers so that's cool okay going to an event so you want to go to more casual events and the reason why you want to do this is because if there's like a presentation or someone's giving a talk you can't really get to know people you can't talk to them and ask them questions it would be good to bring stickers as well you want to choose an an event that has a similar topic to the podcasts so that way you can find people and better interested in your podcast very easily you can ask them what kind of podcasts they listen to and then you could be like hey I listen to this podcast and it's your own podcast so yeah all right trade shows or conventions or whatever else I was thinking of so at trade shows or conventions you can get a booth sometimes all you need to do is fill out a form and then you hand out stickers you can also have pens which are a little more expensive that's probably one or two dollars instead of 50 Cent's but seriously all the pens I have they're branded and so yeah people are less likely to throw away your pens they might be more they might throw away your stickers but not the pens because pens have actual value you can always write with a sticker not write with a pen not a sticker it would be pretty cool if you can written with a sticker though okay and what you can do at these conventions as well is you can give a talk and what you can do what talk you can give is you can talk about your most popular episode yeah so my most popular episode would be dogs and web development so I have to talk about why I started that episode the results yeah and then I could talk about the lessons I learned from that episode or if you have guests you can talk about what you've learned from those guests okay the benefits the benefits of these in-person events are you have a pipeline to guess if they're interested in being on the podcast it's in person so that it's very easy to meet up with those people that are interested in becoming a guest and you have a pipeline to listeners as well because you're if you're targeting people that have an interest in your podcast then they might be willing to listen to your podcast another benefit is personal connection by meeting them in person you're getting to know that those people that are interested in your podcasts and because you've met them and built up a connection with them they might be more willing to listen to the podcast okay finally you're building up a reputation in person so they these people get to know you they get to see your work in action when they're listening to your podcast and they might be interested in helping you out in some way because you've built up that personal connection and maybe you'll get something more out of that the meetups and hosting the events than just listeners they might help you get a job or invest in your product by buying your product in the future so yeah all right the problems having to go out and prepare so I hate going out and I have to go out for all these events right so that's one problem and then I have to prepare mentally and I have to prepare stickers and all that that's a hassle and I don't like it so that's one of the problems all right spending money without a clear are away so to get these stickers I have to spend money on them and it the ROI return on investment some people might call it radio on internet I don't know if people will listen to my podcast and I will be able to monetize the the money I'm spending so it's very unclear whether this will be profitable for me not profitable but I can't think of another one no okay on the last thing is people tend not to show up okay so I hosted an event at a pizza place and 20 people signed up and only seven people showed up people tend to not show up to events especially something like a meet-up where they don't know the person hosting it so yeah that was bad but that's where I learned that niching down is really good because I had personal I had more time to talk to everyone in the group those six people and I feel like that was the reason the meetup went really well okay for comedians and and I'll talk about why I'm doing something about comedians later so the reason why I'm comparing comedians is because I listen to a lot of comedians and I feel like they have similar qualities to podcasters so for comedian having an in-person event would be like being on stage they people show up to their there of that there their performance and they're building a personal connection with the audience and then at the end of the event they're selling things like CDs shirts at the end of the event so yeah okay thank you for listening have a nice day bye