How I Turned My Podcast Into A Profitable Business — Claus Lauter | Why Podcasting Builds Strong Connections, What Consistency Means In Content

How I Turned My Podcast Into A Profitable Business — Claus Lauter | Why Podcasting Builds Strong Connections, What Consistency Means In Content Speaker 2: This episode is sponsored by Bravo. Time to take your marketing to the next level. Bravo is the all-in-one marketing platform that helps you connect with customers through email, SMS, WhatsApp, and automation – all from one easy-to-use platform. Keep your customer data organized, personalize every message, and drive real engagement effortlessly. Try Bravo for free or use eCB to save 50% on starter and business plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Head to bravo.com slash eCB today. You will find a link also in the show notes. Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today, it's a solo episode. It's just me, no guest on the show, and I want to give you a bit of an overview of how I got here, what the podcast is about, what kind of plans I have, and also a little bit of my personal background. So I'll start with my personal background, and I don't want to bore you too much here, but for listeners who have been fans of the show for a long time, they already know that I'm doing digital marketing and e-commerce for a very long time. I started in the late 1990s. I'm with the company Johnson & Johnson back in Germany, working when the Internet just came up. I was at the right time in the right place and became one of the first webmasters – back in the time that was a word – and was managing a ton of different websites for this kind of medical company. Then I ventured into a consulting company before in 2001, having my first own startup. So I was early to the game. And this was what's now called a SaaS. So we were a service provider, a software service provider for event management. We developed our own service, our own software. I was along a rocky road, as it is for a startup founder, and I sold my parts, my shares, after seven years or something like that, and then ventured on and started basically a new career in business development, still in digital marketing in South Africa, in Cape Town. Now, a few years later, I started with e-commerce. So I was a seller on Shopify for seven years. I sold my store about one and a half years ago. And in that time, I was a seven-figure seller, became a Shopify partner, a Klaviyo partner, and was really deep into the trenches of selling online, of figuring it out as a solopreneur with a small team of virtual assistants. And so that was a very, very, very steep learning curve. And even with my long background in digital marketing, I learned a lot because e-commerce is a very, very different field than in the marketing fields that I was playing in before. I started the podcast about four years ago. I was coaching and consulting DTC brands and wanted to use the podcast as a way to reach out to new potential clients. And then something unexpected happened. The podcast got a life on its own. Since then, I basically spent most of my time being on the podcast, creating the newsletter, and basically being a content creator. I do a little bit of coaching still, but only with brands that I really like. So, my focus is completely on creating a bigger media business out of this, being a content creator. And what I like about the podcast, a couple of things there. Obviously, it gave me the chance as we are approaching episode 400. It gave me the chance to talk to a lot of experts in the field. I learned a lot with every interview, with every episode. I'm learning something. It helps me to stay on top of the game and also on what's happening in the e-commerce market right now. Now, you can imagine the last two years, there was a lot of AI. There's a lot of movement in this sector, and I'm a lifelong learner. I just Thank you for being interested in what's happening. I want to share this, obviously, with the listeners out there and give them the chance to participate. I'm not only the news cycle, but also on the learning curve on what's happening. It might be apps, that might be services, that might be themes, whatever you need as an online seller, not only on Shopify, but also on Amazon and other platforms to stay on top of your game and to implement the latest marketing strategies and tactics so that you can make more money. This is basically the whole concept of the podcast is finding people who have something to share, which I find interesting and which I think also the listeners might find interesting. Now, I need your help there. So if you have topics that we haven't covered yet, Then please reach out to me either on my social channels or via my website, ecommercecoffeebreakpodcast. There's a contact form. And let me know what kind of topics you're interested in. And then I will go and reach out and see if I can find someone out there who's an expert and is willing to hop on the show, have a chat with me so that I can squeeze the latest news out of him. This is a win-win situation for all of the engaged parties. Actually, it's a win-win-win situation. Three wins there. So it's a win for you as a listener, as a viewer. It's a win for the person who's on the show, and it's a win for me because I learn, obviously. And for me, it has become a business. And I want to dive a little bit deeper into this, why I think podcasting is still underrated and why I think podcasting might be even a way for DTC brands out there to reach new customers and to build up a relationship to their customers, specifically to build up a community of customers who then hopefully become returning customers. Now, when I was selling online, DTC, a lot of dropshipping I did until I went actually into product development and we developed our own product. There is, with all costs involved, not that much of a profit margin in there. So depending obviously on the price point of your product, what I see and I saw with a lot of brands that I spoke to, profit margins there are somewhere in the range between 10% and 20% on a good day. And that can be a very risky game, specifically if you take into consideration that ad costs are rising, every other cost is rising, and always import fees are rising. So, your profit margin of 10% can shrink very, very, very quickly. And most ETC businesses out there are cashflow-driven businesses. So, you might run into trouble financially very, very quickly, and the big numbers that you see out there from all these gurus. I'm showing you seven, eight-figure stores. These are revenue numbers. So this is not net profit. And I wonder how many of them are basically just exchanging money left pocket, right pocket. And the profit margins probably are very, very small. So don't get fooled by them. What you see out there, D2C, e-commerce is a very hard business. It's a very, very competitive business. And now a quick break to thank the sponsors of today's episode. Speaker 2: Are you looking to take your business marketing to the next level? Meet Brevo, the all-in-one marketing and CRM platform designed to help you connect with customers, drive engagement, and grow your business. With Brevo, you can manage all your customer interactions in one place, nurture leads through their built-in CRM, reach them through email and SMS, and boost retention with powerful automation efforts. Effortlessly create personalized multi-channel campaigns that ensure every single customer gets the right message at the right time. And that's not all. Bravo offers AI-driven personalization, advanced analytics, seamless integrations, and more, giving you everything you need to market smarter, not harder. Get started for free or use code ECB to save 50% on starter and business plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Head over to bravo.com slash ECB and take your marketing further with Bravo. You will find the link in the show notes. Speaker 1: I did this game, I said, for seven years on Shopify. You see my white hair. There are reasons for that, probably not only because of Shopify. But I found out that I could make podcasting my business so I can make a living out of it. It took me a very, very long time to figure it out. I said, I'm doing this now for 400 episodes for four years. So I'm doing about 100 episodes a year. And it's a hustle, I absolutely admit this, but also it's a lot of fun and it gives me the freedom to work from anywhere in the world. As you know, I'm a slow nomad, which I call myself a slow mad. And I'm working from different countries to stay for a couple of months. And then whenever I have the feeling I want to go somewhere else, I just move over there and stay somewhere else. I've been to 70 countries. I've lived on three continents. And I'm not saying that's to brag, but just to give you the idea that a solopreneur business that is Location independent is doable by running a media platform, by being a content creator. Now, I'm in my 50s, so I'm not a 20-year-old influencer. I've met a lot of them, and I still meet a lot of them at some networking events. So, I have a very strong foundation of building businesses. I have bootstrapped more than one business, and so is the podcast. It took a long time to figure out how to make money with it. Most podcasts out there in the world, and I reckon it's about 95% of all podcasts, are not making any money. And you need to really put it together. So I want to give you a bit of an idea why podcasting is a good idea. A podcast is a marathon. It's not a sprint. You need to stay on it for a long time to build up a community, to build up trust, to have returning listeners, so to say. I'm one of your fans and super fans. And then, obviously, once you have built up this trust, you can start selling through this channel of a podcast. Now, a podcast is the slowest and most difficult of all social media channels out there, but it has really one big advantage over all the other social media channels. A podcast is being listened to while you're driving your car, while you're commuting, while you're doing the dishes, while you're shopping, while you're at the gym. So because of the audio format, people can listen to it wherever they are and if they do something else. With all the other platforms, you need to look at your device, might it be Instagram, Facebook, whatever's out there, YouTube, and you're sort of bound to a device and you can't do much else besides looking at it. So that means I'm in your ear twice a week with my guests. And you can consume our content, our information, whatever we just provide in the show, wherever you are, whatever you do. So, big advantage there of podcast over every other medium, but it's very competitive. So, there is about 4 million, 4.1 million podcasts out there, but only about 10% are active. So, let's say there's about 400,000 podcasts out there who have launched, published an episode in the last 90 days. We launch twice a week, every week, and so there is a high frequency, a high interval. You don't need to do this when you want to start, but if you want to compete in the market, Then you need to be consistent and you need to come up with more content all the time to make the algorithm of Apple podcast, of Spotify, of YouTube happy and get into the rankings over time. Now, the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast by now is number five in FeedSpot's ranking on a global perspective in the Shopify category. It's among the top 5% worldwide over all categories, all topics. And we have a ton of listeners every day. Old episodes are being listened to all the time. But it took a long, long time to get there. The show obviously is run by sponsors, by advertisers, by featured interviews, and a couple of other things that are affiliate marketing. So there are a number of different income streams there to make this possible. And with the podcast goes the newsletter, which also goes out twice a week. The newsletter, again, there is the chance to have ads in there. I have very good brands by now that are using the newsletter to promote their brands to my audience. Again, a lot of content creation there. So, four times a week, we send out either the newsletter or the podcast. And with me, that means by now I'm not a solopreneur anymore. I have a team in the background. They're all freelancers, virtual assistants, so no one is on a contract. But it's a well-oiled machine by now, so it works really, really well. And anyone out there can make this work. So if you have a brand and you sell something and there's a story to what you sell and you can continuously add to this story, then you can look into podcasting. You might do this for free just as a marketing channel to sell more of your products or services. That's one way to do it. Or as I do, you become a content creator and you make this a media business, then you can shift over there. And I just want to give you a number. I'm not giving you my revenue numbers, so I'm just giving you the idea this is by now on its way to a six-figure business, but the profit margin It's far, far higher. So I have profit margins on the podcast that are in the range between 65% and 75% depending on the months. Compare this to your 10% or 20% profit margin and the hustle that you have with the online store. I'm willing to say that this is the more fun business. It depends what you want to do in life. If you want to scale, then an e-commerce store probably is the better way to get to bigger numbers, even with smaller profit margins, depending on the product. I'm at a point in my life where I just want to travel. I want to have location-independent freedom and just want to make enough money to finance all of this of my lifestyle. So, the podcast can do this if that's something you want to do. And I get approached a lot with networking events of people. It's like, how can I do this? And this is why I'm doing this episode today. This is absolutely doable. Podcasting is simple, but it's not easy. So, simple means the technical setup is relatively easy, but you don't need much there. There's a lot of services for editing and whatever you can buy on Upwork or Fiverr to make this work so you don't need to become an editor yourself. And then you can publish your first episode. But again, it's a long-term game. If you're just thinking, I publish 2, 3, 10 episodes and I will get tons of listeners, visitors, and business, you are on the wrong path. So I'm just giving you this as an advice. I don't want to ramble much longer than this. I just wanted to give you an update about the show. So as mentioned, we are approaching episode 400. I have a long list of guests piling up with interviews that I'm doing within the next couple of weeks. I will take off a week myself in June. I do a little bit of traveling and we will stay basically or we'll try, me and my team will try to get better with every episode. We're doing a lot of A-B testing in the background and I hope that you, the listener, still like what we're doing. And as mentioned, I want to motivate you to contact me anytime. I read every email that's coming in and give me your feedback, your ideas, your criticism to make the show bigger and better. And the bigger and better the show is, the more interesting guests I can get on the show. That's it for now. I'll see you in the next episode with my next interview and stay tuned for whatever's coming next. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Speaker 2: Bye-bye. Before you leave, don't forget to visit the sponsor of today's episode. Time to take your marketing to the next level. Bravo is the all-in-one marketing platform that helps you connect with customers through email, SMS, WhatsApp, and automation – all from one easy-to-use platform. Keep your customer data organized, personalize every message, and drive real engagement effortlessly. Try Bravo for free or use eCB to save 50% on starter and business plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Head to bravo.com slash eCB today. You will find the link also in the show notes. Hey, Claus here. Speaker 1: Thank you for joining me on another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. Speaker 2: First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. Speaker 1: It will also make it easier for others to discover the podcast. Speaker 2: Simply like, comment, and subscribe. Speaker 1: Subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. Speaker 2: And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter online seller in just 5 minutes. Speaker 1: We create content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you to stay on top of your e-commerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends twice a week in your inbox, 100% free. Speaker 2: Join now at newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. Speaker 1: That's newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Speaker 2: Have a good one.