121: Twenty-First Century Publishing: Hook Into Social Media, Get Targeted Traffic, and Monetize a Podcast with Naresh Vissa

Robert Plank: My guest today is Naresh Vissa, and he's the author of Fifty Shades of Marketing: Whip Your Business Into Shape & Dominate Your Competition, and Podcastnomics: The Book of Podcasting to Make You Millions. Naresh, welcome to the show, I'm glad to have you here.

Naresh Vissa: Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be on.

Robert Plank: Could you tell us what it is that you do and what makes you different and special.

Naresh Vissa: I am a publisher by background, and a lot of people Robert don't really quite understand what that means when I tell them I'm a financial publisher. It's like, what is that? Really what I do is I use the online and digital world to sell information, whether it's investment information, financial information, personal financial information, or even books. I have a book publishing division. That's what I do, so my skillset is very, very strong in the online and digital marketplace. My company, Krish Media & Marketing, it's one of the companies that I have. We provide an array of online and digital marketing, and just general digital services for small businesses.

This is what I call Robert the 21st century economy, because what I do, I'm a publisher, and as an online business person, this job wasn't around 15 years ago, or 20 years ago. It's a 21st century job.

Robert Plank: Okay, and what you do exactly. You said you have your books and you have products and things. Is that right? What exactly is it that you've been putting out recently?

Naresh Vissa: Yeah, so the the Krish Media Marketing side, we help existing businesses improve their bottom lines through the online and digital world. That could be we offer services as simple as web design, web development. Some more complex things like Google AdWords, pay per click, affiliate marketing, copyrighting, etc.

Now on the publishing side, I said I'm a publisher. What we do is we sell investment research to individuals, so let's say Robert, for example, you don't want to put your money with a financial advisor, or a money manager, who's going to manage all your money. Instead, you can subscribe to our services, and we'll tell you exactly what to do with your money. We'll tell you what companies to buy, when to buy, what to sell, when to sell, what to short, when to go long. We provide economic analysis, and other insights so that our subscribers have a very firm grasp, and also total control over their money. These are subscription products that we sell.

Two of my companies that do this, one is called Money Ball Economics, and the other one is called Normandy Investment Research. Normandy Investment Research focuses on options trading, and Money Ball Economics, is more for beginners, so beginner and intermediate type of traders and investors. Those are subscription products that we sell, and again, my skillset in the online and digital world helps me sell these products. It helps me find leads, market to them, and funnel them through our processes.

Robert Plank: Well cool, so you said that this is a job that didn't exist 20 years ago, so can you tell us how you came across this, and how you developed the skills? I mean, how your even discovered the need for this kind of thing?

Naresh Vissa: It happened completely by chance, Robert. I didn't grow up telling people I want to grow up to become a financial publisher. It kind of just fell in my lap, while I was in graduate school, actually, the leading financial publishing company in the world, at the time, contacted me because they found me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one social media platform that I've been, I don't want to say very active, but I've had a presence for almost 10 years now, and even though I'm not super active on it, LinkedIn is very similar to Yelp, where if people type in a few key words, they can find you, and find out all about you.

In the case of LinkedIn, I had a full profile, and this company was looking for someone who had a very similar skillset. That skillset happened to be someone with a media background, and someone with a financial background, all in one. They typed in a few key words, they found me, they contacted me, and they asked if I could consult to start a new project for them. This was while I was still in graduate school, and when I was a consultant to help launch a new project for them. Keep a long story short, the project went well. They wanted me to take over the project after I graduated which I did, and that was my entry into the financial publishing space, because of this company that recruited me. If that did not happen, then there's a very, very good chance I wouldn't be talking to you today, and I would be working in a corporate function.

Robert Plank: Interesting, and so it all happened because they made that one connection. They found you in that one place on LinkedIn from the key word search.

Naresh Vissa: Exactly.

Robert Plank: That's crazy, and that's one of those things, I mean even like five years ago, or so, I was trying to get a house sold over in Nevada, about a five hour drive away, and the realtor was doing all listings, like putting a video of the home on YouTube, and posts on Facebook, and there were four cash offers for the house, and one of the offers came from just posting on Facebook. Even though that was pretty recent, five years ago, I was pretty blown away, like with your story, just having something online, not even having it very well marketed, or having a lot of traffic, or even very well refined, but just having something online. It seems like if you just make this one connection, it can lead to all these extra things.

Naresh Vissa: Yes, absolutely. I tell people all the time some of my friends who are still trying to find their way in the corporate world, or trying to develop a career, they refuse to get on LinkedIn, because they say, oh it's not going to help me. But you can't look at it that way. You have to look at is it going to hurt you. You might think that it's not going to help you, but it's not going to hurt, either. I only see platforms like LinkedIn or Yelp if you're a small business, a brick and mortar type of retail business. Those only start to help you. They're really platforms for people to find you, and to give you business, or to give you opportunities. I lay out actually in my book Fifty Shades of Marketing, I lay out why LinkedIn, and Yelp and a few other platforms, why it's so important to have a presence on them.

Robert Plank: Let's unpack that a little bit. Could you tell us about your Fifty Shades of Marketing book.

Naresh Vissa: My book, it's called Fifty Shades of Marketing: Whip Your Business Into Shape and Dominate Your Competition. It was an Amazon number one best selling book. Sales have been pretty good. It's really a primer on 21st century online and digital marketing. The feedback has been really awesome, because it covers everything you need to know about marketing, step-by-step. Again, concepts as simple as what direct marketing is, what direct response marketing is, why email marketing is the most effective type of marketing, the importance of an email list. It also walks you through the basics, like how to build a simple website, how to set up an email list. What is affiliate marketing? How do you calculate customer lifetime value? How does mobile tie into 21st century marketing, and then social media? It covers anything and everything. I even have a chapter on advertising on porn sites is a cost effective ROI driven endeavor.

Robert Plank: We can't just mention that and just leave that hanging, so could you unpack that a little bit? Can you tell us, I'm really curious, I'm no sure how far we can go with it, but how the heck do you make money, get traffic from porn sites. I got to hear this one.

Naresh Vissa: All right, so this has actually been a very, very popular chapter, because people are like, whoa. Let's face it, porn is a very, very popular niche, and to give you a statistic, 30% of all internet traffic goes to pornography, or other sexual material, so to put that number into context. Okay, 30%, what does that mean? It was actually the Huffington Post that reported that more people visit porn sites than they do Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined, so combined. That means there's a lot of traffic going to pron sites.

Now, what's the opportunity here? The opportunity is advertising on a porn site is 1/10th the cost, even though the traffic is a lot higher, it's still 1/10th the cost of advertising on mainstream channel, or mainstream online channels such as Google AdWords or Facebook, so this is a pretty good opportunity. You've got very high traffic, low cost. Now why don't people do this more? Because it's boring, and there's a stigma attached to advertising on porn sites. That's the gist of the chapter. In the book, I include a case sturdy of the a food delivery company, so again, this was not a company that had anything to do with sex or porn, but they found creative ways to tie their advertising campaigns, and give it a sexual twist. They were selling sandwiches, but they were able to be creative and advertise on porn sites, and it grew their business tremendously, and I lay out that case study in the book.

Robert Plank: That's pretty crazy, so are you talking about banners ads, or free rule ads, or all of the above?

Naresh Vissa: Yes, so to give you an idea, banners on individual video pages on porn sites, or sorry on individual video pages rather than the home page of a porn site, performed remarkably better than the home page, and that's largely because when people go to porn sites, they're not there to look up the home page, they're there to watch videos. The big take away is that banners on these sites have worked extremely well, even better than email marketing. Most cases email marketing is most effective, but in the case of porn, you have to remember people are there for a reason. They're there to essentially watch videos, and they're not going to waste their time reading any emails or grow in through the home page. People are strict business there.

Robert Plank: I mean, that's pretty crazy, but I always like stuff like that. I always like stuff that's a little different than the tired old traffic methods people are using. I like that, that's real, because how many times have we heard stuff like, well just make a website, just optimize for SCO, and that's pretty cool, and I like that it wasn't even anything sex related. They connected it like you said, but just a simple sandwich company getting traffic from that interesting new method that you have there.

Naresh Vissa: Right, exactly. And again, to talk about qualification, porn sites have very engaging users. They're not visiting them by accident, whereas you might accidentally click a Google ad, or a Facebook ad, and then you'll immediately bounce off the page. Instead, the people who visit porn sites, they're visiting there for a reason, and so the quality of the traffic is relatively high. Actually, probably higher than any other type of site on the internet. Bounce rates are low, and session lengths are a little over 15 minutes, so you know that when you advertise on such a medium, you know what you're getting. You're going to get a very attentives probably male, who's going to stick around for about 15 minutes, which is unheard of on the internet.

Robert Plank: Right, that's silly by also crazy. I really like that technique there, so you have that book. You have Firth Shades of Marketing, and then I understand you have another book about podcasting. Is that right?

Naresh Vissa: Yeah, so that was my first book that I came out with, called Podcastnomics: The Book Of Podcasting To Make You Millions, and it is again, another primer, this time on all about podcasting, from its history, what it is, how to start a podcast. The necessary software you need to start it, and most importantly, this is what most training courses and sessions don't do, but what my book does do, and that's how to monetize a podcast. How to actually make money from it.

Robert Plank: Can you walk us through that really quickly. What are the steps, or what are the ways that you listen in this book about how to monetize a podcast?

Naresh Vissa: There are three primary revenue drivers for monetizing a podcast, and to give people a background on why am I qualified to write a book on this or to talk about this. I mentioned earlier about the company that found me on LinkedIn, and asked me to start a new division for them. That division was actually an online radio podcasting network, and it consisted of just a bunch of business and financial shows. Now what we were able to accomplish there by the time it was all said and done, that station was called the Santeria Radio Network, and out of the sense of all to be called the Choose Yourself network. James Altuchera, if your listeners, are familiar with him, he's now running it.

Anyway, there are three primary revenue drivers in properly monetizing a podcast, and this is what I learned while I was starting up this division. The first revenue driver is the old school, 20th century advertising model. This is something that I don't recommend because advertising has changed so much. In the 20th century, you workday was very difficult to track the return that you were getting on advertising, but now you can track exactly how many times someone listens to an ad, or clicks or visits a website. You have all this data available to you and as a result, advertising has been going down, or advertising dollars have been going down. This is evidenced by mainstream media, and how much they're struggling, newspapers, and television stations, trust real radio, all struggling because they're ad based models.

When it comes to podcasting, you can certainly make money off advertising, and I'd say go for it, but that shouldn't be your primary source of revenue. You're going to be sadly disappointed if that's the case.

The second revenue driver is selling an existing product, so that means using the podcast as a lead generator to sell an existing product. In our case back when we got started, we were selling financial research, so we knew that okay, we're going to funnel people in, and our end goal is to sell them our research. We funneled people in by being on all the major podcast distributors, iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, our website. You name it, we grew our listenership. We ran campaigns. We ran discounted offers to our listeners so that they could subscribe to our research, and that ended up being the primary source of revenue, so it's just really another lead generating tactic.

The third way to monetize a podcast is through premium content, so that means creating a pay wall to offer your free stuff, which is available on iTunes, and your website, and all those other places, but coming out with a paid product, where people pay, in our case, they were paying something like $5 to $10 a month. It wasn't expensive at all. Again, because it's recurring, that comes out to about $60 to $120 a year, so let's just say $100 a year, which was more expensive than some or our products that we were offering for $39 a year, or $49 a year. Anyway, we came out with this premium content that people subscribed to, and what they got in return was special type of content that they could share with the listeners. It has to be worthwhile for the listener to get them to subscribe.

We have three different revenue drivers, and now when I consult with the various clients, and podcasts to get them started or to turn things around, those are the tree revenue drivers that I tell them to keep in mind, advertising, selling an existing product, and premium content.

Robert Plank: Awesome, and what I like about what you've shared with us today, is it seems like it's all based on your own experiences, and your own case studies, and you deleted the things that didn't work out of all the noise, and just taught just the proven methods that you know, whether you're talking about, like you said, LinkedIn, Yelp, podcasting, advertising on porn sites, just a whole family of different things. As we're winding this down, could you tell us, as far as the clients you've helped and businesses you've grown, and things like that, when people are trying to grow their business, get some traffic, get some eyeballs, what's the number one mistake you see these businesses making?

Naresh Vissa: The biggest mistake, biggest, biggest one, without a doubt, Robert, is failing to capture traffic, failing to capture traffic. They might get a good amount of traffic on their website, or podcast, or whatever it is, they might get lots of listeners, or hits, and all that. The problem is they're not capturing that traffic you need to capture it so that you can continue that dialog. You can continue that relationship moving forward, and it's not just a first date. It's not just a one and done thing, and the way to capture that traffic, there's no better way to do that, than by collecting their email address. That's a huge problem I've noticed. The podcasters, the media companies, the newspapers. People like their stuff, but they're not capturing that traffic. It's so, so important to do that because that opens up a world of endless possibilities, and opportunities.

Robert Plank: Everyone has an email address, right. I mean, as much as Facebook and Twitter, and all those social platforms are gaining all this traction, there's still more people with an email address, than people with a Facebook account, right?

Naresh Vissa: Yes, absolutely email, everyone has an email address. People say that email is dying. Right now it's still very prevalent. A lot of businesses don't do email. People don't like to be called anymore, so don't call them, instead you can email them. Ten years from now, things could be completely different, and my prediction is things will be completely different, just like ten years ago, there was no Facebook. There was but it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today. There was not Uber. There weren't so many things around that are so prevalent today, but right now, email is still king.

Robert Plank: Cool, I mean the old tried and true stuff works, but there's still lots of exciting things coming up ahead in marketing, for sure. Could you share with us about where people can go and buy your books, and which websites of you're they can go to to find out more about you and buy a bunch of stuff from you hopefully.

Naresh Vissa: My name is Naresh Vissa, website, NareshVissa.com. People can subscribe to my free newsletter, there where I send out tips an tricks on online and digital business, the marketplace. You can also check out KrishMediaMarketing.com. That's my online business consultancy, and agency. We work with a variety of businesses, to help them with any online or digital need, and if you want to contact me, you can visit those sites, and get my email address or contact me through the pages there.

I thank you for your time Robert. It's been a great, great interview.

Robert Plank: Awesome, it's been an entertaining, and an educational conversation, so I'm really glad that you were able to drop some knowledge bumps with us. Thanks for doing that.

Naresh Vissa: No problem Robert, it was a pleasure.