Finding Your Voice: Why Podcasting Became a Power Tool for Modern Advisors

Welcome to "Behind the Advisor" with XYPN, your behind-the-scenes look at the challenges and victories fee-only advisors encounter as they launch, run, and grow their independent firms. Join us for a deep dive into real-life stories, frontline insights, and the actionable strategies it takes to build a thriving, purpose-driven term-- firm on your terms.

Alan: Today, we're joined by Mike Langford, founder and CEO of PodBox and host of the "Modern Financial Advisor" podcast. Mike sits at the intersection of financial services and digital marketing, with more than two decades of experience, both as an advisor as well as helping other advisors adapt to how people actually connect and learn today.

This episode isn't about podcasting as a tactic. It's about podcasting as a stage, a way for advisors to find their voice, grow personally and professionally, and build trust at scale. Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being on

Mike: Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to see you again. Last time we saw each other, we were in person here in Austin, Texas

Alan: It's true. So we did an interview where I was a guest on your podcast, there at XYPN LIVE back in September. excited to have you on, as a guest on, on our podcast to be able to share, your story and expertise, particularly as it relates to podcasting and how that's, you have, your hands in a lot of different pots it seems, but all connecting up to this sort of general theme around podcasts.

I'm excited to learn more.

Mike: I'm thrilled as well. Thrilled as well. So let's get into it. Let's do it

Alan: So I guess let's set the stage for listeners. tell me a little bit about, or I guess sort of high level where your time is spent today, like where your focus is, and then we'll go back on a little bit more of the career journey and kinda how you

Mike: Sure. So I own two companies. You mentioned PodBox, right? PodBox is, at the moment, primarily sending fully assembled microphone setups to podcast guests so they sound their best, right? We s- we started that because we run a company called Finser Marketing, which produces high-quality podcasts, audio and video, and high-quality webinars for companies in the fintech and financial services space.

so we found that we wanna make sure that people sound great when they are on our show, and it saves us a lot of time on the back end. As you can, you might imagine, when you have somebody show up and they don't sound good, a lot of editing work goes on

Alan: So talk to me about your sort of journey- into financial services. Is this where you started your career or did you have a career before the career kind of thing?

Mike: Yeah. I started in financial services actually when I was in college, believe it or not. I started answering phones for a company called BFDS, Boston Financial Data Services,

and they basically had a lot of outsourced, transfer agency stuff for mutual fund companies. So I worked the 4:00 to midnight shift answering phones for Warburg Pincus Funds, and a whole bunch of others, right?

So if you called at 7:00 at night and you wanted to get the closing price or have somebody send you a prospectus or something, chances are you were talking to me back then. and then when I got out of school, started working for a variety of financial firms. I worked for Pioneer Mutual Funds, now it's called The Pioneer Group.

I worked for Fidelity Investments and State Street Corporation as well. And then around 2006, I left Fidelity and started my own RIA, just clean, green, kinda like you guys help people do at XYPN, but long before there was an XYPN, right?

Alan: Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, what led you to launch your own firm? 'Cause, especially then, there were very limited support systems out there. You really had to figure it all out for yourself. Not that it is easy today. We like to say we don't make it easy, we just try to make it easier.

but, that was a heck of a leap that you made. So can you just talk about that decision?

Mike: Yeah, for sure. So I, yeah, I come from a little bit of an entrepreneurial background. My mom owned a floral business when I was a kid, and my first business ever was while I was in college. I started an auto detailing business. I just started shampooing and buffing people's cars and so forth.

So I always had a little bit of the bug. I was the same type of kid who was mowing lawns and shoveling driveways and that type of jazz. And, I kinda had a little bit of a big corporate life. And aro- at two thou- in 2006, my son was, closing in on two years old, and it was one of those deals where, I don't know how, if you've ever felt this way, but you feel like you want to do something, to create something, to show your kids that they can go chase their dreams a little bit.

I know it sounds hokey, but that was a big part of the motivation, right? obviously you think, "I can make more money, have more control over my life," all those types of things. Yes, of course, there's risk baked into it. I didn't really-- for me, I didn't really think about the risk 'cause it's like you can always go work for a big co again.

There's always another job, that type of deal. So yeah, just jumped in

Alan: So then what led you down the path of, observing marketing? it looks like that was in 2013, so call it seven years after you launched your firm. What, sort of led there?

Mike: So this is gonna take a couple of quick jumps. I'll go through it relatively quickly. But, so I, when I started my firm, my RIA, I had no money for marketing, right? And so I wanted to get out there, gotta get the word out. I was doing the chamber of commerce, type of stuff as everybody does, shaking hands, kissing babies type of stuff in the real world.

Started a newsletter. Back then, this is, newsletters were relatively new. Constant Contact is what I was using. So I'd meet you, you'd get on my newsletter list telling you like, a quick little read about what's happening in the world every week. And then I heard about this thing called podcasting.

I'm like, "That's interesting." So not only could people read about me, I could get my voice out there, and that... Back then it was only audio. So I went and bought a microphone, bought a Mac to record, one of those little blue snowball microphones that people have seen. Started recording a weekly podcast, and it was like 10 minutes.

It would just be this quick little update. It was just me. There was no guest, no nothing. And I'd send that out along with the newsletter. But I needed to learn more. I didn't know anything about this. I was on LinkedIn, and I'm a relatively early user on LinkedIn. I'm like one of the first 179,000 users on LinkedIn.

Just happened to be there early. So I knew the power of social media and whatever, so I'm like, "I gotta go find some seminars or conferences about podcasting stuff." And I Googled it, and sure enough, there's this thing called PodCamp. and it is as nerdy as it sounds. but it was happening in Boston at the convention center where I lived.

So I'm like, "I'm gonna go to this convention center. I'm gonna learn about podcasting." And it was way more than that. And somebody said, "Hey, while you're here, our Twitter handle is this. The hashtag is this." Whatever. So I joined Twitter that day. This is October of 2007. so I'm starting to get into all this social media stuff.

I'm learning about blogging and a few months goes by and I recognize, oh, this is a major shift in the world.

This is a major shift that people are now starting to embrace social media. One of my clients, Aaron, sent me an email, and I look, and it's, has, he has his Twitter handle in the email signature.

I'm like, that's just idiotic." I have his cell phone number. I have his email. I have connected with him on LinkedIn. Why would I need this thing called Twitter? I don't even know how that works. But I clicked into it, and he had 600 followers. This is early 2008. And then I Google him, and I see all this Twitter stuff.

I'm like, "Oh my God, Twitter is like Google juice," right? no way. I

Alan: Yeah, it was a big dri- it was a big SEO driver. I think it still is, but not, quite how it was

Mike: So I'm like, I'll start using this thing." And relatively early on, I just realized that I... This might be a lightning in the bottle opportunity here to jump... 'Cause I was really mad, and, maybe some folks in the audience can feel this way.

Every once in a while you see a wave, and then you realize you kinda missed it, right? So some people might think of that with crypto, they might think of it- that was, social. They might think of that with wireless or whatever. For me, it was the early days of the internet. I'm old enough to remember the dot com revolution, right?

And I was in graduate school when the peak of that was happening, and I was so mad when I graduated in '01 that it, the bubble had burst, that I'm like, "I'm never missing this again. I'm gonna jump on something if I see something." So I started a company it-- fast-forward to 2008, I'm like, "This Twitter thing's working, this social thing's working, but it's-- I, I need to fix it," because back then, each tweet was like a standalone thing.

There was no fully threaded... You couldn't see the full conversation underneath a tweet. I'm like, "We should fix that." And also, this hashtag thing is annoying because hashtags take up part of my 140 characters. So we created something called TweetWorks, which was the first fully threaded conversation platform for Twitter.

And it al- instead of hashtags, you could use hashtags, but we created groups. So j- it's very similar to if you've been on Threads right now, it's very similar to that. There's a character limit, sure, but you can categorize what you're talking about, right? Instead of it taking up part of your tweet, your thing, and you can see the full conversation underneath it.

So I was there. I parked my RIA. I'm like, "This is my entrepreneurial journey. I wanna be in this space." So I still have the RIA, still manage some clients, but my main focus was on that. Ran that for a couple of years, then ran out of money after the financial crisis. got to the end of 2010 and I was like, "Man, I need to do something else.

I need to shut this thing down." And anybody who's been an entrepreneur, that does stink when you realize, "This is it. I gotta go do something else." So I was sitting there, I'm like, "Listen, I've got a wealth of financial services experience. I have got a lot of history and experience in, social," and there's, there, there weren't that many people in the world that existed that looked like me at that point in time.

So then I found this company, called Socialware, which was the first company to make it possible for financial advisors to use social media and do that compliantly, so they can have everything archived, supervisable and so forth. And so I got recruited to be the head of strategy for that company.

And then a lot of other startups, like my startup, that company didn't work out. So at the end of that, I was like, "Oh, this stinks." And but a lot of the cl- same clients, the Morgan Stanleys of the world and o- other firms that we were working with were like, "Mike, can you continue to work with us? We need your help.

We need your guidance and consulting and so forth." So I started FinServ Marketing as a consulting company. That was it for the most part, and it was all digital marketing, social media consulting in the financial services space, particularly with organizations that have lots of financial advisors.

And then over time, I started realizing that part of that should be podcasts, right? So right around, geez, 2012, 2013, we launched a podcast for one of our clients, and that led to another podcast, having a CEO of another company on that podcast as a guest, and that kind of thing snowballed from there.

And so everything just pivoted to, that's what we do now, podcasts

Alan: Okay. Thank you for the background. That's super helpful as, obviously I'm a huge fan of podcasts, which we'll talk more about, I'll share a little bit about our journey and how that kind of inter- y- just with the podcast, how that has impacted us. But I, I guess when you're sitting down with an advisor and they say "Hey, you do this podcast thing.

Is this really for me?" How do you approach that conversation? Is podcasting something that all advisors should be doing? Is this just one option of many that they should be considering? Like, how should advisors be thinking about podcasting in your opinion?

Mike: That's a great question. And I think that the answer to that is the same for every business, right? but for advisors in particular, it's really important in my opinion, right? Everyone you want to reach and influence is listening to podcasts regularly. So every demographic you're trying to reach and influence is consuming podcasts.

Whether they think they're consuming it as a podcast or not, they are, right? People who watch a lot of YouTube shows that they can subscribe to, those are basically podcasts. Anything you can subscribe to and get a regular feed of that content is effectively a podcast. YouTube is now the number one podcasting platform on the internet, right?

So bigger than Apple Podcasts, bigger than Spotify and so forth, and over a billion people watch podcasts every month. So right there just tells you like, hey, this is how people prefer to consume content. So if you're thinking about reaching and influence- influencing clients, prospects, referral partners, members of the talent pool, we know that this is a preferred medium of consuming content.

So that's one of the things I tell people, like you want to put your content in a way that your audience wants to receive it. A lot of people get uncomfortable with it though, as not every advisor is outgoing and looking to get in front of the camera and the microphone.

I joke with everybody like, "You will stink at first. You will sound terrible. You will hear your voice and go, 'I don't like the way I sound. I don't like the way I look.'" I did that. Everybody has that moment, so it's okay, by the way, to stink at something at first. Put yourself out there, right?

But it goes to something else I think that's deeper, going back to when I shared the story of why I started my podcast, my first one back in 2007 Your voice is received differently than just print, right? And especially today, if you're considering working with somebody, one of the things you're gonna do is go out to see if there's some validators out there.

They'll come to your website, they'll go to LinkedIn, they'll go whatever, and they're gonna hear you. They wanna see what you sound right? And it feeds into those core things that every business owner's ever heard, right? People do business with those they know, and trust, right? But they also need two other things.

I need to feel familiar with you. I need to see some familiarity, some frequency of cont- content, and I also need to feel like you're competent. Show me, you know what you're doing, and one of the best ways to do it is to talk about a subject that's relevant to your business and relevant to me

Alan: Yeah, your point about YouTube being the largest podcasting platform is really interesting to me because, one of the advantages of podcasting, and really that I think it, has this advantage that really no other platform or marketing channel has, and that's the time within time concept.

when I'm running, I'm not watching a video on YouTube while I'm, like, running down the street, right? I'm not reading a blog post while I'm driving, hopefully. but podcasts are something that we consume just because we can do it a little bit more passively. We can do it from an audi- aud- auditory perspective.

but, you're really-- That, in talking about YouTube, it expands beyond that. Do you see there being a couple of, I don't know, lanes of podcast in that sense? And, how should advisors be thinking about how to approach a podcast with these sorts of various options?

Mike: So there's a couple of ways to unpack that question. one is I wanna, feed into your observation there that, this is a zero net time activity for your audience members, meaning that they listen to it while they're doing something else, right?

I also layer in their podcasts are pausable, right? So when I'm listening to a podcast when I walk the dog in the morning, as an example, every morning I walk my dog, I'm usually listening to a podcast. When I get home, I pause it. I've got other things to do. If I get into my car, guess what? Spotify is right there in my car picking up where I left off when I want to listen to it and that type of thing.

Or I can jump to another thing and I can come back, right? So it's pausable. It's also crazy, you can speed it up. You can do 1X, 2X, whatever. You can be one of those

Alan: I am not a 2X guy. I don't understand. People are like, "Oh, I listen to this on 2X." I'm like, "How? I can barely process at one."

Mike: Yeah. But people rip through things. And also, it's on the YouTube side, and this is actually true now on podcasts and the audio players, now you have chapters. So let's just say we're having this conversation. If somebody wants to just jump to the section where we get to the how-to fact- whatever, and they click into a how-to section, they can jump right to it and get just what they want, right?

So they really are becoming awesome- awesome tools in that manner. So, your question about lanes, I think is the way you asked it, about, what kind of lanes of podcasts. So there's a couple. There might be more than a couple, but the couple that I see that work really well. So one is what we're doing right now.

Th- this is my favorite kind, the interview-style podcast, right? It's actually also one of the easiest ones to do, right? Because it's not all the work is on you as the speaker. You bring somebody on who's interesting, right? And have a conversation with them about something that you think will be interesting for your audience, right?

So I always tell people, "Guess who you should have on your show?" Clients, prospects, referral partners, members of your team, right? That, that, that talent pool. That's the same people who are your audience, right? Have those people on. Have clients on. Now, one question you'll hear advisors ask is wait a minute.

I, Testimonials and all that type of stuff, we don't have to talk about why they think you're a great financial advisor. We can talk about their lives, right? So especially if you have a niche, right? They're-- You're focused on tech entrepreneurs in the Austin, Texas area, for instance. Great.

Have them on. "Hey, we're talking tech here in Austin, Texas. Today we've got Alan Moore on, and we're talking about day, So we're showcasing the client. We're showcasing the guests and so forth. So there's two goals there, right? I'm sh- I wanna give you a stage. I have this stage that's open 24/7, 365, and has global reach.

Let me invite you to be on it with me. I get you a platform that's great. You feel great as a client, as a prospect. And then also my audience gets some value out of this as well, right? And so we're showcasing that way. The other type of show that we see pretty frequently is the educational show, right?

And I always talk about podcasts, and this is true for any other content, there's four E's, right? evangelism first, right? Spreading the good word, getting good ideas out into people, right? So this is more than thought leadership. This is trying to get people to believe in ideas and talk about those ideas with your audience.

Education, this is a big one. You see a lot of people take the educational approach with their podcast, and that's awesome. You can talk about all the things you've had conversations about. Roth conversions. Great. That can be a podcast episode, right? When to do it, how much to do it, all that type of stuff.

engagement, right? I wanna engage with my audience. I wanna have some interactivity. And then of course, the fourth E being entertainment. make it fun.

Alan: Yeah, p- and I'm, certainly biased because podcasting is my preferred marketing medium, but it does seem of some of the other ones, like social has always felt, in the pre-AI world, this sort of like almost like personality or, need to be f- witty, funny. There was this engagement personality you needed to have.

To be good at blogging, you have to be a good writer, which most of us are not. Video is its own, sort of skill set to be great in front of a camera. And, I do think podcasting, at least for me, was like the lowest barrier of entry in terms of, okay, I don't need to go, take acting classes to be successful.

I just need to just, to your point, just find interesting people and have interesting conversations, and share that with others. And do you-- what do you feel like is, especially in the sort of world of AI, like going forward, what do you feel is the, the next evolution for podcasts?

You mentioned chapters, which is interesting 'cause it, the line between audiobooks and podcasts has gotten really blurry. It used to be really clear what you were doing. Now, I listen to a podcast that does three and a half, four-hour episodes, and it's basically like reading a book once a month in the way that it's done.

So I'm just curious how you're seeing that evolve and how that may impact advisors' decisions, to jump in and, Yeah. so we're getting to an interesting place, and maybe, you and members of the audience can, really appreciate this, where w- we're already starting to recognize what's AI and what's not, and people say, eventually the lines are gonna be blurred and you won't be able to tell the difference."

Mike: The-- Then people are gonna start potentially coming off of social media, right? If I go there and all I know is this AI slope, and I n- I know nothing is real, and none of this is actually real and interactive, I might not wanna be there anymore. So this is where podcasts can really help, right?

And by the way, not all podcasts have to just be recorded, edited, and posted. You can do live stream podcasts and then take that live stream, take the recording afterwards, and share it as well. But when I can recognize this, it is a real world conversation between two human beings, and I can hear you, I know it's you, what a difference, right?

and if you think about going to the foundational principles, like why does anybody choose you to be their financial advisor? it's not because of your products and it's not because of your pricing, right? Every other financial advisor out there has the same access to the stocks, bonds, mutual funds, insurance products that you have.

They have about the same pricing, and they offer about the same services, right? So they're choosing you because of you. They like you. I met Alan. I looked into his eyes. I hear his voice. Something about Alan gives me the sleep at night factor and the confidence that my financial life is going to be good, right?

And hearing your voice, seeing your face routinely, having that opportunity to interact with you is just a wonderful way to bring that home. Now, AI can support your show. One of the things we do, so if you were coming on my show, Alan, one of the things we would do would be, okay, I'd take Alan's LinkedIn. I would take, I'd go get a couple podcasts that I know he's been on. I'd get his website, and then I would have a couple of things that I took some notes on a prep call that we had, and I would fire it into AI going, "Okay, I wanna have five or six good conversation starters based on everything I've just given you."

And it gives me a great roadmap. It's helped me with the research, right? Then after a show, we get a transcript of the show. We run that through AI that we've trained as well to help us create blog posts for the show, right? So one recording, one half an hour to hour recording creates multiple marketing assets.

It creates an audio podcast episode, a full-length video episode. It creates social media clips, like several clips from the show that we can use, and it creates a blog post, an email that we can send out that s- that says, "Hey, on the latest episode of whatever show, we had Alan on. Here we go."

Alan: So it, it does seem like with technology it is, I guess make-- it should, I would hope it should be amplifying the sort of reach of podcasts to your point, because it, creating the content's the hard part. coming up with the 32 different ways to use the podcast should be the easy part, but that's the part most of us skip.

So are there new tools coming out that sort of do everything you were just talking about in one place? Or am I, are you having to train your own GPT and have all these sorts of various things out there? I'm just curious how consolidated -

Mike: Yeah. There are new tools and it's every day, right? with AI you're getting a new thing. So for instance, I just got an email today. We use a, a-- One of the tools we use is called Descript. And it allows you to edit a podcast very similar to editing a Word document if you wanna do that.

You can go in and grab the sentence and delete it, and it'll delete that section of the audio and the video, those types of things. It's not great if you're doing super high-end performance st- like you're producing stuff, but there's a lot of benefits, so we still do use it. but they're getting some cloud integration, which is really neat.

And people are getting more comfortable with that stuff. People are getting more comfortable with going in and typing in human language type descriptions of what they want done to something, and then having it transformed. So we are seeing that. There are some tools we're using. One of the things that's been wonderful has been AI improvement of audio.

I mentioned earlier that we created PodBox to send out microphones so people sounded better, and we still do that because it's way better than smaller microphones that are like in your earbuds. But occasionally somebody will have some background noise that the microphone is picking up, and it used to be a lot more work to get that out.

Now it's a lot easier. They have what's called voice isolation. So it used to be you'd try to train a tool to listen to, this is what background noise sounds like, find more of that, and get rid of that. Now you s- it just says, "This is a human voice speaking. Drop everything else." And it's really cool.

It's really neat. but yeah, like I say, leverage, leverage the tools that you have. Don't get overwhelmed with them, though. The general thing is you're creating a product. It's... You don't have to overthink it. You gotta-- What's the idea for the show? I usually say have a prep, have some sort of prep session with your guest, right?

At least 15 minutes to talk about what you're gonna talk about. Make sure they can get on Zencastr, which is what we're using here, or Riverside or whatever platform you're using. Make sure everybody's all set up. Schedule your time to record. Have some sort of doc, high-level outline of what you're gonna talk about.

Record, take it, edit it any way you want, and get it published, right? Relatively easy. It's like producing a product, right? And then promote it

Alan: Yeah, I, we launched this podcast back in 2015, and it took me almost a year to do it because I didn't know anything about audio editing, and I knew I wasn't going to learn. That is, anyone who knows me knows I, that was gonna happen, one time and then it was gonna be done. and I remember I went to f- two or three different conferences, and I remember going to FinCon, the financial bloggers conference, and just saying "Does anyone do this?"

And everyone with a podcast is "Oh no, it's so easy. You just need these 14 different tools and all these editing skills." I'm like, like you're spending eight hours? what are you doing?" Like I, I don't, I just don't have that time. And I ended up at the Podcast Movement conference, which I don't even know if it's still going on.

I think it is. and happened to find someone who provided, who provided a similar service to what you're providing now, which was just like, it was more turnkey. And so for advisors out there, I do think podcasting is, is, can be challenging to get into because of the unknown of all these various things.

And so that's where services like yours are coming in, and just making it so that, we can show up and do the part that we're necessary for, which is interviewing, and let the rest of it get handled by

experts.

Mike: It's funny to build on that. Alan, one of our clients once said, "You know what I love about this? I don't have to do any work." He's "Do you know how long it used to take me to write a blog post? I would spend six hours, writer's block, rewording, researching, all this type of stuff."

He's "With these podcasts, I just show up. We've got an outline, you ask a bunch of questions, and I'm good. I'm gone." And then the editing takes care of itself, right? So not everybody's gonna be in that situation. If you're a solo advisor, you're gonna be the chief cook and bottle washer, you're gonna be doing a lot of the things yourself.

So there are certain things you may have to decide, "All right, I'm either gonna pay somebody else to do the editing, or I'm gonna set up pre-production in such a way," meaning planning, right? "So that when I get my recordings, there's not much editing to be done after the fact." And so you can be cautious of that.

The other thing, as I mentioned earlier, you can go live. "Hey, we're gonna have a live on Zoom," on whatever you do, and click the record button. And when it's... After it's done streaming live, you now have a full product. And if you're okay with the ums and the uhs and the occasional "Hold on, let me take a drink from my Yeti," whatever, that's okay, by the way. And in, in fact, some of that's valuable because the p- your audience is looking for you to be a human, right? They want to interact with you

Alan: So when we talk about podcasting, obviously, for advisors, getting new clients is top of the list probably of reasons that they would, they would be interested in starting a podcast, investing the time. So that area is known. What would you say are some of the other benefits of getting into podcasting as a medium for advisors?

Mike: One of the things, and it does, is related to winning new business, is you're gonna get better at your pitch. And that sounds really interesting to say, but, look man, the more you say the things that are important to your business, like as an example, I, I gave you my four E's, right?

Evangelism, education, e- engagement, and entertainment. I've got to know you, like you, trust you, plus I've said those things a lot, right? Over time, I've gotten better at them. As I'm talking and interacting with people, your brain's kind of firing on a new level.

I've got to find a way of articulating this so that it makes sense, of simplifying things. You will start doing that better. You'll notice little things, and I g- you'll cringe, of course, as we were talking about earlier. The first time you hear your voice, you're like, "Ugh, I don't like the way I sound."

But you'll also notice, "Oh man, I use a lot of ums and uhs. Oh, I'm doing a lot of and you know. Oh, I've got to clean that up," right? "I've got to get better at some of the things that I'm doing." So that's one side benefit. The other little thing is you're going to be stunned... This will happen. I've never had a client where this doesn't happen, as when you get somebody's outreach, some outreach from a prospect who finds a video of yours that's an old video.

I don't know how they found it, but this has happened to me multiple times. We actually just had one this past year. The video was nine years old. Somebody saw the video, reached out like, "Mike, can you work with us? I saw this video." I'm like, "That was nine years ago." We had a client who was on episode sixty-two of their podcast, and somebody found episode five and reached out and wanted to work with them.

So that you're creating this evergreen content for the most part, unless you're doing a current events podcast, and people are gonna find it, and they're gonna interact with it, right? So you're sowing the seeds of sales by planting these things around. So that's one of the benefits.

But it's also keeping your existing clients engaged. You know, everybody's heard the, "You have to touch your client 22 times a year, 30 times a year," whatever the metric is. We've heard a bunch of them, right? What a great way to do it when they see your face in their LinkedIn stream, right?

They are subscribing to you. That doesn't mean they're gonna listen to every episode, by the way, right? but they can when they see the one that's interesting to them and, or they'll say, "Oh, I saw you did that episode," even though they didn't listen to the full thing. A little fun one, though. You, your number one most opened email, highest open rate, and highest click-through email will be one that says, "New episode," subject,

then dot, We tell every client, "Send out podcast, emails. Let people know, and people will... be excited," 'cause we've been conditioned by Netflix and whatever, that new episode is great. So I open this email, and then great, when they come to your website, they get-- they're there and, experiencing your business.

So it's another huge benefit.

Alan: Yeah, one of the interesting things that I never really thought about when it comes to podcasting is, to your point, it is evergreen. So if you want to go back and listen to episode one of our podcast, you can. I think we're at 415, 420 now, episodes over 10 years. And and I s- I will meet advisors at conferences that are like, "Hey, I've listened to every episode of the podcast and I'm ready to join."

And I'm like, "Really? Was 100 hours enough? you had to go through all 415 hours of recordings?" but people really do engage in that content, which is so cool. It does create an interesting one-sided relationship where there are folks who have listened to every episode of the podcast, and they know a lot about me, 'cause I can't help but share a personal tidbit, in each episode.

And in the aggregate, they know my kids' names and their ages and my background and all that. And so it does create this interesting dynamic when I don't really know them, but they know me really well. and that's not always recognized, but

Mike: But for a business that is built on relationships, is it, that's exactly what we're looking for, right? If you're a financial advisor and you're looking to grow your business and mature the relationships you have with your clients that hopefully goes beyond just that one client, it goes into multi-generational relationships and so forth, you're looking for referrals.

The more connectedness you have, even if you're just like you're saying, it's a little asynchronous, right? the other... They're more familiar with you than you are with them. It's powerful, right? It really is. And it goes back to that thing I was talking about, the familiarity perspective.

I feel familiar with, I feel comfortable with you, and now I can refer a client with you a little more easily 'cause I've seen Alan talk in my stream all the time. I love him. I love his style. you should absolutely check this dude out

Alan: So when anytime advisors are taking on a new initiative, especially one that's going to use time, or, use up some of their time like podcasting would, I always put an emphasis on, we have to track results. We have to know how we're gonna measure results. So how do you encourage your advisors to kinda look at measuring results from a podcast on what success really looks like from a KPI perspective?

When, do you decide to hang it up and, say, "This isn't working for me"? like how do-- And, I guess what data do you need to know if it's working for you or

Mike: That's a great question. So one is you have to look at all the metrics if you're gonna, if you're thinking about metrics and you wanna be measuring it, 'cause sometimes people will look at "I started a podcast, I've done 20 of them, and we're still stuck at 50 listeners." Okay, wait a minute. That's just listeners, right? But if I told you that at the Marriott down the street I've rented out a conference room and I've got it filled with 50 people who are prime in your target audience, can you carve out some time today to come talk to those 50 people? The answer is yes. How quickly can I get there? So of course, right?

So number one, keep your audience numbers in perspective. Like 50 is still amazing that 50 people took the time out of their day to listen to your show. Check out views, obviously, on YouTube when you're sharing them. The clips matter, too. If you share the clips on LinkedIn, you're going to see how many people viewed or in some engagement there, how many people commented, right?

So it's looking across all the places that you shared the content that you created for your podcast. same thing with email. If you're sending out an email blast, look at open rates, click-through rates, and all that type of stuff. It doesn't mean that they're going to immediately translate into instant new clients.

We know that for a fact, and that's, by the way, that's true for all marketing endeavors, right? Everything you do to market your business is not always one-to-one. I spent 1,000 bucks, I spent three hours, it created this many. Sometimes, but not always, so just be mindful. But content marketing is important.

think about when people come to... I always tell people, make sure you have a blog on your website, and the blog tab should have episodes of the podcast. Each episode should get its own blog post, right? So now it's a piece of content that lives there when people are searching, whether they're searching on Google or they're searching via ChatGPT or whatever their AI of choice is, they're likely going to come to your website and find rich content, right?

And so we wanna make sure that we're doing it there. At the end of the day, of course, we want it to drive business. y- as you mentioned earlier, we also want it to drive conversation. How neat would it be if a client or a prospect comes in and they're like, "Oh, I've watched your videos. I've listened to your show.

I saw your clip," whatever that is. We had, actually, I did a podcast episode not too long ago with an entrepreneur whose c-company was a-acquired by another company. And he said, "Before I chose to join that company and accept their acquisition bid, I went out and watched every single video and podcast I could get my hands on for this from the CEO of the acquiring company and other leaders at that company.

I wanted to know who I was joining." So people are doing research, and th- what a wonderful way to feed the beast, if you will. Make sure they find something good

Alan: Yeah, they say great marketing should repel more prospects than it attracts. And I, remember in the early days of my firm, so this would've been back in 2012, and I looked like I was about 19 when I started my firm, and I, remember being really stressed about I did not want to show up to a prospect meeting and some- and, the prospect be surprised by my age.

And so I did these, and you can still go find them. They're terrible, these really cheesy YouTube videos, and it's just me reading blog posts that I had written. But those would go on the website and I w- you know, I'm assuming a lot of people did not show up to my office, because of my age.

They're like, "Oh, I need somebody who's seen three market downturns." I had not. but I, they-- So by the time they got to me, they knew I had a slight Southern accent. They knew my age. They knew a little bit about me, which, it is amazing the power that, that, I guess- how much faster trust can be built when you have that sort of foundation to build on.

Mike: I'm so glad you put that out there, the whole like it could repel somebody, 'cause that actually is an, So back when I was in my social media days, right? And I was going around talking to rooms full of financial advisors, usually top producers, and the questions would come up like, "What if I get on LinkedIn and somebody says something negative about me?"

First of all, do you think they can't say something negative about you even though you're not there? Like first, they can say, trash you no matter what, right? but LinkedIn isn't gonna go grab and suck all your network in and send it to every- like you're gonna have to do some stuff, right? But you're right.

The reality is not, you're not gonna be everybody's cup of tea. I know I'm not, right? Some people are gonna wanna work with a different advisor. Fine. But the ones who are going to resonate with you, you've already got a book of business, you probably have at least one client, maybe you have more.

you're gonna be interacting with people. You want people to get to, again, know you, like you, trust you, develop some familiarity, know that you're good at what you do. What a wonderful way to do it and show them. if they don't like a Southern accent, fine, right? Like I used to have a thick box- Boston accent.

I lost it on purpose, but it's there if we've had a few beers. But some people don't like that. That's okay. It's great

Alan: Yeah, that, that's absolutely how it felt with my Southern accent. It has also faded over time. If you go back and listen to the, probably the, original podcast episodes, it was much thicker, the time here has flown by. I have one final question as we're headed into our wrap-up, and that is, you have decades of experience as an advisor, as a marketer, as a podcaster.

If you can distill all that down and into the best piece of advice for listeners who are contemplating podcasting, they're curious about this, what do you-- what would that sort of one main piece of advice be?

Mike: Actively put your voice out there, right? And so you think about when I started, it was a newsletter. My voice was in type, written form, right? Put your voice out there. Be active on your, on a podcast, right? Some sort of audio and video. It can be short clips. It doesn't have to be super long, okay?

It doesn't have to be overly produced. Share that stuff on LinkedIn or whatever social network that your audience is there. Send out emails, right? Become a regular part of your audience's content consumption, so get your voice out there. It doesn't have to be crazy, like I said, overly produced or overly thought, but interact.

Just get your voice out there because they'll know what you do. They know you're a financial advisor, right? But they start to become comfortable with you. They start to know that you're there, and s- at some point in time, they're gonna have the opportunity that they need a financial advisor, or they're gonna know somebody who needs a financial advisor, they're gonna connect with you there.

So

Alan: Absolutely. I love it. Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and share your sort of career journey and story and expertise as it relates to podcasting. So thanks so much for taking the time

Mike: My pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show.

Alan: All right. Thanks for joining us on Behind the Advisor. Want more bonus content from this episode and future episodes? You can subscribe to our email list at joinXYPN.com/BTA. Remember, it's all about helping people live their great lives here at XYPN. We'll see you for the next episode