TSAI

Building a Cult Following

I like to think I have a cult following (doesn’t everybody?). But seriously, I have an incredibly loyal audience that’s been spreading the word about The Bert Show to more and more listeners every day. This has come from 100 percent authenticity and vulnerability, which built trust when we first started The Bert Show.

We were on a brand new signal—three thousand watts—and we were going up against fifty thousand-watt radio stations. The very first day, I went on the air and said, “Look, I’ve been doing radio for ten or fifteen years and I’m super scared to host my own show. I’m not exactly sure what to do—bear with us through the construction of it. We’re going to have a pretty good product. But I can’t promise you anything for the next couple of months.” Everybody on the show was in a new role, and I had never hosted a show. My co-host on the show was more of a behind-the-scenes producer guy, so it was a new role for him too. Plus, we had a reality TV star who had never done radio. We were all brand new, and I was just 100 percent honest, saying, “We don’t know what we’re doing.”

From that authenticity, it grew and grew and grew to where people trusted us. When you’re building a cult following, it’s all about connecting and people feeling that they trust you and they feel safe with you. It all starts from there.

This chapter will walk you through the final instructions for building a podcast that lasts and lasts, which includes doing good in the world, getting emotional, and rewarding fans, as well as more insider tips from the top.

Add the Emotional Details

The emotional detail and connection to the backstory make it a way more intimate experience for a listener.

Emotional detail is so much more powerful than physical detail. Both are hard to do well. Being vulnerable and connecting emotionally to the material you’re delivering is what separates good communicators from great communicators.

The beauty of nonvisual entertainment is that you get to paint pictures with your words. It’s unlike any other platform. We can describe in vivid color what a scene looks like, which is a talent in itself. Adding emotion to the scene gives your conversation life and relatability.

So many put too much focus on the physical parts of storytelling and miss diving into the most important emotional parts that make an audience feel like they are part of the experience.

Remember Kristin Ingram? We talked about her podcast for fellow mothers, and there’s a reason she’s all about embracing emotionality with her listeners. While Kristin might not have an enormous following, she definitely has a loyal following—and her listeners are loyal largely because they see her as a friend, not a face. Kristin never spares her own emotional details, and she’s willing to wear her heart on her sleeve when she responds to her listeners. She’s a prime example of how you can help your audience to feel like they’re participants whom you care deeply about.

It doesn’t matter what your podcast is about—the center of the podcast will be you as the content deliverer. There are thousands of podcasts that focus on money and finances. What is your life experience to share and connect with the audience on the topic of finances? What were your personal highs and lows in the industry that connect you with your audience? Why are you in the financial game? What was your motivation? What makes me want to cheer for you and follow you?

Reward and Prioritize Fans

Tony Robbins and Taylor Swift are just two examples of celebrities who are brilliant at building a cult following by catering to their fans. But you don’t need to go to great lengths in order to make your listeners feel special. At The Bert Show, we’ve hosted what we call “P1” parties for our most hard-core fans. Every Friday, we bring in twelve to fifteen listeners, who get to sit in the studio while we’re doing the show. If any of them have an interesting story, I’ll put them on the air. We give away gift certificates.

So identify your most rabid fans—you can do this through analytics—and reward them. It’s as simple as that. For an example of rewarding rabid fans, look at how Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) has tapped into community influencers. When The Real World debuted, Puck gave us a glimpse into the world of bike messengers, an underground group of influencers at the time. PBR focused just on those bike messengers and started to give them PBR gear. Then, as PBR became the go-to beer at dive bars, they gave people free PBR at dive bars. This was all with zero marketing dollars. It’s about using that same understanding of human psychology with your most loyal listeners and then embracing them, rewarding them, and recognizing them.

I’ll never forget when I sent a message to one of my favorite podcasters, Ed Mylett, and he called me back and left a voice mail. Hearing his voice—a voice I listen to all the time on his podcast—energized me so much. I felt special. As podcasters, you can make people feel special,

When it comes to recognizing fans, I also respond directly on social media—99.9 percent of the comments and messages get a personal reply from me. All it takes is five seconds to write “Thanks for listening,” or “I agree,” or even just a simple thumbs up. People share this with their friends and family members, increasing that cult following.

And I ignore the haters, as I mentioned earlier in this book. It’s a sign that you’ve made it because they can’t hate you if they don’t know you just as they can’t love you if they don’t know you. I say this to my staff all the time because some of those nasty comments can hurt. And I say to them, in any given fifteen minutes, we have about fifteen thousand people who are checking us out. If we were doing the show on a stage in a stadium and there were fifteen thousand people there and five of those fifteen thousand walked out of our show and hated us, would we even notice them? Would we even pay attention to them? The truth of the matter is absolutely not. Five out of fifteen thousand. The percentages are in your favor.

Connecting Is the Key

I’ve written about this earlier in the book, and I’m writing about it again because connection is sincerely important. Huge. Ginormous. (I can’t believe that word made it past spell check.) Immense. Massive. Colossal. Connecting with an audience is the key to being loved by an audience. Not liked. Loved. And love is where the money is.

In order to truly connect, you have to share. What makes you endearing to your audience? What makes them want to follow you? What makes them cheer for you?

My parents were the worst parents ever. Both narcissistic. Both dismissive. Once I was born, they felt their job was kinda done. My therapist told me it’s an absolute act of God I didn’t end up more dysfunctional than I did. Now I have a tough time connecting on an intimate level. It takes me forever to trust a new person in my circle.

They told me when I was three years old that I’d never write a book about podcasting. Okay, they never told me that. In fact, there was no podcasting when I was three. The point is that I had no problem sharing any of my upbringing during my morning show. And it connected me with other dysfunctional listeners.

So what is connecting you? Anybody can give info on taxes, relationships, green beans, technology, meditating, sloths, exotic vacations, whatever. The difference is connecting yourself with those topics through vulnerability, realness, or trust that sets you apart from the other podcasts focusing on the same subject.

How are you going to intimately connect? Are you brave enough to do that? This takes real courage!

There is a huge difference between talking and connecting. I once had a member of my team say: “People love us. They want to hear all about us no matter what we’re doing.” No! Just, no! Just because you’re you and just because you’re talking doesn’t make you entertaining. And this is a big mistake I hear podcasters making. Is your ego getting in the way of knowing what’s really interesting? Listeners have a bazillion podcasts to listen to now. So what’s making some successful? Connection. Pure and simple. Anybody can give out advice. Anybody can provide detailed information. But how are you connecting to the material on a more intimate level? On a personal level. What is unique about your voice? What are you brave enough to share that others won’t? What can you communicate for people to love you?

Again, Make It Evergreen

Two of the longest-running podcasts are Podrunner and Groovelectric, both founded in 2006 by California’s DJ Steve Boyett. “I was the first kid on the block,” says Steve, who was coaxed by his aerobics-teacher girlfriend to create playlists designed for working out. He was one of the early gods of podcasting. His mixes soon landed atop the iTunes chart, and Steve was getting six hundred thousand downloads per month—a big milestone back in the dinosaur days of podcasting.

Today, millions of people continue to tune into Podrunner and Groovelectric, as Steve’s learned to make a living off simply doing what he loves best: mixing funky jams. He takes no advertising; refuses to be part of Facebook, Instagram, or any social media; and marketing is only by word of mouth. How has he become such a massive success with a cult following of runners, walkers, dancers, office workers, and more? People love the music. “People aren’t following me because they love my voice,” he says. “I talk for two minutes. My relationship with the audience is not in the podcast; it’s peripheral to it. I’m not part of the cult of personality, like Joe Rogan.” But as he points out, his content is evergreen: the mixes he made in 2006 are just as relevant as those he releases fifteen years later.

“I accidentally got really popular, and I wasn’t up against two million people when I started,” says Steve, one of the co-chairs of the San Francisco Podcast Association.” His tips for podcasters? “Have more desire than is reasonable to do it,” says Steve. “And you need to have a discoverable, interesting, and relatively narrow niche.” His third, and most important, tip is to educate yourself (which, of course, is what this book is doing for you), get some half-decent equipment, and sound good. You need to have some perspective on yourself and how you talk, how you sound, what your image is, how you come across, how focused you are,” says Steve.

Do Good in the World

The role of doing good is a big component of building a cult following. Take a look at Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, who has connected with his podcast audience and is now building even more of a cult following with the small-business fund that has raised nearly thirty million dollars. He’s taken a really hard stand for the little guy on Wall Street. When they have somebody champion their cause that they trust, that’s where the following comes from. They are willing to follow you if they believe in you as an authentic, safe, trustworthy figure.

I have a nonprofit, called Bert’s Big Adventure, that takes kids who have chronic and terminal illnesses to Disney World for a weekend every year. We bring everybody in the house and my listeners pay for the entire trip. In retrospect, the appeal for me to start this kind of trip was that my parents never took me on one family vacation. They just didn’t think it was important. So I grew up without the memories or pictures of family trips. No laughter together; no reminiscing later in life about shared experiences. I was so jealous of my friends who would leave for a week at a time and come home with amazing stories about their family travels. I just didn’t want kids to feel that kind of emptiness. So, now, taking financially challenged families to escape the everyday, stressful life that medically fragile kids live has filled my soul.

My listeners are really into Bert’s Big Adventure. I built this by going on the air and saying: “This is where my heart is. I want to take these kids down to Disney World. I want them to escape hospitals. I want them to escape doctors. I want them to escape syringes. I want to go down there for five days. I want to pay for the entire trip. And when I say, ‘I,’ I mean you guys. So there’s the idea. Now, here’s the kicker, you guys, I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t have anybody on staff who knows how to start something like this. I’ve never done a nonprofit. That’s the idea. Who can help out?”

Phone call after phone call came in (I’d put them on the air) from people who were immediately ready to help and volunteer.

We started Bert’s Big Adventure in 2002, and it became an organic experience that everybody embraced because my heart was in the right place. I connected on something that people believe in. Walt Disney World is built into the fabric of America. Almost every kid wants that experience. Since 2002, we’ve been bringing kids to see Cinderella’s castle in person, to ride Space Mountain, and to walk down that magical Main Street. Sure, we’ve been down, money-wise some years. And I’ll say: “Guys, here is the true situation. We need more donations.” Suddenly, $50,000 comes in. My listeners have just embraced it because they believe in it. They believe in me, and they’ve connected with the cause. If you want to build a cult following, authenticity and integrity are where it starts.

Stay Patient

How long will it take you to build a cult following? We live in a world of instant gratification, and it’s not going to happen overnight. I’m a big fan of a slow build. If you become really popular really quickly, some people may mistrust your genuine connection with your audience. I’d rather build a relationship and build my audience slowly rather than having this quick explosion of listeners or people who are sampling you right off the bat. And remember, a cult following can just be twenty people.

To bring back up the example of Dan Miller, he made this mistake himself. When he was starting to gain a podcast following in the 2001–2006 era, he thought radio was out the door. He was sure that there wasn’t much popularity to be gained on that front, and that podcasting would become an outdated fad. He’s the first to admit, in hindsight, that he should’ve been more patient. As he put it, “I should have stuck my feet in the sand.”

You’ll know by the numbers, sure; anytime I crack a mic, I can look at the analytics and see what’s been working great for the audience. But for the cult following, it’s more visceral. I could feel it when I started Bert’s Big Adventure, and workers from Home Depot were calling in to help, along with listeners ready to send a check for $30,000. Even before I saw the numbers, I could feel it in my gut.

I want to repeat this. Be patient. Podcasting is work. A lot of work. You will not see instant results. I know celebrities who have been super frustrated because the numbers of their podcasts weren’t paying big dividends within the first few months of their launch. It takes time! A lot of time and work! Do not get into podcasting expecting to be an overnight sensation. Unless you have a loyal following that is transferring over into your podcast, this is a painstakingly slow process.

NOW HEAR THIS

• The emotional detail and connection to the backstory make it a way more intimate experience for a listener.
• In order to truly connect, you have to share. What makes you endearing to your audience? What makes them want to follow you? What makes them cheer for you?
• Do good in the world.
• Focus on the quality of your cult following, not the quantity.
• Be patient!