If you’ve ever dreamed of creating a blog or a podcast and then cashing out big time, you’ll want to study the story of Howard Lindzon, the guy who started Wallstrip last October as a daily vodcast then sold it eight months later to CBS for a reported $5 million. Lindzon headlined the Podcast and New Media Expo, which took place this weekend in Ontario, CA.
1. Figure out what your goal is before starting. In Lindzon’s case that was “finding a niche and selling it.” As he pointed out, even if you’re doing it for “the passion, it’s still a business. You should respect it as a business.”
2. You don’t have to spend a fortune, but money is necessary. Lindzon said that his team (including Adam Elend, Jeff Marks and host Lindsay Campbell) was unsure when it started how much it would cost to do a show. But he had decided to “keep the budget between $1,000 and $2,000″ per episode. He hit up a group of friends as well as his own bank account to raise $600,000 initially, which he said they didn’t come close to spending before the sale occurred. Why would anybody give that much money to Lindzon? Because he has a financial background as a venture capitalist and knows “people with money.”
3. Stick with a topic you know really well. Doing a program about stocks isn’t that much of a stretch for Lindzon, who had come up with a simple theme: “My goal was to create a Saturday Night Live for stocks,” he said. The show would focus on one stock a day and it was meant for people who don’t want to be overwhelmed by financial information. “It’s about teaching a strategy I follow. Stocks that are doing well continue doing well.” On the other hand, Elend, Marks and Campbell “knew nothing about stocks,” he said. “I didn’t want them to have an opinion.”
4. Go after the influencers within your niche. The rest is gravy. “We didn’t care if we got a million views on YouTube,” said Lindzon. “We wanted the 20,000 hedge managers who think Lindsay’s cute, Lindsay’s witty.”
5. Don’t limit yourself to posting material strictly to YouTube or any other single site. “I’m for putting it everywhere,” he said. “I don’t think you can tell your audience where they can watch it.”
6. Shorter is better. Although Lindzon wanted episodes to go no longer than three minutes, sometimes the crew broke the rules “because they had something to say or because of the way they shot the show.” Now, he said, “CBS cringes when our show goes over three minutes.”
7. Selling advertising is scary and hard. “When we started in October, we were like, ah, Google and Yahoo will figure it out. They’ll figure out how to serve ads in what we’re doing.” Three months later, when they still weren’t doing that, Lindzon realized he was going to have to start calling advertisers. “It’s fun to create it, distribute it, to get comments,” he said. “It’s not so fun to say, ‘Mr. Advertiser, we got 2,000 views, 3,000 views’… I was making up numbers.” (He estimated that around 25,000 to 35,000 people were actually watching the show.) In fact, although he got a lot of in-bound calls from potential advertisers, he never closed a single advertising deal that way.
8. Expect to experiment with adverting because the formats are still in formation. Lindzon said they tried pre-rolls (ads that run before the show), post-rolls (after the show but before the final closing segment), product placement (something Dell has done on Wallstrip) and creative (where the host interacts with the product or service). The latter has worked especially well.
9. Plan to deliver your content consistently in order to build a community. “It was important to be out there every day,” said Lindzon. While the production team took care of that, “My job was to get the bloggers involved, and Myspace and the press.”
10. What will make your operation attractive to another company isn’t always obvious. “A lot of times luck’s involved,” said Lindzon. “I’m never going to know the real reason [CBS bought us]. We had buzz. Synergies. We had some credibility. They thought they could leverage Adam and Jeff’s talents… I’ve done a lot of bigger deals. This was the funnest time I’ve ever had.”
Have you cashed out? Tell us the secret of your success.
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