Podcasting as a Sales Tool

Podcasting is all of the talk right now, but can it perform as a sales tool as well? Recent examples prove that it certainly can.

I've been talking with Tinu again, who just recently started daily short podcasts with practical marketing tips, focused mostly on SEO, SEM, RSS, blogging and other related marketing tools.

Here are the results she's getting:

"The funny thing about my audio posts is that the visitors aren't *saying* anything. But I always make one or two sales in the period just after an audio post. And over the next day sales go up. I am still studying it - I don't know if it's because I'm giving away extra secrets there, or if it's because I'm talking about the site and the products I sell - because I only do that in about one of five broadcasts so far.

I really feel that it's because I'm reaching an audience with my podcast that I'd never get in my blog or from articles - the podcast audience now is what the blog audience was a year ago - what I like to call money traffic.

According to my stats, I only have between 15 and 50 unique listeners in each podcast. It looks as if the listeners are only listening once or twice a week, so that's conservatively around 175 listeners who've generated 20 sales. That's over a 10% conversion rate, which is unheard of for my field.

I tried not podcasting for several days to test it out, and sure enough, as soon as I did another podcast, sales went up again. It's crazy. Once I finish studying the process, I'll do a book about it and send it to you."