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Free Content for Personality Driven Talent
August 2, 2022
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The first time I was paid for supplying content for another station or program was in 1994 when I was the night jock in Syracuse at 93Q, using the moniker, ‘The Ragman,’ a name given to me in 1987 by Dave Richards, now flying high with Audacy.
My ratings had exploded from a 12 share to an 18 share within months of arriving in Syracuse and for the first time in my 10 year career, I was receiving phone calls for afternoon and night openings around the country, instead of having to seek them. When a PD called and wanted to hear what I sounded like, I would send them the aircheck from my last days’ show.
The late, amazingly great, Kerry Gray was programming in Buffalo at the time and he asked what I did to see such a rocket in ratings. I shared with him a ritual I would go through weekly which I called ‘Seven Things x Seven Ways.’ It wasn’t organized or polished, but I would make a list of the 7 things I should be talking about on the air, then I would break each of those 7 things down further by creating 7 different ways I could talk about each one.
One of the bits that stood out to him was where I was talking about restaurant workers wearing nasty rubber gloves to serve food and how I was trying to put an end to it. There was a hepatitis breakout in Syracuse in ’87, but here it was ’93 and without any recent illnesses, all the restaurants were still wearing these latex gloves. I would get grossed out by the food on the gloves more than I would have from the fear of getting Hepatitis A that when I described the condition of the gloves, the audience would call in having to share their experiences. Eventually, I would compose a parody to J. Geils Love Stinks titled Gloves Stink, ending with a chant of “Gloves No More By ’94!”
Disco Sucks, But Gloves Be Smelly
Nobody taught this to me, but before I was ever in radio, I would subconsciously notice by listening to talent like Steve Dahl and Garry Meier in Chicago that they didn’t move quickly from their topics, but day to day they might be talking about the same thing they talked about yesterday, but that today it would be tackled from a deeper place or different point of view.
Later, I would find this same treasured sequence in Howard Stern. They made radio like a soap opera for men, where like on General Hospital, if you missed a day or two or a couple of weeks, when you tuned back in, you weren’t completely lost and to the contrary, you were met with an air of familiarity.
Over the years, the list of stations and talent who were willing to dig into their pockets for a simple list of content and the angles to view it from, grew to 58, and by the time I was doing PM Drive in LA in 2013, we had more than 70 weekly subscribers.
And that’s where the peak occurred and then faster than Lake Mead’s erosion of water, talent began getting whacked like old casino bosses in Vegas.
Didn’t Deserve Downsizing
As jobs were lost, I’d get that email that apologized for having to cancel the service. Immediately, I would respond with gracious understanding, and while they were no longer paying me, I’d continue to send them the weekly content.
Some returned to payment as soon as they landed a new gig, but that wasn’t the reason for not canceling their subscription. I didn’t cancel them because their loyalty meant something, and I never felt right as I would contemplate taking someone’s email address out of the MailChimp list I had cultivated over the years, simply because a corporation deemed them no longer necessary.
In 2017, the paid subscribers fell below 20, yet the amount of people receiving the email was still above 50, and that’s when I decided to stop the service altogether. I began putting greater focus on Straight Path Media & Marketing, my consultancy and the Moneyball Music Charts product I had created in 2001, as it was beginning to snowball anyway, and time was becoming too precious a commodity to deposit it into something with diminishing returns.
In early 2021, Lori Lewis Media and my Straight Path Media created a partnership where we share our wealth, wisdom, resources, etc. Lori has a gift of seeing people’s strengths and she identified strength areas of mine, which naturally shined a light on the weak ones, if you’re aware.
Lori Lewis Media to the Rescue
She suggested a book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. The premise of the book is how adding only 1% more to what you’re already doing will more quickly than you can imagine, change everything. It reminded me of that time where I left a promising job in radio marketing at WFLZ Tampa to move to Syracuse to take over a night slot already, basically, at #1.
I was told by some that there is only one way those ratings could go. Because of the 1% more, they weren’t accurate at all, and after a decade of banging my head against the walls of radio stations, I did something that finally created a solid foundation. Until Lori Lewis entered my life, I hadn’t quite realized that.
Since 2017, a dozen or more former clients have asked me how much they could pay me to get the Seven Things restarted. Using Atomic Habits and the theory of 1% more, I made a commitment to get this content starter, this thought rejuvenating weekly service back up and running, but instead of seven topics with an outline of 7 ways to attack each topic, which was the part that took so much time that it became a bear on my back, I reduced the seven things to five things and took away the part with the different angles to look at the topic.
In February of this year, the rebranded Monday Morning Motivator with 5 outlined topics was sent to 31 people, with a note saying, ‘If you know anyone who could benefit from this free service, please forward it to them.’ By March, the list had quadrupled and now it has quadrupled again burgeoning upon 700 recipients with a 53% open rate, which is quite astounding for an email that could potentially be tracked as spam.
There will never be a time that this becomes a paid service again, so please enjoy it and let it create in your content, and your show an extra 1% resulting in building a new, life changing Atomic Habit.
If you or anyone you know could benefit from this free service, please let me know with an email to rob@straightpath.media
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