Claire Pelletreau is the host of the top-rated Get Paid Podcast where she asks successful business owners the questions we all want to ask, like, “How much money do you make? And how much do you have to pay to make that money?” 

Claire simplifies the complex world of Facebook and Instagram advertising to help her clients create a significant impact in their business.

“I was seeing all these ads about making six figures. And I was like, but what is the business model? What is the offer? How much are you charging for that offer? How many people do you have to have on your list in order to make enough sales at that offer in order to get six figures?” – Claire Pelletreau

Highlights from the podcast episode: 

We discussed:

[05:42] Why Claire started the Get Paid Podcast

When I started the podcast, I was living in Argentina. I felt very far away from other online business owners, even though literally, it’s all online. But I had started to make more and more connections with like other consultants, experts, and thought leaders, but I couldn’t figure out how they were making the kind of money they were making. So I figured the best way to ask them was a private conversation that I then get to air. They get to promote themselves. And I get the answers. I didn’t start the show to share all of this with listeners, but I just wanted to know myself. 

I was seeing all these ads about, you know, making six figures. But I wanted to know:  

• What is the business model? 
• What is the offer? 
• How much are you charging for that offer? 
• How many people do you have to have on your list in order to make enough sales to get six figures? 

But when I finally went full time, I only made like $25,000 and spent close to all of it. So I really wanted to know, “How much are you spending in order to make that six figures?”

Those conversations, still to this day, are hard for me to ask about. But I feel the best venue is in a one-on-one conversation that I then get to turn around and share with people. And you will not catch me dead on video all the time. So it wasn’t going to be a bunch of Facebook Lives!  

[10:20] Gender differences in how entrepreneurs pay themselves 

What I really want to know is: if female entrepreneurs are paying themselves $53,000 less, how much are male entrepreneurs paying themselves? I pay myself about, about $100,000. My husband pays himself more but his businesses is at least three times the size of mine in terms of revenue and teams. So I don’t necessarily think of those things as being apples to apples because of different types of business, business size, things like that. 

But is it about women holding on to their profits more and putting them back into the business? Or are they making less like revenue? Or is it that they’re just paying themselves less. Somebody recently joined my coaching program, and I was a little bit shocked when she said, “I haven’t paid myself anything out of this business.” She makes like 500,000, and I was like, “Well what the fuck are you doing this for? Like, why?” But she seemed great and happy and like, excited to learn about ads. So okay, to each their own. But I’m in this for the money in my pocket. 

[16:29] How to know if your podcast has an ROI

It took me a really long time to identify if this investment of time and some money in producing the show was actually gaining any kind of ROI. I actually quit the podcast and brought it back after a three year maternity leave. 

I finally started asking people about it every time I sold anything. Even right now, I have the cart open for one of my courses and I added the question in the form people fill out after buying. I’m not going to get all the data. We used to ask “How did you find out about Claire? But now it’s just a checkbox: “Do you leave the podcast? Yes or no.” And I know that the vast majority of the people who coming in now are listeners of the podcast. That’s what I saw when I launched my mastermind, too. That is almost the only way to figure out right? Is this working or not? 

[18:30] Using ads to grow your podcast listenership

We started using ads to grow the listenership in 2019, which was when that Brooke Castillo episode kind of blew up and went a teeny bit viral, aka, it started bringing in a lot of, “Oh, hey, I heard that episode. And I think I would be great for the show.” I got a lot of those emails from dudes. 

I would spend here and there on individual episodes, and had a carousel ad going for a long time. But I couldn’t really tell if they were working or not. I just was very attracted by the vanity metrics, and the cost per click was insane. That’s one of the metrics that you look at when you’re when you’re running ads: how much does it cost to just get a click on the ad to get someone to your site? 

But in 2021, Facebook ads changed. And I couldn’t run the types of ads that I used to which were list building ads. The cost for somebody to run ads about ads, which people are very skeptical about, are so high that my conversion rates don’t actually support that strategy. I would spend, you know, maybe $2,000 to get a $1,000 sale, which didn’t make any sense.

So, I said, “Okay, well, what can I start promoting, that’s going to be a lot cheaper, but still brings people into my world? And, helps them through that know, like, trust process quickly?” I realized – oh right, the podcast. 

I did an experiment to really track if people were clicking on the ads, and then listening to the show. They were not!  So, I made a tweak. And I started driving people to a different way of listening to the show. And I’m not going to give all of this away, because I’m speaking about it at a conference in the fall and including it inside my Facebook ads course. It’s just like a very, very specific way to run the ads so you can track the actual results. So that’s where I spent all my [ad spend] money these days, like even in the ramp up to this launch. We did some very specific podcast episodes that supported the launch, and I just ran ads to those episodes to cold audiences to get more and more people kind of interested in that topic, and then potentially subscribe to the show. 

[24:14] Why should we try paid ads?   

Ads have always got a bad rap. Always. And it comes from a ton of different places. I get a lot of people who say “I tried ads and they were a total flop.” They feel kind of cheated by Facebook. Or, something that happens all the time is somebody hires an ad consultant and ads manager and they don’t get results, so they tend to blame the person. 

But I also know that some people feel that advertising is cheating. Like that they need to achieve their success, their audience growth, their revenue, growth, whatever it is, organically, because that’s like the true sign [of success.] It’s just that mindset of, ‘Success can’t be easy.”  

What I would say, is that almost everyone who you think should know what you do and when you’re doing it does not.  [Your target audience] doesn’t know that you’re running a campaign right now and that there is a deadline. You probably feel like you’re sending all these emails and you’re always on social, but they still do not know. 

That’s what I love about ads: you can actually do some things for a relatively low spend and get the word out about something, without posting on social all the time, I find posting on Instagram for promotional things to be so disheartening, because I’ll post something like a new podcast episode and they’ll get like 50 likes within an hour or so. And then I’m like, “Hey, I’m selling something, people.” and there will be 13 likes and they’re all from my coach and people in my coaching program or something like that, you know? So I’m gonna pay to just make sure everybody knows, “Yeah, the deadline is this Friday.” You don’t have to open my emails, you can put them in promotions, or whatever, I am just going to get in your face with some funny little stories just to remind you. 

[41:03] Deciding if content should be paid, gated, or free  

I actually did a podcast episode, where I literally outlined every single thing that I ended up teaching in Workshop Magic. I have since taken down that episode because that was too much. People would walk away from my webinars like, “Claire is great. But I think I gotta try what she just taught me before I go ahead and invest.” Somebody, after listening to that podcast episode said, “I just did it. I did exactly what you explained.”  

But I have sort of gotten more comfortable with sharing the strategy, whereas in the beginning, I used to share the entire “how to.” I used to think we had to gatekeep the strategy but realized it does two things. It creates goodwill between me and my listeners, just by giving that entire strategy away. It also shows off my brain, which is the thing you buy. You’re essentially buying access to my brain. 

And finally, people go, “Okay, well, if this is what she’s doing in general [for free], imagine what she can do for my business.”  

I certainly have bought people’s courses or supported them on Patreon or whatever, just to give them money for their good work. You know, just to be like, “Thank you. Thank you for having your podcast or whatever, because it has impacted my life.” That’s what I did with Rachel Rogers, who has been on my show a couple of times. I was about to go on maternity leave and I joined our membership, We Should all be Millionaires: The Club.  There’s no way I wanted to join a membership at that time. But she was going for her first million-dollar month. And I was like, “Take my money.” And that turned out to be the most incredible investment ever. Because her content just like rocked my world. 

[46:23] Claire’s vision for the world 

Truth be told, I am in this business for me. I find it so intellectually stimulating. I also love money. I did recently in therapy, talk about how sometimes I feel like I wish I had more of an impact. And then I realized, “Oh, the impact is just the show.” It’s free for everyone. It’s not always easy for us as a business to produce. It takes away from lots of other projects, but it is having an impact.  

Connect with Claire Pelletreau

Website: clairepells.com

Instagram: @clairepells 

Podcast: The Get Paid Podcast

Connect with Tania Bhattacharyya

Linkedin: Tania Bhattacharyya

Website: lumosmarketing.co

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