Adam Torres and Chirag Sagar discuss Monetize Talks.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Listen to the Monetize Talks coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Chirag Sagar, Co Founder of Mission Matters, explore Mission Matters and the Monetize Talks event.
Watch Full Interview:
About Chirag Sagar
Chirag Sagar is the Co-founder of Mission Matters Media, a media, entertainment, and book-publishing company dedicated to the needs of enterprises, entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. They are also a book publishing company, podcast agency, performance-based PR agency, digital marketing agency, and events company. They collectively over 650 clients and have published over 300 authors in over 120 books and launched over 200 podcasts. Sagar oversees the PR, branding, and events (IRL) efforts of Mission Matters along with community affairs and partnerships.
Chirag is also Co-Founded Digital Luxury Agency, a global Internet marketing and branding agency where the team has collectively worked with over 3000 small and large companies, Fortune 500s, governments, non-profits, and investment firms. Their roster of clients includes Richard Branson and Virgin, the country of Panama, SBE Group, Bank of America, Cadillac, and Qatar Airways.
Prior to that, he served as the COO of Destination Luxury, a luxury lifestyle media outlet that reached over 5 million people every month through their various channels. He spearheaded the team that built the website presence to reach 500,000 monthly unique visitors and built its social media properties to reach millions from scratch. He hired and managed their staff of over 50 writers and editors. Sagar started his own boutique social media agency before merging it with Destination Luxury. Prior to that, he helped scale a White House-recognized start-up non-profit called Moneythink as its second official employee where they’ve taught their financial education program to over 15,000 high school students across the US.
He has served on over ten advisory boards (3 alumni boards from his alma mater, the University of Southern California where he graduated with his Bachelor’s of Science). He was a member of the Los Angeles Global Shapers, a World Economic Forum initiative.
He has published 3 books focused on diversity, real estate, and business leadership. Sagar has been recognized for his work by President Obama, and in publications such as The Huffington Post, Inc. Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of mission matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters. com and click on, be our guest to apply. All right. So today I’m in Beverly Hills, California, and I’m at the 13th. Monetized Talks hosted by David Rivero and I got the other co founder of Mission Matters here, Chirag Sagar, who was also a speaker today.
Chirag, man, first off, I don’t see you in person that often. It’s good to see you, brother. So you just not spoke and I feel like today was. An unexpected commercial for podcasting. If anybody was on the fence about starting a podcast. So for context, everybody that’s watching or listening to this, there were multiple speakers that were touting, including Chirag, of course, which we have a big podcast agency.
So pretty obviously we’re big in podcasting, but other speakers like Casey Adams and some of the others, they’re all talking about podcasting. So I’m like, man, did we luck out today or what? That was the perfect timing. That perfect storm, right? You got a double whammy. They got the. podcast talk at the very beginning as the first speaker and then the fifth, the last speaker or keynote went all in on podcasting, you know, except 15 minutes.
So for those that weren’t here and couldn’t be in the seats, which by the way, this happens once a month. So you can go to monetize talks. com if you want to be present at the next event. But for those that weren’t here, maybe talk a little bit about, about your talk today. Yeah. So today I shared my story, gave the very brief version of my professional journey, kind of how we ended up launching mission matters and kind of stumbled upon this from the books.
So then the podcast and then really diving all in and personal branding and then how that dovetailed. So the talk was really focused on why building a personal brand is more important than ever before and how it can scale your influence, your impact and. Your revenue all at the same time, right? Our whole ethos is this concept that your life mission is equivalent to your passion, your purpose, and your profits, how you make money and believe fundamentally that podcasting is probably the most effective way to build a personal brand today, more than ever.
So what were some of your big takeaways from it? Yeah, I mean, throughout, it was interesting to, to, to hear from all the speakers, you know, affiliate marketing, massive, right? Our host of the evening, David Rivera. That’s how he got started. Yeah. The high ticket closer. The other Casey. Yeah. That’s both Casey.
Casey was both Casey’s killed it. Yeah. Yeah. So you learn kind of affiliate marketing. You’ve got the tidbits on high closing and being a top sales business development person. And then you’re getting the podcasting. You’re getting the personal branding touch, and then you’re getting a little bit of the spirituality and more like finding yourself through Anjali.
Yeah. I thought it was kind of interesting to hear like how even Casey talked about, cause the listeners, I mean, they hear pretty often about like I talk about, I started with, we started with, you know, I don’t even think our first 300 episodes were even edited. I was just uploading them and we built an audience.
We built a fan base and pretty shocking actually looking back, but to hear Casey’s story, very. Similar in case he’s over 500 episodes in which kudos to him, man. I was like, no, most people don’t get over 10. So I’m like, that’s amazing. Like in your experience, I mean, now from your end of the side of running the agency with the director, Matt Cook and being in the weeds day to day with our clients while I’m on the road doing interviews and other things like the shows that are successful or the podcasts that are versus aren’t like, give me some of those, those things that you’ve noticed through your journey.
I mean, look, Casey alluded to this. We’ve seen a firsthand through the content you’ve done. And many of our clients to number one, it’s consistency and frequency across the board. Give you some basic numbers. I think today there’s about a billion bloggers that exist in 2024 and the 2024, right?
There’s 140 million plus YouTubers in comparison. There’s only 4. 2, let’s just say 5 million podcasters, less than 9 million podcasters, right? Three different mediums and channels, right? Podcasting is what blogging was back in 2004. Yeah. What YouTube was back in 2006, 2007. Yeah. And it’s infancy. Hmm. And what’s interesting is that 80 percent of podcasters stop creating content after month 4 or month 5.
Hmm. Simple math. 5 million podcasts in existence. Only a million podcasters are consistently creating content. after their month five or six. Yeah. So what ends up happening is if you can withstand that, then number one, you’re just going to stand out because you’ve done something long enough than most people in the industry.
So you’re already one of a million, right? And there’s 8 billion people on this planet. I mean, it’s really just the start of what’s happening. So number one lesson really is if you can number one, launch a podcast and do it longer than six months, you’re already the top 80%. Yeah, right there. Just, just from, just from numbers, one step further.
So strategy, like talk a little bit about the strategy that goes behind, not just the launch, but like consistently growing a show, a few things, number one, content matters. So you got to understand who are you, right? I mean, it’s everything that we teach in our personal branding course, right? Everything that comes down to this, it boils down to who are you, what are you doing?
What are you standing for? And why podcast in the first place? So you got to have like your intention in place. Right. And part of that is what is your authentic voice? Like, you know, are you interested in talking about yards and floral, you know, if you’re a florist, are you interested in talking about business and entrepreneurship?
You know, there’s podcasters that talk about basketball, right? So you kind of have to figure out your niche and then you have to figure out your voice. That’s part of it. And then it’s starting off. I think the hardest thing is people just don’t start and everyone’s going to stop. Yeah. Think of fear aspect, right?
The fear aspect is a thing. Getting over the fear. That’s the thing. Absolutely. And so it’s just doing it’s practice, right? Yeah. It’s like your first time riding a bike. It’s you’re going to fall. You’re going to get hurt. And but you got to get up and do it again. And for everybody listening, hold on, let’s take on the fear aspect for me.
For everybody listening, like the first, my first even shows before Sherag and before anything else, I didn’t even use my name. Like I was so scared. So if I can do it, I tell everybody you can do it because I was the most fearful. Didn’t use my name. Wouldn’t even be in front of camera until how many, we had like 2000 episodes.
And then you finally pushed me like, Adam, this is ridiculous. We got to do a video, like add a video. And I’m like, but I don’t want to. But before that pre video, I didn’t have to wear my suit again, but now you got me back out. You know what I mean? But pros and cons, right? Pros and cons. Yeah. So look, once you kind of get over the fear, right.
In terms of building and growing the show, you get a little bit more tactical. Once you kind of figure out your voices and how do you find more guests that are aligned with the content that you want to create, right. And how do you find the biggest thing guests and then try to get them on the show?
Cause then you could build an audience off of. You can build your audience off of their audience, right? So their digital presence, their virtual presence, because they have millions of followers or thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers will become your followers because those people are fans of those people anyways.
And so now they’ll, they may follow you, right? That’s one way. Another way is you got to create the video content now, especially for 2024, you have to create video content and then you got to snip it up into shorter snippets. So now you can get content on LinkedIn YouTube and build all the other channels.
All that content will drive more traffic right back to your audience. That’s kind of the baseline. That’s the day and age we’re in now. So you gotta create all that video content and other forms of content beyond just the audio podcast. Be consistent, right? Again, weekly show is what I recommend and that’s like, that’s really, that’s the ideal scenario where you wanna be.
If you can create more consistent, if you can create content more consistently and frequently than that, absolutely do it if you can, right? But this is just very simple bandwidth. You do those things and then, then you can get a little bit more creative if you have the team, or if you know what you’re doing, right?
Where you can do a little bit of ad buying, you can do a little bit of PR, you can publicize your podcast, you can come to events like this right in front of people and start building an audience. You can launch an email newsletter. So now you can captivate and be in direct communication with your audience.
And so these are all more tactical things, but again, if you can do the three, four basic things, I think you, and last longer than six months, you’re already better than 80, 90 percent of the podcasters that exists out there. Awesome. Last thing I want you to do, look into the camera. How can people follow up?
How can they learn more? Absolutely. So anywhere on mission matters, you can find me, but it’s. My handles across every single medium is Chirag, D as in dog, Sagar, my last name. That’s it. On Instagram, feel free to follow me, add me, tag me, and follow back. Happy to answer any questions, any inquiries that come in.
And I know everything will be shared on all the podcasting channels. So awesome. And for everybody listening, we’ll put the links in the show notes. So you can just click on the links, go check out Shirok’s profile, go follow all that good stuff. And speaking of the listeners, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet.
Hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re releasing new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow and shrug, man. Good. Great to have you on the show. I’m telling you, I know, I know all this virtual things, man