Monetizing a list of 1,000 subscribers by selling audio content

Throughout his 30-year professional career , Santiago Torre accumulated over 1,000 contacts in his newsletter and almost 4,000 in his sales podcast.

An audience he had never directly monetized until relatively recently.

Table of Contents

Over 30 years of selling

Santiago Torre is an entrepreneur with a long career history. He began his career in 1988 as a photocopier salesman and has been selling ever since.

Santiago focuses on helping small business owners develop and grow their businesses. He offers mentorship to help them take control of their companies, increase profitability and value, with the ultimate goal of selling them if the owners desire.

He is also passionate about training sales teams, something he greatly enjoys. He likes being in the room with sales teams, answering their questions in real time, and applying theory to their specific cases.

Mumbler is a fantastic and incredibly simple tool for content creators.

To support his work, Santiago has been creating content for many years. He is curious and an avid reader, and for a long time, he set the goal of reading 52 professional books a year. He summarized the books and shared his knowledge on his blog.

Content creation has always been a lead generation channel for him. It has allowed him to showcase what he knows and his experience, and has been part of his inbound marketing strategy.

If you want to know more about Santiago Torre's story, you can listen to the interview we did with him on the Mumbler podcast.

A content system

Currently, Santiago has a daily podcast and newsletter. This is a tremendous achievement, as Emilio Cano can attest to.

In his podcast , titled "Commercial Leadership,"he covers topics such as leadership, sales, professional development, and persuasion. Each day of the week features an episode dedicated to a specific theme. In the newsletter, he mainly provides reflections from his daily life and ensures it does not exceed 300 to 400 words to facilitate reading.

To maintain consistency, Santiago ensures he has a repository of recorded episodes with third parties, while the rest are done day by day. Although there may be some connections between the content of the podcast and the newsletter, these two mediums have different focuses.

Santiago spends approximately half an hour daily on the podcast. It is a pseudo-live recording, where he uses Audacity software for minor corrections and to add the opening and closing tunes. As for the newsletter, it takes him about 20 to 25 minutes daily. In total, Santiago dedicates an hour daily to content creation.

The Role of Books

In addition to the podcast and newsletter, Santiago has also used other resources to create content, such as his six published books.

The first book he wrote was in 2014, which allowed him to successfully establish himself in the publishing world, especially in the field of sales training. His first book even reached the second position in the Amazon store in Spain, providing him with visibility and recognition in the sector.

The success of his first book encouraged him to write more, which significantly contributed to the development of his business. In addition to the aforementioned book, he wrote two books compiling articles he had written for newspapers, as well as two books on leadership and sales.

These publications helped him strengthen his positioning, expand his recognition, and attract clients interested in receiving training based on his books.

Repurposing Content

Santiago has a clear strategy regarding content repurposing. Over his 14 years of experience in training, he has generated a large amount of material that he wants to monetize.

Initially, he admits that he tended to provide too much free content, but over time, he has learned to balance the delivery of open knowledge with the creation of exclusive content.

As a result of this process, he has published two video courses in addition to masterclasses and audio courses on sales and leadership.

Santiago continues to be in constant learning, attending courses and reading books, which provides him with new inputs and inspiration to create additional content.

I had 1,000 contacts in the database. I got them over time and did nothing, absolutely nothing with them until I discovered Mumbler.

Project Figures

Santiago currently has 3,700 contacts on his podcast and an average of 6,000 weekly listens.

On the other hand, he has managed to build a contact database for his newsletter that exceeds 1,000 people. His newsletter has open rates of around 40%, indicating a good level of engagement from the contacts.

The pillars of Santiago's business are:

Mentorship for owners of traditional companies with 8 to 50 employees (60%)
Sales and teamwork training (25%)
Info-products and books (15%)

Santiago's idea is to expand in the field of info-products and gradually reduce his focus on mentorships.

Although he currently has a relatively small contact base, Santiago has decided to focus on subscriber acquisition to leverage the sales potential of a good database.

We are confident he will achieve it.