Today I want to share a little about my latest experiment, an Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing Skill called The Money Making Minute.
I’ll go through why I’m excited about this, where the idea came from, how I’m setting it up, and why you might consider adding an Alexa skill to your own business.
Amazon has sold more than 50 million Echo devices (and probably several million more this Christmas season). There’s a clear demand for these smart speakers, but I think there’s an opportunity in creating content for them and for their users.
Some numbers to consider:
- There are over 525,000 active podcasts in the world today.
- There are only a little over 5000 flash briefings for Alexa.
Compared to the number of potential listeners (remember that 50+ million devices), it seems like a promising new content frontier to tackle.
And as a podcaster, reaching people in their homes, with my voice, on a routine basis, is a pretty valuable relationship to build.
What’s an Alexa Flash Briefing?
So what’s a flash briefing?
An Alexa flash briefing is just a quick piece of audio content.
You could consider it a daily tip or idea. Some of the most popular ones are weather reports, news updates, the word of the day, trivia skills, the dad joke of the day, stuff like that.
Is there a little micro piece of content that you could create that would be compelling to subscribe to?
The goal is to become a part of someone’s daily routine.
Why Create an Alexa Flash Briefing?
What I’m aiming to create with The Money Making Minute is quick daily doses of income-generating inspiration.
The goal in my case (in addition to building listener relationships through voice, which I think is really powerful), is to reach a new audience of podcast listeners.
I believe Echo owners to be a tech-savvy group of people who are already used to–and hopefully enjoy–consuming audio content. A new frontier to potentially grow an audience.
For me, podcast listeners are one of my key performance indicators that influences lots of other positiive things in my business.
Where Did This Idea Come From?
Credit where credit is due: the inspiration for me to create The Money Making Minute comes from Nick True of MappedOutMoney.com.
Nick planted this idea in my ear at FinCon this fall and I couldn’t get it out of my head. He likened it to starting a blog in 2008. That is, getting in on the ground floor of a medium that’s about to blow up.
His skill, The 30 Second Money Tip, reached more than 100,000 downloads in its first 8 months.
When we spoke, he was talking to 1000 people a day, about money, in their homes, on autopilot.
I’ve already seen the power of podcasting so I didn’t need much convincing to see how cool that was, and I was impressed how quickly he was able to ramp it up.
Goals for The Money Making Minute
If I can get to 1000 listeners a day by the end of the first quarter, I’ll consider that a huge success. I’m not sure how realistic that is, but I’ll give it a shot and put some marketing effort behind it.
I see it as a relationship building play, rather than a direct monetization play, although I am certainly testing specific calls to action in some episodes.
How to Access The Money Making Minute
If you have an Amazon Echo and want to check it out, you can first ask Alexa to enable The Money Making Minute and then ask her to play your flash briefing or say, “Alexa, what’s my flash briefing?”
You can also search for new skills and edit the order of your flash briefing skills at alexa.amazon.com.
As with everything on Amazon, reviews are huge, so if you do check it out and think this is a cool idea, I would be in your debt if you could drop in a quick review for The Money Making Minute.
Thanks!
Creating the Content
If you’re thinking a Flash Briefing Skill might be a good addition to your business, let’s talk about creating the content for a minute.
Obviously creating daily content can be really demanding.
One advantage I have is a library of business ideas, blog posts, and podcast archives to pull from. I was able to create the first 100 or so episodes just from that library, and probably haven’t exhausted it yet either.
Going forward though, I’d like to have this be a self-supporting content machine, meaning I can take in ideas from the audience to share.
(Speaking of, I’d love to feature you — just shoot me an email with 150-200 word summary of your business or side hustle — nick @ sidehustlenation [dot] com — and try to include what you do, who you do it for, how much you charge, and how you find customers, that sort of thing.)
Batch Processing
My theory is I can batch script and record these things a few days a year. Since they’re only a minute long, I can bang out a bunch at one time. That is, if I can keep sourcing content ideas!
How a Flash Briefing Works
It’s All Driven from an RSS Feed
Mechanically, how this works is as an RSS feed.
To create and host this feed, I just used my long-time podcast host Libsyn. Since the files are so small, it’s just costing me an extra $5 a month.
You’ll just need to set the limit on your feed to 1 episode so your flash briefing listeners don’t get 10 in a row.
(Or append your feed with /size/1 — a cool trick Libsyn support showed me. That lets me use the same feed as a podcast to submit to iTunes and other directories.)
Side note: I believe you can also set up your Alexa skill as a plain text RSS feed, and just have Alexa read it herself. That method gets your content distributed but doesn’t come with your voice delivering it. As a podcaster, the voice option made a lot more sense.
Setting Up Your Skill
To set up you Alexa Skill, you’ll need an Amazon Developer account. I just used my regular Amazon shopping account login.
There’s a pretty straightforward creation and submission process. I found this post on Social Media Examiner pretty helpful in walking me through the steps.
Coming Up with a Name
I brainstormed a few different potential names or “hooks” for my skill, like Small Business Stories, or The Business Idea of the Day, but I ultimately thought those were kind of weak.
When I peeled it back a layer and asked, “What do people really want?” The answer was pretty clear: They want to make more money. And so I came up with the Money Making Minute — alliterative, brandable, and emphasizes both the benefit and the brevity.
Cover Art
You’ll need to add some artwork to your Alexa Skill. Since I was turning it into a podcast as well, I made this quick cover art in PowerPoint.
How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Flash Briefing
One of the big questions for me in launching The Money Making Minute is the best way to re-purpose this stuff. By nature, the flash briefing is here today, gone tomorrow–but most of the content will be evergreen.
It seems like a waste to just let it die!
One thing I’m doing is syndicating it to its own micropodcast also called The Money Making Minute. It’s available in iTunes / Apple Podcasts and elsewhere. But maybe there’s more I can do like turning these into videos for Facebook or YouTube.
Your Turn
What do you think? Is a flash briefing skill something you could add to your business?
I’m excited to see where this goes and of course will post an update here on the blog in the next few months when I have some results.
Dude! This is fantastic. So excited to see you taking action on this and getting it up and going.
Also, you showed me some new things with simply just appending the RSS feed based on libsyn support. That’s cool! I didn’t know that.
Great write up man. I’m excited to see where this goes for you!
Hey Nick,
Nice write up! I’d be interested in seeing what kind of engagement this gets with 50 million units out there.
It would also be interesting to see how some businesses are using this to reach new potential customers. Time will tell.
Thanks,
Adam
Sounds like an amazing opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Interested to know how you could monetize this?
I believe there are ways to monetize directly (since it’s tied to people’s amazon accounts and credit cards), like asking for orders of certain products, but I’m not sure how to implement that. At the moment, I’m playing an awareness/content marketing game trying to introduce more people to side hustle nation and all the cool ways people are making extra money.
Funny. I heard Gary Vaynerchuk talk about this a few months ago when he was talking about the rise of voice and voice search. I filled it away as “hmmm, sounds cool.”
Today I listened to you talk about starting and thought “okay, cool again” then “what am I waiting on???”. So, just bought my first Echo to figure it out with plans of starting…soon.
Good stuff! And thanks!
Nice! Keep me posted on it Kevin! Definitely curious to see where this goes. A friend just posted they’ve now sold over 100 million Echos.
Hi Nick Loper,
I love your podcast and great guests!
My opinion is: Alexa Voice is amazing, I brought it for my Dad! Although what I love about apps which are available everywhere! (which usage is still growing year on year, but some people think they are a fad!) Definition: Native iOS and Android phone messaging apps (rather than a device that’s limited to being stuck in your home) .
I think there’s a massive opportunity for chat bots (part of app ecosystem) when you’re travelling somewhere. (Perhaps you don’t feel like talking to a device on the train or bus).
Voice is generally heavily used when you’re at home. Think when you’re using short search queries “pizza near [locarion]” rather than a weekly food shop which you don’t want to recite over a voice app for convenience!
I love your content and hope we can continue to chat and discuss chatbot and voice marketing growth in 2019!
Thanks,
Mark Cann
Hey Nick, I’m seeing that you have to own an Echo to do this? Or so it sounds like from Amazon’s FAQ.
Also there appears to be a limit on the content you can produce? It mentions it must not be a music streaming service- but what if I want to release a “song of the day” kind of service from music I created? I’m not seeing a definitive answer.
Thanks! :)
Hi Klim,
Thanks for stopping by. I don’t have an Echo myself but did download the Alexa app on my PC to test this out. I’m not sure about the terms surrounding music, but a song of the day (or a snippet of it) with some commentary sounds cool to me.
Cool thanks!
Yes I was thinking of doing more of a snippet than the full song.