How Active Participation Guarantees Success to Your Podcast Now

There are times when theories are far from the truth when applied. The same is true with learning something and failing to put it to use. It doesn’t matter that you have the best mentors and listen to speakers who’re authorities in their respective fields if you lack active participation. Tracy Hazzard explains why it’s necessary in order to improve and why top podcasters put this into practice. Learn the foundations of creating a great podcast from scratch and how to continue growing and molding it into a platform where you can talk about anything that your show’s about.

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Our topic is active participation. It’s interesting that I’ve done about 50 interviews of top podcasters. We do a feature here. If you haven’t been invited to be a part of the feature yet, it’s probably because you’re not far enough along in your show. You will get an invite into doing that. We create a feature for every podcaster on the Feed Your Brand website as a part of giving you publicity about your show. Because as you get started with your show, sometimes it’s hard to get people to write about you. We kick that off for you.

Effectively Active

You have to have a certain number of shows in and you have to have been podcasting for a little bit before we will do a feature on you, but then we do. I’ve been writing for Authority Magazine for a few months. I’ve been interviewing top podcasters in the industry. I keep coming across the same mentality about things. It became very apparent to me as I was giving a speech in New York City. One of the organizers of the event said, “It is amazing that you have stuck around all day and interacted with all of our people. You came here early. You gave your speech and you didn’t run out of town.”

I thought, “Doesn’t everybody do that?” It didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t the way you were supposed to behave and supposed to do. You were invited to come to an event. You’re invited to speak there. If at all possible, you should do everything you can to interact and participate with the people who showed up and paid to see you. I thought I was raised right. It has started to occur to me that this is a recurring thing that I have with my daughters as well. Showing up is more important than anything that you do, active participation. Our teachers taught us that most of our grade was going to be based on participation.

How many of us learn that lesson and took it to heart? It is something that I subscribed to. I’ve noticed this ongoing theme that is exactly the same with our top podcasters, both on our platform and the ones that I’m meeting out there as I interview them. The top podcasters are active. They are out there seeking their own media. They’re not using a PR firm, they’re active with that. There’s conjunction happening. They’re making decisions about what kind of media they are. They don’t toss it over and say, “Find me some places to be featured.” It’s not like that. They’re actively participating in the process with them.

I’m also seeing it in the coaching calls. People who show up on the coaching calls, they do better. Whitney Lauritsen, one of my favorite people. She watches every video. She shows up for every call she can. She does that. You can’t always show up 100% of the time. That’s why we have many calls so that we can catch everybody. Not showing up at all can hurt your success because you’re not getting new ideas. You’re not interacting with others. You’re not creating an opportunity for you to continually learn and grow.

 

That’s something that I believe is being curious and having continual learning as a significant part of your process. If you make it a part of your process, you’re always going to have it be. There’s no excuse for you not to grow, learn, get what’s the next new thing and how can I incorporate that idea? I had Aaron Young. He is one of our podcasters here and he has this mastermind called the Inner Circle, which I absolutely love. I’ve spoken there before. He came away and he said, “You gave me the one thing I came here for. That is something new I hadn’t heard before. I go to these events. I participate in these things because I’m looking for something new each time and you gave me that new thing.”

That could not have been a better compliment. That in and of itself is why we’re here speaking, why we’re out there sharing our knowledge, giving all of our information away for free on our show. To not get engagement back, maybe it’s something about us not engaging forward. Not putting out that energy of participation, active interest and all of those things. That’s what I’d like you to think about. Are you participating in your own success? Are you participating in the idea of pulling out as much information out of the coaches that you hire and the companies that you are working with? Are you getting as much from them as they’re offering you? Are you taking advantage of all of those things? You’re paying for them so take advantage of them.

If you’re not paying for them and you’re getting them for free, take even more advantage of them. That’s a definite opportunity. One of my favorite things to do is to listen to your podcasts. I wish I could listen more. There’s 220 something of you. I’ve tried to listen to at least one episode of every single person’s podcast, but I can’t say that I have been able to keep up. It is my goal to do that. I keep trying because I learned something from you. I may go through your episodes and go, “That one sounds interesting,” and pick one that’s relevant to me or relevant to something that I want to learn. As long as I’m auditing you, I’m listening to you and I’m learning about you, I’m also helping myself learn too.

You learn a lot from watching other people be successful or not. You learn more from that, than you do doing it yourself. Click To Tweet

Try to do that for yourself. Give yourself a part of your own process on where you can be curious. You can grow. You can learn. The other thing I make it a practice too is I never write a review of authors or books. It’s one thing if I’m interviewing an author, but if I’m writing about their book or if I’m going to interview them specifically about their book, I won’t do it unless I have enough time to read it. That’s important to me because I’m a reader. If they don’t have a good book at the end of the day, I certainly don’t want to be out there recommending it.

Research as a part of it. That’s another success thing that I see from these podcasters who are getting great guests. They’ve been researching their guests. That interest in their guests makes their guests recommend another great guest. It’s cascaded on their success factor and that’s an active participation thing too. It’s not, “I’m doing this thing. I’m interested in this thing. I’m using this podcasting. I’m using it as a tool for myself. I’m using it as a tool for my business. I’m using it to grow.” I want to leave you with those thoughts that may be getting more active and trying to participate more in the process of what you’re doing and participate more with your coaches, your mentors and all of those things. Finding ways to do that you make it a part of your process makes it easier to participate too. Find the time for that. Thanks, everyone for that. I’d love to invite and open up questions. I’m going to flip back and forth between the two, so keep patient.

Identifying Your Show

We have FeedYourBrand.co. I don’t even think we’ve checked to see if we even could get FeedYourBrand.com. It wasn’t available at the time. We could have easily put podcasts at the end. Many people do. It is not a difficult thing for you to have the name of your show with the word podcast at the end of it. It’s very common. You want to be consistent with it, but you shouldn’t agonize over it. In other words, if you’re going to put your show name, Tony’s Podcast, it should be Tony’s Podcast on Instagram, Facebook, on all of the places as long as you can get it in all of those places that should be worthwhile.

To have it be something that’s more difficult and longer, no. You can always repoint URLs. One of the guys I interviewed, Mike Michalowicz. It’s a horrible name to spell. You cannot get worse. He has multiple URLs that he knows are easy. He throws out from stage that forwards to where he wants it to go. You can always do something like that. The URL itself doesn’t have to match and very often, it doesn’t for many people. I have another show called Product Launch Hazzards. It has Hazzards’ with two Z’s because that’s my last name, but I bought the other one too because I know people will misspell it. You can do that as well. You can point to URLs. You’ve got to do it properly, but we can help you with that making sure that’s right for you.

Let’s go back to agonizing over the name. You’re agonizing over the name, which is an issue for a lot of people. You’re not alone in that. This is one of those things where how do you find the right name for you? How do you find what fits for you? The description exercise is to sit down and do five minutes recording about what your audience is thinking. Where they are in the world, what they’re thinking about, what they’re struggling with, what they’re looking for, what they aspire to be. It’s all about your audience, five minutes about why you’re the perfect host for the show, to answer those questions and to provide that for your audience. The last part is what does the show looks like? What does it sound like? Am I getting guests? Am I doing solo interviews? You are starting to imagine, visualize and verbalize what the show is.

It’s a simple exercise. You don’t have to have fancy recording equipment, but it’s a chance to test out your recording too. You might as well do that at the same time. Do that because a lot of times when you go through that process, the name comes to you. Once you’ve done it, we will rewrite your description from there. Because you don’t have your show name, we’ll do the transcription for you first, send it back to you and your name might jump out at you. That’s a good time for you to reach out to me or Tom to get some connection to us to let us help you through this name issue. What did you come up with? Doing that first helps us help you. Interestingly enough, there are a couple of you who are agonizing over things and not making decisions. This is not set in stone. You want to choose the best name possible, the best name that fits you, but it also is something that can be adjusted. Your description and cover art can be changed. All of these things can be changed.

You don’t want to have to rerecord, so having the right name for your show is an ideal thing. Also, at some point, you can always explain that “This name isn’t fitting us anymore and I’ve decided to change it.” You flow into a new name. The new audience doesn’t know any better. The old audience was probably right along with you that it wasn’t right for what you were doing. Think about how many website names we’ve all been through and how many times we’ve rebranded and renamed, this is no different. You’re not printing thousands of bucks.

Added Value Hosting

If I remember right, you were a little more focused on the business side of cannabis as well. While you do want to talk about all things cannabis, you add a little bit more business focus. If you’re having a short call about it, it’s a vetting between the two of you. In your industry, you could hit into people who are not quite scrupulous, who are taking advantage of the cannabis market and don’t have deep knowledge. Because you have the experience, they’d be asking you the question that highlights their experience. How deep knowledge do they have? How into the industry are they are? Are you sure these guys are reputable? Being sure to do that. This is a betting opportunity for you.

A lot of times, once you have a show established, I don’t recommend you taking the time to do the fifteen minutes because more often you’ll have met the people that and invited them on. You already have a connection to them. Once you’re doing it, people reach out to you and there’ll be all over trying to get to you. You’ll get an opportunity to have met them at an event or met them out in the field and had a phone call with them anyway and say, “You’d make a great guest on my show.” You won’t need to require it. You can do it if you want to if it’s somebody who reaches out to you cold.

When I do my interviews in the blockchain community, I don’t know that community extremely well. Unless it’s coming from a very reputable PR firm that I’ve worked with before, who provided me, great top-level guests, I require at least an email back and forth answering a couple of questions and maybe a phone call. That’s how I like to do it. Nine times out of ten, I know the people. I’ve met them. I’m at ease enough to know this is someone I should be interviewing that’s going to be right for my show.

Also, some people who are uncomfortable with the podcast interview process and the call can help ease their fears about this like, “Are you going to be out?” Especially when you don’t have your show up yet, to give them an example, “I’m a nice easygoing guy. I’m not going to do to a ‘got you’ questions or anything.” When you don’t have that out, having these screener calls is a great idea. Asking a vetting question is a good idea. Asking what it is that they hope to get from the possible publicity that you’re providing them.

Understand what their driver is and if they’re all about pushy sales. I get a lot of digital marketers asking to come on Feed Your Brand. I don’t want to inundate you guys with stuff that doesn’t even work. They’re very pushy about it. It’s very clear that they’re pushing their agenda. It’s not serving the community. You can tell quickly by finding that out. You want to have a little brief spiel about your show, what it’s going to be about. The fact that they’re getting one on the ground floor. Don’t treat it like this is a negative.

It’s a great thing to be on the ground floor of a new podcast because those are some of the most listened to episodes. When people find a podcast, they tend to start from the beginning. Those early episodes can have the longest traction. For most people, they do reach out to friends, family and people that they know, colleagues and staff. They also don’t need a lot of sales on trying to get them on the show. You can do that too. Jerry Foster, he’s in the Podster group. He was like, “When can I interview you, Tracy? I need you to make me feel comfortable before I start interviewing other people.” I’m like, “Sure. We’ll do that, but we’re relevant.”

What I talk about when he talks about are relevant together, so it works. Make sure that they’re relevant. It’s not like you’re inviting your mom on because you like her. Someday that might be great. Everybody probably wants to meet your mom, but not early on in your show. This is the advantage of joining in and participating. You’re showing it off that sometimes because of the time of day, because of everybody’s schedules. I know the summer is hard. It’s busy in the summer. We making time for the calls is hard. People don’t show up as much as they do. Because people were conditioned to the last Friday of every month was our old coaching call. We only had it once a month. More of our seasoned podcasters show up only on those days because they’re used to that date.

My blockchain show is called the New Trust Economy. When I was speaking in New York, I spoke after a woman who is in the cannabis community in Arizona and she was an incredible speaker. She was talking about the business side and the investment side of cannabis, why you should get into it and why you shouldn’t. Having a broad name is always a good idea. When we talk New Trust Economy, we’re able to talk blockchain. We’re able to talk cryptocurrency. It gave us a lot of broadness to do it.

At the end of the day, what we’re talking about is do we trust this thing or do we not? That’s the only angle that we had. It is always my angle when I’m looking at any new innovation. It fits me. It would fit what we wanted to do. Is it a revolution? Does that fit you? That’s the word that maybe that you want to finesse and work on. When you do my exercise on the description, you’ll utilize different words as you say that. You’re not talking about the name of your show, you’re talking about the effect of your show. What are people looking for? You may come up with a name where you’re like, “That’s more like what it is.”

Maybe it’s not a revolution. I can’t say that it’s not. We had our vote here a few years ago in California. I thought this was going to be a hot topic with my parents. My mom was like, “All our friends, they’ve all discussed it. They already have medical marijuana life.” I was like, “What? Mom, when did this happen that I didn’t know about?” Revolutionary at an age range that I’d never expected. When it starts to come into your world, I expected it with my daughter and son-in-law, not at the grandparent level.

As you’re talking about it, you’re going to be using alternative terms for the industry. You’ll be talking about hemp. You’ll want to talk a little bit about those differences of what people are grasping with an understanding of what’s going on. How is it going to affect my local economy? How is it going to affect my business? How is it going to affect my personal life? What is it adding to our world? As you start to think about those things, other terms may pop out of your mouth as you describe it. Thinking about talking always when you’re doing this is that your audience may be laypeople. You’re not making a show that’s specifically for the industry. While you may have a lot of industry listeners unless that is your sole focus is only for the industry. Speaking to the converted is a different thing than speaking to those who are curious and interested in learning.

 

I want to say it’s a closed community because it’s not. There’s a whole bunch of us out there who are curious. We’re interested. Should we be investing? Should we be using it? Should we be buying? Are these things scams? Are they useful? Is there any information about that? Where would I go to get information about that? If you can become a reliable source for all of those things, that’s fantastic and access to all of those things is fantastic. Your podcasts are extremely useful in and of itself. That’s an authority podcast. You may not be an expert in hemp oil, but you can connect to someone that you believe is the best that you’ve come across.

There isn’t much out there. When Tom first started our podcast on 3D printing, there were about three or four other shows out there, but one was all news and information. One was from a 3D print industry journal, so they were reiterating stuff that they were writing on their website anyway. They were stating press release information. The other one was dry and scary. There was no way we couldn’t have competed against that. It was like, “Could he talk any slower?” It was awful and badly recorded. There was that as well.

Here we came in and had some fun with it, had a different perspective on like, “How are you going to use this thing and what are you going to do with it? Does the world care about it?” We became popular with the industry, with newbies, and with teachers. It expanded for us because of that. There are a lot of shows that we’ll do an episode on cannabis, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of shows on it. There’s a few, but there’s not a ton.

If you have a show that’s all about it and at the end of the day, they’re hawking their own stuff, is that as valuable as someone who has an outside perspective? I have another person for you. One of our other podcasters, Aaron Young’s best friend, Bill Kelly. He’s a great guy. I heard him speak before. He got such passion for it. He opened my eyes to something I didn’t know about the purity problem. That opened my eyes to something that I encourage you. They’re solving problems in an interesting way. He’s someone you should have on your show. That’s the caliber of guests you should get.

He’s a good guy and I’m sure that he’ll come to your show too. Aaron Young invited Scott Carson to speak at these events. I’ve spoken to Aaron’s events. Bill Kelly spoke there and I wasn’t supposed to stay for that day but I stuck around an extra just to hear him because I’ve always wanted to hear what he had to say and fascinated by his journey about what he did. Bill Kelly is one of the founders of one of the companies that got bought out that eventually became WebMD. He’s been a serial entrepreneur, built amazing, fantastic companies. Everything he seems to invest in and get involved in is on the tipping point of something great.

He’s working on an oil purification system. When you have infected plants or some mold or some issue on them, what do you do? You toss them. They have a purification process that allows you to use it as oils. It becomes pure in the process. What do you do with it? It gives them an ability to buy this subpar product but still turns it into something viable and safe. It’s not like you can research what he’s doing because he’s not public about it yet.

Speaker Training

This is the value of our network. We help each other here. We are always suggesting great guests. That’s something that you can use the Brandcasters group for. If you are looking for a guest in a particular area with particular expertise, there’s a good chance that one of us knows them and knows someone. Type it in there and say, “I’m seeking a guest who has this experience or has this authority or has written a book on this.” We’ll find it for you or “I want to get this guest on my show. Does anyone know him or her?” We can do that too. I’ve gotten some of the best guests by asking my guests themselves, who else should be on my show? If you’ve benefited from this, who else in your industry or who else that is working in and around you that could benefit from being here too. That always works well, especially when you’re doing an industry-specific show.

I read 90% of it and realized it was giving me anxiety. It was a book about giving TED Talks because I was asked. I did this event in New York called Exponent Women. It’s 200 investing women in New York and in all levels of investment, finance. There was a woman from JP Morgan, people from family offices and parts of investment banking that I never heard of before. I felt over my head as it was. Originally when I was invited, I was supposed to sit on a panel. The book is called Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo. I felt like I was maybe in over my head at this point. When they say, “I’m going to be on a panel.” There was a woman talking about cannabis. There was a woman talking about compliance and more technical issues in the investment community. Here I am talking blockchain. That’s what they asked me to come to talk about. I was like, “I can handle questions. I do this all day long. I can adlib anything.” There is no problem there, but a week and a half before they go, “We’d like you to do a ten-minute TED-style talk and answer some questions.” I was like, “That’s way harder than I imagined.”

Whitney recommended this book, which was awesome. I started reading the book at the beginning of it was great. I took a lot of notes and incorporated it in as I was writing my talk. When I give an hour-long talk, I have a set of slides and I do adlib everything because I know my content well. Here, there are no slides. There was stand up in front and go for ten minutes on a subject. You have to have a very concise beginning, middle, and end. There’s got to be stories in there. You can’t drone on. You can’t get off track. It was a lot harder.

When did I get to the point of the book where the book was talking about how much Steve Jobs practice before? That was when I was starting to have heart palpitations. I was worried like, “I don’t have enough time to be this good at it.” When I got there, the funny part was this woman, Sarah Presley. She was going first. I was relieved to go first. She was like, “Did you get thrown by this too?” I was like, “Thank God. I’m not the only one who thought this was a crazy idea.” None of us said, “That’s not a good idea.” None of us stopped her. We went along with it so it went well. The person who had asked me, pretty much known me for a long time. She knows me in a private setting and on a personal basis, not on a professional basis.

Don’t change yourself. Instead, improve on yourself. Click To Tweet

She’s the one that brought me into this group, suggested to me, and she’s sitting at the back of the room. Afterward, she said, “I didn’t want to tell you this ahead of time, but I’m relieved you were so amazing because you made me look good.” I was like, “How terrible I get.” She was worried. I was like, “I’m glad you didn’t tell me ahead of time.” I don’t have stage fright and that helps. I’m not afraid to be on stage in front of people so none of that is a problem for me. I don’t know why that is.

Doing something like this, I did have my notes. If I needed them, but I didn’t end up using them. All went over our time. No one stayed for ten minutes. I stayed thirteen minutes and no one said anything. They asked one last question. It worked out well. I thought, “I could do this again.” I could sit down and maybe develop a good TED Talk. I never wanted to do that before, but after having done that, I thought, “That was more powerful than I thought it would be.”

It was a fabulous event. One of the MSNBC anchors, she has a show there. Her expertise is in bonds and other things like that. From the set of the very first talk of the day, it was high caliber women all day long. I opened up my talk by saying, “I’ve never done this before. Not only have I never given a talk this short before, but I’ve never spoken to a room of these many women. Very often, I’m the only woman in the room or in the minority within that.” It’s a treat and it was awesome because of that. It was different.

I found it valuable. You should check that out. It was useful. I didn’t even totally finish it. I have maybe a quarter left of it. As far as I had gotten, it helped me structure my talk. It gave me the pieces that I needed. It gave me some ideas about how to tell stories, how to make them relevant. I tell stories all the time, but how to make them relevant, concise and tie it from the beginning to the end.

For me, I don’t have trouble with passion for my stuff. I was like, “I’ve got this one.” It gave you the confidence too like, “I got this. I can do that.” I do believe in continual speaker training. Maybe the very first exposure I had to a speaking training was Dale Carnegie. When I first started my career, it was required. We had to take seven weeks of leadership training at the company that I worked for, which is called Milliken. We had a week of statistical process control, which I might as well wanted to blow my brains out as a designer and not loving it, but I did great.

We did a whole week on it with Dale Carnegie. Each week we would have a meeting and everyone had to give a speech each time. That probably was my first exposure to it. It was that environment of watching other people do it that it’s helpful. You learn a lot from watching other people not be successful or be successful than you do from doing it yourself. You’re in your head when you’re doing it. You’re like, “Was it good? I have no idea. I don’t even know what I said.” I don’t like to watch myself after.

This is something for podcasters out there on the podcasting world. I do highly recommend you listen to yourself in the beginning. It’s hard to get over, “My voice sounds like that.” You need to listen to it to make sure that the sound quality is good. It’s the right pace of speech that fits you, but don’t internalize it and go, “I have to slow my speech.” Don’t be inauthentically you but say, “People aren’t quite understanding me. Maybe I need to change up how I speak a little bit.” You’re improving on yourself. You’re not changing yourself in that process, but it’s a good idea.

Taking Care Of Your Audio Recording

One of the things that we find most people who definitely will produce their shows themselves, we take care of it here, but their audio levels are all over the place. You may learn that here when you’re listening to a live stream because I’m active. I’m very animated when I speak. Our team will level that out. They’ll make sure that that doesn’t happen when you’re listening to a podcast. It’s one thing when you’re watching someone and you see them moving, you understand the sound change.

When you don’t have a visual and you’re listening to it, it can sound very disturbing. The sound is going in and out. I had to turn my volume up and volume down. What’s going on here? It can be a reason people don’t listen to your show. The number one we have is making sure that you guys sound good so our sound leveling and training on that are important. You have to think about that when you’re interviewing your guests as well because sometimes your guest’s sound is bad and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s only so much we can do.

If they’re quieter than you or louder than you, don’t worry about that. The worst thing that all that they have is an inline microphone in their headset. What happens is I’m here. I’ve got a lot of hair as I talk. My hair brushes against it. You hear this horrible sound or you hear a continual click. There is nothing arching you can do to get rid of that. If that happens with your guests, ask them to take it off and use their computer sound. You’d rather have sound from the environment than have something annoying like that. If it’s annoying and distracting you, stop it right there because you’re not going to do your guest service. They’re not going to sound good and that’s not fair to them and not fair to your show and your listeners.

It can be worse because you’ve got the microphone set up between the two of you and sometimes it’s awkward and uncomfortable. It’s not always the best. It’s great from a dynamic, but we can’t separate your sound as easily when you’re in person. When you have two-track recordings, we can fix a lot of sound level issues and background noise. We can turn them off when you’re speaking, but when you’re in person, you tend to talk over each other and you do that. There’s no way to fix it because you have a single microphone or even if you have two separate microphones, there’s bleed over because you’re too close together.

If you’re going to do an in-person having slightly better equipment, making sure that they’re pointed separately, making sure you’ve got the setup right. If you’re going to do that, have a tech call with Tom and help set up with the best setup possible because we could still get a two-track recording. We can do the best we can. We can at least prevent the talk over that happens typically with the right equipment. He’ll be able to tell you what to get. We have a whole setup we’ve done for multiple people who do a lot of live interviews.

It’s not convenient always for everyone. It can prevent you from making time to get the right guests. They’re all the way across the country, whatever it is. Don’t let it hold you back that that’s your requirement. If you can make it happen because you’re at an event, some of the events are the worst sounds I’ve ever had. There are giant ballrooms so the sound echoes everywhere, people walk by and they have no courtesy. If you’re going to do something like that at a big event, have a private room. Go and pay for a private lounge or suite, whatever you got to do and do your interviews there. A lot of times, there are press rooms and other things that are accessible and you don’t even know it, just ask.

They’ll treat you like the press, they should. You’re going to give their event, their vendors and their people publicity, they should do that for you. Go ahead and take advantage of those things because at that point, getting some of those live interviews is great. Don’t forget to take your pictures side by side, use it for social media. You want the association with these great people in the marketplace that you’re working within or the industry.

 

Russell Brand is doing a podcast. He’s been doing something interesting. If you are in person, this is a cool way to do it. He’s been doing this thing where he finishes recording with someone. He waits until after. They stand side by side and they do a video recording. With his accent he goes, “What cool things did we talk about?” It puts the guests on the spot and it’s some famous guests. That person goes, “I’m shocked. We went into this and you’ve got me to say that.” It’s genuine because it happened and they’re excited about what they said and sharing that.

He uses that as his promo video to push out the episode that’s coming that week. It’s a brilliant marketing plan. It takes a lot of organization. You need to definitely prep your guests and say, “In the end, we’re going to do a two-minute promo. We’re going to do a talk.” I had another podcaster who did something similar, but at the beginning made me say their show name, “Welcome to the show. I’m Tracy Hazzard and I’m your guest.” They were associating my name with their show. It was almost like I recorded my own intro. It was a cool thing. The intro was in my voice for that particular show. It was a little gimmicky, but it worked. They had a sound bite to use.

It was like, “Welcome to whatever the show is. I’m Tracy Hazzard and I’m your guest.” It was like that. He had a different intro for every single episode. I still recommend having your pro-intro on the front of that. Why not? Rather than you start the show, try your guests start in the show, wouldn’t it be different? Who does that? You can try something new. You get to have fun with your show. Your show doesn’t have to be the same exact way every single time because you started that way. If you think of a new idea, try it out. See if people like it. One of our hosts, he has a podcast called On The Shelf. He was trying to figure out what to call his audience. He was like, “Do I call you, On The Shelfers? Do I call you, Launchers?”

He was trying to figure out what to call them because his show name didn’t lend itself to that. He couldn’t figure out what to do. He went through bunches of different names and finally settled on one episode ten or something that worked. He calls them Big Boxers because they want to get in the mass-market retail. It fits and it worked. People like it. On his Facebook page, he will say, “I’m a Big Boxer trying to get into Costco.” They do identify. Finding something that fits your community. You’ll try some things and it won’t work and keep track.

If you can become a reliable source for things, then your podcasts are extremely useful in and of itself. Click To Tweet

When they start communicating back with you, you know you’ve hit on something but usually, that takes about 25 episodes. I’m going, to be honest with you. It’s that way for everybody. Some people crash because they do a lot of episodes upfront, but it takes a certain amount of rapport to build with them and for them to have heard you. It’s like seven touchpoints with someone. It takes a while before they hit at that point where they want to reach out. What they’re usually asking is, “Are you going to stick around for me?” If they find out you’re going to stick around and you’re going to keep providing the value week after, they go, “They deserve my engagement.” As you come up with names, that’s what this group is for. Float out a few names. Let us vet them as well with you. We might be your future audience. We’ll be back again next time. Maybe get yourself a free private coaching call. Take care. Bye.

Important Links:

• Feed Your Brand
• Aaron Young
• FeedYourBrand.co
• Product Launch Hazzards
• New Trust Economy
• Exponent Women
• Talk Like TED
• On The Shelf