As an entrepreneur starting up, it is important to launch on the right runway. Strategically and tactically placing your clients to expand your network is what Jeremy and Brielle Slate do best. Their podcast interview service Command Your Brand helps podcasters become icons in their industry. Jeremy and Brielle share their story of how they got attracted to podcast guesting and explain how your expertise needs to line up with the audience and the host of the podcast you’re getting interviewed on.

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We’ve got an interview with another couple in business, just like us in many ways. They are also in the podcast space. They have a bit of a different niche for their business, but some great people. I love the name of their company, Command Your Brand. That is aligned with a lot of the things that we talk about on this show. It’s all about authority podcasting and building that brand up that’s yours, that’s uniquely yours. It’s got all that great power in it too. They have an incredible podcast interview service. Jeremy and Brielle Slate’s podcast placement service, it’s the best strategic and tactical boost to get more. They’ve refined this down to placement and boost for you because they’re combining PR and podcast together with the strategy from the get-go. That’s brilliant on what they do.

Any podcaster who is serious about using podcasting as a tool to grow their business, grow their reach, market their business has to seriously consider doing this. I know many people have networks of people they reach out to, to find guests and maybe a lot of people have time to go and solicit guest themselves, but there comes a time when you want to step it up and you need some professional help to get incredibly valuable guests for your show. You have to do it yourself or the other way or guest on other people’s shows to boost your listenership. That’s the biggest power and the biggest value that they offer. Maybe they’ll do that more than the other. They’re taking people and placing them on other shows. Relationship with the podcast host and a good placement agency is a growth plan for your podcast and that doesn’t cost you. That’s the great part about that.

I wanted to mention something. The story is that we are Tom and Tracy Hazzard everywhere and good friends of ours are Ken and Carrie Courtright everywhere, and Jeremy and Brielle Slate everywhere. What happens is, is that those of us that are the tacked onto the end of that, where we are Tracy Hazzard, the first and last name, we get all the Google power. We get all the authority. We get all the command from that. We are the lucky ones. If you are co-hosts like us and you want to make sure that you’re building up both names, there’s a lesson here. You should be Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard or co-host one and co-host two, full first and last name unless it doesn’t matter to you.

Those of us we think, “We’re getting the higher billing with our name first in that Tom and Tracy Hazzard. Tom is separated from Hazzard with ‘&’or ‘and’, and then Tracy and so Tom Hazzard is not out there indexed on Google as much because of it. Your profile is a little lower. It’s one of the things that we discovered with our friends Ken and Carrie Courtright when we were researching their Google ranking and authority power, and Ken has taken a bit of a backseat to Carrie because of that. We’re into power spousing. That’s what I’m going to call this. Power co-host, power spousing and it doesn’t matter because if one spouse is doing well or one co-host is doing well, the other is doing well by association. That’s actually the lesson there is that it doesn’t really matter, but it’s a fun, interesting fact on the side. Let’s hear from Jeremy Slate and Brielle Slate.

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Command Your Brand: Podcast Guesting And PR Combined with Jeremy and Brielle Slate

Jeremy and Brielle, we’re so glad to have you.

Thanks for having us.

We love co-hosting and we love co-collaborating on our business or co-creating a business. How about you?

That’s how we ended up in this space together. We were totally different, working in two completely separate fields. Our paths merged, and we just love the energy.

I was a history major in school. I got my Masters in Ancient History. I wrote a book with titles on Latin and wondered why nobody bought it. Brielle has been in PR ever since I’ve known her, and somehow, we’re now both in PR. The funny thing about that Tracy was I had to learn not to write academic anymore because it’s weird for everybody else.

When we started working together, it was quite a long time ago. It’s coming up on twenty years ago when we first started working together. We had been married for maybe six years and we knew it was either going to be the best thing ever or we were going to end up divorced. Fortunately, we’re still here. This has been great for us. People underestimate the co-host mindset and that co-creation as it is a fabulous way to go about it. First off, you got a built-in backup who gets it and you both have your goals aligned. You’re married to your business. If you all have your goals aligned and you’re all are in support of that, I find it easier, but it’s not for everyone.

You also have to learn when to turn it off too. We balance each other out. I’m a big thinker and I like to think in big actions, where. Brielle is good at structuring the plan underneath things so they work.

You have what most entrepreneurs don’t have and that is, you’ve got resources. You’ve got two types of thinking. That’s fabulous and that’s what we found as well. Let’s dive in to this podcast PR and how you formed this. You started a couple of great podcasts, Jeremy, Create Your Own Life and Take Back Your Health NOW! Those sounds cool and interesting and they’re doing great on iTunes. How did that end up being you helping so many people get placed on podcasts? You’ve got this great podcast interview service that places people. How did that happen for you?

We got approached by a friend of mine that said, “I want you to produce a podcast for me because I absolutely love your show. It’s great.” I helped him do that and Brielle’s PR thinking came into it and she’s like, “We have to get people to know who he is first. He’s very well-known in New Jersey, but if he wants people to listen to him across the country, we’ve got to get him known.” We started booking him on a bunch of podcasts. It was very successful. We found that we liked the idea of working through this PR plan and getting people booked on shows more than we did the whole idea of creating their show. From my background, I’m not great on the audio editing and stuff like that. It’s not what I wanted to spend all of my time doing. It made more sense to focus on to one thing. Brielle, you’re great with putting that story into place too. You made that all work. We became quite a team on that.

It’s such an important part that we get a lot of people who come to us and say, “We want to start a podcast,” as part of why they’re listening to this podcast. What they don’t have in place is exactly what you said Brielle. They don’t have a great platform already. They’re not as well-known as they’d like to be and they think podcast is a vehicle to do it. They might need a boost to begin with.

That’s what we found out with Jeremy’s show too. When his show launched into iTunes, we had the whole PR program going behind it. We had been writing press releases. We had been getting him on shows. We had almost a case study that we were operating off of from when we started to launch the other show that we were working on. The podcast might be the vehicle or the stream, but you definitely need something that’s going to let people know that it’s there.

Let the right people know. That’s also a significant part of what you look for, right?

Yeah. It’s much easier to convert somebody that’s already a podcast listener to another podcast or an additional podcast. Edison Research’s stats this year, the average of listener subscribes to five podcasts, which is pretty crazy to think about. Myself, I listen to ten, but it’s easy to take somebody that’s already in that space and add another show to their plate. Whereas somebody else who doesn’t know what a podcast is or has no desire to listen to one, it’s hard to convince them to do that.

The opportunity that a lot of podcast hosts don’t take is the opportunity to go on other podcasts. That’s been a part of some of the people who’ve been most successful in the marketplace have done that well.

You have to be able to tell your story through different lenses. As a host myself, one of the most annoying things is when you get somebody on and they tell their story in the exact same way they told it on ten other shows. Audiences are so different depending on which show you’re going on. I like to tell them, “It’s a show lens. What lens does this show up to the world where you can talk to it?”

Tell me what attracted you to podcasting to begin with?

I had done a lot of things. I got my degree in World Religions. I went to Oxford University to study Literature at New College. I got my Masters in Ancient History at Seton Hall and taught high school for a couple of years. This wasn’t very happy. Brielle has always been somebody entrepreneurial-minded. She comes from a family where they’ve always owned businesses. She was approached about an opportunity with a network marketing company and said, “You need to take a look at this.” I took a look at it and saw the presentation and thought I was going to make $1 million tomorrow and I didn’t. It was something that allowed me to get started and at least let me think there are other ways to do things. I was successful enough at that, but it wasn’t where my purpose was. I went through a lot of different things from selling life insurance to selling products on Amazon. I started working at a friend’s digital marketing company writing HTML, CSS, doing emails. I was like, “Let me do something for myself.” That’s when I started the podcast and it took off because I took a lot of action upfront to get people to listen to it.

Overachiever comes to mind. You’ve done a lot of stuff in a short career. Maybe it’s not that short, maybe you’re older than you look, but you’ve done a lot. I like how you went and tried a lot of different things. That says a lot about you as an individual, that you take action and you’ve been looking for what’s going to work for you and what’s the right fit for you.

 

A couple of things that happened in my life that I left out in there. I had a near-death experience at nineteen where I had a knee surgery gone bad. I had this thing rising out of consciousness for three days and it didn’t change my life at all. I kept doing what I was doing. It wasn’t until 24 when my mom had a stroke, which, thank God I had Brielle at the time because I don’t know what I would’ve done. She was there to help me. Since I was outside of myself, it also put me in that right place to look at what was going on in my life and say, “Maybe I should look at something else.” To have somebody else that’s always been business-minded and also have Brielle’s mom is a huge resource. She’s owned businesses for years. It’s been cool to have the relationship we do.

It sounds like some of our experience. Tracy launching our oldest daughter and her husband with their entrepreneurial journeys. Brielle, what is it like growing up with an entrepreneurial family? Some people totally react the opposite, you didn’t. Why?

I loved it. Everybody is always like, “How long have you been working with your parents?” I’m like, “Legally, on the books, since I was fourteen.” It’s something that I’ve done for so long. We used to do a lot of street fairs. There were always these big fairgrounds, like a festival, every year that we used to do. I remember being ten years old and being the person standing handing coupons or trying to route people in. It’s always been fun. I grew up in an area that’s like suburbia and all my friends’ parents work 9 to5, really stressed. They got to go on one vacation a year. I looked at my family and every day was not a vacation, but an adventure. I enjoy it.

As you were saying that, I was thinking about all the times that my daughter was off the books. She’s on the books now that she’s older. Alex used to assemble pens at age five and when we had one of our first businesses where we were making stylus pens for handheld computers. She was always exposed to that and I swore that she was going to react the opposite. When she got older, I thought she would never want to be an entrepreneur. It would be the absolute opposite because I thought she hated that the whole time. Alexandra works for us and she’s running our business. She’s the COO of our company. Those entrepreneurial opportunities gave her a great background. Watching that all those years and understanding it intimately has made her dive into this and be so much more successful. What you did was intuit the problem all along that your parents had to solve and that was getting more people to listen, to show up. That’s the number one problem of every business that I found.

That’s always something that comes to mind first for us. A lot of people put promotion into the background and they think that it’ll just spread through word of mouth, but you have to be very active about it. That’s one thing I think has given us a big leg up.

‘If you build it, they will come’ is not how it works. That’s great that you start, and your mindset is already flipped into the thing that is most critical and separates the successful from the unsuccessful in terms of how they go. We don’t have a lot of runway as entrepreneurs when you’re starting out. You don’t have a lot of resources, you don’t have a lot of time, and you don’t have a lot of money, so you can’t afford the hiccups, the failures, those false starts. It takes such a big toll when you’re beginning something, when you’re launching something. Where a big brand, a big company, they can make a lot of false starts because they have more money and more resources to throw at it and add runway.

Since Brielle’s always thought in the PR and publicity mindset, she’s always had me working with local newspapers. She’s gotten me on television.. She’s always thinking about, “How can I get us more attention?”

I love that idea of thinking about it first so that you’re also thinking about is, “Is that the kind of attention I want?” That’s where we look at it. Sometimes people are just like, “Let me get on any podcast and it’ll be fine.” I don’t look at it that way. Do you?

It depends. We’re building a company that helps you to get on podcast. With a lot of shows we work with, I’m the pioneer. I like to check it out first and see how things are going. I say for a lot of brands, it doesn’t make sense if something’s not aligned. For me, since I’m trying to always meet new people and new shows, it does make sense. That’s the interesting standpoint you have to look at. I have to be flexible, whereas a lot of clients and a lot of people we work with have to think about like, “What’s the bigger purpose and why you’re doing this?” It has to align with that show because you have to show up valuable. You see too many people that they show up and they want to send you to a link or a YouTube channel when you’re on for that half hour or 40 minutes to be an expert. Your expertise needs to line up with what that audience and the host needs.

It also needs to be worth your time as the person being interviewed. If you aren’t adding value, if the audience isn’t aligned, then it’s not going to serve your goals anyway. You’ve wasted both of your time and that’s not okay. We’re all too busy for that.

Let’s talk a little bit about some of the podcasts that you’ve listened to and you go, “No one should be a guest on that show.” What do you see as the issues when it’s not as attractive and you don’t want to suggest a show to a client?

We hook up all the shows for our clients, but we’ve learned certain shows to steer away from in certain tendencies. The biggest thing is professionalism because a lot of people approach it in a weird way, especially with scheduling. Scheduling has always been a big nightmare because there are certain shows that they’ll cancel again and again and again. Eventually, our client says, “They’re wasting my time. We can’t do this anymore.”Especially for us because we work with a lot of high-level performers. We have clients that they took a later flight or they changed their whole schedule or they changed meetings, if somebody is going to waste an hour of their time and cancelled, they’re not happy.

We have one client that’s a New York Times bestseller and if you cancelled twice on him, he refuses to reschedule because his time is that valuable. That’s one of the things you have to look at is scheduling. For me as a podcaster, it doesn’t make any sense because I’ve always made schedule an important thing. I do batch scheduling. Every other Friday, I do three weeks’- worth of interviews so that I’m booked out. That’s something to think about is being a professional at it. Another thing too is making sure you have people’s permission to run certain things that they’re saying because even though you’re recording it, a lot of times, it’s assumed. It’s also a good idea to get it verbally or a written confirm because sometimes, somebody may say something and say, “No, you can’t publish that.” It’s a good idea to get their permission ahead of time to do that. Something else would be video. We’ve had a couple of shows that we’ve worked with where their video looks like it’s taken from a dungeon. It’s weird in that way because you’re getting somebody that probably has a big office behind them or a nice home office and you show up and you’re in a hoodie in the dungeon, it looks a little weird to the people that are listening to you.

That’s always one of the things that we felt was the benefit of podcasting. It’s audio and we, especially whether we’re interviewing a guest from Australia, we’ll have to come out and do an interview at 11:00 PM, we might be in our nightclothes already. We don’t have to be on camera.

I’m the same way. I don’t want to do video.

Isn’t it true that video has become a very important asset in a digital marketing arsenal or within your digital marketing toolbox? Video gets a lot of exposure on things like Facebook. I can understand why people want to do it, but if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to do it right.

Sometimes it is good to have video when you can because you’re having eye contact with the person. I do it when I’m interviewing someone I’ve never met before. We haven’t had a conversation before. They don’t know who I am. I do it when I write my Inc. articles. I do it because having that, there’s an energy feed that happens when you’re looking at someone. You can be sure they’re not distracted, they’re not typing, they’re not checking out their phone while they’re talking to you and making sure that you are listening. We never air that video and we’re always like, “This isn’t good video. We’re not great quality so we’re not going to air this on you.” I’m always clear about that. The video is for us to communicate. Sometimes that’s better and it works well with certain types of people, but you also have to know who they are. If you get that they’re much more comfortable on video, then do it because you can.

Video is very important nowadays, but the thing is you have to clean out the shots. We had one person we were working with and they were walking around their yard and they had stuff all over their yard. If you’re going to be doing it, make sure your shot is nice and clean and professional. We have one guy that we work with and his studio was in his garage but you would never know. It looked professional, high-end. He had the background behind him. You wouldn’t know where he was shooting it from. Even if somebody has a black backdrop, it’s fine. If you see anything that looks weird, it makes you uncomfortable. It can give you the adverse effect of feeling uncomfortable. It can make you uncomfortable if it’s a weird situation.

I had that happen to one podcast that I was placed on. I had tried a placement service a few years ago to see what it was like. This was completely more of a test and research, but they put me on this podcast that was for an exclusive group. It was this elite thing and you had to be a member to listen to the podcast or watch the video. I get on it and all I could think about the whole time that I’m watching this guy on video is that, “That looks like an IKEA bookcase behind him.” The books were decent, but it looked like it was a basement and there was no color on the wall and it seems like, “Is this guy running in a millionaire’s club?” It kept making me question it the whole time and I was distracted by it. Then it took them a year to air my podcast with him, which was even weirder. He didn’t say that at the time. It was all kinds of strange. I was like, “Chalk it up to research and I learned something,” but you’re right. You sense that and it’s not good for you. It doesn’t make you look like you’re doing a good job placing, but it also makes it a more uncomfortable interview.

You said something important there about how long you had to wait for the thing to come out. We don’t always have 100% prediction on when an episode is going to come out. Something I’ve always done for people appearing as guests on my show, is I give them a pretty good roundabout idea of when it’s coming out. As podcasters, a lot of us want traffic. We want to get noticed. It’s a good idea to keep the guests in the loop and let them know, “This is the predicted date when it would come out.” That way, we can get the promotional tied together.

When you wonder why your podcast guests didn’t promote you well enough, it’s probably because you didn’t give him any notice. It’s great if you can tie into something that’s going on and I do that. If someone comes and says to us, “We’re running a big promotion, do you have any guests for us?” We’ll suggest some people, but I’m always clear for them, “They have a specific timing in mind and if you can tie into it, it would make for a better podcast, better promotion schedule.” You’re going to get a better boost from it and everybody wants that. Everybody wins in that situation.

We’re talking about not only the value of PR and getting the word out even as a podcast to promote your own show, being a guest on others and having that be an intentional effort and you can get professional help with that. We’re also talking about a level of professionalism and integrity of being a podcast host in doing what you say you’re going to do, having a professional environment, having proper preparation, and proper follow-up.

Schedule and follow-up; that is the thing that we encourage with our podcasters and with our network. We have free lessons on this stuff. It’s like, “How do you set up your schedule so it’s right? How do you set it up, so it has the permissions built into when they book it, so you don’t have to have that conversation? How do you do all of those things and make it streamlined for you?” It bodes well. I’ve been on shows that have 50,000 downloads an episode. They don’t even use a calendar scheduler and they were just like, “Can you come on my show at this time?” It made me question whether or not they were aligned to be about the number of downloads they had because you can’t check it.

 

As podcasters, there’s not that many things we have to do well. The guests are supplying most of the content. There are a few things we have to do well and that’s having a good schedule, appearing professional, having good quality audio, which I know you are huge on, and there’s just a few things. You create more opportunities for yourself that way. You can grow a lot more to show up as professional. For me, I show up as a professional twice a month. We don’t have to do a lot to do it that way.

This tie between the guest being part of the promotion plan that you have as well. Follow-up and that boost that comes from having a guest, that’s part of the growth plan of a podcast. If the guest is not doing what you want them to do, in terms of sharing it, how do you encourage that on your side when you were placing people on podcasts? How do you utilize that and get them to boost that they were on a podcast? What do you do there?

I like to explain to people the podcast appearance itself is important in what we’re going for, but the promotion is this whole other thing. It’s the second big boom and it’s interesting to look at it that way because there’s so much you can do with it. You can segment your email list and share it out that way. Maybe different types of clientele would be interested in it in different ways. You can use it to embed on your blog and write a post with it. There’s retargeting maybe that host’s audience or people similar to that audience. We’re huge on getting clients to promote because that’s what’s going to create more attention. People that already know you, like you, and trust you are more apt to share you with other people that don’t already know you, like you, and trust you. You have the first bump you’re going to get from being on the show, but the second that you have total control over of, “What are you going to do with this?”

For our Brandcasters who we’re producing their shows for them, guest communication is a huge thing and we decided we needed to make it easy for them. You’ll experience when this episode airs, you’ll get our automated guest communication email that contains all the information, the links, the assets, and especially our secret weapon or one of our ninja tactics, as Tracy likes to call it. We call it Ego Bait. The whole podcasting universe of guests, I don’t think knows about it. When they get it, it’s new to them. It’s this graphic of something the hosts said about them that makes them look good or it’s flattering, and they always share it on social media because, “Look at me, I was on this show and look how brilliant they say I am.”Even providing the codes that people can use on their media page or their website or press page that populates that and links back to their website automatically so the guest can’t mess it up. We need to provide as much tools as we can and make it easy for the guest to share, but still even like they say, ”You lead a horse to water and you can’t make him drink.” Even if you provide all this stuff, you can’t force them to do it, but hopefully you make it easy for them. Flattering them incentivizes them to do it a bit too.

When I did an analysis of all my Inc. articles and all of the guests we had had on our podcast, we came up to this that not enough percentage of the people were putting it into the website and taking advantage of the backlink opportunities. That’s a technical thing. If you want to understand the technical side of how the power of linking to power sites together and all of those things, but it wasn’t happening. How could we encourage them to do that and that’s how Ego Bait was born. It was this simple thing we realized that a lot of the people I interviewed and a lot of the people that we had as guests didn’t have the technical skills to know that that’s how they should do it. If they did, they would put a social post out, no problem, but they weren’t using the website side of things, which lasts longer. You want that link up to last there and to be powerful, not in that as you put it, know, like, and trust association because that’s important too but it’s also in actual Google power underneath it all too.

That’s the huge thing about podcast that people don’t realize is the sheer number of backlinks, which can be crazy. If you look at even our hosting sites, a lot of them have authority links, which can help to rank a site as well.

That’s what we started talking about. You had this guy who wanted you to start a podcast and nobody knew who he was yet. Google needs to know who you are too. You got to have all of those things finding you. It’s not just people.

PR has become a more enhanced game than it used to be. You have to understand a lot about the online marketing side of things, which is what I’m good at. Whereas Brielle knows like, “What do we do with it to get people to do something with it?” which is a good thing.

You have the best of both. You have a lot of technical, a lot of story, and a lot of the content itself, like ‘what’s in it’ matters as much. It’s as much of the influence as how you execute it. Usually, we see a lot of people do one thing well and not both.

That’s why we do work with our clients too like you. We have a webinar. Once they’re midway through their program where we go over, “Now you got on these shows, how do you use these shows that you’ve already been on? You’ve already shared them out on social media. How do you use them for your benefit to build awareness, have your clients or your audience or whoever it is that you’re trying to reach understand what’s going on?”Even create more opportunities from that because it’s amazing the opportunities that podcast episodes and what you do with them can do for you.

It’s so frustrating to me when we meet new podcasters, however that is, whether it’s at events or we’re introduced. There are so many different ways you meet people, but they’re creating this incredible content in a podcast. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in podcasts. Having a podcast audience is a wonderful thing and the relationship that you build with people you don’t even know, it’s on another level. There are tremendous benefits to it. If that’s all you’ve done with it is put out that audio show, I see so many people with all this untapped potential to repurpose that podcast in about at least half a dozen different ways, if not more, where they could get so much more return on the time they’ve invested in it. To me, it’s such a shame when I see that.

Having a podcast, it’s gotten me in Inc., it’s gotten me in Forbes. I have a speaking event because the promoter has listened to my podcast for awhile where I’m speaking next to the co-founder of Apple Music. He’s made way more money than I have, but I’m on the same promo with him.

What Tom’s pointing out is that the guest tends to think, “The show aired.” That’s an old radio model that it aired and now you can’t hear it again and now you can’t see it again. What I found was when I did twelve shows all in three months, I did four a month that I was guest on, is that it took about six months before I started seeing that traction from it that was so visible. I did it from January through March. When I looked at the end of the year and then calculated that return on investment from being on those three shows, it was hundred X. It was crazy amount of money that I had already made, and I knew that there was more flow through happening. It was going to lead to even more because we started projects. It was one of those things that you didn’t anticipate it. The timeliness of it doesn’t happen in podcasting it, it’s when the right person finds it.

Even from a content marketing standpoint, people look at a blog post and they’re like, ” The blog post is done. I’m never going to touch it again.” The thing that I find is with podcasts I’ve been on, it may be relevant to a topic that I wrote a year ago and now I can embed that in that post, re-share that with my list and my followers. It’s now making what I did even more relevant and they may create more sales and everything else off of that.

For me and for most of the people that I’ve worked with, last year was the year of content creation and this is the year of content repurposing. You can do more with what you’ve already done. We’ve been getting approached with a lot of people who are looking and considering their legacy. Pretty famous people with fabulous video series and tons of CD’s that they’ve now put into video, what are they going to do with them next and how is this going to create a legacy so that they can retire or do something different? Move on to something and how can you do that? That’s what I’m seeing going on and the theme. Content repurposing and re-sharing and reusing and getting it to come up again because the relevance isn’t relevant to you, it’s relevant to who’s reading, who’s listening, and who’s watching.

There’s a lot of talk about podcasting being hot. We are reading that this is the hot new things. Lots of marketers are trying to get their clients into it. Lots of PR firms are jumping on the bandwagon. You have a history of experience that comes from both being a podcaster and being a guest. You have both sides of it. How do you think it’s serving you well to position yourself in the marketplace?

There was an article from Wired Magazine. They found that podcast listeners are way more engaged that they even thought they were. That’s huge for advertisers. There was this bump in podcasting where it started to die. Adweek, I was searching on their site and it was 2007, “Is podcasting over?” All of a sudden, the smart phone and everything else came about, and now podcasting is on the rise again because it’s so much more accessible to people. If you’re going to build something that has staying power and if you’re also going to figure out how you can tell your story in a way that it’s also relevant to different shows, you’re going to be able to take advantage of this even when it’s “hot” versus when it’s something that’s still growing. It’s something that’s growing all the time. If you’re going to jump into it without realizing what you’re differentiating characteristic is and what you’re differentiating way of telling your story is, then you’re not going to see the benefit from it yourself. One of my favorite branding guys is a guy named David Brier and he likes to say that, “If you’re not promoting and differentiating yourself, you’re promoting your category.” If I’m not saying how I’m different than everybody else, then I’m promoting podcasting and I’m not promoting myself. That’s what you have to think about is, “How can I be differentiating in that way?”

We are all about being original and finding that strategy that works for your business, works to make podcasting a vehicle and not the thing. What I am starting to see a trend of is die-off in passive income podcasters. I don’t know if you’re seeing this as well but I’ve been following some for awhile, I saw a lot of podcasters that were doing that start to shut down their shows.

It’s become more geared on a topical thing whereas make money online and things like that aren’t as big of a deal as they were.

For those of you who don’t know what passive income podcasting is, it’s this idea that you’re going to develop a show that’s going to attract advertisers, which means you have to track a broad range into a broad category. You want to attract all entrepreneurs so you do a show at which you float around and interview all entrepreneurs. It must attract you. It has worked but it stopped. It’s not working as well so they’re jumping off and starting the next thing. Those people are usually leaders and they go in and hack something new. They’re on to hacking something new and they get bored with their show. They don’t want to keep up with it and it’s not fitting their new lifestyle. When the money that comes from the advertising is no longer attractive to them, then they’ve moved on to the next thing. That’s what I’m seeing happening and we had been seeing the growth of business podcasters. Podcasters that are using podcasting to support their business goals, their business plan, their attractor needs in terms of getting more clients, getting more audience, getting more members if they have a membership site, whatever that might be ‘getting more of’.

Brielle has been complaining about this literally all the time. John Lee Dumas is very good at what he’s done, but there are thousands of people out there that are trying to be him in this passive income model. If I have to go on one more show that asks me to fill in the gaps in my intro, I’m going to hit my head against the wall.

The questions were always set up so they can offer you, “Here’s the product I’m going to sell you or here are the best resource or here’s this, here’s that.” I’ll be honest with you, I started with some of that on my own show in beginning and I realized, “This is tacky and I hate it.” It’s about how are you going to service people and service a specific market. A lot of times, those podcasters are like, “This isn’t our full-time jam. We have a back-end business that’s a real business and this is more of a vehicle to promote what we’re doing and also driving leads for what we’re doing at the same time.” It’s not, “Let’s get the CPM up and sell some ads.” For 90% of people, that doesn’t work. The connections of the guests that you’re getting, the different podcasters, that’s where the value is.

We want people to live and feel that podcasting is not an effort. I don’t feel it’s an effort for our business at all because it’s exciting. I get to talk to you. I was looking forward to this. I get to connect with people I want to hear from, I want to hear more from. I’m getting to network with them. I’m building relationships and our value to each other from that. That energizes me and keeps me going. On the flipside of that, we do our topic episodes. I’m providing a greater value because when I do those episodes, I’m helping my audience grow more. When they grow, they’re more likely to become my clients. It’s a service-oriented mindset. Loren Michaels Harris said to me, “Difference before dollars.” I loved that and I had said, “Focus on impact.” Between the two of us, we had that same mindset going into it. That synergy, it comes across on your show.

I have a lot of my listeners say, “I like the way you interview because they answer a lot of questions I have for your guests.” As a host, I’m trying to take the viewpoint of the person that’s listening to me and ask the questions that are going help them do what this person was talking about. Whereas if you’re creating a show that you’re like, “I have an affiliate link here and affiliate link there. I have the CPM I have to worry about here,” you’re not going to look at it that way. You’re not going to look at how can I service the listener.

Service is critical and that’s why, quite honestly, our attitude has been, “We’re going to share everything that we know and that everything that we do for our clients.” If everyone wants to learn from that and do it for themselves, by all means have at it. More power to you. We want you to be successful whether you’re going to work with us or not. The reality is people who are our ideal customer don’t have the time to do those things themselves and they’re going to seek help or maybe they found somebody else to help them and that’s fine too, but a lot of them are going to come our way. Unless they already have another option that they already had, they’re going to come because, “I believe in what you’re doing and I would do it myself, but I don’t have time, so can you please do it?”

That was the foundation of our business. It grew out similarly to how it sounds like yours may have started. People kept asking us, “What are you doing and why is it working so well for you? Can you just do it for me?” Eventually we go, “We didn’t realize it, but we started a whole another business within our business. Let’s spin it off and give it its own entity.”That’s how we had to do it because it got so overwhelming with so many people asking to have our help. Speaking of success stories and everything, one of our good mutual friends, Dustin Mathews, who’s going to come on our show, he was one of your clients and you placed him on an obscene amount of podcasts.

He gave us a challenge. He came to us and he’s like, “I have a book launch. I also have offers from two other companies, so I need you to do it a little bit cheaper and I also need you to do more shows than you’ve ever done for anyone in a short period of time.” He goes, “I need 45 shows in 60 days.” I was like, “Play ball.” It was a lot of fun. For us, it proved to us, “We can do that.” Now, we’re more up to taking even more challenges from clients.

I was at an event with him in the middle of him doing it. You’ve done twenty shows at the point that I had met up with him and he goes, “I am hooked. I love this podcasting thing.” I was like, “I know. I knew you would because you get to do what you’re brilliantly you, which is a mentor and help and talk and add value.” That’s what he does so brilliantly. It fit him so well. I knew it would.

We got rave reviews from every podcaster he worked with because he would go and send each and every person a whole care package, which is like his book and some graphics and a t-shirt.

That’s also a lesson we were talking about of follow-up and making sure that you are going to get the most out of the experience. I went to write an article about him and he sent me his package and I thought, “This is brilliant. This is amazing.” I wrote a case study that is in a free PDF that I hand out all the time to people and everyone can get that on our website. It is that exact thing. He adds tremendous value in relationship that goes beyond what he does for you right on the show there. That is a great lesson to being a great guest.

Even as a guest, we had so many rave reviews. He was their favorite guest ever because he went there and gave them so much information. Serve, serve, serve the audience. It was beautiful.

Even though he asked you to do more work for a little less money, I’d bet having him as a client has given you a lot of exposure and probably brought you other clients.

I wish I had 30 Dustin Mathews because they’re great to work with. They schedule right away. They show up to be super valuable to the audience. You only hear positivity from Dustin. You never hear a complaint. If I had 30 clients like that, my life will be amazing.

He’s got a brilliant mind that is always thinking. That’s why when he adds value, he thinks quick on his feet and that’s a great way to be a good guest is if you are flexible. If you can do more than tow the sound bites and you had that breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge that you can tap into doing what you said, you’re providing diversity, so every show is different. That makes the host look good. What value did that add for you in that relationship building? How did that help you with your business?

He sent us a lot of great referrals. From a show standpoint, we built better relationships with a lot of shows we were working with because we’re like, “We want more people like Dustin.” I don’t know if that’s the part of it most people would see. Most people would look for like, “How much business did he send to us? How much this?” To have more solid relationships with shows that you’ve worked with is so valuable. That’s the other side of what you’re building. You have two sets of relationships you’re building in your business, the people that you’re trying to deliver to and the people that are helping you deliver. You have to understand you’re on the same team with podcasters when you’re helping the books. You have to figure out how you can add that value to them.

It also speaks to the quality of the service that you provided Dustin and you provide all your other customers. We’ve experienced the same thing. Our goal since this became more than just a side project, since this became its own legitimate business, our goal was to make sure we’re providing our clients with absolute incredible value in a quality product that they couldn’t get anywhere else. Once we did that, we focused on that instead of, “Where’s the next customer coming from? Where’s the next sale?” We focused on the quality of the product. What end up happening is our clients became our greatest salespeople and they keep sending us more customers because they believe in it. They rave about us. We’ve even incentivize them to do it in a referral program sense. They do it because they want to. They’re providing these other people they come in contact with, with good value because they think they need the product. We’ve incentivized them to do it in a meaningful way so that we show them our appreciation. It’s the best marketing or sales we could ever do.

Your clients should be your biggest fans because if they’re not, you need to take a look at your business model in all honesty.

It makes it easy for someone like Dustin to say, “Jeremy and Brielle placed me on your show.” Reminding them how you got there, how you connected, reminds them of that value that you add. Other people who are out there going, “How did you manage to be so successful in your book launch?” “Let me tell you about podcast placement. ” That conversation is going to be natural when they know that they received value from it. That’s where you get that well-rounded, not just case study, but proof of concept, proof of your business being successful and providing a tremendous value. You have hit right in the sweet spot that I am so pleased to hear. When I first met you, you hadn’t switched to your new name and I loved Command Your Brand. That is a great name because that’s a power you want to have.

When we were coming up with names, the biggest thing that we changed is Brielle’s mom has been a business consultant for many, many years. I’m like, “I want somebody with that stability on our team.” She has some portion of our company and it’s her name that she came up with and I’m like, “That’s brilliant.”It’s so important to have the right advisors because I’m 30 years old, I don’t know everything about business. I need to know from people that had been there.

I wish that I had sought out advisors in this similar way when we started our first business in the ’90s. We probably could have taken that business a lot further. We did well with it, but still this whole world of networking, of entrepreneurs and mentorship, it may have been there, but it wasn’t there like it is today. Part of that’s probably because the internet was in its infancy and social media barely existed. Maybe it didn’t even exist then. There’s a lot more exposure to these things now, but I wish I had sought it out your age. I’m quite sure we’re going to continue to see big things from you two.

Thank you.

We appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all your wisdom with us and our audience. We want to have you back again. I know there’s going to be so much value in the future, so I hope you will hold a spot open for us later.

Let us know and we’re there. This has been a lot of fun for us. We don’t get to do a lot of joint interviews, it’s cool when we do.

Thank you so much.

Command Your Brand: Podcast Guesting And PR Combined – Final Thoughts

That was a different and fun interview to interview another couple. There’s a dynamic in there from podcast dynamics that you hear about. There’s always a little hesitation of, “Are you going to speak or am I going to speak?” That happens in that situation and that’s why if you’re going to do it and you’re going to do a co-host situation, you must have an edited podcast. It’s so critical to do it, otherwise, there are a lot of awkward pauses and there’s a little bit of it, no matter how synergistic the two of you are. There’s also crosstalk where you don’t intend to, but you both speak at the same time. That doesn’t work very well.

That same thing goes into transcription. There’s a little lesson there is that when you try to use one of those machine transcription services, it’s a disaster when there is any kind of crosstalk or when there are two different voices, it turns out terrible. We had a lot of it and that’s how we ended up founding are proprietary transcription process. That’s one of the things that we do. In the blog post, it’s not like you’re specifically seeing something Tom said versus something Tracy said. Or something Brielle said versus something Jeremy said. The questions and the answers, while they are separated, so us speaking will always be in bold and Brielle and Jeremy will be in light face the reality is that we’ve unified it into a voice so that it reads better in a blog post situation. That’s something we invite you to take a look at. It was a cool interview and I got lots of great information from them out of it and lots of value that they add. Also, technically, this is a good case study for you who want to understand the dynamics of how to produce the show and how to get it out and get it to look right and feel right and sound right and read right.

There’s going to be some upcoming things. They have some interesting products that may be of interest to those of you that they’re offering that are not going to be their full service, maybe higher end package, but how you can learn to do it yourself if that’s more in your budget. They were mentioning sometimes about the calendar scheduling and some of those things. These are ways to step up your game and be a better host, but attracts better guest too, which serves everyone’s goals and makes both your site and your podcasts more powerful. Do more in terms of promotion for you and for your services and your client base that you’re trying to attract.

All of those things are important and these are silly things, they are technical things sometimes that you need to get and play. Being able to listen to how Jeremy and Brielle laid this out to help their guests that they’re placing, make sure that they’re a professional and what they follow and what they do is also critically important. How you can be a great guest, you can guide them some. We turn what might be mediocre guests into great guests ourselves by forcing them to run through the schedule system. They have to enter a bio, they have to enter the headshot, they have to do some of these things so it doesn’t bog you down and it makes them look better at the end. You can push people into being more professional.

The other thing that I want to get across and make sure that you heard from what Jeremy and Brielle were saying is that why they have their name, Command Your Brand. The ‘Brand’ part was important, but the ‘Your’ part is important too. Getting that custom, getting that diversified voice, getting to make sure that you’re not duplicating the same guest talk all the time, making sure you’re getting something different out of that guest is essential. A part of that is how you handle that as the host, how you ask the questions that you don’t overly structure your show, that you can be flexible in what you talk about. It won’t serve you well if you allow that guest to run all over you and do sound bites. It doesn’t serve them well, either. They may not realize that because they feel comfortable in those sound bites, but it’s one of the things that I dislike most about late-night television. It started happening much more when The Tonight Show moved back to New York.

 

What happens is that they use the same placement agency. They use the same PR firms placing this guest and they want to get him on all these top shows. That happens on podcasting as well. They want to get them on all these top shows. What ends up happening is that they go on and they tell the same story. They say the same things. You as a host have to stop that. You have to say, “I know this guy’s going on a PR blitz. I know he’s going to be on a bunch of different shows that are going to surround mine. It’s my job to draw out something different about it that fits my brand, my show, what my audience wants to hear. It’s my job to do that.” Brielle and Jeremy were mentioning that and I want to make sure you picked that up because it is an essential part of differentiating you from that and adding more value to your show. Also, on a technical side, if they say the same thing on all those shows, your Google power is going down.

You don’t want to be known as a one-note, as a guest and be saying the same thing in everybody’s show. As a guest, that’s something to think about but as a host, you don’t want to let them do it, you want to control that interview and make sure that you’re asking smart questions that are going to be unique and make your episode ultimately different. That is the frustrating thing. You watch The Tonight Show one night, if you watch The Daily Show the next night or you watch whether it’s Jimmy Kimmel or any of the other shows, Stephen Colbert, The Late Night Show, you’ll see within the same two, three-day span, and sometimes even on the same night, they’ve got the same guests who are promoting the same thing or talking about the same thing and it gets very repetitive. After the opening monologue, sometimes I’ll turn off the show. You don’t want people to want to skip your podcast episode after they hear who your guest is because they heard the same thing for that same guest on a few other podcasts they listened to. These are very important things to think about and more reasons why you may want to seek out some professional help in several potential different ways regarding your podcast.

Professionalism, stressing that professionalism that Jeremy started mentioning. That was the first thing he said is that professionalism is so essential to, overall, the whole process. It comes across when you have all these tools, all these systems in place, all the team in place and you have all of that, all that you have to be thinking about is, “How can I make the best show possible? How can I get the best questions asked?”And be thinking absolutely only about the person across the microphone, across the computer from you, however you are recording that. When you’ve lived in only that because you’re not worried about all these other technical things, it’s going to be a better show for everyone involved. It’s going to do more for you. It’s going to do more for your audience and it’s going to do more for your guest.

I hope you all had as much fun listening to that interview as we had doing it. It was a treat for us having four people on there, two couples in particular. Quite an interesting and fun dynamic, you don’t hear that every day. Remember, you can visit us on social media @FeedYourBrand.

Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next time. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed Your Brand.

Important Links

• Command Your Brand
• Jeremy Slate
• Brielle Slate
• Create Your Own Life
• Take Back Your Health NOW!
• Edison Research
• articles
• Ego Bait
• Jeremy on Inc.
• Jeremy Ryan Slate on Forbes
• article from Wired Magazine
• David Brier
• Dustin’s Inc. article

About Jeremy and Brielle Slate

Command Your Brand is a podcast publicity agency that helps thought leaders get on top-rated podcasts to become icons in their industries.

Founded by former Get Featured Co-Founders, Jeremy Slate and Brielle Takacs-Senske.

Brielle has over 10 years public relations experience and Jeremy has been a podcast enthusiast for over 10 years and he is now the host of the iTunes Top-Rated Podcast, Create Your Own Life. Together we have become an unparalleled pair that knows how to harness the Power of Podcasting™ to build a strong brand.
Our team has launched and produced two, iTunes Top-Rated Podcasts and booked clients on 500+ podcasts as expert guests.

Whether you call it podcast publicity, podcast placement, podcast guesting, podcast interview service or podcast booking, we are the experts from inside the industry.

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