You want more audience engagement to boost the brand recognition of your show. You need crucial tips to help increase your podcast listeners. Listen to Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard as they discuss how you can create a podcast playlist that attracts binge listeners. They dive deep into highlighting episodes, creating categories, and providing value to them. How will you repurpose your show and create power for your website? Tune in to learn how you can focus on the value you’re creating, organize episodes around it, and grow your business!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Create A Podcast Playlist That Attracts Binge Listeners?

I’m with my cohost, Tracy Hazzard. We are excited to speak to you about creating a podcast playlist that attracts binge listeners. I don’t think that podcasters, even experienced ones, ever realized they can do this, Tracy. What do you think?

It’s an a-ha and probably one of the most common suggestions I make to people who have strategy sessions with me when they reach 100 episodes. It’s like when you hit 100 episodes or over a year of episodes, it’s this thinking of, “What do I do next?” One of the most common ones that I come up with is, “What about playlist? What about highlighting episodes? What about this idea of creating categories within your podcast?”

The list is starting to get long. When you have 25 episodes, that’s typically a playlist, according to most of the players. Some of them only have ten-episode links. Google Podcasts on the phone app only shows about ten. Some of them only show a handful of them. If you scroll down, you have to hit more than ten. When you look at Apple on the app at all, it typically shows about 20 to 25. That’s typical of what most people think of, so they don’t think, “Their playlist is too long.”

A lot of times, they are looking at it going like, “I don’t have enough episodes yet.” That’s the early stage. After that, you’ve got to go to more and more and keep adding. If you get to 100 and are listening on Google Podcasts, you got to hit that more button ten times to get through your whole catalog. How many people want to do that?

A lot of podcasters have different kinds of episodes and content. Typically, by 50 episodes in, maybe as few as 30, you could get to the point where you have 5 or 6 episodes of a certain kind in a certain topic area or micro niche of your topics that it might make sense to have a playlist. Let me give you an example of one.

If you are a relatively new podcaster, you get into that 30 to 50-episode mark, and people find your show, they’ve got 50 or 30 episodes to go through or might have to look through. Maybe you’ve got these core 6 or 8 episodes that you want every listener to start with. You might create a playlist that is as simple as New Listeners Start Here. If you want people to have this foundation of you and your content before they maybe catch up to the latest episodes or start listening to anything new, this might be a good option for you.

There are so many different ways to utilize this in and think about how this might work for you. That’s what we are going to talk about. We are going to talk about how you might categorize them and what types of categories will work for your purposes. Most of these are business purposes. I want to clarify this. Entertainment is organized into seasons.

If you take about any serial comedy and even serial drama like you are watching something that is a TV series, you could take or leave pretty much any episode within that. They run the same model of how the episode runs but it’s a storyline. There might be threads of the storyline but they are tiny little pieces of a long-tail storyline of the characters.

 

That’s how it has rung in real entertainment. We don’t run like that in the business side of things. We look at our podcast episodes as pretty much an episode in its entirety. We are teaching one thing. We are discussing one thing. We are entertaining with one thing. We are focusing on that in every single episode. Overall, they might all be in mixed-up order. There’s usually not a thread of order that we follow. It’s not like the chapters in a book and we are following a specific order. It’s rare that someone does that in podcasting unless they do a limited series.

That’s what we are thinking about. Now that we have been producing content, haphazardly you’ve gone through this. It doesn’t mean you have no strategy, no theory for it but you are creating episodes based on who you can get as a guest at any given time and they are scheduling the topics that you want to accompany that.

We want to look at it from an organizational perspective. We’ve got enough content that we can organize it. When we started our show, we were worried about making sure we post or publish every week; that’s our drive. Now we can look at it as organizational ideas and as having a much clearer strategy as we move forward into how we are producing episodes. That’s also something that can come out of it. That’s the way I look at it when I have a strategy meeting after 50 episodes with someone.

From a listener perspective, depending on the type of podcast and the topic but in most of the business-related podcasts that we work within that you are talking about, Tracy, to come into a show that has 100 or more episodes. For some of our podcasters, 600 or 700 episodes can be a little overwhelming. It’s one thing to make an impression as a brand-new podcast when you only have 3, 4 or 6 episodes out there. That’s one impression to make.

Some people might look at a podcast. They might start to listen and compare one to another. One has 15 or 20 episodes and one has 3. They might choose to go with the one that has 15 or 20 episodes. There’s more content there. When you have hundreds of episodes, a lot of listeners sometimes don’t know where to begin. Even if they jump in and listen to the latest episode, that’s great that they are doing that. They experience the show and enjoy it. How can they get the greatest value out of this volume of content that you’ve created if you can help walk them through what they might do?

It’s not just the listeners. We are at the stage of conversion. That’s what I want you to think about. “How can I make all this content that I created convert better for me?” In doing that, I’ve got to identify different things where a stage of a listener might be. Am I reaching them? We are looking at categorizing the show. We look at that and say, “We’ve got a lot of listeners who haven’t started a podcast yet.” They are at the 101 stage of things. They have been thinking about this but haven’t dived in yet. Where are they with their things?

We have other podcasters who listened to our show and are looking for marketing tactics because it’s their biggest driver to things. We have this categorization built out on our show. I’m going to have distinct categories. We have five total categories that we categorize our show. It’s much easier for us to do this on the blog side. On the podcast side, it’s a little bit different. I’m going to talk about how we do that later.

On the blog side of things, we have Launched Tactics. That’s for someone who hasn’t launched yet. We have Guest Tactics because we do have a lot of people who want to listen to what’s going on in the podcast industry and who come to us for guest tactics. We do talk about that quite a lot. We have a great partnership with PodMatch. We have this going on, where we get a lot of people who are interested in podcast guesting, and not necessarily in podcast hosting or podcasting in general.

 

Advanced Tactics

We have episodes for them as well. We have Pod Marketing. Those are advanced tactics. We talk a lot about the web and blogs like, “How are you going to repurpose it and create power for your business, your website?” We have Web and Blog Tactics as well. We have networks and agencies. We are a service provider because we have our certified strategist program. We have content that’s also built for them as well. Everything we do is categorized into this.

We are thinking about this as we are creating content all week, “Do we need more content for the network? Do we need more content for marketing? Do we need more content over the Launch Tactics? Who are we podcasting for?” As we are building a topic right here, we always think, “What is it going to be? Which 1 of these 5 categories is it going to fall into?” It can fall into more than one.

Putting Categories Together

Sometimes we have Launch Tactics, and marketing happens at the same time. That’s okay that you are falling into more than one but we look at the categorization of that as being critically important to us because this is where our different audience stages are. Let’s think about what we could do with these if we put these categories together. Tom, some of your thoughts on that?

If we put these categories together, we have a way to control the journey that we want the listeners to take, and it’s not just chronological. When you think about it, chronological is the most basic thing. It’s when you published it. What does that have to do with anything?

It doesn’t have to do with anything. Our existing podcasters looking for marketing tactics don’t want it chronological either. They don’t want to know the order. Maybe if you are launching a show, a 101 series, that’s a little bit more tutorial-based, you would like it to be an order. These are also things you need to think about. “Do I want to organize it in order in particular?” When in other categories is not.

Audience

We are thinking not only about the stages of our audience but how they want to receive the information. That’s how we are looking at creating these categories and lists. The most important thing that we can do with these lists is not just to create a feed, which is an opportunity we will talk about. You can create a special feed for it. We call them spinoff feeds. Instead of that, it is creating a landing page for it.

Think about all the conversions we can make happen when we know how to target our niche audience. if our audience is those who have not started a podcast yet, we can send them to the Launch Tactics podcast on a landing page that has that particular playlist on it. When they hit that playlist, we know for sure that they are at this stage. That’s valuable to us from a follow-up marketing. How are we going to follow up with them? What emails will we send as a follow on? Who do we know that’s actively looking here? How can we follow up with the sales conversation?

We know where they are and what’s going on with them because we created that niche, maybe a landing page playlist. We created that all there for them to categorize themselves if we didn’t know ahead of time. This is great because we don’t always know who our subscribers are, and what stage they are at and what they are. If we send them to a particular place, we are helping out our own categorization, connection process, and ability to market further.

 

It’s the ability to know who those listeners are and what stage they are at and be able to retarget them with other messages that they may be more receptive to help provide them value. Also, if you are lead generating from them, then you know who they are and it converts them better. That is conversion. You want to provide value to the listeners for free through the podcast, which you are doing but then how are you getting value out of them? That’s what we are talking about with all these different categories of playlists.

A playlist can become a spinoff podcasts feed. How do people want to consume it? Some people would be happy consuming it on a webpage through a player that has those half or twelve different episodes that are for that micro-journey of a listener right on the landing page. Maybe they prefer to listen to the listening app. You can put these out. Each has its own podcast identity.

Topic-focused

Before we get to those tactics, I want to wrap up the idea of what types of playlists you might want to create. Let’s stop there. We might want to be topic-focused because you might be talking about general health and wellness. Maybe you want to categorize them by topics or themes. You could look at it either way. Maybe there’s a category of mental, physical, and spiritual health. You have different themes going on with the topics of what you are discussing there.

That might be a great thing because somebody is coming into health and wellness through whatever their driver is. Maybe it’s weight loss, mental clarity or memory. You don’t know what they are coming into your business and to your podcast for. By grouping them by themes or topic areas, you might be able to get to them through that. That may be the best way for your show if your audience isn’t all that different.

It could also be age-related, gender-related or something that. You go to the vitamin aisle in a store and they’ve got vitamins that are specifically for women because they are hormone-related or something that. There are items that are specifically related to men. You may want to categorize that. That might be something you want to do. That’s perfectly okay if that fits your model of business, your podcast show, and the audience you believe that you have. It will come through if that’s not the case. You are going to see that, “I have this gigantic segment of women listeners that I didn’t know I had and they are all tracking into this playlist. Amazing.”

That doesn’t surprise me because women are high consumers and high converters. if they are in your audience, that’s a great tactic for that. That’s one of them. What we are doing with Feed Your Brand is the stages of progress that they are making. Where are they in the journey of podcasting? For us, in particular, we have different stages of that. We are capturing that by how we categorize it. That might be ideal for you because the messaging is different at different stages.

If we talk advanced tactics too much to a newbie, they get overwhelmed and never get started. You know how it was for you if you are out there and you’ve already started a podcast. Remember what it was like at the beginning. It was overwhelming. It needs to come in layers of information. By playlisting that into stages, we can layer and make sure that we are not overwhelming them with too much information, giving it to them in bits and pieces, and moving them from one playlist to the next as they go along their journey. That’s something we could do.

Another is audience type. That’s men or women. That’s one. It might be audience type in terms of psychographics or some other way of categorizing the audience. I always say this, “If you are creating podcast episodes for marketers or about marketing topics, they need to be short.” Our marketing tactics episode might be shorter than our episodes that are for the 101 Launch Tactics series because our audience is different.

 

We know the marketers have the attention span of a gnat. Let’s be honest with you. They want one thing. They want it quick and move on and try it. That’s how they are. They are experimenters. They want to do so they need to take away something quick and go do it. Once you know that, you understand the preferences and the audience type, you can also tailor the type of content you then create for them in that particular playlist and feed. You can try some new things and see, “Those short episodes are tracking well.” Don’t you know they are easier to create? These are some things you can test out, try when you start to categorize them.

Tom, let’s head into the three types and tactics we create for creating playlists. I like to create three different types of playlists within our system. I like to create a feed playlist. That’s creating a podcast of only those selected episodes. We will talk about that one first. The second one I liked so that we are going to get them all three across here and then we will talk about them, is a blog category style playlist.

This is for your website. This is for the blog within your website. Think of it all the time. There are category tags. That’s what we are talking about. It’s also making sure that whatever you do on the feed side, you do on the blog category side. You do it in both places. It makes it easier for you to find those episodes and the blogs for those episodes or show notes for yourself when you are doing it.

The third type is creating a special playlist on YouTube. It’s creating it within your channel. You’ve got audio, video, and blog all created and playlisted out for you. No matter where your ideal person is consuming, they are getting that categorization as well. Let’s talk about the feed, Tom, because you are the expert in how to create spinoff beads and why we built multiple feeds into Podetize, to begin with, partially for this reason.

Volumes

It was specifically for this reason. In the beginning though, even for us, and this goes back a lot of years, it was for a different reason initially. We realized, “There’s some value in this.” We reached 300 episodes. At the time, podcast hosts would limit the number of episodes in your feed, which can be found in the listening apps to 300.

When you hit 301, it wouldn’t show up on Apple Podcast, or it would drop off Episode 1. You would always end up losing episodes in the process. It was a common practice to create volumes. We would create 100-episode volumes and do a spinoff of our first 100 when we hit 300.

That’s how it started. We had the first 100 and then when we hit 399, we had to spin off the second 100 into its own feet to keep making room for the new ones.

We can show you this on the podcast player that has the different volumes in it for WTFFF!? which is our 3D print podcast that has over 653 episodes.

Entertainment is organized into seasons. Click To Tweet

In fact, we have a player that has different tabs. In modern times, the podcast ecosystem does not limit you. Most of the listening apps don’t limit to displaying 300 of your episodes in a single feed. We’ve broken it up into different volumes and they have more than 100 episodes in each of them. We have over 600 episodes of that podcast. You can choose how you break it up. There are some feeds that have over 1,000 episodes. We don’t recommend it because that’s an awful lot to go through in a listening app or even on a desktop app.

We do this within the blog on that one but we haven’t done it in the feed only because it’s not our core business. We don’t care as much about that podcast anymore because we don’t actively use it or produce it, and that 3D Starpoint website doesn’t make us money. If it did, we would categorize it. The categories that track on our blog side of it and the YouTube playlists side of it because we have it categorized there are all the equipment reviews.

When we do 3D printer reviews, material reviews or all the reviews are their own technical playlist on YouTube and in the blog. It is its own separate category. Those do extremely well. They probably are some of our most trafficked, read, and shared blogs. They always rank on the first page of Google for us. That’s critically important for that.

The second part is when we review, discuss or interview heads of companies like big name players in the companies, those might be their own playlist. We do have that in its own video playlist but we might have that. The HP Series, because HP sponsored it and they wanted to share just that, has its own playlist, category on the blog, actual physical owned playlist in the feed, and YouTube playlist as well, all of those.

Multiple Feeds

As a podcast though, this is pretty easy to do if you are hosted on Podetize because we do give you multiple feeds to work with. For new podcasters, you might think, “I’m not ready for that.” You are probably right. New podcasters, you are not. Our lowest level of hosting only has one feed but everything after that has multiple feeds. This works well and makes it painless to put out a spinoff podcast or have a player on a website that’s pulling from a feed of only those episodes. YouTube is very well set up for this too because you can create as many different playlists on YouTube as you want, also to match up with it. That works very well.

It’s super easy to do and create that. Creating a separate podcast feed then allows you to create a landing page feed. Our player works if you want to have all of them and have the tabs or have one single one on a landing page, you can use it either way. That’s how our player works. There are no other players that have multiple feeds within it. It can only have one feed at a time. If you want to have all your feeds on your homepage, so all your episodes are there, and your volumes in one place, you can do that. We have and will show you.

On the 3D Starpoint website, we have the podcast page which has all the feeds on it. If you wanted to dive in and just get the HP Series, we have one word. It has only it in its entirety. What that allows you to do is create a landing page with that one feed in it, which you could put behind a pay gate. You could put behind a Subscribe to it, and get an email address. There are a whole bunch of ways to reuse that to your advantage. You don’t have to syndicate if you don’t want.

That’s a good point, Tracy. I’m glad you brought it up because a lot of times, podcasters talk about wanting to have premium content. They are going to put out the main podcast that they have been doing for free out there. Some of them put out the episodes for free for a period and then take them off of the active feed. You only then have access to them behind the pay gate.

 

You have people recording episodes in two different parts. There’s a twenty-minute, short episode on this topic and then there’s a whole hour beyond that, so you get a free portion of it. It’s almost like getting a free chapter of a book. If you want to buy or read the whole book, you’ve got to go pay for it. It’s the same thing with the podcast. You can have that behind the pay gate.

There are a lot of different ways to have premium podcasts and pay for them but a lot of them require to use of one app or another and not easily on both platforms being iOS, Android, and all those things. It may make more sense to have it on your own website, have control of it, have the pay gate there, and then the premium content in a player behind the pay gate. Don’t worry about distributing on phones. Most of these players, including ours, are mobile-responsive and work well on mobile browsers.

You are playing as if you are doing on the app without worrying about anything.

You’ve got to have a login and password. Some people are doing this free where the value is, you are collecting their name, email, and phone number to make them a member before you are going to give it to them. Others have people pay for that premium content. That’s a business decision.

Here’s a great example of that. I interviewed her on The Binge Factor. Belle Robertson is a pseudonym because she’s an anonymous sober coach. Her podcast is called Sober Insights and she creates a $9 a month playlisting area. You go in, pay $9 a month, get in, and can go to the specific area you want. She’s got these playlists created and adds special content.

Usually, it’s like, “I can go to the affirmations area.” Let’s say, I need help on Fridays. I might need some sober coaching, some affirmations or some inspiration on a Friday when all my friends are about to go out to the bars. She’s got that whole in a special area and periodically she adds exclusive content to that playlist. She might do a special thing around a holiday or do something special when something crazy is going on in the world. She will create a special one that’s for members only. She adds to that.

You can do that within our system. You can add self-published short episodes to that feed. Create them so that they are only in that private feed. They are not in your regular feed and you can tease that there’s bonus content. It’s a reason to subscribe. Even for your regular subscribers who don’t necessarily come in through a private area, you can drive them there because there’s bonus content, they haven’t consumed somewhere else. This is a great way to do this.

To be honest with you, Belle told me that this is a huge area for her because she has so much content. It’s extremely hard for someone who is newly became sober to go through this program. She has a start for them. She does cite it all the time on her podcast. It’s a promo ad reminding people that it’s there for them. This is a start. This is one of the best ways for them to get started and find that.

We don't always know who our subscribers are and what stage they're at and what they are. So if we send them to a particular place, we're helping to market further. Click To Tweet

They go in and then they find so much value in the way that it’s broken up there. They don’t come back and consume the other way. They are non-subscribed but they don’t consume the other way. They consume through a website, which gives her so much more opportunity to understand, know, and reach out to them for them to communicate with her. She has much higher engagement by having done it this way. This is a valuable idea for some of you.

To me, it’s podcasting 3.0. We have podcasting 1.0 back several years ago. You had podcasting 2.0 as it’s getting more adoption. There are other advances that happened in podcasting.

I would say that’s 2013 or 2014 to probably right up until 2020. What we are seeing is this advanced use of it, this 3.0.

It is advanced use. When you think about it, the reason I’m putting these labels on it of early podcasting, the next level of podcasting, and the third level of podcasting is that podcasters that started a decade ago, like us, we were experimenting. We are putting out content and didn’t think about how we might organize it later. That’s okay, especially when you didn’t maybe have a plan, although we did have a plan with our first podcast. One day a week was an interview episode. We had a couple of days a week where we are answering questions. We had different categories of things on different days of the week for a while.

Educators’ business content. We could have categorized them. Now we did categorize them on the blog. if you are looking for business topics, they are categorized on the blog. We would tell people to do that. I see where you are going with this, Tom. You are looking these categorizations helping people consume the content. That’s where we find the binge listeners.

The more you are in their ear, the more valuable you are to them, the more they want from you, and the more likely they are to go to your website, look for something to subscribe to, download your book, and go through all of those things. Those are the people that we are trying to attract. Also, think about the way into your podcast. That’s what I want to talk about briefly.

Let me first finish that thought. I want to stick the landing on it. With new podcasters or existing podcasters launching a new show, you can consider this from the beginning.

You can plan it out that way.

 

It doesn’t have to be an afterthought. It doesn’t have to be a post-rationalization, “I have all these episodes in this micro-niche. I could create a playlist of those.” You can plan it from day one. I’m doing that way with a new podcast we are working with. She hasn’t launched her show yet. She’s got 3 or 4 different kinds of episodes that she’s going to be recording. We are going to be categorizing them. In that way, there will be one feed initially, but eventually, there will be multiple playlists. My only point is that more advanced podcasting is thinking about these things early.

Within the idea of attracting someone new into your podcast, when you have a ton of content, they want to give you credit for that. They go, “This person has 100 episodes or more. They must be good at this. They are an expert in this.” The only thing they are doing is jumping into the most recent episode. They might be listening to 1 or 2 of the earlier ones or anything that attracts their eye but it’s not necessarily getting the best episodes. The ones in your favorites list, the ones that they want to listen to. You are not giving them an opportunity to find those.

It’s not always serving them well. Having a Start Here, you can do that. If you are new to the podcast, you can have a Start Here. Having multiple feeds that are syndicated, you can come in through their need and what they are looking for. We were talking about Belle Robertson. She’s got inspiration, meditations, short little episodes, and then the longer topic-based helping you through your stage of progress. She’s got those two going on.

She groups all the inspirations into a feed on its own and has that out there syndicated and published. I come in through those. You make sure to send the message. You can do that through the promo process. You can do it through a separate special outro. When you have separate feeds, you can have a separate intro/outro than you do on the other ones. You can also have separate ads, which is why that works for us with Hewlett-Packard. We have separate ads on those.

Extra Advertisements

Thinking about all that, you can have a new intro/outro and extra ads. You have the ability to run those. That’s a great way for you to promo to come to the other type of content. Even though I only got five minutes of time, that’s all I want to give to this. I’m only going to do five minutes a week but then I go, “There are some great stories over there.” As you keep referring to it back and forth, you are cross-pollinating your feeds and getting me to consume more because I like you. I came in through the thing that I was the most comfortable with. That’s an opportunity as well to cross-pollinate the different feeds.

As we are talking about this, I keep thinking of other ideas that I’m going to keep in mind for the new podcasts we work with. There are some business consulting podcasts. One of them that’s well-listened to that we work with is Consulting Success with Michael Zipursky. It’s got 250-ish episodes. That’s a lot.

He’s prolific and successful.

He’s using the ad system in promoting his program. He’s doing well with it. That’s great. What I see as an opportunity is you can have fun with it, too. This would get a lot of play. If you are wanting to get a lot of people to take notice either in promotion on social or going to that landing page and signing up for some call to action would be the biggest mistakes people make in the business. We have stories in the podcast over 270 episodes, it’s probably at least a dozen stories of the biggest mistakes people made that you don’t want to make. That is bait to get people to go and binge through those twelve episodes.

You can actually plan your podcast playlist from day one. Click To Tweet

Think about that landing page that you create with your idea for that and these episodes with the stories from who they came from that are pulled out of your whole entire series, linking through. Remember every single player, everything subscribed to, send them to the main podcast. If you want to do that, you don’t have to send them to the sub-feed.

You can send them to the main podcast to subscribe. That’s a choice that you can make as well. All of that is working for you. The last one we were talking about was making playlists on YouTube. Playlists are big over there. If you haven’t noticed, channels get overwhelming. I see podcasters too often create an entire podcast named after their show. We just have Feed Your Brand episodes. It’s all of that. It’s too overwhelming.

Everything is dumped on their channel.

It’s either their whole channel or they do create a podcast playlist but it’s everything in the podcast there. Creating multiple playlists helps over there as well because it’s going to go automatically from one to the other. You can also set the order differently over there. YouTube is a learning platform, too. Tutorials kill it over on YouTube. Think about it that way.

You could put them in a specific order that flows them better through the process and gets them to book a call with you. Whatever that might be, you have an opportunity over there to do it differently because of the way playlisting works over on YouTube. You do it anywhere else. You can organize that in a different way. You have to date things differently. You have to re-date them with a different date to get a different order on a podcast fee because its default is always by the date it was published.

Don’t get me wrong. You can mess with that in a new feed. You don’t want to mess with that in the general feed but you can mess with that in any sub-feed and change the order. On YouTube, you can mix up the order. You can put it in whatever order more chronological for the stages of things that you want without changing the dates of the videos. It’s a great opportunity to do that as well. Think about that. If you prefer to have a video on your landing page, you embed that playlist on the top of your landing page. You’ve got that going on for you, too. Everything is working and playing together. How do you do this, Tom? Let’s quickly talk about how to do this?

What you are going to need to do is go through your entire show episode list. Before, I print it straight out of my portal. Out of the Podetize portal, I print it page by page of the episodes. I print it on a piece of document and go through that and go category to category. I put my notes, “Marketing 101,” thinking about all the different tactics and playlists that I’ve wanted to create. I think of that ahead of time, then I go and categorize them. As I’m categorizing them, I might think of one more or it might come to me that we need a sixth one, or we need a different one a year.

This doesn’t fit at all. It also gives me an opportunity to go, “I need to scrub that episode and get rid of it because it shouldn’t be here anymore.” It’s an opportunity to clean up your whole show and episode list at the same time. It could be because you feel that this episode doesn’t live up to your new standards of where you’ve gone with your show or the guests maybe had some legal problems and you want to scrub them out of there.

 

It can happen. It gives you an opportunity to check all of that out at that moment. I do that. When I do this, I then send that to my team and they take care of it from there. In our case with us, we would be happy to help you through that. You can send it to the help team and they can create a sub-feed for you based on that. You just scan the PDF and you are done. You say, “Put them all in sub-feeds for me.” Our team can do that for you.

You can take and copy them into the new feed. It’s super simple. The easiest way we find to do it is to copy your entire feed and create a new feed. You are uploading the same exact feed you already have, give it a new name, new cover art, new description, and then upload it into there, create the new, and delete the ones you don’t want. That’s easy.

For people that don’t know, the word you used might confuse them and think, “It’s a lot of work.” You don’t need to upload your individual to us. You are importing your RSS feed into our system. It’s all automated but that’s the easiest way. Duplicate the feed and delete the episodes you don’t want in it. You are left with the ones that you want. You can reorder them if you want to change the order.

You have to redate them and do some things.

It’s to give a sequence you want them to go. This is advanced podcasting, especially when your podcast is an integral part of your business, serving your community, and lead generating for the right types of prospects. It’s too easy for listeners to come into a show, hear an episode with an advanced topic, and think, “This is way over my head. I’m not ready for this yet.” If it’s clear that there are different paths for them, they can step into it, and instead of dump jumping into the deep end of the pool head first, they can step in and wait a little bit. It makes a lot of sense.

Tom is going to have a demo in our knowledge base which some people call FAQ. To our knowledge based on Podetize.com, there is a demo of how to import your feed. He’s going to demo it in terms of how to import the feed, then delete some. You can recategorize and renumber them so that you will understand how to do that, how to move them around, and get that. That’s the first place you do.

It is in the feed. You decide if you want to syndicate it and go ahead and make sure you have a description, new cover art, give it a different name, and all of that. You can syndicate that. It goes to Apple. You can do that. If you choose not to do it, you still got a new feed to use in a playlist in other areas, and you’ve got what you need to create that.

That the second thing you are going to want to do is to go into the show notes. Now that you have your new shortlist, and let’s say it’s ten episodes. I’ve got my ten episodes and it’s Tracy’s Favorites. That’s what I called it. I’m only going to use it on my website. I create Tracy’s Favorites which I have in the section on TheBingeFactor.com. You can see it on the homepage. I went into each 1 of the blogs for those 10 episodes. I gave them the same category, Tracy’s Favorites. The categories are in the blog section.

What you're going to really need to do is go through the entire playlist of your entire show episode list. Click To Tweet

Show Notes

There’s an ability for you to create categories. When we produce somebody’s show, we put them under the name and/or show notes. It’s either episodes, show notes or the name of your show, depending on what your website is like. We can sub-categorize them by adding a category card like Tracy’s Favorites. Anything tagged Tracy’s Favorites shows up in that section. I can add to it frequently and easily and change that out at any given time on my homepage from the blog, without having to worry about what’s happening over on the feed side, if I don’t want to.

Tracy, because this is a show for podcasters, I want to make sure we put a footnote here because you use the term about categories and you are talking about blogs, not podcasts. Podcasters often hear and understand the term category as being the category their show is listed in under Apple Podcasts. You can be in more than one category.

That is not what we are talking about here. We are strictly talking about blog categories and categorizing your episodes into playlists. That makes sense. When you do that, a category can be anything you want it to be. You can call it anything you want. You have no limitations. Whereas in Apple Podcast, there’s a total of about 100 categories and subcategories.

You can type in any phrase you want. You can call them whatever you want.

In podcasting, the categories are limiting. There is not a category that fits every show. We all have to choose at least one category that our podcasts are in. Sometimes it’s a lesser of evils type of situation. Nothing is perfect. “This one is the closest. I will try that.” This is not that. You can get specific in your blog categories, naming anything you want. In your playlist categories for YouTube and your podcasts, you don’t have limitations. You have plenty of freedom.

The last thing I do is go to the corresponding video. For us, that is simple because if I’m in the blog already, giving it a new category, I can click the video link, go over to the video, say, “Add to playlist,” and create a new playlist called Tracy’s Favorites or whatever you want to name it. I can just click the button. It stays in its existing playlist, which is the show’s episodes.

I click the button that says, “Add to Tracy’s favorite playlist.” Now I’ve got the video playlist all set. It took seconds to do it and super easy for me to accomplish that. The only thing you need to do is remember to be logged in to the proper channel on YouTube. If I’m logged in at Podetize and I add the playlist, I only get Podetize’s playlist, not The Binge Factor’s playlist. Make sure you are logged into your company account for whatever channel you are using for your podcast.

Some of us have so many different emails, channels, and Google identities.

 

I say that because I know some of you are advanced in how you do it. You market under different YouTubes and different things like that. That’s why I say that. Be logged into the right one. I’ve done it before and go, “Why isn’t this showing in my playlist?” It’s because I was logged into the wrong account.

Tracy, we’ve covered this topic well. There are a lot of more creative possibilities of what can be done with it. Any of you, podcasters, interested in that should feel free to get creative. What categories of playlists and episodes to go into the playlist makes sense for you? The wonderful thing about podcasting is you can do it. Try it out. If it’s not setting the world on fire, you can change it up. This is not something you have to live with permanently. You can change it, reorder it, rename it, whatever it might be. That’s another great aspect of podcasting that I love.

We dropped that in here about the sponsorship playlist. You create a playlist. You are creating a feed that is sponsored. We talked about that with Hewlett-Packard. We have other clients that do it. I dropped that hint a few times. It’s something we’ll cover in a future episode because it’s specific to monetization. There’s a way to do that.

You can put the same episode into a different feed and put a different ad on it. When you looked at your feeds before and said, “I have only two ad spots per show that I can sell,” now you have the ability to create playlists and resell the same show itself with a different ad on it. You have the ability to do that in a different way, create more sponsorship at the same content, and selling a different spot on it. That’s going to be valuable to you at the end of the day.

Tracy, why don’t we drop the mic there. Thanks so much for reading, everybody. We will be back with another great episode next time.

 

Important Links

• PodMatch
• WTFFF!?
• 3D Starpoint
• HP Series – Past Episode
• Belle Robertson – Past Episode
• Sober Insights
• Consulting Success
• Tracy’s Favorites
• Podetize.com
• TheBingeFactor.com