Promote Your Podcast Now: How to Use Proven Publicity Techniques

When you’re producing podcasts consistently, you want to promote your show both at the launch and ongoing. In this episode, Tom and Tracy Hazzard share advanced publicity techniques for podcasts, some of which are grassroots techniques and even out-of-the-box thinking about publicity. As they get down into various podcasting opportunities for you to promote your show, they also discuss multiple ways to attract not only listeners but other podcasters as well. Be found and invited. Maximize these techniques and grow your podcast.

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We’ve got a couple of great things to talk about, some things we want to share with you that we think will be of particular interest to all of our clients. I will open it up to questions. What we want to share with you are some publicity opportunities. We’re going to talk about advance publicity techniques in general. We want to get at how you can promote your show both at the launch and ongoing. I’m going to give you some things. I’ve had a few private calls with clients and realized that this is an ongoing thing. I thought we’d do a bigger group conversation about that.

We’re going to talk a little bit about different types of publicity options, things that you might not have thought about. I’m going to call them grassroots techniques. Some of them are even out-of-the-box thinking about publicity and ways to get that and utilize what you’re already doing and get more for that. We want to go over all of those things. There are a couple of things that I want to start with. There are publicity options through us. We try to provide options for you whenever we can. If you haven’t read the email, and we think a lot of you have because we see a high open-rate on that, we have launched the guest directory. That also is a host directory. It allows you to be found and be invited to be a guest on other people’s shows as well. It gives you an opportunity to find other hosts that you would like to guest on.

I have been interviewing many top podcasters. As I interview them, the number one way that they say they see spikes in traffic is by going on other podcasts. That’s one of the best ways for you to increase your listenership. Use our guest directory. It’s free. All you have to do is send an email and say, “I want in.” Our team will build a profile for you. If you want to opt out of the host side, in other words, you don’t take guests on your show, it could hurt you. Usually, when you’re asking to guest on someone else’s show, they expect a quid pro quo arrangement so that you’ll invite them on your show. If you’re relevant to their audience, they should be relevant to yours. It’s not going to hurt your listenership. It’s if you’ve got great content and you’re a real estate show and you go on another real estate show that’s different than yours. David is our new real estate guy here. If you went on Scott Carson’s show, and Scott Carson is on Note Closers, it’s very different from the type of real estate that you’re talking about.

People who are interested in real estate, in general, are willing to listen to different types of shows. They’re always looking for more. The average number of shows that people listen to is seven on a regular basis. They like to listen to many in the genre. This is not a way for you to lose listeners. If you’re great, they’re coming back to you. It’s not going to change. You can also get some new listeners who haven’t heard of you but are interested in the genre. Relevance matters the most here and also going on a show that has a relevant audience, an audience that will be attracted to you. Sometimes that might be demographics.

You are looking for Millennials and you found a show that attracts Millennials. We have a podcast that I’m interviewing. They are a wedding podcast. They’re all about weddings. David, your new homes, would be ideal. Not all of them are going to be in the OC area, LA area or all of that, but you’re bound to get some people. That, in and of itself, is a great tie-in from a demographic standpoint and the right time of life and all of that. We look at that as being relevant. It could also be a genre where real estate shows are all different or investing shows and things like that. Think about that as you’re reaching out to them. What I would worry about is the size of the audience. Any number of listeners coming over drags more listeners with them.

If you’re great, they’re coming back to you. It’s not going to change. Click To Tweet

It’s even if the podcast that you might be a guest on is a brand new show. Being an early guest on a brand new show, people sometimes think, “It’s not so much of an audience. Is that worth it?” I would argue that it is worth it because you’ll be on one of the first shows. Even if it’s not for six months or eight months before somebody finds that show and listens to their latest episode, most often they’ll go back to the beginning and start listening to the early episodes. If you’re on one of those early episodes, you’re probably going to be listened to as much as if you were on a recent episode a year after the episode started. Don’t worry about that.

The second thing that is going to come with this ability to be in our guest directory, as both being a guest, is that I’m bringing in many PR firms into the group that will be bringing new guest options for you. When you get a guest who has a PR firm backing them, there will be higher circulation and publicity happening on your episode. That’s how we’re attracting new guests in. We’re not randomly putting out an ad and saying, “Join our guest directory.” We’re not advertising at all. It is only by relationship that people can join our directory. Everyone is getting vetted before a profile goes up. That is critically important for you.

You will never get a guest outreach that didn’t go through and we didn’t say, “They came from someone we know.” They either already have a profile on it so they’d been vetted before that. They have a website and social following. They are who they say they are. This will not be spam options for you. You can take a look at that and reach out and say, “Is there a PR firm associated with this?” Our team will answer, “Yes, this person came in from one of our PR agents.” That’s a great reason to say yes and invite them on your show because there will be push out in the other direction. You’d have somebody else do that publicity work for you.

Our new guest directory and host directory are on FeedYourBrand.co, which is the companion website to Podetize. It’s where our podcast Feed Your Brand is located. If you’re not listening to Feed Your Brand, our podcast, it’s an additional support for you. This is an option if you’re new to our company and you’re new to being one of our clients here. The Feed Your Brand podcast is your support. We do one-on-one episodes. You can skip some of those. I am doing a whole new series called Center of Influence. That’s the next one that I want to offer up to you as an option. I’m doing some interviews only if they’re top podcasters. I interviewed someone who has 935 episodes. He’s been podcasting since 2015. That’s a lot of episodes at that amount of time. He had some great advice on how to increase listeners and how to get great guests. I’m asking them a series of questions. I’m doing it in two ways.

One is that many people can come in. It’s being pushed out to all podcasters in, not on our network, anywhere out there. It’s being pushed out by Authority Magazine to them and inviting them in. There’s a question and answer forum. You answer the questions yourself. You pull all that in. It gets published in Authority Magazine and on Thrive Global. There’s a section there where it asks these five quick questions like, “What are the best ways to engage an audience? What are the best ways to get great guests?” Those five are going to turn into rollup articles that are going to be published by BuzzFeed. You’ve got three publications that would give you backlinks. That’s valuable publicity. That will be offered to you, as well as clients. However, I cannot do the live interview with you. That’s the third part. I can’t do that and write the article. I can only do the question and answer. You are going to have to do the Q&A and then do an interview with me. You have to do both things separately. Many of those podcasters are just going to do an interview with me and an article will be written. I can’t do that. It’s a conflict of interest.

 

That’s Authority Magazine that asked to write this new column. It’s a requirement or restriction of theirs. It’s a restriction of theirs that I can’t write the article. If you’re filling out the Q&A, it can be published because that has nothing to do with me. You can still have that published and still have the possibility for BuzzFeed. Either way, you’re getting that. We still also have the feature article that you can have written about you. Here, it can still happen. That’s on FeedYourBrand.co. That will still be available there. There are multiple ways to get articles written about you, which helps to get some backlink information. This is just about podcasters so it’s not circulating out to your core audience. It depends on what your business is or your business goals. I would think any exposure for my podcast is going to be good for whatever my personal goal is for my show, whether that’s a personal goal or a business goal. If you missed that email, the email said to opt-in and say, “Yes, I want in on the guest directory.” We’ll create the profile for you. We’ll send it to you. You approve of it. It goes up. You’ll have that option where people will invite you on and where people will also apply to be on your show. Either way, everything goes vetted through our teams so you’re never going to get an email that didn’t get screened by somebody.

Everyone who is able to attend this should have gotten an email inviting you to say, “Yes, I want to participate in the host directory or the guest directory.” If somehow you missed that and you still want to be included, send an email to Alexandra@Podetize.com if you think you might’ve been missed or you want to make sure you’re included in that guest and host directory. You have to say, “Please include me,” and we’re going to go ahead and do it. You don’t have to do any work. That’s been happening for a couple of weeks. It’s continuing to happen. All of our people we’re working with, all of our clients, are getting added to the list if they want to be automatically. We’ve also opened it up to anybody on earth who’s a podcaster or wants to be a guest on podcasts to apply, to also be in the directory. We’ll get to them after all of you.

We have relationships that we’ve been building over many years with PR firms and individual publicists, independent publicists. Those publicists are being offered to put all of their clients in as well. We even have one speaker agency that is going to come in as well. There are some great options here. If you’re running out of guest ideas, every day new people are being added. Come check it out regularly. It’s FeedYourBrand.co. You select the guest and host directory tab. It’s on the top menu. Check it out because these profiles are not just a little something in writing. We worked at it for a long time before we launched it. We made each of you look good in this directory. There are graphics to it. There’s all the written information about you. There’s also going to be a couple of examples of some of your podcast episodes that people can listen to. There’s a lot to it.

There’s an opportunity for you to, in the future, even if you don’t have one right now, add a one sheet. If you don’t know what that is, we can talk about that on another show or discuss that in person if you need that. A one sheet on you or on your show, you might want to have both or a combination of both. There’s an opportunity to put that in or samples of videos and audio so people can see you on stage if you want, whatever that is. You don’t know who’s going to be looking at that. PR firms are going to be applying, hitting through here. They’re going to be bringing their clients in. Building relationships with PR firms is great. Once you’ve had one of their guests on, this is what starts to happen. They ask you, “Can I pitch some more?” You’ll find that you start building relationships over time and it turns into sometimes even better things. Here’s a good example of what happened to me. I launched a new show. If everybody’s not aware of it, I launched a show called The New Trust Economy. It’s on blockchain.

We’ve published at fifteen or eighteen episodes. At the time we were at about ten, the third episode was an interview I did with someone named Eric Tippetts, who was referred to me by a PR publicist I know well. We’ve had a relationship for quite a few years. I interviewed her client. We had a great interview. It went well and I aired it. It was my third episode that I aired. She was pitching him and got him on the Larry King Now show. On TV, the producers do research and research their own questions. The producers were doing the research, trying to figure out what questions to ask if you served up the video from that podcast. I served that up to them and they watched it and some of my questions that I asked him. Not only that, they reached out to me. This is 30 days after I launched the show. I had less than 1,000 listeners because we hadn’t even done any publicity or pushed out our launch.

When PR firms remember that you’ve added value to their clients, they will want to give back and help. Click To Tweet

I don’t think it even had less than a thousand downloads of all the shows. It was low because we hadn’t even done social push yet. We launched it a little earlier than we expected. They reached out to me and with 24 hours notice said, “We’d like to have a woman on our panel. Would you come on the show via Skype with Larry King?” I said yes. It was Tom’s Birthday. I was like, “Sorry, Tom. We can’t go to lunch because I’ve got to be on Larry King.” That happened. There I was on Larry King. That has given me yet two more opportunities.

I’m going to speak on stage in New York City. I’m going to sit on a panel with Maria Bartiromo and be able to talk to 200 investing women in New York. It has led to more things. Your listenership doesn’t always matter when you’ve got these relationships building and you’ve got them out there working for you. These PR firms are remembering that you’ve added value to their clients. They want to give back. There’s that Law of Reciprocity that kicks in there. They want to give back and help. More importantly, it is their job, not just to place their clients, but to publicize that placement. That is one of the most critical things that you could do. Continue to serve that. Do it well. Don’t just take anyone. Take people that serve your audience at the end of the day or serve your core content. That’s going to matter most.

There are a couple of other things. I have a PR tip sheet that we give out. Many of you may not have gotten it. Usually, I give it out when I give speeches. We’ve given it out on previous client calls. It’s a PDF. It has my straight PR tips on how to pitch the media. Things are very different in how you pitch media now. I write two columns, one for Authority Magazine and one for Inc. magazine. How people pitch me matters. We are in a world of nonprofessional journalists. It’s not my day job to be a journalist. It is my day job to run this company. I write because it serves the business. It gets business publicity. How you pitch matters. There are a lot of tips on that. I’ll share that with you. It’s all free. We’ve always given that away. There are a lot of interesting things in there that you’ll find useful, things that you didn’t know you should pitch at the end of the month. People are desperate for stories if they’ve got a column or they have quotas. If you give them a pre-done article at the end of a month or practically wrapped up, they’re going to do it.

We updated that PDF with some new information. Even if you got it before, you might want to get it again. We’ll have more in there. If you’d like to write a column, if you’d like your podcast to lead you to have a column, let’s have some conversations about that. There is a very clear way at which you go about doing that. This is something we can talk about. If that interests you, let’s have an offline conversation. Let’s talk about a couple of other ways that you can start that process or what I call seed articles. Let’s say you run your podcast. We’ve got your transcriptions covered. We’ve got your full-length blog posts. We’re doing all those good things.

If you wanted to, and even if you don’t know how to write, you can do this. You can take that transcript and write a 600 to 800-word summary. You could have a ghostwriter write that. We have some resources for you. If you’re interested in that, ping us. We’ll send you links to those resources. We typically use FreeeUp. Nathan is one of our clients here. Nathan is a new one. He just hasn’t quite launched his podcast yet but he will be. It’s FreeeUp.com. It has many writers. You have to ask for the right kind. If you want a feature article writer, that’s what I do. You can give them the transcript. They can start from there and write a summary article. You can take those articles and pitch them out to publications, trade publications, and try Forbes to become a contributor. They have a little more openness. Inc. is harder to get into. Entrepreneur is even harder to get into. There are a couple of them that are harder, but you can pitch to them.

 

You have to make sure that when you write it, it’s not about you and it has a feature and giveback listicles, bullet points and any kinds of those things. Play well on Inc. Entrepreneur and Forbes have their own style. Look at what the publication likes. Make sure you format the style of the article like that or ask the ghostwriter to format it like that. That’s a great way to start being a writer. That’s one of the ways that I like. You’ve got 90% of the work, so why not? The other things that you can do for publicity that you’re forgetting about are already having guests and email follow up and ego bait. Are you sure that they shared them? It’s following up and making sure that your guests have shared them. That’s why when we send our communication email for you on your behalf or if you’re a customer that works with us to do your episode and blog production, we send them an email the day that the episode publishes. There’s a follow up email we send one week later. Sometimes they might’ve been busy that day. They didn’t get the email or forgot.

It’s very often I get an email back that says, “I’m so sorry. I forgot. I’m pushing it out now.” We found that that second one is good. Have you followed up to see if they did that even after that? We have an ego bait tracking system. I use it mostly for my Inc. column. I don’t do it as much for our podcast. Because of the guests we have, it doesn’t matter as much. Many of our guests are our partners. They’re always pushing us out. I don’t have to worry about it as much. I do it for my Inc. articles to make sure that people do what they committed to and said they would do and to check on these PR firms. If they’re not doing it, I want to follow up and say, “I put your clients on here. Why aren’t you publicizing this?” We check social and the website. I have this ego bait-tracking sheet. It has the name of the person, their email address because that’s who it’s going out to, the link to the show or to all the information and a date of when we’ve checked it. We simply write in there. We checked and they did it. They shared it on social. We checked and they did this.

I also use this sheet in the future for me to check and see how we’re sharing it on social like, “Have we shared it enough? Have we pushed it out enough? Is it going in our evergreen role of things that we share out on social?” We periodically re-share too. It pushes back out to them and reminds them to re-share as well. That’s one of the ways that we do that. That’s a good idea for you to do. You had them on. You did all that work. Check and make sure they shared it. When you push them a month later and say, “You didn’t share it,” they feel guilty and they do. They push harder. That’s always a great way to do that. I want to talk a little bit more about other social things that you can do. There are many different ways you can publicize your podcast and episodes using multiple formats. We’ve found that audiograms do well. You’re creating a small track player thing.

It’s more like a square graphic that you can share out anywhere on social media that has a clip of the audio. Usually, there are closed captions for what’s being said and a waveform so that when people are looking at it in a social feed, it’s a video. They see things moving. “Maybe I want to look at that.” It grabs their attention a little bit. They read the closed caption. We find that works well as opposed to the straight video. Many people have their phones set with the sound off. This is something we’ve been testing and modeling, not currently a part of what we include in our episode production. A lot of people have been asking about it. We always prove things out first on ourselves as the guinea pigs and make sure we could do it as a part of our system before we offer it to our customers. It’s getting very close. We’re going to be offering that as an option to all our customers.

You have about seven different ways you can share your episode. You’re not sharing it the same way twice. Should you want to do seven days of shares for a single episode, you can do that. The audiogram is one. The straight link to the show is another. There’s a clip from the blog. In other words, you might quote something that came out of the blog and have a straight written word post with no image. You have the header graphic. We have it in a square. You have it in rectangles. You have two ways to share that as well. You have quotes. You could take quotes from it and create a graphic of a quote that was said. You have your ego bait as well.

You have to be pushing out in different places to catch all the potential viewers or listeners that might be out there. Click To Tweet

In every blog post, we highlight quotes with a plugin that no site visitors can use to share your blog post about the episode. The reality is you should be doing that too. A lot of our clients do that. When the blog publishes, they go in and click each one of them and schedule a post to go out, not all at once but at different times throughout the week. You hit the click to tweet and it tweets it. It’s the same thing on Facebook or LinkedIn. Taking the URL for the blog post and sharing that will populate the header graphic. Share the link back to your blog post.

That’s a trick there. If you’re going to be doing it yourself and you’re not using a scheduling software like Buffer, CoSchedule or any of those things, you go straight to your blog post and share from your own share links as if you were a customer, a viewer of your blog. Share from there. Those are some of the easiest ways to do that. Some of the top podcasters out there, and I’ve heard this from everyone, pay to advertise their podcast. They pay to get listeners and circulate. You are competing against paid traffic. Keep in mind that the only way to outdo that is to make sure you do enough promo. Once is not enough. Don’t forget your emails. Are you sending it out to your email list? Not everyone is in their social feed all the time. Just because you happen to be constantly on the alerts on your Facebook doesn’t mean they are. Some people still prefer email. You have to be pushing out in all these different places to catch all the potential viewers or listeners that might be out there. Some people prefer to read. Others prefer visual things. Others prefer to listen. People prefer different platforms. There are lots of things to consider.

For press releases, we’ve been testing out some companies. I’m not a big fan. It’s not working out well. There’s no reason for you not to put out a press release if you’ve got easy access to it on the fact that you’ve launched a show or whenever you’ve met a milestone like, “I hit out 100,000 downloads,” or you have a great story to do. It hasn’t shown to do much traction. In terms of driving listeners to you, that hasn’t been shown to do much there. It’s out there. It’s something to consider. I want to talk briefly about follow up episodes, some ways at which you might structure it so that listeners are being tracked into listening to more episodes. This is pretty brilliant. This is what Dustin and we talked about.

He was asking for advanced techniques. I love that Dustin pushes my thinking all the time. There are a couple of things to think about. You’ve been doing your episodes and they’re old to you. You forget that. Sometimes people don’t realize. They join your show and it’s new to them. They haven’t thought about some of the old episodes. You’ve got to remember to refer to those old episodes while you’re in your show. If you’re talking about having done a show on investing maybe and you had these great investors on who had some great tips in your early episodes, make sure you’ve jotted down their names. Remind people of those episodes. You don’t even have to have the numbers of the episodes. You just refer that, “We did an episode with so-and-so.” They can go and Google it or go in the search bar of your website and find them. It will be very clear to them. Make sure you do that.

Also, when you’ve hit over 100 episodes, and many of you are at that place, you also need to remind people of those early episodes. Do a where-are-they-now episode thing where you may take and do three of your favorite clients from the 100 episodes. This is a technique for maybe doing it as your 100th episode. You do a recap of, “In the three, six months since we started the show, here are three success stories from people we interviewed. They’re farther along than we ever imagined. They’ve had this success and this growth.” Do a little three-part recap. It throws back to the original episode and reminds people who they are. It creates a nice path and end to your 100 episodes. At some point, when you’ve done enough shows, iTunes won’t list them all. When you hit 301, your first episode drops off the list. When that happens, start another feed with the classics or volume one. You put up another show identity that has it. As long as you’re hosted on Podetize, you get up to five show identities with your monthly subscription. You may as well use them. There’s a way to make them available. In the current feed, which has probably the most subscribers, this is a great point.

 

You cap your 100 episodes. Now it’s like a whole volume of it. You cap it and do it. If you were to spin it off into its own thing, it’s 100 episodes and it’s perfectly bingeable. That’s something to think about as well. 101, think about it as your opportunity to have a new intro episode where you’re introducing what your show is about. The great guest that you interviewed in the first 100, reminding them of them. You shout out names and topics. It reminds them. If they haven’t listened to it and they look at that as your new introductory episode, they will go back and listen to your volume one. You’ve got people subscribing in two feeds. You’ve got even more traffic. If you’re not close to your 100th episode, you don’t have to wait until 100 episodes. Let’s say you’re doing one a week. Maybe you want to do it after episode 50th, almost a year worth of content. If you’re doing your show in terms of seasons where you’re doing twelve to twenty as a season and you’re going to do season two, you could have a recap of season one. It could be three past episodes. It could be six. There’s no right or wrong answer here. It’s a great way to tie back into previous episodes and get more engagement on them, especially for newer listeners.

We got to hear John Youssi. He’s a sharp person. He used to work on YouTube. Now he’s working for Instagram TV. He gave me some fabulous tips at lunch. I got to sit next to him. I had to pick his brain. He said that some of the best things that you can do is use the Instagram TV option, not the stories style where you only get 30 seconds or something like that. This is a longer tail program. You can sign in and do these videos. You don’t need to do your entire show on Instagram TV. You can if you want, but that’s not the point of it. What he said that is working well is to do these five or ten-minute spots where maybe you’re talking about this entire month’s worth of episodes. You’re giving this recap. You’re in the energy of, “I’ve been using these tips and things that I’ve learned. Here’s what I’ve done with it.” You’re giving out the highlights of those episodes. In the Instagram post itself, you’re sending links to the different episodes.

This doesn’t have to be that type of thing where you’re teaching something. I’m thinking of a new podcast that’s about to launch from Jason Byrd’s The Byrd Chronicles, which are great stories. You could be recapping the highlights of some of the stories of the past month. If you’ve recorded ahead, which you probably have and know what’s coming up on the next month, you could be teasing to what’s upcoming for next month and get more engagement if Instagram is a platform that you choose to promote it. You can do the same thing. LinkedIn has a ten-minute max on a video. They’re opening that up. It may have already started where you could go live on LinkedIn. That is changing. It has been done. This is why I’m suggesting Instagram and LinkedIn. Because it’s new there, they push out anyone. Livestream is tapered off in terms of them promoting anyone. They’re still pushing it out more than it is standard video that you upload. Livestreams are still pushed out more, but they’re not as pushed out as they used to be. They used to go to everyone in your friends. Now they don’t anymore.

On these platforms where the application of live video is new, you’ll get more exposure by using it. Be sure to tag #Podcaster and #YourShow in anything that you do in the Instagram post. People like Gary Vee are hashtagging podcasts. When you do that, you’re helping yourself line up with him in terms of being searched on Instagram TV. He’s one of the prominent users of it right now from podcasting. He’s killing it on there. He’s got high top circulation. He’s also engaged in a paid program to do it. He’s doing both well. He’s doing unpaid and paid. Those are pretty big cocktails to ride or be associated with.

I have Eric Christopher. Everyone calls him ERock. He’s a great PR publicist out of Arizona. He’s got a new program that he’s going to be launching. It’s free. It’s publicity tips straight from a publicist. I’ve secured for you all the previews. You are all going to get in the first Beta group. He’s got some great ways to pitch people to find the right press. This is going to do more of that press media, that is always harder to get. He’s going to talk a lot about that. That opportunity is better than putting out a press release. Everything he teaches is better than that. It’s going to come straight in the newsletter email. They’ll be in all of that. Make sure you watch for that. If you missed it or haven’t heard from it within the next 30 days, you reach back out to us and say, “I didn’t see that.” We’ll send it to you again.

As long as the show is providing you value and to whomever you’re intending to provide value, it’s wonderful. Click To Tweet

We’re going to put it in the newsletter. The other thing I met at Podfest another opportunity to get more exposure for your podcast. It’s not a free option. It is a paid option, but it’s relatively low cost. This company called Digital Audio Exchange has access to networks of podcasts that are more closed systems of podcasts where there are a lot of listeners. They have over 100 million impressions, meaning episodes and opportunities to be exposed in, not that you have to use all of them. They have a relatively inexpensive program, depending on the types of other shows you might want to put an ad for your podcast on. The reason why this would be relevant is this is on other podcasts. You know the people listening are already podcast listeners.

They sell this anywhere from $2 CPM to $7 CPM, which is a low rate range. CPM is cost per 1,000 downloads or listens. Let’s say you wanted to get exposure on 100,000 podcast plays on some networks in the right genre for your audience. At $2 CPM, that would be $2 per 1,000 and then 100,000. You’re talking about $200 to expose yourself to 100,000 podcast listens at that $2 CPM rate. If it was a $7 CPM, it’d be $700, which is getting a little more expensive. You get to choose how many impressions you want to get exposure to. That’s pretty reasonable. We were talking about testing that ourselves, get a little more exposure for Feed Your Brand. We’ll see how it works and share that with you.

We’ll report it to you as soon as we experience that and what the benefit is. We’re moving to a weekly call. The weekly calls will have different purposes because we’re onboarding a lot of people. There will be a lot of setup people and 101 things. You’re always welcome to hop into one of those group calls. The schedule is going to be posted. We’ll get that out to everybody. It will be a call a week where you’ll either be able to touch base with us. We’ll rotate. We will still do the last Friday of every month together. We’re still going to do this call as we do. We’re adding more group calls every month. Some of it is going to be a little more newbie type of stuff that some of you probably won’t want to be a part of. Others of you who are relatively new to this group may want to participate. The idea is that we’re just hopping on. It’s a Q&A call more than it is any lesson like we’re doing now or speech we’re doing.

There’s a relatively new feature in podcaster RSS feeds. In particular, iTunes made this available. iTunes gave birth to the podcast industry. When they make a change to the capability of a podcast, the entire industry follows. This is relatively new. On my Apple podcast app, you have access to your library of shows and can pick a show. I’m going to pick Ken Courtright’s show. There are his episodes. When you’re in the app, if you hit details, which shows you all the information for the episode, down toward the bottom, you’re going to see episode web page. This is in your podcast listing, your published podcast. You’re within the app. If I click that episode webpage, it opens up a browser and is going to the blog post for this episode on Ken’s site that we created. This is a part of our episode production. You get a link from your podcast episode to the blog post on your show. IOS and iTunes-related apps are the only ones that are making that available. The other platforms like Spotify, iHeart and Stitcher haven’t started making that link available. I’m sure they will.

If you’re hosted on a platform other than Podetize for your show, you may not have the ability to put that in there. There’s only one other platform I know of in the whole industry that has the ability for us on your behalf to put in the link to your blog post and publish it with the podcast. It’s something we had to add to the code of our hosting. We did so that your podcast listeners have easy access to the most recent blog post or the one that’s related to that episode. Any of you who are hosted on Podetize, we are automatically putting in that link in the listing for your published podcast. We’re putting it in there. Whatever platforms are making it available, it’s there. We’re already doing it for you. It’s automatic. That just started. It’s very new. It’s a good thing for everybody. I’m glad they did it. The other platform that is doing it is not making it well known that you can do it. If you’re not aware of it, they’re putting a link from your episode to their platform. That’s benefiting them more than you. Everything we do is in your best interest. I’m excited to share that with you. It’s a new automatic feature.

 

I strongly suggest you wait until you have something actionable because you’re going to be up there and compete against top podcasters. Make sure that if you’ve got a great story, something that you got from your podcast, that’s the time to utilize this opportunity. There are PR tips or what I call the media pitch secrets and that slot article is there. Someone said, “As a newer member, what are the best tips for launching?” David is launched but he’s re-launching with us and doing his new website. He’s still early on.

The best way to do this is to think of it like building your relationships. Just like you’re building in real estate, you’re building your relationships with title companies and with those that might refer you. Thinking about it their way is the best way to start in the early stages. “I’ve got a new show. I’d love to give you some publicity. Why don’t you come to my show?” It’s inviting the right guests, utilizing PR firms to be able to bring those guests on. That’s going to serve you well long-term. That’s the best way for you to get started. The other thing is to go and guest. Go on other real estate shows and investing shows. Go to other places and experience. Especially in your case, you want to go on once where you’re going to have Millennials because that’s the focus.

Whether it’s a real estate related show or not, any show that’s got a large group of Millennials listening is probably a good one for you to be a guest on. It might work better because there’s not going to be any overlap between what the show is trying to do and what you’re trying to do. It would be complementary. Let’s say you’ve looked through the episodes. I mentioned that wedding show. It’s a cool show. They dish about weddings. It’s going on there and saying, “I saw that you had someone who was on this. I can provide a different perspective.” Millennials are missing the boat by not buying into real estate. “Here’s the angle we could talk about.” You’re talking about something that’s the subject matter of interest. You’re not pitching yourself or your services. You’re talking about their age group, their age demographic, what’s going on in the marketplace there and what they’re missing. They would love to have that exposure. That’s an angle that would play well for them. Listen to their show and make sure that you’re going to be able to add value. When you pitch them, you’re not just saying, “I’d like to be on your show.” You’re saying, “I’d like to be on your show. Here’s what we can talk about that your listeners would find engaging.”

The other thing I would do is to ask other Millennials because I know that they’re your target market. Know what podcasts Millennials’ listen to on a regular basis. Where are they going to consume information that would give you some direction as to where you might try to get on as a guest on those shows? I don’t know where you are in budget and other things like that, but if you’re willing to do a little bit of a paid boost. Especially when you’re launching your show, it’s a great idea in the early days. It’s a little harder because you don’t have as much history of guests and episodes to have people come and listen and go, “This is a great show. I want to come on.” You could do it a little bit differently. You can offer to place ads on some of these other shows where maybe you won’t make the best guest. Especially if they don’t take ads at all yet, they’d love a few hundred bucks. It’s super cheap.

You could do it directly on a show-by-show basis. Identify a show that you think would be a good fit. You also remember this other company I was talking about, this Digital Audio Exchange that we’re going to test. I can’t vouch for how successful it would be yet because I haven’t tested it, but it’s a pretty inexpensive thing to try. That would be another option for you, which would push out to the target market you’re looking for. Placing an audio ad is one of the tips that 935-episode podcaster told me about. That’s what he did in the early days. It grew his traffic tremendously. He does it every day a week. That’s why he has so many shows. He’s got a lot of engaging content. He went out there in the early days and started placing ads on other shows and brought them over to his platform. They stuck around. He has over a million downloads so he’s doing well. That worked well for him. He said he used to give a few hundred bucks a show and place it for 30 days and move on for four episodes.

In podcasting, the volume doesn’t always matter. It’s the quality of the listener. Click To Tweet

You’d be surprised how many podcasters would take low dollar amounts like that to put out on their show. If they’re not making any money on the show yet and haven’t established a rate, it’s something other than nothing. There’s probably a buyer’s market for that. That’s one of the things. How do you find shows in the right demographics? That’s a little harder. You have to ask around, ask other listeners and your target audience. I would go to some of your clients already and say, “What shows do you listen to?” Not only that, use social media for this. You can post on different platforms, Facebook and Instagram, especially, and maybe some other social media platforms. You could do a poll and say, “What are your favorite podcasts you’re listening to on a regular basis?” Post it in the right groups on Facebook that might have your target market of Millennials. That’s one way I would do it. The direct way would be to go on some of the different platforms like iTunes and Spotify. One Millennial is telling us Spotify and iHeart. There’s also Google Play. I’m the same way.

I use the Apple podcast app. Let’s say I heard of Spotify. I would search on those platforms and type in some keyword phrases, subjects that are related to Millennials, that direct search route, and see what shows come up. Read their descriptions. It will be some educated guessing at first as to, “Is this the right market?” between doing that and maybe cross-referencing some shows that you find with results of an online poll on social media. I like the idea of polling. When we do live webinars, public ones and not like this coaching call, Zoom has a feature where you can conduct a poll right here live. That’s pretty cool. If you have an opportunity to be on any webinars that would be of the right audience, you could conduct a poll like that. Even if you can’t, putting up a post that’s a poll in social media would get a lot of engagement. When you ask a question, you’d be surprised how many people will answer it. That’s something I would try.

When you do a little bit of paid like that, you only have to do four episodes or even a couple of episodes. All you’re doing is trying to attract that listenership and have them come over to you. You don’t need to do it for a long-term because you’re not long-term driving them to a sale of something. You can do a little one thing, move on and try a different one the next month. You could plan that out and do many different ones over multiple months, which should be sending traffic to you all times. If you are already running Facebook ads, try mixing up your ads. That was the next part of the suggestion. Try to mix up your ads with ones where you’re not advertising your services, but you’re advertising the show as a resource. Try that as an option because you’ve already got a demographic dialed in with the Facebook ads. You should already be working in the right place. Don’t do it if you don’t already have a dialed-in audience. You don’t already have your lookalike audience. You don’t have all of that right because you’ll spend a lot of money trying to get that for only the return of listeners. It’s not worth it.

For David, what a good lead gen type of advertisement to put out there for your show might be to ask a question that is a common question Millennials might ask themselves, which is, “How much money does it take to buy a house in Orange County?” On Facebook, you can focus that ad to only be reaching people in Orange County, California if that’s where you are. What are those common questions? Ask that question, even in text, as the visual ad. That may capture them and cause them to come and listen. One of the other ones is when you don’t use a quote in Facebook, Instagram or other things. You’re not doing a straight quote but you do a fact and fiction. Those do well for us doing fact and fiction. We’ve been doing that, and also myth-busting. You’d probably have a lot of myth-busting statistics about that. That might work well for you to promo an episode and see how that is. If you get it, you can push that out as an advertisement later.

It’s eye-opening questions like, “Which one of these statements is true? Which one of these questions is the right question to be asking?” We have a couple of people that I don’t recognize what the names of their shows are. Rolanda has an interview series with celebrities. Jules may not be the host if I remember it right. I have to look it up. I apologize. I deal with so many people every day that I don’t remember. If you want to let us know, Jules, I’d love to check out your show. One of the things that I try to do is to listen to everybody’s show over time, but I’m behind because we have so many now. I try to at least listen to a couple of them. We can’t watch all of the motivational, celebrities and business. That’s a lot. Rolanda, I don’t know if you got your website redone. Jules’ is RE Investor Summit. Mitch is the host. Jason doesn’t care for a bunch of those. Big traffic does not define success for everybody. It’s okay. We have several podcasters that we work with who don’t care one bit about the number of downloads. That is not their primary goal and what they do. That is perfectly okay.

The dirty secret out of the podcast industry is that the average podcast has less than. It gets less than 100 plays per episode. Even with our show, Feed Your Brand, even if a lot of people listen to it, it wasn’t our primary goal to get a certain number of listens per episode. Out of all of our podcasts, it may be has our least volume of listens per episode. New Trust Economy is brand new so it’s lower. Our point for that podcast is to support our community, all of you, but also people that aren’t customers yet. We share everything that we know about how to get the most out of podcasting for whatever your purpose or intent is. We share all that information freely. It’s to be helpful. Those people that are the right fit for us to be a client will come to us. The number of people listening to that one isn’t the point. We have other podcasters that use their show as a VIP guest strategy. They are trying to build rapport with their guests and lead generate from their guests for clients. It works very well for the few people we know that do that.

That’s also not what you’re doing, Jason. You have a different purpose with telling these stories from your experience over your years in the legal profession. I am dying to be a listener of your show after our conversations about what you’re going to do. I will be one of your early listeners. Every different podcaster has their own unique goals and reason for why they’re doing it. They are all perfectly legitimate. Please don’t feel like you’re in the wrong place or using the wrong medium or something’s wrong with you because you don’t care about how many downloads. It’s not. Everybody has their own purpose. They’re all legitimate. As long as the show is providing you value and/or your purpose is providing value to whomever you intend to provide value, it’s wonderful. Don’t worry about that. There are so many different ways. Don’t compare yourself to everybody else.

If you’re coming into podcasting with the mindset of, “I’m going to take the sponsors,” you have to get your listenership up. That is the only thing that’s going to matter at the end of the day. It’s if you want to get sponsors or you’re going to use it in any way for lead generation for your business, which a lot of people are doing. That’s not you, in this case, of your podcast. The volume doesn’t always matter. It’s the quality of the listener. I would much rather you have 500 raving fans who love your content and are waiting for your next episode than to have 10,000 per episode of casual listeners. There’s the value proposition for you and the listener. I want to give you another example. I had a call with a woman who is retired. She’s in her late 70s. I’m not going to tell her name yet or exactly the name of what her show is going to be, but she has had this extraordinary life, lived in seven different countries.

She started from nothing. She was homeless as a child but has had this extraordinary life since then. She has dined with Barack Obama and the president of Ireland. She met the president of Pakistan way back and was invited to Pakistan. She also was an actress. She got an IMDB listing at one point, not her whole career or her whole life. She had this extraordinary life. She is going to start a podcast to tell stories from her life. Her primary reason is to document it for her grandchildren. I was like, “Why do you want to put it out there as a podcast if you can record audio and save them for your grandkids to listen to?” She thinks that her story would also be of interest to other people. After hearing a bit of her story, I wholeheartedly agree. It’d make a great book. It will be a tremendously engaging podcast and will become a book. She’s good. It’s a complete passion project for her. If there are a lot of listeners who also get some entertainment or value out of it, that’s a bonus for her but it’s not her goal. She’s going to start a podcast. I’m excited to support her in doing that. It’s the least business-oriented show I’ve probably encountered yet. There are a few.

Some of you have been getting celebrity guests and needed studio spaces. I already interviewed her at an event. I have an opportunity to re-interview Molly Bloom. If you haven’t seen Molly’s Game or read the book, she’s amazing. She was so engaging. I’m looking forward to sitting down with her for a longer period of time. She’s the person who expects to be in a studio. I’ve been establishing relationships with studios around the Southern California area. I’ve got a new studio. I got off the phone within Utah and the Salt Lake City area. We’re starting to establish relationships with studios across the country that are offering that. Should you need to have a studio, you’re going to be able to find one. Sometimes that can also help you get a big guest, which can boost your show. Sometimes having to do that live is important. We’ve got a few NFL players or retired players. The studios are available. If you have a need for that, ping me. I’ll make sure to get you in touch with these studios. They’re going to give special rates to our clients, especially introductory rates. Let me know if you have even one-time drop and needs for that. I can help too.

Jason has a question. If anybody is in Texas. It’s an interesting area. He has a stock buyer. That’s so nice, Jason. Thank you for that. We’ll make sure to let people know if they’re in your area. I’ll ping you. We may be there in Texas. We’ll let you know. I’m hoping we can get to Houston. We are tagging you when we post your posts. We post out on Feed Your Brand, on social media and everywhere. Make sure you friended us and liked the Feed Your Brand page on Facebook. If you liked it on LinkedIn, even though we have one, it allows us to tag you there as well. Make sure you’re doing that. Make sure you’ve tagged Feed Your Brand everywhere that you can. That’s how we can tag you. Sometimes we can’t tag you.

We’ll share your stuff and push it out. We do try to share you periodically and share your shows. We have a lot of shows in the queue but we try to share at least one a day from clients. It’s also when we write a feature article on any of you if you’ve had that interview with Laura Hazzard. If you haven’t, you will. Those of you who haven’t launched wouldn’t have done that yet, but after you launch, you’ll get an invitation from Laura Hazzard to have a feature article written about you. We put those out all over the place. We want to be tagging you, linking to you. Make sure you’re connected with us. Thank you all so much. Watch the newsletter and invitations to some of the now starting more weekly webinars we’re going to do if you’re interested in any of those, especially if you’re a newer podcaster. We’ll be back to do the same thing again. Until next time.

Important Links:

• FeedYourBrand.co
• Alexandra@Podetize.com
• Eric Tippetts – Previous episode at The New Trust Economy
• Authority Magazine
• Inc. magazine
• FreeeUp.com
• Buffer
• CoSchedule
• The Byrd Chronicles
• Eric Christopher
• Digital Audio Exchange
• New Trust Economy
• Molly’s Game
• Feed Your Brand on Facebook
• LinkedIn – Feed Your Brand