Every show you are on is a great boost to your credibility. That is why being a guest on other people’s podcasts doesn’t have to end when an interview ends. You can compile them for all your listeners to see and even keep track of! How can you do that? Tracy Hazzard and Tom Hazzard introduce ShowCastR, a showcase player that shows all the podcast episodes you’ve been on. In this episode, they dive deep into using this great service, its benefits to your brand, and how you can leverage it to establish credibility as a guest on other shows.

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Watch the episode here

 

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ShowCastR: How To Use It To Showcase Your Guest Interviews And How It Helps Establish Credibility

In this episode, we are going to talk about how to showcase your guest interviews by being a guest on other people’s podcasts and how to establish credibility through the use of a ShowCastR showcase player, a player that shows all the podcast episodes you’ve been on. Tom, I’m going to let you take it from here because this ShowCastR was your vision.

I want to be clear because a lot of you podcasters who are existing podcasters out there are familiar with this. Usually, your media host has some window player. Sometimes, it’s called an archive player or a player where there’s a list of all your episodes and anybody can play it. That’s a pretty common thing but they’re also quite limited. We have been podcasting for a decade and we’ve got an awful lot of episodes.

We have lots of different shows we’ve done and experienced a lot of things. We found that those players didn’t meet our needs as podcasters. If it didn’t meet our needs as podcasters, probably it didn’t meet a lot of other podcasters’ needs too. We are very creative people. Our whole career, we’ve developed products. Our solution is, “If it doesn’t exist, let’s make it,” so we did. We created our own. We have trademarked it as the ShowCastR and we’re going to share with you what it can do, what’s different, and why you might want to use it. Here’s the thing.

 

 

You have so many episodes of your show and once you get to a point where you’ve got at least 25 or 50 episodes, for most of you that would be 6 months to 1 year, you may want to draw people’s attention to some episodes. New listeners coming in are going to listen to the latest episode, maybe start at the beginning, and binge through them all. Maybe there are six key ones that you think are foundational. You want new listeners to start with those.

Let’s say you’ve been podcasting a long time like us, and you get to the point where you have over 300 episodes. Most listening apps won’t display them all. There are some exceptions. What do you do? You create another volume of episodes. Your oldest ones maybe are in the new volume and your new ones keep going where everybody has subscribed.

If people who find your show want to go back and listen to some of those earlier ones, you have to syndicate your show again. That’s only in the listening apps. What about on your own website? How can you organize that? How can you make navigating through your content easier? Here are some of the problems we faced and why we created the ShowCastR. We realized we can’t make this a linear player.

 

Thinking about this from the perspective of if you’ve been on a lot of podcasts. I’m going to call it Podcast Guesting Binges, where you go on a bunch of shows because you’re marketing this book, then it’s your new book. It might have a whole different topic set than you’re doing. I have 150 or 200 episodes I’ve guested on and I had them segmented in too. Sometimes I talk about product design, development, and innovation, and other times, I talk about podcasting.

Other times, I talk about content for marketing, general entrepreneurship, and women in leadership. There are all these distant segmented topics that I cover, and by putting them only in time linear order, you’re doing your listener a disservice. You’re doing the person who’s coming to your website trying to navigate that a disservice or in the case of press and publicity, you’re not highlighting the most important by highlighting the most recent.

That’s why we structure and build the ShowCastR the way we did so that it gave us a real high ability to establish more credibility, authority, or whatever your current mission is in terms of what you’re trying to get people to listen and find out about you, and being able to build that in. Also, being flexible to those who have podcasts and guest interviews at the same time. It’s giving you the opportunity to have both in the same place on your website as well, so you can do multiple tabs and feeds in this sense. This is why we built it the way we did. It’s to be able to showcase what you’re doing, guest interviewing, and podcasting both at the same time for you.

 

You used a keyword there, Tracy, that is very important and most people will understand because of how modern web browsers work. You said a different tab. That’s what we’ve done. By the way, we also have a patent pending on this so everyone is aware. This is new and innovative. If you’ve got a list of all your episodes in your feed, why can’t you have a 2nd tab with a different playlist, a 3rd tab, and a 4th tab? There is no limit to it.

Visually, that’s a lot of tabs. If you get beyond five, it gets a little busy, but you can.

We have one deployed right now with four tabs for our 3D Printing show, which was our first show, and there are over 650 episodes. We’ve got four different volumes of content and I’m contemplating a fifth right now, so I’m probably going to push the edge of that envelope a little. The power of these tabs allows you to curate playlists, as you said, of your guest interviews or your own podcast and have different highlights and playlists.

By putting your episodes in one place, you're being really friendly to people who may not have experience with podcast players that are directories themselves. Click To Tweet

It works incredibly well because you could be listening to one episode that you’re starting to listen to. You’re playing it on the website, you’re listening to it, and then your viewer, listener, or user can browse through the other tabs. They can look through different episodes while they’re listening to one and even expand to read the description of each or click a link within and open another browser tab, but they’re still listening to that first episode.

Those are some innovative features and then, of course, at any point, you can click to play any of the other episodes at any other tab that you want and it will start playing. This is one of the main key features. It is not to limit yourself. How do you create those playlists? We have a way to do that and we’ve built that into the Podetize hosting platform. This player is designed to work with shows that are hosted on Podetize.

It doesn’t have to. You have to have multiple feeds if you want to use multiple tabs. I have a lot of clients and people who have past shows, so their feeds are still active and they have old shows. Maybe they’re putting them on a free syndication service or free hosting company so that they don’t have to keep paying for them. They’re old and they don’t want to get rid of them because they know they still have listeners to them.

 

You might have your old shows or old branding of your show and you can put them in separate tabs. As long as you have a separate feed, it works. Tom is going to do a full demo of how it works and what it looks like. I want to dive into one thing Tom was talking about and that is when you put this on a page. He was talking about people tabbing, searching, and doing things.

This is what you have to remember. The power of having a showcase player of any kind or a player for your show, whether it’s your show or your guest interview shows, is that people can listen right there on your website. It means they’re getting your popups, seeing your sidebar, sticky, and staying on your website, which is giving you Google analytic power. It is making your website more powerful in search engine optimization. By making a place where they can listen and not have to go to an Apple player, Spotify player, or some other player, it gives them the ability to listen right there.

Remember that we’re a little jaded because we’ve been in the podcasting industry for a long time. We think everybody knows about podcasting. Honestly, my mom thinks that podcasting is YouTube, so she watches podcasts on YouTube. She knows she’s watching a podcast, but she thinks that that’s where it is. She doesn’t use a podcast player at all, but she will use it on a website because it’s clear how to click and play.

The more you keep people engaged, the higher all the metrics will be, and the more benefit you get from your guest appearances. Click To Tweet

By doing that, you’re being friendly to people who may not have experience with podcast players that are directories themselves or apps if you want to think of it that way. They are new to it and now you’ve given them a way to consume what you’ve got going on for you. One last feature that I want to point out is that you can put these behind a pay gate, keep it in your membership areas, and make things clear for newbies. Have a tab for newbies that are new to it and have ones for experienced. You can also segment it when you’ve got a learning environment. You can segment your podcast episodes and make it simple for them in that area as well.

Tracy, I want to add to something you said because you did the equivalent bearing the lead on one of the major values of this. As a guest, meaning I don’t care if you’re a podcaster or not. I don’t even know of any exceptions except for you and some of our customers in podcasting who have a lot of guests. We’ve done this already in some of our tests, which are some of the ones I’m going to use in the demo.

Normally, when you’re a guest on someone else’s show, how do you share it with your audience? You share people a link to that episode you were on that takes people out somewhere else from your website to go listen to it. It is a social share or you might have a press page or a media page on your own website. A lot of people do. There might be a graphic featuring you in that episode or some little post you make on your website of, “I’ve been a guest on all these other shows.”

Usually, whenever anybody clicks it to listen, it takes them away from your website. Even if it opens a new tab, it’s sending them somewhere else to listen to it. The game changer of the ShowCastR is, what you were saying, Tracy, that you engage people on your website and let them play it there. It’s someone else’s show and episode but I’ve never had anybody say, “Please, don’t play that episode. Don’t make it available for people to listen to. I don’t want you to do that.”

Every podcast host wants exposure and by putting it in a lot of the apps there and making it downloadable, they’re making it freely available and there’s no copyright issue with this. You’re not editing it and you’re allowing people to play it just like they would anywhere else. You’re taking advantage of it and keeping traffic active on your own website. You’re providing that value there and while they’re listening, as you said, Tracy, they’re looking around through your top-level menu on your website or looking in your sidebar.

Maybe a popup comes up while you’re watching and then you’re giving other ways to engage with that site visitor and also does help your site value in terms of average time spent per page on the website. All those metrics of ranking of a website, SEO, and all that. The more you keep people engaged, the higher that’s all going to be and the more benefit you get from your guest appearances. The main point is why send people away from your own website? Don’t do that.

Why not make it easy to find out all about you? I find it on my speaker site. I have a speaker site but I don’t use it. It’s not like I’m out there marketing it or sending people to it, but when people do use it, what happens is if an event organizer comes, it’s easy for them to hit play and hear how great I am as a guest on a show. It starts to make them think, “She’s going to be great on our stage. This is going to be easy.”

They’ve gone through and consumed it but because it’s not my own show, it’s me on somebody else’s show, it has this third-party credibility that is helping them to make that decision, “Look at all these amazing shows she’s been on. She’s been guested of this person and this person. That’s our right audience.” They can easily see that right in one place by scrolling right down through the player. They don’t have to skim through a bunch of blogs, look at a bunch of featured images, or go in, as I put it, linear timeline order. They don’t have to do it that way because you can organize it in whichever order you would like. By doing that, you’re giving them the best first.

For all those speakers out there, I would have a tab that’s like, “Event organizers listen here,” or event organizers with an arrow down like this is for you. It is a way that a lot of organizers will make some decisions. They want proof that you can speak intelligently. They want to hear it, even if they don’t see it.

They want to hear how engaging you are is what they’re looking for. This is the whole idea of what we’re building here. It is to make it so easy for you to organize and showcase what podcasts you’ve been on, whether it’s your own or guest interviews, and highlight that and show off how great you are. Organize it in a way that makes people want to take a step, hire you, or buy your book. Do the things that you intended it to do by organizing them in a better way. You can make that a clearer path to their understanding of what it is that you’re all about.

Tracy, that’s a great place to wrap this episode up. Don’t forget, there is a demo at Podetize.com for this episode. It’s also for our customers in our knowledge base. You can check it out there if you’re tuning in to this first. That’s where you get to see the ins and outs, the magic, and even how you can custom color it for your own branding. Each tab can be a different color scheme and there are lots of cool things we’ve put into this.

Have some fun and check it out at Podetize.com under the Feed Your Brand show.

Thanks for tuning in everybody.