The podcasting medium has been such a breakthrough and it continues to grow and develop in this digital age. In this episode, we aspire to discuss updates to Podetize and the podcast industry. We want to talk about Google competing with iTunes as they get into the podcast industry. We’re also going to take you through our customer dashboard as we just did a major site revision to ensure that you’ll get utmost value out of this business.

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We have a few subjects to share with you and discuss which they are going to be of great interest to you. There’s been a lot going on. We also are going to introduce someone to you, another member of the Brandcasting family who’s going to be doing some things potentially with some of you. First of all, I want to address the elephant in my room. I’ve been in severely email-challenged. Which I told him sounds like the dog ate my homework. It totally sounds a cop out. If I wasn’t here listening to the screams and frustration and the constant calls to Network Solutions to yell at them, I wouldn’t have believed him either.

My outbound email, believe it or not, was not working. Most of the time my inbound email was working and I couldn’t reply. I also heard from some people that inbound email me had been being rejected. It was the strangest thing in the world. It was getting stuffed in a spam folder on the way out of our own IT email server and they’re the biggest company in the world, Web.com. They fixed it. Finally, it has been working and everything seems to be going well. Here’s the reason to talk about this. Any of you that have sent me emails over the course of the week and you have not gotten a reply, please resend me the as soon as you’re able. I promise I’ll reply to everybody. We believe we’re back on track and Alexandra also had a little similar trouble although less than I did. Her email is also now working. We think all company emails are working.

If all that fails, you all have access to Alexandra and make sure you copy her if you have any issues or anything like that. If it’s based on anything logistic or operational with your podcast, make sure you send them to her. We are here to support you on strategy and all of those other things. For the most part, the person who it’s going to get passed over to be sent to the team is Alexandra anyway. You cut a lot out by going straight to her. We have brought on board full-time customer service person because we’re going to have so many customers. There is another email besides Alexandra that sometimes you might get a faster response from and that’s Help@BrandcastingYou.com.

Our CSR’s person name is Manny who has been trained and some of you have already gotten some emails from him. That’s new and it’s an effort to try to give you quicker responses to a lot of questions you may have. You still have access to us. You have access to Alexandra but sometimes you may get a quicker response, especially those of you that live on the East Coast. I’m an early bird and sometimes I am doing work early, but Alexandra is not. She’s our West Coast into the evening for the teams that are working around the world. Scott put into the notes, “Somebody sends compliments to you, Tom and complaints to Alex,” and I said no, “I think you should turn it around because compliments to Alexandra means you get more stuff done.”

Onto some more interesting subjects. This is an issue that was a question from an existing client who is not on the call, but it’s useful for everybody. Mark Pattison who is a former NFL player and one of our clients, his podcast is Finding Your Summit. He interviewed some great people you haven’t heard of, so you might want to check it out. He interviews sometimes a lot of older people. I’m not trying to be age-discriminatory, but he had some people he’s wanting to interview that don’t use a computer or don’t want to use a computer and don’t know how to use Zoom or Skype or anything. His question was, “How can he record this person remotely?” It was a great question.

There are a few different ways you can do that. The one that I would recommend the most because you’re pushing to them, you’re not requiring them to go even dial into a conference call number and enter a pin. You can do that with Zoom. We’re on Zoom now. You can have a Zoom call and give somebody their phone number and the pin to dial in from a phone to the Zoom call. You could record them that way, but it still requires them to take action and come to you dialing a pin, but they could do it wrong. The simplest way that we know to do this and still record a separate track for you and your guest is to use Skype. I have to say we use Skype a lot in the early days. Microsoft bought Skype and we have seen it steadily go down in terms of features and functionality. Microsoft has taken it over and then made a mess of it. There is a lot of sound interruptions and glitches in the compression.

However, if you need to dial someone just as if you’re dialing them on the phone and you want to do it from the computer to record them, these plugins on the Mac where you recommend Call Recorder. On the PC, we have TalkHelper. It’s the other one you can use that you can record a separate track for you and the guest. Skype allows you to put in Skype credit and when we were doing it a lot, I would put $10 on an account you pay on the credit card or PayPal or whatever. I would have enough credit to do interviews for three or four months. It doesn’t use up the money very quickly but it is a paid option. You have to put Skype credit in an account to do it, but then you can dial any phone number in the world through Skype. They pick up their phone just as they would if you were dialing from your iPhone or anything. You’re on with them just like we are with you now and you record them. If you are dealing with a low-tech person, that’s what I would recommend.

 

Somebody asked, “Is there a rotary option?” I assume that means can you just go phone to phone? You can. There are apps on the iPhone that you can get and some of them are free that are made for this. If you want to record a phone call on your phone, go into this app and then it makes a call out to the cloud. It’s as if you’re making a three-way call between you, your guests, and then this recording service that will record it. To me, it’s a little more complicated than just using Zoom or Skype, but there are other options both on iPhone and Android. That’s that. It was a great question Mark asked because I realized we haven’t done a tutorial video on that. I will do a tutorial video on doing that and post it in our help resources section. Shortly, I just haven’t done it yet, but I will.

I’m going to have to do a tutorial video on how to turn off your notifications because you are the worst offender. We have a question, “How do you do it in person?” If you started your podcast with us and we’ve sent you your equipment, the microphone that you have, the reason we gave you that microphone is that it plugs in a couple of different ways. It has this plug called an XLR cable because it’s Tracy and me on this at once. We’re using a big mixing board. It’s very old school. The mixing board is overkill. We bought it years ago. I wouldn’t do it again. It’s too much money you don’t need to spend. The point is it’s capable of plugging in through USB to a computer or through a mixing board or another device. If you’re going to record in person, I recommend you have one microphone for each person, one for you, one for the guest.

There are other recording devices that will record you directly on an SD card and record a separate track for each of you the best one. When clients want that and they’re going to do a lot of that, it’s an upgraded equipment purchase. It’s about $500 of total equipment because we put it in a case and added microphones and everything. It’s not cheap, but it’s very high-quality stuff. If you’re going to do a lot of in-person interviews or you’re going to travel on the road and you want to do a higher quality recording, that’s what we set people up with. It’s a Zoom H6 device. It’s not by the same Zoom people that were on this call with you. It’s an entirely different brand. You could find that on Amazon just as a device itself, but when we provide it, we package it with a case and with some microphones and cables and things that make it easier. That’s how you might record in person.

It does require little more steps because you have to take out the SD card, plug it into your computer, download the file, and convert it. We have clients that have bought this and use it. We do have training videos existing on the help resources section of how to record using those devices. Even before you buy it, if you’re interested in that, you can go look at those videos and see what you’d be getting into. Most of you are just using your laptop and the microphone we supply you with, which is the highest quality microphone. Honestly, it rivals DJ-quality microphones. People spend $300 and $400 on it. I wouldn’t even bother because eventually, we’re all reducing this to an MP3 file to be a podcast. MP3 files are limited in their audio quality anyway so if you have a more expensive mic, you’re not getting the benefit of it.

We have a question, “Can you connect to Audacity?” You can. You can have your computer there, you can plug in. It’s the issue of your sharing a mic then so you’re not creating two tracks. That’s the problem. Using a computer to record more than one person right there in person, every computer without special equipment and a lot of tech configuration, that I would not recommend. Every computer will only allow you to plug one USB microphone into it. It will only recognize one even if you have two ports and you plug two into it, it will only recognize one. If you’re going to do that, use your computer to record your interview in person with someone. You’re just going to have to pass the mic back and forth, which is a little tedious and you might get some different levels by your mic moving closer and away from your mouth as you’re talking. That’s why we always recommend you to learn to maintain the same distance between your mouth and the mic at all times.

You can plug it into your phone, but it does the same thing. You’re going to have a lower quality compression on there. You can plug your mic into some phones. You have to have the right cable. You’d have to have a headphone jack. If you have an iPhone, you’d have to have the adapter to the headphone jack and the right cable from the microphone, which does not come with the microphone. If you want to do that, let us know and we can help send you a link to the things you would need to buy on Amazon to do it. It wouldn’t be very expensive, but you have to get the right stuff. I would seriously test out the quality of that because you’re going through multiple devices and a chain to get to it. You may end up with deteriorated quality in your recording.

There are cheaper other devices you could use, not your phone to record that is not the Zoom H6. It might be $150 or $200, but you won’t be recording a different track for each person. I don’t want to get too far into the tech on this. If you need a specific solution, let us know what your situation is and we’ll be happy to recommend one. The next thing I want to talk about is the big news in the podcasting industry. This is the last news item then we’re going to introduce one person and we’re going to do a tour of our customer dashboard, which is the big news also. This is noteworthy.

Google got into the podcast industry when they created Google Play Music and added podcasts to it, trying to compete with iTunes. Google came out with their own podcast app. If you’re on the Android platform, if you have a Samsung phone or anything like that, you were limited to using an app like Stitcher. It was one of the most common ones. There was an Android podcast app that was available but not very good. You could use Google Play to find them, but you couldn’t play them on your phone and keep consistent. You just have to bookmark them. It was not useful.

Google Podcasts announced and came out on the Android platform only. All you iPhone users are going to have to wait, but it came out of Android platform only Google Podcast app. It’s a big deal in the industry because of course, it’s Google. Any of you that were producing your podcasts or even if you’re hosting with us or we’re not producing it, your shows are automatically registered on Google Play Music. That’s where they need to be to show up on the Google Podcast. You don’t have to do anything to show up here. You’re already there. This is important.

When I was doing some reading on it, I learned the history of podcasting, Apple invented it on iTunes. It’s the primary platform and the data suggests anywhere from 60% to 80% of podcast listens are on iTunes or one of the iTunes-related apps; the Apple podcast app and things like that. The Android listeners were only 13% of the market. The Google Podcast app intends to change all that with Google behind it and the power that they have for indexing things in their search database and everything, they may be a large contender because there are 75% or 80% of the smartphones around the world are Android-based phones. Apple is a much smaller percentage. The numbers may be a little off, but the iPhone is not the lion’s share of phones, the IOS devices are worldwide even though they dominate the podcast listening market. Now you bring out this app on Google platform, in all these Android phones, they are going to become a formidable destination for people to listen to podcasts.

Keeping in mind that everything is in a Google Search world, which is why you’re here with us because this is where we dominate. It means that the Google Podcast version of your show if someone were to type in the name of your show like Feed Your Brand podcast, it’s going to start out ranking the iTunes version as the first one. It’s just going to happen naturally from the way that they’re going to be presenting it. It happens when you take your videocast and you put it on YouTube, it outranks any other video player that you use. I guarantee you, this will be the same thing there. It’s going to start out ranking because of the association. Because you’re also using it in conjunction with a blog post that is coming up in Google search, that’s going to help you come to the top of the listing.

We’re going to keep an eye on this and we think that you have a good chance of high ranking on Google Podcast as you go forward because you set all the groundwork that’s ahead of other podcasters. We want to watch it. We also want to recommend that you go and subscribe to your shows and subscribe to all your friends’ shows and do all of that on the Google Podcast app if you have an Android phone. Go ahead and do that. I have an android phone and I do this on Stitcher as well. I subscribed to all of your shows. We’ve just gotten so many new shows. I haven’t quite caught up yet, but I promise I will get my subscriptions in for you so that you’re getting the hits of that.

We do this on our iPhones too, but we don’t have this Google Podcast. It’s not available for iPhone. Go ahead and have others do it for you. Recommend it, push it out there because the more you push it out there especially in social if you’re giving an option of where to subscribe, start recommending people subscribe there. They won’t choose it if they have an iPhone anyway but recommend it because when they do choose it, it’s going to make a significant difference to your Google Search. There’s a new icon for this already available to put on your websites for people to show that and link to it and I’ll show that to you. Your URL where your podcast is located in terms of subscription has not changed. I’ll show you where you can find that on your customer dashboard on our site because we have it there for you. Let’s bring Laura on, Tracy. This is Laura Hazzard for full disclosure.

Laura is our sister-in-law. We adore her and we are so happy to have her involved with us here. She’s been working on a lot of things on one of our other podcasts, Product Launch Hazzards, with me. Her skill set is just so geared to what we needed her to do here for you. We want to grow our customer feedback. Laura has a background in market research and consumer market research, business to business as well and she’s working with companies like Target and Starbucks. We’re excited to have her here. We had started this initiative where we were trying to formulate the questions that we wanted to ask you about, what you find valuable on our platform and how we can improve for you and different things like that. We were starting to formulate this, but we realized that by asking you to spend some time on that, we needed to serve you too.

 

We’ve invited Laura to reach out to you. There’s a long list of all of you, of course. She’ll be reaching out to each of you month by month. She’s going to reach out to you. She’s going to not only ask you to answer a couple questions that are going to help us improve our services, our products for you, but she’s also going to give you an opportunity to be featured. I’m going to let Laura tell a little bit about that, but I’m so excited for you to meet her and get to know her. We wanted you to recognize her name, her face and know that this is coming.

It’s nice to meet you. You’ll be getting an email and then a quick conversation so it shouldn’t take too much of your time, but it’s an important one. It will be about 15 to 30 minutes depending on how much we chat and we’ll be talking about your podcast. I want to hear what started it, what inspired it, what we have to look forward to. Just so they can feature you and share out to everyone on all of our platforms who you are, what you’re all about and what to expect from the podcast. I love to hear about your experience, what you love, what you’re looking for and what could be improved. We’ll cover all of that and it will be fun. I’m excited to talk to you.

What is the intention for where you’re going to feature each podcast? How are you going to do that? Initially, all of them will be featured as we do for our normal podcast, transcript-style for some of the questions. Some of them will not be included because they’re about the market research side of things. For the most part, the majority of it is about you and about your podcast? It’s a feature for you that will be on the Feed Your Brand podcast blog post section. It will exist on BrandcastingYou.com and Feed Your Brand. It’s going to provide a top-level link back to you because our site is getting lots of hits so we have a high ranking. We want to share some of that link back ranking with you as a feature for yours. We’re testing out a new model of social posting. Our social team is going to then make soundbites and make little graphics. You know what Ego Bait™ is and those types of things and they’re going to put out little inspirational quotes about you and your podcast to highlight them and push them out through social.

We want to see how much play we can get on your behalf for that and see if we can get that traction working for you. The other thing that we’re going to do is there will be some stories that we work into a full-length article and we pitched somewhere. I have a system for doing that and there may be a few of them. That’s just a great story that fits the model of some of the publications that are willing to take articles from us and we’ll see. Maybe we can feature you in Thrive Global or maybe even on Inc. That’s our goal. If we can get you a PR feature that’s even deeper than that, we’ll essentially write a post from the interview, which is how I when I write my articles.

We’ll do that and then we’ll push that out somewhere and see if we can get you a story somewhere else as well. We’re hoping to amp up this publicity side of it in terms of providing marketing perspective. One of the missions here at Brandcasters is that we want to support your brand. We want to support the growth of your podcast and the growth of your brand and how can we best do that both from a services perspective. Also from a feedback loop and that’s why Laura’s here. I want to remind everyone of the National Social Media Day. We want you all to participate all day. Scott of the Note Closers Show, welcome. Scott kills it on social, by the way, if you haven’t figured that out already and his show is booming because of it.

We’re doing okay. We’re not doing too bad. I’m great because I have great guests and you help a tremendous amount. We have the National Social Media Day for those that didn’t know. It’s been around for a few years. Good friends of mine got something passed here in Austin to put the National Social Media Day in Austin, but we decided to take it to a different level. We decided to do a whole full day streaming social media with guests, speakers, and tips. I’m glad I have Tom and Tracy on there. Stefanie LaHart is going to be speaking on there as well. We’ve got 40 different experts on social media and marketing and we kick off at midnight East Coast time. That’s getting eight hours. We got a whole bunch of stuff to do all day long until midnight on West Coast time.

Are you and Stephanie taking shifts?

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I’ll be running the whole thing. The hotel we’re having is great. They do a great job. We’re going there if we need to take a cat nap. We’ll be rotating Kristie Whites from Serving Social. You met at Digital Marker. We rotate through and the three of us will be fine.

Everyone should keep an eye out mostly on Facebook. It’s going to be streamed live on Facebook.

We’re using Zoom to Facebook streaming and of course, share it across the board with the ultimate goal and take the videos and upload to YouTube, Vimeo, and then turn it into the fourth podcast that I’ve got.

You have three actual different listings on iTunes. Someone is asking about the recording. It’s going to be on YouTube. You’re going to have a whole podcast about it. It’s going to turn into its own 40 episodes or more show.

I’ll have 30 minute-incremental just combined two in one hour. It came from watching House of Cards. If you remember, the last season where the governor and the young guy’s running for president against Underwood, he runs a 24-hour Facebook Q&A.

I just participated in one on LinkedIn. It was a guy who was participating in 24 hours on the tariffs because that’s a hot topic in our product world. Then he was just answering questions nonstop. The only time he’d be off LinkedIn was when he was on CNN. It was crazy. He was live answering questions on LinkedIn. It was great.

It’s going to be live streamed. You’ll be able to go to National Social Media Day. Our biggest goal of this is to get a quarter million to half a million views based on our guests and everything we do to promote it.

 

We’ll be sharing and pushing out on Feed Your Brand and on our personal pages as well. Watch for that and join in because it’s going to be a lot of fun. The guests you have are great. Some of them are going to provide some great training about how they do stuff on social media. I’m going to share my social media management and mastery. It’s this idea of not about learning how to use Facebook, it’s about learning how you can incorporate it and still keep yourself sane in your business.

Stefanie LaHart is going to be a big shout on Instagram, Tom is going to be a big shout out on podcasting.

Podcasting and how to dominate your marketplace. That’s the goal there. I can’t wait to join in on that. For a visual designer, I’ve not been able to make Instagram work for us, so I’m tuning in.

I don’t think you’ve met Stefanie.

Not, but I’ve heard her name around the office. Is there a list of who’s speaking when?

We just had a couple of people tweak so we’ll have the final registration list up on the website for everybody here. We have people speaking from Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Australia, London and all across the United States too.

It makes sense to go around the globe because somebody is going to be awake at some point.

If you're dealing with a low-tech person, you can record them remotely using Skype because it lets you dial any phone number in the world. Click To Tweet

Since we they don’t want to pay you $100,000 to have Gary Vaynerchuk on, we decided we’d take it a little international. We only have a total of three or four hours we have to fill our own selves so it won’t be so crazy.

For the audience, check this out because it is a great way to launch a podcast with an event. You might learn some things from the way Scott is doing this to continually promote, but it’s a great launch strategy as well. You can be thinking about that. For some of you out there, you’ve been hearing about launching with 25 episodes. I just did that with our Product Launch Hazzards podcast. We were trying something and we launched with 20 episodes and then launched one a day for the rest of the month. We had 900 views and listens in one week. It gave you that boost that you need right at launch. It is working.

Thank you, Scott. Good luck with that.

I’m not going into the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts. Many of you log into our site on a regular basis are already familiar with a lot of the changes made to the site. You’ve noticed our website had a complete revamp which it desperately needed. We are very excited about our new logo. We hope you like it. Podetize.com is redone on the front end and more importantly, the user dashboard. Tracy was mentioning Product Launch Hazards. We have another business that is all about launching a physical product, product design and development and there’s a whole membership site and this podcast supports that.

I just want to mention this to you. We’re going to be sharing this with you as we move forward. We’re using this as a testing ground to test both premium podcast and the use of a podcast at a membership site. There’s been a lot of logistical complications to it so it’s not something we’re ready to roll out. If you’re thinking about anything like this, let’s have a chat. You can connect with me and we can talk about some of the things that we’re finding if you were thinking about this in any way, shape, or form. This is something that we want to make sure that we have the full-service package for how to do this right and how to get the most out of it.

It’s podcasting on another level. What we want to show you is the new design of the interface. As usual, you know you’re in the right place because your podcast information is here on the left, your description, which you can see we’re using all 4,000 characters available to us on this one. Here was something we talked about. If you’re ever looking for quick links to anything like your feed URL or what’s your iTunes link or your Stitcher link. We were mentioning before, your Google Play link. We’ve already registered you on Google Play and your link is right there if you need to find it. You can always find it on the customer dashboard.

One of the things we’ve done though is made it so if you don’t need to see that all the time or read it, you can shrink it a little to the left. You can see more of what’s going on here on the rest of the page and with your analytics and all that. That’s a nice new little feature. If you have more than one show like Scott Carson or like we do, you have this drop lists. You can just click into your other show and hit go and the dashboard will refresh. One note about that in case any of you didn’t know, it’s always recommended when you do that. You’re at the main dashboard page. Don’t be on any subpages or in the episode details of a particular episode. When you switch podcasts at that point, it can just kick you back out where you were. You need to be on the dashboard level. You’ll lose what you’re working on.

 

It’s just one little pointer in any case. I want to start with the analytics. We’ve put up here at the top your total plays, unique plays, and then last 90 days’ plays and then you see this more analytics. When you click that, it’s going to drop down and show you your top ten episodes last 90 days. You can enter in a date range that you want to look at all this from. We used to have multiple graphs, now you’ve got a merged graph with your total plays and unique plays. Let me go here to June 5th. Total plays 143, unique plays 106. There are reasons why there is a difference in these numbers. People may wonder, “What’s the difference between total plays and unique plays?” A lot of people have more than one device that they have their iTunes account or Stitcher account linked to.

One of the things you are going to be able to do with the new Google Podcast app and if you have a Google Home smart speaker, you can be listening on your drive home from work or wherever on your smartphone to the Google Podcast app to an episode. If you get home before you finish it and you stopped playing it, you get home, you go into your living room or kitchen and start cooking, you can say, “Hey Google. Continue playing that episode of Product Launch Hazards podcast that I was listening to.” It will pick up where you left off and start playing it. The episode has been played on more than one device. In the old system, it would not have recognized that it was one person listening on two different devices and two plays should have been one play. The same thing happens on other platforms and people listen on their computer or their smartphone or their tablet. That’s why you get a difference between total plays and unique plays.

This is an industry-wide thing where you’re starting to see this happen on all over the place. Libsyn is changing their metrics and iTunes is sharing more metrics and things like that and that is because the advertisers are all on an ad kick model. The advertisers are saying you are falsifying your numbers. I want them to be more accurate. This is what’s happening. The whole market is shifting in the way that we gather analytics is shifting to better reflect what’s happening. As you scroll down, if you’ve been on the platform before, you’re familiar with the geographic distribution of all your countries. Google Podcast is already on the list. This chart is the player, not the service. Then the platform is over here like Mac, Windows, Android, Linux, iPhone, and things like that. This is the actual player that it’s tracking.

Keep in mind that the Smart Podcast Player is not a separated thing. It’s not that we can track it. It’s listed as other. I think unknown is going to change as this Google Podcast app gets bigger, but also every website where you would play it on, that goes into unknown. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of things that go into unknown. We also had a request from another customer and that was Kimchi. Her podcast is viewed and listened to in a ton of different countries. She wanted to have a little listing here, “How many countries total? Is it listed and just display the numbers?” She doesn’t have to go through here and count on hers. It was getting to 40 or something. That is in the process and that is going to be added here. There are a couple of other things that you’re going to continue to see enhanced in our statistics display as we go forward here.

We just did a major site revision and that was painful. There’s a lot of little tweaks and you may find something here that doesn’t seem quite right. Rest assured we’re working on that and it will be updated. It’ll create for better user experience. One thing I wanted to indicate on this show and from and the date range when you click on it, it’s not popping down a calendar. We have that functionality and it’s being added here. Right now you have to add a date and month and the four-digit year format. You’re going to be able to pull it just from a calendar.

The question is, are the numbers updating from the last couple of days? Yes, it will be shifting and you’ll see an update to your numbers as it gets accurate, as all the algorithm has been folded out. If you look at a couple of days ago, your numbers are different today because it’s been corrected. It pulls every morning. This refreshes every day. These numbers should change day by day. If you looked at it a couple of days ago, not all of the algorithm was in place so the numbers may be different. We did have some issues. If you looked at the dashboard, there were some incorrect displayed numbers here on the unique plays in all episodes. Even some of the total plays, especially if your podcast started on another platform and we migrated you here. When we added your old statistics to our system. When the site rollout happened, all of that data was not being displayed properly. Rest assured we have all the data. Our database is sound and solid. It was just a display issue for your user interface.

I clear your cache, Scott, just to make sure that you aren’t still looking at a couple of days, but it should be correcting itself across everybody’s podcast within the next 24 hours. This is supposed to be real time. You see when we click more analytics, it went to less analytics. This is just a toggle. We decided to put the analytics right at the top because a lot of times that’s what people want to see first. Depending on my episodes you have, this can be a long list. For a new podcast, I have 55 episodes in the process.

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Here are your episode lists. What’s at the top there are episodes that have been submitted for production but have not been published yet. The ones that have been published have these blue buttons which are other functions and also the file link, the embed code and the detailed statistics for each episode. That’s one thing I do want to make clear. Your overall analytics are here for the whole show. For your episode level, if you want to know the detailed stats for just an episode, you have to click this button here.

I want to jump on an episode that hasn’t had a whole lot of plays. It’s very new, but you have your plays and unique plays that are two different graphs. Those are being merged into one. It hasn’t quite happened at this level yet, but that’s coming. This calendar is what you’re going to see on the dashboard analytics page where you can just choose the date range from a calendar. You don’t have to enter any texts. That was always how it was intended to be and it will be within a matter of a couple of days. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so it takes a little time to get everything completely detailed.

There are some other conventions that were changing based on customer request. For episodes you’ve submitted but haven’t published yet, the scheduled date is going to say target publication date. If you edit or change that target publication date, which you can do anytime, they will reorder in this list based on that target publication date. Everything will be chronological. The ones that are published are already chronological so you don’t have to worry about that. The status live, we’re going to change that to published just because that makes more sense. We also have the draft status and then the scheduled status is going to be for episodes that have been completed. They have all these blue buttons and the embed codes and everything. Those are going to be listed as scheduled. We wanted to make sure you understood about the dashboard. I’m not going to go into all the nitty-gritty detail of every function of this. We will create more new training videos for each different section of the site that will be in our help resources section.

With managing your ads, the display has gotten a lot better. Tracy isn’t using any ads yet on the system. If you are getting hosting to the point where you’re deploying your own promotions or ads into your episodes, this is where you would upload your ad spots. Once you name them, the title of the name is here. It’s easy to organize and then setting your ad spots within your episodes. If you have us produce your episodes, we’d do it for you, if you request us to. If you are a do-it-yourself customer, in any case, you set at as many ad spots as you want in your episode. I know this looks a little confusing. I didn’t mean to scare you that’s why there are separate training videos on that.

The last thing we want to show you here is the new Google Podcast icon that you can download and add to your podcast website pages with the link that you saw in the dashboard. Most of you that work with us have the Smart Podcast Player on your site as you’re going to see pops up here on our Feed Your Brand podcast page. The podcast app linked information is automatically going to be updated to your Smart Podcast Player. You have the option to display links on the player. We don’t use it right here because we have and above, but we’re going to be adding this.

You can add it. This is optional. That little thing, “Stay up-to-date,” it’s a new upgrade that happened on the Smart Podcast Player. It is completely compliant. It’s a way for you to get your email and everything. As long as you fill out all the information, it’s compliant with the new rules for European privacy and all of those things. You have this option of being able to say, “I’m hooking it to my Mailchimp or my Infusionsoft or whatever it is.” It gets you into the list. They updated the plugin to make sure that that was updated so it requires you to be using one of those servers and you can’t just put an email in there. It’s is a great way for you to get your subscribers.

If you have new topics for a client call, just forward them into Hello@BrandcastingYou.com or email anyone. Someone will get it. The old dashboard, it was about function before form initially and now it’s gotten mature. When the site first went live, there was a little instability in the site. I know some of you experienced it. There was a little bit of downtime, which is very unfortunate. We hate doing that. That’s why we don’t do this often at all. Now, it’s stable and we are now just continuing to tweak it, fine tune it, and keep adding more features. More analytics as they become available and greater features. Even if you have suggestions for more features and a lot of you provide that feedback anyway. Keep doing it.

 

That’s part of why I’m developing my own podcast. Part of why this is going on is because it’s helping me be able to look at it from your perspective and rather than someone who’s been in the weeds because I didn’t develop this. It’s a lot easier for me to have that outside perspective and advise us and go, “It’d be great if we had this,” or “I’m experiencing these kinds of issues. We have some issues where I go and I do a batch of episodes at once and I feel that we’re going constantly back and forth. I’ve asked for a little add of like, ‘Let’s just add a new episode here.’” Little things like that are going to keep improving the user interface because we’re using as well as developing for you. You are in it and it’s your business and if you’ve got some suggestions, we’d love to hear it.

We’ve got a question, “It’d be great to have a draft of the audio and the transcription without going into your website. Could we do that from our dashboard?” We already have audio links. When the audio is done in draft, that would be available if the post is scheduled to publish already. It would be available on your dashboard. There are links that are already where you could listen to the audio. The hard part is showing you everything about how your blog post is going to look from our dashboard. That’s not possible because it is created on your website and it is only available on your website but a lot of that data will be there. We’re working on displaying more information there for you. I don’t know if it’s going to be everything that you would like, but we’re going to do our best to try to put as much information as we can to make it easier for you.

We got some cool new mic blocks. We got some new ones. Update your art or do anything. Don’t forget to ping us because we’ve got the template for it. We’ve sent you your mic and we’ll send it with a mic block. Usually, they’re black, but we’ve changed this up a little bit so that users can replace their stuff on their own. If you’re working with us to launch a podcast, we’re going to do it for you. If any of you want that to brand your mic as you’re doing video maybe with your mic and stuff, I’d recommend that. We’ll set you up, Mitch. I have to just double check what kind of microphone you have. It should fit, but we’ll just double check that and we can work on that. Mitch, you already were a podcaster before you started with us, so we didn’t provide you. This will fix that. We’ll send you one.

We’re using that as a lead generator in our marketing for the Podetize platform for do it yourself customers. You will see some rough ads with some stuff on Facebook. There’s been also video ads going on YouTube. People that are learning at a podcast who might go watch John Lee Dumas or Pat Flynn might get served our video ad in front of that video. We can get you the draft first and we’re working to get very far ahead on shows. As long as you submit them ahead, we should be getting ahead on that so we can have an offline conversation about that. Accents are always difficult, but the reality is with time, our team gets it. Even Scott Carson. Scott Carson talks at 300 words a minute with guests, up to 400 and sometimes that’s tough as an accent.

We have the issue elsewhere. I have a lot of industry terms in my podcast. I have a lot of different experts. It’s not just one host all the time, so we have all these different speeds of talking and it gets complicated. We do understand where you’re coming from with wanting to review it because there are learning curve to any new podcast. We’re going to be out there. Anybody who’s going to Podcast Movement, let me know. I will be there. I’m going to have a little cocktail party at the hotel during that event. I want to get together. Tracy has a different event at CEO Space that I can’t go to, so our schedules didn’t align.

Lannea, my nine-year-old is coming with me to CEO Space and the two of us are going to be manning that show together. If you’re on Tampa CEO Space, I will be there. Make some time with me. If I don’t know you and if you’re new to our podcast business, I’d love to meet you in person if you’re there. Thank you so much for so many of you jamming. We appreciate your taking time. Thank you for coming and we’ll look forward to talking with you soon and have another great call. Thank you all for trusting us with your show. We appreciate your business and we appreciate you as podcasters. We want to see you all grow so if there’s anything we can do, please let us know. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.

Important Links:

• Web.com
• Network Solutions
• Finding Your Summit
• Call Recorder
• TalkHelper
• Zoom
• Zoom H6
• Audacity
• Product Launch Hazzards
• Thrive Global
• Help@BrandcastingYou.com
• BrandcastingYou.com
• Feed Your Brand
• Note Closers Show
• Stefanie LaHart
• Serving Social
• National Social Media Day
• Podetize.com
• Smart Podcast Player
• Hello@BrandcastingYou.com
• Podcast Movement
• CEO Space