It’s a mess out there in social media. The algorithms are changing every moment because of the struggle with privacy concerns, with fake stuff in your feed and bots, and all of those things. It’s changing all the time so it’s a must to be updated on things that are happening on social media. Learn some of the best practices and what things are working on social media, specifically LinkedIn, as well as on the blogging side, music, copyrights, and more.

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Welcome to BrandcastingYou client call. It’s great to have some new people there. I know we have a couple of new customers who joined us. We are excited to have you. As a customer in the help resources section of the customer dashboard, we have each of these calls that we do every month posted there. You can go back and look at some of the old subjects that we covered if you’d want because they’re evergreen topics. It’s great to have so many people. Especially on a busy weekend for many. We have a couple of interesting updates we want to bring to you so we’ll go through those. Some of them are non-podcasting things, but we want to bring you some updates to things that we’re experiencing in exploring specifically on LinkedIn at this point. We’re going to talk about that.

They’re all related to all that you’re wanting to do in marketing and growing your businesses even if it’s not very specific to a podcast or content. How you’re sharing things and how you’re sharing your podcast and all of those things. We’re always trying to bring you updates on those and things that we’re finding aren’t working and everything. It’s a mess out there in social media. The algorithms are changing every moment because they’re struggling with privacy concerns and struggling with fake stuff in your feed and bots. They’re struggling with all of those things. It’s changing all the time. We want to try to keep bringing you what’s going on in best practices and what we’re seeing is working because we have a viewpoint of all of your shows. We also have our partner who has a thousand revenue-generating websites. We see the things that are working on the blogging side and the things that are working on social. We will try to bring those to you every single month. If there’s something critically important that could damage the business or you could see a decline quickly, we will do an interim call and we’ll notify you all of that mid-month if we need to.

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. As some of you may know, we’ve had issues with Skype because when Microsoft bought Skype, they had a different viewpoint on how they wanted to use it. LinkedIn is going through some of these growing pains as well and here’s what’s going on. If you are posting your links from an outside source into LinkedIn, you’re getting lower visibility and lower feed traction. LinkedIn is encouraging within their own network posts. If you’re posting to the LinkedIn Pulse, if you have images and things that you’ve added into your profile or into your personal newsfeed, that’s okay. If you are posting outside links and sharing them in, they are getting lower and lower traction.

I’ve seen some that I was shocked at. Harvard Business Review, I specifically follow them. They are one of those top influencers that you can follow on LinkedIn. They’re an approved LinkedIn influencer. By the time I get a chance to read one of their posts or see one of their articles, which comes up on my feed 100% of the time because I always do click it and read it, it has thousands of shares and thousands of comments and links depending on the subject matter. I saw one that is so interesting. It’s about a decline in influencers and what that means and the size of influencers and having an expert panel. I wrote an article about Betsy Westhafer and how she does these expert advisory boards. It interested me because it was a dovetail to that so I clicked through it.

LinkedIn Pulse

I read the whole thing, I come back to it and it dawns on me that it doesn’t even have 100 shares at this point. It has 60 and I thought, “Maybe they just posted and I happened to catch it.” It had been posted twelve hours earlier. What that is evidenced to me is that it’s not getting boosted in, it’s not getting moved up and it’s not going out enough because it’s an outside link in. When I clicked it, I went out to Harvard Business Review to read it. It is being downgraded in the new LinkedIn formula. One of the things that we do is, we do a LinkedIn Pulse. That is where you can put up a blog post. What you do is you simply copy and paste all or part of and I don’t recommend it to all because the transcripts are way too long.

When I do my column, when I copy an article from Inc., I’ll do the whole thing. If I want them to come to the post and read Feed You Brand’s podcast, then I’ll only put a portion of it. Usually, I’ll do the opening paragraph and the enticing part. If there’s any video, you can embed a video. You can embed photos. You want to do that and you want to put your header at the top. Sometimes I’ll take the header though and I won’t use it like it says Feed Your Brand in the corner. It will just be the image and then I’ll post the header within the article, within the Pulse post and maybe I’ll do one or two paragraphs or more. If there are guests, maybe I’ll highlight the guest bio so I’ll move that up. I don’t put much more than 800 words. It’s usually 600 to 800 words total. You can see that when you’re posting.

When put in the Pulse, it’s getting pushed out to the majority of what you can do. At the very bottom though, you must put on, “If you want to see the whole post, if you want to read the whole thing, if you want to listen to the audio, click here.” It will send you back to your website and back to the post, but that’s within their post and linkbacks are allowed within there. What you do is you then push that out and share that because it’s from within LinkedIn. That’s the best way for you to get a higher circulation level on your post. It’s more work and we’re keeping and trying to test various ways to do that.

Sharing

The second way after the Pulse and doing this and sharing that, the second way you can do it is to share everything that you would normally share. Maybe you rewrite the leading paragraph at the top. Maybe you put whatever your social post might have been before but you do not put a link to the article. You do not put a link to the webpage or a link to your podcast, instead, you just insert and drop in the image as a picture. You drop in your header image as a picture and then you put your link as the very first comment. You post it and then add your link as a comment and that’s the faster way to do it. I’ll do that immediately after something goes live and then a couple of days later because it takes me a couple of days to get around to the Pulse. I’ll put the Pulse post as my second share.

I want to add one other thing to this short discussion about LinkedIn. I know it’s not directly podcast-related, but I was on the phone with one of our podcasters the day that we learned about this with LinkedIn. That’s Scott Carson. Sometimes he’s on with us. Scott does a lot of marketing on LinkedIn and I mentioned this to him. I was like, “Are you doing this?” He uses LinkedIn in a little bit different way that I just wanted to mention to everyone. I thought it was brilliant in how he does it and there’s no right or wrong way to do these things. Anybody who’s using LinkedIn one way can also do this so I thought I’d share it with you. He’s using LinkedIn in getting connections all the time. He’s not posting things on LinkedIn to get exposure in that way. What he does is downloads all of his connections’ email addresses in an Excel spreadsheet. Every week and then every month he’s getting new connections. He’s downloading their email addresses and then adding them to his email marketing campaigns. He does a lot of that.

You have to send in a very official opt-in the very first time you mail to them letting them know that that’s where you got their email and you have to give them the immediate option to opt-out. You have to have the opt-out on every email that you send, but you must give them that in hot top level saying, “You are one of my LinkedIn contacts and that’s why you are receiving this.” The other thing that I do is a significant message chat program. I use a service that is doing that in an automated way. I serve up links to them periodically that I think they will be interested. I can search and sort by my connections anyone who might be interested in podcasting or anyone who lists podcast host as one of their titles. They’ll get this message in LinkedIn with this article link. You can send links in messaging. That doesn’t change. You can send posts in messaging, you can send shares in messaging. Messaging has not changed. It’s just your newsfeed.

Expanded Podcast Descriptions

This is going to be very helpful to people that have been podcasting for a while. It’s useful for everybody, but if you’re just starting a podcast now and working with us to do that, we’re already going to be taking care of this for you. One of the things that you may not realize, especially if you started, is that at one point the description of your podcast on iTunes was limited to a relatively small number of characters. Now, they have increased that and you can have up to 4,000 characters for your podcast description. While we still are advocates that you should have a very good overall description of your podcast within those first 250 or so characters. On some devices and in some podcast players, you’re only going to see the first sentence or two and you want to make sure you’re getting your most important message across right at the top.

 

We are recommending that podcast descriptions be expanded in general to use as much of those 4,000 characters as you can. The reason is the search functions on iTunes and Google Play and Stitcher and some of the others are following iTunes lead on this and expanding the descriptions to more characters. You should expand it in order to infuse your description with as many different search terms or things that you think people would search on. When they go to iTunes looking for a podcast or they go to Google Play or they go to Stitcher, your podcast would be indexed for some of those keywords and come up in the search.

Don’t artificially hack it though. This is not the old-school SEO cramming to your website where you just put a whole bunch of words. Don’t do that because someone will see it. It’s visible if they click to read more, see more, or learn more depending on whatever it is. Concise on your 250. We then put a hard return so that you don’t end up with some weird characters. In that way, when they’re searching on mobile devices, the short version is right and it still entices people and brings them into the show. From there, we do a more expansive. That’s what we just did at the new podcasts that we launched. We expanded that in those areas.

Keywords

It’s a good place and a good time for you to do some more on yourself because there is not a clear link while you are the host. You may have a mention of that in your first paragraph and you should. You should have something like, “Product expert, Tracy Hazzard.” It might say that at the beginning, but that’s it. It’s very short. You can have a little bit more bio but don’t put, “We were in this publication.” That’s not going to help you. You want to put anything related to your skillset, your keyword. That’s where you can put in your keywords. I might be an Amazon or eCommerce seller expert. You could put those types of things there in the description of what you do and you can have that in your 4,000 words.

When you have your hostname where it’s over on the side and it says, “Tom and Tracy Hazzard,” that’s not clickable. There’s no bio that comes up with that on almost any of the search engine versions or the search directories like iTunes. You don’t have a place to have that anywhere unless they head to your website and unless it was in this description. That’s a good place to do that and add that piece of information. You can add about your website; you can put links in but not everyone will show it. I recommend that you put the word and then put HTTP: and put the whole link separately. At least they could copy that because not everyone will put dynamic links in. You do want that in there but I wouldn’t cram it with links either. I’d have just a couple.

Copyrighted Music Versus Royalty-Free Music

That was something we thought. Maybe not everybody knew so we would share it with you. This is not a public forum. This is private for people that are working with us. This is a private service announcement instead of a public announcement. What we want to talk about is copyrighted music. Many of you may understand this, but we’ve had a couple of people come to us especially the ones who have been podcasting for quite a long time. They are running of music cover laws. We thought we should touch on that. We just did an episode which will be the longer deep dive of that. Alexandra substituted for me as a host because I was unavailable. I was speaking somewhere. What I want to remind you all is that it’s not just in your intro and outro. Some of you play music in the background or during your show. You have like, “We’ll turn on the music.” I’ve heard it and that’s a problem. It’s a bigger problem if you are also producing videos. It can get you with no ads on your shows on YouTube. It can get you downgraded in Facebook’s algorithm if they detect songs.

They’ll take your video down if they reasonably believe that you don’t have the right to use the music that you’re using. This has become a bigger issue and more prominent lately. Podetize is our platform and we are a podcast host. Even Libsyn and SoundCloud and some of these others out there have actual notices and we know this because we log into a lot of those sites for some of you to post your podcasts. There have been these big red flag notices warning you. If they even determine that this is a problem, they’ll take your showdown and de-list it off of iTunes. I’m sure most of you are not in that situation, but we’ve had a couple of people who were using music for the theme song of their episode. It’s royalty-free music, but they downloaded it from a website where you have to buy it. I don’t know if they bought it or not, but they were using the watermarked version of the clip of that music.

A share is faster because I could just copy the link or hit a button. Click To Tweet

There are several royalty-free music websites out there. When you listen to the music, they’ll play somebody saying the name of the website like, “RoyaltyFreeMusic.com.” They’ll say that every five or eight seconds behind or on top of the music so that you won’t use it without paying for it. We had somebody who had used that as theme music. For a number of episodes, it was that out there on iTunes like that. It doesn’t cost that much to buy the music, $50 or $100 may be at most. There’s no reason to do that. That practice as well as playing copyrighted music in your show can get your whole show taken down.

We don’t want to see that happen so if we detect it, we will say something. We also wouldn’t allow you on our platform if you were a done-for-you customer. We’re having to monitor the do-it-yourselfers who are coming onto the Podetize platform. We will notify you of this, but sometimes I just wanted to make you aware of the interim. I also want to be clear. Royalty-free music doesn’t mean the music is free. It means that every time someone plays it, you don’t owe the artist royalty. A lot of people are very confused by that. You do have to buy a license. Depending on the site where you bought your music, you have to renew that license. Be really careful about that. We do it from a service in which we do a one-time buy.

There are several different royalty-free music websites that we look to find the music that is going to meet the client’s satisfaction. It’s very much of a taste thing. That’s why you use a bunch of different sites. We also do create original music and have a more limited supply in different genres. We have music that’s original. You do need to make sure you’re buying the right kind of license. Some of these sites have different kinds of licenses than others. If you’re confused about that, reach out to us and we’ll help you with it. It’s not that tricky. We have a question, “We have music, the intros, and outros. We purchased a license of royalty-free music for a music site. Do we need to do anything differently?” The answer is no, as long as you’re sure that you bought the right kind of license. If you bought any license, chances are you’re going to be just fine.

Digital Online License

There’s a digital online license, which is you playing it over a website. Podcasts are included in that. One of the big distinctions, you want to make sure that you haven’t bought a license for single one-time use. Make you buy it for your entire show. Depending on the site you bought it from, they have distinctions there. It’s still between $50 and $100 at most for the license. It’s not that expensive, but you do want to make sure you bought the right one. As long as you bought one, you will have downloaded the music that doesn’t have this watermark. It doesn’t have somebody saying anything over the music. It’s just the music. If you’ve downloaded that, you’ve paid for it, and you’re just fine. I was shocked that it happened with two different people. They’ve been using actual music you would hear on the radio. You can’t do that.

It happened to me. I was being interviewed and someone plays some music and then does his intro. I was like,” Are you allowed to do that? Do you have the right to that music? You’re going to get your show shut down.” He had not realized it. It happens all the time. It surprised me that some of you use the one with the watermark in it. That was just silly because it was not very expensive. If you’re concerned or if there’s an issue, we check all of this when you come on because when we set up a show, we buy the music for you and you’ve approved that. If you’re coming to us and transitioning to us and you’re concerned, just send us either the receipt or the links to where you bought it from. We can check out the license terms for you and just double-check all of that for you. If you’re concerned, we’re happy to take that on and have our tech team check that out for you.

 

Upcoming Webinars

One of the things I wanted to mention coming up in April 2019. We do this client webinar once a month and usually, it’s the last weekday of the last Friday of the month. In April, we have two additional webinars that I want to mention to you. If you’ve received the email for this webinar, you’re going to receive the email about these. We have another company that we’ve started to collaborate with. They have services that we don’t offer in-house and we’re also offering our services to them and to their customers. We’re cross-promoting and doing some webinars. One of the webinars is on April 10th, 2019, 1:00 PM Pacific or 4:00 PM Eastern time is going to be about podcasting your way to a book.

Basically, taking a set of episodes and planning it out. Ideally, you’ll have a time where you can do it after the fact. The company’s name is Market Domination. They offer this program where you can take your podcast episodes. You can edit the content in a different way to put out a book in a very fast way. I thought that might be of interest to some of you. On April 24th, 2019 at noon Pacific, 3:00 PM Eastern, they’re going to be talking about their service to help get your guests. To help place guests if you have different kinds of guests. Some of you have an incredible network and have no problem getting guests. Others of you may want some help getting guests or maybe you just don’t have the time to do it yourself. Maybe you don’t have a VA who can help you with that either or whatever the case may be. You might be interested in at least tuning into each of these webinars whether you think you’re interested or not to learn a bit more about what they’re doing and what they’re offering. Just something to think about.

Speaking Events And Guest Interviews

I had a call with one of our new clients as well. He had asked me how I get speaking events. It isn’t embedded in one of the episodes that we did on relevant guests on the podcast on Feed Your Brand, but this is how I do it. I use my guesting of podcasts, my choice of what guest to have on my podcast, and/or have interviewed for my articles, for my column with Inc. Magazine. I’m using it both ways. I planned that out. I’m selecting guests based on the fact that I think they have a very relevant audience that I would like to speak to. They may be an event organizer or involved with organizing an event or influential with organizing an event. I plan specifically to invite them to the show.

When I invite them on, I build a rapport with them. I build a relationship with them by the questions that I asked and the comments that we make especially in our intro and outro. You know that we do a pre and then we do our interview and then we do a post and that discussion between the two of us. When we do those in those places or when I do it alone, I’m also further establishing my expertise. When they go back and listen to that episode, they will hear my framework of why I invited them on the show and how I’m bringing value to our audience. We put that in there and they appreciate that.

From that, I’m establishing my expertise at a level at which they should invite me to speak. I don’t ask them at that moment, but it happens by the end of the call. We’ll turn the recording off and they’ll go, “Tell me again what you do, and do you speak in other places? Would you be interested in speaking at our event?” This is exactly how I got the speaking engagement for the event that I just did in Las Vegas. There were 1,400 people who came to the event and 1,000 people showed up to my speech. It happened a whole year earlier. I had found out about a show that had a relevant audience interest to me, but it was just about to happen.

I invited the organizer to be interviewed by me. I wrote an article that mentioned this as a place to go for Amazon sellers and eCommerce sellers and he appreciated that. At the end of the interview, I hadn’t even written the article yet. He goes, “You should be one of our speakers. Could I call you after the event and book you for next year?” That was fabulous and that is exactly how it happened. I was booked a year in advance for that particular event. If they don’t offer that up or they haven’t done that, then this is what I do. They get their Ego Bait™. They get their email that says, “Here are the links. The episode went live or the article went live.” A couple of days after that, I follow up and say, “I hope you got that email from my team. I hope you had a chance to read the article or listen to the podcast. I just personally wanted you to know that when we were doing the interview, you had mentioned that this was one of your challenges. I just wanted you to be aware that there’s a white paper, there’s an article, there’s a video on solving that problem because I’ve dealt with that before with some of my clients so I wanted to make you aware of that.”

Articles within LinkedIn is synonymous with the Pulse. Click To Tweet

It’s something brilliant that you’ve done, you’ve written, you’ve spoken about, or whatever that might be and you share that with them at that moment. That’s how I do it simply. At that time, if they haven’t listened to the podcast or haven’t read the article, they will do it. They’ll click the links there and all of those things. What they’ll also do then at that moment is, “Thank you for putting out a great episode, putting out a great article.” They’ll follow up and say, “What can I do for you?” That’s your opening to say, “I’m looking for speaking events that would get me in front of this audience or do that for me.”

Q&A

I just wanted to make that clear that there are sometimes that we use guests to increase our backlinks and our credibility and our influence. Sometimes we are using them to build our business and increase our sales and increase our access to our targeted audience. That’s one of the great ways to be using your guest interviews. If you have that project, that’s the perfect project to send over to a company to help you achieve and say, “I want someone who has events, who does this, who does that who might have access to these types of people.” Be very specific when you use them rather than just say, “Get me, big high-profile guests. That doesn’t always serve you well. What specifically about LinkedIn do you want to go over? Is it the Pulse or the whole thing?

I just wanted to make sure that I had it correct. The two recommendations you’re making for us, if we’re putting our podcast up is, either post it in the LinkedIn Pulse. Within that, we can put most of the good portion of the podcast but not the whole transcript. We would just do read more and there’s where we could put a link to the actual podcast. Is that correct?

The blog post on your sites. I have been unsuccessful at putting any kind of audio track player into the Pulse. I keep checking it out and trying again but I’ve been unable to post an audio file. They used to have the ability to do it and they took it away, but you can post videos. Adam’s videos are there. You could post within the post. You can insert the YouTube video. Remember that a video view is a video view no matter where they watch it from. You can do that as well. I would put a word post at the beginning before you insert a video because otherwise, you’ll have a header. It’s automatic. You can’t change that. You’d have a header, then you’d have a paragraph or two, and then the video. Put the video at the end. That’s something else that you can do as well.

The other alternative you offered was to copy some of the posts and then drop the header image.

 

If you had clicked the share button, some amount of copy is going to show up. What post would you have written if you would clicked share? What would you have written there that might be personal or that might be why you’re sharing it? It’s not just like, “Find our podcast. Listen to our podcast.” It’s usually common about why it’s relevant. Whatever that normal post that you would have made, that’s what you just put a sentence or two. The important distinction here that we didn’t realize is that if you’re just going to put it out as a LinkedIn post in a normal sentence in your feed, your profile, and not in the Pulse, it’s not going to get much exposure at all. It’s not going to get put up.

I could do a demo. I might go to Feed Your Brand. I’m just going to pick the link. This is normally how I would share it. Whatever it is, you would share it and you would go, “Here’s my page.” This box will pop up with the preview of whatever that is. Normally you delete that and then you type, “Please listen to my podcast.” When you would hit a post, someone would click that and they go straight to the article or straight to the most out of LinkedIn. That’s what they want to prevent. Now, I would put, “Listen to my podcast.” I might take an image. I would say, “Listen to my podcast.” While I would put maybe something not much nicer like, “If you’re looking for the hottest new color on the market now, it’s the silver color.” I might write that there. After I post it, I would go down into the comments. From that place, I would put the link to the article. That’s the best way to do it.

Would you recommend doing both on the Pulse and in the post?

Yes, I do both. I’ve always done that. I’ve always shared. A share is faster because I could have just copied the link or just hit a button. I can share this post on my site because I have a LinkedIn share button. Here you’ve got all of this and you can click share LinkedIn and now all of a sudden you’re your article. You can share an update. You can post it to your groups. Do you mean that in your normal feed you can share a Pulse post? You can share a Pulse post of your own stuff. You can also share other people’s stuff. That’s important too, but that’s what they’re recommending that you do. You share from within here and that’s what LinkedIn wants you to do because they want you to close your network.

Don't post on holidays. It's intrusive to push the business on that day. Click To Tweet

I’m a big Pulse writer. I post up every single article here. This is your articles and activities. It says, “Articles post, all activity,” up here at the top. All activity, this is every time I comment on somebody, every time this is that Harvard Business Review article. You’ll see how many followers they have on that. This is my sharing of an article that I read. They had 140,021 likes and 22 comments. I can tell you that other Harvard Business Review articles have ten times that easily. They’re being downgraded and they’re a partner. Look at the millions of followers. Harvard Business Review should have a much better reach. From there, I can go to posts, which is me making a post. That is just what we were just doing. I wrote this thing. I was thinking of your advisory boards when I shared the article to my newsfeed. I shared it within LinkedIn, but they didn’t post it from within LinkedIn.

Articles within LinkedIn are synonymous with the Pulse. Over here on the left, you’ll see I have managed your followers and your address. You always go to your address. You can put new ones in, but you cannot schedule posts. These are my letters. They are scheduled here to go out at some point. I have my assistant do them when there’s time because I post six articles a month whenever a new one comes out. They’re just sitting here in the queue and we go out two to three times a week. These will get launched. She did all these earlier in the month. This March 9th, 2019 was the date she happened to post all of the ones that will air within this month or within this within four weeks from whenever she did it. From there, now I can write a new one. There’s an image at the top headline. It’s just like blogging.

We’ve never posted an article about our podcasts. What kind of drumbeat would you recommend we do? I don’t want to take all 50 and stick them out there at one time. What do you think is a good number and timeframe over which we can get them out there? Would you just go moving forward?

 

There are lots of recommended post amounts for LinkedIn and I find that people are not as frequently on LinkedIn as they are on Facebook. I find that posting more than once a day is too much. I would recommend no more than once a day for sure. Sundays are good data posts as long as it’s not a holiday. I personally don’t post on holidays. It’s intrusive to push the business on that day. It’s not that people won’t catch up in their feed because they’re bored with their family, but I don’t think you should actively post on that day.

I always make sure I have one on Friday because people will catch up over the weekend as well. Sundays and Fridays are the days that I do and I take Saturdays off and Mondays. I don’t post on Mondays personally because I find that’s the day people are just inundated by their email. The readership is low. If you want to do that to catch up, you do it five days a week but at unpracticed on the hall, because I like to meter it out. I do it three times a week because I post 3D printing. I post on a product, which is my Inc. articles and I post something related to podcasting. I post three a week because they each have their own purpose.

Thank you very much.

You’re welcome. Sometimes these calls go a little longer or sometimes they go a little shorter. It just depends not only on how many questions we have but how much of a deep dive we’re taking into a specific topic. Now, was a little different than we’ve done in the past because we had three or four different things that we thought we should share with you. It changes month to month. As always, you have access to Alexandra and she’s happy to answer questions. She’s also happy to take topics for the next call if you have something that you would want us to mentor you in and deep dive. It doesn’t have to be about podcasting, it can be like how you handle the sharing of things, how you handle social media, and the organization of things. If we’re not an expert in it, we’ll bring someone in to talk to you. We’re happy to do that. We have lots of people who are on our platform who are experts in their own areas. Thanks again. Take care.

Important Links:

• Betsy Westhafer – Inc. article
• Scott Carson
• Market Domination