262 Creating A Private Podcast Feed for your Clients

Listen. Podcasts are so hot. Like so, so hot. And they remain a really unique way to build a connection with your audience in like a long form format. Everything else is getting crunched down. Social media, YouTube, like videos, everything's getting shorter, but somehow podcasting is arguably getting longer. And a really interesting thing I'm seeing more of in the wild is private podcast feeds. This is like something you can't just find in a podcast player and is even tied to specific individuals or groups that individuals. And there's some really interesting ways we could use this in the context of an accounting firm that I want to explore today. Come on in. Let's talk about a version of podcasting that's a little more private, if you know what I mean. Not like, not like in a weird. Not in a weird way. It's not like that. What the hey is a private podcast feed? Okay. One of the leading tools that does this is called hello Audio. I'll just run you through what hello Audio does real quick. Your audience is on demand. Go. We make sure your content is too. It's got a little carousel, you know, like the landing pages where the one bit of text keeps changing over and over again. It says, we turn your X into private podcasts. Audiences love says, courses, content membership, summit, event, coaching. So basically turn anything and everything into a podcast feed. I can say, personally, I consume more media via podcast than anything else, especially if you add in audiobooks. And I think people are generally more hungry for content from people that they have a relationship with, like from their advisor. If you make that available, I think they will be all over it because it's so contextual to them. But most of the people from whom we consume content these days, they are like, you know, influencer types or micro influencers. Like, if what I do is micro and very, very specific, it's going to get way more specific over time. Because still for most of us, my attorney doesn't have a podcast. Like the. The folks that you actually interact with each day, like they don't have a way to get you information via these channels. And I think that stuff will just continue to trickle down in more contextual ways and we'll go from just consuming like the big celebrities of the world to things more specific. I mean, I'm a great example of that, right? The cloud accounting podcast guys. It wasn't that long ago where there weren't podcasts that talked shop about this sort of stuff. That's an example of it getting more specific. And I actually think it's just going to continue to get more specific from there down to your advisors and your coaches and the people that you work with. When I'm looking at a tool to understand what it does, I often jump to the pricing page, not to see the price, but to see the comparison of, like, the features at different tiers. So this tool, hello audio, starts at 14 bucks a month. With that, you get one public podcast feed and one private feed. And so it clarifies, private feeds are not searchable in directories like Spotify or Apple Payments. They're unlisted. Only those who you've given access to can listen to the content in their podcast app. So somebody's gonna listen to it. It will be in their podcast app like anybody else, but it is a link that is specific to them. Meaning at any point, you could take away that person's specific link and you can control which episodes and what content gets pushed to whom, either on the individual level or, like, across groups of people. At this entry tier, you have unlimited episodes for an unlimited number of listeners. It'll also do automatic video to audio conversion. So if you have video versions of this content, it'll turn it into audio only. They also give you a signup page for listeners. You can release things according to, like, by date, like, schedule it for a future date. They say this is good for products that are hosted as part of a live experience, like Q and A's, summits, events. If you don't want it available until a certain future date, they'll also do, like, instant feeds as well. They'll do remastering of the audio so they improve the quality of it. They give you an embedded player you could put on a website, and they give you listener scores so you can see who your most engaged listeners are. That's actually really useful. We talked about that around email marketing, how you can build things specific to the folks that are most engaged with your content. Cause they may be the most likely one to, you know, buy something else from you or upgrade or something like that. Now, if you're listening to this, I suspect you are aware of public podcasts. But why go private? Like, why not make everything public? It could make sense to send something that you're working on just to your clients. Right? We're actually gonna do an episode next week around what to paywall and what to not paywall. Cause I think these days people still put too much stuff behind a paywall and the price they pay for it is in reach. So, for example, I could put half of the videos or the podcasts that I ever make behind a paywall. Or I could do what other other groups do where it's like, maybe I just put the most recent five podcasts out for free and then you have to pay for access to everything else. The reason why I never do that with very like extremely limited exception is every single thing that I make has an to find a new person. And we are all, in this day and age, distribution limited. It's all about like, how do I find the next person that I could solve a meaningful pain for and that distribution compounds. As you build an audience, it's easier to get in front of more people. And so everything that you could otherwise give away that you instead put behind a paywall is a missed opportunity to find potentially a new person. And the calculation that people get stuck on is how do I ever get paid? Like, if all I ever do is give away everything, how do I ever get paid? I can tell you, as someone who gives away like every all of my content, there's a hundred other ways that I can get paid. And when you are that visible, you have the amazing privilege and opportunity to hand select. Well, now I can go do this other opportunity and that opportunity and that opportunity. And they have nothing to do with content, and they have nothing to do with discovery and how people find me. They're fun things to do that people will pay me well to do. And it's the difference between the content being what makes the money versus that content, invisibility, creating opportunities that are cool businesses and things that you wouldn't otherwise imagine doing. We're gonna talk about that more next week. But this is for scenarios where it probably doesn't make sense to put that stuff out in the wild. So that could be just to your client base. It could be to specific client groups, like my short term rental clients, like my beekeeping clients. If you're doing something like running a mastermind group, group coaching, that sort of thing. This episode is brought to you in part by Flow. You know, a really wild way that some people are using Live Flow. So Live Flow connects all of your QuickBooks data to excel or Google Sheets. There's just a little button in Excel or in Google Sheets and you get a dropdown of every company you have access to in QBO and all the reports. And you can pull that stuff into Excel one time, make it, keep updating all that really wild way people are using. This is for month end closes for their clients. So you have basically this, this spreadsheet or set of sheets in like a workbook. That is a template you've created and all you gotta do is connect it to a company and it'll pull all the different sheets in. You need to do the review from balance sheet P and L GL reports, all that in a templatized way that you can do the exact same way for every single client. And it creates this really like rich standardized work paper instead of having to dump out like a whole bunch of PDF reports or something to put together those work paper. That was how we did it. We had like a standardized file structure and you would run various different PDF reports for all these things and then annotate them. But that was all a manual process rather than creating like a big old Google sheet or Excel workbook that has all of the reports that you want and it's a single template. So you can do it the exact same way for all of your month end closes for all of your clients and it pulls that stuff instantly. Pretty darn cool. We normally talk about the client facing ways to use LifeLow, but I know some pretty smart firm runners that are using it just for like closing clients books 2 turns out when you can liberate your data from QuickBooks and get it into a spreadsheet, there's some handy things you can do with it. That's Lifelo. Learn more about that one. Check out the link in the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant Staffing. You ever had problem finding staff? No. Okay, keep going, skip ahead, move along if you have had any issues finding staff. Cloud Account staffing. It's a great way to find talented folks in the Philippines to join your team. I've talked about it many a time. I was doing this four or five years ago. I came into it with all the spooky scaries you would expect hiring offshore folks for the same time for the same time for the first time. Is there a stroke in here? I can't hass talk Today we started pulling Philippines hires into our team and it completely changed how we approach hiring. Cloud Accountant Staffing makes that super easy for you to find talented folks. In fact, I got a resume right here along with a video intro of a real person. Cloud Accountant Staffing's recruiters pulled for a firm. This person got their bachelor's in accounting in 2018, went straight into audit. Good for them for getting out of that. Spent the last four years doing accounting. Month end close stuff. Full cycle for western Companies selected among 30 staff for exceptional performance. Wow. ARAP management payroll month end close financial statement prep 1099. Bless their heart. Finding resumes like this in states is like pulling teeth. And as soon as you find one, it is hungry hippos for every single person that can get their hands on them. Like I said, we got away from this by hired folks. In the Philippines. We still needed people onshore, but we went from exclusively hiring onshore to like one to one onshore and offshore. You're going to have a whole bunch of embarrassing questions. It will feel unattainable, confusing. That's totally normal. You do it just by getting started and learning. Learn more about cloud accountant staffing. Check out the link in the show notes 1. I guess sort of thing to look out for here. Podcasts aren't usually framed as like required listening. So if, if you do, you know, coaching with folks and there's things that you really need them to work through, I would say be mindful of the fact that like podcasts still kind of feel like content even though they are private. They're still served up in an app in your podcast player where people go to learn. Not really. Like, I don't know, I don't think of a podcast as like a to do. So maybe be, be mindful of use cases where it's something that's mandatory that somebody has to go through. Now I got this idea like what, what kind of brought it back to me is I'm in this community as it's an online community for, for full time creators like myself and they run a bunch of private community events, like a lot, like more than I could possibly get to live myself. And most of them are recorded and they've made available a private podcast feed for the audio versions of all of the sessions that are recorded. And it's made it way easier for me to keep up with stuff that's going on because most of those sessions you don't need video for every now and then like you will. And so that wouldn't make sense for a podcast format, but it's happening inside of a private space. The creator behind this community has their own podcast. They have a public podcast where they put a bunch of stuff out, but all the things happening within this private space then are put out on the podcast feed. And I only have access to that podcast feed because I'm a paying member of the community. And as soon as I am no longer a member of the community, you can either kill that person's podcast access altogether or just stop them from getting new episodes, which is actually really interesting. They could actually retain everything that came out, like while they were paying for it. So two different ways that you can do that. So rundown of ways that you could use this. Any content that you're already making anywhere, honestly, you could also send through a podcast feed. Now, whether this should be private or public is kind of a whole different consideration. But social media posts, your newsletter, Q&As, weekly office hours, these are all things that you could also record on a podcast and even, like, kind of expand on those thoughts a bit, go a little deeper on them. All consumers have their own preferred channels. And when we're creating content, sometimes we can assume that if we put something out, everybody will see it and everyone that we want to reach will be on, you know, this channel. Right. If I'm going to do an email newsletter, I'm kind of coming into that with the assumption that everybody that I want to reach reads email newsletters when they just don't. Right. So there's an element of finding people where they're at. Now, this can also be a trap. The most common example of this is somebody just getting started out in content and trying to post all their things across seven different channels. Reality is, there's enough people on any given channel to, like, build a killer business around just a single platform, podcasting included. But if I put a bunch of effort into my. My weekly newsletter or something like that, and it's like another 10 or 15 minutes to do an audio version of that, you going to catch a whole other group of people. Especially if it is. And where I think it's compelling is when it is like the sawdust of some other, you know, work that you're doing. So if you run office hours and people can come and ask you questions and that sort of thing, maybe your client, maybe only your clients are allowed to come and ask questions. You've already got the recording of that. That's a super easy thing to put out on a private podcast feed that's probably going to reach at least two times as many people by putting it out that way. And again, the value here is people are building trust and building a relationship with you as they consume this in a very similar way to how they do when they're talking with you live. It's not a replacement for talking with you live, but it's a whole lot better than not hearing from you at all. And the more somebody consumes, like, the more of a relationship they build with you, and to be able to do that at scale is just a really, really powerful hack. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Team up and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, Gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up and source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles. Team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants Thought experiment what if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky ol inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever going to get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team Up. This week's episode is sponsored in part by Makers Hub. Maker's Hub is one of the coolest examples I've seen so far of awesome new AI tech like making your life way easier. Which we're all ready for, right? Stop telling me about AI stuff. Tell me how it can save me a pile of time. So they're a buildpay platform that is using AI vision models to take ocr like so much further than traditional OCR ever took us. It feels like for about the last decade we've been being told fully automated bill extraction. So it's removing human manual entry. Haven't people been saying that like forever? MakersHub set out literally to be like could we actually do this now with vision models? Now I did a demo day video on the main channel a week or two ago demoing like some crazy complex use cases super hairy invoices that Makers Hub just gobbled up and spit out without breaking a sweat. Now they are exceptionally good at big ugly invoices. So like I used to work with some Retail flooring stores where you have these super hairy detailed invoices and you had to do the receiving just right to make sure you had the right quantities of all the items going into inventory. Maker's Hub can process this stuff to like every little like granular level of detail that you need, not just the invoice amount, like all of the detail in that video. Actually we chucked 68 pages of like 64 Home Depot invoices, all with like multiple line item details. All these various different inventory items. It processed that thing in like less than 30 seconds. It is the sort of thing that my clients would have. Like people just sat in a chair doing all day long and right now like we could come in and be like, we're going to take that off your hands. We'll actually do the receiving part now. I just helped him with the bill payment part. We never got into the ugly receiving stuff. These days I would grab a tool like Makers Hub, come in and offer that service and honestly, like automate, 85% of it. Super cool. You want to learn more about Microsoft, check out the link in the Show Notes or head over to my YouTube main channel or just search Jason Stats Microsoft. Super cool. One of the best new AI things that I've seen. Now, other things to be thinking about contextually. What are all the different ways that I could route this by client type? Maybe you're going deep on specific subject matter that's only relevant to part of your client base. Similar to how you may use like tagging on email newsletters to. I'm only going to send this one to my beekeeping clients. These private podcast feeds basically let you do the same thing. You could also use this for more personal content like Meet the Team. How cool would that be? What if every time you onboarded a client, they got a link to sign up for your private podcast feed and in there were introductions to all the people that they were going to talk with. A 30, 40 minute conversation with that person who's going to be your account manager. Wouldn't that be just a really interesting way for them to get to know the folks they're going to be in contact with? That's a really interesting thing in the context of onboarding a new client. Some companies will use this for internal team communications. They'll have like internal podcasts. Others will use it like a drip campaign where they get a new one, you know, every week based on when they signed up. That's really interesting. It's something you could even paywall if that made sense. Educators are distributing lectures this way, where even if the students are there live, they will, they will distribute an audio recording of it this way. Man. I had one college professor, only one who would record his lectures, who record a screen share of what he was doing on his computer and then what he was saying via the mic. And it was so appreciated to be able to go back to a lesson from four weeks ago and dig into that one specific thing that he explained in those recordings was so, so helpful. I have to think there's a version of this that is going to be useful for your clients. One other thing I've seen in the wild was a, was a feed tied to an event. And in that sense it made sense to limit the scope just to people who are signing up for the conference. One other consideration I'd add here, that was actually a big consideration of me starting this podcast. It's great training data for AI. It is a documentation of your expertise. And when your expertise is documented, there's so many different ways that you can use that, from a chat assistant that your team can interact with to potentially even a chat assistant that your clients could interact with down the road. You know, if you're working with a marketing agency, their ability to create content for you, that sounds like you, that, that gives advice the same way that you do is massively supported by having access to some sort of assistant, your own expertise. The problem for most of us is we have this expertise. Like I say, you have everything that you need in your head to write a book. It's just not in the right format. And podcasting and these more long form conversations are a great way to flesh out that expertise that is in your head. That for many of us is much easier than sitting down and building the practice of writing. It's a foreign thing that we don't do much like technical writing, but you know, we do do all day, every day is we sit here and we advise our clients, we get on calls, we get on zooms, we answer their questions over email, like through the lens of their specific client situation. So to be able to talk about it for many of us is much easier than to have to sit down and like write this memo or a blog post or something like that. And then, and then all the other factors creep in, like how will this work for SEO? And will this get engagement on. On social media? And they all become blockers to you. Just documenting yourself as opposed to talking, which is a, which to me is still the easiest way for me to document myself. It isn't as structured. It isn't as concise as it could otherwise be. But that's where AI is really, really helpful to answer specific questions with big bodies of context. But for most of us, the blocker is that context just it doesn't exist yet. Pretty interesting. I actually, I love the idea of this. I've had several things in the past where a private podcast feed actually would have made a ton of sense and like heightened an event or heightened, you know, the quality of what that group went through by having that added content or even access to content that we all went through together, like after the fact in audio form. You got any ideas there? I'd love to hear them drop them in the comments of how that could be useful. Podcasting obviously is just massive these days and this is kind of a logical extension of that, like a more contextual version of podcasting. That's all I got today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'll catch you in the next one.