Publish, Pair, Promote: The Strategic Framework for Podcast Success

We do three things with the podcast. We publish the media, we pair it with titles and descriptions, show notes, if you will, and then we promote the show. I want to talk about the primary purpose for each of these and then I want to talk about two strategic byproducts of each of these and then a long term goal for each of these. I'm going to go across, we're going to go down, we're going to have a good time. When you publish a podcast, the reason you publish a podcast or the reason you should publish a podcast is to meet a need for your audience. Interesting people. Talking to other interesting people about interesting things is not a need unless the need is to cure boredom. And by the way, there are people curing boredom a lot better than you will. You've got to meet a need. Your client is, your audience is looking for X. That's what the show is about. The title and the show notes for the show are really not for the audience who is looking at it because you're already meeting their need. They're already subscribed, they're already getting a new episode. The purpose of the title and the purpose of the notes is actually discoverability. People need to know what the episode is about. They need to know if they want to click, play, you know, they want to know what's next. Now you promote the episode to rise above the noise. We know there are millions of podcast episodes now. Honestly, podcast episodes have a better chance of being found than YouTube videos or that kind of thing just because of the sheer numbers. And that's a whole nother episode. But you publish, you promote what it is that you're publishing to rise above the noise. Yeah, they might get the ding on Monday that the new episode's out, but if they it a couple of times in social media, that will remind them that it's out. And you got a better chance of it going by product one, when you publish a bunch of episodes. If you publish an episode every week for a year, you have 52 pieces. If you do this for five years, you've got 250. You know, if you do this for 10, you've got over 500. We've got clients with that. One of the strategic byproducts of a regular publishing schedule is a body of work. It's not just that you talked about this on this day, but you have this whole library about this content that is worth subscribing to, which is worth following, which is worth maybe giving an email address or something at some point. The reason you Pair it with. The byproduct is also the body of work because audio by itself, yeah, AI is getting smarter, transcripts are happening. But the fact of the matter is you need to have a title, you need to have a description. And again, that times 500 episodes across all the platforms is huge. Now, by product one in promotion, my clients always enjoy this and it's always funny because you actually, with podcasting, have a reason to be social. You don't have to talk about your lunch, you don't have to talk about the crazy weather. You simply are able now to talk about your show. And maybe Monday I'm on Spotify, Tuesday I'm on Apple, Wednesday I'm on YouTube. That type of thing by product one for promotion is reason for social media. Now let's talk about by product two across all these, because these are really not necessarily in order of importance. They're just kind of the way I put them in this chart. When you publish, the second byproduct is really social proof. You publish once a week, every week for multiple years, even if your audience never listens to the show. And I know as a person who works hard on the show, this is the type of thing that's hard to take sometimes. But the social proof of that body of work, of published content, sets you as the established expert on what it is that you're trying to meet the need for. Think about it. If you're trying to figure out how to do underwater basket weaving and there's a podcast with three episodes, and there's a podcast with 500 episodes, you're going to go to the one with 500 episodes. So sometimes, no, not sometimes. When you publish, one of the strategic byproducts is social proof. One of the byproducts of pairing with title and description is simply audience support. You can say things like, go to the show notes for this episode and get a graphic for what it is that we're doing today. I really should do that on this episode. But I'm getting this out too quickly, actually, to test something else. But you'll hear about that soon enough. Byproduct two is audience support. You can say, hey, I know that URL was long, or that person's name was hard or whatnot. We'll put in the show notes, we'll support you. But it is your second byproduct. You're not doing it for that. You're doing it for discoverability. You're getting the byproduct of the body of work and you are getting audience Support as the secondary byproduct. Now, on the promotion side of things, byproduct number two is simply social proof. Again, you promote every week, multiple times a week, every year about your podcast. Now it's like, hey, we just released episode 500, we released episode 600, episode 1000. We're seeing in some cases that's that social proof is huge. Publish pair, promote. Now, the long term goal, we don't podcast and you hear me joke about it, but we're not trying to do interesting people, you know, talk about interesting things. The long term goal of your podcast is to build an audience that you meet needs for that audience. Might not listen to every single episode, it might not even be in the audience's best interest to listen to every single episode, but you're building that audience. The long term goal of the pair is not discoverability is not the body of work, that's a subset of the discoverability. It's not the audience support, it's the pathway. Building 500 episodes with 500 really strategic titles, with 500 really strategic show note batches across all the podcast directories. Now things start to get really interesting and then the long term goal of promotion is what we call Izyat, we've been calling that for years. Go ahead and look it up on YouTube if you want. Izjot, the Iziot effect I've seen out there because you have hundreds of episodes across all of the platforms, with all of the show notes, with everything that's happening and all of the social Man, I've seen him here, I've seen him here, I've seen her here, I've seen her here, I've heard about him here, I've talked about the two of them here. Now you are the presence that you need to rise above that noise. So when you publish your show, know the purpose, know the byproducts, know the long term goal. When you pair it with your titles and description, don't do it for one specific reason. Know the purpose, know the byproducts, know the long term goal. And when you promote your show, know the purpose, know the byproducts and know the long term goal. You do that and you will see some crazy results.