The Podcast Publish - Team Clarity Matrix Part 4 of 6

They were publishing their podcast just like a machine, and then seven years later, they realized they were doing it wrong. This is Paul and this is the Team Clarity Matrix, a six part series on the six elements that make up a podcast team. We have looked at three. We are into part four, and today is the publish. All of these videos will be made available atteambeforetech.com, but let's get to it. We'll also put them on the podcast and we'll put them at a number of other places, but if you want to see them all together. Team before tech. Com. Yeah, as I said it, they'd published for seven years and then they found out they were doing it all wrong. They found out they were making some really big mistakes. The role of publish is not just filling out forms and clicking the upload button. The role of publish is understanding well the role of publishing in the grand scheme of podcasting. The person who handles publishing in your organization, in your team, the person who wears the publishing hat, needs to have answers to these seven questions. You have the answers to these seven questions and you are ready to go and you are ready to publish for both now and the future, which is really important in podcasting. The first question, the first thing they need to know is the difference between the published time and the discoverability realities. What does this mean? Well, in short, you can make a podcast available in a matter of seconds. Some platforms will sit you like that, others will take a few minutes to get it going. But your podcast is available to your subscribers pretty much the second it is released. But unfortunately, what happens is it takes the larger organizations like Apple, like Spotify, like Stitcher, it takes them a little while longer to find that you've released a new episode. So just because your podcast might be published Wednesday at 9pm doesn't mean somebody on Apple, itunes or Apple podcasts is going to know that it's available by seeing it in the directory. Apple might not catch it until later. So you have to understand the difference between the publishing time and the discoverability realities. Ask that question first. Number two, Is your publisher aware of the rules today and the rules that are coming in the future? There are multiple versions of publishing your podcast on Google right now. At the time of this recording. At the time of this recording, Apple is about to change the whole tagging system for categories inside of podcasting. Are you doing the right things now? If Apple changes something again, are you ready? Do you know what's coming? Do you know what's existing? And then finally, you want to think about when new podcast hosts, and by hosts I mean platforms where by which to get podcasts, directories, that kind of thing. When the new podcasts pop up, are you ready to get in there? Are you using the destination modality made famous by the guys at Libsyn, or are you doing a generic feed available for everybody else? You have to know what's happening today, you have to know what's happening in the future for publishing. Number three, what is their plan for SEO now? Number four is the plan for search. And these are going to be different. SEO is the optimization. SEO is the 8020 of all this. Do they have a plan for SEO being found when somebody's searching for very specific terms? But is that plan the type of thing that is going to get you kicked out? Some very big names thought they had a plan for SEO. People with millions of downloads thought they had a plan for SEO. They were doing the thing, the publisher was doing what they thought was best and Apple took them away like that. Now they were able to come back in a couple of days. It was not a tremendous death story, if you will, but the fact of the matter was it was embarrassing and it took some time to fix. And well, are you. Do you have a plan for SEO that is within what Apple allows? Do you have a plan for SEO that is within what Google allows? Stitcher, Spotify, whatever player is on board, don't get kicked out. Number four different what is the plan for search? That's the long term plan. Show notes, the world of show notes and podcasting. How often they're read, which audiences read them, that's a whole big question. But if somebody is searching for the topic that you are chatting about in your podcast, can they find you? What is the publishing strategy there? Yes. Obvious if the exact title they're looking for is in the title of the episode, but that doesn't always happen. People have different words, different terms they search for. What is the plan for SEO? That 8020 stuff. And what is the plan for search? The long term stuff? Question three and question four, question five is something that not everybody thinks about. But the person I chatted about the beginning of this, this was one of the very reasons why we had to change everything was the plan for insertion. There might be a time where you decide that your podcast now gets ads inserted or content inserted or things changed dynamically at the server level. Are you set up so that you can do insertion when you're ready to do insertion now? Again, it took seven years to realize this particular client that I'm Thinking of that this was necessary. So you might be thinking of it right now. Oh, that'll never happen in the future, but it might. Do you have a plan? Are you publishing for insertion? It's really. It's an issue of file size and it's issue of compression. Do you have the types of files that make the most sense for it? Are bandwidth kills going to bandwidth bills going to kill you? What do you do there? Normally this issue many times would be shared with the editor. Sometimes the editor edits it and the publisher just publishes whatever was given to them. Sometimes the publisher does the file size issues and the compression issues. Different organizations do it differently. So are they working with the editor to make sure all is right? And again, this is something you might be doing later. It could take six, seven years to realize this is what you've got. But are you planning for insertion in your publishing process? Are you on a platform that could move to insertion or once that day happens, do you have to do a big move and is that worth the hassle? Number six, are you publishing to accounts that you have access to? This is huge. You know you're publishing on Apple, but can you see your Apple stats? You're publishing on Spotify, but can you see your Spotify stats? You're publishing on Pandora. Can you see your Pandora stats? Obviously the list goes on. There are a lot of people who are publishing, they've picked platforms that don't even give them access to the stats and then they publish and then they realize they don't have that chance for review of the strategy that we chatted about earlier in HAT number one of the team clarity matrix. So are you publishing the publisher to the place they have access to? Will that ever change? Will that go away? Who has the logins and passwords? Who has the emails, all that stuff? And then finally, question number seven is really important because the publishing tech, as we said, number one, you got to know what's happening right now, you got to know what's happening in the future. You got to stay up to date with this stuff. What happens if you need to move? What happens if you leave? You know you made your best choice, you did the best you could, and you got to pick up and go somewhere else. What happens if you need to move? Are you able to move? Does the platform you're on make it possible for you to move? What do you have to do to move if that happens? If you're not ready now, it could really come up and bite you in the butt in the future. So publishing is not just filling out a form and clicking a button. Publishing is answering these seven questions. I'll give them to you again and then we'll close. Number one, do you understand published time versus discoverability realities? Do you know what's happening today? Do you know what's happening in the future? Do you have a plan for SEO? Short term, short tail? Do you have a plan for search? Long term, long tail? Do you have a plan for insertion? This might not be part of you right now, but are you able to do it? If it's necessary, can you at least create episodes and can you publish in such a way that it would make sense? Number six, are you publishing to accounts that you have access to so you can look at your stats, you can make changes, that kind of thing? And then finally, do you know how to move if you need to? Do you know who owns the feed that is it on the publishing process? If you have answers to these seven questions and the person who is publishing on your team has these seven, then you are ready to go and you can go to the next. The next one is promotion. We'll hit that in the next recording. It's big. There's a lot of issues. I'm going to give you some good stuff. Not necessarily all the secret sauce here at the partnership, but. But the big level. Are they ready to promote? We will hit on the next one. So thank you so much teambeforetech.com if you want to grab the whole series. Have a great day. Bye.