Be Bingeworthy with Tracy Hazzard, CEO of Podetize, from Mind of A Mentor with Marla Isackson

Mind of a Mentor is an ASSA original show about all things podcasting. Each episode is about 30 minutes of mentorship from some of the top players and podcasters in the industry. And I am your host, Marla Isaacson.

Mind of Mentor.

This week I sat down with Tracy Hazard, media expert and CEO of podasize, a podcast production and hosting company. As a podcast marketing and monetization expert, Tracy shares her insights on how to make your podcast as binge worthy as possible from the start. The creative techniques and strategies that Tracy shares on this episode will help you earn trust and loyalty from your listeners. She also dives into her perspectives as a woman in this tech focused industry. Let's take a listen.

So, Tracy, how are you feeling today?

I have great. I got to start my morning really early with a women's call from a mentorship group I belong to and I just was fantastic.

Oh, I love that. That's great.

So tell me, how long have you been in the industry?

Let's see, my daughter is nine and a half, so. Nine and a.

No, about nine. Yeah, about nine. Because it did start a little after. I mean, we started setting up our show, but we didn't start our first show until after she was born, so.

So what attracted you to the industry?

Well, I didn't have to have my hair done for podcasting, you know, because back then video was like much more structured. And so this is 2014, it was much more structured. There wasn't live streams, so we weren't casual. We couldn't just throw our hair up in a bun. And, you know, and I have a baby. I had a baby. So, like, you know, it wasn't the easiest. So podcasting seemed little bit easier to handle.

Right.

And it turned out to just be a whole lot more fun too.

Well, I agree on the fun part, that's for sure. So tell me about your podcast. Let's talk about that.

So I've had six. I have six, I should say, because they're all still active in some way, shape or form. So that very first one was called WTFF, which is a geeky show on 3D printing. It got 100,000 listeners in five months. And that's how I ended up starting productized. So. So it was the impetus to start our business because people were like, what are you doing? And will you do it for me? Because once I told them what we were doing, they're like, I don't want to do all that work. Can you just do it for me? And that's how our business began, and then we quickly moved into shows that are for podcasters. So we have feed your brand, which is sort of the tech stuff side of things, like how to do stuff, and the binge factor, which is my success. Interviews with successful podcasters, what are they doing to create that level of success for their business? And so it's usually business focused, although we do have some entertainment shows now and again. And then I had the new trust economy, which I turned over to my partner, so Monica Profit. So it was profit and hazard. We couldn't resist doing it. Oh, wow. And it was. It's about cryptocurrency and blockchain, and occasionally I'll pop in for an episode, but she mostly does it from this point forward. And then our most recent show that we just started is called the next little thing, and it's a test and review show. So we also have product launch hazards in the middle of there, which was my gift to inventors and e commerce sellers. And so, like, all of that's in there. But we make it a point to start a new podcast pretty much every year since we started the business completely full out. And the reason is because I want to make sure I see exactly where my clients are when they start their show today. It's different than it was, you know, nine years ago. Right. And it was a lot easier nine years ago. So what do I have to do different to help change my services, to change things up? And that's why the next little thing just launched this year. So.

Okay, that's cool. I mean, I'm. I'm dealing with one podcast. I can't believe you're dealing with all those podcasts.

Remember, I have a team.

Right. I understand your strategy, so that's cool. So you talked about launching podcasts. Right?

So at a macro level, what strategy do you think someone should follow when they want to launch a podcast and have it be successful?

Well, so many people.

Loaded question.

Yeah, it's a really loaded question. That's why I laugh at the beginning was, you know, it's. It's. The thing is, is that the biggest problem that I see from most of the people who get hung up in that start process is just that they don't have the confidence to start Start. Right. And so you need to build that for yourself, find that for yourself, find an accountability partner, whatever it will take to get you through that. The second part is the tech. So some people get overwhelmed by the tech. And my answer is there doesn't need to be tech. Like, if I can do it. You can do it. Like, this is not hard. Plug in a USB port. Right.

Like, it's not that difficult.

Right. And so. And it doesn't have to be expensive either. So kind of getting over those two hurdles, if you get past that, it should build this momentum that I can do this. Right. But I think, I think the biggest thing that we found again and again, and you know, there's a huge amount of pod faders, those. Those that quit their podcasts, that's what we call them. And usually they Fade at like 3 episodes, 11 episodes, 23 episodes. That's kind of the typical. I think if you make it past 100, you're not a pod fader. You gave a good. You gave a good effort. You probably got something really valuable from it. Maybe it wasn't a fit for what you wanted. I don't consider them pod faders at that point. But if you pod faded at those early stages, chances are really good from our research that you didn't have support system. And if you had a support system, it would make a huge difference for you. And it might be a tech support system, it might be a confidence support system or a mindset system, or it might be just simply like, what's next? How do I make this work?

What's.

What do I dial in? And so it might be the sort of tactical ideas. So any one of those. Choose which one you need from the beginning and start there.

So let's say I say to myself, I'm brave, I'm going to do it.

And yes, I have someone who's going to do the editing, because I don't know how to do that. So what about thinking about your content strategy? Like, how do you do that?

So we spend a lot of time. Yeah, we spend a lot of time thinking about that very front piece, the strategic part of your podcast, because we've launched over a thousand shows for our clients, and when we look at that piece, that's the critical piece to your success. So if you make that. And we. We defied the odds on podfeeding, the industry is at 75% people quit their show. We're at 7% in our podcast network. So they don't quit us and they don't quit the show. And why don't they do that? It's because it's strategically planned into their. So we're looking at the business side of podcasting. You know, I heart might be looking at the entertainment side, the advertising side. Right. Like, they're building shows specifically to put ads on it. So they're hiring help. Is it going to succeed? No. If you're going to do it yourself, you need to integrate it into your mission, your message, your business, whatever your plan is for what your, your purpose of doing it. And it might be to have some fun, but the reality is that, look, if I have fun and it succeeds, what am I going to do with this? Am I creating a movement with this? And thinking about that from the beginning, about where you want this to end up is critical. Because a lot of the choices you make at the beginning either prohibit you from being able to do that without a complete show shift or your audience is not well matched to you. And if that happens, you'll quit your show because there's no feedback loop in there eventually.

Can you just talk a second about feedback, getting some feedback for your audience? Because I think that's a really important topic.

I think it's really hard for people to understand that they're not going to get feedback immediately. This isn't like I put a post and my mom goes like, on Instagram. There isn't a built in audience already. We have to push them to go subscribe to our show, get that momentum moving. So we see very, very consistently patterns that you won't get a lot of feedback or enough where you feel like this is worth it till after 25 episodes. That why that? That's the reason all those Podbeaters Quit before 25 episodes. Quit at 23 or less, didn't even make it to the point where they're hearing from that audience on a regular basis. And there's. There's a couple of reasons for it. Number one, as listeners, if you're an avid podcast listener and most podcasters are not podcast listeners, interestingly enough. So if you're not a listener on the listener side, they are so used to people quitting their show that they don't trust you till you get to over 25. So you haven't earned their trust yet till you meet that point. And when you think about touch points, like we say, oh, it takes seven touch points to get somebody to think about buying from us, or 11 email touch points, whatever the number is that you've heard in various places before, it's really up close to 25. Now, that being said, if you tap into something earlier, you will hear back. But I find the thing that we do most consistently, we see most consistently is that you'll get feedback saying, this is really great, please do more. Here's a suggestion, that's the positive you get. And then Sometimes you get the really negative. Like, it happens more to the women in my network than it does to to the men, which you'll get the negative flack that says, your voice annoys me. And my answer back is, don't listen to it. Just push back and say, you know what? You don't have to listen.

Exactly.

You chose. You don't have to.

Yeah. I don't know why people are rude.

Like that, but they are. It does happen. And, you know, I went to this very large New York broadcasting event, and the guy who spoke, who was one of the keynotes, and even though it was a women's event, he spoke about the fact that he started this network, put women into anchor positions, and he was so shocked at the nastiness that was all focused on how they sounded and not their qualifications or anything like that. If he put a male in the position, they might complain about his qualifications, but not with the women. It was all about their voice. It was all personal. It was really nasty. And he was shocked by that. And so he created a system to insulate them from that, which is really great. So maybe get yourself a team that can insulate you from those so you don't hear them.

Right. And I think that the voice issue is just one of the reasons why women shy away from. From starting a podcast, which is unfortunate. Well, you know, this is the same. Yeah, right, right.

We don't all love our voices, and men, too. Like, it's not any different. So none of us love our voices. And there are things and techniques you can learn and do. Like, I can get closer to the microphone, and I can lower my voice level, which is more resonant and great with a community. So when I'm doing something and I'm in an interview, I'm excited. I like to leave that. I like to lean back and let that happen. But when I'm doing something where I want the audience to take it seriously and want to listen to it, that this is a valuable point. I'm heading home. I slow my voice down, and I come in close to the microphone and I say, listen up. This is really critically important for you to take in. And I do it because I know there's that technique of doing it. So these are tips and tactics and things that you can learn. So if you're uncomfortable about that, there are ways around it. People learn ways around it.

Okay, that's fabulous. And I just learned something, so I will do that as well. So thank you for that tip.

You're welcome.

So if a podcaster is interested. What are the prerequisites that you need before we, you know, podcaster can work with you?

So there's nothing. Look, I mean, you have to want to do it. That's really my thing. So we, we pride ourselves on, you know, part of the reason we have such a high success rate is that they're active to begin with. So we kind of have a hands off sale process. There's no pushing. We're not pushing you into our network, we're not pushing you to join us, we're not pushing you to hire us. If you don't take the actions required to hire us, then you're not right for us. And that's, that's what we learned early on, is that first off, we don't have to work that hard at it. We get great referrals and almost every single client that's come to us has come from a referral from someone either in our network or one of our clients already. And so we don't have to push out for that. It's going to happen naturally. So there's this desire to make sure that we're ready to take it at that action. And those action takers I know are going to be successful. I know we can help them. So that's something we've built into our process. We've also built into our process things to, to weed out the people who are doing it for the wrong reasons. So if you're doing it for vanity, I call it vanity metrics. Like you want to say, hey, I'm a podcaster, but you don't really take your content seriously or you don't have that. Our system's kind of built in the way that they're going to get discouraged and quit quickly. So they won't keep going. If that's the case, they won't continue on the sales process.

Oh, that's, that's interesting. Thank you. That's super helpful. So part of what we all do, if you have an interview format, is to think about guest strategy. Can you talk about that, how important it is and what to do to make sure that it makes sense?

Yeah. So I have three stages of guest strategies. So that's what I teach my clients. This is what we do. We have our startup stage because we're starting like we, we need to get a few great guests on to kind of give our show an anchor to it. We also want to just take like whoever we can get in the beginning because we want to make, we fill our slots and we keep doing it weekly, consistently and constantly. So like there's a different strategy for startup, but after startup, probably within once you hit that 25 episode mark or more now I like to pivot and that's when we really put in, I call it the monthly strategy. So the four different types of podcast guests you might want to have on your show and I look at them as what are we trying to accomplish in this show? I need to have one guest every single month. That is really accomplishing the core goal of the show. So if my messages to bring really valuable high success leaders to, you know, mentors in your case, right. Really high mentors into it, I need to make sure I've got like a stellar option. I'm going to spend personally the time looking for that one because if I want to learn from them, then my audience is going to get high value from them. So that's really critically first and first, most important, content based. Right. Topic based. And then the second one is that look, I need more listeners, everybody needs more listeners to our show. So I want to find someone with a bigger reach to the right type of audience that I'm looking for. So it's an audience match, but I want to reach growth. So I'm looking, I check out their social media, I check out their Google so see if they show up on the first page. I, you know, do all those techniques to just make sure that they have really great circulation. But before I bring them on, I double check and see how well do they share other people's stuff.

Interesting.

The bigger the celebrity, the bigger the following, the less likely they are to share other people's stuff and actually the worse for listener growth. So they don't fit my model. So I'm looking for those, I consider them to be like nano to micro influencers that might have that right following level to the right audience that I'm looking to reach. So I might want to reach speakers. So I want to look at someone who sponsors a speaker group and does things like that and that might be going out. So so that's my second1. My third type is really I'm looking for something to build authority. So if I need to build authority in the marketplace, I need to be maybe side by side with someone who has higher authority than me. But I also like my personal is I also like to bring people up so if they're like just behind me or like they've got something good, you know, I want to bring them on too. So I kind of use it both ways because I know I have really decent. And what I, what I consider authority is digital authority. In other words, if you Google me, there's actually a famous singer named Tracy Hazard with two Z's. She's a fabulous singer.

I know, I've heard your name before.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. She's fabulous. She's amazing. But I beat her on Google every day of the week because she only puts out an album like once a year and I put out constant content on a daily basis. So digital authority is what matters. And so I know I have decent authority. So can I help the whole marketplace grow then? It helps me grow. Right. So everybody grows at once. One, so that's an authority building. And then the fourth one, I just want to have some fun and I want to like, you know, have someone who's going to make everybody laugh and you know, and, and I just want to have someone who's going to be energized and exciting. So I always looking for that fun component for my fourth one. But you might want to be more strategic about it. Like it doesn't, you know, I don't use my podcast necessarily for lead generation, for the guests becoming my client. It happens naturally, but it's not the point of it. But if that's the case, then that's what you want to use your 4th position for is saying, I have a lead generation list. I'm going to mine this list. I'm going to invite them on my show so we can have that follow up sales conversation. And that way you're using your podcast to its fullest extent.

Exactly. I love what you just said. And I'm going to listen to it again because I'm going to follow your strategy. So I think it's fabulous. So, but talking about the overall industry, what do you think is the biggest challenge for podcasters today?

Well, I think the biggest challenge is that it's like indie versus, you know, indie versus the big guys. And I say guys because that's what they are.

Right?

They're really big. And so there's been this sort of consolidation of all these big kind of players and they're all concentrating and fighting over less than 5% of the industry. It's really about 2%. And so, you know, so if you look at that, they're fighting over this like big brand advertising play and the independents have kind of gotten lost in the shuffle. You know, there's some really good people working on those and thinking about the independence, you know, but it's our main focus is, is that really I don't care to Ever take a brand advertiser on any one of my shows, and I have six of them. I could, but I don't want it. I have done it on wtff. Hewlett Packard was one of our sponsors, but we did it in a completely different way. We didn't take ads. We said, let's partner together and create a really great series and see what we can do. And it was. That was valuable and interesting, gave us industry insights. So we look at that from that perspective, is that there are ways for indie podcasters to alternatively monetize their show, but it doesn't necessarily have to be big brand advertisers. So you can always work with those advertisers, more like an influencer level and come up with something that's going to really work for you. And that's not. There's just not a lot of structures around it. Your OSA Collective is an exception to that because you do have really great sponsors who are looking to reach that audience. So there's a grouping there that, that works together to really make that match happen, but there isn't enough of that in the industry helping to help the indie podcasters sort of make it work for them.

Right.

And so there's the. There's outdated. A lot of really outdated information. So we did this host in the hot seat. We do it regularly at every conference, but we just got to do it live again recently when we were at the she Podcast Live event. And so there.

Tracy, how did I not see you?

I don't know how we didn't bump.

Into each other, but I did get.

The message from your team Bill, right after. So anyway, yeah, it's, you know, there we do this host in the hot seat. And I can tell you that 99% of the time I see the same exact mistakes in the setup and technical pieces of the show that are hurting their ability to just be found on the. On the apps, be found in Apple, Spotify and all those places. And it's stupid, simple stuff like your description should be 4000 characters. Most people who started a show but as early as I did didn't do that because it wasn't even allowed back in 2014. Right. But today it is, and you should use it because, you know, if you want people typing random search things in, you want them to have the maximum ability to find you for all the keywords and topics of what you do.

Right, Right.

It's. But these things are not. They're not useful. They're coming from old guides, old courses and the independent industries kind of filled with them, and that needs to stop.

I agree with you. And you know, you touched upon monetization.

The way we do it at asa, we do CPM based advertising, but we also tell our podcasters to think about sponsorships, especially those in niche audiences. So if you have a great sewing podcast, go talk to a, you know, a local craft store. So, I mean, I think there are definitely other ways to monetize. But that leads me to my next question, which is, I'm sure you hear this. So what do I need to do to monetize my podcast and when can I monetize my podcast? So what do you say to that?

So I think there's different levels of monetization. You should be monetization, you should have a monetization plan from episode one. So from episode one you should have the plan for what you're going to do. And maybe it's not, you know, making huge amounts of money there, but it is. I'm really clearly going to have a guest strategy so that I at least have network referrals, people referring me to clients, and maybe my guests are going to become my clients. So I can build that in from the beginning. So I know that part's working. So when I get that side working and I'm getting that referral network based, maybe the next one I want to do is build authority so I get more speaking opportunities, which will give me more business. So just kind of thinking about what the leveling up of that is going to be for you is great. But the real reason we built potatoes to begin with was because we didn't love the CPM model. We thought it was archaic for even websites to begin with. Why should it be? Because a play is a play is a play. It's not right. I don't get one out of every thousand as a play. Like that doesn't make sense. It's not how it works. Those people are really listening to my show. They're actually downloading it. Over 70% listen through rate is average in our industry. It's like, it's like 30 seconds to a minute on video and we're talking about, you know, hour long shows that are getting 70% of it listened to. It's huge in the podcast industry. There's great influence there. So I thought that was broken. So we look at even the CPM model looking as let's, let's maximize our monthly views. So when advertising works on potatoes, you're able to run through your entire show catalog and capture your Entire monthly listenership. So even if you're taking ads from day one, you're at least maximizing to the full amount, not per episode, but the full amount of CPM for your whole show, even if you choose to do that model. And then mixing ads. So telling people, you know, your show is growing. Why should I take an advertiser, lock it into my episode today, and then be stuck with that advertiser at that low rate for life or whatever they once paid me, and now they're still stuck in there. Contractually we have the ability to like drop ads in and take them out. So that dynamic. Dynamic, yeah, it's more than almost everybody else calls it dynamic, but we call it ad mixing because in our case you're putting it anywhere within the show that you want. So it's at a listening point. Most dynamic ads stream on the front and the back. And so that destroys your show. I think when you have streaming ads at the very beginning, before you even started speaking, like, I, I just don't love that model. I think it invites people to not listen to all your episodes. They feel like they got cheated in some way. And then if you do it on your own and then you're being listened to on Spotify and they add ads, you've got like two minutes worth of ads before your show ever starts. So we don't love that model. So we built a system and a patent pending system where you actually insert them wherever you want. You can take them in and take them out and it, it rotates about every 24 hours. You could do it if you wanted.

Oh, that's amazing.

Yeah. And so that way you're, you're able to maximize and sell on a monthly basis and then as your next month grows, because you're always in a fast growth rate in those early days, as your months grow and you get, you get more and more listeners, you can charge more and more for your advertising. So you have a built in growth model.

Do you talk about contextual advertising? Because I try to hammer that home big time.

I think it, I think it's the only way to go. Like if you're just, you know, general advertising that doesn't have anything to do with your audience. I don't think it benefits your brand, the brand that's advertising with you. I think it has to be in context. And so that's why I loved what we did with Hewlett Packard when we did the sponsorship model was what we did was we agreed to have zero ads on the show, although it would be announced that Hewlett Packard was our sponsor for it. Right. And we got interviews behind the scenes and like to people who'd never been on on camera. I never been on a podcast before from their company doing initiatives in education, sustainability, manufacturing, supply chain management, like all this really cool, interesting stuff in the industry. Of course, if you're a geek in 3D shooting.

Right, right, right.

And so yeah, and so we got to do that. And then every other episode was topic based and they could put ads on the topic based ones. But after the series launched to our initial subscribers for a. So we gave it to our, our, our core subscribers with no ads dropped the ads in once the main listening had happened like a month and a half later. And we dropped them in only to those alternative episodes that were just my partner Tom and I talking and talking about the subject of sustainability or the subject of supply chain. And so that's when they, so now they're in context. And when they were in context there. Now there are like, here's a, a webinar, here's a video on YouTube that, that HP has supplied us with that is going to help you learn more about this related to 3D printing. So it was really, really tightly contextual. And when we do Contextual, we see 37% on average conversions on the advertisement call to action. And that's across the board with our clients. So 37% is like I don't think there's anything that's big. I think it's really cool. Yeah, Google, like if you get it on the first page of Google and they click through it, that's only 13%. And people are looking for that. They're looking for whatever topic they put in. And that's the best one out there that I know of. I think Facebook and Instagram and all of those are less than 2%.

So can you talk a little bit in addition to monetization? We touched on this earlier. There are very good reasons to start a podcast in addition to making money. So building networks, influence, etc. Can you talk about that and how you communicate that to your clients?

Well, I mean I'm a classic case of this. So we started this podcast on 3D printing. I knew nothing about it except that we had used it as prototyping. So my partner Tom and I, who's my husband as well, we used to design products that you buy every single day at mass market retail. In fact, that chair that you're sitting on, I help that company work on the fabrics that are on the arm pads, fabric behind You. Yeah. So, like, these are things. There's a chair that we. We design that you buy in Costco every single day. And sometimes we go to hotels. In fact, the she podcast hotel in Scottsdale had our chair in every room.

All right, that's really cool.

We were like, this is, you know, this was our business and this is what it was. And when we added 3D printing into it, we discovered how hard it was. So we said, how are we going to, like, help other people do this? That's an influencer desire. Right? My goal was to help people figure out how to. How to jump the learning curve. Right? How to. How to, you know, do this better and easier. If it's hard for pros, it's going to be really hard for amateurs. So how can I help you do that? So that was the, you know, the driver for it. But what happened was, is we started getting a lot of listeners, and then I got speaking opportunities, and I didn't know why someone would want me to come speak week at a geeky conference on technical 3D printing when I'm not the techie. My partner and husband was, but they wanted me to talk about pricing products. So I came out and talk about a nitty gritty subject that nobody gets to talk about. I talk about that. In the audience is an editor from Inc. Magazine. And the online portion was starting a new section of the publication. They wanted to compete against Fast Company, and they were. It was on innovation. And they said, you're perfect. Will you consider writing a column for us? And so I had had a desire my whole life to write articles. And so it just. I. The opportunity was there. I jumped at it. For four years straight, I wrote over 450 articles for Inc. Magazine. And so it was. And every time I published an article, someone would invite me to another sing, another. Another speaking engagement. So that authority build was probably the most powerful, easiest thing that I could do nowadays, though, you know, back then it was a little bit easier. Like, people were like, oh, and Tracy and podcast host, like, was a cool thing. But now you jump on any talk show and they're like, podcast host of this and podcast host of that. So, you know, you have to do something a little bit more with it if you're going to do an authority building exercise. So digital authority matters. How I show up on Google matters most. How I show up on Apple and Spotify matters as well, because I want listeners. And that is a technical thing. That's like, because I blog every single one of my episodes in a very Specific way I can outrank anyone on Google because I speak fast, as you guys have heard here. Right. So any blog post from an episode that I'm in, it's going to be 6,000 words or more. Most people can't even write an article that at 600 words. So you can imagine Google likes more.

Yes.

And they like the spoken word because you know, they have hey Google and we have Amazon Alexa. Right. So they love the way the verbal patterning is. So that does matter digital because if you don't get served up, no one knows who you are. So it doesn't matter how popular you are in an industry if you're not showing up from the digital search first. And so that's where I excel as well. And that helps with everybody. And that's what really makes a difference for my clients. Like it's the digital search was the piece they were missing. They might already be really well known authors and speakers, but they miss that digital piece.

So question just overall about women in the industry. What's your experience been?

I would love to hear your story just in terms of maneuvering and getting ahead in this industry.

So we do defy the odds in the industry. Again, we're close to 50% of our network are women. So we're really happy with the fact that we do that. We're a women majority owned and women led companies. So all of that really matters to us in it. But again and again I see the same problem, both as a mentor and as just a businesswoman in this industry is that there's a lack of confidence. Confidence and there's a lack of I'm good enough going on that is just wrong. Because I can tell you out of all the interviews I've done on the Binge factor and I've done over well over 100 episodes, the women have better shows than the men that I've interviewed. But those men are really cocky about it. They think their shows are so great. And I'm like, your show sounds like you know everybody else's. And the women have very unique shows. They're really great at putting their signature on something, at paying attention to those details are critical to the success of your show at the end of the day. But if you don't have the confidence to come on, to offer yourself up, to come on my show and say I have a successful show, then you're not serving yourself. So there'd be the case, rare cases and that, you know, I invite people on my show all the time. Rare case, I'll invite Someone on. It's almost invariably a woman. And she'll say, I'm not ready yet. I'll be like, when are you going to be ready? Because that's what goes through my mind at that point. You're never going to be ready, never going to let yourself be ready. And that's not an okay place to live, as far as I'm concerned. There is so much room in this marketplace for someone who can consistently and constantly show up. And I know a whole lot of women who show up to do things that they don't like doing. Cleaning up after our kids. Right. There's a whole lot of things we know how to do. So consistent and constant is in our genetics here. We can do this.

It's such a natural platform for women. So I think I've been a little surprised.

At the progress. I mean, it's definitely better. There are definitely more women hosts, but it's still. I saw a number. 27% of all podcasters are hosted by women. And that number doesn't make sense to me. So I think, and I do agree it doesn't.

It doesn't make sense. But I can say that I have.

The women that I doing shows that I've been lucky enough to get to know are doing it for longer periods of time. Men do pod fade quicker. So there's a difference in that. Yeah, there's a gender difference in the numbers we surveyed.

Okay, that's good to know. So let's talk about the future of your company. What do you envision?

Oh, we have. You're going to be hearing about our company, like, pretty much every month for the next six months, starting in December or maybe even late November of 2021, when, if you're listening to this later. Right. So you're going to be hearing from about our company. We have got so many new initiatives. Our whole focus is that indie podcaster. We've got new apps coming out to show values of podcasts. We've got. I just. We just launched a certification program that we're really proud of. So we're certifying other podcast coaches and all of that to become strategists utilizing this technical knowledge that we have. We want to make sure more people out there are building better podcasts at the local level. So we are sharing all of our knowledge and our systems and some of our pricing so that you guys can get into it and do that. So we're really excited about that, that our official first session starts in January, and it's just, just. I. I'm that one. I was so shocked at how well received it was. I thought this was going to be a little niche. But I have had people coming out of the woodwork saying I want a part of that program because I want that potato certification level because I feel like I don't know what I don't know. And there are a lot of that going on. So that's coming up. We have, we have a whole new statistics section that came into our portal. So like we show website statistics and podcast statistics side by side, which is really unusual. So we have really top level integrations with Semrush, which is expensive if you were to do it on your own and it comes with your hosting with us. And when you look at that, what's going on is that you'll see and this is why I also believe people don't quit us as a, as a host is because they see the growth in their website, they see the growth in their organic traffic and their organic keywords. They don't realize that this is like I put out a podcast and I only got 100 listeners or a thousand listeners or, or whatever it was and it didn't feel like it was feedback. They never went back to check what it was doing for their social media.

What was going for their website.

And so we're showing that right up front for them.

Right, right. So final question, little bit of a crystal ball. So what do you envision is the future of the industry?

So I think we're going to have a split in the industry. I think we're going to have YouTube. Right. That all the creators, the independent creators, we're going to have a platform for that. Right now we don't. And the big players, Spotify, Iheart, they're all gonna just continue to battle over what is gonna be while it's big. $1.6 billion in ads. But they're gonna fight over that advertising dollars. And what they're gonna miss out is that the YouTube monetization, which is the Google model. Right. The Google Adwords model is the, is the missing link because we want to dial down as a brand advertiser, I want to make sure I get high conversion on every dollar I spend.

Businesses have no access to being able to advertise on Joe Rogan show. Never going to happen. They can't afford it, they won't do it. Right. But they could advertise on feed your brand and, and be really niched into something that's so totally topic based for them and they could do it on a single episode on an entire show. However, they wanted to get that high contextual conversion going. That's what I think is next, and that's actually what we're building here. So we hope we're going to be that player that wins.

Awesome. So this was super interesting. I love what you're doing. Tracy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.

Oh, thank you for raising the industry.

Oh, I appreciate it. I learned a lot, too.

I took notes. So thank you.

Mind of a Mentor is created to help you along your podcast journey. To stay up to date with the latest episodes, hit the follow button wherever you are listening, go follow us on social media and our links are in the show description. If you're a woman podcaster looking to monetize your podcast from advertising, go to joina.com that's J-O-I-N o s s a.com and apply to join 1200 plus other women podcasters. And finally, if you loved this episode, please let us know and leave us a review. Okay, see you next week. Thanks for listening.