Compelling Podcast Descriptions

Remember how I told you we're going to talk about descriptions, right? And descriptions might be a great way for you to determine that name that you're still brainstorming and struggling with. I am a strong believer in the most compelling description comes when you speak it. So that's what I want you to do. I want you to speak your way to your description. I want you to record it instead of write it. I don't want you to record this as an episode, as your first episode. This is not quite your intro episode. This is the rehearsal for your intro episode. So I want you to record in this particular order exactly what I'm saying here. So I want you to.

Record for about five to 10 minutes anything you know about your listener or what are they struggling in, what questions are they asking? What do they come up to you? When they come up to you at conferences and tell you about? Where are they in pain and what are they looking for? What do they aspire to be, where do they want to go? And everything needs to be focused on them, not about, on your solutions to that. It's all about where they are and what they're doing and what they're looking for right now. Focus completely on them, put yourself in their shoes and, and think about them. Then I want you to record five minutes about why you. This is not your total resume, I might say in columnist in that process because it is a little bit of title. But in columnist on innovation is perfectly relevant to a show called Product Launch Hazards, which is one of the shows that I have. So making those two things relevant, that's relevant. Why me, right? Why am I an expert in this? Why am I able to do a show called Feed you'd brand for yourself? Because I'm a four time podcast host. I'm the co founder of a company called Potatoes which helps podcasters day in and day out launch and be successful producing their show. So I'm giving relevance about it. I'm not giving you my whole resume, my whole history. I went to Rhode Island School of Design. I'm not telling you my story unless my story is relevant. And it's the short version of my story because. Because I only need a few sentences here into my description. I don't need more than that. So want the elevator view, right? What can you say in that elevator ride to someone if you were explaining why you are the best host for this show or the best person to be able to deliver and understand the pain and the aspirations of those listeners that you just talked about? So after We've got those two sections. The last thing is I want you to imagine what your show is like. What are you giving them? What expectations can they have if they come to your show? So I'm going to do in depth interviews with celebrities about their pain point, about what they did wrong and about all the setbacks they've had. You know, thinking about that, where I'm going to talk to you both about topics and process for how you can be successful launching products. And I'm also going to interview successful inventors and entrepreneurs who've launched products into the millions or multi millions. So, so you're explaining to them the expectation of what the show is going to be like and what they can expect from listening to your episodes. Now I know you don't have your show yet. That's okay. We're imagining what it's going to be like. We're planning it out. And that's also part of the mindset we're getting in the mindset of the power of what we want. Because now we really focus on those listeners. We've really figured out why we're the perfect host for this. And now we're going to say and here's the format of the show that's gonna work to really deliver all of those things. Now you've got all the great components of a description that draws someone in to say I'm gonna click on this show. So here's the description, text specs we're going to take from each of those three sections and create the short description. Okay, so I want you to take a sentence or two from the first one, one sentence from the second one, or even a phrase that describes you because you're gonna get described later. So don't worry about that. It's just maybe a phrase that describes you. So like in columnist and four time podcast host Tracy Hazard, something like that, it's short. And then I'm gonna take one sentence from the last section that I did about what the show looks like. So my first, my short description might read something like.

Are you on the marketing roller coaster? Are you sick of doing more and getting less? So I might ask questions there. And then Tracy Hazard, Inc. Columnist and four time podcast host shares. And then now I might be working the same shares, interviews with top successful podcasters who really have given you tips and tools for, for launching and growing your show. Great. I worked that all in into a 250 to 300 character short description. Now I want the rest of what I've written, the rest of What I recorded, transcribe it and write that out and now make that the rest of it. And you want to use up 100% of the 4,000 characters. You want to use all of it because why waste the time space? Because I might say podcast, I might say videocast, I might say brandcast, blogging, video editing, I might refer to microphones and equipment. Like I might say all of those things in there. And all of those things might be something that someone types into the search engine on itunes. And this. There are very few places on itunes that they look through the whole thing. They look through the description, they look through the title, they look through the subtitle, and they look through the tags. That's it. That's the only way you're going to get your show served up. So making sure that you're utilizing all of the real estate available to you is highly valuable. Many gurus out there stop at the 300 characters because what happens is that on most listings you see that and then it says read more. And so nobody, they think nobody clicks. Read more. Because you're all podcast listeners. Yes, nobody might. There might not be real people who do, but who does the bot, right? The itunes algorithm goes through that whole thing and decides who gets served up based on using all that real estate. So if you haven't used it, if you've already launched a show and you're just watching this because you're trying to make sure, because it's not working for you, make sure that you go ahead and do this after the fact. You can do it anytime you can correct this description. I like to pay attention and review my description and every six months because I want to make sure it's still accurate to what we're doing. And so remember when we were talking about, while we didn't have our show yet, so we were setting show expectations of what the show was going to be like if the show changes. Don't forget to change the description. So you're going in place, but as you start recording, you're going to learn more. Go back and change it. You can change it at any time. It gets re indexed, so you don't have to worry about that. The other thing is that when you're launched, double check it, sometimes things get truncated. You think you used 400 characters and you didn't do it right. You used 4,000 words or something like that. So make sure and check it in the listing. Okay? Absolutely. Check what it looks like and you can go ahead and edit it in your. You should be able to edit it at the end of wherever you're hosting from. That's where you should be able to edit it and correct it. And then it might take 24 hours to flow through into the listing. On our end we can source it, but typically you may have to wait 24 hours for iTunes to update. So make sure all of those things are in place. There are some other things to listings that I just want to mention to you. If you already have your listing, if you just launched your show and you're still watching this and you're still learning and you're trying to learn more about the post production side, but you've already launched your show, I want to invite you to go to poditize.com inquiry and have somebody review, have a member of a team, likely it will be Tom. Tom will review and see what you've done in your launch. Because if you've made a mistake, if there's a problem there, we can identify it quickly and get your show moving again. And especially if in your first eight weeks of your show launching new and noteworthy, that algorithm matters in that time period. So we want to be able to help you with any of the things of those of those pieces and make sure that we're getting through that and you've done everything technically right. So if you need an inquiry, please do that. I'm putting that out early here because I want to make sure that, that if you're just like, that's it, I really need you to check this over. I really need an appointment. This is the way to do it. Book a call with Tom to be able to check that for you. The last thing I want to say about descriptions and listings and all of those things is that there are other things in the listings that can go wrong. There are other things that happen when you list with the wrong hosts and the wrong syndication is happening. And that is where they do something called authority stealing. Where your website link isn't really to your website, it goes to the radio show or it goes to your host. So there are some technical things in your listing. We make sure to review that. On our end, every productized customer retains 100% rights to their authority and their intellectual property. And we make sure that that happens for you. But you have to keep an eye on that. If you are listing and syndicating yourself, make sure you are filling out every single field on the form. Make sure you're putting in the right information to drive them back to your website, back to you. Make sure your host name is filled out exactly like you want it to read and double check that as to how it appears in the listing. Click on everything. Check everything about that listing once you've launched. Do not trust that it was done right. Check it.