Effectively Use Open Loop Content Tactics to Lead Listeners to the Next Podcast Episode

Get off the marketing roller coaster and get on the automated fast track to digitally market your brand everywhere. Now join podcast producer Tom Hazard and Inc. Columnist Tracy Hazard as they share easy content building formulas and smart cut secrets proven to fuel hundreds of blogs, podcasts and brands with bingeable original content. Join the conversation on how to get your message out to the world. Be original, be heard, promote with power and purpose. Feed your brand.

Hey everyone, this is Tom and Tracy on the feed you'd brand podcast and we're excited to be back for another episode and talk about one of our favorite subjects.

Yeah, Open loop content.

I just love that name open loop.

I do. It's future and past open looping. So if you don't know what open looping is, it's like, well, I'm going to tell you about that in a minute. First, I really want to talk about future and past episodes.

Oh, but I want to know what you're going to talk about. What you just said.

I just open looped you.

Damn it.

Right? You just fell for it. I just left you hanging. Right? That's the open loop. And so that's what you want to do because the brain wants to fill it in. And think about this like a circle, right? If you've got a little opening in your circle, it doesn't matter. Your brain thinks it's a complete circle. When you look at a visual image of that, this is a very classic imagery test or whatever you want to talk about. And so if you have like less than 10% of the circle is open, then your brain will fill it in.

No, I understand that. Actually there's been a image of a T shirt circulating on Facebook in the last few weeks. It's of Neil Degrasse Tyson, who's the physicist and scientist who.

Yeah, love him.

He's pretty neat guy, right? And he actually has something he talks about, about how people's brains fill in the missing pieces. And so this T shirt actually has a message that it's saying, but it's in very cryptic characters, not the actual proper English letters to say the statement. But you know what it says because your brain fills in the bl.

Right? I love that. I can't wait to see what it actually says. And looks like you just open looped me on that. Now I have to find it.

Well, and now I'm gonna open loop everybody because you're gonna need to go to the blog post@braincastingyou.com in order to see that image. I will post it in that blog post.

Exactly. And so this is the thing is like you want to open loop with something that the brain can't fill in without you. Because now you've left me anticipating and I'm excited and I want to find out more.

And now all you listening want to go if you're not already, and maybe you're driving or you're riding the commuter rail on the way to work. Now you're gon want to go to new york.com. i know, I grew up in suburban New York. What do you want me to do? If you're on Metro north, you're going into the city or you're going from Brooklyn into the city, whatever you're going to want to when you get into work, go and quickly look up the blog post so you can see this image because it's pretty neat, right?

Well, so that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about future open looping and past open looping. And it's something that we do really well in our podcasts and we do really well in our blog posts. Like you can do it in both places at once, right? In both places you'll be doing it. If you're speaking your podcast to a blog post automatically happens, but you really want to make a concerted effort to do it. And so we think that through when we're recording an episode and say, which episode are we going to refer to? And we don't always refer to numbers. Sometimes we do when you get way up there in numbers and they're hidden away. So we have a podcast that has almost 500 episodes and sometimes only the last 100 are showing on itunes. So we really need to make it clear so that they're actually going onto the website and looking for the specific podcast number so that they can find it because it's so old and it's way in the archives.

But at the same time, in our blog post for the current episode, we're gonna have links to the other episodes that we reference, right?

And so most often we just refer to the title of something or the content of something and we send you to our blog post about it. And the reason for that is because we want you to go to our website. We want you to go to our website and we want you to connect to as many of the episodes, as many of the blog posts as possible. Because you doing there means that you're to get multiple touch points from us. You're also going to get more value from us because we're sending you to things that are relative and relevant, which will help you more at building your business or whatever it is that your podcast or your blog posts are about.

Yeah, I just want to add to that. Tracy, you know, you're so right. I mean, there's a reason why in all of our episodes, when we have important links, references, videos, images that we talk about in the episode, we're not going to tell you, oh, go to YouTube and search on this. We're not going to say, oh, go to Facebook and search on that. We're going to tell you to go one place back to our blog post on our website. And that's the one place where you can get everything that we reference.

So while we're open looping what it is that you're going to get from there, we're sending you to one place because we only want you to remember one thing, right? It's too much for people, I think it is too remember more than that. And you want to have that positive reinforcement on everything that they need all of these things that they'll want to find. All these things that you've heard, you're going to find them in one place. And so that's one of the things what we do. So while we open loop and we open loop future as well as past, because we want you to hang on to hear what's next, right? So what's coming up in the future, right? So we're going to do that right now. We're going to kind of use an example of how we might do that in conversation and then you'll sort of see how that works. Right. So we were thinking about, and we've been working through a lot of guest issues, like guest influencers. So we had a podcast we just did recently on Influencers, right? And how you can find really great influencers for your business, right. And for your particular podcast. What defines an influencer? So you're gonna wanna go and listen to that episode because that episode has a lot of powerful content in the way that we define it, because it's much more defined than someone who would say, oh my gosh, it's a celebrity.

Right.

In our definition, celebrity does not necessarily make influencer, not valuable, influencer to growing your business. And that's what we're here about, right? You wanna feed your brand, grow your brand.

Yeah. Celebrities may be more recognizable off the bat, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're an influencer.

Right. So you're gonna want to go to that episode and hear that. But coming up in the next couple of weeks, we're gonn interview with Jennifer Spencer, who is an expert at placing guests on podcasts and she's going to have a lot of valuable content as to how you might find just the right person you're looking for, what criteria you need to put in place, especially if you're going to use a service to find influencers when you don't already know them and you're not already networked with them. So there you go. We did future and we just did past. So now you've got both things going for you.

I love it. And I still think that John Levy, who is one of our great friends and he's also a customer of us at Brancasters Inc. Has a podcast called Influencers and we've probably mentioned him once before on one of our episodes, right?

But he has the best open looping.

It's the ultimate open loop, his format for his show and it's brilliant. And in case I've mentioned it before, I'm just going to mention it very quickly here again. He interviews very high profile and well known people for the most part in their industry or in our country in general, or maybe even the world. And he has an interview with a guest for the maybe 90, 95% of his episode and then he has a little break and then he ends that interview and has a anonymous interview for five minutes with the guest who is going to be on his show next week. And he doesn't tell you who that guest is, but he invites you to guess who it is and write into him, communicate with him. And if you guess who it is, then you actually win a invitation to an event of which is very exclusive.

Which you should totally do if you can.

You can't buy a ticket to this event. It doesn't matter how much money you have. This is very exclusive events that he does that are very small and intimate.

Gatherings of influential people.

Very influential people. So he open loops you to come back to the next episode by giving you a taste of that interview, not telling you who it is, asking you to guess who it is. It is brilliant.

Yeah, it's a great open looping process and it's also a great show builder. Right. You can't wait to hear if you were right or you think who it is and you're not really sure and you maybe don't even apply to the contest, but you still want to listen. So now he's built this amazing anticipation for his next episode and his next and that is the ultimate value of what you really want to do with an open loop, right? You want to keep them subscribed, you want to keep them involved, you want to keep them coming back for more because they know there's more value coming up.

And you want to educate and you want to entertain, and they're both. Those factors are right there in that show format.

And then here's the thing that. So why we open loop backwards. Okay, let's talk a little bit about that. Because that was future open looping. We want to open the past as well. And that's what we call. Because you have so much content that is evergreen. And we get into a place as podcast hosts, as blog writers, we get into this place of, oh, we wrote that it's over with. It was out for a month and it got whatever circulation it got, and now it's done. And that's so not the case. Companies like buzzfeed, Dwell, these are amazing businesses that do a tremendous job of recycling their existing content into more content, into spinning it into new things sometimes, too. Like Dwell does an amazing. Like the 10 best bedrooms that ever designed or the 10 coolest chairs you'll ever sit on, Right? And they do visual imagery which ties back to posts that were written all about those items. So they're not only giving you a whole visual new post that gives them something new to push out, but it gives you a way to go back to all that and dive deeper into something that you see that you like. And so it's bringing them back up to the surface. And so when you have, like, one of our shows, our WTFF show on 3D printing has 500 episodes. That's a lot of content that someone new to it can't consume if you don't summarize it for them or make it relevant for them to go back to some episodes, right? So we just recently did an episode on 3D print guns, and this is controversial episodes. We were talking about 3D print bump stocks in conjunction with what happened in Las Vegas for the Route 91 shootings. And we were talking about that in terms of how referencing many other episodes we had had on safety on gun parts on 3D printing. There was even an ink article I wrote on the Reno airport finding a 3D printed gun at TSA. So we referenced about six different episodes and podcasts and blog posts and articles within that scope of things because they were relevant and timely. And that's like another reason to bring them up and make sure that they rise above so somebody doesn't have to search so hard or go elsewhere to search and miss out on getting more content from you when you're either an expert in that or have provided valuable content already. What a waste for them to leave your site, leave your podcast and go somewhere else and get that information when they could have gotten it directly from you. So do not waste your efforts that you've made and think that it's old information because it comes up new again and it's relevant again.

Yeah. And this is going to be sort of a little side pro tip here is that old content on your website is just as valuable as new content for keyword ranking. So don't think that just because it's content that's six months or a year old that it's not doing much for you anymore. That's not true at all. That content is still indexed on Google and people are entering in new keyword terms every single day that Google's never seen before. That Google will match up with your post if it's relevant.

Right. And keeping in mind that if you're sending people to those posts, right, you're sending them back into them. And now Google is recognizing that they're valuable, that people are still clicking through them and interacting with them. Right. So now they're going to give that more weight. It's had a longer life than they anticipated. Right. You want to think about it like that. So that's where you get into this point of if you're not reusing your content, if you're not repurposing it, and if you're not referring to it in an open loop situation or in any situation, then you aren't getting enough maximum value from the time you put into creating it. And that's another reason why we want you to use this open loop content process.

Yeah, we talk about that a lot as getting the greatest return for your time invested as possible in this content you're creating all the content you create. All the content we create, we put it out in every different way possible that we can think of.

Right. And this is not just our rules. Like these are really good, high value magazines do this. Like I was talking about Buzzfeed and Dwell. Well, at inc.com where I write, I have a column there, as you've heard me mention before, I have a column there. And in that column it is our number one rule. In fact, there's like a reminder as we go to type in our post that they recommend three links to other Inc Articles within the first paragraph or two of your article. They recommend that. And there's like a little message that you can't get rid of until you've typed that in or until you've said, okay, I got it. Right. And so it's of utmost importance that they're sitting there reminding us columnists who write every single month, right? I write six a month, and they're reminding us all the time that. That linking is so critically important.

That's a really great tip, Tracy. And I think that. But I don't think most of us would really think to do that unless we were schooled or reminded. Right? It's really a lost opportunity, I think, in too many blogs and too many bloggers and websites out there, right?

It's an absolute lost opportunity. And because I've gotten really good at thinking about it, I actually write my sentences to make sure that I'm clear about which one I'm going to refer to, because I have some articles that I think are really valuable to a lot of people. And the more people who see that, the more value they get from that. And there's the same thing here in our podcast. And in your podcast or your blog posts that you're writing out there is like, you know, the ones that are of utmost value and you want to refer to them as often as possible. And so I always find a way to write a sentence knowing that I'm going to link these two words to that particular column or to that particular article, because I want to bring it up again and again as many times as possible because there might be someone new who's never read my column before joining for the first time. And wouldn't it be great if they were able to get additional value by finding that instead of having to search for that?

And another little pro tip that I think it's okay. And we talked in, I think, a recent episode about making sure you're always sending people back to your blog post on your website to get links to go to other things, and you want to bring them to one place, give them only one thing to remember. And I do believe that. But I think it's okay as a podcast host if, you know, hey, you know, if you want to listen to the episode where we talked about this, go to episode number, you know, 28 or whatever it is. I think it's okay to mention that for the podcast because it's on your.

Phone and you want to just skip to the right number and not have to figure out what the title is or whatever. So it makes it easy if you know it, if you remember it. We tend to forget after we've Done so many episodes like it's hard to find it. And we actually sometimes before we start recording, we were like, we know we're going to refer to these. What were those numbers again?

Yeah, we go look them up and have them written so we can mention them. But still, any of the real links, information, visuals, videos, whatever it is, we still are driving everyone back to that blog post. Right.

And then just one more thing, just from a technical side, so you understand what's going on here is what you're doing is you're creating cross linking between your own content. So it's like backlinking is when somebody else from someone other site is linking back to your website. But this is cross linking within your own catalog of stuff, essentially. And when you're cross linking, you're also linking whatever the words might be. So we might say influencers podcast or the podcast on influencer guests. And that word, influencer guest might not have been the title of that podcast. I forgot what we named that one. So I think it was just influencers. I think it was something.

Influencers.

Yeah. And so anyway, so we've added an extra word on there. So when we're linking back to that, we're now actually giving Google another set of keywords to associate with that URL. So we're actually creating our own, like broader keyword terms.

By doing that, you're just increasing the relevance of the original terms you had in an old post with some new terms now.

Right?

All of that, that is the name of the game. But you know what the reality is? You don't even have to understand that it's the name of the game. You don't have to think about it, be aware of it. Again, fundamentally all you gotta do is record valuable content subjects that you're an expert on that other people may want to learn about or be entertained by, make that content and to a large extent the rest of it'll take care of itself as long as you have a system in place to convert that content to written and to put it out there properly. And if you do, that's great. And if you don't, that's what we do at Brandcasters.

That's right. And this open looping is so awesome in conjunction with social as well, because this is a really great way for you to do sort of that idea of referencing back to other articles and older podcasts and older things that you consider old but are really evergreen in your social media feed. So you really want to be able to utilize it there as well. And by doing those direct references, it gives you a good excuse to say, oh well, this week's podcast is on open looping. But it also logical for you to bring up the next post in your social feed to be about influencers. So it just gives you a commonality of what should you post for this week. It gives you a system. It gives you a whole process of what belongs in your feed for the week that is going to be of most value to your readers or your listeners or your followers.

Awesome. So open looping. What a fun word. Fun term. I've loved it every time you've mentioned it and it's I guess been now in your vernacular for probably about six months or more.

Yeah, I stole this one. I did not create this word, the term.

I'm not saying you did, but it's something that you have been very mindful of and had us using and you've been using.

Well, we've been doing it. I just didn't really have the terminology to describe it and now we do. So anyway, well, we hope you found this valuable and we look forward to having your comments and your shares and all of those other things that are great. You can go to feed your brand on Facebook and you can also go to feedyourbrand.co or brandcastingyou.com to find the blog posts and to download the app and subscribe.

Well, thanks so much everybody. We'll be back next time with another great subject. This has been Tom and Tracy on.

The feed you'd brand podcast.

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