Get Set And Get Ready To Launch: Proven Strategies For Launching Your Podcast

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works today. Get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

If we're clarifying our launch goals and what might be some of those launch goals, we might be in an awareness campaign. A brand awareness for the podcast and for us. Right? A personal brand awareness. The podcast and the host, if you want to look at it from that perspective. So we're building an awareness campaign. Then we might be looking at then subscriber building. Right? We want to get listeners to our show. That might be our top set of goals that we want to do. The second thing that we might want is we might want to hit the new and noteworthy and hit the charts. This one's not my favorite because I think that it requires a whole lot of energy to do something that might not be useful to your business. So if that's the case, if this is important to you, let's talk about what those important reasons are. It's something you can have a conversation with. Tom's great at evaluating whether or not that's going to fit you and it's going to service your business. So in other words, it might not serve you to even have this new and noteworthy and the charts are fleeting. It's similar to I'm a best seller on Amazon. Pretty much anyone makes a chart. I can hit the top 50 one day by getting a really great episode at any given time. You it's not just in my launch week. So it's unlike being a best seller where you have like 24, 48 hours. You've got to achieve a goal here. We have an eight week window to achieve new and noteworthy and the charts happen continually. So those are not necessarily the best goals. Offset. That doesn't mean that it might not be right for you. And we do have many clients who this is really important to. So just note that there's some different strategies. I'm going to try and note them all along the way and if that one's your goal because there's some differentiators to what you need to do. And then the third thing I think is that you want to have a long term. Right? This is slightly tying into your long term, but it may also be Your initial most important thing that you need to do, which is get clients, build a list, serve your community, or get engagement from that community. These may be some critical factors and things that you need to do as soon as possible. I'm going to say that, that I don't recommend expecting that to happen in week one of your launch plan. Let's look at that as a week three on plan of the eight weeks that we're looking at. So why is it eight weeks? Let's go back to that again. It's an eight week window because that algorithm for new and noteworthy gives you eight weeks. So for those of you who want to plan for that, that's a really good model. For those of you who are, it's not important to eight weeks is going to help you settle into the routine. So, so you're going to be the first four weeks promoting your show and the second four weeks you're going to be settling into promoting your episodes, getting into a regular programming. So it really helps you settle through the whole model of what the podcasting world is going to be like for you and moving you out of the hype of the launching period. So that's why I look at it as an eight week window total of launching. There's also, we're going to talk about a prelaunch, a planning window that we're going to do as well, that you can do it really quickly if you have team and you can assign it to a lot of people. So we'll talk about that as well. So we have eight week. When does our eight week start kicking off? Now here's the problem. A lot of you want that magic launch date and I want you to get launch date out of your head right now. You have a launch window. Okay, we are launching into space and, and there's a window of time of which the weather might be perfect. And there's a whole bunch of controlling factors to that Mother nature, you know, God, whatever you want to look at, the universe is controlling that you are not. In this case, your universe is Apple. Apple is controlling your launch date and time. You have no control over that at all. So when we submit you to Apple or when your host, if you're using another host, submits you through to Apple, it's anywhere from three to seven days. It can be, they say one to three days. It's not that often right now we've been seeing three days. This is actually pretty typical at this time of year, at the very beginning of the year in December, over the holidays, in July, the summer's actually really slow and right around back to school time in September. And that's because this is a manual process. At Apple, there's still a human being who reviews and approves the shows. So as long as a human being is doing it, it's not an automated thing. It doesn't just you submit it, they approve it. An hour later you're alive, there's someone going to review it, and those people go on vacation, their staffing goes down and they can't review as many shows or the level of the amount of shows, and they haven't staffed up for it. That happens every year. We've seen it in cycles for seven years now that that has happened. So it's not gotten better. Although I have to say their window of time has gotten shorter even on their worst time periods. So we are still seeing less than a week for almost everyone. But you could also get denied. And if you get denied, we have to do an appeal process, fix whatever's wrong. It could be something technical. We've had people who had the wrong size cover art they tried to submit. Could be little silly things. Sometimes it's the name of your show overlapping with somebody else's name, so they can't approve you. So there are some things like that that can happen. Usually you correct it and within a day or two it's fixed and they'll approve you. But that could happen as well. So again, we don't have a launch date to plan on. We have a launch window to plan within or without. Right. We want to have the window pass and then we want to plan and go. So that's what I'm going to have you guys look at. From this point, I want you to reset your mind and say, I've got a launch window and. And I'm not really going to panic or worry about the actual date my show goes live. Why is that? Because only someone who knows to look for your show at that particular moment. I mean, there could be a random person who happened to at the moment you went live, searched for your name and found your show, but that would be rare. So most people aren't going to find your show. If they do, it's going to be an accident. And so it won't happen initially. So until you start making announcements and until you really get into the search algorithm that is Apple, you're not going to just see a mass amount of subscribers, you're just not going to see that happen. So you have time. It's not an urgency at this moment to make sure that it's exactly the minute they made you live. So we're not going to worry about that. We're just going to ignore it and we're going to say as soon as we hear we're going to kick off our plan. So we're going to have a prep for that and we're going to kick off our plan from that point forward. And the last thing I want to say about it is there's no tangible benefit. There's nothing that I found that allows you to have a better show, make more money by optimizing it and making a minute after you launch. There's no reason for you to worry about that either. So there's nothing you're losing out on and nothing you're gaining.

So we're going to forget about that. We have a launch window and we're going to go from there. So we've got our launch window. We figured out what the date are in this particular case. I'm going to set the date for April 1st so that it's in our heads that way it's about a month away. We're just going to set our launch. My launch window is the first week of April. It's not April 1, it's the first week of April. So I'm giving myself a whole week of window and that's how I'm going to plan from this point forward. So that's what I'll be talking about as we go on here. So we now have to look at this and said, okay, great, I've got an entire month to do my pre launch to pre launch plan. So I'm going to use that entire month. So I'm going to talk about the pre launch plan and the things that I like to do and you can treat them as week one or step one, day one. You can do it whatever you would like. If you want to shorten it to doing this planning in one week, go for it. All the power to you. I'm kind of busy. I have a lot of people to coordinate. I like to give myself a whole week to do each of these steps. So having a four week planning process is a really good idea if you don't want to really be intense about it. This is my low intensity, let's squeeze it into my regular workday kind of model for you because I want this to be easygoing. I don't want this to be so much effort that it feels like you can't record your podcast or you're sacrificing That I don't want that to happen. I want you to fit that all in. Okay, so our planning is going to be, I'm going to call it four weeks. So we're going to plan through the whole month of March and then hit our pre launch window, our launch window week, and then hit our eight weeks from the day that it eventually goes live, of course. So in week one, what I do is I take an audit of all of our platforms. So I gotta look at my LinkedIn, I've got to look at my Facebook, I've got to look at my email, my email footer. Like there's all these different things, right, that have my name or my company's name and information on it. I'm going to go through all of that and sort of and rebrand it, add my podcast into the branding. So that might mean you get a new social media header that it's the same one you already have, but you're now adding your cover art instead of your book or next to your book, right? So you're adding that on your LinkedIn header. I might want to change the about us on my Facebook page or the about me on my profile page. I might want to put the. Change the title on my Twitter so that it says podcast host of the Binge Factor or whatever your podcast name is. Right. So thinking about all those things, I'm going to do that reset a month early because if people see it, they're going to be like, oh, where's that? And if they don't see it in the podcast player, they'll message you. Now you've got someone DMing you who you could message back as soon as you go live. So that's a really great thing. So that's the first thing I do. And of course the next part of that is making sure my website's ready. Right. For those of you who aren't working with us, that means a podcast page, right? A podcast with your cover art, the information, your player, if you've got one, we highly recommend for those of you who aren't our clients who are doing it yourself, there's fuse box. We can send you over to them and get you a link. And it's a really great player. It's what we buy for all of our clients. Love the player. Looks really great on your podcast page. Of course, if your podcast isn't live yet though, there's nothing in the player. So you want to have a temporary plan for what goes in this spot that might be a graphic that says coming soon and a picture of your cover art and the description of it, which should already be done. Like all of those things, you, you can use a coming soon and a subscribe or a get on my notification list. You can do that right within your podcast page. So making sure that's ready, making sure your podcast info is now in the bio of your website. Those are some other things you gotta refresh. So we're looking at our platform overall, making sure it's ready. So we've got our website, our social media. Now we've got our email. So I have my podcast right in my email footer. I, I go actually one step further and I actually put episodes. So I'll show you what that looks like. Let me pop up my email real quick. I'll make a new email. So now you can see this. So see, I've got it, says Tracy Lee Hazard, podcast host, authority, magazine columnist. It's got all my podcasts here because I have a lot more, but it also has check out my podcast and I list my podcast and some of my best episodes. So now you might only have one, but you could add this in as soon as your episodes go live with your best new podcast or your best first episodes. Or you can just do it with your teaser if you have that out earlier or ready earlier. So that's a really good way to do that. So that's a thing that you can create. Mine's pretty. I created it pretty. If any of you got an email from me or from anyone on our team, copy the way we do it and replace it all and change the colors and do all of that. So feel free, copy freely from what we do here. But the email footer is something that I absolutely love. I think it's a great way because, I mean, these people are in contact with you. Why shouldn't they know you have a podcast? You should be reminding them at every step. For you speakers and authors out there, if you have a chance to update your bio on Amazon or update your bio in your ebook, do that. If you are speakers, make sure that all of your presentations that you do, you add a podcast announcement page or add some kind of call out to your podcast or some kind of case study example from whatever it is, make sure that there's a mention somewhere in your speech about your podcast and make sure the name's spelled right and you send them nowhere. So this is our number one rule of everything we're going to do going forward. The only two places you're going to send anybody to is let's say you have a podcast website. So you have an entire website that's focused on your podcast. Like I have the bingefactor.com it's only the binge factor. There's nothing else about potatoes over there. It's just all about the binge factor. So the bingefactor.com is my version of a podcast page. It's just not on my business site. So if that's what you are, then you have a website link that says the bingefactor.com you can also buy a forwarding URL that is the name of your show and for some of you can't get it, you could always do something like podcast show name or show name podcast or the something show. Right? You can always add a little word here and there to get around somebody who's got a URL. Just make sure it's easy to say on air and easy to remember. And you can forward that to any page within your website so that you don't have to do a poditize.com the bingefactor. Right, I don't have to do all of that. Say all that, put all that and type. I can keep it really simple. So finding your simplest forwarding URL, your simplest URL that you're going to be able to use, use that everywhere for everything you do for call to actions. Just keep it really, really simple and streamlined. Especially in these early days, especially in these first eight weeks or in your prelaunch phase. So we want to keep doing that. So that's week one. We've like revamped our platform, we got ourselves official, we've made announcements out there. So this is also the other thing. This is holding you accountable. So because now you've gone out there and said you're a podcast host, so you better darn launch and become a podcast host. How about that? So now our week two or our day two, or however you're going to run about this, our day two is our schedule planning. So right before we do this, the one thing that I want you to do is make sure, if you don't already work with a social media scheduling software or platform, company or portal, like a hootsuite, a buffer. That's a really great simple one. I love buffer. We use Meet Edgar, we've used CoSchedule, we've kind of used them all. So any one of those that you might want to use, hopefully you already use one and you're already comfortable there. If you're not, now is a good Time to select one that you feel comfortable with and go ahead and get oriented in it. They typically have good calendars and planning grids, so they're easier to use in this planning phase. So that's why I'm recommending it to you to do. And as we move through these steps, if you are already there, you just want to go and maybe check some stats, check some information, revise your schedule that you've been doing in the past and make a special launch schedule that's a little bit different. So now that we're doing our social media, our schedule planning side of things, it's going to be our social media and it's also going to be our email planning. We're going to do those components of it, but we're going to pick our two best channels. So if you don't have two, pick one. Right. I don't want you to say that all my channels are really important or essential and I need to do them absolutely, perfectly all of them. I want you to pick your two most dominant ones. And the reason why I want you to pick two. And if you've got Facebook and Instagram, I actually want you to consider them one, because there's so much similarity in what you can post in each and the effect of what you do, it's sizing, styling, other things. It works similarly between them both. You can treat them like one, even though you might be posting in Facebook and posting in Instagram independently. So you can treat them as one unit. So in my case, I look at it for these three things. Which channel do I have the best engagement with? Which channel do I feel the most comfortable with, and which one do I have the highest numbers of followers? So if I went with the highest number of followers, it would be my Facebook page. But I know that my engagement and the amount of people who see my post is the lowest there. Even though I have the most followers than it is anywhere else in my social channels, it's not a really great choice for me. I'm going to spend a lot of effort in an area where less than 10%, usually 13%, is the sort of magic number. Less than 13% of those followers are going to see me and see any posts that I make. So it's not really as useful to me as it could be. Now that may be the case. You have this huge membership group and it's really valuable to you. So use that. Right? So thinking about where those are, that's how I want you to pick the two. So in my case, and the Examples I'm going to use here, LinkedIn is my most important because I have the most engaged followers, the most right followers, the ones who really could possibly become clients who, who could benefit from my show. So that's where it is. I've been in it the longest, so I'm the most comfortable there. I know how to engage there, I know how to post there. I don't feel like I'm a fish out of water. It's not something brand new and so it fits all the criteria. So LinkedIn is my predominant. And then for me, we're working hard to grow our Instagram. And so when I Look at the LinkedIn and the Instagram, I see Instagram's a lot more visual than LinkedIn is. And so that actually gives me a great set of two to work with. And Instagram allows me to do what I need to do on Facebook, even though it's not as converting for me. But I still need to keep it active and do it. I also have a Twitter, I also have a TikTok now. So all these things are still in play, but I'm not worrying about making sure the content and posting is right. I'm only going to concentrate on those two platforms to make sure I'm getting them right there. And then I'm going to reuse all the pieces in all the other areas that I do want to touch on. So I'm basically reposting, resharing, maybe sometimes reformatting, but only if necessary. Another one that we use a lot and it actually does really well for us, is Pinterest. And so because Pinterest and Instagram have a similar visual feel to them, there's a lot of similarities. And I can use what I'm doing on Instagram to help engage over on Pinterest as well. So for us, these are the why I've chosen this. So if you hear me saying LinkedIn, Instagram, you can. You want to substitute with whichever two are your best are the ones you're going to concentrate on. Now I'm going to figure out a schedule, the number of days per week and times per day per channel that I'm comfortable posting in. Now, keep in mind, most of you are not going to be as prolific. You may not feel really comfortable. You may have been doing a. I'm going to call it a model. You may have been doing this model of. I'm posting once a week, right? Like, I'm just posting once a week. That's where I am. I try to keep it simple. That's all that I want to do. Okay, that's great, but it's not really a great launch strategy. So I'm going to pull up my episode planning calendar and you're going to see why in just a moment. Why this is important. Why we want to really look at our schedule and we want to think about doubling or tripling our schedule of normal posts for the launch period. Because remember, not as many people see it. So the more touch points, the better it is. The faster we do those touch points, the better the results will be as well. So I know it sounds like a lot of work, but you actually have a lot to work with, especially if you're launching multiple episodes at the beginning of it. So there's a strategy here. I want to make a note of this for you. For some of you to launch, we recommend no less than three to launch with. It gives you a basis of downloads and some other things. But some of you are on that new and noteworthy strategy or on that I want to get a lot of listeners faster or I want to beat someone on the charts. And having more episodes from the start is a strategy to do that. You have many, many choices. You can watch 20 at once, 25 at once. I'm going to use the number 20 here because it works evenly into four weeks, five episodes a week that you're going to promote. So I'm going to use the number 20 here. But if you've got 25, it can be worked out. You just might need to use the weekend. So seven day plan instead of a five day plan to make that work out for you. So there's a launch plan for 20. And then of course you've got episodes launching every single week. So the more episodes you launch, the better off you are. So you may want to have episodes launching that are two per week, three per week, whatever it is, at a pace at which you're going to. You're going to beat out the algorithm, right? You're going to beat out and do better than your competitors. So if your competitors are only launching once a week and you're launching two a week, you're doubling the downloads you're receiving for the number of subscribers you have and you're boosting the algorithm. That's how you raise in the charts. That's how you get on new and noteworthy. But remember, this is just competition that may not be important for you, right? It may not be important in your category. We couldn't make new and noteworthy to save our lives for our 3D printing podcast but there were only five 3D printing podcasts. It wasn't that hard to beat out all five of those very quickly. We still did 25 episodes to launch and we did one a day to beat them out. But it was more effort than we actually needed to expend to win in that strategy. So we can take a look at and anyone on our team can take a look at the competitive landscape of. Tom's really great at this to do an audit for you. Jennifer Orvis can help you as well. So those two are the best ones to take a look at. That is like, competitively, how many days a week are your competitors posting and where do I need to be? So you're going to look at that and make some decisions for yourself. Are you going to post every day of the week? I highly recommend posting at least five days a week when you're launching this plan. I actually post seven days a week regularly. But that's because we have so much content and we're re sharing old content. And so we get into a pace of where we have all this stuff and we want to keep using it because it's so valuable. It gives us leads and then gets us subscribers on a consistent and constant basis. So we just have an auto plan, right? It just does it all the time. So two times a day, five days a week is my recommendation for your launch period. If you want to up that three times a day, seven days a week. So thinking about that, that's like 168 posts over that time period. That's a lot of posts, right? So you're thinking, oh my gosh, Tracy, you just completely overwhelmed me with all that. Don't worry, we're going to break it all down and we're going to get it. All right. But just be thinking, this is the schedule I want to set. Don't panic over it. Pick it. How do you decide what times of day? Go into Facebook, check the stats, go into your buffer, your meet Edgar if they recommend times the day, know when you engage. That's important too. So I happen to get a lot of engagement at 7pm Pacific Time on Sundays. That's when I get the most engagement. People are responding. I get more views of my videos at that time of day, usually on LinkedIn, but in other places as well. So I don't want to miss out on a Sunday night because I went a Monday through Friday plan. So be looking at that and just double check that for yourself.

So let's take a quick peek at my social media plan. You Want to take a look at that? So here's the top part of this. So again, I'm recommending to you. You pick a channel and in this case, I'm putting an example. So you can see my example of LinkedIn. It's kind of grayed out. It says, I'm going to do it seven days a week. I'm assigning it to me, or I'm assigning to a specific assistant. That's something you can do. And here's the different post type. Now I have 14. So I have two posts a day that I plan for this and then I actually do a third. But if I were launching, the third would be my episode, right? The current episode of the week. So I'm leaving room for that. But this is what I'm going to do for my launch plan. I have 14 different assets I'm going to use. Now, that sounds like an awful lot. You can cut that down. There's no reason you can't do 10 of these. You have most of these things. I mean, these are simple things. Most of them are created for you. At minimum, you could do three of each of these things. Three in LinkedIn, three in Instagram, in the case of the two types, and you can rotate them between the two platforms. So you would have six assets, but you'd use three on one week and three on the next week, or three on Instagram for three days in a row. And then you use those three on LinkedIn for three days in a row. Like, it's totally up to you. You can mix and match these, but these are some choices to make, some options of things that you have and some ways that you do. If you're really, really stressed about this and really worried, here's what I'm going to say. Narrow this down to three post types and still post them multiple times a day. You're just going to repeat the posting of them. Now, I don't recommend repeats on a normal basis, but if this is overwhelming you, I would rather you repeat than only post once and not post again. And why is that? The reason for that is simply because so few people will see your posts that we want to make sure we're repeating the posts enough to create that brand awareness of your new show, of the episodes, of the content of the guests you've invited, things like that. So repeating them is better. So three specific episodes, three specific posts, and roll them out of those first four weeks and just keep rolling them out. So thinking about your plan, if I've got five episodes, I want to promote every single week because I did the 20 plan. So I'm doing five episodes, plus I'm doing one or two that I might have launched that single week. So I've got a lot of things that I have to promote. So I may want to lower the number of assets but change them up. So if I'm doing episode one, two, three, four, five, for episode one, I might do an image. For episode two, I might do a guest ego bait. For episode three, I might do a video. So I'm changing up the type that I'm using by what I'm posting. So it allows me to utilize something different the next time I share them. So we're going to switch in and do that. I'm going to show you that in just one second though. So you see, of course I've numbered them from what's above. So you have to go look back up and go, what's number 10? Or what's number three? But in my LinkedIn, so this is the example of LinkedIn only I create one like this for LinkedIn. I create one like this for Instagram. So LinkedIn example, my new episode airs at 3:00am on Mondays. I just put it on Mondays. It's simple. Mine actually starts on Wednesday. So your week might start on a different day of the week. If that happens, what I recommend you do is just move your calendar and do the start at the left. So Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. That's the order I would do it in. For your organizational, for your mind. Maybe that doesn't work for you, but you don't want to leave blank and you're like, I don't have these assets yet. So the episode airs at 3am on Monday. The first post I'm going to create is a number three, which is a guest ego bait. The reason why the guest messaging is the first thing I want to put out there, the guest post is because I want them to share my show, right? That's why I invited them on my show. I want them to share my show. So we put the guest ego bait as the first thing. And for those of you who are listening, who don't know what ego bait is, this is the graphic of my face and the face of a guest and a quote of what I said about them on my show, or a quote of something I said that was complementary to them, their business, to what type of expert they are. It's stroking their ego, it's giving them a testimonial. Of course they're going to want to share that. And by sharing that, they're sharing the episode that they were in. So that's why that one is one of the more important ones to put at the very beginning of it. Now, sometimes you may not want to do that on day one, you may want to do it on day two. Some people don't really check over or they were in a rush on their episode, so they didn't fully check everything. And so if you feel really strongly that you need time to review them and you're always behind your schedule, then move it to day two. And don't put any posts of your new episode on a single day. Remember that there's no magic to posting on the day that it airs. In fact, if you want to do some deep tracking and you want to get a little hacking of the system here, don't make any social media posts, no emails, no nothing on the day that your episode airs or your new episodes. Not the day, all of your episodes, the very first day, but on your regularly scheduled episodes. Don't let any posts go out on that new episode. When you look at your stats, the number of listeners and downloads you see when will be pure as to the estimate of the people who subscribe to it and got it downloaded to their phone. And that way when you start on day two, if you say LinkedIn is my day two, my LinkedIn launches day two. Now you can see the boost that LinkedIn gave you to listenership. How many more listeners came on on Tuesday? Because I posted in LinkedIn on Tuesday and then if I put my Instagram start on Wednesday, then now I can say how many Instagram listeners are starting on because I posted it on Instagram. So how many are coming organically from each one of these? Because remember, subscribers are not coming through a link. You're not tracking that link. They're going straight to the app on their phone and subscribing. So you have no idea where they came from. So this is a way though, to see the spikes in your listenership if you're consistent about how you post. So for those of you advanced social media hackers out there, that's a great way to do this. But this is super simple. I'm using up all 14 of my assets and as you can see, and as I'm rolling down, I've got number 14, which is my call for guests and show promotion. So because I have the Highest engagement at 7pm on Pacific Time on a Sunday, I've put the thing I want that's a little bit different than Just asking people to subscribe. So I've put here I'm looking for new guest recommendations or topic recommendations, and I'm promoting my show to make sure that they're subscribing to it at the same time. So that's the post that I do on that day. It's a little bit more general one and not always specific to the show, although I usually do highlight one and say I'm looking for guests like this for my show, right? So I am tying in my episode. But the post that I create and the call to action that I create there is usually asking them to engage with me and add it to the comments, suggest some topics or suggest some guests, whatever that might be, depending on what type of show you have. So this is how I use this. This is going to be available for you. I will download it as soon as we're off the air, I will download it to the Facebook group. And so you'll be able to get that in the documents area. I'll make sure you have it right there in the Facebook group. So that's a lot of information that I just gave you. But we've got a lot of different types of posts, and so we now have to check those posts, right? So do we have all these assets? Do we have what we want? Now that we know where they're going, though, we can be more specific about it. So now we know we're going to create an Instagram story on Tuesday morning, then what we can do is say, okay, what do I need to create that Instagram story? And do I have it in what's being created for me, or do I have to create it myself? Now, of course, you have to assemble the story yourself, like the components to it, because that's how it works in Instagram. Like, you load up page one, page two, page three, or however you load up your clips, your movies, whatever you're doing in any of these places, you know how they work. But the pieces that you're pulling together, you want to make sure that they're exactly what you want. So that's what we're spending on our week three, or our day three, is we're going through our assets, all of those 14 things, deciding which ones we want, deciding what size they need to be for the platform. And here's where my great gift is coming to you. Of our social media size guidelines, we've already got it all sized for you. So if we are creating your assets for you, which happens, right, we create your show header, we create your square Ecobait. But if you'd prefer an ecobate, that's a vertical because verticals are doing really well. So you want a longer one instead of a square one. Now's the time to decide that. Make those decision early so that we can change your standard operating procedures, change your templates to only being the thing you're going to use. What a shame if you're not using some of the stuff we send you because the size is wrong. Just come back and ask us for a different size so that it becomes useful to you. So we had that happen. One of our podcasters likes to use the horizontal format, likes a big horizontal, wide format for his guest Ego bait. It works out great. His pictures over on the right, the guest pictures over on the left, and there's more room for a big quote. And the way that he uses it both on his website and in his social media, it's the perfect format for it. So easy to do. Why does it have to be a square? It doesn't. That's what we've put out for you because most people use it. But you get to reinform that as you're planning your social media and you're planning your launch. So thinking about all of those things, I want to make sure that we do that. The other thing is we want to make sure. Remember I mentioned to you emails. I'm going to talk about emails at the end because most of you have your own email system. You have what you're going to do. But remember that you might need some assets that are going to be utilized in your emails as well. You might want a gif or a meme or something that's story like as well there. So don't forget to gather those. So once we're creating all our show assets, we want to have some good assets. We want to make sure if we're creating extras, we want to show off our guests, entice them to share, engage our target audience, right? So ask targeted questions of them, post the things that would interest them, not just something cool someone said. I mean, if your show isn't about mindset and you're posting your quote says it about mindset, let's try to make it more relevant. So change that up. And what we want to do is create a fear of missing out and leaving people hanging. So the only choice they have is to subscribe to our show. Right? So this is what we want to do as we're planning out where those assets are going to go, whether they might need to be slightly recreated, resized or whatever. And, and if you're in our social media asset program, remember, you get 10 additional sizes and assets and other things that you can do. So very easily you get 14 by using the social media program in pluggedin. And if you don't know about that, you can ask Christina or you can ask Jennifer about those. So Christina Paxton, Jennifer Orvis in the Brancasters group, you can ask them about that. So let's look really quick. You want a sneak peek at what this social media asset protection program looks like of what our images look like? See, look at this. So our essential guide to social media sizes. This is all revised for 2020. It's all current. We'll be fixing. LinkedIn will get added. We'll have the stories for you. Oh, he already has it in here. Boy, they were fast. So video stories are covered here. The COVID photos here. Over on the left, you're going to see the profile things that you might fix, the personal or the company profiles. And then you'll see what you need to create from a sizes for different types of posts that you might want to create. We have Facebook, we have Instagram, we have Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube. It's more of your videos are already being formatted if they're being sent for us. But there might be a couple of profile things that you would like. And for most of you, we create that. And I guess that's what I look like on TikTok. I haven't actually been on Whitney does it, and so Whitney's been handling that for me. So I haven't actually seen all of this. So I've got to get on there and make it a priority to take a look if that's what I look like on TikTok. So as you get all of that, these are the things we have for you so you can help yourself. But also remember, we're here for you. We create social media headers for every client that goes through our setup process. If you need them revised because you want to add your book in there. And we didn't have that initially, just ask us. So those are no problem at all for us to help you with. So there you go. A sneak peek on all of the quick, fun things that you're going to get for the masterclass here. So I got to jump in because we're going to get short on time here and get to our fourth week or our fourth day of planning. Now we got to do the scheduling. Now we got to plug everything into the schedule. But remember our Episode links, our links to our blogs, our links to our RSS feed, if that's what you were using, which I don't recommend. Remind you, I don't recommend you send people to Apple, don't recommend you send them to your Spotify link. I recommend you send them only to your blog link, where the episode lies, where they can consume the video, the audio, the blog and the graphics that go along with that. Because it's comprehensive, because you're capturing them on your website, which you want web traffic, you don't need to give Spotify more members, they don't need more users. On your effort and on your promotion and on all the things that you've created, keep that authority for yourself. So when you do that, those things though are not necessarily live yet. So sometimes when you put them in the scheduler, they don't look right yet. So keep that in mind. Make sure that you're checking them out. Make sure that you, as you're posting some of these things, you're reviewing them and making sure that they're correct and correcting them and making sure that you set yourself up to be correct. This is why I love to plan that pre launch window week. So from the time I send it to Apple, knowing that it could be anywhere from three to seven days, right? I have a window of time of where I'm scheduling posts in my meet Edgar, my buffer, wherever. I'm scheduling them within Instagram, within Facebook, you can schedule them from within there too. When I'm scheduling posts that have to do with promoting the show, what's coming, maybe there's a teaser trailer, I'm promoting that. It's like any day now. But I'm not giving anyone any call to action except to ask them to DM me or message me or put a comment in if they want to be notified. And the reason I don't send them out of there to a landing page is the conversion rate on that is really low. So you can send them out to the landing page. If you start this really, really early, it's fine. But if it's a matter of a couple of days, it's a whole lot of effort to go mine that and make sure you get the conversion right. So people just, they're like, that sounds really good. But now I've got to take 12 steps to go. Like not only get on your notification list, but then I've got to wait for the email and then I've got to take action on it and I might be too busy and then I might not see it. So it's just a whole lot more to try to get subscribers that way than if you ask them to comment and dm, because then you can quickly go through a post that you created and message everybody because they all get notified, hey, it's live, here's the link. Go to it, subscribe on your favorite player and you can make the announcement within the posts you've already made from that week. Or if you've got a bunch of DMs, you can DM them back. And that's easy as well. So direct messages for those of you who are not in the lingo. I should have stopped myself. So that's the way I prefer to do that in this launch window week when I don't know. And then of course, the minute it is ready to go, the show is live and I'm like, I'm ready to go and I'm anxious for it. I, I have pre planned but not scheduled. So I don't actually put them in a date and time, but I have two to three posts depending on which channel I'm doing it in. So on the two channels that are my most important, I would have three posts, I call them my day one posts, three posts for LinkedIn and three posts for Instagram in my example of what I'm doing here. And those three posts on LinkedIn and Instagram are we're live on Spotify, on Apple, on your favorite podcast player. That's one of the type of posts I do. And so it could be a like big celebration graphic with my cover art in the middle. We create a graphic for you when you're launched and send them to you once you're on all the different platforms. So sometimes we have to wait for Apple and then it takes quite a few days for all the other platforms that feed off of Apple to pick you up. So you may not be on Castbox, you may not be on iHeart, or some of those things haven't picked you up yet until that goes through and gets through the Apple process. So if that's the case, then you may want to wait on this graphic. And so we don't send it to you until we know you're actually on all of those places. But it's a graphic of your cover in the middle and we send out like all these little arrows out to all the different places where people can find you. And it's kind of fun and we just do that as a celebration. You can put that out at any time when you know you're Available anywhere. But if you want to just celebrate being on Apple first, then go ahead and make sure you put the Apple podcast logo on whatever graphic you do. But don't use the Apple link. You're using your original link, your link. And they're going to go to their favorite player and they're going to subscribe to you. So it's not going to matter anyway. They're going to ignore your links for the most part. They're going to ignore your links if they already know how the podcast ecosystem works. Right? Some people won't. But my day one is that I might do a live stream. I might want to just jump on live, share it and show it to everybody, pick up my phone and say, look, I'm on Apple Podcasts, I'm so excited. Or I'm on Spotify, I'm so excited, whatever that might be. You might want to share that in a quick short live stream. 15, 30 seconds, just do that, share it with everyone. That's a really fun way to create an engagement on that, whatever that day one is. Because it's something you can do just quickly and you don't have to schedule it, you don't have to worry about it. And then the third one is that I really have a ready to go post. That's my number one post. I call it my compilation post. If you have a teaser video or a trailer video, that would be a great post. But I like a compilation video of what some of those first episodes have in them that are going to be airing over the first month. So it might not be everything that aired day one. It might have a couple of little things that are in day two, day three or week three, week four. Right, whatever that might be for you. But you're teasing them to what's coming. And so stories work really great for that. Instagram stories work great for that because you can have the visual of that. But stories aren't permanent. So you may want to create a story like, or a multi imaged post, something like that, or something that has a great image. But then it's got like a little list of what they might learn or might miss out on if they don't subscribe. Our call to action will be, of course, subscribe. Right. So those are the three types of posts that I reserve. I have them ready for, but I don't schedule them. But as soon as I hear that we're live on Apple, I've checked everything, I'm happy with how it looks. Then I go ahead and I do those three Immediately, even if I have to like either move the other posts that were scheduled for the day or do them in addition to the posts that were scheduled for that day. It's your launch day. You can go wild, right? You can post six times in that day. No one's going to care. So that's how we do this. This is just this sort of beginning gathering, whatever. In your week four, you've planned all of this, what the schedule is, you've planned that day one excitement ones. You've set your blog feed and your favorites into the players. Because once we set you onto Apple and we send you over to syndicate your blog and your podcast player actually can go live on your website if you would like. Because it's set to, in our case, our host feed, right, the poditized feed. So that's live whether Apple has started carrying you or not. They're just a directory. So you can use that to make sure that your podcast page is ready to go. So now you have a podcast page that is ready to go that has an email, subscribe, link and other things. So you want to set that, make sure that's ready to go. Make sure that page goes live and you want to insert everything according to your timeline. I don't always go and do all eight weeks of my timeline. I might do the first three I might do to see how things are going and, and then do a week every week and keep moving on that until I get a rhythm for it, right. So that might be way to do it. And I also really want to double check all the copy, right? We want to really make sure our call to action is setting everyone to subscribe. Our week one through four and our pre launch week two are all set to the subscribe mentality. We want people to subscribe in their favorite player and then the second set of weeks. So the week four through eight, our calls to action are set to start to set the mind for rating and reviewing. So subscribe, listen, rate and review. I know that sounds like a lot, but you want to treat it like it's one thing that you're actually asking them to do because they have to do all of that. So if they've already subscribed and listened, they're ready to rate and review. If they haven't subscribed yet, they have to do all of those things to get to rate and review. So we want to set that as subscribe, listen, rate and review. That's the method and the call to action we create in week five through eight. So those are just our planning for week four and our scheduling.

So the last thing I want to talk about is those emails while we have a couple of minutes left here, and then I'll take some questions and we'll go beyond the hour is those emails. So don't forget if you have a good email list, if you have no email list, when Tom and I started WTFF, I don't think we had 15 people on the email list. And I think we maybe had an email list of 100 friends and family that was like our email announcement list to our friends. Right? So we didn't have enough people to make it worth the while and it didn't matter at the end of the day. But if you've got a good email list, that's an asset you should use. So when you're doing an email list, one of the things you want to do is you want to have four emails planned. And I don't schedule them because I want to wait till I know the show is live before I do them. So I sit them all in draft. They're all ready to go. If you use any kind of email program that lets you kick off just one and then the others follows, you're creating a thread of those or a campaign of those, then do that. But I make four total. And I try to do it over one week. Like, I don't try to do this once a week. It's too spread out. I want to hit them in one week with all of this. The exception is I might do three in the first week and then one in the second week, and that'll be an exception. It depends on what your normal pace of emailing people. You don't want to inundate them if you don't normally do that. So the first one is about the show, highlights the fact that it's live. Yay, celebration. Subscribe is your call to action. Super simple. Do not mix it into your normal newsletter. Send it as a special edition. It's this like, bonus, like, hey, guess what, guys? This is special. So if you have a regular newsletter that goes out every week, this is a separate email. We want to make sure that you're doing that. The second one, I usually put a meme, a gif auto playing, anything that you can get. Autoplay that animates at the top, something similar that does that. That might be like the Instagram stories that I'm putting out, best guests, episode topics, stuff that's not to be missed, something that I'm teasing them about. I'm teasing But I'm not telling in the copy of what I put there. It's okay to highlight ones that are not aired yet so I can tease guests that are coming that haven't even launched in the first set. That's okay because the goal is again, in this one, subscribe, that's our call to action getting them to subscribe. The next one I do is what I call my three tips or my three lessons learned. So if you're doing an all interview show, lessons learned from your great guests, you might highlight those guests, make sure that the guests are copied on the emails that are sent or you forward them to them because that helps them feel obligated to make sure that they're sharing your show. These ones, I like to have them from the initial set of episodes so that people could get immediate gratification. So at the point at which this third one airs, I want to make sure the episodes that I'm featuring the tips or lessons from, they can get a taste of them. So that's the only exception. So if you've launched 20, you've got plenty to choose from. If you, if you've only launched three, you've got a more limited set to choose from. So just choose wisely in there from what you learn from a guest and what tips you've given out there. I like to combine all those three things into one email and again, subscribe is the call to action. And then my fourth email and that's the one which sometimes I send a week later because I got to give everybody a chance to subscribe and listen first before I'm asking them to do this. The last one will be my rate and review email. So I know all of you subscribed. Like you're kind of being a little ego about that. Like, of course you subscribe because I've been sending you messages for a week, right? Be a little bit like you're ridiculously missing out if you haven't subscribed yet. And now what I'm really asking you to do is rate and review the show. So what'd you think of it? Please rate and review. And if you rate and review and send me a screenshot of it, I'll give you a shout out on social media or you can win a prize. There's people who run contests, so a lot of times we have some people who screenshot their best ratings and reviews, create a social post on it, and they use those rate and review social posts to help to encourage the rating and reviewing. In the last four weeks of the campaigns, right? So week five through eight in their social but you got to get them so the best people to give them to your people who already know and love you because they're going to give you better ratings and reviews. And so this email is critical to that and so we want to do it in the first couple of weeks and then we want to start to add in those into social posting from that point forward. But encouraging people to rate and review and share one of your great reviews so they know what it should sound like, what you want them to model and if you're running a contest, share whatever it is that's in that great contest for you. So now I run over time but I want to say as you start to kick off this campaign the day of, there are five critical things I want you to remember to do. I want you to really work hard to tag your guests. Sometimes the auto posting systems from using the scheduling softwares doesn't properly tag your guests. Learn how to do it. So when I do a LinkedIn post and someone's name is missing in there and I interviewed Brie Noble and she didn't come up and it just says her name, Brie Noble, I can edit the post in LinkedIn, edit it and tag her name and put an sign in front of her first name and and then click it to make it a hot link and then save that again. So even though my auto scheduler did it every morning I go in during my launch period every morning I do it anyway because that's my regular schedule for all the episodes that are launching. But I go in and I make sure that tag is there. If for some reason you can't tag your guests because maybe you're not friends with them or maybe it's not working and it's just not working out for you. Make a comment. I still like to make a comment anywhere where I'll mention the guest name and I will thank them for but for something really specific or I will ask them a follow up question like after I thought about what we talked about in the episode I should have asked you this, what do you think? And so you're forcing the guests to engage in your post that's going to help you. It's going to remind them how much fun they had with you and it's going to help them bring their viewers, bring their audience to your post that you've created there. So those are essential. One of the things I don't want you to see doing, don't tag all your friends or tag all the guests in one single post, make them all separate. It's not a great strategy in podcasting. I know you may have all these guests that have come up. If you're doing a compilation of all the 20 episodes you've done, give them each a separate comment, recognize them each separately and do it in that way rather than putting like all the apps and all the hashtags of all the people, don't do that. So guest tagging, commenting, engaging by doing this, inviting people to subscribe. So if you start to get a lot of comments, don't forget to go back in there and say, wow, you guys seem really excited about this. I'd love for you to subscribe and then tell me what else you'd like to hear or who you'd like me to have next. And so you're kind of constantly inviting them. And then if you're getting in there and you're seeing some conversation going, it's going well. If you loved this episode, you're not going to want to miss out. So make sure you subscribe. So. So you can listen to this guest that's coming up or this topic that's coming up. So again, we're creating that fear of missing out. So those are your daily practices during your eight week launch period to make sure that you're keeping up on that. And if you're not doing it, this is your assignment to your assistant to do this with you and for you.

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