Hosting, Launching & Syndicating, Oh My!

Let's talk hosting.

Let's talk hosting.

We really understand what hosting and syndication, because you have launching syndication, which is a little bit different. Yes, you're syndicated on a daily basis or every time you're posting an episode. But launching it is really important to make sure you're getting into every directory to begin with.

Yeah, you know what, you may have heard the term RSS feed. The reality is that is the distribution method, the technical way podcasts are distributed. Itunes doesn't keep your episodes in their servers. No, very few. This is one or two exceptions. Very few of the podcast distribution networks do keep your files. They are just a gateway, a middleman, a directory. Right. So you have to have your MP3 files somewhere that they can be served very quickly when thousands of people try to download them at once. And when you publish a new episode, that often happens where many thousands, even tens of thousands, when your show gets big enough of people will download an episode at one time. And that gets served by a web server. And if you were to do that from your own web server, and I'm going to be very frank with you here, some people in the podcast industry do serve them from their own websites, but then when they get hit with all that traffic at once, it can actually crash their whole site. It's kind of like they've invited the denial of service attack on themselves.

Right. And your web host can dump you. Many of them will dump you.

They have to do that. They have bandwidth limits and you know, bandwidth and storage limits. And so those are things you'll run up against and you'll find pretty quickly, you know, if you podcast for any length of time at all, you're going to really need a real media host that knows what they're doing, that has the infrastructure to meet those needs, that to serve them all on demand or stream them on demand as needed. And the other thing you get with a good media host is you get statistics.

Let's give them a little tour. So we'll give you a little walkthrough of the hosting platform. Walkthrough, because measuring statistics matter. And so going into one of these free hosting or low cost hosting that doesn't give you statistics is a waste of your time because you're not going to have the feedback loop you need. You will pod fade and you will quit because you don't know how well your show is doing. And if you're not getting people reaching out to you think I have no listeners at all. You don't know. So let's make sure you're measuring that. So here's what the platform looks like, and we're going through redesigns of this platform. So if you're watching this boot camp one day and then a week later or two weeks later, we might have updated this slide on you, and you'd be like, oh, I don't remember it looking like that before. Because we're updating our system behind the scenes at all times. We're really upgrading the user interface, but this is how it basically looks like right now. And you have buttons to be able to input and start episodes and do all this, but your statistics are right there.

Right.

And so we're showing you your analytics of your podcast and your website statistics. I'm going to let Tom walk us through the rest of that.

Sure. The dashboard, the analytics, you can expand them, which in this image, they are expanded now, or you can collapse them. If you really just want to get to looking at some information about your published episodes, which is down below. And I think we will get to seeing that in a minute here. But on the left side of the dashboard is all your show information. That's how you know you're in the right place. And then all the links for where you're syndicated on every platform are there as well. On the right, you have how many total plays, you have how many unique plays and how many in the last 90 days. Your top 10 episodes, that's being expanded. So you could look at your top 25, 50, or even 100 episodes, and you can look at all your statistics based on a certain date range. You want to look at just the last month or the last week or the last year. You can do that. And then here we're going to have different information on. You can see the graph is of. There's two lines, because that's your total plays and your unique plays. The reason you have total plays and unique plays is some people download your episode to more than one device. They have an iPhone and an iPad, and it gets download to both. And itunes knows that. So you may have two total plays or downloads for that particular customer on that episode, but really they know it's one person, so it's not what they consider a unique play. So that's why you're going to have two of those. Then we look at how many countries.

You'Re in, and this one is coming up as Slovenia, because it happened to be. That mouse was over it when we took the screenshot of it. But, you know, obviously it'll show that the bulk of your listeners might be in the United States. And then you have all these. All these random other countries, and it'll show you how many different countries you have there. Some people are really proud of how many different countries. They listen to it.

Yeah. You have an accurate representation of how many countries. You can mouse over the pie chart and they'll tell you the specific percentage for each. Now, when you have almost 100 countries and you've had a couple plays in one, right now the system is not giving you a fraction of 1%. So that's why it says zero, but really it's not zero. You've actually got plays there. That's one of the upgrades that we're working on in the system. But you also know, you know what platform and what application people are listening on. You have a lot of that information and more different kinds of information coming soon as well. But the most important thing here is not, you know, beyond your podcast is actually your website statistics or the only podcast hosting platform that integrates with Semrush and pulls in your information. This information would cost you a $99 per month monthly subscription to get any other way. We have a commercial license. We're bringing it in here and giving it to you. So you can see, how many organic keywords am I ranking on? How many unique visitors are coming to my site every month? How many backlinks do I have? And what are my top organic keywords I'm ranking on? You can track this over time. It's incredibly valuable. And then you see on the left side, again, on that left sidebar, you're seeing the links to the different platforms that you're seeing.

So that's all the places you're syndicated to. And we take care of that. We're syndicating you to, to Google Play, to Stitcher, to itunes, to Spotify, to iHeartRadio, to FM.FM Player FM. Yeah. So there's a bunch of different ones that you're all being syndicated out to. We keep that up and we make sure we're adding directories all the time when new ones pop up that are of value and we'll add them for you, so we'll take care of them. But if you wanted the specific link for one of those directories to share with someone, because someone says, oh, I'm an iHeart listener. I want the iHeartradiolink customer. Oh, let me give that to you. And so then they can go right there and start subscribing and listening. Sure, you've got all that for you. We don't Recommend you actually use it and share it. Remember, we recommend you send them back to your website where there is a page that we build for our clients where we show people how to subscribe in different places. So if they don't know, they go straight to a page that tells them where to subscribe and they'll hit into all the links, they can check any button and go straight to Iheart, straight to Spotify, wherever they want. So we just make it really simple and it gives you one place to share.

Sure. All right, and now we'll show you. Now, remember, you could collapse all those stats and this part would rise to the top of the dashboard. If this is really what you're after right then, which is to either publish an episode or submit one for production. If we're producing your episode, what you're seeing here, that first one on the list is one that has been submitted for production but not produced yet. When you have those other blue buttons, that means it's either scheduled for release or it's already been published and the status is there. It'll tell you it's scheduled or it's published and you have additional links to get, you know, any of the particular file links that you need for use in a blog post for the audio or if you want to get the detailed statistics of a particular episode, this is where you would do that and it would bring you up a similar kind of stats display, but only for that episode, not for all the shows. The one we showed you before is for all the shows.

So this is kind of your dashboard for knowing where your episodes are in production, what's going on with them, and, you know, what's the next schedule and where you'll go in and you'll add your new episodes when you upload your files and where you do all that. Now, we didn't show you that here because it's like, you know, it's a form, but basically there are hundreds of fields if you want to use them. For the people who are really techie, not quite that many, but there's a short one, I think I use like eight fields. Like, that's me. Like, I just use. I put the title, I put the date, I put my guest name, and I put their email address and their bio and their photo and like, that's about it. And of course the files themselves for the audio and video recordings, but that's about it. Just keep it really simple so you can do as little or as much as you want in there. Just making sure that you communicate the Base information and let our team take it from there and do it for you. So that's one of the things that we do here. So we also wanted to show you some of the benefits, some of the things that are very different about what we do than other platforms.

Yeah, this is another unique differentiator for Poditize. And it's true at our standard hosting pricing, the $49 a month, you have access to up to five show identities, five RSS feeds, to be technical. But you might think, why would I want to use that? Well, you may have different classifications of shows. Kind of like the App Guy does. He has all these different aspects of shows. Some are interview shows, some are just solo casts. Some are, you know, more, you know, tech issues. There might be more, you know, seasons or event series.

Once you get into podcasting, he has archives because he has well over 500 episodes like we did. And when you do that, itunes only allows you to show 300 at a time. So everything over that starts disappearing off your face. So a strategy is to create a volume one and take your first 100 shows and drop them into that, and then leave your 300 and, you know, keep going like that. Or drop them into hundred episode volumes. People do that all the time.

Sure. And then, you know, once you get to having 50 or 100 episodes or more, you may have some that are really foundational, and you want to highlight those. When anybody is new coming to your show, you want to make sure that they listen to these 10, 12, 20 episodes. You can separate those into their own 101 series or starter set. Start here.

The interesting thing, besides classifying episodes and making it easier for your listeners to find the kind of episodes they want to consume, the better advantage for you as a podcaster is your descriptions and your titles of all these shows will be very similar. There'll be some slight variation in the titles. Most of the descriptions will be the same and have the same keywords. So when somebody searches on a term, that would bring up any one of your shows, and in this case we're showing you searching for App Guy, it comes up with.

Five different shows, or is actually six here, six different shows that are all related. And so you dominate the search results. And then otherwise, if you have one show, when somebody searches on keyword terms that are going to bring up your show, they're also going to serve up five or six other shows that they think are similar or relevant or might be of interest to that listener. So why distract the listener and give them an opportunity to Listen to somebody else. If you're making enough content, then make it so that you are the dominant thing they see when they come and do a search on something that would align with what you talk about.

Absolutely. So I mentioned before that we syndicate to all these different places. So, you know, these are some of the various places. Tunein is the one for the Alexa device. That's what plays it right now. Although Alexa is developing their own skill. So it pretty much you don't even have to say play it for on Tunein. It will search it and play it when you ask for a podcast. So there's a lot of advantages there. We're always keeping up on the newest, latest things. Pandora's coming on board and we. We'll be right on top of that when everybody's ready to be listed. It took us quite a while to get everybody on Spotify and Iheart. There was like an application process you had to go through manual and now it's a lot more automatic and things are happening and moving and that's kind of how it goes whenever a new directory opens up. And so we push in and we push for our clients and we push them in. And so maybe where you wouldn't qualify initially, but some of our bigger shows will. We can push through the process with them, get them in and then get you on board. Once we've gotten sort of a connection and into the teams who are working on creating APIs and other things at these directory levels, you shouldn't have to syndicate yourself.

No.

Any host who makes you do that.

Syndicating yourself is just a waste of your time. So new and noteworthy on itunes. You know, this is something that's talked about a lot. I think a lot of people focus on this. Itunes is still where the majority of your listeners will come from. Typically they're around 40 or so percent of all your listens. And then the other 60% will be spread across 10 or more other platforms.

I do want to mention too though, that our podcasters, our brand casters, tend to also have a large portion, a large percentage that comes in this other category. And that happens because they're coming from Google and listening over your website. And so it gets classified as this other other categories. So it kind of falls and people are like, wow, I have 30% or 40% of my listens are coming in this other. What is that? It's probably on your website and if you look at your web statistics, you'll be able to see that that's happening. And so that's a really good way to be looking at this. It's like, wow, I'm capturing a bunch of people who aren't even on itunes, Right.

No, that is very important, Tracy. You're right. But you know what? New and Noteworthy is very achievable. We see more and more new podcasters ending up featured. There's. It is algorithmically driven. The biggest factor is the number of plays of your episodes when you launch. So that's why.

And the percentage of listening.

Yeah. And how much of the episode they listen to. There's a lot of factors that go into it, but the number one, the largest one that we have seen by far, just through experience and analyzing the data, is that the number of downloads or plays makes a big difference. So something to think about when you're strategizing the launch of your show. The more episodes you launch with from day one, you have a better chance of getting featured in New and Noteworthy. And then more people seeing you. And of course, you can screenshot that when you're there. You want to be monitoring it daily. When you have a new show, just look once a day, see if it's there. I wanted to screenshot it and spread that news to the world, blast it out on social media to your email list everywhere.

Well, you also want to check the top lists. So there are top business podcast lists or something. Or top business investing or marketing and marketing and management. Marketing. Management and marketing. Thank you. Management and marketing. Top podcasts. And you get. There's different lists in there, and that changes daily as well. And if that's your category, it's kind of like being an Amazon bestseller for a day or an hour or whatever that might be. If it's valuable to you, watch it. I have to say I've never watched it on any of our shows. And it's just not something that I pay attention to at all. But some people do and some people really like it. We had it one that just happened with one of our clients.

Yeah. Very recently, one of our clients ended up. Now there are multiple lists, new and noteworthy. There is that in general on itunes or Apple podcasts now. And in every category and subcategory, there is a new noteworthy list. So there's a chance of getting on there. And they have charts, though, of the top 200. And not just new. Okay. The top 200 podcasts in each category and in general overall of itunes. So we had a client who's been podcasting since the. Well, I think really the beginning of this year, maybe. I don't know if they launched in December or January, but six months old at most of a podcast, and they all of a sudden started to get a lot more downloads of their podcast in the last month. And they were featured just very recently as podcast number 180 out of the top 200. And this is across all of itunes, not just in this niche category or that niche category, all of itunes.

So that's a really big deal. Yeah, that's a really good deal. And the thing was is he hadn't really been paying that much attention, but a spike in listenership was probably part of the reason. And when we went through and Tom looked with him at the stats and what was going on, he had a spike. One of the things to do is to analyze and find out what that spike was caused by. Maybe you were featured, you had some publicity. I'm going to talk about that in a couple of minutes. So maybe you got some nice publicity, maybe you've gotten some trade publications. One of the podcasters I interviewed on center of Influence, he has the not old better show. He was able to get 250,000 downloads in one day. And it was because he was amazing. Yeah, in one day that happened because he was featured in the AARP.

Newsletter. And so it went out to millions of people. And the traction on that was so high and it sustained and it got him, raised him up a huge level in listenership overall. So it wasn't just a one hit day, it was actually overall really boosted his listenership. So I think he has two and a half million downloads of a show total. So it can really help you. So getting in and doing some of those publicity things are valuable and they may be the reason for the spike. So you want to try to repeat that periodically. So find out what you're doing when something like that happens so you can repeat it. This is why we want you to measure and pay attention to your stats and what's going on.

When you have your podcast up and running, you may want to monetize it. Now, there's a few ways you can monetize it. You can monetize it after you already have built a big audience. And maybe you can get a paid sponsor advertiser on your show, but you could monetize from day one using our system, not have to edit ads into any of your episodes. In fact, they can be changed, even the past ones, anytime on demand. But you could use it to actually put promotions for your own products or services, books, speaking, events, anything that you have. If you have a way to make Money. The fastest way to monetize is promoting that in your shows.

Yeah, I like to call it promo mixing then, because it doesn't feel like ads. Right. Ads feel a little in your face. But you're providing relevant, valuable promotions to your audience that they want to know about. They want to know where you're going to be. So it's always surprising to me that when I announce somewhere, and sometimes we just do it casually like, oh, next week we're going to be at this such and such event and people show up and they're like, I came just because I heard you were going to be here. Like, how what a disservice you're doing for not making those kinds of announcements, but also how annoying for the people who are getting it in old episodes and they can't catch up with you now. So that's why we like doing them in these promo spots. And that's kind of how this came about. So Tom and I invented this ad mixing system because, well, frankly, I didn't want to re edit the shows.

We didn't want to pay to have them re edited.

And, you know, I'm kind of sorry because he turned out our audio editor at that time, turned out to be our son in law, but I just didn't want to pay him more money to do it. And so what really happened was we were running this mentorship contest.

And it was timely and you had to apply by a certain date and all of these things were happening. And I felt like it was odd to have it in there and have people who now were binge listening and just getting to it. And it was months and months later, maybe even years later, because this was pretty much within the first 100 episodes of our podcast. So I thought, wow, that's not really a great thing to be having do. People are going to get kind of annoyed by it. Or so I thought, it's kind of like having Christmas ads in March or June. And so how can we get rid of that? And so he said, well, the only way to do it is to edit it out. And it requires just as much editing as it did for me to do it the first time. And so it's going to cost just as much to do the editing of your show again. And I was like, well, that's ridiculous, Tom. Figure out a better way. And so Tom and our software partners figured out a better way, a way to knit together these promotions. So we're very careful not to mention anything timely or anything we're not going to repeat, especially when we don't want you repeating URLs anyway. But if there is a special promotion URL, anything like that, we do it in a promo drop in. And so we drop it into those mid roll. Remember I told you we have a couple of spots because we can flank two mid rolls around the guest interview, if you want. And so we have those two spots we predominantly use. We don't really use our pre roll or our post roll very often. We might use it if it's just kind of a casual ad. But more often we use the mid roll ones and because you can be sure people listen to them. And so we'll drop the promotions in there when they're relevant. And one of the great things that I love about what you built and how that system works is I love that we can lock ads out of an episode. So if it's a very serious topic and we don't want it interrupted with advertisements or something like that, you can lock ads out so no ads will go into it. And you can also lock ads into an episode. So let's say somebody wanted to pay a higher dollar amount to be a lifetime sponsor of a particular episode because it was relevant to their industry or to their nonprofit or their charitable organization, then you could put that in there. And so I love that we have such flexibility. But more importantly, I love that we can run this across your entire catalog.

And you can mix them any way. These ads don't have to go in every episode back to back. Certain ads can go in certain episodes. You could alternate ads in every other episode, or you can make them completely random. It's completely up to you. There's all kinds of flexibility in the system. The best part is putting ads or promotions into your episodes now has nothing to do with editing them. They can go in, they can come out. Nobody ever listening to an older episode is ever going to hear an old outdated ad. And I don't know if you mentioned this earlier, Tracy, but easily every month, at least 60% of your monthly plays of your episodes will come from episodes you published in previous months, not the current ones you're publishing, right?

So let's put that into numbers, okay? If you're getting a thousand downloads an episode on your current episodes, and yet you have 10,000 downloads over the course of the month. So 4,000 downloads of that is all that is the current month. That's all you can monetize. And with CPM or clicks per play, or.

You know, the different metrics that some people use to pay out, you might only make 60 to $200 for that. But imagine if you were able to put that across that whole 10,000 plays every single month because they were mixed across all these episodes. Now you can ten hundred thousand times X your ad dollars and your promotion. And you're providing higher value to your listenership for relevant ads and promos. And you're providing higher value to your advertiser or sponsor because now they're getting timely listens. They're not sitting around and waiting for it to happen over time.

Yeah, it's really the best way to monetize your entire show, all of your episodes. And it allows you, the more episodes that you publish, the more impressions those ads are going to get, the more effective those ads are going to be, the more money you're going to make. And if you have a paid sponsor, the more money and the more effectiveness their ads are going to be. So it's really a win for everybody across the board.

Right. And remember, we told you early on, we see about 37% conversion rates on the calls to action on these when they're relevant. When it's not just a standard advertiser or some big brand that's just advertising for brand awareness or that kind of thing. When it's very relevant, it's a relevant event, it's relevant experience that you're providing or relevant product that you're selling in there. People click on that. People do that. So they will go through and follow whatever it is that you're doing it. Now, in this case, in an ad like this, this is where you may want to have calls to action that are URLs that you mentioned. So keep that in mind. A good ad is something that we haven't actually provided a lot of guidance on. We just help our clients create them so it's just easier to do that. But it has a little bit of cue of music. You might want a little cue of music to know that that's what you're doing. So it has a different tone. Most often it works best if the host is mentioning it and doing that. But you may also have a situation which it's your product and it's your promo. And it feels a little weird to be then like interrupting your own show with your voice to talk about yourself. And you might want to use your voiceover artist. That's your voiceover of authority. He might want to mention Tom and Tracy are going to be at this event in the end of July. Don't miss it. Here's how you can get a free Ticket, go here. And so Whenever you mention URLs, one thing to do is make sure that you're spelling things out. Because remember I told you that they have trouble spelling. So make sure that you're spelling it out and you're repeating it for people so that. Yeah, this is promo ad mixing. We're the only company that does that. If you want upgrade to it, you can upgrade anytime. So if you want to do standard hosting and then in a given month, because you're running events, you want to run ads at that time, you can just increase it. It's a premium hosting. It's $50 extra for the month, and then after that you can remove the ads and drop back down. So that's a, you know, thing. If you're making money on those ads because your event is selling, your books are selling, you know, or you're making actual ad dollars, it's, you know, it's not a problem.

It's not a big expense to do that, to have the power of putting those ads in all your episodes. It's really pretty reasonable.

Yeah. So that's how we've done it. We designed it again because we want you to own your own authority. We want you to be in control of your advertising. We want you to be in control of all those things so you make the money. Now, in the future, we are going to be looking at doing partnerships with advertising agencies and brands and other things, but your show may not qualify if you're not getting it professionally produced or going up to that level. So it's something to aspire to. But we'll be bringing that in in 2020.

Yep. All right, so let's share with people how to get even more right, because.

We got to get some more right. We've got to get launched, we've got to get our word out there. We've got to get people to know. We've got this podcast thing. So first things first, before I go into all of my media pitch and the publicity secrets here that I share with you, I want to remind you to mention your podcast everywhere you go. I can't tell you how many times I go to listen to a speaker and they never once mention that they have a podcast. It's such a miss. Because if somebody enjoys you, they may not take the call to action, but they may listen to your podcast. So when I speak, I like to drop in episodes that I've done. You saw me do that today with you. I dropped in the episode for the interview questions and I gave you a Link to find it. Right. I'm giving you more. I gave you a way to quickly get through to it. Right. Tom gave you a link to poditize.com mike to get all the blog posts and all the information from one of our podcasts about all those mic comparisons. Right. So doing those things are providing a service to your audience, but it's also making them aware that you have a podcast where they can continue to get touch points with you. And this works especially well when you're speaking on a stage that doesn't allow you to sell, and that happens frequently. You're not allowed to sell. They don't like you to do the text programs. They don't like you to do any of those things anymore. But what you can do is you're sharing something that's absolutely free and of detailed service to continuing the message and continuing their education. There's nothing wrong with sharing that. And so that's a great way to do it. So do not forget to mention that you have a podcast every chance that you get that you're out there speaking.

I can't say that enough with launch strategy. So now how about getting some of these media pushes? How about getting featured by AARP and all of those things? Well, here's the thing about pitching today. We have to find the right media. We have to find the outlets that are going to do the most for the value of the audience we want to draw in. Who do we want to attract and what are they reading? And if you don't know, go ask. So if you've got some clients already, ask them what their preferred feed is. What are they reading, what are they watching, what are they listening to? Go ask them, find out more about where they are. If it's not an audience you have access to, immediately join a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group. Go join a group and ask them, say, hey, I'm trying to do a poll to find out where mothers of preschoolers get their information, because my show is about that. You're not telling them about your show. You're not promoing anything. You're just simply asking you, where do you get your information from? What do you watch, what do you listen to? What do you read? And that's the first step for us. So now when we do that, now we want to go to that publication. So in this case, I'm going to just talk about Ink, because I know a lot about it. So if you go to Ink's website and you type in that you want to know more about innovation On Ink, you. You type in innovation, you might even go and find that category, whether it's marketing or business or financial management or any of those things, those categories that you're interested in, you go right there, you click on that, and you'll find a whole bunch of articles that are coming up. And what you do is you see who's writing and you check some of the things and you check some of the ones that resonate with you, that you find interesting titles, you find them compelling, and you click on them and you open up that article and you click on the author. And this is the trick to finding the right media. If you click on that author, you want to find out if they're a contributor or a columnist. And the difference is on some ways on Inc. The difference is that the columnist has a named byline. So it's not just a column, it has a name to it. Mine is called By Design. And so it's specifically focused on product design and design, creative design. And so other people have other ones that have different names. And when it has a name, you're a syndicated columnist. In this way, when you're a contributing writer, chances are you won't listen to somebody else's pitch. Because when you're a contributing writer, you're in it for your business, you're in it for your client's business, if that's what you're focused in. If you're a PR agent. So contributors are less likely to respond to pitches than columnists are and then also less likely to. Than editors are. So keep that in mind. There's an editorial staff, there's columnists, and then there's contributors. And a lot of people try to go straight to contributors. But the only way that I've ever found to get an attention of a contributor is to get to know them, is to find them, meet them. If they're in your network and they write for a publication, get to know them. They'll eventually write about you when they run out of things to write about. Right? They just, I mean, that's actually how we got featured in Forbes that very first time. And she was like, I've been hearing about this podcast thing, tell me about it. And we had just met her, so I mean, it wasn't like we had a long term relationship, but she met us at a networking event, she said, let me write about this because it's interesting. And so we told her a compelling story and she liked it. So, you know, this is the way that you can get more by making sure that you're being targeted about who you're choosing. Not just the publication, but the person within it. And you're showing that. You know, the next thing is that inside this insider media pitch and PR secrets, I talk about how to make that pitch just right, how to get their attention, because press releases frankly don't work anymore. That there is an amount of press releases that get picked up by certain publications. That's actually what they do is publish the press release. So that's where you're getting this Google ranking and you're getting all of these publications to pick you up. But the reality is it's a repeat across all of those markets. They pick up your press release and they reprint it. It's not really a story written about you, it's a promo you wrote. And so it's not as valuable as being featured in the media. It does help you put some of those logos on your website. So if you need that, go ahead and do it. But for us, it's not been found to help any of our podcasters get more listed. It just gets authority and credibility to your website if you've got none. So there is a purpose for it. But we want to make and you know, putting out that to getting maybe featured by some top best lists and those kind of things, you've got to pitch them as well. That doesn't work with just being picked up because they happen to see a press release they're not going to write on you. They need to know more about you first, so they're going to ask for more. So how do you make that pitch happen? That pitch needs to happen a very certain way in a very specific message and it needs to be relevant and personal and make sure, sure that you are giving recognition for the fact that that writer is talented and niched into what you want to write about. So you're adding value to them and to their audience by offering them up something. And the last thing you want to do is drone on about your product, your services or the stuff you're selling. You want to just give them this top level value. And so it is harder to pitch a brand new shell. You need to have some episodes under your belt that you can send them to. So that's another thing. So remember that platform check we were talking about with that? I do when I vet guests. Well, you need to do that platform check on yourself. And if it's not in place, you need to improve it. The podcast itself is going to help you improve it because it's going to help you Build all those backlinks, make sure that you're showing up on Google, that you're showing up in the social platforms. But if you don't qualify on this platform tech level, you're going to pitch till you're blue in the face. It's not going to work for you. So make sure that those things are in place for you too. And if you don't have them, go out and get some help to get them in place and give yourself the time you need to make sure your website's in place, that it's out of the Google sandbox, that it shows up on Google, that all of those things are happening. One of the things I want to mention that I didn't mention earlier is a mistake that some of our clients make made and it can happen because we're co hosts and sometimes things say Tom and Tracy, right.

This is a good one.

So Ken and Carrie Courtright. Right. And so this aha happened to me at an event where Ken's speaking and Ken was saying he's like Carrie Courtright, my wife, who is also co host on the show occasionally and they speak together and she's showing up in Google and she has way more authority, digital authority value than I do and I don't understand what it is. And so I'm looking at this and so I Google him and I start looking this up and I see what's happening. It's because everywhere on their website, everywhere that they've done things is they decided to follow this model that some branding people told them, which is we're Tom and Tracey Hazard and we're a brand and we're together but a lot of people meet us separately. So we're not being branded as Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard, which is what Digital Authority cares about. So yes, we want to, in case somebody were to write Tom and Tracy Hazard, we want to occasionally be that too, but we want to brand both. So when you put in yourself as co host, you're going to put Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard, you're going to put both your co host names and you're going to have it featured where you're saying it both where somewhere in your description you might say Tom and Ampersand Tracy. And that's how we do it. And so you might be doing that as well. But a mistake that a lot of other people are making is they're only putting first names. Yeah, it's they try to see personal because I want to be personal, I want to be approachable and it's such A digital mistake.

It's really kind of the same thing and it is unique to the bots, the digital algorithms out there. Because when you say Tom and Tracy Hazard, my name, Tom is not next to Hazard and it's not associated with it according to all the Google algorithms.

And there's millions of Toms. So like, that doesn't help.

And same thing with. We've seen this happen where people on their own website when the individual person is the brand and it's, you know, and I'll just give an example of one of them that we have is AdamMarkel.com he is a speaking coach, among other things, is a big speaker. And his website wasn't ranking. When he typed Adam Markell into Google, he wasn't ranking at all. It wasn't coming up and he couldn't understand it. When we analyzed his website, he was referred to as Adam everywhere, never with his last name next to his first name. There were some other issues too, but fundamentally, within a week of adding his last name right next to his first name in a lot more locations on his website, pretty soon after that you Google his full name. And then he came up number one in Google search for his own name, which is what it should be. So this is a rookie error and sometimes a branding error. And it's another place where branding sometimes is in conflict with good SEO and.

Digital marketing and platform checking, right? Because if you're not showing up, you're not showing up. So these are things to fix. But there's one other thing. It's like author value adds something to it. So the other thing that you want to make sure when you're putting in your blogs is it's not administrator as the author that it is Tom Hazard, Tracy Hazard. So we actually trade off because we do episodes separately as well as together. We have one that's Tom and Tracy Hazard, and we have one that's Tracy Hazard and one that's Tom Hazard. And we're very careful to rotate our authorship to make sure that that authorship adds value because those that are authors in website also have a higher Google value. Just like my authorship on Inc. Adds tremendous value to me outside of that. So making sure that these things happen are really important because they're going to keep that platform up there for you. One of the other things I talk about is timing, right? People go out and they pitch the media and they think, I'm going to get this and my launch is tomorrow. And like all of these things and it's just going to happen. And it doesn't work like that. It just absolutely doesn't work at that speed, especially when you're trying to launch something. So we highly recommend you pre launch you start working on it ahead of time if you can. Or you just say, you know what, this is acceptable. And it really doesn't matter when they cover my podcast because I've got, it's going to be there and it's always going to have something new. So it doesn't matter. I'm just going to keep this pitching and in contacting the media and trying to get more coverage, I'm going to keep it a continual and constant things that I'm doing. So whether you hire a firm or you try to do it yourself, here are some secrets to you. So@poditize.com Bootcamp offer I have a PDF here. It's like multiple pages, I think it's like eight pages or something. I have multiple pages here and it goes over a stories about how this works. It goes over, it shows you an article that I wrote and it shows you some different things that I do and things that I like to receive in pitching and they're good practices for just anyone. I have an entire page that goes through that platform check in detail and all the things that I check and I do before I decide I'm going to write about someone because I don't want to get burned. And you don't want to either. You don't want to have someone who then ends up caught in some, you know, ftc, you know, who knows what's gonna happen to them. They could have problems, they could have scam reports, they could have other things on them and you don't want them associated with your brand. All right, so all of these free gifts, when I go to all of these free gifts, don't forget, there's my media pitch secrets, the fee publicity, poditize.com bootcamp offer and there's also all of the handouts, all of the worksheets, all of the things that we've been referring to before. So we have show description and helping you do the listing sheet. So helping you with all the details of that. We have the content planning sheet, we have the guest planning sheet, the social planning sheet, we have the recording tips, we have the ones for Zoom and the ones for Skype. So you've got multiple things, you've got this media publicity tips, you've got the links to to the best interview questions, you've got the mic links. So all of those things are there for you and we Want to make sure that you take advantage of that. If you watch this bootcamp all the way through, don't forget the downloads. They're all there for you. And there's those offers that we made to you before so that you have all of those there. And especially because you watch this bootcamp, you get a free month of posting. So take advantage of that.

Absolutely.

And as always, because I said this before. Right. Don't forget to subscribe to our show.

Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't be podcasters if we didn't tell you to subscribe to our podcast. But really, this podcast is for you. There's a lot more content there for you to consume to help you get the most out of your podcast and help to market and grow your brand.

So absolutely, don't forget about that, because that's really important. And. And there are also ways to ask us questions and come to us. So the best way is to go to productize.com inquiry and set up a time to talk with Tom or a member of our team. That way you can ask some questions, learn some more about the show that you want to build and how it can power your business. So really tie the two things together. And, you know, this is an evaluation, too. So if you've already started a show, but you took this boot Camp and now you're worried, and this is definitely a time, if you've already got your show a little bit off the ground, but you're really trying to refine it, definitely make an inquiry call. We also have helloodatize.com all the links for all those things, including the booking calendar, is at that Boot Camp bash offer page, by the way. So you can just go straight in there and book on Tom's calendar right there when you go to get the handouts. And you can also hit the email link and ask some questions in that. The other place that we do answer lots of questions is at Feed. You'd brand our Facebook page.

Yeah, absolutely. So you want to go and like that page so that you can participate and be alerted when new things come up. But then anytime you have a question, you can ask it of us or our community.

And we go live frequently into that Facebook page with alerts with things that are new. So, like, we just went live this past week with the pod fading information, letting people know that there was only 140,000 active podcasters. So we would really love for you to join us. We'd love to be a part of more than just helping you at the starting point of your journey. We'd love to take you the rest of the way through becoming brandcasters. So please take advantage of our opportunities to connect with us. And we really appreciate all your time watching today's boot camp. We hope that we've added tremendous value to you and best reward for us would be if you share this with other aspiring podcasts podcasters.

Well said, Tracy. I don't think I have anything to add. Thanks so much. Hope you've gotten a lot out of it and we look forward to hearing from you. We look forward to poditizing with you.

So thanks again everyone. I'm Traci Hazzard.

And I'm Tom Hazzard.

And this is our one day boot camp close. Congratulations on finishing up and getting your podcast ready.