How To Create A Podcast Playlist That Attracts Binge Listeners?

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

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Welcome to Feed. You'd been on Tom Hazard, along with my co host, Tracy Hazard. And today we are actually very excited to speak to you about creating a podcast playlist that attracts binge listeners. And, you know, I don't think that podcasters, even experienced ones, ever really realize they can do this. Tracy, what do you think?

I think it's an aha. It's probably one of the most common suggestions I make to people who have strategy sessions with me when they reach a hundred episodes. So it's like when you hit a hundred episodes or you hit over a year of episodes, it's kind of this thinking of, like, what do I do next? And this is one of the most common ones that I come up with is, well, what about playlists and what about highlighting episodes? What about this kind of idea of creating categories within your podcast because the list is starting to get long. When you have 25 episodes, that's typically a playlist. According to most of the players. Some of them only have 10 episode links, like Google Podcasts on the phone app only shows about 10. Same thing with, you know, some of them only show a handful of them. But if you scroll down, you have to hit more beyond 10 Apple. When you look at it on the app and all, it typically shows about 25 so or so 20 to 25. So that's kind of typical that most people think of. So they don't think, oh, their playlist is too long. A lot of times they're looking at it going like, you know, I don't have enough episodes yet. And so that's the early stage, but after that, you've got to go to more, more, more and keep adding. So if you get to 100 and you're on what, listening on Google Podcasts, you got to hit that more button 10 times to get through your whole catalog. How many people want to do that?

Well, and a lot of podcasters have different kinds of episodes, different kinds of content. And I would say typically by 50 episodes, in maybe as few as 30, you could get to the point where you have five, six episodes of a certain kind in a certain topic area or micro niche of your topics that it might make sense to have a playlist. And let me just give you an example of one. If you are, you know, relatively new podcaster, you get into that 30 to 50 episode mark and, you know, people find your show, they've got 50 episodes, you know, to go through, or 30 episodes to go through, or might have to look through. But maybe you've got, you know, these core six episodes or eight episodes that you want every listener to start with. You might create a playlist that is as simple as new listeners. Start here. You know, I mean, if you really want people to have this foundation of you and your content before they maybe catch up to the latest episodes or start listening to anything new, this might be a good option for you, right?

And there's so many different ways to utilize this and so many different ways to think about how this might work for you. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. We're really going to talk about how you might categorize them and what types of categories will work for your purposes. And most of these are business purposes. I want to really clarify this. I mean, this isn't something entertainment is organized into seasons. And the reality is if you take about any serial comedy, any serial, even drama, right? Like you're watching something that is a TV series, you could take or leave pretty much any episode within that. They run the same model of how the episode runs, but it's just a storyline. And there might be threads of the storyline, but they're tiny little pieces of a long tail storyline of the character. That's how it runs in real entertainment. We don't run like that in the business side of things. We look at our podcast episodes as pretty much an episode in its entirety. We're teaching one thing, we're discussing one thing, we're entertaining with one thing, right? Like we're really focusing on that in every single episode. And overall, they might all be in like mixed up order. There's usually not a thread of order that we follow. It's not like it's the chapters in a book and we're following a specific order. It's very rare that someone does that in podcasting unless they do a limited series. So that's what we're thinking about is that is now that we've been producing content kind of haphazardly, you know, pun actually intended here on the haphazard side of things, because that was actually Tom's grandfather's nickname, haphazard and so anyway, but haphazardly, you've gone through this and that doesn't mean you have no strategy, no theory for it, but it is. You're creating episodes based on who you can get as a guest at any given time and their scheduling the topics that you want to accompany that. But now we want to look at it from an organizational perspective because we've got enough content that we can actually, actually organize it. Before we were worried, when we started our show, we were worried about making sure we post every week. Right. We publish every week. That's our driver. But now we can look at it as organizational ideas. And now we can also look at it as having a much clearer strategy as we move forward into how we're producing episodes. So that's also something that come out of it. So that's the way I look at it when I have a strategy meeting after 50 episodes with someone.

And you know, I think from a listener perspective, depending on the type of podcast and the topic, but I think in most of the business related podcasts that we work with and that you're talking about, Tracy, to come into a show that has a hundred or more episodes, or like some of our podcasters, six or seven hundred episodes can be a little overwhelming. You know, I mean, it's, it's one thing to make an impression as a brand new podcast, when you only have, let's say, three, four, six episodes out there, that's one kind of impression it makes. And some people might look at a podcast, they might start to listen to, comparing one to another and one has 15 episodes or 20 episodes and one has three, they might choose to go with the one that has, you know, 15 or 20 episodes, there's more content there. But when you have hundreds of episodes, I think a lot of listeners sometimes don't know where to begin or even if they jump in and they listen to the latest episode, that's great that they're doing that and they, you know, experience the show and enjoy it. But how can they get the greatest value out of this volume of content that you've created? And I think if you can help.

Walk them through, it's not just the listeners. Okay, we're now at the stage of conversion and that's what I want you to really think about is how can I make all this content that I created convert better for me? And in doing that, I've got to identify different things where a stage of a listener might be, am I reaching them? So, you know, if we're looking at Categorizing feature brands, podcast. Right. We look at that and we say we've got a lot of listeners who haven't started a podcast yet. So they're at the 101 stage of things. They've been thinking about this, but they haven't dove in yet. So where are they with their things? We have other podcasters who listen to our show who are looking for marketing tactics because it's their biggest driver to things. So we actually have this categorization built out on our show. And I'm going to have the show notes for this episode have the distinct categories, and we have five of them, actually. So we have five total categories that we categorize our show at. It's much easier for us to do this on the blog side. On the podcast side, it's a little bit different, and I'm going to talk about the. How we do that in a minute. But on the podcast side, on the blog side of things, we do. We have launch tactics. That's for someone who hasn't launched yet. We have guest tactics. And that's because we do have a lot of people who want to listen to what's going on in the podcast industry who come to us for guest tactics, because we do talk about that quite a lot. And we have a great partnership with PodMatch. So we have this going on where we get a lot of people who are really interested in podcast guesting and not necessarily in podcast hosting or podcasting. Right. In general. And we have episodes for them as well. We have POD marketing, right? That's those advanced tactics. We talk a lot about web and blog, like, how are you going to repurpose it and create power for your business, your website? So we have web and blog tactics as well. And then we have networks and agencies because we actually are a service provider. Because we have our certified strategist program, we have content that's also built for them as well. And so everything we do is actually categorized into this. And Tom and I are thinking about this as we're creating content all week. Do we need more content for the network? Do we need more content for marketing? Do we need more content over on the launch tactics, like who are we podcasting for? And we always think of as we're building a topic right here, right now, what is it going to be? Which one of these five categories is it going to fall into? And it can fall into more than one. Sometimes we have launch tactics and marketing happens at the same time. Right? So. And that's okay that you're Falling into more than one. But we look at the categorization of that as being critically important to us because this is where our different audience sees stages are. Now let's think about what we could do with these if we put these categories together. Tom, some of your thoughts on that.

If we put these categories together, we really have a way to control the journey the listeners take that we want them to take. And it's not just chronological, right? And when you think about it, chronological is the most basic thing. It's just when you published it. Right. What does that have to do with anything?

It doesn't have to do with anything. And I think our podcasters, who are existing podcasters looking for marketing tactics don't want it chronological either. They won't don't want to know order. Now maybe if you're launching a show, a one on one kind of series that's more, a little bit more tutorial based, you would like it to be in order. Right. So these are also things you need to think about is like do I want to organize it in an order in particular? And then you know, when in other categories not so we're thinking not only about the stages of our audience, but how they want to receive the information. That's how we're looking at creating these categories and lists. But I think the most important thing that we can do with these lists are not just create a feed, which is an opportunity we'll talk about in a minute. You can create a special feed for it. We call them spinoff feeds. But instead of that is create a landing page for it. Because think about all the conversion we can make happen when we know how to target our niche audience. So if our audience are those have not started a podcast yet, we can send them to the launch tactics podcast to a landing page that has that particular playlist on it. And when they hit that playlist, we know for sure that they're at this stage. And that's really valuable to us from a follow up marketing, you know, how are we going to follow up with them? What emails will we send as a follow on? Who do we know that's actively looking here? How can we follow up with the sales conversation? We know where they are and what's going on with them because we created that niche maybe landing page playlist. We created that all there for them to actually categorize themselves if we didn't know ahead of time. And this is really great because we don't always know who our subscribers are and what stage they're at. And what they are. So if we send them to a particular place, we're helping out our own categorization, our own connection process, and our own, you know, basically ability to market further.

Yeah. Ability to know who those listeners are and like you said, what stage they're at, be able to retarget them with other messages that they may be more receptive to help provide them value. And also, you know, if you're lead generating from them, then who they are and. And it converts them better. And I think that's what you said earlier, Tracy, is conversion. You know, we need to think about, you know, obviously you want to provide value to the listeners for free through the podcast, which you're doing, but then how are you getting value out of them? And I think that really what we're talking about with all these different categories of playlists, and then a playlist, like you said, Tracy, can become a spin off podcast feed. How do people want to consume it? Well, some people would be very happy consuming it on a webpage through a player that has just those half dozen or, you know, 12 different episodes that are for that micro journey of a listener right on the landing page. But maybe they prefer to listen in the listening app. You can put these out, each as its own podcast identity.

Yeah, well, before we get to those tactics, Tom, I want to kind of wrap up the idea of what types of. Of playlists you might want to create. So let's stop there. So we might want to be topic focused because you might be, you know, talking about general health and wellness, and maybe you want to categorize them by topics or themes. Like you could look at it either way. And so maybe there's a category of mental health, physical health, spiritual health. Like you have different kind of themes going on with the topics of what you're discussing there. That might be a great thing because somebody's coming into health and wellness through whatever their driver is. Maybe it's weight loss, maybe it's mental clarity or memory. Right. You know, you don't know what they're coming into your business particularly for and to your podcast for. So by grouping them by themes or topic areas, you might be getting in. You might be able to get to them through that. That may be the best way for your show if your audience really isn't all that different. It could also be age related, like, who knows, maybe it's, you know, age or gender or something like that. So, you know, we have a lot of things where you go to the vitamin aisle in a store and they've Got vitamins that are specifically for women because they're hormone related or something like that, or items that are specifically related to men. Right. So you may want to categorize like that. That might be something you want to do. That's perfectly okay. If that fits your model of business, your podcast show and the audience you believe that you have, it'll come through. If that's not the case. Right. You're going to see that. Wow. I have this gigantic segment of women listeners that I didn't know I had and they're all tracking into this playlist. Amazing. Well, that doesn't surprise me because women are high consumers and high converters. So if they're in your audience, that's a great tactic for that. So that's one of it. What we were talking about before, like we are doing with feed your brand is the same stages of progress that they're making. Where are they in the journey of podcasting? For us in particular, we have different stages of that. And so we're capturing that by how we categorize. That might be ideal to you because the messaging is different at different stages. If Tom and I talk advanced tactics too much to a newbie, they get overwhelmed and they never get started. You know how it was for you. If you're out there and you've already started a podcast, remember what it was like at the beginning? It was overwhelming and it needs to come in layers of information. So by playlisting that into stages, we can layer and actually make sure that we're not overwhelming them with too much information and giving it to them in bits and pieces and moving them from one playlist to the next as they go along their journey. So that's something we could do. Another is audience type. So that's kind of men, women, we were talking about that before. That's one. But it might be audience type in terms of psychographics or in terms of some other way of categorizing the audience we have in marketing. Right. I always say this when I said if you're creating podcast episodes for marketers or about marketing topics, they need to be really short. So our marketing tactics episode might be shorter than our episodes that are for the one on one launch tactics series. Because our audience is different and we know it. The marketers have the attention span of a gnat. Let's be honest with you. Like, they really. They don't have. They want one thing, they want it quick. They want and they want to move on and try it. That's how they are. They're experimenters, they want to do so they need to take away something quick and go do. Once you know that you understand the preferences and the audience type, you can also tailor the type of content you then create for them in that particular playlist and feed. You can try some new things and see, wow, those short episodes are tracking really well. And wow, don't you know they're easier to create, you know, so these are some things you can test out, try when you start to categorize. So, Tom, let's head into the three types and tactics we create for creating playlists. I like to create three different types of playlists within our system. I like to create a feed playlist, right, that's actually creating a podcast of only those selected episodes. So we'll talk about that one first. The second one I like just so that we're going to get them all three across here and then we'll talk about them. Is blog category style playlist. And this is for your website, this is for the blog within your website. And so think of it all the time. There's category tags. That's what we're talking about. Also making sure that whatever you do on the feed side, you do on the blog category side. So you do it in both places. It actually makes it easier for yourself to find those episodes and find the blogs for those episodes or show notes for yourself when you're doing it. And then the third type is creating a special playlist on YouTube, so creating it within your channel. So now you've got audio, video and blog all created and all playlisted out for you. So no matter where your your ideal person is consuming, they're getting that categorization as well. So let's talk about the feed, Tom, because you're the expert in how to create spinoff feeds and why we built multiple feeds into productize to begin with was partially for this reason.

It was really specifically for this reason. Now in the beginning though, even for us, this goes back a lot of years. It was for a different reason for initially. And then we realized, hey, there's some value in this, which is that we reached 300 episodes. And at the time, podcast hosts would limit the number of episodes in your feed. What can be found in the listening apps to 300.

So when you hit 301, it wouldn't show up on Apple podcasts or it would drop off episode one. So you would always end up losing episodes in the process. It was a common practice to create volumes and we would create a hundred episode volumes and do a spinoff of our first 100, when we hit to.

300, that's how it started, right?

That's how it started, right?

The first 100. And then when we hit 399, we had to spin off the second 100 into its own feed to keep making room for the new ones.

So we can show you this on the blog post for this episode. You can go see this. We'll show you the podcast player that has the different volumes in it for WTFFF, which is our 3D print podcast that has over 653 episodes.

So now in modern times, the podcast ecosystem does not limit you. Most of the listening apps don't limit to just displaying 300 of your episodes in a single feed. So we've just broken it up into different volumes and they have more than a hundred episodes in each of them now because we end up we have over 600 summit episodes of that podcast. So, you know, you can choose how you break it up. And there are some feeds that have over a thousand episodes. I just really don't recommend it because that's an awful lot to go through in a listening app or even on a desktop app.

And so we do this within the blog on that one, but we haven't done it in the feed only because it's not our core business. Like we don't, we don't care as much about that podcast anymore because we don't actually actively use it, produce it, and it doesn't. That 3D start point website doesn't make us money, right? If it did, we would categorize it because the categories that track on our blog side of it and on the YouTube playlist side of it, because we do have it categorized, there are all the equipment reviews. So when we do 3D printer reviews or material reviews or all the reviews are their own technical playlist on YouTube and in the blog, it's its own separate category. Those do extremely well. They probably are some of our most trafficked blogs and most read and shared. They always rank on the first page of Google for us. So that's critically important for that. The second part is when we review or discuss or interview heads of companies like big name players in the companies, those might be their own playlists. We actually do have that, its own video playlist, but we might have that the HP series, because HP was so sponsored it and they wanted to share just that has its own playlist, its own category on the blog, its actual physical own playlist in the feed and its own YouTube playlist as well.

So all of those podcasts, though, this is pretty easy to do if you're hosted on Poditize, because we do give you multiple feeds to work with. And I know for new podcasters, you might think, well, I'm not ready for that. And you're probably right. New podcasters, you're not. And our lowest level of hosting only has one feed, but everything after that has multiple feeds. This works very well and makes it very painless to put out a spinoff podcast or, you know, have a player on a website that's pulling from a feed of only those episodes. And it actually. YouTube is very well set up for this too, because you can create as many different playlists on YouTube as you want also to match up with it.

Right. Super easy to do that and create that. So creating a separated podcast feed then allows you to create a landing page feed where you put a. You know, our player works. If you want to have all of them and have the tab or just have one single one on a landing page, you can use it either way. That's how our player works. There are no other players, I think, that have multiple feeds within it.

It can only one feed at a time.

Yeah. So if you want to have on your homepage all your feeds, so all your episodes are there and in one place, like we have all your volumes or all your volumes in one place, you can do that. So we have in the. On the 3D Start Point website, we have the podcast page, which has all the feeds in it. But if you wanted to dive in and just get the HP series, we have one where it has only it, you know, it's in its entirety. So what that allows you to do is create a landing page with just that one feed in it, which you put behind a pay gate. You could put behind a. Subscribe to it, you know, and get an email address. So there's a whole bunch of ways to reuse that to your advantage and you actually don't have to syndicate it if you don't want.

Yes. So that's a very good point, Tracy. I'm glad you brought it up because a lot of times podcasters talk about wanting to have premium content. You know, they're going to put out their, you know, main podcast that they've been doing for free out there, or some of them put out the episodes for free for a period of time and then take them off of the active feed, and you only then have access to them behind a pay gate or people recording episodes in two different parts. There's a 20 minute short episode on this topic and then there's a whole nother hour beyond that. And so you get a free portion of it. It's almost like getting a free chapter of a book and then you want to buy the whole book or read the whole book, you've got to go pay for it. And same thing with the podcast, you can have that behind the pay gate. So as Tracy is suggesting, there's a lot of different ways to have premium podcasts and pay for them, but a lot of them require to use one app or another and not easily on both platforms being, you know, iOS and Android and all this sort of thing. So may make more sense to have it on your own website, have control of it, have the pay gate there and then the premium content in a player behind the pay gate. And don't worry distributing it on phones. I mean most of these players, including ours, are very mobile responsive work well on mobile browsers you're playing as if.

You'Re doing on the app without worrying about anything.

But you've got to have a login and password, which means they're in. Some people are doing this free where the value is. You're collecting their name, email and phone number to make them a member before you're going to give it to them. And others have people pay for that premium content. And that obviously that's a business decision.

So a really great example of that, I interviewed her on the Binge Factor, Bell Robertson, which is a pseudonym because she's an anonymous sober coach and her podcast called Sober Insights, and she creates like a $9 a month playlisting area. So you go in, you pay $9 a month, you get in and you can go to the specific area you want. And she's got these playlists created and she adds special content. Usually it's like I can go and go to the affirmations area. So let's say I need help on Fridays, might need some sober coaching affirmations, some kind of inspiration on a Friday when all my friends are about to go out to the bars. So she's got that whole in a special area and periodically she adds exclusive content to that playlist. So she might do a special thing around a holiday or do something special when something crazy is going on in the world. And she'll create a special one that's for members only. And she adds to that. So you can do that within our system. You can add to that feed self published short episodes and just create them so that they're only in that private feed. They're not in your regular feed and you can tease to that that there's bonus content and it's a reason to subscribe. So even for your regular subscribers who don't necessarily come in through a private area, you can drive them there because there's bonus content they haven't consumed somewhere else. This is a great way to do this. And to be honest with you, Belle told me that this is a huge area for her because she has to so much content. It's extremely hard for someone who is new to, you know, who. Who maybe just became sober for them to go through this program. She has a start for them, and she does cite it all the time on her podcast. It's kind of like a promo ad reminding people that that it's there for them and that this is a start. This is one of the best ways for them to get started and find that. So they go in and then they find so much value in the way that it's broken up there that they actually don't come back and consume the other way. They aren't unsubscribed, but they don't consume way they consume through a website, which gives her so much more opportunity to understand them, know them, reach out to them, for them to communicate with her. So she has much higher engagement by having done it this way. So this is a really valuable idea for some of you.

I agree. I think it's incredibly valuable. And to me, it's really podcasting. You know, I will say maybe 3.0. I mean, we have podcasting 1.0 back 16, 17 years ago. Then you had, you know, podcasting 2.0 as it's getting more adoption. And then there are other advances that happen in podcasting. And now what I would say that's.

Like, you know, 2014 or so, 1314 to probably to 2020, like right up until 2020. And now what we're seeing is this sort of advanced use of it, this 3.0 version.

It really is advanced use. And when you think about it, you know, the reason I'm sort of sort of putting these labels on it of early podcasting, the next sort of level of podcasting, and now a third level of POD testing is that podcasters that started like we did, like a decade ago, Tracy. I mean, we were just experimenting, right? And we're putting out content and we didn't think about how we might organize it later. And that's okay. I mean, but I think that especially when you didn't maybe have a plan, although we did have A plan. With our first podcast, one day a week was an interview episode. We had a couple days a week where we're answering questions, and then we had different categories of things on different days of the week.

Educators, business content. And we could have categorized them. Now we did categorize them on the blog. So if you were looking for business topics, they're categorized on the blog. And so we would tell people to do that. But yeah, I see where you're going with this, Tom. So you're really looking at like these kinds of categorizations help people consume through the content. And that's where we find the binge listeners. Of course, the more they're. You're in their ear, the more valuable you are to them, the more they want from you, and the more likely they are to go to your website, look for something to subscribe to, download your book, you know, go through all of those things. So those are the people that we're trying to attract. But I think also just think about the way into your podcast. That's what I want to talk about briefly.

Okay, let me first finish that thought. I kind of want to stick the landing on it, which really is that now with new podcasters, or I mean existing podcasters launching a new show, you can consider this from the beginning, right? It doesn't have to be.

You can plan it out that way.

It doesn't have to be an afterthought. It doesn't have to be a post. Post rationalization. Oh, you know what? I have all these episodes in this kind of micro niche. I could create a playlist of those. You can actually plan it in from day one. You're going to do. And I'm doing that way of a new podcast we're working with hasn't launched her show yet, and we're going through. She's got three or four different kinds of episodes that she's going to be recording and we're going to be categorizing them in that way. Now, they'll be in the one feed initially, but eventually there will be multiple playlists. And so that's my only point is that now more advanced podcasting is thinking about these things, things early.

So within the idea of attracting someone new into your podcast, when you have a ton of content like they want to give you credit for that, they go, wow, this person has a hundred episodes or more. They must be really good at this. They're an expert in this. But the only thing they're doing is jumping into the most recent episode. They might be Listening to one or two of the earlier ones or anything that attracts their eye. But it's not necessarily getting the best episodes. The ones that your favorites list, the ones that you know they want to listen to, you're not giving them an opportunity to find those. So it's not always serving them well. So having a start here, like you can do that. So if you're new to the podcast, you can have a start here having multiple feeds that are actually syndicated. You can come in through their need and what they're looking for. So if someone's got like we were talking about Bell Robertson, she's got inspiration kind of meditations, they're short little episodes and then the longer sort of topic based, helping you through your stage of progress. Right. So she's got those two going on. If she groups all the inspirations into a feed on its own and has that out there, syndicated and published, I come in through those and then you make sure to send the message. And you can do that through the promo process. You can do it through a separated special outro, because you can when you have separate feeds, you can have a separate intro outro than you do on the other one. So you can also have separate ads, which is why that works for us with Hewlett Packard. Right? We have separate ads on those. So thinking about all that, you can have new, new intro outro, extra, extra ads. So you're, you have an ability to run those. That's a great way for you to promo, to come to the other type of content. So even though I may be like, I only got five minutes of time, like that's all I want to give to this and I'm only going to do five minutes a week. But then I go, oh, wow, there's some great stories over there. There's, you know, as you keep referring to it back and forth, you're cross pollinating your feeds and you're getting me to consume more because I like you, because I came in through the thing that I was the most comfortable with with. So that's an opportunity as well to cross pollinate the different feats.

You know, as we talk about this, I keep thinking of other ideas that I'm going to keep in mind for new podcasters we work with. Because I know there's some that are like business consulting podcasts. Like one of them that's very, very well listened to that we work with is consulting success with Michael zapiersky. It's got 250ish episodes. That's a lot.

He's prolific and very successful using the.

Ad system, promoting his programs, doing very well with it. And that's great. But I see as an opportunity you can have fun with it too, right? You could have. And this would get a lot of play, which if you're wanting to get a lot of people to take notice, either in promotion, on social or going to that landing page and signing up for some call to action would be the biggest mistakes people made in business. You know where you have stories in the podcast, over 270 episodes, there's probably at least a dozen stories of the biggest mistakes people made made that you don't want to make. And the boy is that, you know, bait to get people to go and binge through those 12 episodes.

So think about that landing page that you create with that, with your idea for that. And then these episodes with the stories from who they came from that are pulled out of your whole entire series, linking through. Remember, every single player, everything subscribed to, send them to the main podcast. If you want to do that, you don't have to send them to the subject feed, you can send them to the main podcast to subscribe. So that's a choice that you can make as well. So all of that is working for you. And then the last one we were talking about was, you know, making playlists on YouTube, right? And making playlists and playlists are really big over there, if you haven't noticed. Channels get overwhelming. I see podcasters too often create an entire podcast named after their show. So we just have feed your brand episodes. And it's just like all of that.

Their channel is just everything dumped there.

It's either their whole channel or they do create a podcast playlist, but it's just everything in the podcast there. So creating playlists, multiple playlists really help over there as well, because it's going to go automatically from one to the other to the other. You can also set the order differently over there, which in YouTube, it's a learning platform too. Like people really like to go to tutorials, kill it over on YouTube. Think about it that way, way so you could put them in a specific order that flows them better through the process that gets them to book a call with you, whatever that might be. You have an opportunity over there to do it differently because of the way playlisting works over on YouTube, then you do it anywhere else. You can organize that in a different way. You have to date things differently. You have to redate them, I'm going to say with a different date in order to Get a different order on a podcast cast feed because its default is always by the date it was published. So you can mess with that. Don't get me wrong, you can absolutely mess with that in a new feed. You don't want to mess with that in the general feed. Right. But you can mess with that in any sub feed and change the order. But in YouTube, you can mix up the order. You can put it in whatever order more chronological for the stages of things that you want without changing the dates of the videos, without having to do that. So it's actually a great opportunity to do that as well. And think about that. If you prefer to have video on your landing page, you now embed that playlist on your video page on the top of your landing page. And you've got that going on for you too. So everything's really working and playing together. So how do you do this, Tom? Like, let's quickly talk about how to do this. So I don't know any of what's.

How are you looking for?

Yeah. So the three things that you want to do is, what you're going to really need to do is go through your entire playlist, your entire show episode list. So the way I've done it before is I just print it straight out of my so out of the potatoes portal. I just print it page by page by page of the episodes and I just print it on a piece of document and I just go through that and go, you know, category, category, category. And I just put my notes, marketing 101, like, you know, just thinking about all the different tactics and playlists that I want to create. I think of that ahead of time and then I go and categorize them. And then as I'm categorizing them, I might think of one more or I'm. It might come to me that we need a sixth one or we need a different one eight year. And so because this doesn't fit at all, it also gives me an opportunity to go, I need to scrub that episode and get rid of it because it shouldn't be here anymore. So it's an opportunity to clean up your whole show and episode list at the same time. And it could be because you really feel that this episode doesn't live up to your new standards of how. Of where you con with your show or the guest maybe had some legal problems and you want to scrub them out of there. So like it can happen. It gives you an opportunity to check all of that out at that point moment. So I just do that What I do is then send that to my team and they take care of it from there. In our case with us, we'd be happy to help you through that. You can send it to the help team and they can create a sub feed for you based on that. So you just scan the PDF and you're done. And you just say, put them all in sub feeds for me. Our team can do that for you, or you can take it and you basically move them into. Copy them into the new feed. Super simple. Copy them in. Easiest way we find to do it is to copy your entire feedback and create a new feed. So basically you're uploading the same exact feed you already have. Give it a new name, give it a new cover art, give it a new description and then upload it into there. Create the new and delete the ones you don't want.

That's like the easiest way actually, if I can. The word you used might, for, you know, people that don't know us might confuse them and think it's an awful lot of work. You don't actually need to upload your individual to us. You'd actually importing your RSS feed into our system. It's all automated. But you're right, that's the easiest way. Duplicate the feed, which is what that does. Delete the episodes you don't want in it and you're left with the ones that you want and you can reorder them if you want to change the order.

Yeah, you have to re date them and do some things.

Yeah, you want them to go in. But yeah, to me, this is advanced podcasting. Especially when your podcast is an integral part of your business and serving your community and lead generating for the right types of prospects. You know, I think it's too easy for prospects to, for listeners to come into a show and they hear an episode with a really advanced topic and they think, oh, this is way over my head, I'm not ready for this yet. But if it's very clear that there are different paths for them and can step them into it, instead of jumping into the deep end of the pool head first, they actually can, you know, step in and wait a little bit, you know, whatever. I think it makes a lot of sense. Sense.

Tom's going to have a demo in our knowledge base, which some people call faq, whatever you'd like to call it. But in our knowledge base on productize.com there is a demo of how to import your feed. Like there's, there's definitely a demo on that but he's going to demo it in terms of how to import the feed, then delete some so you can recategorize and renumber them so that you'll understand how to do that, how to move them around and get that. So that's the first place you do it is in the feed. Then you decide if you want to syndicate it and you go ahead and, you know, make sure your description, new cover art, give it a different name and all of that, and you can syndicate that to send it, it goes to Apple, you can do that. If you choose not to do it, you still got your feed, you've got a new feed to use in a playlist in other areas, and you've got what you need to create that. The second thing then you're going to want to do is go into the show Notes now that you have your new shortlist, and let's say it's 10 episodes. I've got my 10 episodes and it's Tracy's Favorites. That's what I called it. And I'm only going to use it on my website. So I created Tracy's Favorites, which I have this section on my, on my thebingefactor.com you can see it on the homepage. It's Tracy's Favorites. And what I did was I went into each one the blogs for those 10 episodes and I gave them the same category, Tracy's Favorites. And the categories are in the blog section. There's an ability for you to create categories. We automatically, when we produce somebody's show, we put them under the name and. Or show notes. It's either episode show Notes or the name of your show, depending on what your website's like. But we can subcategorize them by adding a category called Tracy's Favorites. So now, now anything tagged Tracy's Favorites shows up in that section. So I can add to it frequently and easily and change that out at any given time on my homepage just from the blog without having to worry about what's happening over on the feed side if I don't want to.

So, Tracy, because this is a show for podcasters, I want to make sure we put a footnote here because you use the term about categories and you're talking about blogs, not blog categories. But podcasters often hear and understand the term categories being the category their shows listed in under, you know, Apple Podcasts. And you can be in more than one category. That is not what we're talking about here. We are strictly talking about blog categories and categorizing your episodes into playlists that make sense. And when you do that, a category can be anything, anything you want it to be. You can call it anything you want. You have no limitations. Whereas in Apple podcasts, they there's, I think, a total of about 100 total categories and subcategories.

You can type in any phrase you want. Yeah, you can call it whatever you want.

Call it whatever you want. Because in podcasting, the categories are kind of limiting. There's not a category that fits every show. We all sort of have to choose at least one category that our podcasts are in. And sometimes it's a, you know, lesser of evils type of situation. You know, nothing's really perfect. This one, I guess that's the closest I'll try that. This is not that you can really get very specific in your blog categories, naming anything you want and your playlist categories for YouTube and your podcast. The way we're talking about doing this, you don't have limitations. You have plenty of freedom.

Right? So then the last thing I do is I go to the corresponding video and from us, that's really simple because if I'm in the blog already giving it a new category, I can click the video link, go over to the video, and I just say add to playlists, and I can create a new playlist called Tracy's favorites or whatever you want to name it. And I can just click the button. It stays in its existing playlist, which is feed your brand episodes and now I've checked or the binge factor episodes, whatever it might be. And now I click the button that says add to Tracy's favorite playlist. And now I've got the video playlist all set. It took seconds to do it and super easy for me to accomplish that. The only thing you need to do is remember to be logged into the proper channel on YouTube. So if I'm logged in at poditized and I add to playlist, I only get potatoises playlist, not the binge factors playlist. So make sure you're logged into your company account account for whatever channel you're using for your podcast.

Always good advice. Some of us have so many different emails and channels and Google identities, it's hard.

That's why I say that, because I know some of you are really advanced in how you do it. You market under different youtubes and different things like that. So that's why I say that be logged into the right one, I've done it before and go like, why isn't this showing in My playlist, It's because I was logged into the wrong account.

Well, you know, Tracy, I think we've covered this topic topic very well. I think there's, you know, a lot more creative possibilities of what can be done with it. And I think any of you podcasters interested in that should, you know, feel free to get creative. What categories of playlists and episodes to go into. Playlists make sense for you? And guess what wonderful thing about podcasting? You can do it, try it out. If it's not setting the world on fire, you can change it up. This is not something you have to live with permanently. You can change it, reorder it, rename it, whatever it might be. So that's another great aspect of podcasting that I love.

Yeah. And we dropped that hint here today about sponsorship playlists. So you create a playlist, you're creating a feed that is sponsored. We talked about that with Hewlett Packard, and we have other clients that do it. And I dropped that hint a few times. Definitely something we'll cover in a future episode because it's really specific to monetization, and there's a way to do that. But thinking about this, you can actually plan, put the same episode into a different feed and put a different ad on it. So now when you looked at your feeds before and you said, oh, my gosh, I have only two ad spots per show that I can sell. Now you have the ability to create playlists and actually resell the same show itself with a different ad on it. Now you have the ability to do that in a different way, create more sponsorship, same content, actually selling a different spot on it. That's going to be really, really valuable to you at the end of the day.

All right, Tracy, why don't we drop the mic there? Thanks so much for listening, everybody. We'll be back with another great episode next time. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazzard on Feed.

You'd brand.

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