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Hi again, I'm Melanie Hershorn, the digital content creator and marketing strategist and coach for women business owners. And welcome back to another episode of VIP Access. VIP stands for visibility, impact, profit. And this podcast will get you inspired and fired up about content creation and marketing yourself and your brand. Each week you'll get marketing and mindset strategies, actionable tips, and the motivation you need to land more clients, nurture your leads, and position yourself as an expert in your industry. We also go behind the scenes with powerful women in business to discuss strategies, messaging, and more. My mission is to empower you to stop spinning your wheels and to make your mark with your marketing. Ready to wow your ideal client and create a community of raving fans? Let's dive into today's episode. hi again. I'm Melanie Hershorn, digital content creator and marketing coach at VIP digital marketing Masters. Welcome back to another episode of VIP access. This is a podcast for women entrepreneurs to get inspired and fired up about marketing their product and service-based businesses. We go behind the scenes with powerful women in business and learn about the importance of getting your brand's message out into the world. Whether you're just dipping your toe into entrepreneurship or you're already well on your way to world domination, this is the place to get strategies, actionable tips, and the motivation you need to get your messaging on point. Ready to get tips from the pros to help you attract your ideal clients and customers and position yourself as an expert in your industry? Let's dive in to today's episode.

Hi, and welcome back to VIP Access. I'm Melanie Hershorn. Today's guest is Tracy Hazard. She's a seasoned media expert with more than 2,600 interviews from articles in Authority Magazine, BuzzFeed, and her Ink Magazine column. And from her multiple top-ranked video casts and podcasts like the Binge Factor and Feed youd Brand, one of CIO's top 26 entrepreneur podcast. Tracy brings diverse views from what works and what doesn't work in marketing, branding, and media from thought leaders and industry icons redefining success around the globe. Tracy's unique gift to the podcasting, marketing, and branding world is being able to identify that unique bingeable factor, the thing that makes people come back again and again listen actively, share as raving fans, and buy everything you have to sell, which is of course very important. Tracy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, my pleasure, Melanie.

So let's talk about podcasting because you are like the podcast queen. And I think that people don't realize how incredible a tool it truly, truly is for your marketing, for your branding, for your business in general. so, you know, what turned you on to podcasting in the first place?

Well, I didn't want to have my hair done for video, number one. But, I mean, that's the original story is we had the choice of doing that six years ago, and video was harder back then. It's easier now. And about 60 of my clients. And of course, I do all of my podcasts on video, too, right now. So that's no longer an excuse, but it was at the time. But, you know, podcasting was just more accessible. It was easier to edit. It was easier to Construct a show, lower cost to get started. You just needed a microphone and a recording computer. At that time we used Skype, but we've since abandoned that and use Zoom all the time now. So, you know, these things were just easier to do. And it's a smaller pond. Like that's what I always like to say to people is like, and then they'll say, Tracy, but we just hit a million podcasts on iTunes and I'll say, yeah, but only 300,000 of them are actively posting. So it's a really small environment when we consider how many billions of websites there are and YouTube videos that are watched every day. It's still a small playing field, and that's really important. When you can still be seen, heard, and found somewhere, you need to go there.

Absolutely. Like, I find it so crazy that I'm the only person with the last name Hershorn in all of Apple podcasts, like, in the whole world.

I'm the only hazard except for another Tracy Hazard, but she's a musician.

Okay, so she doesn't count.

So, yeah. And actually, the funny part is that because of how often I post, as opposed to how often she releases a new song, I beat her out in search engine every single day.

That's fantastic. Is that your married name?

It is my married name, yes. But I've had it for 29 years now. So happy.

It's a long time. I said when I got married, I said to my husband, I love you, but I've been Melanie Hirschhorn for 28, 29 years. And when you Google me, it's me. And I'm not taking your last name.

Sorry.

Yeah.

See, I was, that was pre-internet for me, right? So, yeah, nobody knew me and my name. I was incredibly mispronounced all the time. So I was like, everybody knows Duke's a hazard. So like, they won't mispronounce this. And it was just a cool last name.

So I gratefully took it and upset.

My father in the process.

I know you can't make everybody happy, right?

That's right. So let's talk about the longevity of podcasting, right? Because if you keep it up, it can do really great things for you. But you just pointed out the fact that there might be a million podcasts, but only one third of them are actually active.

Yeah, you know, this is the thing. If you can do anything consistently and constantly, you're gonna find a great return on investment, but most people won't stick it out. They're not in it for the long game. And podcasting is a long game, but the best part about it is that it has compounding interest. It has compounding effect over time. So your authority in the marketplace grows, your Google ranking will grow, your iTunes ranking grows, right? Or Apple Podcasts, whatever you wanna call it, right? All of those things grow over time. more you put into it. So the more podcasts you create, the more consistent you are doing it every single week. You know, I was telling a real estate podcaster, I was, she was saying, I was thinking about doing seasons like this. I get a lot. It's a very common thing from publicity firms who work with people who want to start a podcast is they are like, they just want to drop 10 episodes. But what does that do? See if it works, right? It does nothing for them. I was like, you don't even recoup the amount of time and energy It took you to set up the show and do that with 10 episodes. I would say, okay, if you're going to do that, at least do a 25 episode season. Because then it's a full page on the Apple Podcasts list and it looks like you tried a little harder than doing 10. 10 looks like you quit before you got started. And so anyway, but what happens with that is, is that when they only do a season, what happens is that it's like all of a sudden you've been putting away money every single week into your savings account, into your kids' college savings, and then all of a sudden you say, okay, I'm going to skip the next three months. Nothing changes. You don't compound the interest. And then when you come back, you have to start again to start that compounding model again. So it doesn't have the same effect, but it's even worse in the digital world because once Google decides and Google's.

The ranking, you know, Google is King here.

That's right. Once Google decides that you dropped off the face of the earth, it's going to take you months to earn their trust again and get back in the process. So a little hiccup in the process isn't worth it.

Right. Not only that, so it's going to take you longer if you stop than if you keep going right now.

Exactly. And this is the thing. It's like, look, we're out here to build trust. So if your business, if your business is about coaching or about serving your community with consulting services, providing whatever it is, there's a lot of competition out there in every industry, whether you're in financial management, real estate, publicity, right? You know, there's a lot of competition for what you do. How do you set yourself apart and build trust with a community? Well, building trust, it's built on integrity, doing what you say you're going to do. And if you say you're going to show up every week and you show up every week, that speaks volumes to people in terms of them coming back and trusting you with their business.

Absolutely. Well, I was literally born to be in front of a microphone. So this podcast, they're going to have to pry the mic out of my cold dead hands to get this one to stop. But you're right, it's so much about the long game. And that really is about marketing in general, content marketing. specifically, people so often want to just have something, you know, let's just put something out there and see what sticks and then nothing happens and then they give up. And I feel like with podcasting specifically, it is so important to not only maybe have your own podcast, but what about being a guest on people's podcasts? What can you speak to about that? Yeah.

So I recommend guesting because what you're doing is you're crossing audiences, right? But the idea of guesting is that the audience has to be a right fit. So a lot of my podcasters are content marketers or content marketers recommend a lot of the podcasters who come on my platform. So my coming on your show here is a logical connection of audience. Plus you exposing your show to my audience by sharing it out on my social media. I'm sharing someone who got more expansion on the interest and area of which I can offer my listeners. So it's a really nice collaboration between us in that process. So if you're guesting under that model of matching audiences, you're going to do a lot better, both from who you bring on your show and whose show you go on.

Absolutely. And, you know, when people say, well, what's the ROI? What do you tell them?

Yeah. So I'm into alternative ROI.

Ooh, I like that. Alternative ROI. Is that trademarked? I love this.

No, I don't think that one is. We call it alternative monetization here because that's what people and podcasting, they tend to ask about the monetization model, not about return on investment. But I'm always into a multi-level return on investment. So I want to have an authority return on investment. So that's an alternative model of where I'm building up my digital authority, because that's where I care about, because that lasts. So if I can build up my Google ranking over time, the organic traffic to my website, my keywords, if I can build all of that at once, I want to do that from doing one thing. I want to be able to also then keep and maintain my mail list and my audience. Retention is an extremely important return on investment that we overlook. It's a whole lot harder to get a new client than it is to keep one that you already have. Same things with fans and subscribers. So that's an important ROI that I look at all the time. And then the last one is, is that I just need to be relevant and want to make sure that I'm out there and people know that I'm a thought leader in this industry. So producing that content and making sure that that's constantly into my blogs, into my social, into all the different places that I wanted to go, my YouTube channel, right? Making sure that all of that happens is extremely valuable return on investment for the things that I want to do as a marketer. But when I look at it at the end of the day, the real return on investment is in how fast I close my sales. Oh, and that's what I found is mine. It's different for every person, but we close sales much, much quicker. People don't reach out to us until they're ready. so I don't have to go through a funnel. I have a pipeline.

That's awesome. So when people work with you, is it to start up a podcast of their own or are there different facets of how you work with them?

That's a great question. So we have multi-levels of it because we help existing podcasters maximize their show. We have a hosting service that comes with coaching so we can help people's show grow. So we work with just as many existing podcasters who already have shows but who want to get more They realize they're onto something, but they maybe didn't have all the strategy and the right pieces to start with it, or they're ready to really maximize it and make some money off their shows because we have some unique software and features of how we can do that once a show is established. And then we do work with lots of people to set up and start. Our trick is and what our special sauce is, is the strategy piece. If you start yourself with the right strategy, and sometimes it's a hypothesis, you might be wrong with what people love. When we started our very first show, which was on 3D printing and totally geeky, we had this premise that we would build an audience and we would sell them files of 3D printed designs. And they said, no, no, no, no. We don't want that from you. In fact, we wouldn't pay anything for that. But what we really want you to do is keep producing this information. And so you might be wrong about what you should make, but you're not always wrong about the audience connection. So we want to start with a strategy. We want to test against that strategy and then shift the show to make sure that it stays with that. So that's kind of why most people work with us because we do all this stuff for you. So like there's no technical stuff, but our advisory and strategy along the way is going to keep you making sure that you achieve the outcome and goals you set for yourself.

And you know, that's really across the board with content marketing. It is about strategy, but it's also about always having new content.

That's right.

Feeding that content beast. So how far in advance should somebody plan out their content for a podcast, for example?

So I have a lot of podcasters who are a year out, like, seriously, they do interviews and they have a year out. And, you know, and that's partially because they've set a pace for themselves of how much budget they want to spend and what they want to do. I run five shows myself. I'm the host of five different shows. Now, some of them I don't post. I'm not the only host, so I don't post every single week.

Right.

So somebody else does three. I do one, you know, that kind of thing. But for the most part, I want to make sure that I'm not more than 30 days out. And that's because the energy of having someone interviewed on my show or having a topic be relevant becomes irrelevant within 30 days. And the excitement over it and their willingness to share and the value that you get lowers the farther out you do it. I understand people want to take vacations, they want to take time off, they want to bank them up. And I get that. And I do have banked backup, I'm going to call it like, you know, evergreen topics that I want to cover, but they're not urgent and they'll be there in case, I get sick and my voice doesn't work or, you know, an interview falls through. I always have a few of those on hand. But if I'm 30 days out, there's no way I'm not in the rotation of being able to make up for that at, you know, at a moment's notice.

So for our listeners who don't know what Evergreen is, it's basically something that is valid and relevant today as it will be in maybe three years from now, and it's not really tied to something timely. But if you don't have something evergreen. Let's say you're talking about an election, right, at a specific time, and then the election already happened. So what do you recommend to somebody who's, you know, banked things and now it's kind of obsolete? What do you do?

You know, I actually have a show that does that. So I have one of my shows that does that, and they've had to lower their, their time frame so that they're really only about a week and a half out. so that they're about 10 days out from when they post. And what they do is they air the raw video immediately. So within 24 hours, the video goes up unedited because most of us don't edit video, which is stick a bumper on the beginning and end so that YouTube will go in, then the podcast follows within a week, and then the blog post follows a few days later. So like it's coming out, but it also helps them push out the social for it. So immediately they can promote the video, then they can promote the podcast, then they can promote the blog or any images or charts or anything that goes along with it. So it gives them a continuous week and a half long promotion of every episode anyway. So it actually works out really well for them.

So if that's all the same stuff, it's all the same content, right? Right. But they're able to use, spend an entire week and a half promoting it.

So how cool is that, that you.

Can do one thing and use it to cross promote and repurpose? You want to speak to repurposing and the beauty of it?

So we repurposed in like, it's an extreme, such an extreme way here because, because my shows have a lot of episodes, right? And a lot of it is always evergreen or things we reuse or point out new things. So I have a meeting later today with my social team to try to simplify it because we have too much content to post. And so that's a really great problem.

It is, right?

And so, yeah. And so we want to make sure, you know, the relevant things are coming up. and how do we decide what we pull out of our evergreen actually is the way that we're looking at that is that do we have that? But for every single show we create for our clients and for ourselves, we have up to seven assets possible. And when I say assets, that's something you might share on social media, post on your website, put somewhere. So of course we have video, we have the audio, which is going to go into the podcast, and we have a blog and the blog goes on our website. so those three things are core to everything that we do. The blog has a graphic header. It has a square, a thumbnail that might be on the website. That's two more. Then we also have a video clip that we use, and that's usually a raw clip that we'll share on someplace like Instagram or LinkedIn. So where you don't want the fancy bumpers and you don't want to have lots of graphics, you just want to have this nice little 30 seconds or so that gives a teaser about what the episode's about. Sometimes we do a longer one. We might do up to 10 minutes on LinkedIn. That's if the topic is just really important. and so we have the clips. So those are there as well. We have audiograms, which is basically taking our voice sound wave and showing a visual of it. Even though we have the video, the audiograms do really well. We repurpose those and they do really well in Facebook now, but they mostly restarted in Instagram and just kept sharing them to Facebook. And for some reason, they're doing so much better than our regular posts that we just use those anyway because people like to turn the captions on and don't always want to listen to the sound of something. so they can see that caption running below it and so they can see it without having their sound down. So that works really well there. It also works great in Pinterest. So we repurpose in Pinterest as well. So those are just some of the many things that we create. We also create graphics for every single guest that comes on a show. And it's a quote graphic of not only what, not what they say, but what I say as the host about them. So it sounds like a little testimonial-ish. So they're more likely to share it than they would. We actually call that ego bait because it gets them to share it where if you gave them a graphic of their quote, it feels like they're posting into their own social media a quote from themselves. It's a little odd. It makes you feel like you're dead. Like, you know, you died and now here's a quote. Your eulogy. Like attributed to you, right? It's just a little weird and people are hesitant to do it. So we found that flipping it and having it be something you say about them works a lot better. That being said, we also do want to have great thought leader style quotes that we then use elsewhere. So, you know, you're looking at that. That's like seven plus really different assets.

That you could create all from one. podcast episode.

And then really think about it. One Zoom meeting either with yourself or with a guest, right?

Brilliant. I love it. Tracy, thank you so much for joining today. This has been so awesome to talk about podcasts. I love it.

Thank you for having me, Melanie.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of VIP access. We can't let the fun and here, please join our private Facebook group at VIPdigital.live/community, where you'll get live trainings and other great tips all about digital marketing. And if you've enjoyed listening to this podcast, head over to iTunes and leave me a rating and a review. This tells iTunes that you found the show helpful, and they'll share it with more women entrepreneurs like you. As reviews come in, I'll be reading them on podcast and you will get a shout out. Have an amazing day, friend. And remember, your message matters. You've written a book. Now what? If you're ready to implement a simple content marketing strategy to create buzz around your book and your brand, Schedule your free Sparkles and Strategy call with me, Melanie Hirschhorn, at ContentStrategyCall.com Thank you so much for listening to this episode of VIP Access. We can't let the fun end here. To find out how engaging your content is, take the content quiz at MyContentQuiz.com Plus, you're invited to join our private Facebook group at VIPDigital.Live /Community where you'll get live trainings and other great tips all about digital marketing. And if you've enjoyed listening to this podcast, head over to iTunes and leave me a rating and review. This tells iTunes that you found the show helpful and they'll share it with more women business owners just like you. Thank you so much for listening.