Podcast Like A Pro with Tracy Hazzard, CEO and Co-Founder of PODETIZE From The Mediacasters With Julie Lokun and Corinna Bellizzi

Welcome to the Mediacasters with your business besties, Carina Bellizzi and Julie Loken. In every episode, you'll get behind the scenes access to experts who share their struggles and successes in podcasting, publishing, and presenting. So grab a pen, grab your bestie, and kick it with Karina and Jules.

Hey, Jules, how are you today?

Well, I'm doing really good because we're going to get all like, Dukes of Hazzard today, aren't we?

You know, I wish we could have both of the hazards on, but today we're super thrilled to be joined by someone incredible that we've been collaborating with for a bit of time, and that is Tracy Hazzard. She is the founder and CEO of Potitize, who's our preferred platform for hosting. An incredible matriarch running a company that a lot differently than many other people in this space, and one of the only I know to be female led. So much podcasting on the technical side is just led by men. Men, men, men, men. So we'll get to meet him.

Men, men, men.

We got a woman in the house. Tracy Hazard. She's amazing. She's so smart. It blows my mind. I mean, and I just can't wait.

To talk to her about that first show she started, specifically in this hyper niche of building 3D printing. Right. So, Tracy, we're going to welcome you to the show right now. Thank you so much for spending this time with us today.

Hey, both of you. So happy to be here. Love media casters. Like, who doesn't want to talk about casting media, right?

I think, Julie, you know, you. You initially thought too, it was like almost like you're weaving a magic wand. We're casting spells and helping people to really reach more. More individuals.

The facilitator of dreams. The facilitator of dreams. You know, I love this about dream making.

I think I. So I think, you know, that's it. When you can create ripples of voices out there, right? You know, and it's just cascading into them, telling other people and inspiring others because of their show. Like, to me, that's just the best business to be in, is that I don't even have to. I don't have to know the thread all the way through it, but if I'm just setting off a ripple that's going somewhere, I love that.

So as we get started today, Tracy, I would just love to know a little bit more about your history. I know you've been in the product side side. You've worked to develop technologies I mean, you're kind of. You have a pretty incredible history and landed in this world of podcasting, became so passionate about it that you essentially built this. This new and different enterprise. So let's. Let's talk about that. What led you here?

So I, you know, I have a big history in product design and development, and for me, everything's the product. It doesn't matter what I'm approaching, if I'm designing software, if I'm designing a physical product, like a brand new microphone, or if I'm designing a system of how to run my business or how to run my podcast. So all of those things are design at the same time. So that's my passion, and it's been from the day I graduated college and met my husband and partner.

Go on. I just explains the connection to 3D printing, right? Because it's like you got people that were super passionate about 3D printing because they could essentially become creators of whatever they could imagine in their own homes. And so I just love that. I personally have friends who have 3D printers in their homes, and I'm constantly just curious about what's the next thing they're going to build or what's the next blueprint they're going to offer to other people in the 3D printing space.

Well, that's why we called our show WTFF, which is what? The Fuse Filament Fabrication. It's not a swear, even though that's what my mother thought for the first, like, year that I was doing the show. It's fused Filament fabrication is the geeky term for 3D printing. What we did by naming it that was tap off of WTF was popular. Marc Marone had just, like, had Obama on his show. So, like, it was really popular. People were searching for it, and then they'd see ours pop up. Like, you know, when you start typing wtff, the FFF would show up, you know, as an. As the next one on the list. And so we would just show up there. So that helped us, in conjunction, just get visibility for our show. But if they didn't know what it was, there was that curiosity factor. But if they did know what it was, they clicked it every time. And that's how we ended up with a hundred thousand listeners within a year. And it was just so much fun to do that first show. But what was more fun was to see what it did for us and our business. It was unexpected, and it blew so much up in our worlds. And I know it's done the same for the two of you. So I think this is a common find for a lot of people. So for us, that was 2015, which was pretty early on in the scope of podcasting, where our show was blowing up and getting that kind of visibility. We were written in a lot of articles, and I got an Ink column from. For. From with Ink magazine, writing on innovation because of it.

Wow.

I mean, you're an innovator, and I. How do you go from 3D printing to a podcast? I mean, like, there seems like there's a disconnect there.

Well, yeah, because it's visual, right? You know, 3D printing is like. It's an object. It's a physical object. And the real reason is I didn't want to have my hair done like it was. It's like, nice. The silliest thing, but, you know, but live streaming really hadn't taken hold back then. It was just this experiment. And so everything was still so structured in video, and video was so expensive still at that time to produce, and we just didn't want to take the time to do that. So what we would do is we would do this audio show about how we did it or what we were working on or who was really fascinating us in the 3D printing world. And we would just do the show five days a week. We did it, and we would just talk about these things, and then we would offer them up to go to our YouTube to see the print that was running on our machine at any given time, or go to Instagram and check out the photo that of whatever the object was. And so that was how it went. So we also increased our social media, and our following on YouTube just expanded along with the show. And it was just a fundamental of. I know you want to see this. Here it is. Like it was. We just stuck it there. We didn't do anything with it, but talk about it on the show. And it worked for us. And that's what we realized, is that the power of that platform build in podcasting was actually where the power was. And most people didn't know that. They thought, I build a podcast and people listen, and that's where everything lies. And it really wasn't for us.

Well, you've done a lot of trade shows, too, in your time, I imagine, and so have I. But one of the most innovative booths I think I ever saw was in the 3D printing space, in the algae space. Specifically, a company had chosen to bring the 3D printer there, and they were printing out a 3D copy of Yoda using Algae based plastics or pseudoplastics, I don't even know really what you call them, but he was like perfectly green Yoda. And so people would come back by the booth over and over again throughout the trade show just to see the progress that had been made on Yoda. And so I just think that this particular arena of innovation inspires that kind of childlike curiosity in us. And with a show name like wtff, like I would have grabbed that and listened. Probably brought people into 3D printing that probably had no idea really what it was back in 2015 as well.

Well, we really, I mean, we really did it as a business test. And this is where I think a lot of people come to us. Like, we knew the industry was shifting and we had been what we call ghost designers, designing for big companies behind the scenes, Martha Stewart Living, Costco. We would do products for Costco and all kinds of different places like that. And what would happen is that being that ghost designer, no one knew who we were. So we saw this Instagram world and thought, we need to get out front of that or we're not going to get enough clients in the future. Imports were changing. We were an expert in that. So how are we going to go about this and create this, you know, future business for ourselves? And 3D printing seemed like one of those options, but it would mean we were the end product producer. Right. And so, you know, in this case, it would be a design file, but they'd have to be as inspired by us as designers as they would the product itself. And so we realized we needed to have that sort of celebrity model, that influencer model. And we thought, well, let's try podcasting. Let's see how it works. And if we feel, if we find something that works here, then we'll, we'll figure out where to go from it. What we found really quickly is no one would ever want to buy designs from us. We thought there'd be like, you know, 14 year old boys in their garage being our listeners. And we weren't really sure that that part was going to work. What it turned out was we had retirees in the Midwest, teachers on the east coast who were struggling to figure out what curriculum to develop for their students in stem. You know, we had STEAM organizations that were actively trying to add the art, which we had. So add the art into stem so it makes it steam. Like this was like ongoing movements that were happening at the same time. So some of it was timing and luck in that sense, and some of it was because we had had 25 years of expertise. We were also the perfect people to bring that forward at that time. And TIFF tip that. So 650 episodes later, we had Hewlett Packard as our sponsor. Like, all these things went on from it. So it really cascaded into building something that could have been a business, but it wasn't the business we wanted. The business we ended up saying attracted us was to keep podcasting, to keep doing that, to develop that into a podcasting service business. And people would come to us and they'd say, WTFF is so amazing. How do you do it? And can you do it for me? And here's my credit card. I'll pay whatever you want. Like, that's how it started for us. Our first 10 clients were like that. And then we said, okay, well, now we have to design a system and a process and where are we going to take that? And how are we going to go from 10 to 100 to 1,000 clients and 10,000 clients? How. What's that path for us? And that's when we designed a new business and that's the way we. When we sat down to do it and we. It was a purposeful decision. It wasn't a, this is a side hustle. And then it expanded. It was, we are going to purposefully do that, and we're planning every step of that way.

You know, you mentioned a couple of things earlier that I want to draw back to. When you designed WTFF as your first podcast, you were already thinking about SEO. And I think one of the things that helped you to stand out at that early stage. But also, just as you're working with podcasters to build their platform so that they get the right people into their audiences so that they can continue to grow their exposure. You focus a lot specifically on SEO, so I'd love for you to speak to that.

Yeah, it is. SEO is powerful. But SEO isn't just Google search engine optimization via Google. It's also any bot that you're. Any search engine that exists anywhere. So when we're in an app like the Apple Podcasts app and. Or we're in Spotify's app, there's a bot that is controlling that search. What's coming up when you're typing into the. The app itself, same thing. We knew this from working on Amazon. Optimized listings for Amazon products is critical. You have to know how to title everything, how to put your bullet points, how to attract the consumer to them. But you also have to know, more importantly is how Amazon's algorithm works so that you show up on the first page when someone types something in relevant to the product that you're selling. So we understood how important it is to make sure that you didn't just put things out there without understanding who's actually controlling what gets seen. And that's that association power that SEO brings to everything. So it actually was at the core of everything we've ever done, because when we design a product that was on a shelf in Costco and the Costco shelves are gigantic, if the product was too small, it wouldn't be seen. Sometimes we design bigger boxes for things than they needed, even though that sounds like a waste environmentally. But if it didn't get sold, then we didn't do our job. So we would have to come up with ways to be thinking about this as, how are things being searched for? How are things being found? And so we call it being seen, heard, found, and rewarded. And that's kind of our motto for everything that we do, whether it was designing a product or designing a podcast.

And I mean, the surprise of a podcast, because you were pioneering podcasts. I mean, I'm not even sure the word where the acronym WTF was really in its. All its glory as it is now, you know, as we're texting it every single day to our friends, like, WTF? But, you know, WTAF, WTAF, WTAf. You know, I just see it as such an interesting path. And then you found this success in podcasting and you've taken it to exponential levels. And where does. Where's that born?

You know, it's. It's Tom and I together. It really is the two of us and the way we approach everything, you know, it is that designer's mindset that we came out of college with. So we both went to Rhode Island School of Design, which is kind of like an Ivy League design school. Costs that much, as my dad would say. Yeah, it costs that much. And so, you know, coming out of that is this design, thinking about the experience all along the way from everyone's perspective, but also understanding the layers of who's touching things and who's the decision maker in the process. So, you know, not that we design food because we never do, but if we were designing dog food, it's. While it's important to make sure the dogs love it and it's healthy for them and all of those things, but the real importance is to get the dog owner to see it, find it, and buy it for them. Right? So we have layers of people. We have to go through for everything that we do in the world. Moms control a ton of stuff that their families get, you know, in that process. So kids, things have to be designed that they're not objectionable to moms. So no matter how many times my girls will come to me and say, hey, mom, I saw this on YouTube and I want it. If I object to it, it's not going to happen. It's not coming into my house. So understanding these gatekeepers is a critical part of the design process, and designing out objectives is a part of the process as well. So what happens is that our services, our technology become easy to sell because we've already designed out the problems. We designed out those things in the beginning, and we're open to redesigning along the way, which is not always comfortable for a lot of companies and a lot of people. And so our process is built to continually learn and figure out what's not working and make adjustments for it. We're not perfect. Absolutely not perfect. We're, we're new, you know, we're a business that's only five years in, so, you know, that's young, that's still a startup stage. And we're doing it on a budget because we refuse to take investors before now. So. So, you know, all of those things make a difference as to how you approach it. And you've got to have that process where you can do that, compounding growth.

I love that. Just you speaking to the agility of leading your business and understanding those bumps in the road and always recreating and you know, what is on the horizon for you next. There must be something big.

Well, right now we have 108 employees, so we're getting, we've just tipped over that point where you have to take everything that you do within the company as seriously as you take it externally. Right. So that means that we are redesigning our training systems where before we could do this one on one kind of training, and that was perfectly fine. We now actually have to have systems for those trainings plus one on one support. We have, you know, corporate communications. I just sent out a memo. Like, I never, I said to Tom, I was like, I never thought I'd have to say a memo about how to communicate, like teaching people what the protocol for communication was within my company. I thought it would just be understood, but it's not. It's like, here's how you use chat, here's how you use email, here's how you use this and set a tone for how we want to run Our company, which is a little bit different. So you have to train people and put in systems internally and externally because they make a difference to your clients. Right. If our team is better at communicating inside, we're going to be better at serving the client on the outside. And so we want to make sure all of those are in place. So that's kind of the real core of what we're doing. Plus, we're in crowdfund raise mode. So, like, there's a lot of those external pieces where you have auditing happening and you have SEC regulations and you have investors who are scrutinizing what you're doing. So it brings you to a whole level of, you know, professionalism that you have to move into faster than if you were bootstrapping your organization all the way through and funding it yourself. So there's freedom in that, bootstrapping, funding, because you do have the ability to say, well, that's not perfect yet. We can still manually handle that. And we don't have to have a system for that yet. But the minute you get into, oh, we have to have documented every single little receipt, even though, like, they're all here in this email box. That's fine for me. For me, it's not so fine when you have to have audited financial returns presented to the sec. Right. So, you know, you have to look at that. It's like everything gets scrutinized.

You know, another company at your stage would likely just say, okay, I'm going to go and go the traditional investor route. I'm going to submit my company up in front of all these VCs and have all that scrutiny. But you made a choice to go in a different direction, which I personally really loved, because, for one, it means that you're not going to have any one investor that's, you know, kind of strong, arming you to do something differently. So I wanted to hear from you, like how as Tracy Hazard, CEO of her own company, in the potatoes world, like, this is the whole podcasting world.

Well, let's introduce Potties, because we really haven't even touched upon potties and the amazingness of potties and why we love ourselves some Tracy Hazard.

Well, thank you.

What is potatoes?

So, yeah, so potatoes. We are actually the largest post production company of podcasts. So we produce more podcasts, have produced more podcasts than iHeartRadio has produced. Yeah, I know, but they, you know, their shows are. Our shows are all independent. Right? They're all independent podcasters on our show where they're taking controlling and doing all the creative in that whole process. We don't do that. We handle everything from once to recovery cord and hosting and syndication. So we have software and services and we have, you know, group support. What I love about our company is that we said, you know what, we're not going to leave anyone behind. So we're going to develop group coaching programs. They're all going to come with your subscriptions. You know, we just made everything a part of it to keep that support going because we found that that was one of the biggest gaps for most podcasters being able to keep going. And so this is just kind of how we run the company. Potatoes is its front facing brand. We're actually Brand Casters Inc. Which is our corporate name, but really we registered trademark and front facing brand.

Yeah, we're the media casters and we had no idea.

I'm like brandcasters. Yeah.

You know, it was just great minds think alike.

It was a corporate name. And you know, Poditize actually came out of the fact that we lost a URL. And at that point it was about monetization. So we mixed podcasting monetization. We came up with Poditize and it was really just the best name. It just fit exactly what we were doing, resonated with the audience of who we were talking to. And our clients just came back and said, we love this because it's an alternative view of monetization and it is more than ads.

So let's talk about that because I think it's the number one question that comes up in any community about podcasting. How do I turn this into a money making process?

Money, money, money.

Right. And I think people have this idea that they can suddenly just start podcasting, put their ideas out there and become Joe Rogan. And that's not going to happen for 99.9999 probably percent of people. So not to say that your dreams can't be realized, but that the success comes from different spots, I think in the world of podcasting. So what is your take on monetization as it relates to podcasting?

Well, I mean, the reality is, is that the numbers speak for themselves right there. 98 of podcasts don't make money from advertising at all. Just doesn't happen. So it's not even, not even possible. So don't get discouraged. Listeners out of the 2% that makes money for it doesn't mean that they don't make money for their show or for their business or what they're doing, but they don't make money in advertising. And for the 2% that make advertising dollars, the minimum threshold for it to be worth their while is 20,000 downloads per show. And at that, most of the ads, ad systems, most of the processes treat it like radio and they treat it like only the forward facing catalog is worth anything. The back catalog is cheaper and not worth much. And that's a mistake because we know we have binge listeners and binge listeners start at the first episode and listen all the way through. Because a lot of our podcasting isn't about what's newsworthy today and only talk show stuff that cares about the future and what's next on our show. It also cares about what, what we talked about before, right? Our, our listeners care about those things. So there's a overall structural value that has changed. So now some of them are starting to look at them more like a Netflix series. But the problem with that is when your iheartradio or your Wondery or you're any of those companies out there that are building these types of shows as vehicles for advertising, that's how they start. They're like, I have this advertiser, you know, Coca Cola or whoever they might be, and we need a show to put that add on. That's how TV and radio have been coming for years, like for decades and decades. The industry. I mean I was just watching the documentary Amy Poehler did on Lucille Ball and the whole reason it happened was because Philip Morris agreed to, to bankroll her show. Like that's the whole reason she ended up with I Love Lucy. And so, you know, think about that. Nothing in Hollywood, nothing in those places happen without an advertising sponsor driving that. So if they're driving that, then what is the chance of your success rate? And in just like in any other like VCs, right? We were talking a little bit more about funding and going the VC route and everything. In VCs, they have nine out of 10 failures. But that one success is a unicorn and makes them loads and loads and loads of money. But nine out of ten failures, product design that I came from, seven out of ten failures. Home shopping network, 11 out of 15 failures. Like it's high in those industries of failures when we are developing commercial products for things, right? Commercial vehicles for things, right? But when you're developing a show from your business, your model, your way, you know that better, there's an audience to resonate against, there's something that they want from you, they're going to ask you for more. When our, our 3D print show that we were talking about before. They asked for more. They asked us to do longer shows. They asked us to do shows on educational topics. They asked us to help develop curriculum to. To talk about, you know, to help improve. And this is one of the things that I loved about that business we had because we were in so many different countries and Africa was one of them. They were. Africa and Brazil were having issues with power supply, so they would have rolling blackouts and rolling brownouts. And what would happen is that if your 3D printer stopped working in the middle of a print, then you would have to start all over again when you started it. And so sometimes the prints that we would Design would take 12 to 20 hours to print because we designed really complex large prints. And 12 to 20 hours, your chance of having a blackout in Africa is high. So they couldn't print our designs over there. So we worked with some of the manufacturers. We were able to be a liaison to point out this problem for them. And they were putting. They could put in a pause and a save if the power went out. It was a coding thing, super simple. Cost them nothing. And now they had a 3D printer that was viable in another country. All because we heard it on our show like that. Those are the things that are really powerful and where we can really get to and where we make differences. That company made more money. That 3D printer company made more money because they now had a new market to sell into. You can really make a monetization difference in your industry and your world in your own business.

But what you're also speaking to is thought leadership. You essentially positioned yourselves as thought leaders in this particular space. So you were able to push for the change that you wanted, which has, you know, it's. It's not necessarily always a monetary payback, right? It has. And maybe not an immediate monetary payback, but it's something that could then become a partnership or something that develops from there or establishes a new career path for you. Like, for instance, when I started Care More Be Better last January, I was thinking, heck, I've been in this world of sales and marketing for nutritional supplements for a long, long time. I want to work in more kind of this thought leadership perspective on the social impact and sustainability space. Perhaps this will end up being part of a career pivot for me. Maybe I'll work in as a corporate social responsibility advocate or consultant or something along those lines. I still haven't pulled the trigger on anything like that, but it was a way for me to explore that and also have the conversations I wanted to have with people I might not ever, ever, ever have had access to without the show. And so by creating the show, I was suddenly able to interview thought leaders like Paul Hawken or Mo Gaudet who are internationally renowned best selling authors and movers and shakers in their spaces. And so it meant that I was now rubbing elbows with people that I both admired, respected and then just getting this kind of, well, personal satisfaction that.

Well, you get, you raised your industry authority, you raised your thought leadership. You're making a difference and it's making a difference to your career. I mean, when I was doing the 3D print podcast, they asked me to give a sponsor speech at a low, at a an LA trade show. And it was like a big maker fair. So I mean it wasn't like a small audience, I must have had 200 people in the audience. But I gave a speech, like a nitty gritty granular speech about pricing your 3D print designs. So if you're going to go selling your designs, pricing your services and doing this, because I came out of the consulting and design world, this is something I knew. And the head of, of a new section of Inc. Magazine saw me speak there and she invited me to have a column in Ink magazine for this. And so I wrote then a column, I wrote over 400 articles for them on not 3D printing, but on innovation in general. And you know, how you, how you do things. All these nitty, this is what they asked me, like write about these nitty gritty things that everybody needs to know and learn. Wow. And that was a great, that's been really fun. It was fun. But then every time I turned around and I said in columnist, even now when I say former Ink columnist, people still use it to invite me. They invite me to speak because of it. So it had a long term residual value. And that's where I think we don't anticipate what we put out there. If we've done our job of making it, as you mentioned earlier, SEO, like we made it so that we're really searchable and we're really there for people and we're easy to find and we're always there, right? You know, hundreds of hundreds of episodes and articles late, later, right? We're always there. That authority, that thought leadership can't get taken away from you very easily. And a really good example is this is when Hewlett Packard came to ask us to sponsor their show. We'd actually stopped podcasting for the 3D print show because we'd been so much on it. I had three new shows I'd started here, the binge factor feed, your brand had already been well underway, which are my podcast for podcasters. And so I was like onto other things and you know, frankly, 650 episodes of 3D printing, how much more can I talk about? It was like what I thought. And so anyway, oh my God, I can't even imagine. I was done. I was, you know, I felt, hey, this is not pod fitting. I put my time in right, Like I've done with that. But when Hewlett Packard came to us, we had already been. We'd stopped podcasting for about nine months. And they said, and I said, why do you want to advertise with us? Why do you want to have us? They wanted to sponsor a series and actually ask us to do some interviews. And so I said, you know, first I'm going to charge you a lot of money because I'm retired, you know, I'm retired from that podcast. I'm going to charge you a lot of money, but why do you want me to do this? And they said, because we spent the whole year trying to get you off the first page of Google and we couldn't. So you don't realize value, right? The strength of the sustainability of the thought leadership you create is really your long term value. So those that quit their podcast and decide, oh, I can't afford to keep it live and don't find a way to keep their podcast live is making a huge mistake. This is portfolio value for you long term.

I love that portfolio value. I mean, you're doing so many amazing things and, you know, let's not be remiss, let's also say that, you know, you launched your first podcast right after you had your first or your third baby, right?

That's my third baby. Yeah, she was born.

And juggling all those, and juggling all those things and being a thought leader and using this as cachet for your expertise is so inspiring to me. It's giving me all these ideas that Karina should be a little bit nervous about. I got an idea.

You got an idea. I know. That's so dangerous.

My frustrated, let's go ahead and start six podcasts. No, wait, I got an idea.

She I actually said to her, I'm like, I want to do a true crime podcast or something. She's like, no, Julie, no, like a dog.

Like they said, sit, ubu, sit. You know, no, sit u boo sit.

And then the next day she's like, I'm going to start another Podcast. It's going to be a documentary about my family's journey. I'm like, hey, how come you get to start another podcast? And I don't.

I love it. I love it. It's addictive, right?

A little bit. Like, I get an idea and then I'm like, oh, I could run with this. The reality is I'm getting ready.

We start up new podcasts every year for our business. Right? It's our.

And that's so phenomenal.

I love that concept. So that's why I have. I have seven now. And we're just about to start our eighth and our eighth.

Who has that many podcasts?

Yeah, but do you know all of them aren't live wtff? We don't record anymore. It still has residual value. It still makes us money. I still get people reach out asking to advertise on the show. So which I can do. I just deploy them and it's done and they get advertising. So, like, it's easy for me to utilize that, but it's not something that I have to concentrate on every single day. It's upon request. I have product launch hazards. The new trust economy is about blockchain and cryptocurrency. I. I started that with a co host because, I mean, how could you pass up the opportunity to have co hosts named Profit and Hazard? Like, does that not sound like the best cryptocurrency podcast you could possibly have? Right? So she has two F's and two T's and I have two Z's in my name. Like, it just made it perfect. So Monica Proffitt actually manages the show now. It's all hers. She's still doing some amazing things, you know, defining NFTs and things that I don't know about. And I get to listen to my own show that I helped start, but I get to listen to it and go, oh, that's what that means. Oh, now I know more about that. And so my curiosity in that field just helped me move that one forward. So, like, there's all these little ones that we start them because we want to make sure we know how hard it is for our clients to start a new show and make sure that we've got our launching systems, our systems and processes are working. But then also, we might want to transition and try something. So this year, we're trying a private podcast for our crowdfund investors so only the investors will get access to it. And we wanted to launch this week, actually, but we've come up to a slight roadblock. Of something that we have to figure out how to block from a. From an algorithm so that we can make it available so you could listen to it over some apps, not all the apps, but we wanted to block it because Apple, when you. If you syndicate to Apple, then it automatically syndicates to all these other smaller podcasts, and they don't have blocks for private podcasts where Apple does. So, like, it created this barrier for us to understand how do we need to go about syndicating that to make sure that you can keep something private if you're charging for. For it, or in our case, we want to keep it totally exclusive. So we've created a new password protection system and some other things that we need to do to keep the feed private from being syndicated out further. And so, yeah, technical difficulties, but we learned that and now we have a model that somebody else can use and we're launching a show. So we're also testing out what that's like. Are we getting, you know, testing out a. So let's say you have a community like the mediacasters community, and you say, okay, we launched a show within this. How much does that community contribute to your listenership beginning, and then if you decide to then expand it outside of that, how much does that happen? So if you kept your podcast only within the media, your mighty networks, and kept it within that, like what. How. What kind of volume would it do? And then how much if you open it up beyond that? Because when we close out our round, we'll probably open it up beyond that and open up that podcast as well. We'll see what happens. Because that's a great case study and test.

Wow. Well, I know everything in podcasting is changing. It seems every month, like there's a new player that comes into the game with another app, or there is just a shift in what's working. And so I appreciate that constant commitment to staying new. I will also say I'm preparing to launch a podcast in support of a business that I'm connected to in the nutrition space. Right. And so being able to tap into that industry knowledge from you is something I'm really grateful for. And one piece that I want to mention, because this is something I actually got contrary advice on very recently. You guys are an advocate for actually using the 4000 character limit that podcasters are allowed to use in their description. And I know that some of the platforms don't pick up all of it. I think Stitcher is one example where they might just take the first, I don't know, 2,500 characters or something like that. But generally speaking, you want to use close to all of those 4,000 characters for that SEO reason. And the reason I like, I was skeptical at first too, because as a marketer I was like, well, they only really want the little blurb and you want them to just see the little blurb. But if you look at most of the platforms, you'll notice that they say, you know, just a little blurb and then read more. And you can choose to click on that. Read more.

Right, but most people don't choose to read more. Most people don't clear on that.

Yes. So you want that first bit to be like kind of your punchline. Right? Well, the moment that I shifted the moment that I shifted to having a full description for care more be better. That filled out that 4,000 characters that was written to optimize for SEO that yes, maybe spoke about some of the concepts in several different terms that then I might vernacular like use in a typical marketing document. But written out this whole way, I suddenly went to search for myself under social impact, sustainability or all these different terms on Google podcasts and I would be in that first set as opposed to like, you know, several scrolls through where you have to just kind of like keep going to see where I might crop up in this thing. So it was immediate. And so then I saw from that that I started to get selected by. For one, a team in Ohio decided to use my podcast as curriculum for their high school class that was learning about sustainability and climate change change. And I was like, oh my God, like it all happened as a result of shifting how I was approaching podcasting, how I was approaching my blogs on my website to support the podcast. I mean, and all of that came from you guys. So I just.

And keep in mind that they have no idea how many listeners you have. Right. None of that matters because they see you showing up first and they see see you showing up again and again in all these different places. So for them that means authority. Even without the backup of how many friends you have or how many, you know, how many listeners you actually have. Right. It doesn't matter. That to them is a sign of authority. So I love that working.

Yeah.

Google is queen. And everything I do for my businesses is based around Google. So the SEOs are. So it's true.

Like Gmail business.

Yeah, that's why we recommend YouTube, frankly. Because if you embed YouTube videos and YouTube's own by Google and we embed them into your website, into your blog, you're going to get bonus points. Why would you skip the bonus points? Right.

Right. You know, why. Why skip these things that are when we're independent? And this is why we do this. Right. You know, I heart and Wondery and Spotify's corporate shows can afford to be lazy about using 4,000 characters because they control the algorithm. They can push themselves out. They have an in. Us independents don't have an in. We have to use what's available to us. And if they say there's 4,000 characters, there's a reason for there to be 4,000 characters and we should use every bit of it. And that, that's, you know, that's how we feel is our job is to make sure and understand how that works. Works advise you to do something that takes advantage of that. That's the things, the repeatable success things. That's what I care about.

I've experienced such wonderful growth on Potted Ties and it's amazing. Super easy to use. And I mean, the numbers speak to what a great job you're. You guys are doing for us little podcasters.

Well, and little things I've learned like you're not supposed to have. I guess if I have more than 300 episodes, I'm going to need another stream. Yeah, but if you get more than 300, all of a sudden Apple won't show those older shows, right.

Like, and if most people are listening the volume over. Right. And that happened to us when we hit our, our 650, you know, when we were hitting that. And what we found is that is that 300 is still too many for people. Right. So we try not to do volumes any bigger than 200 episodes. And if we can do them in one hundreds, we, we do them that way. Just recommend it. I gotta slow too much down. No, no, don't slow down. Just create another one. Just create another feed and. But what you don't want to do is this is a mistake. So somebody says, well, I'll start a new feed. Right. Instead, what you want to do is you want to roll your old episodes into the new feed and keep your current feed because that's where all your subscribers are. So you don't, you don't want them to have to start out. But what you'll find is that aggregate over time, the different volumes will end up with their own listeners. And listeners will go, oh, I finished and joined the next volume, and join the next volume. So you actually end up with listeners across all the volumes.

Right, well, and you make it easy because with every subscription you get Five feeds. So that's awesome. And enables you to do this.

Brilliant.

So I love that and I just feel like I've always got really sound advice from your team, so I appreciate the community. I'm happy to be one of the many people who is now a. An official.

I'm a positizer.

Yeah. We love having you a part of our community and we love so supporting Mediacasters group because we strongly believe that your support makes the whole industry rise. And so when. When anyone where you need to get your support, please go out and seek that. That's what we want for everyone and build something bigger.

It can be lonely.

That's right.

It can be lonely. But it's never lonely without. With Tracy Hazard and Karina Velezzi by my side.

Well, I love you too, Julie.

Well, listen, Tracy, we just thank you so much for spending this time with us today for your support of the mediacasters and for everybody in the world of podcasting, because all I get from you and your team is that you're here to help and the advice that I. You even hear. I listen to your podcast brandcasters. Really, really great. I mean, the binge factor, really, really great. You know, you get. You give people really sound advice. So I just appreciate that. And while you've got me as a listener for life, I look forward to that.

What. What's the name of your next podcast? Your next year?

It. It's Potatoes because we're, you know, it's branded for our. But it's worthy news and notes, so.

Oh, that's brilliant, girl.

Yeah, I love it because we're talking about the industry. We're talking about what's going on in the world, so the world of podcasting, mind you, but.

Okay, so at the end of every episode, we ask all our illustrious guests to say, kick it.

Let's kick it.

Okay, you ready?

Your turn, girl.

Let's kick it.

Kick it.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Mediacasters. You can keep this conversation going and kick it with Karina and Jules in live office hours each week. Visit TheMediaCasters MN Co to sign up and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whenever you listen. Let's kick it.