Podcast Live Streaming Setup Guide For Engaging Your Audience

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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

Hey everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard. Today we are going to talk about going live, podcast, live streaming setup and a guide for engaging your audience. So not everybody records or podcasts live. Let's just state that right up front. In fact, the majority don't.

Let's talk about the fact this is our two year anniversary of doing it live.

Really? Right now?

Yep. We are on two years now.

I did not remember that.

Yeah.

All right. So I mean, Tracy and I each co host or host a number of different podcasts and you know, occasionally we would go live or do something live related to our podcast. But for me anyway, this is the first podcast that I really record pretty much every episode live. I forget about some of the shows you've been involved in, Tracy, but for the most part, we would pre record all our episodes and never record them live. But for feed your brand, for two years we've been recording them live. And we should talk about why we do that and what our purpose is because it's not necessarily a fit for everybody. But if it's something you want to do, there's some things you need to know and how to do it in the best possible way.

Yeah, because we're really going to talk about the fact that this is not for the spontaneous. Those of you out there who like to be spontaneous, this is not for you. For those of you who have no systems or process or team, this is probably not for you either. Even with all of our systems, process and teams, it took us two extra months. We were supposed to start in September of 2022 and we ended up not starting until November. So it took us two extra months than we wanted it to. So this is our podcast live streaming setup guide for those of you who want to engage your audience via live streams, who want to use this to engage podcast listeners, foster community, do things with a real time live stream. Strategy. You need strategy and systems. That's what we're here to talk about today. We're talking about that setup guide side to getting started to do this you can go live spontaneously. You can go live. We used to go live on a monthly basis into our Facebook group. Right. Like, we could do that. But it was an afterthought, not a planned promotion and live streaming strategy. Totally different thing.

Yeah, it was supplemental, I would say, is another way to say it to our podcast episodes that were recorded and not live streamed. So there are many reasons why people might want to record their episode live. Or honestly, there's maybe more of you out there that are doing other weekly, monthly live streams anyway to your community. And this should be something you really pay attention to, because if you do it right, you can repurpose them as a podcast. And for us, what we're doing is showing up for our existing customers who want to and are able to join us live every week and providing them value. But recording the first, let's say half of that session as an episode of our podcast, it's kind of live demonstration for them. And then if anybody wants to get our information first soonest, they need to show up live. That's one reason you might want to do it, providing additional value, more value. People can get it first if they show up live. Not everybody can. But you have to wait a few weeks, at least in our case, until it comes out as a podcast that you can listen to anytime or watch anytime on YouTube. So that's one reason you might do it.

So we have three. So there are three reasons, three prongs to this strategy that we put in place two years ago. And the first one is a sense of urgency. So wanting to start a podcast and getting out of permanent potential and getting your podcast going, there's an lack of urgency to it. There's lots of planning, there's lots of things to do. There's lots of ways to get in your own way for it. So by creating the sense of urgency that comes with a live stream where we're discussing it, it starts to push people along. So that's part of what we did with the live stream. It's like you're getting it here. If you want this help, you got to show up. It's part of why we started our coaching call to begin with as well. Right. It's like, you got to show up. We're here for you. And we create the sense of urgency by adding a topic to it. It helps to also move things along for our existing clients and for those that need more information about things. The second part of it is that it taps into a marketing algorithm. It taps into a social media algorithm that is pushing you out there. So it gives you the boost that you need because you're live streaming, and they want to encourage that and they want you to do more of that. Now, that isn't in any. Every social media doesn't all work like that. They all have their different algorithms. But for the ones that we specifically have chosen to use, this is a part of that algorithmic strategy that we put in place. And then the third thing is, is that Tom wouldn't show up if people weren't there. That is. I could tell you this from years of podcasting with him. If I make an appointment with him, he will cancel on me, but he will not cancel on you. And that's how I can be sure that we do not miss a single date in our editorial calendar. Because Tom always shows up for other people. I do, too. But I have. I have guests on my show, so it's easier to make an appointment with somebody else and to have them show up. Right. So if you need something that forces you to create content, a live stream is a great way to do it. If you don't have guests, it's a great way to do it if you also need to have something that you show up for your community for. So this way, we found that even if only two people showed up to our coaching call because it happened to be a busy month, it's not going to matter to us because we know we're also live streaming it and we're reaching out to the outboard community. So it gives us this broader sense of purpose to the calls, keeping us engaged and doing it. So those are our three reasons for doing it. That's part of our unique strategy. So anything that we've done from a tactic standpoint or from the system standpoint taps into making sure that we're accelerating one of those three things.

I don't know that I agree with you that I would never show up. That's a little extreme, Tracy, but certainly showing up live for our customers, you.

Would cancel more often than not.

I might delay it a little bit. Yeah. For one thing. Good. One good reason or another. But no, it does compel you to show up on time. So if you're one of those people that struggles with time management and accountability. Yeah. Then having that live stream. Oh, my gosh, I need to be there. Can be a good thing. Other people would be more annoyed if they have to show up at the same time every week.

The spontaneous ones. Right. Like, that's what I said. If this is not the way you want it. If it feels too much pressure, it's too much. It makes you, you know, look at the podcasting thing as a slog, then that's not the way to go. Right? We want this to be something for you, Tom, and I. I'm an extrovert. I love the audience even. I feel you out there. I know that you're there, and it makes me energized to give you a great show. So it's actually better for me that I do this life that could be you. So there's all sorts of personal reasons for why you might want to do it as well. So let's talk about the complex setup. Tom. Do you have any idea how many moving pieces of parts we have to the show side of everything that we.

Do, how many moving pieces we have.

Regarding pieces, parts, tools, like all of.

Those things just to the live stream.

To being able to go live, all the stuff that we have to do to get it to go live.

I'm sure there's a lot more than I realized, but I know there are a lot for sure. Yeah, there's about maybe what, 10?

There's about 12. There's about 12 different parts and pieces that we have to handle each week to make this work. And we used to, as some of you may know, we used to have an assistant who did most of that work. And it was fabulous for the last year and a half. I don't think we could have done it without her working through all the systems and processes. So the three key tools that you need are Zoom. We use Zoom webinars. We like the webinar model. It means that we can keep our community silent while we're doing the podcast so there's no interruptions, there's none of those meeting noises and things to go on. The webinar model allows us to do that. It also has a lot more of capabilities of programming and scheduling and other things that we want to utilize with our live stream process. So we use a webinar licensed Zoom. It's not cheap, so some of you may not find that as being too expensive for what you want. We use Restream. We've chosen Restream out of many, many different tools that we have tested and we did a whole evaluation before we chose them two years ago. And Restream allows us to pre schedule and puts events on LinkedIn and YouTube for us, but it streams out those events once we schedule them in their system. And that's the number one reason why we chose them. There are some drawbacks to Restream. I'm not gonna kid you. I really wish Zoom would just go straight to LinkedIn and YouTube. They don't. And they don't go to multiple places. So you can't do it without a third party software. So you're going to have to have some kind of third party streaming software.

That one puzzles me. Can I just say, and I'm sorry, I'm not interrupting your flow here, but that one really puzzles me. I don't understand why Zoom wouldn't make themselves more desirable by buying a company if they needed to like Restream and integrating that stuff right into their platform or. I don't know, There must be some good reason why they haven't done it. It may be because some of the platforms don't like Zoom. I don't know.

It's maybe coming. I don't know. There are some drawbacks to all of them. This is the one we've chosen. This is the one we will mention and talk about a little bit today. But we're not giving you a Restream tutorial. If you want to learn about Restream, we'll have a link to it in the description notes in the episodes, and so we'll give that all to you. The other thing, the third tool that you absolutely need is a prep doc. And so whether you use Google Docs or you use Dropbox Paper or you use Microsoft Office Doc, it doesn't matter what you use, but you are going to need a working document that you can collaborate and share with other people and members of your team if you have them, or you're going to want it all in one place for yourself. So those are the three main tools that I could not do without. If we're able to live stream, the other two tools on the side of that are the camera and the microphone. I just hate to say this because I've seen so many bad livestreams out there where you can't hardly hear what they're saying. There's too much background noise. Just get yourself a darn good camera before you do this and make sure that you're utilizing it in the right way. So we'll talk about a couple of those things as we go forward.

As a podcaster, I have to put my vote out there more that it's more important to have a good quality microphone, that your audio be the best it can be. Drives me crazy when you see people on the 24 hour, you know, news stations. I don't care which one you might ever listen to. And they have regular contributors that are on there every day, every evening, and they're from home, remote wherever they are and don't have a good microphone. I mean, these. You're in professional broadcasting. I don't understand how it's so hard for you to get what is very inexpensive, even a sixty, seventy dollar microphone to hook up to your computer to make your audio so much better. Everybody should do that.

Okay, Pet peeve over airpods are not a microphone.

No, they're not. Well, they're a bad microphone and they pick up every bit of white noise, background noise, everything going on in your environment. You need a microphone that's just getting you and making you sound the best you can be. That's more important to me than having a high quality video camera because depending on your Internet connection, that may not end up being what you hope it to be. Even if you have a great camera.

Yeah. So then the sixth thing is a good Internet connection. And Tom and I have had this struggle over time, like where we really had to dial it in because we are sharing an Internet. We're actually in two different rooms, but we're in the same location. Right. So we're sharing an Internet. And live streaming can take a bit of bandwidth. So you do need to make sure that you've checked that out, you've tried it all. There's nothing worse than a glitchy video.

I agree. And in fact, even though you may have a professional Zoom account, or even if you're using another recording software or streaming software, then Zoom, they're limited by your Internet connection. And Zoom in particular, I mean, we have the kind of account that we could do full 1080 HD recording and streaming and recording from Zoom. But if your Internet connection, even if you have a good one, if for some reason something wrong with it that day and you don't have as good a bandwidth, Zoom will step down the resolution of your video to preserve the conversation and the bandwidth, which actually is a good thing to do. But this is why you need a faster connection. Even if yours is fast and the person you're connecting with has a slower connection, it'll take down the whole quality of the video. Now, not every system works like that, but Restream only works with certain systems. So make sure you're aware of these things and you, you know, test it and plan it and that what's the outcome you're going to get is acceptable to you.

Absolutely. So the next thing on my list is I'm going to call it a home base. Now we have the ability to use our Zoom events because we actually have beyond a webinar license, we have what they call an events license. And that allows us to create a home base that everyone can go through. And as long as they log into that event portal, they are able to get all of our past videos, our forward videos. You can use YouTube that way and create a live stream playlist and do all of those things out there. So there's other places you can do it, but I highly recommend a home base where you can track who's going to it. You can see who's logging in, you can see what they're watching, you see what they're doing. So for us, that's our website and that's podcasters united.org that's where we house all of the live streams, it's where we, we put all of the past recordings, it's where we repurpose all of our content. So those are the big top seven things that we need. And that home base, it's all in post production, it's all after the fact, but it is also notifications of what's coming as well. So you do have to be on top of keeping that updated and have team to be able to help you with that. I know how much you love home bases, Tom, so I thought you were.

Going to comment there how much I love home bases.

I do love, I love website as the home base.

Right, like that's website for sure. And I mean we have a, actually a URL to our own podcast.com forward/events, but it really forwards to the Zoom events space where all those recordings are. And no, I think it's very important. It makes it easy for people to go and see. Your new customers to just join this week can log in and see past events and then, you know, know what the upcoming ones are. That's very important to me. These are modern things that if you're gonna go live, you've gotta use some of these tools, be organized and also be everywhere. I mean, before Restream, we only went live to on Facebook, I think only at one point. And way back, LinkedIn didn't even have live streaming capability and now it does. And it's. Well inte all of us podcasters, I think we want, if we're gonna live stream, you'd want to be everywhere that you could possibly be. I mean, at least on platforms that you're gonna engage in or want to engage in. Right. Why pick one or another? Because you may have listeners that prefer one and other listeners who Prefer a different one. So do a one to many approach. And that's why we're doing this, and.

That'S what I wanna remind you here, is that a home base, its purpose is to have an archive of everything because not everybody can. And the problem with a lot of social platforms, not including YouTube, I don't include YouTube in that comment there. I don't think of it like a social platform. It's like a video library. So when you don't have a library function, they can't find your live streams. They're gone on Instagram, they're gone in LinkedIn. It's very hard to get back to them and find them when the event is over. So it is not a library. Storing it, you need a place to store it. And that's why that's such a critically important part of everything. So now let's get into the nitty gritty of like getting an event planned, right? Getting the live stream going. There are a few things that you have to plan ahead of time. And Tom and I start with the topic. So we actually start with the topic and refine it to a title. We start there. That's just our way of doing things because for us, the topic leads everything that we do it. We are all about search engine optimization. We're about covering topics that our clients care about, covering topics that lead generate for us. The topic itself is what we do. And we. I talked about this last a couple of weeks ago when we were doing AI or when we were talking about leveraging AI, right, that I utilized it to generate 52 topics for next year. And I'd say 90% of them are pretty darn good. So there's no excuse for you not being able to generate brainstorm ideas for topics. There's no excuse for you not to be able to write, refine them into a title, let in seconds nowadays, because I can click on that and say, hey, let's turn this into a YouTube ready live stream title. And I can give it directions and tell it what I'm looking for and who I want to attract to it. And my title is done in seconds. And I can even have four or five options to choose from. So there's no excuse for that. But the topic part always starts with us making choices about the time of year we're going to do it. And so this is not something that I think you should do with no human involvement at all. It's your show, it's your live stream, you have to talk about it. You better be passionate about It. So that one, I think is. Is where we start. I think it's the most important thing.

I agree. It is the most important thing. You need that roadmap. I mean, that. That's the foundation of everything, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. It's the roadmap. So we start there. That's like the place that we start. Then the next thing we do is generate some imagery to go with it. Because every tool that we use has some imagery that is needed. And we have a very simple template that we use that says weekly coaching call and live stream. And it just. It's overlaid on top of the image and the title and the short title, not the long title we use. It'll be the short type. It'll be like this one is podcast, live streaming guide or setup or something like that. It's super simple. And it's usually just the focus keywords with a little bit of activators around it. How to. Or, you know, the ultimate. Like, you might want to give it a caveat, right? Something like that. Keeping it very simple because you don't want a ton of words on your graphic. And so we use that in Restream, we use that in Zoom. It'll go out to LinkedIn. It'll be utilized in YouTube. So, like, it's always being utilized. Now we have to have three different formats for it. Like, that's a big pain in the butt. So I'm a big fan of Canva because it's so easy to just switch this up yourself, have a template set in there, do it once, drop images behind, change your copy and change your sizes. So you go from a panoramic size that works for zoom to the square that works for episode art, which is what we use on our podcast. But it also works really great in our newsletter. So, like, there's a bunch of different formats that we do. So we use the panoramic and square, and we have to have multiple sizes for the different tools or resolutions, if you want to think of it like that.

Now, this is really important. I want all our listeners to really understand and pay attention. Most of you that prerecord episodes, you just jump in and record your episodes. And if you create unique graphics for every episode, and that's a big if. Cause I think there's a lot of you that don't. I, you know, when I meet with podcasters every day, more probably don't than do create a unique image for every episode. We highly recommend you do. But let's just assume you are going to do it. You really don't have to think about doing that till after the episode is recorded or even after you've edited it. And you just go and make up a graphic before you go publish the episode. But you're going to go live if you're, you know, wanting to plan it properly and even promote it, raise awareness of it ahead of time in advance. Like we're doing for these lives of Feed your Band. We have a little nextup podcast we're publishing two days before. We're doing some social media promotion with it. And you've got to do it before. And so this is why the title and the topic generation that Tracy was talking about and did AI generated 52 and did it before, and we have those things ahead of time is so important. Because even if you have a template worked out in canva, what are you going to say about this episode row? Really? You're just going to use the title mostly and some catch words or a portion of the title, an abbreviated title. But if you don't know what the title is, you don't know what you're going to be talking about. Pretty hard to promote it, don't you think?

Absolutely. And some of those are advanced things that we'll talk about at the very end, like other things you can do with it, like do the next step and repurpose as the podcast. But that comes into the next thing, Tom, that we prepare. And so you need a description, right? You have to put a description in, a summary of what you're going to do. And how easy would that be to just have your assistant write it or your social media team write it. But here's the problem with that. In your event description, in your live stream event promotion on YouTube and on LinkedIn, it needs to attract people, needs to get them excited, but it also needs to be relevant to what you're actually going to talk about. And only you know what that is. So Tom and I have come up with a process and a format that we do, and basically, who's ever more passionate about the topic, we actually assign it to them. So this was my passionate topic, but also I'm more experienced in it because I handle all the setup in the background side of it. So if you saw our next up or listen to our next up podcast this week in the podcast episodes for Feed your Brand, you would have heard my voice doing a three minute, not longer, three minute video. I record that, it's a video and we take off the audio and we use it in the next step. That three minutes gives my team and AI, if you're going to use it all that it needs to create an appropriate description with an excitement level about why you should join the call. So when I do that, in my three minutes, I cover three things. I cover why we chose this topic and why it's so valuable. Right. That's the first thing I cover. Our take on it, why what we're going to say is probably a little different than they've ever heard before. And then the third thing is I basically make them feel like you don't want to miss it out and make sure I cover the dates, times and all the other stuff, the important information, so that they can join us on it. Right. That's it. Create that sense of excitement and urgency for that call to action.

You need to build that anticipation so that people will show up to get the reward of, you know, the promise that you're offering them. Right, Right.

So three minutes. I'm going to tell you later at the end of this when we talk about our advanced tactics here, that we utilize what we do with those three minutes. But that three minutes, its main purpose used to be for us to generate a proper description and have my social team understand what we were going to actually talk about on the show. Because nine times out of 10, they go and they pick the typical thing. And Tom and I never talk about it from a typical perspective. We talk about it from a very different experience than other people. We talk about it from the experience of managing over 1500 podcasts and launching over 1500 podcasts with different formats and different models. So it makes a big difference about how we view the world and the advice that we give that we're getting that across because that's the unique reason you want to tune in live to hear what we have to say. So we utilize that for that so you can do it. And I've done it. I did it since our assistant left us in the summer because I had to train someone new and they weren't ready for all the pieces and parts. This is a lot to train somebody. So we're slowly training them. So I just did this part. I took that three minute video and I didn't even have to transcribe it. And I linked it to Gemini AI, which is Google's AI on my. In my Google Doc that I was already talking about in my prep document, I showed it the title and I gave it the video and I said, now generate a description for this and here's its purpose. And its purpose is to Promote a live stream event, get people excited who are already podcasters or are thinking about podcasts to come and watch it live. And I want it to be three to five sentences. That was it. Like, I kept it nice and short because that's what I wanted. I don't want it too long. It did it. It's done. Like, I didn't have to even really agonize over it. Occasionally I'd make an adjustment because sometimes it would be in, like, first person or. And I needed it to be Tom and I, we. Even though it was my voice. So it would say I. Right. And so, like, it would just change a few words here and there and it would be done and it would be ready to go. So now I have my title, my cover art, and my description all ready to go for this episode, for this live stream.

So, Tracy, you just, in that Google Doc, referenced the video that was out where in Google Drive or something, and it went and analyzed it, listened to it, and came up with that copy for you based on the prompt you gave it. Is that right?

Yeah. I used to have to give it the transcription. That was a while ago, but now it's so sophisticated, I just give it the video link. As long as it's sitting in my Google Drive, it's easier.

What if you had an audio link, not a video link? I imagine it would do the same thing.

It'll do it too.

Yeah. Okay, cool. That's fantastic.

Yeah, absolutely. Super easy. And then the last thing I absolutely need are links. I need people to have a call to action. I need to link them to it. Tom and I created a shorthand link that we used to use for most part, which was poditized.com forward/events. And it would get them into the events portal, and they could find the next live stream that way, if it went out there, they would go to it at any given time and be able to join the latest live stream, not just join the past one. So if they did happen to come upon a post somewhere or a newsletter article or something about it, and it was old, it would still work. And so that's something to keep in mind, that you want some kind of generalized link, but you can also do a very specific tracking link, which is what we're doing now. We utilize a tracking link that is unique to our newsletter, that is unique to a partner. So we actually send them out to other partners who share them with their audience as well. So there's many, many links. So I put them all in that prep document because I Need to know quick and easy where to send it to. The other thing that I do is I invite my partners into the prep document. So the graphics linked those titles, those descriptions. So we have partnerships with Juliet Clark over at Breakthrough Author magazine and Fran Acero over at Senior Tuber. Right. We have partnerships with them and we give them to them so that they can utilize the latest link if they're working with clients or if they want to add it to their newsletter or whatever it is. They've got their own share links so we can track where the audience is coming from. So that's something that we do and we utilize the link straight from Zoom for that. So they are coming out of the Zoom share. You can create special links for that. So that's where we do that. But those links are all in that document and they are important if you want to track where people are coming from when they're watching your show.

That's so critical. I hope everyone realizes, you know, it's wonderful to say, hey, I've got more people listening. That's great, or I had more activity on this episode than that episode. But if you don't know where that activity is coming from, if you don't know where people are, you know their departure point to come to you happens, you can't make smart decisions about where you're spending your time or what services you're going to use or what platforms you're going to continue to engage in.

Yeah, absolutely. So the last piece of this is the promotion that you're going to do. You just did all this work, so utilize it right? Like make sure people actually know that you're going live. And so part of it is, yes, restream created that LinkedIn and YouTube message and created an event over there. And you have to have your settings right and you have to have the right type of pro payment level in order for those things to be accomplished. So you may need to upgrade your accounts if you don't have those features available to you. I can tell you that they run a Black Friday sale every year and that's how I renew us. And it saves you a ton of money. So go ahead and do the yearly if you're gonna, you know, commit to it and force yourself into it. And that's what we've been doing every single year. And it' also very reasonable. It keeps the cost way down for us.

That's a pro tip. And you know what? Here's going to be an advantage for those of you who are seeing this on the live Stream because you're going to. You're hearing this before Black Friday, but this episode may very well publish after Black Friday and then everybody else who saw it recorded later, maybe Sol, I don't know. What do you think, Tracy?

I think they probably keep it up for through the holiday, so, like they may still be able to get it through the end of the year.

Okay, so it's not just one day you think it's for.

Yeah, it's like it starts and then through the season, but we happen to renew on Black Friday. Like it's actually our renewal date because I upgraded from starting the account in September and then I upgraded it to a yearly on Black Friday. So if you're going to have all these tools, you're going to have all these prep that you've done, use it. So here's where I think we miss out. If you've created an event in LinkedIn, for instance, it can only be created under one profile. An event must be created by one user profile in LinkedIn. It's not allowed to be created by two people. And we're co hosts here, so we have to share it the whoever's not the owner of it. So Tom and I actually trade off because we both have a pretty decent audience on LinkedIn and so we have a lot of followers and they're all followers who are podcasters. So like we want to make sure that they both get served up. So when the topic's something that's I'm passionate about and it's my voice on that recording, then I am the one who's the lead on the LinkedIn side of it. That's how we decide. And then if not, it's Tom. So that means that in the off week, when I'm not the lead, I have to share Tom's host and join the event as the co host so that I do that on LinkedIn so that my followers will see it. So I do have to do a little bit of promotion work. So usually what I do is I actually join it, say I'm going to the event and then share it right at that moment in time, live through LinkedIn's process of doing it at that moment. I don't make a separated scheduled post, although we do do that too. But I don't bother to do it quite that way because I want the activator of the algorithm. Remember we talked about those marketing algorithms by my joining an event that is already created and sharing it out that I'm joining that event, I'm going to get more visibility on that post than it would if I just posted and said, come join our live stream. So that's one of those like pro tips mixed into the promotion side of it. The next thing that Tom and I do with it is we put it out in our weekly newsletter. So look, we baby our clients and I'm going to say to the clients that are listening out here, it's like the ones that are are joining us live. They are not the ones that need to hear this message. It's the ones that ignore all the emails from everywhere else and all pissed off when they're getting too many emails from Zoom. That's notifying them that we're going live, that there is a live event, that there's a different topic this week and they just want to hear nothing. You are shorting yourself of expertise and coaching that would make a difference. We know that when clients show up to our coaching call, when they ask us questions, when they join week over week over week, they do significantly better. We did a study on it and they do 72% better than clients who don't show up to a single call in the year. If you even show up to three of our calls over the course of a year, that's nothing. We do it 52 weeks a year. You show up to three of them, you will still do twice as well as someone who never showed. So you're going to do better. Like small amount of effort of showing up for something. So being willing to see that email in your inbox that shows you what the topic is for the week and saying does that resonate with something I need in my business is important. But our compliant clients, they're like, I don't want to hear from you, I don't want it anymore. Remove it. So we had to come up with another method to do it. So we joined this newsletter, which we absolutely love when we've done a coaching call on this before. About our RASA newsletter, we absolutely love it and so to the point that we are creating a new relationship to actually do it for clients coming forward into the new year. And we're very excited about it. But this newsletter comes out every single week, has the new topic pinned to the top, has the link that would actually be the join link for the specific event because it is specific to the event and not just any event. And it creates this, uses the description, the image, everything we already created, we're repurposing it and using it prior to it and it comes out the day before our coaching call. So that it lets everyone know what's coming up tomorrow. Now, that newsletter, we have an extremely high open rate. It comes out once a week and it doesn't feel pushy to them. There's lots of serving and other articles and all the different things. And if they missed a feed your brand episode or they missed the past coaching calls, they'll be able to see some of those things in their newsletter, but it's customized to them. It feels very personal and they have not balked at that. However, our show up rate is not as good as those reminders from Zoom saying, hey, you're missing the event, it's starting in five minutes. And that's unfortunate for our client base.

It's unfortunate for us too, because we'd have more people showing up in Zoom Live if we got them all those reminders. But yeah, we'd have more customers unhappy. Their email inbox is getting filled up with all these Zoom reminders. So they have pros and cons, right? But the email newsletter, especially this AI driven one, has been fantastic.

But if you've got a free community, this is the thing to remember, our community's not free. Podcasters United has a free community and they get reminders and they get emails and they get. It's the price of being in Podcasters United is that you have to get email because there's no cost to join that membership group. But for our clients, they are paying us and if they say they don't want email, we gotta accommodate that because the last thing we want to do is upset someone who's paying us. So we have a different model. But if your list is free, if they did not pay you, if they've not paid you anything yet, then send them all the Zoom reminders. Send them everything. You can send them all the email reminders about what you're talking about. But what I found is make it custom. If you just send out a reminder that says we're going live. If you do the lazy system in Zoom Events and Zoom Webinars, which is set up a recurring webinar every single week and don't take the time to customize that event session every single week, you are going to not have the kind of traction you want. It will not convert for you. That's what we did the first year and it did not convert the second year. We went in and customized every single week, every single topic, and we did all these things that I'm talking to you about and the conversion rate and the open rate was off the chart. And here's what happens so often, Tom. Right. Tell the story of somebody sees us going live, they see it, they can't join us. And what do they still do?

What do they still do? They. They email us for how to join while we're going live, right?

No, let's say they can't join. They don't have the time. But they saw us going live, they saw the promotion, they saw everything getting pushed out and they can't join. But that topic seems really important. And all of a sudden podcasting jumped top of mind. And what do they do? They book a call with you.

Oh, right, right, right.

We have that happen all the time.

That's why you also want to have your booking calendar link in a very obvious place on your website where people can find it. I have it on the homepage of poditized.com but yeah, right.

So use all the promotion tools in your tool kit. Emails, social, use them all in that weak buildup. The advanced tactics that we've just started implementing over the last few months and been able to do those advanced tactics are also to use your podcast. And this is working extremely well for us. It is getting people to show up and getting people who we've never heard of who show up on our calls because they get the direct link to join on Zoom. We are giving our subscribers to our podcast because there's no connection point. We don't know who's listening to the show. We give them the exact link to join Zoom, not just watch it on live stream. That's where a lot of people make a mistake. So we have taken that three minute, remember that three minute video that I did to record the description. That three minute video gets utilized as a podcast for us. And so we air that podcast the Monday before the Wednesday call. So our calls are Wednesday at noon Pacific time. So we air it at Monday at noon Pacific time because we want to reinforce that time slot. And so we, we air the episode and it's three minute audio with a special intro outro that has the call to action on how to join and what to do. And because we have our intro outro, I mean, because we have our advertising system that automatically drops in links and calls to action, we can change up the link and call to action based on each episode that we do so that our description for our episode changes as well. So it's getting updated as every time that we go in so that they know how to join. And so that has really been a powerhouse for us. It has done so well. The next steps are Getting a hundred percent listen rate. Like we are seeing them twice as much listen through as our regular episodes. Right now they are helping us determine whether or not a podcast episode, a topic is going to be really popular. So gives us an opportunity for a couple of days to say, oh look, we are getting more and more people coming into this. This is going to be very popular. We need to make spend a little bit of time making sure we're aligned with what we're going to talk about, a little bit more prep. So it gives us all the opportunities for that. Then we take it one step further. And that's what we've just started implementing over the last 30 days. And it is just doing so well for us on increasing the YouTube views of the live stream. And that is that we take that three minute video and we break it into three video shorts and we air them in the hour prior to this live stream live stream happening. So we air it from 11am to noon Pacific time. On Wednesdays we air 1, 2, 3, we do one at the top of the hour, one at the bottom of the hour and then one 10 minutes before the live stream happens. And so we broken that up into three YouTube shorts. And those YouTube shorts can be linked automatically linked to the live stream event. And then once the live stream is over the recording, they're linked to it already and you don't have to do any more work. If somebody caught those shorts late, they can now watch the recording. So you do not have to make any changes. It's super simple, it's super easy. And it is increasing in just 30 days time of doing this. So four times we've done it, it's increased our views by about four times on the live stream video.

And that was really what we wanted to see why we started doing this process, right? We wanted to see if we could increase engagement, increase awareness of our upcoming live stream. And it also has some algorithmic benefits for the podcast itself too. I mean there are lots of good reasons why we did this. So still a little too soon. I think for us to analyze all that. We need to do it for a bit longer to be coming back to you and giving you some specific numbers on that. But I know we intend to do that, right?

And then here's the last thing. We're no longer editing our video because we stopped the live stream and we don't take our Q and A with our client base. We don't have to cut this off of the podcast video version of it on YouTube. We just actually add the live stream to our podcast playlist on YouTube. We just make click a button and check the box to add it to the playlist and it is done. And now our videos are all in there and all ready to go with no editing. Nothing else we need to do. You can go in and optimize them. You can add an end card, you can do all of those other things. You can add a different thumbnail. You can do whatever you want in there. We keep it because it already has the event thumbnail on it. So it's reinforcing the live stream. So we just keep it the way that it is. That's why we put the work in at the beginning. Right. So that it works for us. But now we don't even have to edit video going forward for the livestream versions of our show. We do edit the audio because that's totally different model, you know, for the podcast itself. But we just don't bother because otherwise it's duplicated in the system because your live stream still exists and then you have a final edited video. It's double of the same thing. And it just doesn't make sense to do that. They miss the energy of the live. So it's there already. Use it.

So, Tracy, how soon after we go Live is the YouTube video available for people?

Immediately.

Right away, right?

Yep, it's immediately available. So that means that YouTube subscribers to our podcast are getting it immediately. They're not waiting for it to air on the podcast two or three weeks later? Yeah, absolutely.

Of course, there's other aspects of what we do. The resources, the links in the blog post, all that stuff is not going to be available at that time. So you're going to get the experience, the visual content, but you're not going to get much more until we have all of those other resources created and bubble.

Yeah, and our Fran over at Senior Tuber that I mentioned before, not optimizing that video after the fact is a mistake. You need to make sure you've got your tags updated. You've got. The description that you put was a short one. You might want to put a much longer one because when we do the short one, we are not utilizing the 4,000 characters or 5,000 characters. I forget what it is on YouTube that you have available to you. You have a lot more description space and you should utilize it because YouTube's not necessarily tracking what you say in your video. So that's a great way for it to be more search optimized for YouTube. So all of the optimization stuff, you should spend A little work doing that on the after the fact. So that should definitely something. The only last thing I want to say and I'm going to do a flip screen here, Tom. So when you are live streaming, what you see on your end when you go live is what you get on the other side. And so if you are in a, I call it gallery, you know, when you're in the speaker view in zoom, if you know what that is, or in gallery view, that's what's going to happen. Very often gallery view looks horrific on the other side. So you do need to go do a test, check it out and then delete the video if it's really bad. Right. Do a little five minute then to put it out. So I'm going to switch my view here. For those of you watching us live, you're going to now see Tom and I in gallery view and you're going to probably see like half of our faces cut off in some of the views. Now it won't happen on YouTube.

Oh. Because some of you are going to be looking at it on your phone in that tall format, vertical format. Yeah, yeah, that's not going to work well.

And if we had a guest, a third, like it's just a mess. So here's where it really fails is usually on Instagram. Now there is also another problem with Instagram that I just want you to make aware of. If you do not have an assistant, do not attempt Instagram. Instagram involves getting that last minute right before you go live. You have to do some more things in the, in the restream side of things to make it live. On Instagram it is much more difficult to do. So we do not do that because if you don't do it right, it looks terrible on Instagram and it's not worth. No one will watch it because you're basically not even seeing a face. You're seeing like the side of my hair or the top of my head, like above me and not even seeing me. So like if you do not do it right on Instagram, it falls miserably. So make sure you have somebody who can help you because it's a lot to do right as you're trying to go live. And this happened just here. We had a glitch when we went to go live. So this is something that you also need to be prepared about. I stick those restream links, which are like the key and all the other stuff, even though I pre programmed them into the zoom event, I also put them in that document that A prep document, because sometimes it fails, sometimes there's a typo, sometimes there's an extra space after it. And when you did it and you messed it up and when you try to go live, it doesn't work. And so I copy it again, do it again, and then all of a sudden, it works. Now, Tom and I are lucky because sometimes when there's Internet issues or computer issues, we've got the two of us, so we can just pass the hosting back to the other person and then they do it, and we end up going live. So, like, you don't have glitches when you have two people, and that's helpful. But if you don't, make sure you've got everything you need prepared for you. Because when you try to go live at that last minute, there can be glitches or there can be viewing issues, or there can be issues on the other side. So you must check how it looked after the fact. Go watch yourself. Go listen to it. Go watch what's going on in the video screen it, and then make adjustments. It did not happen for us overnight. We had a rough few months, I think, of live streaming and when we first started it, and I don't think we really got into the rhythm till we were probably, like six months in. Then we had a really good year, and then we lost our assistant and we had to start it back up again, and we had glitches and system checks and things that I was like. I mean, I got a tutorial and whole how to doc, and it is four pages long. It is 40 steps.

Well, that's the thing, Tracy, that I'm a little concerned our listeners are hearing. I mean, this is a longer episode than we usually record because there's a lot of things to talk about and consider when doing this and things people need to be aware of. The good news is we're creating a comprehensive blog post that lists all these things, has all the links to everything we've talked about, which will be@podcasters united.org when the podcast episode is published. And I'm afraid so many podcasters are going to be overwhelmed by this. Tracy, you're scaring them off. We are scaring them off by being transparent about everything that you need to do in order to do it well. But I think what you just said is a really good, important point, is that if going live is an important part of your strategy or what you want to achieve, the outcome you want to provide to your community, give them some advanced access to your content on a more timely Basis get started. Even if you're starting ugly, I think you need to get started and start doing it. But be aware of all the best practices, be aware of the different tools you can use and start layering them in so that you have, you can make it easier on yourself as you go. And yeah, hire an assistant. Hire a. You know, whether it's a virtual assistant or some other kind of assistant, there are third party companies that can help provide certain kinds of support like that. And you could get some support if you're willing to pay for it. But then you gotta be aware of how to do it yourself because like you said, Tracy, we had one assistant who was fantastic and automatic worked every time when we went to do it and then that person left. As that happens, no employee is permanent. Everybody's temporary to a degree and we had to then pick it up. And even though you had instructions, there was some learning curve there. Right?

There was, there was like I thought oh, that's not important and I skipped it and it was a mistake. Right. Like so things like that. So I look at it as a month over month over month basis and that's what I really want to remind you is like start with one thing that you're mastering. Master zoom webinars, get it going. Then master restream, then master your prep doc, then master graphics titles like whatever it is. Take each month to work on mastering your process in system and document it. As you document all of that, you now have a training manual. I love Scribe how it's my favorite thing to use because you just turn it on and you do the steps that you do and it creates this multi step document for you. If you reach out to me, if you send us an email on podcasters united.org if you reach out to us and let me know what steps you want, I will add a PDF of my how to for you into the blog post. But you got to tell me which parts you want because all of it is not possible because our show is very custom. But if you want to know how I use Restream, if you want to know how I set up in Zoom, if you want to know how I run the prep document right like I will share that with you in a scribe so that you can see how you can build it. And then in the new year we're working with a new partner and we are thinking about doing assistant training programs. Now. They will be paid programs. Absolutely. But if you want me to train assistants to do this, I will that we will add that into our course load. I wasn't planning on it. It was not on my short list of courses. But now that I see how complicated this is, maybe it should be one of the courses we teach. And so if you want that message at me, do it on social, tag it and say, yes, we want this as a course, we will make it that way.

Sounds good. I'm glad you addressed that. I was about to ask you, how do you want people to reach out if they want to see this or that?

Yeah, reach out on social or send us an email@podcasters united.org There's a whole link over there. So for.

Okay, well, that's a lot. Well, I hope everyone got some great value out of this. If you've stuck it out this long, you must really be interested because that. That's a lot longer than our normal episode. And again, if you're listening to this as a podcast, you can go to podcastregionited.org to see the blog post, get all the links to everything we discussed, and if you're watching this live, you're gonna have to wait a little bit for that to be generated, but still replay this video. There's a lot of great resources for you to start doing this yourself if that's a part of your strategic vision for your show and to reach and provide more value to your community.

So thanks everyone for listening here to feed your brand. For those of you who are in zoom with us, we're gonna jump right over and have a chat with you and we will see. Stay longer, but if you are on the live stream, we'll see you next week. Check out the new topics.

Heard something valuable today, but didn't get a chance to write it down. No worries, we've got you covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities while you're you're there. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social @United Wepod so you can get feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting.