Podcast Mission: How to Unleash Endless Possibilities In Your Podcast

Get off the marketing roller coaster and get on the automated fast track to digitally market your brand everywhere. Now join podcast producer Tom Hazard and Inc. Columnist Tracy Hazard as they share easy content building formulas and smart cut secrets proven to fuel hundreds of blogs, podcasts and brands with bingeable original content. Join the conversation on how to get your message out to the world. Be original, be heard. Promote with power and purpose. Feed your brand.

Hello and welcome to the first episode ever of Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard.

And I'm Tracy Hazzard. And yes, we are married. We're just like, let's get that one out.

Yeah, we're married and we're business partners and this is our first episode of a new podcast. It's not our first podcast. We've been podcasters for several years. But this is a new podcast about brandcasting.

Right. It's about brand casting you. So what we're really doing here is serving you guys in a way to help you take it to the next level. We hear a lot about Facebooking and live streaming and broadcasting via podcasts and all of these different things. You hear them all out there and you've got this entire realm of marketing, all these different things that you should do, right?

Yeah, but where to start?

But where to start? Where do I start? What do I do? And what happens if you get paralyzed in that process and this happens? So we're going to talk about like the marketing rollercoaster. What happens when you stop and then you end up with no revenue and then you go back up and you market again and then you end up with more revenue and then you get too busy and you forget to market and then you drop again. That kind of how we can get that everybody off of that and off of the like effort that it seems to take nowadays to market. Anything we can do to take that effort out of it, we want to share with you.

But I want to be clear. This is really about business, all right? This is not about entertainment. This is about you have a business, you have a brand, or you're building a business and building a brand and you need to be everywhere in the media at once. You need all that exposure in order to market your business. And how do you do that without it taking over the main business that you're actually trying to do?

Exactly. How do you continually provide great original messages, great original brand content? How do you do all of that? Create those multiple touch points with clients and fans and potential clients over the course of a month? So we want these to be really clear about this, when we talk about brand casting, it is about making money, broadcasting your brand, right? Whether it's making money directly or it's making money in your business by having more business. Right. It's not about passive income. There are a lot of podcasts out there. You can go listen to them and they're going to employ all these SEO techniques and all these crazy things you have to do to try to get advertisers and do all of that. This is not what we're building here. We want to brand build you and your business.

This is really more organic and it's really about more tangible value at its core to what you're doing. This is about broadcasting your unique, original message to the world and helping you rise above the crowd. That's really what it's about.

We want you to be heard. I mean, that's the ultimate of what we want. We want to make sure that you're heard, that you're listened to, that your audience gets focused and right fit for you like so that they're perfect, so that they can't wait to buy from you, get more of you.

It's really about helping you build that platform that you are going to have raving fans and people ready to buy your services or your products.

Our plan for this podcast for feed you'd brand is to cover all areas of places and types of things that you might do to generate content and get that message out there and be heard in places. So there's a lot of information about content, blog, podcast, video, video cast, live streaming. You can consider it all of those things. There's going to be lots of information about influencers, really want to talk a lot about that. Guests and reviews and partners and affiliates and how you might be using that type of influence to grow your business More social media, of course we're going to touch on social media. This is not a how to about how to Facebook or anything like that, but it might be about interesting techniques that you use on Facebook or interesting techniques that you use to push your message out there. More things like that. So anything having to do with feed and fans and maybe even things that are working on your profile itself on LinkedIn or other places like that. It's about your website.

Boy, is it about your website.

Oh my gosh, it's about much and.

So it's so overlooked all too often overlooked by business people.

Right. And we really got it. We'll dive into this and we're going to get some experts in, in all of these Areas, of course, to talk to you. Some people that we work with or have worked with or have met that we thought had really interest things to talk about. It's about brand design on that website. It's about having a really focused message on that website and actually about not as much the tech details of it or there's some of that we will touch on. I don't want to go into too techy about it, but it's about knowing what not to put in because I think we're loading too many things. Like there are some websites that are just taking way too long to develop for a starter business.

Well, and we're doing it. And not only that, Tracy, social media is critical in business today, but it's also about not just putting everything out there on social media, it's really more about getting people out there through social media to come to you.

Right. And so then it's also about promotion. We're putting together a funnel. We've been working on it for a while. We'll share what's working for us. So there'll be some of those things as well. There's media, of course. I write for Inc Magazine. That may not be clear because we haven't even really talked about ourselves yet, which we should in a minute. But I write for inc. I write a column called the Inc Innovation section called By Design and I'll talk about how to get the media's attention and how you can get your information promoted, how you can get seen and heard that way. And then also about speaking. Tom and I speak on a lot of stages and so we can talk a little bit about unveil the curtain, reveal what goes on behind the stage a little bit and so you can understand how it works if that's what your goals are. So we're going to talk about content, influencers, social media, website and promotion sort of in a global picture of building your brand, but not, I really want to be clear on this. There might be a few technical things in here, but it's really more about how you manage that, how you use all of that to build your business and brandcast you.

And also we want to share with you that we understand that you have a core business and what we're going to talk about are high level techniques of how you can do all this, how you can be everywhere and not have it dominate what you do on a daily basis. You don't have time to be full time doing all these things. So how do you get it accomplished?

Yeah. So let's tell A little bit about our story about how we got started podcasting and then turned into brandcasting after all of that.

Well, Tracy and I have been in business for a long time, really 25 years. And we had our own business. Right. During the original dot com boom in the late 90s. Our website, there was no WordPress. Everything was hard coded.

Okay. I think we should start back a little bit farther so people understand really who we are, because. So we're married. We've been married for over 25 years. We met our first day in college. Tom insulted me and called me a Valley girl because I came from California. Not originally, but I came from there to go to college. We met at Rhode Island School Design. So we are designers. That's our background. And so when we talk a lot about the things here, we're talking about from a design and branding expertise area, because that's where we started from. But Tom always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I'm not sure I wanted it all along, but you've always wanted to be one.

Yeah. And I come to learn that I'm probably genetically unemployable.

Another great podcast, by the way. Yeah.

That I've been interviewed on. And I guess the way I used to say is I'm. I don't know, I guess I'm just not suited to be an employee. But we've had several different companies, built them up, had lots of employees and ended up selling things and moving on to other kinds of businesses.

Yeah. We had a business back at the sort of, I guess you would call it the pre911.com boom. You know, it was.

Yes. Yeah.

And so you would have it there. And we developed stylus pen for handheld.

Computers back in the original PDA personal digital assistant market. The pre smartphone world.

The Palm Pilot world, for those of you who are old enough for that. Right. And we did that and we had this great little business and we were running along and we were doing some really great things and then we got our patent infringed upon. And I'll never forget the day because we pulled out the catalog out of the book and I saw that other pen, that other stylus pen that looks so much like ours, and I just wanted to cry because we'd worked tried so hard to get into this catalog that was shipped in the box with the Palm Pilot. And they kept saying no. And now we know why. It's because they were making their own, knocking us off. And they were knocking us off. Right. And so anyway, we were really upset about it. And I was like, we're going to lose this whole business. It was based on this. And what are we going to do?

Well, we ended up waging what became one of the really first viral marketing campaigns using PR to win that battle. And it was before modern social media, but we learned a lot from it.

Yeah, I mean, you have to remember that here we were, we had just started. I mean, we. The business was only like a year and a half old at the point at which that that happened. We'd spent a ton of money on the patent on building the business on. We had employees, we had just had a warehouse. We just moved into new offices, like brand new offices. And so I was like looking at the catalog, the infringing product, and just crying because I was like, we're about to lose everything because we have maybe $5,000 in the bank. I think that was it. I think literally we had $5,000 of cash flow.

But when you're backed into a corner like that, you get very creative.

You do. And that's kind of what we want to really talk about in this podcast is like some of these creative, low cost, like, grassroots way, but you want to make sure they're working so that you're not spending money. So at that time, we spent the $5,000 to wage a PR campaign that was like really a grassroots PR campaign. Right. Sending out emails, putting stuff on our website, trying pitching magazines and newspapers and trying to get them to profile us and what was going on, a sort of David versus Goliath story. And what really worked for us was we put on our website a timeline which our attorneys told us not to, mind you.

And it was kind of tongue in cheek the way we approached it.

So we created, what, a gif, basically of a stylus pen clicking and unclicking. And it was above the other stylus pen. Theirs and ours. Yeah, the knockoff, theirs and ours. And it had the title. Do we detect a bit of pen envy? Theirs was a little bit smaller than.

Ours.

Which just emphasized the tongue in cheek.

Right, exactly. And then we listed. We wrote our story. We wrote about what happened. We put out the timeline of when we invented it and did all of these things, which every attorney said you should, should do. But we knew we couldn't go all the way through court. We filed lawsuit, but that was it.

We didn't have the money to take the disc, take it the distance. And eventually, though, it worked, we got articles written in at the time, what was it? Fortune Small Business, which I now is CNN Money.

Right. Yeah.

It's now CNN Money, San Francisco Chronicle, and all sorts of high profile.

It was the San Jose Mercury News that picked us up. That really, really helped. And then the San Francisco Chronicle did pick us up. So they picked up the story. And this is a good media lesson that we probably can go into at some time about how to get somebody to pick up your story. They picked up the story because of that graphic, because it was spreading around and people were saying, oh, you got to visit Tom and Tracy's site, it was called Tea Tools at this time. And you got to buy a pen because you got to buy the original. So it really actually boosted our sales for a little bit there, which was a good thing because we really needed that. And so all of that, but it became what was considered a viral campaign. And then happened from that, is that we did eventually settle the lawsuit. I will tell you what we've learned throughout our career is that even when you win, you lose. We made no money from that because you spend more than you make in settling a lawsuit. But we retained our patent, we got it endorsed. We kept our business going for another whole year.

Well, even more than that. And it grew a lot more after that.

It did. And so we really did that. And a few years later, we got approached by Northwestern University professor who wrote a Harvard Business Review case study about our choices. And he does something interesting. It's a whole course on entrepreneurialship and marketing in their MBA program. And they do something interesting. They have them run through as if they were us. And what decisions would they make? Would they do the same thing we did? And he said that at 90, 95% of the time, they do not choose. His whole class does not choose what we chose to do.

And that to me was kind of shocking. But I guess you learned something about yourself in this. And I think actually it's been helpful to us in business that we may not make the typical decision.

Right. And I think it's because we do approach everything from a. There has to be a solution. We don't believe in impossible, right? We believe that impossible means I'm possible. So it's going to happen, right? So Tom and I get creative. And I think that's really where we've come here. And I think that the other part of our story that I would love to tell you guys about is really how we headed into building this direction of where we have all these clients who are brand casting and what we're doing with that. So we started out doing a podcast a couple of years ago.

Right. Yeah. It was several years ago now. And we knew there was a certain niche area of business that we were not established in, and we wanted to establish ourselves as experts in, and we wanted to build an audience that we could market things to in the future. We didn't even yet know what we wanted. Yeah.

We didn't know what we were going to sell anyone. We just wanted to build authority. That's what. You know, I didn't know that that was what it was called at the time.

No.

Wanted to build credibility. Authority. Right. We wanted to become known as associated with a particular. In this case, it's 3D printing, but a very technical thing. But we wanted to be associated as an expert and the go to source for something there.

Correct. So we then researched at the time, the hard way.

Yes.

How to start a podcast, because we thought a podcast might be a good way to build an audience.

Right. So I read a dozen books, I highlighted them, I analyzed them. I do what I do. We watched tons of videos I sent you on, like, watching all the tech videos about how do you do it, what equipment you need. Read tons of blog posts and came to the realization that 90% of them were not telling you something important.

Yeah. They were holding something back.

It was like there was a recipe and they were holding back the secret ingredient.

Right. But it was very interesting. By studying all of these different ones, we really were able to read between the lines and figure out what a lot of those key elements or real secrets were.

Right, exactly. So we figured out the real formulas there. And because Tom and I are busy, this was a side business, a side job. It was something we didn't actually have allocated budget for or time for. We needed to make sure that we didn't waste a lot of time.

Yeah. Because it was an investment of our most precious resource, Our time.

Our time. Right. So we needed to make sure we didn't waste a lot of time doing it. So we, over the course of the first year, we refined this. We refined the system by which we did it. We developed with other partners and people we met along the way and at various entrepreneurial conferences and other things, best practices. And we refined it into the system in which we could do our marketing, get the original core content we needed, do our marketing and networking, which is critically important to us because you know that you got to make those calls and you don't know if they're going to be worthwhile or not. But, you know, you need to keep your network updated and you need to talk to them and you need to do that. So we would do our marketing and our networking in less than two days of time a month. And everyone was like, what are you doing? That's crazy. How do you do that? I want to do that.

And, well, the other thing that we discovered along this path was that it was really much bigger than just the podcast. In fact, our process today that we call brandcasting, it's much bigger than podcasting. In fact, podcasting is just one small part of it. And it doesn't even have to be podcasting. It can be video, video, streaming, recording videos, putting them up on YouTube, live streaming, things on Facebook. It doesn't matter. You're recording your original message one way or another, right?

Stories on Instagram. It doesn't matter where it's coming from, what the source is coming from. For me, one of the reasons we decided podcasting was because video felt too cumbersome. It was like a lot of setup, lighting. I didn't want to have my hair done. You know, like, there was like some of those things.

We also, some days in some weeks were too busy to record anything during the day, and we do it at 10:30, 11:00 clock at night. And I'm in my shorts and a T shirt. I don't really want to have to dress up right.

And so some. And a lot of times, most of the stuff that we do when we do the networking part of it, we're talking on a phone or Skype to someone, and they don't always want to be on video. You get turned down a lot more for people to do those kind of video events than you do for audio ones. So we decided audio was the perfect format for us. But it really doesn't matter where it starts from. And that's one of the key things that we. Because we do do some video.

Yeah, we do. But it's so much bigger than that original recording, that podcast or that video. It's what you do with it after the fact and how you do it. So in order to do this and be able to do it in just two days a month, for the amount of content. And we create a lot of content. Okay, that's. Your average person might spend only one day a month doing it.

Right. So that two days worth of content allows us to do hit actually a touch point every single day of the week. And for social media, it might be anywhere between one time a day to three times a day, depending on what media, what channel it's being done in. So for us, it's all of that but the most important part is it also gives us tremendous amount of repurposing of content. So reconnecting people to old topics. And if you're only doing something live, you can only do one thing. And how do you really get that out there? And how do you refer to old things? So it gives us a chance to connect and send people throughout our site, throughout our social media profiles. It gives us an opportunity to connect with people in the place that they want to find us.

It has become a platform.

That's right.

Which is what we're going to share with you, that you could do for your own business. But what we discovered then, doing this, we put together a system for how to do it in just one or two days a month. We had to put resources together, we had to put a plan in place, we had to put systems in place so that it could happen automatically. All we do is record the content, upload, and we're done. Everything else happens for us. And so once we did that, a lot of these people we meet in business say, wow, oh, I really need that. Could you do it for me? Oh, wow, could you do that for my business? And so this is how, over the course of the last couple years, this ended up growing into its own business, its own entity, which now it is its own business entity and called brandcasters, Inc. And brandcasting is the thing. And so, yes, we do have lots of customers using this, and a big part of this podcast is supporting those customers.

Right. We can't talk to every single one every day, and we get a lot of questions. And so we wanted to disseminate that information out to all of you because we want to make sure that you're able to learn from others, learn what's wrong, learn what's working, or learn how.

To improve what you're doing.

Right. Or try something that, wow, you hadn't considered before. Because we have some. Doing some really creative, cool things we do, and so we absolutely love that. So there's an opportunity to be profiled, if you're interested in that. And we'd be happy to have any of our clients who are listening here to be on the show and talk about how they're feeling with it, how it's working for them, and something unique that they think that they're doing. But we also really want to talk to all of you out there who are struggling, who are really, really doing too much, too much effort, too much work, getting bogged down, not getting into your business. We really want you back in your business.

Yeah, we want you really focusing on whatever that unique talent or expertise that you have, your unique position in the market helping you succeed there. But in order to do that, you really do need to be putting yourself out there, creating that original content and broadcasting that message to the world. But how can you do that without it breaking the bank? Or without it taking over all your time, Right.

Or without it being maybe not something that you're good at? So maybe you're not a highly organized person. Maybe you're not a systems and operations person. That's okay. Maybe we can help find you that for you. Maybe we can give you hints on ways that it should look. So Tom and I were watching the other night the Prophet. I don't know if you've ever seen it, the Marcus Lemonis, but great show.

We really enjoy that show.

I mean, I think it's really good because it touches on a lot of people's stories. It's realistic businesses that go on there. And I like the way his approaches, although it is obviously for made for Television, and you can see that happen.

There is some license. They take creative editing, but they're at the core. There are real people, real businesses that are trying to achieve great things.

Right. But over the last four or five episodes we've watched, I've seen the same thing happen again and again. And so Marcus Lemonis would go into a business and he'd sign a deal with them, and then he'd say, okay, you have no process. I want you to clean up your shipping area, and I want you to have a system here. Organize it, organize it.

Make it efficient.

Right. Or your production side doesn't work. I want you to have a whole production system. So put in a place, a whole process here. You don't have it. And he says this, and he says, and I'll come back in two weeks, which may or may not be two weeks. Who knows how long it is? But I'll come back and you have this. And when he comes back in, they don't have it. It's always still somewhat. I mean, they may have picked up the dirt, cleaned up some trash, but.

What they did is they dipped their toe in the pool to see what the temperature of the water is. But they didn't really jump in and get it done.

Right. And it's not just a matter of getting it done. This is what I said to you when we first saw it. I was like, the people. Because we understand people really well. That's one of the things that I do, is read to people And I was like, these are not the kind of people, they need to see what it is supposed to look like to them. That might look organized to me. I'd be like, that is no way organized. Because I'm an extremely organized person. Right.

They have no context.

They have no context for it. Right. So what we want to provide you is some context for what organized might look like, for what a system might look like, for a way to plan what it might look like. So I actually happened today, we have this great friend who runs a major organization that we absolutely love. And I emailed her a my social media plan. And this is my starting plan. I don't use this today, but it was the starting plan. And it had like, all the social media outlets listed on one side, like Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and all of that. And then had a column, and the column was how many times you would post per day, per month, whatever it would be, who was gonna post, because there might be a different person. Maybe it was you, maybe it was me, maybe it was an essay assistant, and what types of content went into that. So, like, hey, these were always videos. They were always text posts. There's always an image, whatever it might be. So, like, it was like, all laid out like that. And I explained to her, I was like, this is how I started, because I wasn't sure what was going to work for our business. And she's like a super, like, systems person. She has to do list for. To do lists that are, like, way beyond what I do. And I thought I was kind of crazy about the way that I do it. And she's got it to the nth degree. And. And she looked at me and she goes, this is better than mine. And I really didn't expect that. She was like, this is more organized.

It surprised me a little bit too.

Yeah, it totally surprised me. But that's the kind of thing we're talking about here, is like, there might be a system out there that you go, wow, that's better than mine, or, wow, I never imagined that that's what it should look like. That's what we want to expose you to in the course of this podcast.

And the other thing that we want to share with you to understand more about us now. And yes, we've been entrepreneurs, been in business for over 25 years, but. But we have partners, alliances, people that we work with to create this brandcasting process that are absolute experts in their field. We have rocket scientists of the Internet. And we don't say that like that's right. They really are. I mean, some of the people we work with, quite literally, when the FBI has a big problem trying to find somebody in another country through the Internet and needs a really good hacker, a legal one, not an illegal one, they contact one of the people that we know very well for help. They don't have the internal capability. I mean, so that's the kind of level of people we're dealing with. But some of our partners, they manage over 800 revenue generating websites. So we have learned from them and we have access to them. When things change at Google, with how they run things, we know, we learn and our team pivots to do whatever is needed next to be able to rise above the crowd. So we have become experts ourselves in a lot of this. And then whatever we're not experts in, we have experts that know what we don't know.

And we want to expose you to them so that you have access to the information or to them themselves so that you get that. But one of the most things, and I think this is really where we want to end it on and what's really important when we talk about that marketing roller coaster, like you going up and down, we want to level that out. So you're always doing it consistently so it feels like a regular part of either your daily work or your weekly work or your monthly work in the way that chose to do it because it happened to be outside of the core of our business. So we decided to segregate it. But you can do it however that works for you. We want to make that happen for you so it's consistent and constant and growing for you at all times, so that there's that organic but fast tracking you to the right clients, the right members, the right listeners, the right viewers, whatever it might be, so that your audience is growing. But what we really want to do is make sure at the end of the day, the brand authority, the one who gets the value from it, is you. We don't want it to be YouTube. We don't want it to be Facebook. We want it to belong to you, to your website, to you personally, to grow your audience so that it belongs to you, so that eventually, if you're ready for it, the money that gets made is made by you.

And this is not something we hope to do or we are thinking it'd be great if you could do. No.

Or we're bringing you along the path of like our exploration of doing it. No. We're past learning.

This is proven. You absolutely can do this in really any niche field, you absolutely can do it. And we will share with you a lot of the details of how to do it. And Tracy actually sort of foreshadowed our next episode, which is really about the marketing roller coaster. We're going to go into that in great detail next time.

That's right. So you can find information on us and the podcast and you can get notifications so you can sign up and get subscription if you want to get it in your email. There's no obligation to do that. But you can do that on brandcastingyou.com so you can get information pushed to you in your email if you would like. So the blog post on this and all our podcasts will be@brandcastingyou.com where you can find more information, see images, find any downloads or references or links. They will always be there in brandcastingyou.com and you can also reach out to us on social media. Reedyourbrand. That will be on Facebook primarily, but it will also be on LinkedIn as well. There's a LinkedIn page, I should say. So you can do that and you can find us anywhere on those things. And you can also reach out to Tom Hazzard and Tracey Hazzard and LinkedIn. We are always happy to connect with people via LinkedIn. That's one of our preferred methods. And we hope that you'll join us on this journey to help you build your brand.

Yeah, we really hope that you will find this to be very useful for you and your business. And maybe all of it won't apply to you, but I bet a lot of it will. So keep coming back. We got some great episodes lined up for this first series of, I guess a dozen or so episodes, and we'll keep going beyond that. So thanks for listening, everybody. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed.

You'd brand.

Sam.