Podfest Multimedia Expo: Essential Tips Every Podcaster Should Know Gathered From The Best Hosts/ How Facebook Live Easily Helps New Podcasters Build A Loyal Audience?

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Hey everyone, this is Tracy and Tom on feed you'd brand and I am excited to pick Tom's brain today because he went to Pod Fest 2018 in Orlando and had a fabulous time and he got to meet incredible people and I want to hear all about it.

You know, it was first of all a lot of fun. I didn't know it was gonna be fun. I didn't go there to have fun. It's not like I went to party, you know, but I didn't know what to expect, honestly. And I really did not plan so.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me stop. We do a lot of events. Yeah, we do a lot of events.

We do. We go to a lot of events. I agree with that.

And you go with them without the expectation of having fun. Because why would we go again if we weren't having fun?

Well, it's business too. It's not just for fun. I can't justify taking a trip all the way across the country paying, you know, I don't. It had to have cost. Well, all told for the business and everything, it was at least 1500 or $2000 to go. So I don't just go to have fun. Right. So I mean, I went because I thought it was important that I should go. I really didn't even know about the PodFest, which is called PodFest Multimedia Expo. It is focused on podcasts, but there's. It also covers a lot of tangent, you know, technologies in media, you know, YouTube and digital marketing and all sorts of things.

Facebook Live.

Facebook Live. Yeah, but I didn't really know about big podcast conference. Every year that we've known about for several years is the podcast movement one which they have in different places around the country. This year I think it's in Philadelphia in August and I'm going to go to that as well.

So. But I understand that there's sort of a dichotomy happening in this sort of event market. And we have PodFest, which is focused on indie podcasters, and we have podcast movement which seems to be heading towards the more of corporate podcasters.

Is that what we've heard that is what we've heard. And I'll tell you, I can't speak as much from personal experience on this. I mean, I can for PodFest. I'm going to tell you about that today. But yeah, when I was at podfest and I actually got to spend a lot of this podfest with one of our podcasters. His name is Scott Carson.

We Close Notes podcast, which is just awesome.

It is a great podcast. If you're at all interested in real estate investment, this is one that you should check out. But Scott is just an all around great guy and I've known him for quite a while. I mean, I've known him for probably a year or more. And because we were introduced through a common business associate who actually is another podcaster of ours, Aaron Scott Young, who does the Unshackled Owner podcast. And you know, Scott's launched his podcast back in August and it's done very, very well.

He's our star pupil. Like Scott has done everything and, and just gotten, I mean, he's just done so well with it and I keep, I keep going. The only thing in the mix is Scott himself and that it's just that he's so much dynamic that it's working, it's working everywhere for him.

And he is a master, I think, digital marketer, you know, for his own business. And he, you know, is always looking to learn more, learn more best practices. He said he went to this because he wanted to go to an event where he wasn't the smartest guy in the room. He puts on his own events around real estate investment and in his case it's distressed, you know, real estate distress notes, distressed notes, distressed mortgages, you know, and there, and it's a funny story too, there was actually another conference going on at the same time time in New Jersey that he has attended multiple times. That's in his industry. It's called the Distressed Mortgage Expo, something like that.

Yeah, I had actually heard that because someone else who in our network was going to that one and I thought, wow, Scott's skipping that.

And I didn't know it when Scott first told me he was going to PodFest and he booked a ticket before I did. And when he told me about it, I was like, hmm, I gotta check that out, I really probably should go. And there were some other things going on here in California at the same time you were speaking at a different event in Los Angeles that I was thinking I was going to go to also. And it's like, wow, maybe I shouldn't do that. Maybe I should go to PodFest. And Tracy and I sometimes divide and conquer. She's at one time, at another, and that's what we did this last week. But I was really shocked when Scott wasn't going to the Distressed Mortgage Expo. And he explained to me why. And, you know, there are business reasons why. And I'm not going to go into all those details here because it's not necessarily for everybody's ears, but he had his own reasons. And he's like, you know what? I need to continue moving my company forward. And marketing is a huge aspect of what we do. And the podcast has been such an important tool and a very valuable tool for how he's marketing his business that he wanted to go and learn more. And he did tell me that he got definitely enough great information, valuable nuggets out of PodFest that it was well worth the expense and time to go. And he didn't really miss much from, you know, the other event. So it was. It was the right decision for him this year and ended up being the right decision for us and our business that I needed to go to, you know, for many reasons.

Well, you know, we got introduced to podfests from our good friend Dustin Matthews, who is extremely good friends with one of the organizers, Chris Cromidos. And Chris, I mean, it just. He impressed me with every conversation we had, and we got right on the phone and we had a nice chat. And, you know, next year I think we're going to have to get in and do a little early bird special with Chris and try and get our. Because our podcast. If Scott got such value, maybe there's others of you out there who will listen to, you know, who would like to go as well. So maybe we, we need to make that happen. Let's make a note to make that happen next year.

Yeah, I've actually already reached out to Chris after this expo just to, you know, thank him for a great event. And I want to. We're going to talk about the event here in just a minute. But I said, hey, you know, thanks for putting out such a great event, but also letting him know, I personally want to get more involved and I want us as a company and you as well, Tracy. Hopefully next year we won't have a conflict that we can plan ahead. Want to get more involved with PodFest next year in terms of. Well, I did speak from their stage this time, but, you know, continuing to do that, maybe being on some of the panels, but also being a vendor, because for growing our business, I think that we should exhibit there at this show next year. But I'll tell you for, not just for us, because we are in the podcasting business. Not only obviously we have podcasts, but our business is about digital marketing. You know, your company using podcasting as a tool, it makes sense for us to exhibit there. But for even for the rest of you that are new podcasters or aspiring podcaster, and I have to tell you, probably about a third of the attendees at least, or maybe even up to, you know, 40 plus, were aspiring podcasters, who hasn't started one yet, and then the rest were seasoned podcasters. But this is an event that I think as a business person, an entrepreneur of any level, that you really, if you're going to use podcasting in your business, it's worth going to this at least once. And maybe you'd find value in it more than once, year over year to continue pushing yourself forward, to get more out of your podcast. You know, whether it's you or people that work for you, your staff, whatever, there's so much to be learned, especially when it comes to marketing your podcast, I think.

Right. And, you know, and this is the thing about these kinds of events. I mean, when you're in an emerging media, right, and that's what this really is because it's growing, it's, it's taking off in different areas. There's new tools every day, there's new service companies. You know, there's all of these things going on. And it's a critical part of your business if you get, if you rely on the old school. And so this is what I keep saying to people out there, when you, if you follow the passive income podcast model, you're making a mistake today. That was this model that worked in 2014. 15. You could make money then, but you had to have already been podcasting for a while. But nowadays you can't make money that same way. The barriers to entry are low for getting into podcasting, but the barriers to profitability and success are extremely high. And I did not say the, the founder of Gimlet Media says that. And they're the ones who produce serial and a lot of those other podcasts that you might be competing against in that small percentage, right, that, that, you know, the indie podcasts are the larger percentage. Tom will talk about that in a second. But they're in the smaller percentage of these sort of like corporate or highly produced podcasts, but they have a lot more power than you to market. And so if you're competing against them, you've Got to keep up on the tools. You've got to keep up on the methods. Or you better have hired a team that's up on it. And that's our commitment to our clients, is that we are here. We're going to keep up on that. It doesn't mean you don't want to be on the cutting edge like Scott is. You don't want to be pushing it and you don't want to be doing more than more in areas that you can that have more relevance to your business and bring that strategically in for yourself. That's a great way to do it. But, you know, you've got to be on the cutting edge of it's because it's evolving right in front of you. And if you get static in what you do, you don't move along and you don't grow and you wonder why you got left behind when your podcast was really good, or so you thought.

Absolutely. So let me, let me try to just give you an overview, you know, decent overview of what really went on at the expo. So they certainly had many different, I guess I would call, you know, seminars, if you will, lecture series and a wide range of topics. And this took place over Thursday, Friday and Saturday primarily. There was some event a little bit on Wednesday as well, was in Orlando, Florida. It seems to be there every year. And the two organizers, Chris Comedian and John Dennis, I just want everyone to understand this one is kind of a grassroots, you know, growth event. You know, it was the biggest that it's ever been this year. And these guys put it on because it's their passion. It's not for profit. It's not part of a bigger picture to try to upsell you on, you know, other more advanced programs. Like a lot of events are, this is really by podcasters and audiophiles for podcasters is really the spirit of it. And it was a large event. I've been to a lot events in the last couple years that have had far fewer people. This had easily 350, 400 people at.

This event, which is amazing.

It was amazing. So you had all these different, you know, topics being discussed about. Yes. About Facebook Live, about podcast monetization, about, you know, everything from if you're a new person. There was kind of some 101 tracked issues for about, you know, learning to podcast and about, you know, interview styles and how to create a really engaging show to even topics about, you know, your introduction, introduction to your podcast. So you could get all that sort of one on one and stuff. But then there Was also really advanced topics about, you know, hey, your podcast getting out over the Amazon Echo and how, you know, these smart speakers are really becoming a much bigger market. Also breakdown over stats of the industry and where it stands. And easily a fully 70% of the podcasts out there are independent podcasts like ours and probably like most of you that are listening today or certainly most of our clients at Brandcasters. And then and there's only a very small percentage of those big media companies who would put out podcasts for NPR or the big media outlets like CNN and big magazines and such are big media companies. Are that really the small percentage? So it's a very level playing field for indie podcasts to really legitimately compete in this market, which is really cool. But I also, I went to this Facebook Live demonstration and lecture. In fact, the entire session was broadcast on Facebook Live right in front of us and going over, you know, best practices because guess what, there have been some changes in Facebook's algorithms and what they push out. And you know, when you go live with Facebook Live, here was the big, here's a nugget that I got out of this. It's very important. If you have your personal Facebook account and then you have your business like page or your brand like Page or maybe your podcast like Page like we do with feed your brand. If you push out, you do your Facebook Live from your business page or your your branded like page, it will now get pushed out to fewer people. You won't get near as much reach if you do that versus if you did it from your own personal page. Because Facebook is trying to encourage more engagement between real people and sort of battling like the bots. And the major media companies that are utilizing Facebook to reach people, they're really rewarding and giving more reach to individuals for sharing over their personal account. Now it's still worth it to share it over your business account. It's very important to do that. But you should if you have both. The best practice recommendation from the experts is Facebook Live on your personal account and then share it to your business like page. And in fact, there is a specific tool I'll share with you. I'll also put it in the links of the blog post at FeedYourBrand Co for this episode where there is a program called a utility called Live Leap which will actually, you can go Facebook Live from your personal account and it will simultaneously share it for you to your business or your fan page on Facebook. So you can do, you know, if.

You can do that as a guest Tom, because I was just invited in on a Facebook live this morning as a guest. I wonder if it works that way.

I don't know if it's a.

Because I then had to share it later to our. To our feature band page.

This is a new tool and I have not used it yet because literally the day we're recording this is like the second business day back in the office from when I was at the show. And we haven't had time to go over that because I've been catching up on emails and doing so much follow up from podfest. I haven't experienced it yet, but we are going to be changing our standard operating procedure on how we do Facebook lives. And I'll tell you something about that. I also was invited to speak on their stage in this, what they call Pecha Kucha round of speakers.

If you don't know what that is, it is a speed round. Like in their case, it's 20 slides and 15 seconds each. And it's five minutes, which actually the traditional one is a little bit. It's 20 seconds each, but. But it's a little bit longer. So seven minutes is a normal piccio round. But in this particular one, 20 slides, 15 seconds each. Very visual. Five minutes total. And Tom spoke as fast as me. I'm so proud of him.

Yeah. Those of you that listen to me probably know that my style is I don't speak as many words per minute as Tracy and I even personally. And I'll just criticize myself here. Sometimes I think I speak too slowly and I'm surprised I don't get more people writing and say, damn it, Tom, would you speed it up? You know, get to the point.

Well, not everybody is a New Yorker listening to us. Right.

Talk very quickly.

Yeah. I compensate for me.

But the reality is I did not know what to expect from this. I know. You know, we took out an advertisement in their show magazine for our business and, you know, they invited me to speak for the stage about what we do as a business. And it wasn't. It wasn't like a pay to play type of thing. I mean, they. I think they invited me to speak first. But the reality is it was about, you know, sharing what you do and sharing it with all the people that are there. So on Thursday afternoon, for a period of I don't even know how many Pecha Kucha speakers there were, but it was a lot.

I could see it in here.

Yeah, but think about it. Five minutes for three hours and it just was back to, back to back to Back in this room. So what is that? That would be 12, like, 36 or so speakers. Right. And not only did I speak, but Scott Carson got to speak about the note closer show and his experience when he's getting out of it. And he went before me, and I did not know what to expect and originally hadn't done my homework. And, Tracy, I don't think you did either. As we're looking at the thing and we're like, oh, it's five minutes. Well, we'll have four slides and we'll talk on the. You know, here's what we're going to. What you can talk on that you could do communicating in five minutes. And after we got into it, we're like, no, no, no. It's absolute. You have to have 20 slides and.

You know, and it runs on auto.

Yeah. Instead of doing a PowerPoint where you have a clicker to advance it, they convert it to a movie, like an mov file. So you just play it and it goes. And so it's like, ready, set, go. So, you know, I've talked quite a bit from. Not as much as you, Tracy, but I feel like, you know, hey, I'm pretty good. I can deliver a good speech, but this is like five minutes. Holy heck, that was fast. Seriously. But. And I did prepare and did some research and. Or, you know, rehearsal, I guess, not research. I did rehearse it a bit. And even though I did, you know what, There was a slide that went by and I hadn't talked about it yet. And in hindsight, I wish I just said, oh, I'll skip over that. All right, if you want to know more about that one, come talk to me after. And I didn't do that at the very end. I went back to try to share what that was and ended up going slightly over time and sort of got the hook.

Yeah, you got the hook. I saw it.

But anyway, the fun part and the Facebook Live tie in is that Scott Carson and I both planned this. And just the way the schedule was, it was pretty random. Scott went before me about two or three speakers ahead of me. I said, all right, Scott, I'm going to Facebook Live this your talk, and when I go, you can Facebook Live me. So we get it out there. And I did what I thought was the right thing to do, and I went on to our. Our Facebook, like, page for feed your brand, and I shared and did the Facebook live from feed your brand and later shared it to my personal account and you shared it to yours, and all this stuff Right. But then I learned the next day at the Facebook Live, you know, presentation that I had done it all wrong. I should have done it from my own personal page and Scott should have. We should have done it to Scott's from his personal page. And then each of us shared it to our business or brand like pages, you know, live and learn. We'll do it better going forward. But that worked. At least we did it and we shared it. Right. And we filmed each other. And I have to tell you, it was fast, but it was a lot of fun. And I think the whole event for this three hour period was that, you know, with about 400 people attending this event, they were able to get 36 more speakers in a three hour period talking about what is important to them, unique to them, or whatever it was important they wanted to share. Then they could have squeezed in at most shows in a three or four day period.

Right.

And so was just a taste. At least you got a taste and you get to watch all these people and see what's very interesting. And you could then go and spend more time, you know, networking with these people or asking them questions over the course of the next couple of days.

Yeah, you could seek them out because this happened on day one, which I think was brilliant on their part as well. So I thought there's really, I mean, you came back so excited and normally, I mean, you guys don't know this. Maybe I don't think we've mentioned this, but Tom's not a night person. So we rarely record evening episodes because Tom just is not all like, I'm.

Definitely an early bird in general, except when I go back east because I am from California. And then I'm like waking up three hours earlier and I was like, oh gosh, it was hard to get up in the morning. But you're right, I'm not a night owl.

But you came back on the plane at night. I pick you up at like 9:00 clock at night and you don't stop talking till we get all the way home. So it took us. Well, because LAX is so slow with bags, it took us like two hours to get home. And so you talked for two hours about how excited you were about this event. And that's incredible at that hour, let me tell you.

It really is. The energy level of this entire event was really up because it wasn't just your typical event where you're getting people to, you're seeing presentations and things like that. But.

It was a very cooperative event. And I was asking people when they would tell me what their podcasts are better, what they're doing. I would ask them, well, what are you looking for next? And there was a lot of that kind of spirit of it. And in fact, one of the best events of the whole time was in the evening after dinner for, I don't know, a couple hours at least, there was a huge networking event. You walk into this room, literally there were 350 people at least participating in this. It was like the only thing going on at the time. You walk into the door of this big.

Banquet room, whatever, and you're given a card which tells you randomly what table you're gonna sit at. And then it had a bunch of other numbers of other tables that you're gonna eventually sit at, almost like a musical chairs type of thing, but no music. And it was a networking event where you got to know everybody else quickly at the table. They did their very short elevator pitch. I think they got 90 seconds to talk about what their podcast is, who they are. But then there was also, each time there was a random question that they would ask each of us to say, like, what are our two favorite podcasts? Was one. Another one is, you know, what are you looking for to move your podcast forward? And there were some other random questions, but it really got us all talking with each other, meeting other people, and exchanging business cards every time at the table. So you got to meet a ton of the room. Just the value in that and helping your business no matter what your business was. And so many people had different businesses. The only commonality was an interest in or an, you know, activity in podcasting that they're all doing. But there were so many ways that that benefited your business in other ways that was worth it the whole time going there for me. And I love those type of events where we get to go around and meet more people and network and that. So I got so charged.

Sometimes you get into events where, like, you never have enough time to speak to anyone and. Or it's too noisy, like at lunch to speak to anyone, and so you get to know the people right next to you, and then that's it. So, yeah, that's nice that they facilitated that and made that happen. I want to ask Tom, like, what were some of the statistics and other things that you heard that that really would be of great value to our listeners that really meant something? Like, you heard some stats going on about active podcasts. You were meant mentioning a few things. So tell us a few of those.

Well, so, you know, there were several companies that are podcast hosting companies, just like we are with our pot of ties. Although we're much smaller than all these bigger companies, hopefully not by the time we get there next year, we hope to be much bigger. But they have a lot of, you know, statistics and information to share because they have so many podcasters that are hosting with them. And some of the interesting stats really were, I guess, demystifying download statistics was a really good, good presentation that happened and that it was shocking to me to learn sort of what the median number of downloads per episodes is. And you'd be shocked. I mean, most people might think, oh, I'm really going to make it when I have 10,000 downloads an episode or when I have over 100,000 downloads, or people have this goal of getting to a million plus downloads a month or something. And really the smallest fraction of a percentage of podcasts out there actually achieve hundreds of thousands of downloads a month and millions very.

So, you know, that's. It's so interesting because when you say that, like, I kind of really casually drop out to people, I'm like, oh, yeah, we have a hundred thousand listeners on our WTFF podcast. And I'm really casual about it because it doesn't seem like enough to me.

Right.

But it is. I shouldn't be. I should be really proud of that. We should be really proud of that. That it's like, it's actually significant. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm proud. We make money and it's working for us and it's been working and our listeners love it and it keeps us going. But I always thought, oh, wow, that's not big in the scope of podcast.

We're still small player, actually, percentage wise, we're definitely among the top 5% of podcasts that actually have those kind of numbers. I mean, some people were touting, oh, the podcast has historical 300,000 downloads. Well, I know we've exceeded that on WTFFF and not on this one. Feed your brand. Feed your brand is very new, right? And it's up and coming and hopefully we'll get there someday. I did actually meet somebody randomly at one of these networking tables who had listened to our podcast. That's always fun when that happens.

It is. It happened when I went to my event because I was representing our podcast podcast, our 3D printing podcast at the event at the same time you were speaking. So. So we were both speaking at the same day. And so, yeah, I said that happened. I met a former guest in person and I met a few listeners. So it was really interesting.

So the vast majority of podcasts are achieving less than 5,000 downloads an episode, or even less than 5,000 downloads a month. And if you have a podcast that has a niche audience and you're getting, you know, anywhere from 3, 4, 500 to 1,000 downloads an episode, you're doing great. You really are. Now you might think, well, if only getting a thousand downloads an episode, how can I monetize that? Well, there's so many different ways to monetize. You know, a thousand really active, loyal listeners can be a great market to, you know, be communicating with, but also, you know, per episode, that may mean that all of your downloads of all your back catalog and everything maybe are getting more than 10,000 downloads a month. And guess what? You can actually monetize that. There were so many discussions about monetization at PodFest and a lot of companies that are actively there to help help podcasters monetize that are very happy to help bring you sponsorship, even when you have, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 downloads a month across everything.

I think what shocked me the most though, was, Thomas, that you coming back and telling me how like, I mean, in a way they're old school, though. They're still old school looking at it like radio and that they're still looking at or like cpm. Like, it's just still. It's still like so old school web that it hasn't caught up with the technology like we have on potatoes, which allows you to, you know, go across an entire catalog because of the timelessness and the evergreen nature of the episodes.

Yeah, I was kind of surprised at that, you know, that some of the companies that are bringing sponsors to podcasts are definitely. They're not really getting very specific into the niche opportunity of the podcast. And they even talked from the stage of putting all these podcasts on a spreadsheet, how many downloads they have on the new episodes every month. That equates to a certain price people will pay per thousand downloads. And here's what you can make. And I think that's very short sighted, but I did, you know, pleasantly find others that recognize the niche value and opportunities and different pricing models. And we're talking to some of those media companies to help bring sponsors to the podcasts that we work with at Brandcasters. And I think we're going to see a big change in that over the next year.

Right.

Poditize is really gives you that ability to leverage plays across all your episodes. And because we're finding most podcasters have more than 60% of their episodes that are downloads every month that are not on the new episodes.

Right. And that, that's the statistic. The 60% on back episodes is so powerful. Which goes to show you that if you're not putting in the blog posts on those back episodes, you're also missing out because we get 80% of our traffic for our clients come from Google. So you're missing out on that altogether if you don't have that in play. But I look at it like this, Thomas, like we're in a world, binge watching, listening, whatever, right? And why would an advertiser go and do one single episode of, you know, a Netflix series? They wouldn't. They would do the entire season or all the seasons, right?

Yes.

And so why would it be any different for your podcast? And that's what I don't understand. Why that's just not a logical thought process on the advertiser's model themselves. Like that just makes way more sense.

It seems so short sighted to me. I was actually really shocked one of these companies, and I'm not going to out them because I don't want to. You know, that's not really our style to badmouth another company from our podcast. But there was one of these companies that their entire business is monetizing podcasts with audio ad sponsors. And they were considering two things. One, they were only considering the new episodes. Like if you publish one a week, you have four, roughly four episodes that publish new every month. They were only considering the advertising on those four episodes every new month and disregarding the opportunity on your back episodes. So that, that seems shortsighted to me and certainly not what we believe in here. You have a lot more plays than that every month and there are new people listening every month. So why would you have an old ad in an old episode? Just doesn't make any sense. So that was one way. And the other way that shocked me, really shocked me more, is that there was this. One of the people at one of these media companies placing sponsors on podcasts have their own podcast and they have these blinders on that are just all about the audio ad sponsorship of the episodes. They weren't even considering monetizing the traffic that would go to their website. And they actually said from the stage. I don't think it was like an intentional point. It was just sort of like almost like an open mic moment where they were just being very real and honest about what they're doing, where they said, oh yeah, our website is like a black hole. We don't even, you know, pay attention to the traffic on our website. I'm like, are you kidding me?

Well, and this is why, if people want to know what we did to get to a hundred thousand plays on 3D printing podcasts, which we had no email list, nothing when we started.

We had zero.

We had nothing. And so when you want to talk about how that happened, well, how did that happen? Because we used our website to power it. We used our website to attract it. We use a website as a predominant means to make it happen in addition to podcasting heavy and doing really good practices on the podcasting side. But we never spent a single dollar to make any of that happen.

And what we learned through doing that, which we've turned into this whole business that is Brandcasters today, is that we learned that while the podcast audience is incredibly powerful thing and a wonderful thing, and we have fun with it, and our listeners really do enjoy listening to the podcast. But honestly, it would not be worth it for us if it was only an audio show. Turning that into written content for our website is. Is really at least 3/4, if not more of the power of the marketing power. It's about 80% of the reach that's out there that is producing value for us. And so that's why this business exists. And we're doing this for customers and recommending it to anybody and sharing all these things with you on this podcast. And here is a company that in the middle of this modern digital marketing industry, and they're completely disregarding their own website. It just, it blew me away. It's like, how can you be doing that? And so I'm gonna call them up and want talk to them about that. I haven't done it yet because it's been a little busy, but I'm going to do that shortly and reach out to them. And whether they work with us or not, I just want to share it with them because to me, they're just leaving opportunity on the table.

So I want to just quickly go back to something that we said at the beginning. Was that about this group of indie podcasters, you said it was what, 72% or something like that?

It's about 70%, 69 or 70% of the entire podcasts of podcasts that are out there. But actually the downloads are even higher. They're like 80 plus percent of all podcast downloads belong to the independent podcasts.

Right? So if they belong to the independent podcast, and we're seeing this really big trend because we service both sides, we service Corporate and we. And production for publications as well. And so because we service both sides, we have this viewpoint. But what I'm saying is, is that I think the real reason that the downloads aren't working as well is because the publications and the bigger corporations are not taking advantage of the blog side of it as much much that they're not putting the power in their website because they already had blog practices and writers on staff and they have systems and they have other teams that manage this and then they just come and hire us to handle, handle just the audio and podcast portion of things. So because they're siloing all of that, they're missing out on the cross platform power that the indie podcasters that you guys out there are taking advantage of because you're doing it right and you're spreading the message right. And, and they also do social media sales like because of they're all siloed like that they actually haven't caught up. They have to change a whole bunch of systems and get all of those systems to buy into the idea of what we're doing here and what you guys are doing in brandcasting, that sort of brand multicasting model. And so there's great power to be doing this right now. And competitive edge, this is where it lies, is being able to do all of that. And it's not like you didn't need to do it before you needed to have a website. You needed to have social platforms. You, you need to have social sharing. You need all of these things to happen and you don't have system. So you might as well do it in the fastest, easiest way possible. That's the way I always looked at it. It was like, what can I do? So I, because we're such a small staff, to take time out of my day, you know, time out of the things I have to do and make them so that they're fun and interesting and exciting to do.

You know, I agree 100% with you, Tracy. I've experienced that as well. I think the bigger the corporation is that we work with, then the less that they either value converting the podcast into a blog post or, or even if they value it, and maybe I shouldn't say they don't value it. I think many of them value it. But I think the bigger the corporation, the less control that the people who have the authority and ability and the initiative to create a podcast don't have any ability to create the blog post on the corporate website, that they're so big that the company has like you said in silos. People that run the website are over here. And the people who are doing this podcast aren't allowed to touch the website. The people that are in charge of the website don't have no interest in the podc. So the bigger the corporation is, the more that they are just leaving the podcast in its own little silo of just being a podcast, and therefore, they're not taking advantage of it now. They're a much bigger company with a lot of revenue and more budgets, and they don't necessarily need to take advantage of that. I mean, if they did, they would still do better and probably even make more money as a big company. But they sort of. They can't take their attention.

They can't focus on some details like that.

Right.

So that's unfortunate for them, but they still see value in the podcast, and they do it. Now, there's one exception to that, and I. We can't mention it today, but there is a very, very large Fortune 500 company that we're launching a podcast for that has seen the value and actually is creating a whole new website just for the podcast, which is really exciting to see.

That is really exciting to see happen. So, yeah, maybe up and coming more, and that will be the new model, maybe. And so that actually can make it really dangerous for indie podcasters out there to compete. But I think that it's, you know, this is really great that you have this viewpoint, and there's a support system like PodFest to support that indie podcast movement. And I love that we call it indie podcast because it makes it seem. Yeah, I mean, it just makes it seem more like cutting edge and exciting.

Well, it is really cutting edge. And here's the big overall message that I want to say to any of you listening to this who are podcasters and might think, you know, why would I want to, you know, spend time and take three, four days out of my business and go to something like PodFest? And here's, I guess, the overall message I want to communicate. And this rang through the entire show. As a business, as a podcaster, you absolutely can compete. It is a level playing field in the podcast world for you to compete for listenership. And you can build an audience, even though more people are getting into it. It's true. But guess what? There's a lot more listeners discovering podcasts and listening year over year, too. So the market of listeners is growing. But it doesn't matter if you're not a big company like the NPRs of the world. World and I, that's the only one that really comes to mind. But these big media company, highly produced corporate podcasts, they don't have any more ability to build an audience of podcast listeners than you do. You absolutely can compete and thrive and build a wonderful audience that is loyal and engaged and will produce value for you as a podcaster and for your company. Company. So that's very exciting.

And the most important thing that I think your takeaway is that continual learning is so important in this fast moving industry.

You know what things are changing. Like look that Facebook has learned, I think from a lot of issues since the 2016 election and they're changing what it takes to get pushed out and to gain reach on their platform. And it changes some of the techniques you need to use for how you push out messages. Things like that are going to continue to happen. I do think what we're doing as podcasters, as brandcasters, creating the written content, the original organic content on our websites is so tremendously valuable that that will continue to pay dividends over time for your business, for marketing your business, marketing your brand and being able to monetize that. I don't think that's really going to change. Still, the original content is key for your podcast and your blog. But the ways in which you have to get attention and blast it out and the best techniques for getting attention on social media, media in gaining reach, some of those things are going to change over time. Among other new technologies that keep coming out, I think the smart speaker market as that's changing, the Alexas and the Google homes of the world and all that, and I've heard Apple's now going to get into it, that the reality is there are things that we all still need to learn that I still want to learn to help bring this to you and help all of our clients and to help ourselves. So it's worth going and I'd love it if some of our listeners would like to join me and you next year at Podfest is going to be in early March of 2019. So you got plenty of time to plan ahead and think about it on your calendar and we can go and have a great time and all learn some things together at each other's businesses. We can have a Brandcasters dinner, brand casting dinner, little meetup within it. This year it was just me and Scott Carson, but next year and a lot of drinks. Yeah, there was one night that there was a lot of drinks. It was a little hard getting up the next morning, but boy, boy was it fun. So there you Go.

Well, you know, if you'd like to find out more information about PodFest and what's going on there, just so you can take a look at what you know, who is on the speaker list and things like that. We'll have all the information on the website@feedyourbrand.co in the blog post for this episode. And we'll also have, of course, there is the recording of the Facebook live of you doing the Picha Kucha round, so you can catch Tom talking really fast if you'd like to see him. And I'm going to run it again, though, and because I want to make sure that people could see the slides better because it was kind of far away. So I'm going to run it so that someone can see the actual slideshow.

You know, that would be good because I gave 11 ninja tips, we call them, for how to get more out of your podcast. And if you work with us, you may know a lot of these because we take advantage of these, you know, tactics for clients. But for those of you that are not customers of ours and are aspiring podcasters, this would be very valuable for you, and we're happy to share it. We're an open book here.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to post that in the next week on Facebook as well. So that should be up by the time this podcast is up.

Well, we'll add it to it. Actually, I'm going to try and get this podcast up really quickly, so it may not. Either you're going to have to do it faster or you may have to check back, you know, a couple days after the post airs. If that's going to be there. We'll figure that out.

Be sure to check out Facebook. EdYourBrand is our Facebook page there, so you can check that out as well. So thanks for sharing everything about PodFest, Tom.

You're very welcome. Wow, that was a longer episode than I expected. But you know what? There's just so much to talk about, and it was very valuable. It was a great time. So thank. Thank you again to the people that put on podfest. They did a very good job. Chris and Dennis. It was awesome, and I'm looking forward to it next year. And hopefully you will, too. So, hey, that's it. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back next time with another great episode. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed.

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