Producing Your Show Like a Pro

Okay, let's get started. To get back to start yout Authority podcast. And one day Bootcamp continues. Let's continue on and we are gonna start talking about professional production. Post production, specifically.

Right, sure, yeah. Post production, meaning we're not talking about what are you going to record, what is the subject of your podcast, who's your guest gonna be? Those are all pre production things. Post production is after you've recorded, you've got a raw recording. Now what do you do with it? Right. And you know, there are DIY possibilities, but right now we're talking about professional production.

Right. This is where you want to step up your game. You want to make sure that you're doing everything you need to brand, cast your show. So we're going to talk about the production process all the way through from that. So we're going to talk about video speakers, specifically video sharing, because that's actually what you're doing with it. You're not editing the video. You may do a little bit like put bumpers on it, but you're not doing heavy video editing. We're not going to go into that here. That's way more complicated. Podcast, audio editing, blog posts, adding SEO links, images, all of those things that create a really great blog post, including the great titles we were talking about earlier when we were talking about our editorial content. We want to create shared graphics for blogs and social posts. So what are those shared graphics? We often call them episode header graphics, episode graphics. There's multiple names for those. And then we're going to go into that last thing that I referred to just before the break, which was ego bait and email. Follow up.

One of my favorite subjects.

I know, I love to talk about this. So everything we talk about here are set with time, team or budget.

Yeah, you really, you have to either set, spend a lot of time, or have a team that's going to do it for you and. Or spend money on an outsource to do it for you. I mean, you really can't do it without one or more of a combination of those factors, Right?

Exactly. And so it may be a matter that you want your own team and that you're going to do it that way. We're of the opinion that unless you have a team that is deep dive experts into SEO, into blogging, into what it takes to social share, into each one of those areas, then a team is on you to manage, which will take you more time. So building a team and managing a team will take more time. That's what we did when we Started our business here. Well, we didn't even know we were starting a business. We just built a team because it was too much work for ourselves. But getting that team trained, providing them standard operating procedures, prescribing them the best practices, and then making sure that they stay up on everything, they're on top of it. This is not a great place for just a virtual assistant, unless that virtual assistant is deep dive into every single one of these. So what we've found is that if you have a team, you need about five different people with five different skill sets and they're in each of the areas as we're going to talk about them.

Right. And so to add to what you're saying, Tracy, the reality is they not only have to be experts in those areas, but they have to be staying on top of what's new and changing in software, in algorithms, on social platforms, with audio editing software, with itunes and their requirements. I mean, there are just so many things they have to stay on top of that if that's not what they live and breathe and they're not even, it's just hard to do. Right?

And especially if they're virtual assistants who you're saying, like, I'm only paying you for five hours a week. No, they're going to do the things that are the most important. And staying up on things is really hard. So that's where we get. Expertise starts to fall apart and your show gets delisted or things don't happen in those processes. So thinking about those things as to whether or not you have time, team or budget to plan. So everything is coached in that. We want to talk about that. So we've referred to video sharing. So what we're talking about is going from livestream to YouTube or Zoom to YouTube. But everything ends up on YouTube.

It does end up on YouTube. It does not have to be live. Many of the podcasters that we know and work with record every episode using a tool like Zoom. And even though they were intending to just record the audio only they get the video. And so many of them now have started to actually publish that video more intentionally. YouTube is the place. YouTube is the number two search engine.

On the Internet right now. You can also do Vimeo and there are other video channels. There are some that are running like Roku type stuff where they're out there on video sharing that that's a possibility for you, right? I mean, you could absolutely make that happen. But.

Excuse me, but predominantly what we're talking about here is live streaming to YouTube, Facebook to YouTube Zoom to YouTube. And so because Google owns YouTube, it has the richest SEO. It's going to help us do the things we want to do in getting seen, heard and found. And so that's why we recommend that if you've got a limited amount of time, a limited amount of effort that you want to put into it, this is, this is a great way. There are other tools that you can use to repurpose and put it out there, and there's actually tools for that and you pay a fee for doing all of those things. But this is the simplest and the most basic with the most value. Because remember, we always talked about at the very beginning that we want to get you the maximum conversion, the maximum ability to get seen, heard and found for the amount of effort that you put into it. And the Google YouTube effort is worth it. So here are some of the things, Tom, if you'd like to take those. Here's some of the things that you need to do when you're sharing your videos.

Sure. You don't just want to take that live stream video you did on Facebook or that zoom video you've recorded and just put it up Raw on YouTube. At minimum, you want to put video bumpers. That means a professionally created introduction, just like you would do for a podcast that's only audio, but this time it's video, usually your logo. And it's very important because it brands it for you. Right. You need to make sure that when people see this video, they know, hey, this is from your show, it's about you. Otherwise, you know, you get. If you just jump into what is a zoom, call it just. It just doesn't look as professional. It gets less.

So if you can't afford the time or you can't create video bumpers or all of those things, at minimum, you want to have more than just a thumbnail of like whatever still shot in there. So you want to load up a image that is at minimum that size. And YouTube has different sizes that come up all the time. There's different size configurations, JPEG value that you have to do, usually JPEG or png. And they have different size constraints. So make sure you go to YouTube and check the most current one. But that's at minimum you want to do. But you're leaving money on the table, you're leaving link backs and other things. By not putting a bumper on the back end, you're not sending them back to your website, you're not sending them into that URL. There are some ways, but most people's YouTube channels don't have ways to put clickable links or any of that because YouTube's changed it so much that you must have a big enough channel with enough power, with enough views in order to get those extra rich features that some videos you see out there have.

Right. And one thing I just want to add about these video bumpers is because of the nature of live streaming, where remember we talked about when we did it in the very beginning, you don't know that you're live yet and so you're not really giving your presentation at that time. The other thing that's highly recommended is you trim the very beginning of your video and the end if necessary. So it's really just the important content that those video bumpers are then going on. So just a quick.

Yeah, and especially if you do the live stream, then you do Q and A and stuff afterwards, you want to cut all that off for the YouTube video. Yeah, cut the Q and A. Yeah, exactly. So the other thing that I want to mention here is that if you have a brand new channel, let's say we just started up the feed your brand channel and we didn't even have 100 subscribers yet. You can't get your, your name associated with. You can't get what they call a vanity URL where it says YouTube. I think it says for YouTube.com forward slash. I think it says you and then it says forward slash. And then it would have feature brands. And so you can't even get that if you don't have a hundred subscribers to your channel. So when you're brand new, one of the things you must beg your friends and family to do, go like your YouTube channel. Right? Make that happen. Because the sooner you get that, remember when you're announcing on your podcast, you can go to our YouTube channel eatyourbrand, like now. They'll be able to find you easier. And so it's a great way to do so making sure that you have that put that in place. It's the one time where you want to beg your friends and family to do you a favor.

And so you really need a really good title for all these videos. And you should be coming up with a really good keyword rich title for your podcast episode anyway. And this title can be the same, right?

Yeah, this can be absolutely the same. You don't have to make it different, but you don't want it to be the short title that you might have done. You did that strategy where you have a short title that's for itunes and the Longer title for blog posts. You want that longer keyword rich title to be here on YouTube as well, because Google owns YouTube, so we're reinforcing that. Now.

Google doesn't use tags, but videos still do and podcasts still do.

Yeah, YouTube is one of the most. One of the biggest platforms that still does use tags as a way for people to find them. And those are keywords. You can enter in as many tags as you want in a YouTube video. Now you can sort of go overboard. Probably half a dozen is enough, unless you. Depends on your episode. But you definitely want to make sure you put in those tags when you publish that when you're configuring and publishing that video.

Right. And one of the things to tag is making sure you put your guest name right. Guest name. And any companies are associated with. You want to make sure to put those in the tags because someone will do a. Do a search of those things to check and see, hey, where were we mentioned in the news? And you will get pushed out and you will get friended and you're on itunes.

You have that long description. You want to use that same description here on YouTube. Absolutely no reason not to. And then of course, you want to be putting in that description. You want to have your show name, the website, the links, all the information that's relevant to what you are doing in your show, your company. So please definitely do not forget to do that. All right. Anything else on the video before we move on?

I don't think so. Yeah, just making sure your website link. You could put your website link or your show link earlier on in it as well. That's one of the things you can put it up so sooner so that it shows up on the short Google on the short YouTube description because it is pretty short when you just see it with the video.

Okay, well, let's move on to audio editing.

Not my favorite subject. I like never wanted to edit the IO.

I understand. I never did either. And there is a whole.

I don't know if I want to call it community of people or there is a certain kind of podcasters out there that are doing it really on a bootstrap and they are going to edit the audio themselves and more power to them. They're welcome to do it. And we have some resources we're going to share with you where you can learn how to do that. We are not going to teach you how to edit audio, but it is really important to have audio editing to make you and your guests sound your best. This is one of those Things like Tracy was saying earlier, you're going to have to spend a lot of time or you're going to spend some money getting this done, or you're not going to do it at all and you're just going to just put the auto intro and outro on it and you're not going to really edit the audio.

Yeah. The only thing I really want to say about the audio editing is the most. Even the successful podcasters that I interview for my column and Authority magazine and for the center of Influence podcast, the ones who still edit themselves are few and far between. When you get more more successful, they don't edit themselves. The ones who still do, it's so time consuming that they recognize that it's hurting their business, it's hurting their core of what they do. So while we understand it. But then also the thing is, we see the people who pod fade the fastest, the ones who quit podcasting are the ones who really go for the heavy editing, complicated system. They're doing it all themselves. It took them months and months to learn how to edit, or months and months to get good at it. And then they realize this is like, I can't run a business. I can't do my day job. And so they took on a lot more than they should. Now, that doesn't mean that you don't already have great skills. Maybe you already have amazing video and audio editing skills. This is like no brainer. And you'd rather do it yourself because the creativity of it allows you to differentiate your show. That's a great way and a great time to do it. But you already got the skill set. It's not something new you're going to learn.

Yeah, I feel like for me, that's kind of like I don't hire a painter to paint the interior of my house because I used to do it and I'm really good at it. I'm fast at it, and I don't like anybody else's work. Is that really the best use of my time around my home and my weekend? Probably not, but I'm gonna do it and I'm pretty quick at it. So more power to you. Very happy if you want to do it. But professional audio editing is definitely going to be the way to get you and your guest to sound their best. There's so much involved in it. I mean, it really is audio engineering, right?

It is. And so remember that there's also things that you want to do in terms of the structure of how you edit it. Like I talked before about Having a pre talk, having your interview, having the clothes. So keeping that in mind, that's part of the editing job, is to knit those pieces together. Maybe you have to put promos and ads in. You definitely, of course, want to put your intros and outros on, unless you're using the auto intro outro editing. So these are the things that you want to accomplish with it. But you also want to remove ums, ahs, dogs barking, like different sounds, people coughing, like it happens, or the most important thing that I hear again and again from the ones that maybe even started themselves. But the thing that they spend the money to go have a professional do is audio leveling. It's the number one most annoying thing that gets people to quit your show because the audios are up and down from the two different co hosts or from you and your guest.

Right. Your guest audio is almost never as good a quality as yours, especially if they're a remote guest. If you're recording them through zoom, they usually don't have as good a microphone as you do. There will be some exceptions, but for the most part, their audio will not be as good. So that's something that you want to keep in mind. And that's where a professional audio editor will, you know, be able to help make a poor guest audio really sound much, much better, at least not as bad as it really was. And there's other things about background noise. You know, there's always a certain amount of ambient white noise in any environment and depending on the mic equipment that's used. And a good audio, professional audio editor can do things to reduce that background noise that are not so simple. It's not just pushing a button and editing software or turning on an automatic feature.

Right. So one of the things that our team tells us and our experts in audio editing have said is that leaving five seconds of sort of wait space where you're not speaking, where you're hearing the ambient sound in the environment at the beginning and at the end. Because sound can change over time. Like maybe an air conditioner kicked on and kicked off. So we have that here right now we know that we're recording our audio and the air conditioning is on, but if the air conditioning wasn't on, we'd be like sweating under the hot lights here. So, like, it wouldn't be a good plan for the video. So you kind of have to compromise. There we go. The audio editors know how to take that out and it'll be just fine. So we're not worried about it because we have the Professional editing. So if you don't have the pro editing or if you're doing it yourself, removing all of those things in the environmental sound and taking Tom's earlier recording tips to heart is going to make your job easier when you're doing these editing things.

Right. So oops, I think my microphone. Just pardon me one sec. It's not gonna sound too good. Doesn't affect the live, but it's gonna affect the recording. The recording. Okay, there we go. So if you do want to edit and learn how to edit your own audio, there are a lot of resources. Now we don't teach you how to do it because quite honestly, I'm not an audio engineer and there's not enough.

Time in a one day bootcamp.

Yeah. To train that. But there are many softwares you can use at a range of prices. Audacity, the first one on the list is completely free. It's available for PC and Mac. So most people who are on a budget start there. Then you have simplecast. Auphanic is kind of an automated online system where you can upload your audio and they have some editing tools and processing tools there that can help you. Adobe Audition is a professional audio engineering audio editing software. And quite honestly, that's the one that we standardized on and all of our audio engineers in our audio department use. Hindenburg is another very high end one. And this is not the blimp that crashed about 100 years ago that's spelled slightly differently, but I don't know why they chose that name.

But anyway, still doesn't sound good to me.

Hindenburg is one of the biggest, most professional audio editing software. A lot of audio files and audio engineers really like it.

These are probably most of the tools you would consider using if you're going to edit your own audio.

Yeah, just to step in here and say that there are some, I'm going to call them, platforms out there that offer audio editing. You record in their software and you're able to edit in a very limited way, mind you. You typically can't level your sounds, but you could take out ums and ahs and you can cut the beginning and the end and that's just about it. In it. But be very cautious of using them because when you record in their system, many of them have an intellectual property clause that says that they own your audio because you recorded it in their system. So we have had people who wanted to move from a host and was using that recording function that had this little bit of editing to it and in it they lost the ability to retain their show rights. So be very cautious of it. That's why we don't put them up here, even though that they are available. We don't put them here because we don't want you to lose the rights to your show. It's your show, it's your voice, it's your recording. You shouldn't be allowing someone else to put ads on there that you didn't approve and be able to keep your show and not give it back to you at the end.

Okay, so how do you learn how to use these tools? Quite honestly, it's free. You can go to YouTube, YouTube or YouTube. Really, that's where all the training and tutorials are. And quite honestly, that's how most people are learning things like this to. And there's lots of great resources there. So there's no point in us or really anybody else trying to put together some sort of curriculum or course, when it's just right there.

It is, it's absolutely out there. It's the easiest way. And you know, each one of the softwares, of course, have their own tutorials, but they may be more complex. And that's why we recommend YouTube here, because you're just trying to learn how to edit it for podcasting, not learning every feature of their editing software. So that's why we recommend it here. It's just faster.

Transcript blogging. So some people call them transcripts, some people call them show notes, we call them blogs because they're a little bit deeper and more sophisticated than just than just show notes or something like that.

That's the thing, the old school term used for a post, a written post that was to support or related to the podcast episode was show notes. And it was very short, it had very limited amount of information.

It was the Cliff notes version of your show. So if that, if that, it might have a sentence or two, like a description about what the episode was. It probably had a player that linked to the episode and it had bullet points of the links for the top things covered. Some people even put timestamps in there. So at 15 minutes we said, we talked about this. And then it usually had just a little bit of information on how to link to the. The guest or whatever was being sold. There might be an advertisement or a promo on there. And then some people would add a PDF version, a downloadable PDF. Some of them made you put your email address in to get it. But it was a PDF version of the transcript from the show.

Yeah, these are all old school techniques. And quite honestly, we do not recommend them. We still find some of the older school podcast gurus teaching people to do it and suggesting they should do it. While an old school show notes post will provide some useful information and be a supplement to the episode, it really is not as helpful as other things can be. Like having an entire comprehensive blog post that is based on the episode, what was said in the episode, and it's more of a multimedia visual experience. It is where the real hidden value is of a podcast, both on the.

Bot side and on the human side. So it's a little bit of both. So remember when I was telling you when you were booking, when you were doing your edit, your editorial calendar and everything, you were always trying to drive them back to your blog post. This is what you're driving them back to. So you have to do a little bit of WordPress prep, website prep. You gotta have a website for it. If you don't have a website and you're watching this bootcamp, I want you to right away go to poditize.com inquiry and book a call with Tom. We have very quick podcast websites that are built in just this format for you very quickly. It's just something that we do because so many people were like, well, I paid this guy $7,500 for a website. I've been waiting six months and I still have nothing. So that got to be unacceptable for us. That's way too much to pay for the starter website anyway. And it just takes way too long. You need to be started, you need to get this out there. Because when you start up your website, you're in that Google sandbox. So the sooner you have your website started and powered with content, the sooner you're going to be searchable, the sooner you're going to be seen and found. And we want to make that happen for you. So website prep, here's some of the stuff that we do. WordPress is absolutely the best and the only thing we recommend to our clients. Those that are on Squarespace, WIX podcast websites, any of those other ones, or.

Even some of the like. The GoDaddy has its own website builder. We have worked with all of them. We've seen all of them, we've studied them, we've analyzed them, we've benchmarked them. None of those other platforms are in your best interest. Quite honestly, from our perspective from SEO.

They don't perform as well. So remember we were talking about that organic growth. We want the traffic and the keyword growth. We don't see it working on those types of websites has to do with how they're blocked, how they're framed, how they're configured, how they've simplified it to make it easier for you to build them. But in simplifying it, they've made it harder for Google to search them.

Right. And the reality of WordPress is we know individuals and companies that have websites that are anywhere from a very beginning starter website all the way up to a full membership website with full e commerce, you know, shop and everything. A membership website that has over 100,000 members, all that can be built on WordPress. So the platform is scalable and will meet your needs for really a long time to come.

Does this mean that if you've got this hard coded corporate site, it's not working? No, it doesn't. But typically those that are built on WordPress are the best ones that we find performing. Some of the hard coded sites do not work, they just don't. And that's because they're following old school model of website development. And it is, I mean there's frankly there's a lot of web developers who came out of what was comfortable for them and they haven't shifted into what's working best today. And WordPress has the Lion's share of the market space and Google knows that. And they've made it easier for them to track through and run their bot spiders through WordPress, and that's what's made it work best for everything. Plus, a lot of the plugins that we're using are designed because people don't design plugins and other things to work with other types of sites because WordPress is friendly to them and the lion's share of the product market, so why would they go anywhere else?

Right, so here on this slide is a list of the recommended plugins that you should have on your WordPress site to help support the best podcasting best practices and blog posting. Best practices, yeah.

And you know, keep in mind here, the more plugins you have, the more conflicts you might have, the more updates you have. Plugins can take down your website. They can be security leaks as well. So having plugins that work again and again, that are updated, that are run by reputable companies is extremely important. Yoast SEO, for instance, is a very reputable company. It's been around for a really long time. They update their program, their plugin very frequently and they update it with success and you can see how stable it is. So if you're having problems in your site, it's probably coming from a plugin issue. It Usually happens from there. So. So keeping that in mind, the Smart Podcast Player and the Smart Track Player were designed by Pat Flynn and they're designed with podcasters in mind. And we don't see any reason to deviate from them. They look really nice. They have lots of really great features like allowing email opt in, allowing links out to subscribe, allowing episode information. Like, there's just a lot of really great information there that's already there. So we don't reinvent the wheel when we know something works really well and works again and again across all of our 220 clients.

That is the only plugin on this list that is a paid plugin. It will cost you an annual fee. It's pretty reasonable and we find it's well worth it. If there were a better solution that cost less, we would use it. But this is it. So that's what we recommend.

Absolutely. So how do you create these blogs? Well, it starts with being wordy, right? We already talked about the length and so I, I already talked to them about the length of how long the podcast. Remember guys, I told you that there was a technical reason for why I wanted you to be about 20 minutes. And that's because the typical blog link out there, 55% of small businesses have a blog. This is a couple of years old, but it hasn't increased tremendously. It might be 65% by now, but 16% of the people spend one to three hours creating a blog post and 84% spent more than three hours creating a blog post. And do you know what the average blog post length is? 500 to 700 words. But the best link for Google is anything over 2,500 words. Guess how long 20 minutes gets you? 3,000 words plus depending on how fast you talk.

That's right. The average person speaks 150 words a minute. So that means a 20 minute blog post is going to give you. A 20 minute podcast is going to give you a 3,000 word blog post, which is is ideal. And if you're recording episodes that are 45 minutes or an hour long, so much the better. Because Google likes blog posts that are longer in the length of words. If you do a 45 to hour long podcast, that might be a 6, 8 or even 10,000 word blog post. That's great. All those rich keyword phrases that you and your guests speak in that episode will do very wonderful things for you for your website and ranking on keywords and bringing traffic to you.

But remember our editorial training, you don't just do longer, just because making sure that it's relevant and worthwhile, you don't.

Want it to be contrived.

You don't want it to be contrived because Google will know that too. Because if you're starting to deviate, not talking about anything relevant, it doesn't, it won't matter at the end of the day. So while yes, longer is better, we want to make sure that it's the right length for the show that you're doing. So keep that in mind. So how do we know this? Well, we have a good friend, Ken Corbright who runs the income store and his podcast is called Today's Growth Growing Business Today and he runs 1,200 plus revenue generating websites. Right. And 32% of them see a boost from Google from longer tail posts, from the posts that are going longer. But not just that. Because we manage many of the podcasts for his network of websites, they're all seeing that boost again and again. The consistent and constant pushing out of content is also something that Google is rewarding. So when you're consistently posting every Tuesday morning and every Thursday morning, Google is rewarding that saying something new is going to go here. Remember back when I said 20% of what Google sees every single day is brand new? Well that when it's brand new, they don't know who to send it to. They're going to send it to the one who's been the most consistent and the most, most constant in performing for the people that are searching and clicking through and finding relevant content there. So these two things are going to get your reward length and consistency.

Right.

So let's talk about that transcription blog. And why are we still calling it a transcription blog? Because it's starting from the spoken word.

Yeah, that's what we recommend. It does begin with an actual transcription, but transcriptions, unless you're going to spend an awful lot of money, an awful lot of money for a, and this is going to spend an awful lot of money for a human transcription that's going to make sure is absolutely perfect. You're going to use some kind of software machine transcription and that's only going to get you about 70% of the way there. It just won't be completely accurate. And it also would say Tracy Collins said this, Tom Collins said that, and that is not easy to read and it is not visually engaging. So what we recommend is to actually begin with a transcription, then have it cleaned up and quality checked, made easier to read and then also putting all those really important links inside of there anything that's linkable that somebody says you would put within that.

I want to mention something also about when you go and have your podcast or your audio transcribed. There's an option in a lot of the transcription services. There's like Rev.com and Timi.com are a couple of the various ones. There's many out there. You can pick any one and try them all. Human transcription is really the only option though, I can tell you. All machine ones are terrible, as Tom mentioned, but you can also don't request the ones where it gives you time stamps because you're going to have to strip them out. It's going to be a waste of time to put them. So we don't like them to have split Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and we don't like them to have timestamps. So like that's something that you want to move out of that. So that transcription blog, the other thing that we like to see is bold face for the, for the host and lightface for the guest.

That's what we do to distinguish. Rather than have those names, then you know, you need, unless you're going to have those names, then you know, you need to have some way for the reader to understand, oh, this text that I'm reading has shifted from one person speaking to the other. You don't really need to reinforce that every time it changes.

Right. And so sometimes they'll do that for co hosting as well. So like you'll have one, one being bold and one being light just to distinguish that as well. Google doesn't matter what, how bold or how light. They don't care about that. We just don't want all that information there because it's a sure sign that it's not.

That it's a transcription and it's not a blog post. And so that's the clear sign to that right there. So going into that, you also want to make sure you use your edited version of your podcast. So you wait till after you have the editing and that can slow things down for a lot of people because otherwise you then have to go back in and cut the transcription and cut through the parts that you took out. So if you're doing heavy editing, you're going to have to remove all of those things. And that's problematic as well. So that's also another reason why having a service or being able to do this all in one is really valuable. So we follow the model of our transcription team transcribes it and they run through four checks, so four editing processes. So that's a lot of time and a lot of people, because it takes you about as long to edit it as it does to listen to it. Because they have to listen and edit at the same time. So that takes usually longer. Longer than the episode. So four times. That is the amount of time you should spend. So keeping that in mind, it's going to help you plan your own timing for how long it's going to take you to go through that. The other thing we want to add is share graphics. And that's what we're going to talk about next. Is there anything else that we want to review about the transcriptions?

I guess one other thing we do is we don't like to put the bullet points with the links at the top. We like to put them at the bottom. And there's a reason for that, and that is that we want people to scroll all the way through the post to get to them. They know they're at the end. They're trained. We tell them that on the show. But we want them to go all the way through to the end because we want them to have screened through that. Because scrolling through that and sort of skipping a post actually has some value in it. They're staying on your page for longer.

And the reality is, we always recommend putting relevant images throughout the text of the post anyway. Or if you have any charts or references, anything you talked about, images from.

Your guest, if they can send you in things that you can use, great. And remember to refer to them on the show and remind them that they're there in the blog post. You're driving people back in. You can add extra videos, any kind of visual accents you want to add into it. You can do that. We also, as we mentioned before, we want the track players on there. We put the episode track player on the page because a lot of times somebody who finds you on Google hasn't yet subscribed to you and they want to just listen to that one single episode, they can subscribe right on the track player. They can go straight to subscribe from there, but they can play it on there. And the more they sit on that page listening to it or watching an embedded video, it could be that as well. The more time they spend doing that, the better for your website value to Google it will be.

Yeah, absolutely. So that the shareable graphics, it's so important.

Okay, so adding in now what we call it, mix it up post and share graphics. So thinking about this, at the top of a blog post, there's usually some kind of header Graphic image. Right. It's good practice. Most people put images. When I write my in column, there's the title and then there's an image or there's an image and then the title. Right. It can be either way.

And that's really important because when you share the link for your blog post on social media, which is one of the things you're going to share, the image that populates in that post is that top header image.

Right. So if you plan this right, you're giving yourself exactly what you need to share on social media. So you're doing it right. So. But here's the mistake that a lot of people make. They make this graphic so branded. It's the old guru style. And part of it is because they mostly have no graphics.

Yeah. They want to make it easy to change it from episode to episode. And of course, real. A lot of branding experts and a lot of graphic designers want your brand to have consistency, to appear the same everywhere. And the reality is this is one example of why you don't want to do that in social media.

Right? Absolutely. I'm going to. You know, this sort of scripted branding is a problem, and here's why. Because we're in a fast scroll world.

So look what happens here as you scroll through this podcaster's podcast blog feed, it all looks so much the same, only headshots are different.

Right. And this is a really common thing that most branding teams have taught people. Most branding teams, like most gurus and podcasting teach this. But this woman whose scroll this is right there, whose blog scroll blog role, she's a PR consultant and this is what she says to her clients. I advise my clients to never wear the same clothes twice in their videos so that people don't think they've already seen it. But yet when she's putting out posts on social media, people think they've already read it, they've already watched it, they've already heard it. Because she's making that same mistake of being seen in the same exact clothes. Right. In the same branding clothes. That is not the place to be branded. And scripted. And remember when Tom was talking about having that bumper put into YouTube? That's why we don't use a branded, just a logo style bumper. We want a bumper that has something to do if we can create it new every single time. We want a bumper that has something to do with the episode. New imagery that reinforces the episode content and that makes it more valuable and more likely to be seen.

Well, more likely to be clicked. Right. If I think I've seen it before, I'm not going to click it.