Reflect & Project: Elevate Your Podcast In 2024

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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

Hey, everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host, Tracy Hazard. Today we're going to talk about reflecting on the past year podcasting and projecting intentions for the next year of podcasting. I think it's a great thing to do this time of year, don't you, Tracy?

Yeah, I mean, I think, look, whether you do this periodically throughout the year, which I recommend, like I recommend, you know, if you started your podcast in the middle of June, a year later, you should reflect on it, right? You know, you should always it for me, it's about every 50 episodes. Like every 50, 52 episodes. You should really reflect on it. But for some, they just have more opportunities at the start of a year or the end of a year. It's just, you know, maybe you have some downtime and some time to really think about what you want to do. And that's the reflect part, right? So. So if we reflect on that past year of what it is, then we hadn't make some plans, some intentions for the next year. And I'm all about intention. That is my theme for this year.

Well, it sounds great. What are some of your intentions for the next year?

Let me talk a little bit about the reflection side because it goes to the intention, right? So I mean, look, there are different intentions for things that you might want to do. So sometimes things are cogs and pieces and tools and the, you know, you know, in the whole business machine that you have going on for you. So sometimes my podcast is simply and feature brand. This one that we're doing right now is simply a vehicle for nurturing my client base and my potential client base. Right? So that's its purpose. So even if I don't find hundreds of thousands of listeners coming from it, the ones that I do are getting well served. And that is serving a piece that is necessary in my business, which we want to be a very high touch coaching model of podcast hosting company. The hosting companies who are out there who don't care if you ever publish an episode is just a horrible business model that we don't want to be in. So it doesn't fit our needs. So we have the intention of making sure that. So even if I would like, this is so inconvenient for me to show up every Wednesday at noon Pacific time and do a live stream. Like, even if I was thinking that in the back of my mind and I'd love to cut away because we're making a decision, I'd love to cut away something in my schedule to make my schedule less impacted. This doesn't. It won't be cut because it has value to a piece of the business that is essential to the core of what our business is. It's not a direct return on investment for the exact same thing like, oh, I don't make money in this hour so I should stop doing it. That's not the way I think about things.

Yeah, I don't think about them that way either. I think about the long term value, the trust it builds with our customers and our potential customers, new listeners to the show and providing them value to help make progress toward their goals.

Yeah, absolutely. We did a previous year, in a past year we did an episode on talking about intangibles, tangible and intangible benefits, return on investment from your podcast. And I think those are some good episode for you to go back and listen to as a partner to this one. So we'll make sure to link to it in the show notes and in the description for this episode so that you can quickly find it. But that is kind of an essential thought process is that sometimes there's these things that are building your brand, that are about who you are, that are the essence of your business. Sometimes they're simply mechanism. You need like I need an article for my newsletter. It's a monthly newsletter. So I've got to at least record one episode a month in order to make that happen. Right.

So.

So you've got to make sure you're not by saying, I don't really love this and I'm not getting tons of listeners, so it must not be worth it. You might be destroying another part of your business. And we've seen that. Hey Tom, you know, tell us some of the stories about people who buy a podcast. Buy a company that had a podcast and then all of a sudden just discontinue it and discontinue all the blogs and what happens.

It happens all the time and actually just happened recently with another show. That new company bought the podcast and then actually deleted all the blog content that existed. They really had no understanding and never cared to ask A question saying, hey, is this content important to my business, the business that I just purchased and the host of the show knew it, mentioned it to them several times, and still the new companies really had some kind of a not invented here syndrome. It isn't something they actually asked for or thought of or wanted to do, and therefore they thought it had no value.

Right. But when they did it, it discontinued thousands of backlinks and cross links to their website and thousands of keywords that they were ranking on that no longer happened. And then what does that do is it lowers the traffic to their website. So now they bought a business and they destroyed the, the foot traffic.

They destroyed a lot of the lead generation benefits that existed and really represented, in my opinion, one of the largest value propositions of the podcast for this business.

Right. So then you do that and you now then destroy the ability for you to get new listeners and to grow in that way and, and for the business to generate leads. So all of those things combined, you have to make sure that you're thinking about this. Just because you want to pull this away, you might then find out like, hey, I don't feel like doing my podcast anymore. This isn't for me this year. This. The next thing you know, you've got nothing. You're going to work 10 times harder because you've got nothing to put in social media. You've got to now create videos, you've got to now do that work. And you're doing separate work in addition to it. So it's way more effort if you aren't taking a full consideration and look at all the things that your podcast might be bringing you and feeding you. So that's why you really need to sit and reflect first on what has it been doing, where has it been going, where have we been using these pieces, what's been happening with this? And what happens if I decide decide I don't want to do it? Because then maybe it's not an option. And if it's not an option but you feel that your podcast isn't working for you or something's not right now you can consider what would make it right. And that's when we can make some new intentions and new projections about what we want to accomplish and do in.

The next year, that sounds great, Tracy. My biggest thing I want to accomplish in the next year is get all our podcasters more listeners. That is what I want to do.

Yeah, because they don't do as good a job at promoting their show as they should.

Look, some do a better job than others. But all too often they're relying on their guests to do it only. And guests are a great way to help promote your show if they do it. And we always incentivize our clients, guests to show their show still doesn't really make them do it. So I've always been frustrated in our podcasting experience now of about a decade that there wasn't a more easy and measurable way, meaningful way to get more listeners. And so that's what we're working on here at potatoes in 2024 and have multiple different new programs that we are using to actually get our customers more listeners. And that's.

But it's not like we haven't been testing and working on this. Like this is the other thing. It's like, so at the start of a year, we take a look at what are we going to research and what are we going to test, what are we going to put into that beta mode so that we can be working on solutions. And then we say, okay, what's coming out of beta, what's going into full force? Because it's working, it's done exactly what we said it would do. We are achieving a measurable return. It's worth selling, it's worth doing whatever it might be. We then implement those things as well. And then we look at the gaps and we say, where didn't we do well? Where could we do better? Like on the podcast here. We took a look at the podcast and we said, you know what, we've had tremendous benefits from the live streams. We've actually gotten clients from it. We've gotten a lot of information out of it. What can we do better? Well, we put into research at the last half of the year, research on YouTube. How can we use the podcast and livestream better on YouTube and what could we do over there? And now we're about to put that into full implementation. We've done a bunch of tests, we've come up with some learnings, we came up with some. A hypothesis. We tested out that hypothesis. It worked in a small way and now we're going to magnify it and we're going to make it go big. And so we're going to elevate that podcast model in YouTube and we're going to bring it to our clients as well. So like this is the flow through of things that come out of testing and then move into full implementation for us. And that's our model of doing it is. But it comes from reflecting on something and saying, I'm not getting what I wanted out of it. How can I get that? What's the path for that that I'm going to try. And that's really what we look at when we put together a plan. Because look at the New year everyone kind of goes through and they make their New Year's resolution. We don't make resolutions, we make projections. So we do it a little bit differently. We set intentions and we make projections. And so we say this is what we want to accomplish, this is its purpose, and this is the expected measurable return. Now we might achieve something totally different in a return we didn't expect. Right. Like it might not work at all in the way we thought it would, and it works completely differently. That's why it's a hypothesis and it's okay. That's why it's in testing mode.

But the emphasis is on measurable results. That really is key to everything we do. We don't want to guess and, or to put it better, we don't want to put something out there into the world and hope it is going to achieve what we want it to. If you can't measure it, you don't know. Now, it's okay if you tried some things that don't work, but you need to measure the results so that you can course correct and then do what does work right.

For me, those, sometimes those things are less work. Like it feels like less work. It's less touch points that I have actually simplifying the process, easing things up. It doesn't have to be a, oh, I got 10,000 listeners. Right. Like that is not a clear cut answer for every single person. There are those intangibles and tangibles I talked about earlier that we talked about in a previous episode. Those things are still measurable though for you because they're. I come into this call an excitement for it. It's not a, oh God, I gotta record my podcast today. Right? So that's different. If that changes over the course of the year, that's still measurable. You may not like have a specific, like measure my happiness level, but you can feel the difference. It's measurable in your own ruler, your own scale. Right. And that's what we want to have, is we want to have something that says when I get in and I do this, this intention is going to have this effect, this result.

I agree. Well, everybody should keep your eyes and ears open for things that we are talking about in the new year. They're going to be, I think, opportunities for any podcaster to do some things differently and have some different measurable results. Ideally to get more listeners. Right. Because at the bottom line, bottom line is no matter what we're our podcast is about, we're going to achieve our goals by having more listeners, reaching more people, right?

Well, yes, that is true, Tom, but sometimes it's the guest model. So it might be reaching more guests, which is still reaching more people. Because if you don't have a show that's like visible out there, then your guests don't aren't as att to coming on it. So even if you have a guest model and I, because I hear a lot of you going, oh, but that's not my model. I don't care about the number of listeners. And I'm thrilled that you don't care about the number of listeners. I'm glad you have a model that works. But the reality is, is that the more high powered guests you want to attract, the better show you're going to need to have. And it's not always about this just happened to me in the last week. It's not always about the number of listeners, it's about how visible out there you are. So I had a past guest who I don't think he's been on my show in three years. Maybe it's been at least three years, maybe even longer, maybe 20, 19. It was the last time he was on the show and my name came up in some kind of call that he was on with somebody who's a partner with us. And the next thing you know, he was like, I saw you in seven places in two hours. I saw you on LinkedIn, I saw you on YouTube, I saw you on Facebook, I saw you here, I saw you in someone's newsletter. And so he just looked at all these things and said, I'm missing out not talking to you. How did that happen? So he became aware of me and then all of a sudden I was everywhere. That has nothing to do with the number of listeners, has to do with how good I am at repurposing and connecting and having people share our show. Because a lot of those came from other people's feeds, not mine. And that's really good. So there are ways for you to still achieve your goals without having it just be more listeners. But it does need to be promotion, right? You're promoting your show, you're out there sharing it, you're out there doing those things that should definitely be an intention and it's going to get harder. There's a lot of changes coming up that you may not be fully aware of, and you're going to be trying to catch up when the algorithm shifts. So a lot of you are going to lose a lot of download numbers in the next six months because everybody's resetting their numbers and there's a bunch of algorithms going in and IAB is put in a push and Spotify has put in a push, and you're going to see your numbers down. I think there's lots of people who are already seeing that. And so now all of a sudden, you just lost the downloads you thought you had. What are you going to do about that? How are you going to figure out where you're going to go, what's happening? What are you going to measure? Because obviously downloads is, I'm going to say, adjustable by your hosting company, which is a terrible way to look at it. Not an intention we have here, which is why we refuse to comply with IAB and the other type of models for it, because I think it does a disservice. So these things are coming up too, that you don't know about. YouTube, Google Podcasts going away and YouTube coming up. There's going to be a lot of things that are going to happen to you in the next year. And if you aren't clear on your intention and your purpose and what you're going to double down on and what you're going to cut away and not do anymore, then you're not going to be prepared for what happens. You're not going to be able to respond quickly to those things because you're still going to be catching up on other things over here. So be thinking about that as you go into it. So my number one goal for the next year and my intention is to make sure that podcasters don't get screwed by AI in the next year. That's my simple intention. That is everything that we're building in this company, everything that I'm doing personally, everything I'm talking about, how I'm out there advocating, that's my intention for the year. What about yours, Tom?

Well, my intention, I stated it earlier, is really just to perfect these several different tactics that we have been testing and are now rolling out to our customers that will get them more listeners in a passive way every day and every episode they publish valuable listeners.

Like that's the goal.

Sure. Valuable, relevant listeners that would be interested in what they have to say. And I know that's different for every show, but there are very real ways to do that.

Yeah, because there's a lot of people out there who's pushing messages out there that says, I'll get you more listeners, I'll get you more downloads and oh.

Yeah, or I'll get you more reviews. I'll help you at the top of the charts. It's not about that. I don't care about the top of the charts. We're really talking about more listeners, more subscribers in a steady climb over time.

Well, that's what we're going to talk about next week. We're going to talk about how to get on the top lists, but that doesn't mean the charts. And we're going to make the distinction between the two things as well next week. So I'm so glad to have been with all of you for the past year. So my reflection on that is I have enjoyed every minute of our coaching calls and I look forward to the next year full of them. And our intention is to be even more targeted in what we do with our SEO and our topics in the next year. So you can see us dialing that in next year as well. So we've got like micro intentions and big macro ones as well. So you'll be seeing them in play. So stay tuned to feed your brand.

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