ShowCastR: How To Use It To Showcase Your Guest Interviews And How It Helps Establish Credibility

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 feed. 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 Tracie Hazzard, and along with my partner and co host Tom Hazzard, we are going to talk today about how to showcase your guest interviews, being a guest on other people's podcasts, and how to establish credibility through the use of a showcaster showcase player, a player that shows all the podcast episodes you've been on. So, Tom, I'll take it from here because this showcaster was your vision.

I want to be clear because a lot of you podcasters who are existing podcasters out there are familiar with. Usually your media host has some sort of a window player. Sometimes it's called an archive player or just a player where there's a list of all your episodes and anybody can play it. And that's a pretty common thing. But they're also quite limited. And we've been podcasting for a decade and we've got an awful lot of episodes. We have lots of different shows and we've experienced a lot of things, and we found that those kind of players didn't meet our needs as podcasters. And if it didn't meet our needs as podcasters, it probably didn't meet a lot of other podcasters needs too. So Tracy and I are very creative people. We develop products. Our whole career, we've developed products. So our solution is, all right, if it doesn't exist, let's just make it so. We did. We created our own. We have trademarked it as the showcaster, and we're going to share with you what it can do and what's different and why you might want to use it. Here's the thing. You have so many episodes of your show. Once you get to a point where you've got at least 25, maybe 50 episodes, for most of you, that would be six months to a year in, you may want to draw people's attention to some episodes, new listeners coming in, they're going to listen to the latest episode and maybe start at the beginning and binge through them all. But maybe there's six key ones that you really think are Foundational, you want new listeners to start with those. Or let's say you've been podcasting a long time, just like me and Tracy, and you get to the point where you have over 300 episodes. Now, most listening apps, there are some exceptions, but most listening apps won't display them all. And so what do you do? You create another volume of episodes. Your oldest ones maybe are a new volume, and your new ones keep going where everybody is subscribed. But people who find your show want to go back and listen to some of those earlier ones. And you have to syndicate your show again. But that's only in the listening apps. What about on your own website? How can you organize that? How can you make navigating through your content easier? Here's some of the problems we faced and why we created the Showcaster. We realized we can't just make this a linear player.

And thinking about this from the perspective of, if you've been on a lot of podcasts, a lot of people go on, I'm going to call it podcast guesting binges, right? Where you go on a bunch of shows because you're marketing this book, then it's your new book, and it might have a whole different topics that you're doing it. Like, I think 150 or 200 episodes, I've guessed it on. And I had them segmented into. Sometimes I talk about product design and development and innovation, and other times I talk about podcasting, and other times I talk about content for marketing and general entrepreneurship, women in leadership. So, like, there's all these distant segmented topics that I cover, and by putting them only in time, linear order, you're doing your listener a disservice. You're doing the person who's coming to your website trying to navigate that a disservice. Or in the case of press and publicity, you're not highlighting the most important by just highlighting the most recent. And so that's why we structured and built the Showcaster the way we did, so that it gave us a real high ability to establish more credibility, authority, whatever your current mission is, in terms of what you're trying to get people to listen to, find out about you, and being able to build that in, and then also being flexible to those who have podcasts and guest interviews at the same time, giving you the opportunity to have both in the same place on your website as well. So you can do multiple tabs and feeds in this sense. And so this is why we built it the way we did, to be able to showcase you what you're doing and guest interviewing and podcasting, being able to showcase both at the same time for you.

And really, you used a key word there, Tracy. That is very important. And I think most people will understand because of how modern browsers, web browsers work. You said different tab, and so that's really what we've done. If you've seen any of these typical players. And by the way, we also have a patent pending on this. So just so everyone's aware, I mean, this is new and innovative. You've got a list of all your episodes in your feed. Well, why can't you have a second tab with a different playlist? The third tab, a fourth tab. There's really no limit to it, at least visually.

That's a lot of tabs. If you get beyond five, I think it gets a little busy, but you can.

Well, and we have one deployed right now with four tabs for our 3D printing podcast, which was our first podcast, and there's over 650 episodes. So we've got four different volumes of content, and I'm contemplating a fifth right now. So I'm probably going to push the edge of that envelope a little. But the power of these tabs really allows you to curate playlists, like you said of your guest interviews or your own podcast, and have different. Highlight different playlists. And it really works incredibly well because you could be listening to one episode that you're starting to listen to. You're playing it on the website, you're listening to it, and then your viewer, your listener, your user can browse through the other tabs, look through different episodes while they're listening to one, and even expand to read the description of each or click a link within it and open a browser to another browser tab. But you're still listening to that first episode. Some really innovative features. And then, of course, at any point, you can click to play any of the other episodes in any other tab that you want, and it will start playing. So this is one of the main key features, is not to limit yourself. And fortunately, with the tabs, how do you create those playlists? Well, we have a way to do that, and we've built that into the Potitize hosting platform. So this player is really designed to work with shows that are hosted on.

Palletize, but it doesn't have to. It's if you have multiple. You have to have multiple feeds if you want to use the multiple tabs. So if you do have more than one show, and I have a lot of clients and a Lot of people who have past shows, so their feeds are still active. They have old shows, maybe they're putting them on a free service. So that free syndication service, right? Free hosting company, so that they don't have to keep paying for them, but they're old and they don't want to get rid of them because they know they still have listeners to them. So. So you might have your old shows or old branding of your show and you can put them in the separated tabs. As long as you have a separated feed, it works. And so Tom's going to do a demo of it that will be in the blog post for this episode. So he's going to do a full demo of how it works, how it looks. But I really just want to dive into one thing Tom was talking about and that is that when you put this on a page and he was talking about people tabbing, searching, like doing things, this is what you really have to remember that the path power of having a showcase player of any kind, a player for your show, whether it's your podcast show or your guest interview shows, the power of having it is that people can listen right there on your website, which means they're getting your pop ups, they're seeing your sidebars, they're sticky, they're staying on your website, which is giving you Google Analytic power, which is making your website more powerful in search engine optimization. So by making a place where they can listen and not have to go out to an Apple player or a Spotify player or some other player, it gives them an ability to listen right there and then. For people new to podcasting, and remember, not everybody, we're a little like, you know, jaded because we've been in the podcasting industry a long time, we think everybody knows about podcasting, but I mean, honestly, my mom thinks that podcasting is YouTube. So like she watches podcasts on YouTube and she knows she's watching a podcast, but she thinks that that's where it is. She doesn't use a podcast player at all, but she will use it on a website because it's really clear how to click and play. So by doing that, you're being really friendly to people who may not have experience with podcast players that are directories themselves. Apps, if you want to think of it that way, they are new to it and now you've given them a way to consume what you've got going on for you. Another one last feature that I really want to point out is that you can put these behind a pay gate and Keep it in your membership areas and make things really clear for, like, newbies. Have a tab for newbies that are new to it. Have one for experience. So you can also segment it. When you've got a learning environment, you can segment your podcast episodes and make it simple for them in that area as well.

Tracy, I want to add to something you said, because I think you sort of did the equivalent of burying the lead on one of the major values of this as a guest, meaning I don't care if you're a podcaster or not, but when you are a guest on other people's shows, what I see. Well, really all the time, I don't even know of any exceptions, except for you and some of our customers in podcasting, who have a lot of guests that we've done this for already. As some of our tests, which are actually some of the ones I'm going to use in the demo, is that normally when you're a guest on someone else's show, how do you share it with your audience? You share people a link to that episode you were on that takes people out somewhere else from your website to go listen to it. Even if you.

Right. You're talking about a social share. Right.

And it's a social share or a social share. Or you might have a press page or a media page on your own website. A lot of people do. And there might be a graphic for or featuring you in that episode or some little post you make on your own website of, hey, I've been a guest on all these other shows. But usually whenever anybody clicks it to listen, it takes them away from your website. Even if it opens a new tab, it's sending them somewhere else to listen to it. So the game changer of the showcaster is what you were saying, Tracy, that you engage people on your website, let them play it there. It's someone else's show. Yeah, someone else's episode. But I've never had anybody say, no, please don't play that episode. Don't make it available for people to listen. I don't want you to do that. No. Every podcast host wants exposure. And by putting it in a lot of the apps there and making it downloadable, they're making it freely available. And there's no copyright issue with this. So you are just.

You're not editing it.

You're not editing it, you're playing it. Yeah. You're allowing people to play it just like they would anywhere else. And so you're though, taking advantage of it in keeping traffic active on your own website providing that value there. And while they're listening, like you said Tracy, the sort of looking around through your top level menu on your website or looking in your sidebar, maybe a pop up comes up while you're watching and then you're giving other ways to engage with that site visitor. And also does help your site value in terms of average time spent per page on the website. All those metrics of ranking of a website and SEO and all that, the more you keep people engaged, the higher that's all gonna be and the more benefit you get from your guest appearances. So that's really the main point is why send people away from your own website, don't you?

Yeah, why not make it really easy to find out all about you? So I find on my speaker site, right? And I have a speaker site, I really don't use it. Like it's not like I'm out there marketing it or sending people to it. But when people do use it, what happens is an event organizer comes. It's really easy for them to just hit play, hear how great I am as a guest on a show. It starts, make them think, oh, she's going to be great on our stage. This is going to be easy. And they've just gone through and consumed it. But because it's not my own show, it's me on somebody else's show. It has this third party credibility that is really helping them to make that decision. That look at all these amazing shows she's been on. That's our right audience. They can really easily see that right in one place by scrolling right down through the player. They don't have to skim through a bunch of blogs, look at a bunch of featured images, go in, as I put it, linear timeline order. They don't have to do it that way because you can organize it in whichever order you would like. So by doing that, you're really giving them the best first.

Yeah, I agree, Tracy. For all those speakers out there, I would have a tab that's event organizers listen here or something like that. Event organizers with an arrow down like this is for you. Something like that. Right? Because it is a way that a lot of organizers will make some decisions. I mean, they want proof, right, that you can speak intelligently. They want to hear it. Even if they don't see it, they.

Want to hear how engaging you are is really what they're looking for. So yeah, so this is the whole idea of what we're built here is really to make it so easy for you to organize and showcase what podcasts you've been on, whether it's your own or guest interviews, and really just highlight that and show off how great you are and organize it in a way that make people want to take a step, hire you, buy your book, do the things that you really intended it to do. By organizing it in a better way, you can make that a clearer path to them understanding what it is that you're all about.

All right, Tracy, I think that's a great place to wrap this episode up. So don't forget there is a demo and the blog post@potatoes.com for this episode. And let's see, it's also for our customers in our knowledge base, so you can check it out there if you're listening to this first. And that's where you really get to see the ins and outs and see the magic, even see how you can color it, custom color it for your own branding. And by the way, each tab can be a different color scheme. There's lots of cool things we've put.

Into this, so have some fun and check it out@pottitize.com the blog post for the episode under the feed you'd brand podcast.

All right, thanks for listening, everybody. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazard on Feed you'd brand.

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