Three Powerful Things Every Podcaster Should Do For A Successful Show

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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, everybody, Tom hazard here from potatoes.com, feed your brand podcast. And today I want to share with you all a few things that sort of come back and bother me from time to time. They really bug me. I want to talk about three things today. Three things that every podcaster should be doing, you know, in order to get even, you know, I would say get more out of your podcast, but in reality, it's to get almost, to me, the minimum out of your podcast, the things that you should be getting. And all too often, I do not see enough podcasters doing this. And I would say two of them are, I would consider to be absolute baseline necessities. Everybody should be doing it, and I think too many of you are not. And then the third, I think is something the majority of podcasters should be doing. Maybe not absolutely everybody, and maybe not. If your show is brand new, but if your show is at least more than you know, if it's at least, you know, you're at least 12 episodes in or more, and maybe 20 at the most, then I think this is absolutely something you should be doing, too. So, all right, I want to go over these three things. I hope everybody is ready and listening, because I am going to be going through these and then hopefully you'll be able to determine if you're doing them or not or if you want to in the future going forward, I would say hopefully you do.

Okay, so here we go. The three things that every podcaster should be doing to be getting the most out of their podcast. Number one, subscribe to your own show. I am shocked how many podcasters I talk to that are not subscribing to their own show. And there, I know you don't want to listen, maybe to your show. You recorded it the first time, right? You were there live when you did it, you recorded it. You don't need to watch it when it comes out or listen to it when it comes out. However, please subscribe to your own show, because I all too often hear from podcasters that get surprised by something, either in their episode that's published or they hear from a listener or they hear from the guest they had and something surprised them about their show and this is days or even weeks after it published and they didn't have awareness of it. And that's cause they're not subscribed to their own darn show. It's very silly to me that you as the podcast host might not be subscribed to your own show. So please subscribe to your own show because you're gonna be hopefully then one of the first to see if anything wasn't quite right about the publication of that show. Especially on Apple podcast app and all the itunes, Apple related apps, desktop or mobile. Because the Apple app, it's confusing. There's a lot of different things going on there and there are so many different designations for so many designations to, you know, podcasts on Apple, you have full normal episodes, you have bonus episodes, you have trailer episodes, you have season trailer episodes. And I've seen people select the wrong type all the time and they think their episode hasn't published when it has because it's not showing up. If they're publishing their episodes as seasons, then they designate one as a bonus episode. It doesn't go in as a part of the season in the Apple apps. It goes in under unknown season. And then it doesn't show up where you want it to or expect it to. And you think maybe your episode hasn't published or what's worse, other people looking for and finding your show think you haven't published an episode in several weeks when you have because they're looking in the latest season and not in this unknown season area. And that's just because maybe the wrong kind of episode was chosen when you published it or you didn't select or put it into the season. That's your current season. You might have forgotten to do that or somebody forgot to do it on your behalf. But regardless, if you were subscribed to your own show, you'd have awareness of this. You'd also know if an episode didn't publish when it was supposed to. Because I get an alert on my phone from Apple podcasts when an episode of my show publishes and I need, you know, you want to be aware of that. So there are just so many reasons why subscribing to your own show is a good idea, even if you're never really going to listen to any episodes. But another thing you may want to do is actually listen to at least the beginning of an episode or go through it quick on 2, 3, 4 times speed and you know, listen to your own audio once in a while, hear how you sound, hear how your guest sounds. I mean, are maybe, you know, you could improve your audio quality, you know, or maybe you don't realize, wow, something you're doing is particularly, you know, annoying or distracting, you know, and I'm gonna do something here that I know is like, oh, I'm gonna move my microphone, I'm touching my mic, right? And wow, that's kind of annoying. And if it's happening while you're talking, there's little that an editor can do to get rid of that without just taking that entire section out, you know. So I do think it's a really good idea to subscribe to your show, listen to one once in a while. Be aware of how your show listing appears, your episode descriptions, any links within there, call outs, information about your show. You know, there's lots of aspects to your show within the app that you need to be aware of. So that's my number one tip for, you know, three things every podcaster should be doing. Subscribe to your own show. Just do it, okay? And if you have more than one app, maybe you have Apple podcast app, Spotify app, maybe you have, you know, another app. I think it's important to subscribe and see how your show looks on a couple different platforms too, because Apple is very unique and has a lot more functions the others don't. And so things don't always appear the same way on every app. So subscribe to your own show or have other people you know and trust, even if they're not going to listen to every episode, have them subscribe and check it out once in a while. Do your own, you know, I would say homework or checking on your own show and, you know, help us help you if you're working with us, you know, obviously we're doing our best to publish your stuff the way we understand you want them to be published in the way we understand you want them to appear. But if you've never looked at how it appears, are you really sure how you want it to appear? So subscribe to your own show. Okay, number two, and I know some of you watching may laugh at this because you think, well, of course I do that. Well, you may be a hyper aware marketer of your own show, but I'm shocked how many people don't do this. Share your show on social media. Every single episode. You should be sharing your show on social media. That is a big reason why we create a blog post for every episode because you can actually post the link to that blog post on social. It'll populate the header image. It looks really cool. And then when people click, it takes them off social media to your website, to the blog post. Fantastic. You're on one of the, you know, on a social platform, one of the most popular and trafficked places on the Internet, and you send people from there to your website. That's really good in terms of traffic and getting people to get off that app and into your turf. But you've got to share it on social and you've got lots of things to share. So everybody should have these things. And if you're working with us, you really definitely have these things. You should at least have an episode graphic that's unique for every episode. You can post that on social, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. And then you can put a link to the blog post in the comments. If you're doing that type of a post, you have the blog post link. You can post. You have usually quotes. We're usually highlighting three or four unique quotes for every episode. You can just have that quote be on a solid color bold quote, sort of a card type thing. And again, post a link back to the blog post on your episode. You might have audiograms. That's something that we do as an optional. It's an a la carte added thing. But if you have an audiogram, absolutely. Post that on social because that builds anticipation. It's usually highlighting. Want a great quote from the episode, A real cool sound bite. And it has captions, it has, you know, the waveform that's actually responding to your voice and that gets people's attention if they don't have their sound on. So they'll click and turn the sound on and listen. And then you're gonna post again a link back to the blog post for your episode in the comments right below and push that out. All these quotes that we do are also really easy to tweet out. And if you have a WordPress site and we've put those quotes in your site for you, we're using a tool called Click to Tweet, where you can go in and click each of these quotes at maybe one on Monday, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, whenever you want. And it'll open up your Twitter account and it'll share the blog post URL, but the tweet is that quote. And so it'll link back to your site automatically. Everybody should be doing that. If you're working with us and you have a WordPress site. And if you don't have a WordPress site. That tool is not available for you, but you can still take quotes and you can tweet about them and post the link to the blog post. You can just do it manually. There's not a tool that makes it automatic for you. Right.

If you're recording video, which about 35, 40% I think of our clients are recording and distributing video. And if you're doing that, we are usually also creating a short video clip the episode. And that's something you should all be posting as well, especially on platforms that are hyper video focused. Audiogram is also a video, so that works too. But if you have actual video footage, take a clip, post it on social, link back to the blog post on your website. Now I also want to point out, are you noticing sort of a common theme here in a lot of these social posts? I keep saying you can post this, you can post that. You have all these different materials that we create for you. And every one of them though, I keep saying link back to the blog post on your website. Now why do I say that? I keep saying that because if you leave people on that app, you're just helping that app. You don't know who your listeners are. If you want to engage with them, you want to potentially lead, generate from them or provide them any additional value, you got to get them off that app and have them identify who they are. How are you going to do that? Your website is the key component of that. That's what you have to do, is use your website as a way for people to go and get added value, but also give you their information. Opt in, let them know who you are so you can communicate with them, get them off that app onto your website. Supercritical. So that's why I keep saying every one of these different social posts that you should all be doing for every episode. With normal production, there's at least six or seven different elements, materials or assets you can post on social media that we create. And if you're doing video, there's even more. And if you're getting some of our we have additional social media assets we create. That's this a la carte. Add on, that's where you get audiograms, maybe additional video clips, things like that. You can opt in and you know, just incrementally pay a little more and get some of those things and you have even a lot more. You should have enough material to post something about your episode every day of the week. And in some cases you'll have multiple things over the course of each day. You could do two or three posts a day. Even if you're doing only one episode a week, there's lots of opportunities you have to post on social. I get a lot of people saying coming to me, even somebody that I participate in their podcast on a regular basis. But it's not my podcast, so it's not my job to promote it. And this is great content. And I'm thinking, wow, there should be tons of people listening to this. And there's, you know, 100, 150 listening to every episode. I'm like, why are there not 10,000 listening to every episode? There should be. It's lack of awareness is the biggest issue I see. And you're gonna raise awareness by posting on social, using all these elements and all these tools that we're creating and providing for you. No reason you shouldn't be getting lots of awareness and attention. Increasing your reach for you personally and your brand, your show brand. Utilize all of the materials you've got for every episode and post on social. And I would also add to that, create some posts that are inviting people that are seeing the post to communicate back with you, either offering them something of value or asking them a question that you want to survey them for, or inviting them to ask a question you might answer on a future episode. So many different ways to foster listener engagement and make those people feel like they're a part of the show or they're contributing or participating or supporting you by listening. There's so many different options, and not enough of you are posting on social enough. You're not getting enough out of every episode. So post on social. And Tracy does a masterclass on social media posting, you know, periodically, usually renews it every year. Probably getting to be time to do an update on that. I'll talk to you about that. And we may do a whole session just on that. But there is enough really fundamental baseline stuff you can be doing. It's not really rocket science. It's just putting yourself out there. And you know what? I focus on just really maybe two different social media platforms. Some people are hyper involved in multiple, doing four or five, I'd say pick one or two at minimum, that are the ones that you think are going to benefit you the most. Maybe it's Linked and Facebook or maybe it's, you know, LinkedIn and Twitter, whatever it is. Or maybe an Instagram. If you're more visual or your audience is more visual, just pick one or two and start there. You can always add incrementally once you get that into a groove. But systematize it, plan it out, do something every day. Doesn't take that much time, doesn't even take five minutes a day. If you just sit down and do it, put it on your calendar and do it. Okay. Number three thing that every, certainly every podcaster who's hosted on Potitize should do, and it's not that I don't think others should. If you're not hosted on Poditize, I think you should, but your hosting provider may not be capable of this because most are not. Certainly not to the level that we are at Potitize, because we've created our own software, it's patent pending for doing this. But if your show is older than, let's say, 12 to 25 episodes, if your show is at least that mature and you are in business in some way, shape or form, and most of our customers, all these podcasters behind me, the vast majority of them are in business in some way. They're podcasting to serve, provide value for free. Yes. But they're also intending to support that community and either market and sell to that community or lead generate from it. You're in business in some way. You're not just doing this for your health or as a passion project. Right. And if that's the case, you absolutely should be putting audio ads, or call them promotions, you know, whatever you want for your own stuff into your episodes. If you're not doing that, you're just missing an opportunity. Yes. You're providing great value for your listeners, and that's admirable, and that's a great thing that you're doing. But if they're coming back listening to every episode, guess what? They like you. They trust you. And if what you talk about is in alignment with what you do for business, when you make any kind of an offer to them, a promotion of some service, or maybe it's, you know, buying your book, or maybe it's getting people to sign up for a virtual event you're going to be speaking at, whatever it may be, there's probably something that you could lead, generate from this audience for that will benefit them and benefit you. But are you letting them know about it? And are you letting them know in every episode? That doesn't mean you have to have the exact same promotion every episode you can record. 3. Tracy and I just did this. We have a special series in our 3D printing podcast. And I know that's a really, like, geeky thing. The 3D printing podcast has been around since 2015, and we got HP to sponsor a 25 episode series and as part of that we've recorded 12 different ads because we've got over 500 or maybe close to 600 episodes in that entire series. Even though there's 25 series that HP sponsored that's new. We're putting their ads into all the episodes and we get tens of thousands of plays every month across all of them. So whoever's listening to those, it's new to them now, even though it's old episode, but they're going to get a current relevant ad or promotion.

So again, if you're hosted on Politize and you're in business and you have something to offer people, you should be putting audio promos into your episodes right now. And you can change them at any time. I mean, you can try it out. If they don't work, they're not resonating. Switching it is really easy. Upload a new one, push a button, it swaps it out, right? And then the next time anybody downloads or listens to an episode, it'll have that new promo in it. So this is just really low hanging fruit for offering your audience something of value that also has value to you and helping you monetize your show. This is the fastest way to monetize any show. Yes, there are shows out there that are getting 250,000 plays a month and more, you know, but they're the minority of shows. I don't care if you have that many plays. I don't care if you don't even have 10,000 plays. I'd rather you have a thousand raving fans coming back to listen to every episode because they're probably hyper focused on your niche. And out of that thousand people you probably with a call to action can get easily, could easily get what, a thousand, probably 250 to 300 to respond to a call to action that's in a episode because if they're listening to you, they like you already. They trust you. So this is something that I don't see enough podcasters taking advantage of. There's a little incremental cost in hosting over the basic level of hosting to be able to do this. But you have complete control. You can use this the way you want. You can ab test, you could do certain promo that is on one thing, another promo that's on another, and see which ones resonate or maybe just the way you talk about it, or is it in your voice or is it in somebody else's voice? You know, many things. You can split, test run all these and then see which ones resonate and get a lot more out of it. So that's the third thing, and that's what I really wanted to share today, is that just this has been bugging me in the last month or so. I keep talking to people that are trying to get more out of their podcast, but they're not subscribed to their own show and they're not aware of how their show appears to others, whether it's in the app, just looking at it or listening to it. I'm not saying you have to listen every episode, but once in a while you should do it. Subscribe to your own show, promote your own stuff on social media is number two. You've got all this material. Do it. No one else is going to do it for you. You got to raise awareness, promote on social. Three, use the ad system if you're on potatoes and promote your own stuff. You got to market it. All right, so that's what I wanted to share today. Hope you have found that helpful and I will be back next time with hopefully another exciting subject, something I may be fired up about again to try to help you get more out of your show. And until then, it's been Tom on feed.

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