What Everybody Ought to Know About Establishing Your Brand and Starting a Podcast Now

Get off the marketing roller coaster and get on the automated fast track to digitally market your brand everywhere. Now join podcast producer Tom Hazard and Inc. Columnist Tracy Hazard as they share easy content building formulas and smart cut secrets proven to fuel hundreds of blogs, podcasts and brands with bingeable original content. Join the conversation on how to get your message out to the world. Be original, be heard, promote with power and purpose. Feed your brand.

Hi and welcome to Feed you'd Brand. This is Tom and Tracy and we're going to address a subject for all of you out there listening to this podcast who have not started your podcast yet. You've been considering it, thinking it's something you may want to do, but you really have this dilemma.

But it could also be for anyone who's just got this like, idea of what they want to start. So even if you're a podcaster, but you have this project that you're like, do I do it now or do I wait till later in my business? Or I have my podcast and it's so successful at this point, but do I wait until I hit 100,000 plays like this? Now or later comes up. A lot is to the right order to do things. And I think the proper order, the right order, like any kind of term that you want to use in that way might be the mistake.

Yeah, I don't know if there is an actual proper order that's universal for people.

Right. And that's really it. I think that there are a lot of overlying issues at which are coming up that are causing this delay, this, what do I start on? Where do I start first? And that's what I get when I speak at a lot of events and I do mentorship. And what I get a lot of is people will say I need to do this first and then.

Right.

Or I get, I don't know where to start. I've got all of these things, where do I start? And of course, if you ask the people who are giving you quotes on them, they'll all tell you, oh, start with me.

Right? Right, everybody, whether it's you, the marketing person, the branding person, or there's all different aspects of consultants vying for an entrepreneur's budget and they're all going to say, oh, you got to start with me.

Right? And I think that that's not the case at all. I think for the most part you can do things in the wrong order and still get an okay result. So I like to talk about it. A good friend of ours, Dave Phillipson, who I adore is a funny guy, but he tells the story all the time of like, you're baking a cake and you've got all these top great ingredients. Like, you've got the best chocolate and you've got the really good butter and you've got all this stuff and you've split, spend all this time on it and it's really great. And you just throw it all in the pan and you throw it in the oven and you cook it and you come out and it doesn't come out chocolate cake, it comes out weird chocolate mess, you know, or fried eggs over here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there is a proper order to things, but it doesn't mean that it's so restrictive. Like, I think some bakers, like, I'm a good baker, I think I'm a really good baker.

I'm a decent baker. Of course, there's about three things I bake.

Yeah. And sometimes I will not do it in quite the right order. And you're like, oh, I forgot to cream the butter and the sugar. Oh, I'll just do that separately over here. As long as you still do it and then you get it back in the pot, you're still doing okay. What you are doing is wasting a lot of time, though. When you do things out of order, you waste a lot of time along the way and you're at higher risk for it not working right and making a mistake along the way. You made that recently when you were baking some banana bread and it seems to maybe have been light on butter or something.

No, I didn't have enough of the mashed, overripe bananas. I didn't have the right wet to dry ratio.

Right. There was nothing wrong with it. It just was a little bit dry.

But if I have all the right ingredients, though, I'll tell you it is a good analogy because it doesn't matter if I put the sugar and the butter in first or I put the sour cream and the eggs in first and then put the sugar and the butter still, there's a lot of the steps that it doesn't matter the order. Now, there are a couple of critical ones that do matter.

Right. For instance, creaming butter and sugar together, you don't do that. You don't get fluffiness. You get a lot of bad texture and sometimes bad flavor. So there are things and there are reasons to do it in the right order if you can. But if you can't, it's just going to take you a lot longer. And that's something that I hate. Do I Hate to waste time. It is like my biggest pet peeve. When there's a plan to follow in an order that can be made and it consistently works, why do it wrong?

Well, and also why delay? Unless you really just don't have the funds. If you're financially restricted, and that's the reality of it, then okay, I can understand that.

But I think that a lot of us use that as an excuse, maybe. So I think we use it as an excuse when there are people out there who bootstrap it in the most amazing ways. And you do favors and you get it done. And you run up podcasts on our network for free.

They actually do get the production for free because they're referring people that customers, and then we credit them episodes to produce in kind. And so they get it for free. That's true.

But yeah, so, I mean, it's possible that you can do things like that. And so I think that we have to separate out. And this is a good lesson to separate out whether or not the figuring out what the right order of things are, what should come first, whether I should do this now is a situation at which you're procrastinating or a situation where you really just don't know the right order. You really just don't know what comes first.

Sure. And I think when it comes to podcasting, for sure, I sometimes have people tell me, well, especially if they're an existing podcaster, because we get a lot of people who are existing podcasters that come to us, but they're not doing everything we do. They're not converting their episodes into blog posts. Right. And think, well, maybe I should just come over, you start producing my audio show now. And then I'll worry about the blog posts or these 30 episodes that I've already done that are audio shows, but I don't have a blog post for them. I don't have that comprehensive Google power going for me. I won't pay for doing that now. We'll do that in the future. And I'm always of the opinion that, you know what, if you don't convert all those back episodes, that is money you've left on the table. You're not getting the return of what you invested in creating all that content to begin with. The longer they wait, the longer they're just delaying, getting the benefit of all the rich Google keyword, organic keyword ranking that is going to help market their business. People are searching on Google today for the things that you've talked about in your podcasts. And if you have that just out there as an audio show. All Google's indexed that for is the title and maybe a couple of tags if there are any associated with that episode. But there are hundreds of keyword phrases people are searching at Google for every day. And they're not finding your website, they're not finding your post, they're not finding your show because you haven't converted that content. So waiting, it just delays and really it's missed opportunity.

Right. So let's outline a few of the misses we see and few of the good reasons to delay. Okay.

Yep.

So I want to start there with a couple of the good reasons why you should wait. If you do not know why you want to podcast, why you're doing this, then you better wait. There's a ton of reasons why. There's a whole lot of great reasons. It's great marketing, it's great networking, it's great Google power for your website. There's a whole ton of reasons to do it. But if you don't understand why you want to do it, that makes a big difference in how your show should be structured. So getting that wrong from the get go, not thinking that all through not understanding why you want to do it. And believe me, we have podcasters of all kinds. We have some who the podcast is literally ego boost.

Oh, absolutely.

Right. It is all about every time they do a show and they hear from their audience, it gives their ego a boost and they're able to keep their business going like it is. Just they really revel in the crowd approving of them. Right. And so it's about that, that's okay. But if they know that, then the show needs to be structured about them in that way. Right. And if your purpose is to sell a product or software or system or your show is to get sponsors, you want to make advertising or affiliate income. Like there are different types of shows that we structure them differently and we make different suggestions and different recommendations about how you record and who you have on your show and how things happen in it based on that. So making that choice up front, understanding that up front is actually a critical factor. And we do this on the product side of our business as well. So in the product business, we don't take anyone who doesn't want to be a business. So in other words, if they want to just invent, they have an idea and they want to invent it and they want to sell it and just make money off the idea, licensing or whatever, they're not the right client for us because they don't want to build a brand, they don't want to build a business, they don't want to be in what we do. Right. So it helps us understand the match. And that's why you need to understand how far are you willing to take this? Where is the show going to go? Like, is it an integral part of my business? Is it the marketing part of my business? Is it building a brand for me? Is it subset of that?

It can be, absolutely. And similarly with this business, with brandcasters and brandcasting, you, the reality is, if somebody comes to us and they just want us to produce their audio show and they don't want us to do the whole blog post conversion thing, we really don't get into that because that doesn't take advantage of what we do really well. And the unique thing we bring to this industry, it really, the audio show is about 20% of what we do. There's so much other stuff so powerful for business beyond that, that if you really just want a good audio show produced, someone to edit your audio and syndicate you on itunes, there's dozens and dozens of people out there that can do that for you really well. And they're looking for that work and needed.

And we have a different focus. Understanding who you are makes it understanding who you need to hire actually easier too. So that's another thing. So understanding your why and understanding who you are and what your goals are with that, I think that those things make a very, very big difference. And I always like to say, know your brand. Like, that's where it sums up to me. Like, because we always say that, it's like, know what your brand is about. Know your brand, know what your mission is. Know who you are, what you stand for. But brand is more importantly. And I don't know if I've discussed this on the podcast before, because I do talk about this when I do a presentation for brandcasters whenever I give a speech. And brand is way more than what you put out there. It's also how it's perceived. And that's really the perfect time for you to start a podcast when you have this idea of what your brand is, who you are, what you stand for, but you don't have enough feedback yet. That's the perfect time to get it before you've developed a course and wrote a book and done all of those other things and it's too late to find out that nobody wants to buy it.

I agree. Creating that platform with your podcast, among other things, to really start connecting with the audiences out there. That is a great time to do that. But you have to know. You have to know who you are and what you're about.

Yeah. And so we see. It doesn't matter whether it's a podcast or not, but we see that a platform, and that's what we call it here. Your platform is foundational. Every single business, every single entrepreneur needs a platform. It's what you stand for, but it's also what you stand on to be heard. So that might be a podcast. That definitely needs to be a website. There's no question about it.

You have to have a website.

Yeah. And it needs to have a social channel. So what we say is that it minimum has to have one social channel, probably two. You should always start with two is what is where I sit. Because you find out some differences about them and you'll find a maybe an audience nuance difference between it. If you want to do all of them. We try, but we. You won't do them well. And so we say we concentrate on two at a time and we let put the others on autopilot so that you have an address and you exist. And if you haven't heard my talk on. We did air my Facebook Live, didn't.

We, as an episode on social media, your masterclass.

We did, yeah. So go back and listen to that, because I talk about that. Because you do want to have an address everywhere, right. You want to be in every directory you can be, which is why you want to be on itunes, Stitcher, Tunein and Google Play. That's why we do all of that for our clients, because you got to be on all those. There's no reason not to be listed when it doesn't cost you any money. And so anyway, you want your social and your website to be taken care of, but then you have to power them. And you have to have something that produces content consistently and constantly and provides a feedback loop through that platform with your clients or with your listeners or with your watchers. If you've got videos with your viewers. Right. Whatever that is, your potential, who you are wanting to reach, your potential, who's. You've got to have that run through the platform to reach them, but you've got to have that content input. And we have done this enough. I'm a writer. I write six articles a month plus some. And we podcast now. We're on our third podcast that we're going to be launching. So we record a lot of episodes.

We're recording at least 30 somewhere. Thirty episodes a month, right? Yeah.

And We've done videos, multiple videos. My son in law is a videographer and a really good one. And out of all the things that we've done, we cannot keep up with video and written. It's too hard, it takes too much time. The audio is the fastest.

It is absolutely.

Now we still try to do the video and we definitely try to do the writing and we have them fit in when we can. But it's hard to be consistent and constant about it. And the one thing that helps your platform grow, gets you a bigger audience in whatever area you want, is the best marketing tool for you, is to have that content go out consistent and constant. So if you can't do that, then it's not a right fit for you. So if you're capable, if you're comfortable speaking, it's the easiest way to make sure that you're filling your pipeline and you're using it. So while we say, sit back and say, okay, yeah, a website does have to come first, like you physically need a website, but it does not have to be an advanced, complicated website.

No, I agree. And in fact you can when you make the decision, okay, I'm going to be a podcaster. Certainly with us you can be a podcaster within four weeks from pulling the trigger to being launched on itunes. And if you don't have a website, we've done this for some clients, we can create one within that same period of time and launch them all at once. Now that website can then be taken.

It's a starter site. Be really careful about this, right?

Three to four page website, right. A homepage and about us, a podcast page and a blog. That's really the essential elements of that starter website. But it's a WordPress site that then any WordPress developer, if you're going to do a membership site or you're going to do a resource site, or you're going to have a shopping cart and sell things, whatever you're going to do can be built off of that. And all of the author equity for all the content can start under that domain and it's still there no matter what you do with that site in the future.

And this is another reason, this is those that wait. When you wait to start your website, it is a huge mistake.

I agree with that.

Because every day that that website isn't live is a day that Google isn't indexing it. And you're going to be in the.

Google sandbox for start a new site, a new domain. They used to say four to six months, but I'VE been seeing it trending more in the three to four month range lately with new sites, with people, is that Google just won't trust your site initially. It doesn't know who you are, it doesn't know if your site's any good. It doesn't know if you're going to create content on a regular basis until it can have a little experience with you. And that takes three to four months. But if you do, if that site is operated and performs consistently over that period of time, you will come out of their sort of penalty box, if you will. The sandbox they call it sooner, right?

And so there's no time to wait. Do that sooner. And why put a ton of effort into your site? Why build it all out and do all of that work initially when it's not even going to rank? It just matters that it's live and it's got some content on it, right?

And if you needed to completely overhaul the design of a website and the structure of it behind the scenes and eventually that ends up replacing the current site, that's okay too. It's just that the domain is the same and all that written content is still there within that domain and that's all that matters.

So being able to have a site that you can fill with content is really the starting point, right? And fill it with content is the key. You gotta fill it with stuff so it gets ranked. And the second thing that I see is a mistake out there is not starting your social fast enough too. So we get a lot of people who are, oh I'm about to do a book launch or I'm about to do a product launch. We get a lot of people who are come to us with that and they start up as they're launching or a week or two in advance of the launching, start up their social pages. And it's such a mistake.

I agree, you need to establish those early. And the other thing I think that's going to come up with this, people think, oh but don't I have to build and I need a lot of likes on my Facebook Like Page. And isn't it going to take ages to build organically? Well, to build organically maybe it will take some time. But you know what, you can get 10,000 likes in three days to just populate that Facebook like page in short order on as low as 150 or $200 worth of expense on some simple ads that are going to do that for you and it gives your Like Page more credibility. So then when people find It. It's like, oh, wow, there's 10,000 people that like this page. They don't know where they are in the world, and it doesn't really matter. But you have an inherent credibility there that also is kind of foundational, helping you build that platform.

Yeah. I mean, I don't love that process. And so the more time you can give it, the more you can do a better job at it. So you could still spend a couple hundred bucks, but it might take you two months. And so if you want, if you're willing to be patient and to do it that way, it's going to serve you better in the long run because it'll serve you with a better organic traffic later. So I don't love that method. I think it's a little disingenuous, but I don't know.

But it's legitimate. It works. It's not like you're. It's not scamming the system. These are legitimate likes. It's just that they're not necessarily useful to your business, useful to your business in your target country, or really necessarily in your particular target customer. You don't know as much about them, but you can get them just so that the site, the like page, has that baseline credibility that when someone comes to it and sees, oh, my gosh, only 33 people have liked this page, they don't move on and say, next. Right. That's what I'm trying to avoid with that process. And I know Tracy and I differ on the value of that. I'm saying, hey, 150, 200 bucks, not that big a deal. It's not going to hurt. That's my opinion. Tracy would rather have more organic, genuine, focused likes. And I. I respect that.

But the point is, is to start now. So the point is to start now is to have.

We can agree on that.

To do three things right away. Get a website, make sure you get it launched. Like, it does not matter how basic it is. Get it launched, get your social pages launched, and get your content creation machine running, whatever that is going to be for you. If it's going to be writing, if it's going to be podcasting, it's going to be video casting, whatever it is, doesn't matter. But get it running. Do those three things as fast as possible, and then the only two reasons to delay is if you don't know who you are, why you're doing this, figure those things out.

Yep. I would say those are the only prerequisites.

Yeah. So that's my now or later.

And obviously the emphasis on now.

Yeah. And the reality is it's like all the other things that we need to do in our business, we've been able to test, market, confirm that is valid. Doing a course, writing a book, but doing all of those things, speaking, events, all of those things came from great content being posted constantly and consistently through our platform.

And for us, from podcasting specifically, because that was our method of choice. I mean, hey, you can live stream every day on Facebook and use that video to create your content. Awesome.

Just proliferate your platform with everything else. Right. Use the content everywhere.

I like it because I can be in my pajamas at 10:30 at night and we can record something and just when we want to do it. I don't have to be pretty in front of the camera.

Are you making a comment as to how I look right now?

No, I'm not.

Because it's not 10:30 at night.

I wasn't. I was talking about me. Did you hear me say about me?

Okay, okay. But, yeah, I mean, I really. That was why we chose podcasting. That was like, what made it in. Because I didn't have to have my hair done every single time I got on camera.

Right.

Does that make sense to me? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. If I have to wait for you to get your hair done every time we have to do a video, are you kidding me?

I know. It takes forever. That is a problem. Anyway, so we hope this helps you guys get off the fence, really, and just get going. Because there are things that are not helping your business run, and there are things that could be doing so much power for you, determining things that you don't know, laying in front of you, the right order of things. And by reaching out there, by starting this, by talking about it, by getting into your thing, into your brand, into who you are, by doing all of that, you're going to be able to find out what your next step is. Do they want a course? Do they want a book? Do they want a product? What is it that I need to make next? And you have people you can ask. You have beta testers. Such a great way to make that happen for you. Way better than spending all that money and all that time building something and no one comes.

But if you have additional thoughts or questions on this subject or this podcast, please reach out to us on social media, feed your brand on Facebook, or go to the blog post@brandcastingyou.com for this episode and leave us a comment. And we would love to continue this discussion with you. And if we get enough questions, hey, we'll make another podcast out of that coming up soon.

Absolutely. So thanks again for listening. This has been Tracy and Tom on feed.

You'd brand.

Sam.