Do you want to level-up your game in podcasting? Are you interested in starting a podcast? If so, this episode is for you. Corinna & Jules introduce you to Tracy Hazzard, CEO & Co-founder of Podetize. They talk about establishing thought leadership, what’s working in podcasting, and how you can monetize your efforts in podcasting.
00:00 Introduction
03:30 Tracy’s successful history in podcasting with WTFFF (it’s not what you’re thinking)
10:30 Unleashing the power of SEO to get “seen, heard, found & rewarded”
13:11 Having a designer’s mindset (#designthinking)
16:00 Developing internal/external systems to speed growth and ensure customer satisfaction
18:20 What exactly does PODETIZE do?
20:15 How do you monetize your podcast?
24:30 Establishing thought leadership through podcasting (creating portfolio value)
30:00 Why Tracy starts a new podcast EACH YEAR
34:00 Why using ALL 400 characters to describe your podcast is imperative
38:00 Why you might want multiple feeds for your podcast (separating your feed into volumes of 100 to 200 episodes)
About Our Guest: Tracy Hazzard, CEO & Co-founder of PODETIZE
Tracy Hazzard is a prolific podcaster host/co-host of five different shows with over 2600 episodes and interviews. As the CEO of Brandcasters, Inc. (Podetize.com), she makes it a practice for all of the executive team (herself included) to start a new podcast every year. That way the leadership of the organization intimately understands what it is like to podcast today and helps inform the value and development of products and services.
About Podetize
Podetize is a podcast hosting and done-for-you-production services that get you heard by more of your ideal listeners. If you would like your podcast to be audited by the Podetize team at no cost, visit https://podetize.com/podcast-audit/
Podcasts Mentioned:
WTFFF: https://3dstartpoint.com/
The Binge Factor, Hosted by Tracy & Tom Hazzard: https://thebingefactor.com/
Care More Be Better: Social Impact – Sustainability – Regeneration: https://caremorebebetter.com
Feed Your Brand, Hosted by Tracy Hazzard: https://podetize.com/feed-your-brand
Podetize: Worthy News & Notes (Private podcast for Podetize investors, coming soon)
Join Our Community Of “Dragonflies” And Reach For Your Dreams
Follow us on all social spaces @themediacasters
Join The Mediacasters Community FREE for a limited time: https://themediacasters.mn.co
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themediacasters
Podcast website: https://themediacasters.com
Network website, with all our community shows: https://podpage.com/themediacasters
COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT
Corinna Bellizzi:Â How are you today?
Julie Lokun: Well, I’m doing really good because we’re going to get all like Dukes of Hazzard today.
Corinna Bellizzi: You know, I wish we could have both of the hazards on, but today we’re super thrilled to be joined by someone incredible that we’ve been collaborating with for a bit of time. And that is Tracy. She is the founder and CEO of , who is our preferred platform for hosting an incredible matriarch, running a company that a lot differently than many other people in this space.
And one of the only I know to be female led, um, so much podcasting on the technical side is just led by men, men, men, men, men. So we’ll get to meet
Julie Lokun: her, got a woman in the house. Tracy Hazzard. She’s amazing. So smart. It blows my mind. I mean, well,
Corinna Bellizzi: I know, and I just can’t wait to talk to her about that first.
So she started specifically in this hyper niche of building 3d printing. Right? So, Tracy, we’re going to welcome you to the show right now. Thank you so much for spending this time with us.
Tracy Hazzard: Hey, both of you so happy to be here. Love media casters, like who doesn’t want to talk about casting media, right.
Corinna Bellizzi: I think Juliana ho you know, you, you initially thought too, it was like, almost like you’re waving a magic wand and we’re casting spells and helping people to really reach more.
More individuals, the
Julie Lokun: facilitator dreams, you know, I love this about
Tracy Hazzard: remaking. I think I, so I think, you know, that’s it, when you can create, uh, ripples of voices out there, right. You know, and it’s just cascading into them telling other people and inspiring others because of their show. Like, to me, that’s just the best business to be in is that I don’t even have to, I don’t have to know the thread all the way through it, but if I’m just setting off a ripple, that’s going somewhere.
Corinna Bellizzi: So as we get started today, Tracy, I would just love to know a little bit more about your history. I know you’ve been in the product side, you’ve worked to develop technologies. I mean, you’re kind of, you have a pretty incredible history and landed in this world of podcasting became so passionate about it, that you essentially built this, this new and different enterprise.
So let’s, let’s talk about that. What led you to.
Tracy Hazzard: So I, you know, I have a big history in product design and development. And for me, everything’s the product. It doesn’t matter what I’m approaching. If I’m designing software, if I’m designing a physical product, like a brand new microphone, or if I’m designing a system of how to run my business or how to run my podcast.
So all of those things are designed at the same time. So that’s my passion. And it’s been from the day I graduated college and met my husband. Go
Corinna Bellizzi: on. I just explained the connection to 3d printing, right? Because it’s like you, you got people that were super passionate about 3d printing because they could essentially become creators of whatever they could imagine in their own homes.
And so I just love that. I personally have friends who have 3d printers in their homes and I’m constantly just curious about what’s the next thing they’re going to build, or what’s the next blueprint they’re going to offer to other people in the 3d printing space.
Tracy Hazzard: Well, that’s why we called our show WT FFF, which is what the fuse filament fabrication.
It’s not a swear, even though that’s what my mother thought for the first like year that I was doing the show it’s fuse filament fabrication is the geeky term for 3d printing. What we did by naming it, that was top off of WTF was popular. Mark maroon. Like had Obama on his show. So like, it was really popular.
People were searching for it and then they’d see ours pop up. Like, you know, when you start typing WTF, FF, the FFF would show up, you know, as, as the next one on the list. And so we would just show up there. So that helped us in conjunction. Just get visibility for our show, but if they didn’t know what it was.
There was that curiosity factor, but if they didn’t know what it was, they clicked it every time. And that’s how we ended up with a hundred thousand listeners within a year. And it was just so much fun to do that first show, but what was more fun was to see what it did for us in our. It was unexpected and it blew so much up in our worlds.
And I know it’s done the same for the two of you. So I think this is a common find for a lot of people. So for us, that was 2015, which was pretty early on in the scope of podcasting where our show was blowing up and getting that kind of visibility. We were written in a lot of articles and I got an ink column from, for, from within magazine writing on innovation because of it.
Corinna Bellizzi: Wow.
Julie Lokun: I mean, you’re an innovator! How do you go from 3d printing to a podcast? I mean, like, there seems like there’s a disconnect there.Â
Tracy Hazzard: Oh yeah, because it’s visual, right. You know, 3d printing is like, it’s an object, it’s a physical object. And the real reason is I didn’t want to have my hair done.
Like it wasn’t, it’s like nice silliest thing, but you know, but live streaming really hadn’t taken hold back then it was just this experiment. And so. Everything was still so structured and video and video was so expensive still at that time to produce. And we just didn’t want to take the time to do that.
So what we would do is we would do this audio show about how we did it or what we were working on, or who was really fascinating us in the 3d printing world. And we would just do the show five days a week. We did it and we would just talk about these things. And then we would offer them up to go to our YouTube, to see the.
Prints that was running on our machine at any given time or go to Instagram and check out the photo that of whatever the object was. And so that was how it went. So we also increased our social media and our following on YouTube, just expanded along with the show. W, and it was just a fundamental of, I know you want to see this here.
It is like it was, we just stuck it there. We didn’t do anything with it, but talk about it on the show and it worked for us. And that’s what we realized is that the power of that platform built in podcasting was actually where the power was. And most people didn’t know that they thought I build a podcast and people listen and that’s where everything lies.
And it really wasn’t.
Corinna Bellizzi: Well, you’ve done a lot of trade shows too, in your time, I imagine… And so have I, but one of the most innovative booths I think I ever saw was in the 3d printing space, a M in the algae space, specifically, a company had chosen to bring the 3d printer there and they were printing out a 3d copy of.
Using algae-based plastics or let’s say the classics, I don’t even know really what you call them, but he was like perfectly green Yoda. And so people would come back by the booth over and over again throughout the trade show, just to see the progress that had been made on you. And so I just think that this particular arena of innovation inspires that kind of childlike curiosity in us and with a show name, like WTF IFF, like I would have grabbed that Elizabeth probably brought people into 3d printing that probably had no idea really what it was.
Tracy Hazzard: Back in 2015 as well. I mean, we really did it as a business test. And this is where I think a lot of people come to us. Like we knew the industry was shifting and we had been what we call ghost designers, designing for big companies behind the scenes, Martha Stewart, living, uh, Costco. We would do products for Costco and all kinds of different places like that.
And what would happen is, is that being that ghost designer, no one knew who we were. So we saw this Instagram world and thought we need to get out front of the. Or we’re not going to get enough clients in the future, uh, imports were changing. We were an expert in that. So how are we going to go about this and create this future business for ourselves?
And 3d printing seemed like one of those options, but it would mean we were the end product producer. Right? And so it, you know, in this case it would be a design file, but they’d have to be as inspired by us as designers. As they would the product itself. And so we realized we needed to have that sort of celebrity model, that influencer model.
And we thought, well, let’s try podcasting. Let’s see how it works. And if we find something that works here, then we’ll, we’ll figure out where to go from it. What we found really quickly is no one would ever want to by design. We thought there’d be like, you know, 14 year old boys in their garage being our listeners.
And we weren’t really sure that that part was going to work. What it turned out was we had retirees in the Midwest teachers on the east coast who were struggling to figure out what curriculum to develop for their students in stem. You know, we had steam origins. Organizations that were actively trying to add the art, which we had.
So add the art into stem. So it makes it seem like this was like ongoing movements that were happening at the same time. So some of it was timing and luck in that sense. And some of it was because we had had 25 years of expertise. We were also the perfect people to bring that forward at that time. And TIF tip that 650 episodes later.
Hewlett Packard as our sponsor, like all these things went on from it. So it really cascaded into building something that could have been a business, but it wasn’t the business we wanted. The business, we, we ended up saying, attracted us, was to keep podcasting, to keep doing that, to develop that into a podcasting service business and people would come to us and they’d say, WTF F is so amazing.
How do you do it? And can you do it for me? And here’s my credit card. I’ll pay whatever you want. Like, that’s how it started for us. Our first 10 clients were like that. And then we said, okay, well now we have to design a system and a process. And where are we going to take that? And how are we going to go from 10 to a hundred to a thousand clients and 10,000 clients?
How what’s that path for us? And that’s when we designed new. And that’s the way we, when we sat down to do it, it was a purposeful decision. It wasn’t a, this is a side hustle will, and then it expanded. It was we’re going to purposefully do that. And we’re planning every step of that way.
Corinna Bellizzi: You know, you mentioned a couple of things earlier that I want to draw back to when you designed WT FFF as your first podcast, you were already thinking about.
And I think one of the things that helped you to stand out at that early stage, but also just as you’re working with podcasters to build their platforms so that they get the right people into their audiences so that they can continue to grow their exposure. You focus a lot specifically
Tracy Hazzard: on SEO. Yeah, it is.
SEO is powerful, but SEO, isn’t just Google search engine optimization via Google. It’s also any bot that you’re any search engine that exists anywhere. So when we’re in an app like the apple podcast app and or we’re in Spotify app, there’s a bot that is controlling that search. What’s coming up when you’re typing into the, the app itself.
Same thing. We knew this from working on Amazon optimized listings for Amazon products is critical. You have to know how to title everything, how to put your bullet points, how to attract the consumer to them. But you also have to know more importantly as how Amazon’s algorithm works, so that you’re you show up on the first page when someone types something in relevant to the product that you’re selling.
So we understood how important is. To make sure that you didn’t just put things out there without understanding who’s actually controlling what gets seen and that’s that association power that SEO brings to everything. So it actually was at the core of everything we ever done because when we designed.
That was on a shelf and Costco and the Costco shelves are gigantic. If the product was too small, it wouldn’t be seen. Sometimes we designed bigger boxes for things than they needed, even though that sounds like a waste environmentally, but if it didn’t get sold, then we didn’t do our jobs. So we would have to come up with ways to be thinking about this as how are things being searched for?
How are things being found? And so we call it being seen, heard, found, and rewarded, and that’s kind of our motto for everything that we do, whether it was designing a product or designing a podcast.
Julie Lokun: I mean the surprise of a podcast because you were pioneering podcasts. I mean, I’m not even sure the word or the acronym WTF was really in its all its glory as it is now, you know, as we’re texting it every single day to our friends like WTF, but you know,
Corinna Bellizzi: WTA.
Julie Lokun: You know, I just see it as such an interesting path.
And then you found the success in podcasting and you’ve taken it to exponential levels. And where does where’s
Tracy Hazzard: that born? You know, it it’s it’s Tom and I together. The two of us and the way we approach everything, uh, you know, it is that designer’s mindset that we came out of college with. So we both went to Rhode Island school of design, which is kind of like an Ivy league design school costs that much as my, my dad would say, yeah, it cost that much.
And so, you know, the coming out of that is this design thinking about the experience all along the way. From everyone’s perspective, but also understanding the layers of who’s touching things. And who’s the decision maker in the process. So, you know, not that we design food cause we never do. But if we were designing dog food it’s while it’s important to make sure that dogs love it and it’s healthy for them and all of those things, but the real importance is to get the dog owner to see it, find it and buy it for them.
Right. So we have layers of people. We have to go through. Everything that we do in the world. Moms control a ton of stuff that their families get, you know, in that process. So kids, things have to be designed that they’re not objectionable to mom. So no matter how many times my girls will come to me and say, Hey mom, I saw this on YouTube and I want it.
If I object to it, it’s not going to happen. It’s not coming into my house. So understanding these gatekeepers is a critical part of the design process and designing out objectives is a part of the process as well. So. What happens is, is that our services, our technology become easy to sell because we’ve already designed out the problems.
We designed out those things at the beginning, and we’re open to redesigning along the way, which is not always comfortable for a lot of companies and a lot of people. And so our. Built to continually learn and figure out what’s not working and make adjustments for it. We’re not perfect. Absolutely not.
Perfect. We’re we’re new, you know, we’re a business that’s only five years in, so, you know, that’s young, that’s still a startup stage and we’re doing it on a budget because we’ve refused to take investors before now. So, you know, all of those things make a difference as to how you approach it. And you’ve got to have that process where you can do that.
Compounding.
Julie Lokun: I love that. Just you speaking to the agility of leading your business and understanding those bumps in the road and always recreate. You know, what is on the horizon for you next? There must be something
Tracy Hazzard: big. Well, right now we have 108 employees. So we’re getting, we’ve just tipped over that point where you have to take everything that you do within the company, as seriously as you take it.
Right. So that means that we are redesigning our training systems where before we could do this, one-on-one kind of training. And that was perfectly fine. We now actually have to have systems for those trainings. Plus one-on-one support. We have, uh, you know, corporate communications send out a memo. Like I never, I said to Tom, I was like, I never thought I’d have to say a memo about how to communicate like teaching people, like what the protocol for communication was within my company.
I thought it would just be understood, but it’s not, it’s like. Here’s how you use chat. Here’s how you use email. Here’s how you use this and set a tone for how we want to run our company, which is a little bit different. So you have to train people and put in systems internally and externally because they make it.
To your clients, right? If our team is better at communicating inside, we’re going to be better at serving the client on the outside. And so we want to make sure all of those are in place. So that’s kind of the real core of what we’re doing. Plus we’re in proud fundraise mode. So like there’s a lot of those external pieces where you have auditing happening and you have sec regulations and you have investors who are scrutinizing what you’re doing.
So it brings to you to a whole new level of. You know, professionalism that you have to move into faster than if you were bootstrapping your organization all the way through and funding it yourself. So there’s freedom in that bootstrapping funding, because you do have the ability to say, well, that’s not perfect yet.
We can still manually handle that. And we don’t have to have a system for that yet, but the minute you get into a, oh, we have to have documented every single little receipt, even though like they’re all here in this. That’s fine for me, for me, it’s not so fine when you have to have audited financial returns presented to the sec.
Right? So, you know, you have to look at that as like everything gets scrutinized.
Corinna Bellizzi: You know, another company at your stage would likely just say, okay, I’m going to go and go the traditional investor route. I’m going to submit my company up in front of all these VCs and have all that scrutiny. But you made a choice to go in a different direction.
Which I personally really loved because for one, it means that you’re not going to have any one investor that’s, you know, kind of strong arming you to do something differently. So I wanted to hear from you, like how, as Tracy Hazzard, CEO of her own company in the prototype world, like this is the whole podcasting world.
Well,
Julie Lokun: let’s introduce Potter ties because we really haven’t even touched on, okay. Hotter ties and amazingness of pot attire and why we love ourselves some Tracy. Yeah. Well, thank
Tracy Hazzard: you. So palletize we’re actually the largest post-production company of podcasts. So we produce more podcasts, have produced more podcasts than I heart radio has produced.
Yeah, I know, but they, you know, their shows are there. Our shows are all independent. They’re all independent podcasters on our show where they’re taking controlling and doing all the creative in that whole process. We don’t do that. We handle everything from once you record and hosting and syndication.
So we have software and services and we have, you know, group support. Love about our company is that we said, you know what, we’re not going to leave anyone behind. So we’re going to develop group coaching programs. They’re all going to come with your subscriptions. You know, we just made everything, a part of it to keep that support going because we found that that was one of the biggest gaps for most podcasts are as being able to keep going.
And so this is just kind of how we run the company. Palletizes it’s front facing brand. We’re actually brand casters, Inc, which is our corporate name, but palletizes are registered trademark and front facing brand. Yeah,
Corinna Bellizzi: we’re the media
Julie Lokun: casters. And we had no idea.
Tracy Hazzard: Brand casters. Yeah. It’s, you know, it was just think alike.
It was just the corporate name. And, you know, Pata ties actually came out of the fact that we lost a URL. And at that point it was about monetization. So we mixed podcasting monetization. We came up with palletize and it was really just the best name. It just fit exactly what we were doing, resonated with the audience of who we were talking to.
And our clients just came back and said, we love this because it’s an alternative view of monetization and it is more than.
Corinna Bellizzi: So let’s talk about that because I think it’s the number one question that comes up in any community about podcasting. How do I turn this into a money-making process? Right. And I think people have this idea that they can suddenly just start podcasting, put their ideas out there and become Joe Rogan.
And that’s not going to happen. 99.9 9, 9, 9, probably presented people. So not to say that your dreams can’t be realized, but that the success comes from different spots, I think in the world of podcasting. So what is your take on monetization as it relates to podcast?
Tracy Hazzard: Well, I mean, the reality is, is that the numbers speak for themselves, right?
They’re 98% of podcasts don’t make money from advertising at all. Just doesn’t happen. So there it’s not even, I mean, it’s not even possible. So out of the discouraged, out of the 2%, that makes money for it doesn’t mean that they don’t make money for their show or for their business or what they’re doing, but they don’t make money in advertising.
And for the 2% that make advertising. The minimum threshold for it to be worth their while is 20,000 downloads per show. And at that most of the ads ad systems, most of the processes treat it like radio and they treat it like only the forward facing catalog is worth anything. The back catalog is cheaper and not worth much.
And that’s a mistake because we know we have bins. And binge listeners start at the first episode and listen all the way through, because a lot of our podcasting isn’t about what’s newsworthy today and only talk, show stuff that cares about the future. And what’s next on our show. It also cares about what, what we talked about before, right?
Are our listeners care about those things? So there’s a whole overall structural value that has changed. So now some of them are starting to look at them more like a Netflix. But the problem with that is when your iHeart radio or your Wondery or you’re any of those companies out there that are building these types of shows as vehicles for advertising.
That’s how they start. They like, I have this advertiser, you know, Coca-Cola or whoever they might be. And we need to show to put that out on that’s how TV and radio have been coming for years, like for decades and decades, the industry. Oh, wait, I was just watching the documentary. Amy Poehler did it on a Lucille ball.
And the whole reason it happened was because Phillip Morris agreed to, to bankroll her show. Like that’s the whole reason she ended up with. I love Lucy. And so, you know, think about that. Nothing in Hollywood, nothing in those places happen without an advertising sponsor, driving that. So if they’re driving that then.
What is the chance of your success rate? And in just like in any other like VCs, right? We were talking a little bit more about funding and going the VC route and everything in VCs, they have nine out of 10 failures, but that one success is a unicorn and makes them loads and loads and loads of. But nine out of 10 failures product design that I came from seven out of 10 failures, home shopping network, 11 out of 15 failures, like it’s high in those industries of failures when we are developing commercial products for things, right.
Commercial vehicles for things. Right. But when you are developing a show from your business, your model, your way, you know, Better. There’s an audience to resonate against. There’s something that they want from you. They’re going to ask you for more. When our 3d print show that we were talking about before they asked for more, they asked us to do longer shows.
They asked us to do shows on educational topics. They asked us to help develop curriculum to S to talk about, you know, to help improve. And this is one of the things that I loved about that business we had because we were in so many different countries and Africa was one of them. They were Africa and Brazil were having issues with power supply.
So they would have rolling blackouts and rolling brown outs. And what would happen is, is that if your 3d printer stopped working in the middle of a print, then you would have to start all over again when you started it. And so sometimes the prints that we would design would take 12 to 20 hours to print because we designed really complex, large prints and 12 to 20 hours.
Your chance of having a blackout in the Africa is high. So they couldn’t print our designs over there. So we worked with some of the manufacturers. We were able to be a liaison to point out this problem for them. And they were putting, they could put in a pause and a save. If the power went out, it was a coding thing, super simple, cost them nothing.
And now. 3d printer that was viable in another country. All because we heard it on our show like that. Those are the things that are really powerful and where we can really get to where we make differences. That company made more money. That 3d printer company made more money because they now had a new market to sell into.
You can really make a monetization difference in your industry, in your world, in your own.Â
Corinna Bellizzi: Wait, wait, you’re also speaking to his thought leadership. You essentially positioned yourselves as thought leaders in this particular space. So you were able to push for the change that you wanted, which has, you know, it’s, it’s not necessarily always a monetary payback, right?
It has. And maybe not an immediate monetary payback, but it’s something that. Then become a partnership or something that develops from there or establishes a new career path for you. Like for instance, when I started care more of you better last January, I was thinking, heck, I’ve been in this world of sales and marketing for nutritional supplements for a long, long time.
I want to work in more kind of this thought leadership perspective on the social impact and sustainability space, perhaps this will end up being part of a career pivot for me, maybe I’ll work in as a corporate social responsibility, um, advocate or consultant or something along those lines. I still haven’t pulled the trigger on anything like that, but it wasn’t a way for me to explore that and also have the conversations I wanted to have with people I might not ever, ever, ever have had access to.
Without the show. And so by creating the show, I was suddenly able to interview thought leaders like Paul Hawkin or Mo GoDaddy who are internationally renowned, bestselling authors and movers and shakers in their spaces. And so it meant that I was now rubbing elbows with people that I both admired, respected.
And then just getting this kind of. Personal satisfaction.
Tracy Hazzard: Well, you, you raised your industry authority, you raised your thought leadership, your you’re making a difference and it, and it’s making a difference to your career. I mean, when I was doing the 3d print podcast, they asked me to give a speech at a, an LA trade show and it was like a big maker.
Fair. So, I mean, it wasn’t like a small audience. I must have had 200 people in. But it gave a speech like a nitty gritty, granular speech about pricing, your 3d print designs. So if you’re going to go selling your designs, pricing your services and doing this. Cause I came out of the consulting and design world.
This is something I knew. And the head of a, of a new section of Inc magazine saw me speak there and she invited. Have a column in Inc magazine for this. And so I wrote then a column, I wrote over 400 articles for them on not 3d printing, but on innovation in general. And how you do things, all of these niches, this is what they asked me, like write about these nitty gritty things that everybody needs to know and learn.
Wow. And that was a great opportunity for me. It must have been. It was fun, but then every time I turned around and I said, in columnists, even now, when I say former ink colonists, people still use it to invite me. They invite me to speak because of it. So it had a long-term residual value and that’s where I think we don’t anticipate what we put out there.
If we’ve done our job of making it, as you mentioned earlier, SEO, like we made it so that we’re really searchable and we’re really there for people. And there were easy to find and. Always there, right? We, you know, hundreds of hundreds of episodes and articles late later, right? We’re always there that authority, that thought leadership can’t get taken away from you very easily.
And a really good example is this is when Hewlett Packard came to ask us to sponsor their show. We’d actually stopped podcasting for the 3d print show because we’d been so much on it. I had three new shows I’d started here at the binge factor feature brand had already been well underway, which are my.
For podcasters. And so I was like onto other things and, you know, frankly, 650 episodes of 3d printing. How much more can I talk about it? It was like what I thought. And so, anyway. I was done. I was, you know, I felt, Hey, this is not pod fitting. I put my time in, right? Like I’m done with that. But when Sheila packer came to us, we’d already been, we’d stopped podcasting for about nine months.
And I said, why do you want to advertise with us? Why do you want to have us? They wanted to sponsor a series and actually ask us to do some. And so I said, you know, first I’m going to charge you a lot of money. Cause I’m retired, I’m retired from that podcast. I’m gonna charge you a lot of money, but why do you want me to do this?
And they said, because we spent the whole year trying to get you off the first page of Google and. So you don’t want entrenched value, right? The strength of the sustainability of the thought leadership you create is really your longterm value. So those that quit their podcasts and decide, oh, I can’t afford to keep it live.
And don’t find a way to keep their podcasts live. It was making a huge mistake. This is portfolio value for you long.
Julie Lokun: I love that portfolio value. I mean, you’re doing so many amazing things and you know, let’s not be remiss. Let’s also say that, you know, you launched your first podcast right after you had your first or your third baby.
Tracy Hazzard: Right? It’s my third baby.
Julie Lokun: And juggling all those things and being a thought leader and using this as cache. Your expertise is so inspiring to me. It’s giving me all these ideas that Corrina should be a little bit nervous about. I got an idea.
Corinna Bellizzi: I got an idea.
Tracy Hazzard: I know that it’s so dangerous. My team gets frustrated with that.
Corinna Bellizzi: Wait, we have five streams. Let’s go ahead and start. Six podcasts. No, wait. I actually
Julie Lokun: said to her, I’m like, I want to do a true crime podcast or something. No, Julie, no a dog. And then the next day, she’s like, I’m going to start another podcast. It’s going to be, um, a documentary about my family’s journey.
I’m like, Hey, how come you get to start another podcast? And I don’t,
Tracy Hazzard: I love it. I love it.
Corinna Bellizzi: Right. A little bit, like I get an idea and then I’m like, oh, I can run with this.Â
Tracy Hazzard: Well, as we start up new podcast every year for our business, right. It’s our model. So that’s why I have, I have seven now. And we’re just about to start our eighth, but all of them aren’t live WTF.
We don’t record anymore. It still has residual value. It still makes us money. I still get people reaching out, asking to advertise on the show, so which I can do. I just deploy them and it’s done and they get. It’s easy for me to utilize that, but it’s not something that I have to concentrate on every single day.
It’s upon request. I have product launch hazards. The new trust economy is about blockchain and cryptocurrency. I started that with a co-host because, I mean, how could you pass up the opportunity to have co-hosts named profit and have. Like, does that not sound like the best cryptocurrency podcasts you could possibly have?
Right. So she has two S and two T’s and I have twosies in my name, like it just made it perfect. So Monica profit actually manages the show. Now it’s all hers. She’s still doing some amazing things. D you know, defining NFTs and things that I don’t know about. And I get to listen to that, to my own show that I helped start, but I get to listen to.
Oh, that’s what that means. Oh, now I know more about that. And so my curiosity in that field just helped me move that one forward. So like there’s all these little ones that we start them because we want to make sure we know how hard it is for our clients to start a new show and make sure that we’ve got our launching systems, our systems and processes are working, but then also we might want to transition in and try something.
So this year we’re trying a private podcast for our crowdfunded investors. So only the investors will get access to it. And we wanted to launch this week, actually. But we’d come up to a slight roadblock of something that we have to figure out how to block from a, from an algorithm so that we can make it available so that you could listen to it over some apps, not all the apps, but we wanted to block it because apple, when you say, if you syndicate to apple, then it automatically syndicates to all these other smaller podcasts and they don’t have blocks for private podcasts where apple does.
So like it created this barrier for us to understand. How do we need to go about syndicating that to make sure that you can keep something private? If you’re a. For it, or in our case, we want to keep it totally exclusive. So we’ve created a new password protection system and some other things that we need to do to keep the feed private from being syndicated out further.
Wow. And so, yeah, technical difficulties, but we learned that. And now we have a model that somebody else can use and we’re launching a show. So we’re also testing out what that’s like getting, you know, testing out a, so let’s say you have a community like the media casters community, and you say, okay, we’re launched a show within this.
How much does that community contribute to your list? Beginning. And then if you decide to then expand it outside of that, how much does that happen? So if you kept your podcast only within the media, your mighty networks and kept it within that, like what, what kind of volume would it do? And then how much, if you open it up beyond that?
Because when we close out our round, we’ll probably open it up beyond that and open up that podcast as well. And we’ll see what happens. Cause that’s a great case. Study and tasks.
Corinna Bellizzi: Wow. Well, I know everything in podcasting is changing. It seems every month, like there’s a new player that comes into the game with another app, or there is just a shift in what’s working.
And so I appreciate that constant commitment to staying new. I will also say I’m preparing to launch a podcast in support of a business that I’m connected to in the nutrition space. Right. And so being able to tap into that industry knowledge from you is something I’m really grateful for. And one piece that I want to mention, because this is something I actually got contrary advice on very recent.
You guys are an advocate for actually using the 4,000 character limit that podcasters are allowed to use in their description. And I know that some of the platforms don’t pick up all of it. I think stitchers one example where they might just take the first, I don’t know, 2,500 characters or something like that, but generally speaking.
You want to use close to all of those 4,000 characters for that SEO reason. And, and the reason I like I was skeptical first too, because as a marketer, I was like, well, they don’t want the little blurb and you want them to just see the little blurb. But if you look at most of the platforms, you’ll notice that they say, you know, just a little blurb and then read more and you can choose to click on that read more.
Right.
Tracy Hazzard: Most people don’t choose to read more. Let’s be clear on that. Yes.
Corinna Bellizzi: So you want that first bit to be like, kind of your punchline, right? Well, the moment that I shifted. The moment that I shifted to having a full description for care. We better that filled out that 4,000 characters that was written to optimize for SEO that yes, maybe spoke about some of the concepts and several different terms that then I might vernacular like use in a typical marketing document, but written out this hallway, I suddenly went to search for myself under social impact sustainability or all these different terms on Google podcasts.
And I would be in that. As opposed to like, you know, throw, you know, several scrolls through where you have to just kind of like, keep going to see where I might crop up in this thing. So it was immediate. And so then I saw from that, that I started to get selected by for one and oh, a team in Ohio. Decided to use my podcast as curriculum for their high school class.
It was learning about sustainability and climate change. And, oh my God, like it all happened as a result of shifting how I was approaching podcasting. How I was approaching my blogs on my website to support the podcast. I mean, and all of that came from you guys, so
Tracy Hazzard: right. And keep in mind that they have no idea how many listeners you have, right.
None of that matters because they see you showing up. And they see you showing up again and again, in all these different places. So for them, that means authority even without the backup of how many friends you have or how many, you know, how many listeners you actually have. Right. It doesn’t matter that to them is a sign of authority.
So I love that.
Julie Lokun: Yeah, Google is queen and everything I do for my businesses is based around Google. So the SEOs are so it’s true. Like,
Tracy Hazzard: well, that’s why we recommend YouTube, frankly, because if YouTube videos and YouTube is owned by Google and we embed them into your website and into your blog, you’re going to get bonus points.
Why would you skip the bonus points? Right. You know, why, why skip these things that are when we’re independent? And this is why we do this, right. You know, ally Hart and I’m wondering, and Spotify is corporate shows can afford to be lazy about using 4,000 characters because they control the algorithm.
They can push themselves out. They have an in us independence don’t have any. We have to use what’s available to us. And if they say there’s 4,000 characters, there’s a reason for there to be 4,000 characters and we should use every bit of it. And that that’s, you know, that’s how we feel as our job is to make sure and understand how that works, advise you to do something that takes advantage of.
That’s the thing, the repeatable success things. That’s what I
Julie Lokun: care about. I’ve experienced such wonderful growth on palletize and it’s amazing, super easy to use. And I mean, the numbers speak to what a great job you’re you guys are doing for us.
Corinna Bellizzi: Little pod-casters well, and little things I’ve learned, like you’re not supposed to have, I guess if I have more than 300 episodes, I’m going to need another.
Yeah, but if you get more than 300, all of a sudden apple won’t show those older shows. Right. And so
Tracy Hazzard: then you gotta move the volume over. Right. And that happened to us when we hit our 650, you know, when we were hitting that. And what we found is that is that 300 is still too many for people, right? So we try not to do volumes any bigger than 200 episodes.
And if we can do them in one hundreds, we do them that. Just recommend it. It’s just too much for a person. I got a slow obsess down. No, no, don’t slow it down. Just create another one. Just create another feed. And you, what you don’t want to do is this is a mistake. So somebody says, well, I’ll start a new feed, right.
Instead, what you want to do is you want to roll your old episodes into the new feed and keep your current feed because that’s where all your subscribers. So you don’t, you don’t want them to have to start out. But what you’ll find is that aggregate over time, the different volumes will end up with their own listeners and listeners will go, oh, I finished and joined the next volume and joined the next volume.
So you actually end up with listeners across all the. Right.
Corinna Bellizzi: Well, and you make it easy because with every subscription you get five feeds. So that’s awesome. And enables you to do this. Brilliant. So I love that. And I just feel like I’ve always got really sound advice from your team. So I appreciate a part of the community.
I’m happy to be one of the many people who is now a, an official investor in what you’re doing. You’re a pot of Tiser. I’m, apostatized
Tracy Hazzard: giving you a part of our community and we’d love. Media Castro script, because we strongly believe that your support makes the whole industry rise. And so when, when anyone, where are you need to get your support, please go out and seek that.
That’s what we want for everyone.
Corinna Bellizzi: Build something bigger. It can be lonely,
Julie Lokun: it can be lonely, but it’s never lonely. With Tracy Hazzard and Korean up Elizabeth, by my
Tracy Hazzard: side, we love you too, Julie.
Corinna Bellizzi: Well, listen, Tracy, we just thank you so much for spending this time with us today, for your support of the media casters and for everybody in the world of podcasting, because all I get from you and your team is that you’re here to help.
And the advice that I even hear, I listened to your podcast, brand casters. Really really great. I mean the binge factor really, really great hot on, you know, you get, you give people really sound advice. So I just appreciate that. And all you’ve got me as a listener for life. I look forward to that.
Julie Lokun: What’s the name of your next podcast? For next year?
Tracy Hazzard: It’s Podetize because we’re, you know, it’s branded for our, um, but it’s worthy news and notes. So it’s. Leon new and note where they,
Corinna Bellizzi: oh, oh, that’s brilliant
Tracy Hazzard: girl. Cause we’re talking about the industry. We’re talking about what’s going on in the world. So the world of podcasting, mind you, but,
Julie Lokun: okay.
So at the end of every episode, we ask all our illustrious guests, guests to say, kick it.
Corinna Bellizzi: Let’s kick.
Tracy Hazzard:Â Let’s kick it. Kick it.
