Mind Readings: 2007 Podcast Marketing Video Reaction Part 4/4

Welcome back. This is part four, the uh fourth and final part in our series uh of the podcast marketing talk that I gave way back in 2007, PodCamp Toronto. So let's go ahead and finish up this talk and then some uh some thoughts about it. Drill down to any level uh and see what's going on. The last thing I want to talk about, remember we were talking uh, I can actually show the Financial Podcast webpage here.

We were talking about calls to action. These things here, right? Now, how do you know which what's most effective? What should you be promoting? There's a service that I found that I thought was really nice called Crazy Egg, which is a stupid name for really good service.

What it does, then that's okay, is it will make you a heat map to show where on your site people are clicking? So what catches their attention? iTunes, popular. Win app, much more popular. RSS feeds, ehh, Morpheus, waste of time.

Uh this is from uh before I start promoting it to Oracle. MySpace, popular. Um thing that's not in here, because this is a snapshot from a while ago, is uh if you have an MP3 link right inside your blog post, that's very, very hot because people say, oh, this is a file, just click on it and that's what happens. This is where my flash player is on my site. People click on that all the time.

Popular blog posts. I'll have people click at the top here randomly. The nice thing is the entire header is uh linked back to the homepage. They always get back to the homepage. Um make sure this is a great way to see what's effective on your website and what is not.

Are you installing like a snippet or code or code statements? Yeah. Um Google Analytics. Exactly. If you use WordPress or any other blogging software, um you can put it in the footer file and it'll it'll run automatically.

What's it called again? Uh that's called Crazy Egg. Let me pull out that slide back up here. It's a paid server basically. It is a paid service if you want lots and lots of uh things, but if you're just gonna do a quick hit, they will let you do a 14-day free trial.

So make your your website optimized as much as possible, then let it run until your your trial runs out, and then if you're really evil, you sign up with a different email address. Umadays, uh if you use Microsoft Clarity, uh it is totally free. Uh just pull it up real quick here. So Clarity, you go and you sign up for your free account, uh, you install you get your copy paste, your tracking code, and then within Clarity, I don't think I have any projects set up on this particular account. Um, you get heat maps, you get user statistics, you get uh top level statistics about hey, you know, this page has this many people bouncing off of it.

Um it's a and you get recordings too, you get anonymized recordings where you can watch the person's cursor on screen moving around, you know, struggling to use your website. So it is definitely uh the preferred tool these days, again, because it's it's totally free. You don't have to do that whole you know, pretending you're a different person, you just install it. Why is it free? Well, because Microsoft realized that Google Analytics gets an enormous amount of data for free from almost every website out there because their software is free, and they use that with Google Ads.

Microsoft wanted to have something that would give them uh equivalent types of data, so they built Clarity and are giving that away for free uh to folks as a way to get that data for presumably the Bing advertising system. So takeaway Evangelists count the most. No matter what you're doing in terms of your efforts podcasting, having people who are working for you to promote your stuff is key because it reduces your workload, it keeps your sanity intact. I actually disagree with that now. Evangelists are still important, for sure.

Evangelists are still important. But if you don't have the loyal base to begin with, um, focusing on evangelists while not keeping your the happy people happy is kind of putting the cart before the horse. If you can make people deliriously happy with your products and services, if you can make people deliriously happy with your show, they will share it by nature. They will they will do that for you. So it's important to keep an eye on evangelists, but really focus on making the very best content you possibly can and making your audience deliriously happy, and then evangelists kind of takes care of itself.

Most of the tools, with exception of the friend adder, are free or you know, free trials that you can manipulate manipulate. Make your show easy to promote as many different ways as possible. And uh give it a try. Any questions? Okay.

So that was me from 2007. I think it was 2007. It was 2007 or just after that. Um podcast marketing have stayed the same, right? You've still got to have good content.

You've still gotta have intelligent calls to action. You've still gotta have uh an easy to remember product, right? Your your podcast is a product. If you are selling entertainment, you're selling education, you're selling content to people, and they are paying with their attention. That's why we call it paying attention, because you are selling something and people have to pay for it with their time, their energy, and their efforts.

So if your show is not resonating as much as you would like, if your show is not growing as fast as you would like, one of the things to ask yourself is Am I doing enough to get people to pay me in their attention for what it is that I'm selling? A lot of companies, companies especially, are really bad at podcasting because they're so focused on selling something that like a product or a service or something's revenue generating, and they're missing the point that before you can sell something for currency, you have to sell something for attention. And if people don't pay attention, they will not pay currency. If people do not pay attention, they will not pay with money. And that's a lesson that a lot of corporate podcasts have learned the hard way.

As evidenced by the fact, if you go into Apple Podcasts, there are so many companies and so many pot company podcasts that have like eight episodes, and that's it. And they know they pod faded, they stopped after eight episodes years ago, and you're like, well, this is the podcast graveyard, because they did not have that content that people actually wanted. It doesn't take a year and a day to get someone to pay attention to your show. If your show is something people actually want, it does take time to ramp up. Uh, in a variety of ways, using things like Google Analytics to measure your show website, still relevant, still valid.

Using any kind of analytics would be good. Podcast analytics itself has not changed much for the average podcast. Now, for um shows that have budget to spend, there obviously are incredible measurement programs that are statistically valid that are that are rich. Uh user surveys, listener surveys, um, you know, share of market stuff. There's research firms like uh Sounds Profitable that do exactly that.

Um, there are companies like Edison Research that do exactly that, and they are reassuringly expensive. For the small to mid-size show where you don't have a lot of budget, yeah, you're still looking at things like downloads. That's one of the reasons why your community is so important because your community will give you that data, uh, particularly if you you have an accompanying email newsletter, which every show should have. After a show goes out, there should be an email of some kind that tells people the show is uh out so you can get that listenership. And then you can run diagnostic or you can run uh demographic data on that email list.

There are services like uh ClearBit or Hubspot that can take an email list and augment it and tell you demographics and photographics and things about your your audience. So one of the things you want to do is try to capture that information from the audience. Yeah, ask them to help you out with it. Other things like running listener surveys, you can do that without spending a dime. You can set up a Google form or a form on your website and ask people questions like, how did you hear about our show?

Um, what's the reason you keep listening to it? What three things would you improve about our show if you had a magic wand? All those, you know, your standard uh CX questions you should be asking of your listeners on a regular basis. One of the things that I do in my my almost timely newsletter is I have a survey, and that survey runs every every issue. And there's it's just a one-click, you know.

Did you like it? Thumbs up, thumbs down. Did you like this issue or not? That is that feedback is vital to making your your podcast successful. And finally, no substitute for the for the truth.

Your show's got to be worth listening to. It's got to sound good enough that people it you know it doesn't hurt people's ears. It doesn't have to, you know, you need a million dollars of gear to do it. Just has to you know not be offensive. And then you've got to have content that people want, that people desperately want, that people would pay for.

One of the simplest and best questions that you can ask an audience is let them know you're probably not going to do it anytime soon. But if you were to pay for my show, how much would you pay for it? You know, a dollar a month, ten dollars a month, a hundred dollars a month, nothing. If the vast majority of your audience says nothing, your show's not that good. There's there's there's no uh no sugarcoating that the show's just not that good.

If no one would be willing to pay for it, if someone would be paying to be willing to pay even a dollar for listening to your show, then you know that you're you're sharing value. Finally, let's talk about the presentation. So, a couple things have really changed since since way back then. Uh, I do still talk reasonably fast, but um, my friend and informal, infrequent speaking coach, Tams and Webster, who has listened to my talks, has said I just go full, I used to just go full blast all the time. Now I try to vary the cadence to give people time to keep up, to take a pause, and and let people's brains catch up.

And that's really important. It's okay if you speak fast as long as you don't speak fast continuously. It's okay to speak fast as long as you don't speak fast continuously. If you give people a chance to take a break mentally in your speech cadence, uh that helps. Another thing that um I I don't do nearly as much.

There's I used to pace a lot on stage, and I found that did two things. One, it distracted me, and two, it distracted the audience. So now what I do most of the time, and you can see this in a lot of my videos, is I I pick my spot and I stay there. That has the side benefit of making it very easy to film myself. I can set up a camera in the back of the room and I know where on stage I'm going to be.

I will give myself maybe like two feet uh to which to be in. So I can turn and face different parts of the audience, but I will typically just root myself in one spot. Then I can reference things on the stage and know where they are, and then later on when I'm processing the video, it's easier. So you will see in some of the talks I give now, I will root myself in one spot and I will lean toward, I will refer to even to this projections and screens on both sides of the zoom, I will refer to one side specifically. And what I'm doing is I know I have the camera position, so I am stage usually stage uh left in the camera, and there's a big open space on my right hand side, the the audience left, and that's where I'll put an overlay of the slides that'll add post-production later because the slides never come look come out looking good in a video.

So I'll shoot the video of just myself, and I will know that if I am going to stand in one spot and look to the right, when I edit it in the video later on, it's going to look much better. So that's why I don't pace anymore. Because if I was pacing, I couldn't do that. I I you know I've been trying to move the video all the time. Where's the slides going to go?

And this, this, this time. That doesn't work. Um I also changed presentation structure quite a bit. Um, there are uh uh any number of formats you can use. Um there's uh steal the show, that that format from Michael Port.

There's find the red thread from Tams and Webster. And then what I use most is the the Trust Insights framework, the 5P framework, purpose, people, process, platform, and performance. Why are we talking about this thing? What is this thing? People process platform and how do we know it's working, right?

Performance. That for a talk structure seems to work pretty well for me. It's sort of why, what, how, as opposed to just having just a lot of information that doesn't have a coherent narrative. So this whole talk was podcast marketing, and it gave a lot of very tactical things for people to try, but it doesn't have a framework that says, here's the end goal. The end goal is to get more listeners to your podcast.

From that end goal, why do we want that? Because you want more business, you want a personal brand, whatever, and then you can dig into the peaceable process platform, but you've got to have that structure. One of the things that you can do and you should do with any talk that you're going to give or plan to give is find a framework that makes sense to you. Write it out. You know, write a couple of paragraphs about what the framework is, why, what, how, uh, six W's, uh red thread, you name it.

Feed it to the generative AI system of your choice, Gemini, chat, GPT, whatever, and say, here's my talk outline or slides or whatever. Here's the framework I want to use. How well does my talk align with this framework? And how would you reorder it to make it more uh coherent to find that that flow and pat and and logic and rhythm within the talk? Again, that's something that not a lot of folks do, and it's a way to very easily make any presentation, whether it's inside a company, whether it's in a podcamp, whether it's on a TED talk, it can make it so much better.

There's other frameworks, you know, there's talk like TED and all the those other sort of TED Talk uh frameworks. Again, you can take those outlines or those concepts, write a prompt and generative AI, and then have AI rearrange your talk to make it more coherent, to make it flow better, to make it easier for people to understand, and critically to tell you what to leave out. Say, like, yeah, this isn't relevant. If this is your purpose, then you the this slide's gotta go. So I've changed a lot in the 17 years since this old talk of me.

Um, and hopefully for the better. And podcast marketing has changed a lot, and yet it hasn't, right? The timeless principles of having content people want, making it easy to share, making it easy to find, that hasn't changed. And I think that's the final most important lesson here the basics don't change, right? The basics of marketing don't change, the technologies do, the how we do it, the execution that changes all the time.

But the strategy doesn't really change. And so if you find that you're not getting good results, start with your strategy, make sure your strategy is sound, then look at the tactics, what are you doing, and then look at how you're doing those things. And somewhere along the way, you're gonna find the disconnect about the things that are working, the things that are not. I hope that you've enjoyed this reaction video series. Um, it has been a lot of fun to to go through, and uh it's been a blast in the past.

So thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you next time. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.