How To Create Bingeworthy Content With Tracy Hazzard From The Recognized Authority Podcast With Alastair Mcdermott

One of the most effective ways to build business authority these days is through podcasting. Creating bingeworthy content is easier said than done, and that takes consistency and the right knowledge of online algorithms. Tracy Hazzard joins Alastair Mcdermott of The Recognized Authority Podcast to share tips and strategies for producing an impactful show that solidifies your market reputation. She discusses how combining education and entertainment leads to engaging conversations. Tracy also breaks down SEO strategies that make a podcast easily searchable online to garner higher traffic and listenership.

Listen to the podcast here

I want to take a moment to read out a review that I got on Apple Podcasts. “Alastair is a great guy who is eager to help. This comes through loud and clear on his show. He is one of those rare interviewers who asks the questions you would ask if you were there. I especially enjoyed the episode with Norbert Schwarz about quality audio. Mind. Blown.” That is from ENJunkie on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for that. It’s nice of you to say that. I try and ask the questions that I think my audience will want to hear, and I am eager to help people.

The audio quality stuff with Professor Schwarz is insane. Thank you so much for leaving that review. For anybody else out there, you can leave a review in your favorite podcast app. It is encouraging for me to read those reviews, and also it does help to rank the show up the charts and get more audience. I would appreciate it if you could take a moment to do that. Thanks, and on with the show.

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In this episode, my guest is Tracy Hazzard. She is a seasoned media expert. She has over 2,600 interviews and articles in Authority Magazine, BuzzFeed, and Inc Magazine columns. She has eight shows, including The Binge Factor, which I’m going to talk about. Ironically, I was binging on The Binge Factor, Feed Your Brand, and a whole bunch of other ones. Tracy is big into podcasting. I’m delighted to nerd out about a little bit.

I want to put some context on the discussion about podcasting because I’m sure that somebody is saying, “He’s got another podcaster on.” One of the reasons why I think podcasting is so important is because of what we are doing when we are building authority. One of the important things that we do is putting content and putting our views out into the world.

That content is important, and podcasting is one of those crucial vehicles or channels that you can use, particularly because podcasting builds so much trust. I think it’s important to consider doing if you are trying to build your authority to start a podcast. With that context in mind, Tracy, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. The Recognized Authority, how could I not want to go on a show named that?

I have been binging on The Binge Factor, and I want to talk to you about that because that’s a cool show name. It’s a great concept. Can we just talk about what The Binge Factor is in the context of this type of content?

Early on, when I started my very first show, which was a geeky little show on 3D printing called WTFFF!? which stands for Fused Filament Fabrication. It’s a geeky engineering-focused and design-focused show. It is totally weird. We started that a few years ago. When we started it, we would get people who would message us. They would send us a tweet or email us and would say, “I have been binging on your show all weekend. I got to number 50, and I have a question.” We always ask them if they have questions to reach out to.

The first time it happened, I thought, “You are binging on me. What does that mean?” After a little while, I thought, “Someone’s listening to me for 50 episodes in a row. Are you sure you want to do that?” I couldn’t listen to myself for 50 episodes in a row but that’s what they were doing. They were massively trying to learn something, so they were cramming it in.

That’s what we do. When we want to gather knowledge, we binge on something. My dad does this all the time. We will go to the bookstore, and he will buy 3 to 4 books on the subject matter so that you are covering the gamut of what you want to learn and what you want to absorb. Now, we have such easy consumption. Podcasting is so easy to consume. We can listen to it at double speed. We can skip through fast. We can skip around and choose episodes that interest us. Go back and then go to the others.

Bingeworthy Content: Podcasts are so easy to consume. You can listen to it on double speed or skip around and choose specific episodes that interest you.

It’s so easy now with the way we consume media, and podcasting is one of the simplest ways to consume that. That’s how the term bingeability came about. What we realized is that the most critical factor was that when someone binges on your content, they come back and ask for more. They buy from you. They ask questions, and they participate. The bingers on your show, the people who are binge-listening to you, are the ones that are going to become your best customers.

Bingeing on shows has become a thing since the streaming services started to open. Netflix released a season of a show for the first time. Whatever that first show that they did where they released an entire season, and then they realized, “Somebody has watched this in a weekend or a single night,” if they are big fans of a show. It changed the way that some people consume or it showed people that this is the way that people want to consume some of this. Noticing and doing that is interesting. How many episodes of The Binge Factor do you have now?

I have over 120 of The Binge Factor but The Binge Factor was a spinoff from Feed Your Brand. We still have to Feed Your Brand in its own entirety. It’s over 150 episodes on its own. Out of the two shows, we are probably getting pretty close to 300 episodes. The Binge Factor was my interviews with successful podcasters identifying their binge factor. As I started to do that, we realized it should be its own entity, so people could consume it separately from the tips because we were noticing in our stats a skip around.

We would see that the tactics sometimes had double the amount of listens that the interviews did, which makes sense. If you are trying to learn something really quick, if you are trying to get skill up on your podcast, figure out how to podcast or whatever that is, you are going to consume the tactics in a much more concerted way. The interviews are, “It’s nice to know, I would like to hear what other people are doing,” but it’s a little bit more casual. I would say you maybe don’t binge on all of them. You binge on some, and then you listen regularly. What we end up having are very regular listeners over there. It’s steady growth.

I want to ask you about the different types of content and the tactics versus interviews, solos, and things like that but let me ask you first. What are the actual binge factors that you are seeing over and over again? I’m sure you have some number of them that keep repeating. Can you go through some of those? It would be interesting to talk about how those apply to podcasts, and maybe they might even apply to other types of content as well.

I feel pretty lucky that every time I do an interview, there’s always something unique I can say about them because everyone has such a different show. There is always a twist on something but you are right. There are ongoing patterns and themes. One of the most consistent ones that are the most valuable is when somebody is a deep expert in a particular area, and they curate well within that area. They are choosing guests or their topics well or the way they ask their questions narrows in on what’s the most valuable takeaways that you could be doing. That’s their significant binge factor, and that’s a very clear pattern to a successful show. That’s probably the biggest one that I see again and again.

The next one might be something more along the lines of someone who is very entertaining in the way that they do something. Maybe they have a little comedic flare to them, or sometimes when I get cohost, the interplay between the two is fun and keeps you engaged. Those are probably the two most significant ones that I see again and again.

I’ve noticed that in my favorite podcast going back actually to podcasts that I listened to in 2005. They were podcasts that had cohosts who had fun with each other and had good banter.

Cohosting is hard, so when it’s done right, you will love it. It’s very interactive.

One of those podcasts had an hour-long podcast episode, and they had 15 or 20 minutes of banter that wasn’t directly related to the topic all the time. Interestingly, they managed to pull that off. I think that was what first got me interested in podcasting when I was listening to that show, which by the way, was called Boagworld. They ran it for about fifteen years but they don’t run it anymore.

My very first show was with my partner and husband, Tom. We were cohosts there, and there was this nice interplay between a male and a female voice. The voices didn’t overlap, which is helpful. If your voice and your cohost’s voice sound too similar, it’s not a good thing because people get confused. The clarity of having the gender difference helped. My role was to play the role of the novice, the one who needed to make Tom explain the techie details. I’m like, “No.” There are a lot of people out there who don’t understand that. Go ahead and explain it.

Bingeworthy Content: There is a nice interplay between a male and female voice in a podcast. They don’t overlap and are not too similar.

Even though I didn’t have enough knowledge to be dangerous in 3D printing, my job was to make sure we explained it in plain English to everybody. That worked at the end of the day. My role in that was to prep and asked great questions of the guests because that’s one thing I’m great at interviewing and asking good questions. Tom would interject and can go for like, “Let’s expand on the techie details here.”

He would geek out, and I would keep things on track. It was fun, and people liked that. Every so often, we would disagree, and when we disagreed, we got so many comments. People would side with one of us. It was fun. If you knew us, you would know that any kind of disagreement was never anything heated between us. It’s truly a real gentleman and lady debate.

It’s hard when you are interviewing experts, particularly if they have been experts and seen as experts and authorities for a long time. It’s very hard for an interviewer to disagree with them, particularly when they’ve written multiple books and they’ve got all of that kind of thing. There have been a couple of times where I’ve plain disagreed. I’ve tried to bring that in, and there have been times when I didn’t because it wasn’t possible.

We could always do that in our close together because we would say, “I hear that, and I see how that could work for some people but it doesn’t work for us, and here’s why.” We would go into it or Tom would take that person’s position, and I would take the opposite. It helped us to be able to explore without being rude about it.

The entertainment factor that you are talking about here is important. This is something I mentioned before when I was talking to somebody about YouTube. I did a training course on YouTube with Tim Schmoyer’s company but what struck me was that I needed to make my educational content more entertaining. That was the biggest takeaway I took from the whole thing. They got nerdy and into the details, stats, retention graphs, and all that.

Especially in the video, if you don’t capture them every minute, people drop off. That’s the stat, and it’s crazy. At least in podcasting, we get a little more leeway. They start up a show and listen through more.

There is a bit more, and it’s a different type of consumption in part because people are usually doing something else while listening to podcasts. They are driving, at the gym, doing chores in the house, gardening or going for a walk. We get a bit more time before they hit next or pull up their podcast app and start searching.

There’s this great thing. Have you ever seen The Voice?

I have seen that, yeah.

The Voice is like the blind audition singing version. The judges can’t see who’s singing. That’s the same thing with podcasting. Our listeners don’t have a visual of us. They haven’t made any of those preconceived notions of what we are like, who we are, and whether or not they will listen to us. The visual interferes with our ability to take in content. When we don’t use the visual, and we are only using the audio version, their brain is giving us more grace and that time to judge it to make those decisions. That’s working for us as well because our eyes make our mind judge too quickly on people. That’s one of the best things about podcasting.

Early on, we didn’t do video at all in our first show for about the first two years. We would do little video clips of the machines running or prints that we made but we didn’t do it of us. The very first time, we used livestream. We live stream out, and some longtime listener types in the chat and writes in the comments, “I didn’t know you looked like that.” I said, “Look like what? What did you think we looked like?”

He said, “Tracy, I thought you were taller, and Tom, I thought you had more hair.” I said, “I’m very sure that I think I’m taller than I am and believe he has more hair. We are all good in our perceptions,” but it was such an a-ha that this longtime listener never looked at a photo of us. It’s all over our website. They could have but they never did. They were only listening and had no idea we looked like that.

It is interesting. I’m still fascinated by the fact that somehow people listening to audio builds more trust than watching the video, and I don’t get it because you’ve got more signals with video. I still don’t understand why that works but it seems to be the case.

Malcolm Gladwell had started his podcast. He had only started it and hadn’t written a book. He was on Stephen Colbert’s Late Night Show and said, “You think with your eyes but you feel with your ears,” and that’s the difference. We are going straight into a feeling instead of thinking. We are not overthinking things when we are listening to someone, and that’s how trust builds faster because emotion and trust are connected.

That’s ultimately why people are reading this and why I’m doing this because we want to build trust because that trust is what we are substituting for the personal referral. We are trying to scale past that or avoid having to do in-person networking and that kind of thing. We are creating content for it to create trust. That’s the reason we do this. That’s ultimately why content marketing and authority marketing works is because we are creating trust. That’s a crucial point. This is fascinating.

There’s this thing of what we consider to be showing care for our audience. If we show care for others, benevolence is the term that you would use but care. If we show care first and we are putting our audience first, we are putting what’s in your best interest first. If I do that, then I build trust faster than me saying, “I’m an expert. I’m an authority. I don’t have to say that if I’m out there putting out things that are useful to you.”

I think that you specifically can’t say that you are an authority. You can’t sell them. It has to be somebody else.

Somebody else should say it.

That’s where the recognized part comes from. Other people are recognizing that you are an authority. It’s not that you are recognizing that you are. In fact, there are lots of people who are experts at something but don’t have any external visibility. The difference between the expert and the authority is that the expert who doesn’t have that external visibility is an expert but is not an authority. If somebody else recognizes them, they might even be known to a handful of people but if those are the right handful of people with double PhDs in a topic, then it doesn’t have to be a lot of people but it has to be external to yourself.

That’s getting a bit into the weeds on that stuff. Let’s talk about curation because you mentioned that people must be deep experts. What you said was that you’ve noticed this as a binge factor. People who have deep expertise in a field and that they curate well. Can you talk about what that is when you say they curate well?

It means that they know what’s important. They are going in for the most important thing that they can learn from something. Part of it is if you are curious, and I love curiosity. If someone is curious, they can make a great podcast or do great content because if you are asking a question, you are probably in the same position as your audience. You might be a year or two years ahead of them but you are still asking the questions that they are going to get to at some point, so you understand that.

When you are asking questions yourself, and you are saying, “What do I think of this, and who’s an expert in it that I could ask?” Now, you are talking about what curation is like. “Who can I bring on, so I can learn some more and get an answer to this question for myself and my audience?” When you look at it from that perspective, you are out there seeking answers, and that’s really what people are doing. When we are searching on Google or when we are out there searching for a podcast or content that is teaching us something.

Even if we want it to be edutaining, we still want to learn something in the process. We want to have takeaways. When we are in that mode, we are always out there asking a question. We may not have it formulated as a question but it is a pondering of something. If you are doing that in your curation process in how you select guests and how you select topics, then you are right on. You are right in that place that your audience wants without you having to be so conscious of it. Sometimes we get the professors, and the professors are not necessarily experts. They are great at teaching and simplifying things down to A, B, C, and D. You do it in this order.

That’s great for a course but that’s not great for a podcast because a podcast is meandering. I might go down a rabbit hole of something and want to dive deeper into some other area. If you are curating in that mode of yourself, you actually will be doing this because curiosity leads you down the paths you need to go, and then you get back on track and go back down.

When you do something that’s completely ordered, and our brains go, “I’m learning something,” it feels excruciating. It feels like I’m in school, and we don’t want that. That’s when the entertainment part is missing. That’s why curiosity and curation do better. It’s okay that it’s out of order. That’s what your book is for later. If they want it in order and they want to learn, that’s why you have a book and a course that you also sell.

I know that in the world of copywriting and copywriting for sales pages and things like that for online, I know that the word learn is a bad word. You never want to tell somebody that you are going to teach them something or that they are going to learn something. It’s always going to be that they are going to uncover or discover.

Also, gain knowledge.

Discovering something doesn’t sound like you have to put a lot of effort in, whereas, learning sounds like you are going back to school. There are subconscious associations that these words trigger but that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that because I do try and make these episodes as actionable as I can. I like to get straight into the details and almost make it a masterclass.

That was how somebody described it, which was an interesting way. They said the podcast episode was like a masterclass in whatever the subject was, and I liked that. I also get what you mean about this meandering aspect because that’s interesting. I’ve got an A4 sheet full of notes, and I’ve got three-quarters full already from things that you’ve said so far.

This is the thing. Your audience would be mad at you if you didn’t ask the follow-up question because you followed your rules. You are going in order or you are trying to do that. If you didn’t ask that good follow-up question, your audience would lose interest in the way that you ask questions and would find me somewhere and find me telling the answer to that question they wanted to be answered. You would lose them in the process. That’s why we want to stay in that place of our own curiosity and go with it.

Bingeworthy Content: The audience will lose interest if you don’t ask good follow-up questions. They will look for the guest somewhere else to hear how they answer the same questions.

What I was also thinking there is that I’ve got about six different things I could ask you next. That’s the other thing.

We then end up with a longer show.

This is one of the reasons why I like the longer format show because I can ask more of those questions. Let’s go back to something we were talking about earlier. You were talking about how you had tactics and interviews separate, and people would consume them separately. You saw higher numbers on the tactics. Can you describe what was going on there and what you were learning from it?

I have a company called Podetize. It is the largest post-production house of podcasting in the US. We have over a thousand shows on our platform. Our own clients use our podcast as a knowledge base. They share it with other people who ask them, “How do you do this for podcasting?” They are like, “Tracy and Tom have an episode on this. You should go listen to Feed Your Brand.” That’s how it’s gotten shared and how it gets out there but the reality is that it’s the blog that is what works for us. The blog is what gets people into the episode and into the podcast, and it comes in that direction.

When you think you have an issue and don’t know how to handle something in podcasting. Let’s say you are having a syndication problem with Apple. Apple is about to have an outage, and not a lot of people know about it. The last time they had an outage, shows disappeared. What do you do? What you are going to start doing is that you are going to Google that. The chances are good. Apple hasn’t caught up with it.

They are dealing with the problem of the outage that they haven’t caught up with and don’t have an answer for that. Google is going to serve you up somebody else who has an answer on, “What happens when your show disappears off of Apple? What do I do when my show’s gone on Apple Podcasts?” However you type it in, you will end up with our episode showing up as one of the top three. Usually, our episodes show up in the top ten on any kind of topic.

When that happens, you are going to say, “That’s not put out in an ad. That seems like a trustworthy source. It came from a podcast that’s all about podcasting. Let me check this out.” You click on the blog. You listen, watch the video, learn what you need to do, and fix your problem. You are thinking to yourself, “What else don’t I know about podcasting?” Now, you subscribe and become a listener, and you are into it.

That’s how we get into people. We aren’t pitching our podcast out there. It happens. It’s getting referred, and it’s out there. I’m on shows like yours, and people will say, “I will subscribe to Feed Your Brand. That’s exactly what I was looking for,” but it’s less likely that that’s going to happen than it is that somebody is going to have a problem and I’ve got a solution for them. That’s the blog issue. Unfortunately, what we say is not documented unless we document it.

You are bringing the blog into it there, and you are talking about the tactics. Does that mean that those episodes and those blog posts are very much focused on a single problem and that it’s designed to help answer that question to rank for search engine optimization? Is that the strategy there?

The strategy is that, yes. It’s taking what wonderful things you’ve said on your show, and whether it’s an interview or a tactic-based show doesn’t matter. What I can tell you is that overdoing this for a thousand clients, the real power, the reason they don’t quit their shows, the reason that they are getting clients, traffic, and monetization in the non-ad style of monetization is because of the blog post.

If I told them I was a blogging company, they would be like, “Nope. I’m not going there. Blogs are old,” but we are a podcasting company that adds blogs, social media, graphics, and video. We add the whole gamut of repurposing and redistributing content from one single source of the recording, and that’s what works. The fact that it has multimedia types and that this is finally reduced to a blog.

We don’t call it a blog. We call it a verbal SEO article. We would call them a power page in the old days of blogging. If anyone is out there from the SEO days, we call them power pages and power pages are anything with 5,000 words or more. Your show that’s an hour-long is going to be at least 6,000 to 10,000 words. You have a superpower page instantly, no matter what.

There are questions, and there are answers. If you make your questions a heading or one of those title sides, subheading 3 or 2, and then put what I say right below that as the answer to the question without saying, “Tracy: or Alastair:” You are not doing that. There are no timestamps. It’s not a true transcript but making it more of a blog style.

What you are going to end up with is this power page that Google is going to recognize as what they believe a blog should be but because it’s in the spoken word. It’s because everything is said and phrased as I said it, Google recognizes that as not bot. There are a lot of articles that Google questions and says, “Is this a bot that wrote that? Is this an AI that wrote that?” With our speech pattern, that never happens. Not only is it getting lots of power points because it’s such a long blog. Google loves more content.

The bots over there love more, and the pattern of that voice works. Those things are the things that people mess up. They think, “I will take my podcast. I will turn it into show notes or transcripts and make it easy for someone to find what they are looking for by putting time codes and doing all of that.” I say, “Don’t do it because it’s not sticky.” I want them to go searching through that blog. I want them to take five minutes because the more time they spend on that page, the more bonus points with Google I get too.

We always put our bullet points and the things at the bottom of it, so they at least have to scroll through the whole page to get to it. Now, my clients and my frequent listeners know that they are going to scroll to the bottom but they still got to scroll through 10,000 words to find it. All of those points aren’t going to add up. We add images and break up text because it’s too much. You got to make it look good too but it’s there for the bot, not for humans. They will stop at the podcast and listen.

Do you do that for all of your shows?

For every single show that we manage and produce on our DIY system, we teach them how to do it but they have to do it themselves.

I’m looking at a random selected post that I picked from Feed Your Brand just to see because the way that I do the episode pages, I have that transcript with timestamps, and I’ve got the show notes. I think of that as the show notes page or the episode page. If you click on the link for this episode, it will have links to Tracy’s bio. Any books we mentioned will be linked there as well, and of those things but Tracy’s episode is different. You’ve formatted it. You’ve taken it out and turned it into a blog post. Do you do much editing on that or do you only take the transcripts?

No, we really do. The first level is an AI that does it. That’s the first round that we do it, and then we have three human beings who touch it after that. Someone who will edit it so that if I say the words twice or I repeat a phrase, it will delete the repeats because you don’t want to have that. That repetition is too much. It will take that out. The third pass will be formatting it in the style that looks like it should go for the blog, and the final pass, as we put it and insert it into the blog, someone is listening to the podcast and making sure that they take out anything that was edited out. If it was edited out by the audio editors, they are moving it at that time.

There’s a lot of work there. This isn’t straightforward.

It is probably the lion’s share of what we do but it’s also power. You have 100 episodes that you’ve already produced. You can go back and put blogs in for all a hundred of those episodes at any time. You can do 1 a week, 1 a day or at whatever pace you want. The faster you do it, the more power you get for your website faster but you can pace yourself out and be doing 1 of your new episodes and 1 of your old episodes every week and be filling your website and ranking higher and higher on Google organic keywords and organic traffic.

You are going to get people who are extremely interested in what you have and what you are offering. They are going to find you. Our shows increase in the volume of listeners because of it. Everything is a direct relationship to that blog going into place. We see it because we renovate shows all the time. People who have 100 episodes or more come to us, and we do it. When we do it, we see an immediate result 30 days later.

I’m looking through it. I picked a couple to see how it’s done. Is that a heavy edit or is it only a light edit to remove those repeated words which are common and all that stuff?

It’s a light edit unless we had sections edited out. You could wait. We don’t wait because we try to produce our podcasts in 7 to 10 days for all of our clients, from video to audio, to blog to social share and graphics, so that they have everything ready to publish in ten days. It’s because of that we overlap the audio editing and the start of the transcript because it does take the longest to get that blog produced. That’s why our final pass is to cut out any edited sections, and we have a process. Our audio editing team is luring them to large sections, so they will see it and only have to delete it.

What you are doing is you are cranking up the SEO aspect of not just the audience but the traffic growth and getting new people to see the content.

You talk about that, and we are making visible what was said, and that’s the big issue. Now our world is controlled by a bunch of bots. There’s search engine optimization on Google. We all are very familiar with that term but there is search engine optimization on Apple, Spotify, and all of the podcast players. That’s a search engine in and of itself, and it can only search on what’s listed as the description of the episode, the description of your show, and the titles. It’s all it has to go on and the name of your show and your name but that’s it.

Bingeworthy Content: The only things that can be searched online in a podcast are the description, title, show name, and host name.

Unless they know you or they type in what is in your title, chances are most people didn’t put much of a description in for anything, their show description or their episode description and because of that, they are not as searchable. For those topics that you are talking about, sometimes people put cute titles. You think podcasting is entertainment but the search engine doesn’t work like that. Entertainment is good, and it’s catchy if you’ve got a human being looking at it but if it’s not even getting in front of that human being, catchiness isn’t helping.

I had a friend who had a podcast, and she had 40 episodes. They were all interviews, and all of her episodes were called A Conversation With, and then the guest name, and that was it. I showed her what the preview looked like in my podcast app, and it was just, “A conversation with,” and then dot, dot, dot.

You never saw the guest’s name.

She was like, “I’ve got to change this.”

We recommend to everyone that when you are titling, don’t use episode numbers. Apple recommends that you don’t do it anymore. People still do but don’t use episode numbers, and we always put the guest name at the very end so you don’t see it. If somebody were to type my name into a search engine like Apple and they were looking for shows with me, your show is going to show up because it is in the title but they aren’t looking for that initially. They don’t know me. What did we talk about? We always put the topic first, and if you want to have a cute, catchy title, we do cute, catchy two words, colon, and then the hefty description that tells you what that means.

That is the more SEO, which is usually how to do something. That’s what people are searching for. They are searching for the question that they want to be answered.

In other words, conversation. You are only using that there. People don’t type that in because if we are listening to podcasts, chances are good. We are listening on our phones. We will type in a convo or chat. If we were to type in that phrase, we would never use a long word like conversation or talk. We would use those phrases. You also have to simplify your words and not be so much of a professor about it. Using a good vocabulary is not helpful in search engine optimization.

One other thing that you mentioned is that you said interview show or tactic-based show, which is interesting.

The topic is a lot more common. People say it but I like it as a tactic. I want them to take away, use it and tell other people they used it.

When are you saying that, is that a solo or monologue-style show? Is that what you are talking about?

It can be. It doesn’t have to be. It could be you and someone else who is solving a problem together. A lot of times, Tom and I will do a show together where we are giving 2 sides to something like 2 ways to do it. That can work as well. It’s focused on a topic or doing something. It’s a how-to. I call it tactics because when I got my column for Inc Magazine, they reached out to me because I had the podcast in 3D printing, and I gave a speech in LA. I got the speech because I gave a podcast, and the speech was about pricing 3D prints, pricing services, pricing your models, and things like that. It was super tactical at the end of the day. It was nitty-gritty.

The editor of this new section of the magazine, the Innovation Section, saw me and reached out to me. She said, “This is what I want. I want nitty-gritty. I want people to read our magazine and not have it be esoteric commentary philosophy on design and on, 3D printing, and disruptive technology. I want it to be about how you use this in your business and do something with it. I want it to be tactical.” That got me started in saying, “If Inc Magazine wants something like this, then this is what people are seeking,” because they know they are going to make a lot more add dollars off of it. They know there’s money to be made there in solving the tactical problems and getting into the nitty-gritty. That’s why I’ve always dived deep into that area.

This is where I use my podcast as a way to get free coaching. One of the best things about having a podcast is being able to ask all these experts for their advice on specific things. You have a show. I would be interested to see what your answer is on this one. This show is about building authority. When I bring on a guest, I’m usually showcasing them as an authority. We can try and make it as conversational as possible but ultimately, they are on the pedestal. That’s the way that a conversational interview podcast goes.

With a cohosted show, usually, the two cohosts are both building their authority. You will see that in the 2Bobs show, David C Baker and Blair Enns are both experts but don’t have the networking impact of having a new guest every time. They already have a huge network anyway. I’m interested in adding some solo segments to my show or spinning that off as a separate show and having a solo separate show. I’m wondering what you would think about that. Should I incorporate solo episodes into this podcast or should I start a new separate podcast for that?

We invented our Podetize system. Our hosting platform has multi-feeds for this purpose because you might need to spin it off. You might want to create a feed that’s a 101 series. You might want to create a feed as I did. Take out of Feed Your Brand and shift into The Binge Factor and make it its own thing. We made it simple and easy for people to create multi-feeds and not have to go and register.

You still have to register and syndicate your show but you don’t have to register and get a brand new account. You can manage it all in one. You can look at all your shows and see all your stats together. That’s one of the reasons we did a tactic to be able to solve this problem because we don’t know if it’s going to be a good idea.

What I like to do is get started because I don’t want to start a show with only one episode. It’s a lot of work to market a new show. What I like to do is start the idea for a new show, and I might call it a segment. I started calling it The Binge Factor before it was The Binge Factor. I might start it as a segment and do it as its own separate show. You can do it as a bonus episode each week for a month or two months until you get eight episodes under your belt.

Now you say, “Let me see how well listened those shows were and let me make a few twists and a few adjustments to them. Now let me spin them off into their own thing.” How we do it is that we say, “Now, it’s worth spinning off and making it its own show because now you can consume it separately.” One of the ideas for you and because I’ve listened to your show and we’ve already had an interview.

You have been interviewed on The Binge Factor for you personally. I recommend a short format show so that it’s under ten minutes. Do it on video. Maybe do it live on LinkedIn or something like that. You are utilizing it as a promotion piece and then utilizing that as eventually a spinoff show as well but use it within your show. See how it does. It might drive more traffic to the regular show by keeping it within. Some people find that happens and that spinning it off doesn’t do as well for you.

That’s the case of, let’s say, you had a guest on, and then your topic that you chose to cover was a deep dive on something they said but didn’t go into, and it’s like, “How do I do this? Why is this important? What can I accomplish with this? What’s the benefit to me?” That could be the show that you do as the secondary. Your shows are tied together, the interview and the topic, and then they go hand in hand. You wouldn’t want to separate something like that. You would want to keep them together but having the different formats, one 1-hour and one 10-minute, makes a lot of sense to people.

They will easily see the difference. They can go binge-listen to all ten-minute ones. They can skip through it. They will see that. That’s a tactic and a way that I would do that for you in particular but for others out there as well. Start it within your regular show because it’s way more work to start a new show and get a new audience. The only time that I recommend spinning it off is if you have a different audience. If that was a totally different audience, then you want to spin it off. You want to get into a new place.

That’s part of why we did that with Feed Your Brand. Not only did we notice that the interviews weren’t getting quite the same number of plays. When you look at the stats from the stats perspective, you don’t want it to muddy the stats for us. We also noticed that experienced podcasters listen to the success stories and new podcasters listen to the tactics.

We can differentiate who we are talking to by doing that. When I go out and give a speech to a podcasting audience, I give a speech and tell them about The Binger Factor. When I give an audience to an entrepreneurial group who’s not that familiar with podcasting, I give them Feed Your Brand as the option. It also gave me a way to segment how I market.

I love the distinction because some people might think of that as the same audience, and it might be.

It’s still niching down, and I know you love that.

I have this other podcast called The Specialization Podcast, which is a static podcast. It’s got nine episodes now. I don’t intend to update it very often but it’s an audio course. Is there anything that you would recommend that I do with something like that?

The multi-feed strategy that’s one of the reasons. If you wanted to have a course that you put behind a pay gate or if you wanted to have it on a special landing page by creating a separate feed and using those episodes in it, you can create a player that’s only for that. You can see how many people are consuming that. You can see the stats. You can understand what that’s happening. In our podcast portal, where we do our hosting, you can see your podcast and website stats side by side.

By separating them out, you could use the landing page as your website and be able to watch how that’s doing individually from your overall website, which you might be watching for The Recognized Authority instead. You would be able to see those stat differences all in one place and be able to watch its growth and see what’s happening as you move forward. We also have players. I love our brand-new player that hasn’t even come out. Only our clients have seen it yet, and we have tabs.

My 3D Print show has 650 episodes. That is way too much to consume and scroll through and pick episodes. We can put out a favorites group that is in the top 10 or 20 episodes. We can put out volumes 1, 2, and 3 so they know what order to go in. You can do a special series as you have with the specialization. You can create them, and then there are tabs on your main player. Those are some tactics that we like to use. Everything that we’ve developed and we do is at getting a higher level of authority.

The real reason authority works are because they can find you. They are finding what they are looking for. If they have to search too hard because you are a deep authority. In my bio, you read 2,600 articles. There is no way you are going to be able to go through that and figure out what’s worth consuming. You are going to go, “I give up. It’s overwhelming. I will type in my topic, and let’s hope that the search engine works and pops up what I want.” That might be the extent of what you do. It’s too much information. When we can niche it down and get it specific for the right audience, we solve their problems, and then they want to go deep dive in, consume more, and they will go through the rest of the stuff.

Bingeworthy Content: Authority only works if people can find you online. If they have to search too hard, you will have little chance of reaching your audience.

I guess that’s the same reason why YouTube has playlists and things like that so that people can go in on a topic. That makes me think about playlists for my podcast because you talked about curation, and the other way of curating is taking your own content and maybe categorizing the podcast episodes in some way. For example, I have a lot of podcasts by specialization. I’ve got a lot of podcasts about podcasting, for example. I’ve got some about books, and I could categorize those down and make those easier to find. That’s interesting. That might be something I will look at but I’m very conscious of time. Thank you for sticking with me over the hour.

No problem.

It’s not an hour into the episode. It’s that we are past the top of the hour on our clocks here. You know that I have some questions I like to ask, so let me ask you. What is the number one tip that you would give somebody who wants to build their authority?

The thing about authority is that it’s not an overnight thing. You have to be in it for the long haul. You need to look at this as a continual building. I used to do a stage presentation where I would show authority. I’m 5’2”. I’m not very tall. At 5’2”, a pair of platform heals does a lot. When you are starting, it’s okay to use platform heels, then get yourself a little mini stage and then get a bigger, broader stage. You are constantly building up that authority over time. Whatever you are going to go in to do, look at it as a long-term, long tail. The thing that you are going to do that’s going to continue to build on.

That’s why I love what we do in podcasting so much because it’s building all this long-tail content for us but we are also building out our domain authority, our web authority, and our Google authority. All of those things are building at once. Our social media is filled with all kinds of content topics. My team has too many choices. They are always complaining about they could choose 10 clips instead of 2, and I’m making them choose two because it’s too much information otherwise.

They have plenty to fill our social media. That’s constantly being filled. That is giving us authority and social proof over there as well. The connection to all the guests weekly and social proof of me with somebody else side by side talking about a subject matter that is of deep interest to my business and to the authority I’m building. All of those things compound over time and what you will find is that compounding adds to an acceleration later.

You got to give it time to put its framework in. When I started one of my shows, I was asked to do a blockchain and cryptocurrency show, and I decided, “I will do a show with it as well because they are asking me to do all these interviews and write all these articles. I want to record the interview.” We called it The New Trust Economy. We launched The New Trust Economy in January 2018, and in February of 2018, I was asked to be on the Larry King Show as an expert in blockchain, of which I had only done about 25 interviews in that area and written articles about them.

I was by no means an expert, but I wasn’t going to tell the producer who was asking me to be on the show. She specifically said, “We want you because very few women comment on this. We want a woman, and we want you to do what you do best, which is make it in plain English because Larry doesn’t like things that are all techie and all talk about the industry. He wants it reduced down to stuff the audience can understand, and you seem to do that well.”

That’s why they were asking me on the show to explain things. I was like, “I can do that and that.” I got that and looked at the numbers on our show. I don’t think we had 1,000 listeners in 1 month because we had only launched it, and we hadn’t put any marketing effort into the podcast yet. It was coming but we launched it a little sooner than we had the marketing plan for it.

The compound effect is 100%, and that’s something that you see in the world of SEO. You write one article but it doesn’t make a difference. You write 1 article a month or 1 article a week, and that makes a difference over time.

Consistent and constant is what we say here again and again to our clients and to ourselves to be consistent and constant about it. At minimum, what that means is weekly. One per week is consistent enough for all of the bots. Less than that is actually not worth it. It has diminishing returns.

The other thing that’s interesting is that Larry King’s team didn’t reach out to you because you were the world’s expert in blockchain. They found you because they were looking for a woman and someone who could explain blockchain in plain English, and the podcast demonstrated that you could do that. You were the person they were looking for. It wasn’t like you block your way on or something. You were the ideal guest for them.

Everything that we did is because you can find me easily on Google. When they googled me, and that’s what they did, they were like, “She’s written a column for Inc Magazine.” All of those things added up to them saying, “This is a good enough authority for us. This is exactly what we need.”

Business mistakes and failures. Have you ever experienced one, and what could you tell us about it?

Of course, I have. You can’t be in business and not have business mistakes. If somebody says that to you, they are lying. They are selling you something. There have been tons of mistakes. We had all kinds of mistakes in doing business with the wrong people. That happens all the time. We take on the wrong clients. It becomes a big mistake. We learn how to do these things. We have recording mistakes and podcasting. You learn how to simplify everything. If you are not learning from those mistakes, though, that’s the problem that I see with a lot of people is that they blame something else. They don’t take it as a learning experience.

Having a process, taking that in, and saying, “We spent $10,000 doing this marketing plan, and it absolutely felt flat on its face,” but what are we going to learn from that? This is a recent example. This happened to us in 2022. We launched a Republic Crowdfund campaign, and Republic is one of those portals where you can do equity crowdfunding, and you have to file with the SEC. It took us six excruciating months to get the program going, get everything filed, get it all ready, and get it launched. We launch, and we have an unbelievably bad email open rate and not with our clients.

That works out fine but in our general, our main list that we use, which is well over 50,000 people or something like that. It’s an unbelievably bad delivery and open rate, and that’s because of the changes at iOS and a bunch of these things that had accumulated and happened in the amount of time we were prepping up, thinking we had this list to work with. If we had launched sooner, it wouldn’t have happened but because we launched after the 2022 New Year, all of these changes have taken place.

It went so badly that we weren’t able to achieve the number of sales or interest in our crowdfunding campaign. That means not enough investors. We were looking to go up to $1 million. We ended up at $200,000. We had to figure out how to pull out a win, and to compound, all of that, the advertisements and the agency that we hired weren’t working either because Facebook ads weren’t working because the war started.

Nothing worked as it was supposed to. Everything went wrong. All the money we had invested and spent was feeling wasted here. How could we pull out a win? We sat down and said, “Here are our learnings. Here’s what we are going to take away from it. What still works, and what can we do?” Our client base still worked. We said, “We are going to do a text campaign. We are going to do it and try to get over 300 investors, and whenever we hit over 300, we are closing the campaign. We want to get 300 investors, and we want 200 of them to be podcasters or our clients. If we can achieve that, then we can come away with enough of a win, even though we didn’t get what we were going for.”

That’s how you can turn what you’ve got into something that works for you that still becomes, in this case, what we were looking for was investor social proof. This is working for us, as we are taking Angel investors on, as I’m telling them and saying, “We did a crowdfunding campaign. We did $200,000, and 200 of them were in the podcasting industry or our own clients who invested in us.” They think, “I don’t know enough about the podcasting industry but that sounds like social proof to me.” That gives us credibility on something. Turn it around, even if it’s a loss. That’s the one thing that we always try to do to figure out how we can pull a win, even a small one, out of it.

Can you tell me if there’s a business book or some resources that have been important for you or something that you would recommend for people?

I’m a huge Shane Snow fan. I interviewed him on my show. He’s one of the only non-podcasters/authors that I interviewed. I love Dream Teams. I love the way he talks about how you assemble your team and what you are going to do. There’s so much about the way that he talks about things and builds them. When I was talking about benevolence before and showing care, benevolence, trust, and then expertise. If you go in that order of benevolence, trust, and skills, that’s through know, like, and trust. That’s the way it actually works. It’s giving it in that order. He talks about building a team that can do that within itself to each other and then externally to your clients, and that is one of the books.

Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart

I referred to it again and again. I give lectures on it on a piece and go tell people to read it. When I mentor people, we have a certified strategist program, and I mentor on running a podcast business, I send them to read this book as an assignment as well. They cannot build a team if they don’t understand these fundamentals.

That’s Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart by Shane Snow.

How important is that now and when your team is remote too? I have 108 team members around the world. It’s essential that we make our teams work, and this is one of the resources we use.

That sounds interesting. I’m going to go check that out. I have a team of two.

It’s okay. It doesn’t matter how big it is. They have to work together. They have to function.

The last question is, are you a fiction reader? Do you read fiction books at all?

I do. I’m a huge fiction reader. I read about 300 books a year between my business books and the fiction books that I read but I read a lot of fiction because it helps my mind shut down. There’s something about fiction reading for me that improves what I have been mulling over. If I’m agonizing over something, I switch to a fiction book and let that fiction book wipe my mind a little bit and make it easier.

I’m a big classics reader. My dad turned out to be an engineer but wanted to be an English professor. We were filled with Shakespeare, classics, and all kinds of things. I’m a Russian Lit geek, and I love Dostoevsky and Chekhov and the deep dark mulling. I say it’s fiction and should be taking it easy, and then they are so melancholy but I like that. I like non-happy-ending books.

I read about the same amount but I go a little bit lighter. I go more on science fiction and fantasy.

I like that too. I guess for me. I will watch more science fiction or those things. I watch more of that, and I read more of that. We are space geeks here.

One thing you mentioned is that it helps you to shut down. I see reading as almost a form of meditation for me, particularly because when you are reading fiction, it forces your brain to concentrate on one storyline, and you read it in a sequential fashion. Whereas when you read nonfiction, you tend to jump around more. If I read a nonfiction business book, I won’t go to sleep at night, so I can’t.

It’s because your brain will start working on it. I always read fiction right before bed because the storyline and the characters distract my brain. It is like meditation. It didn’t use to be that when I was a kid. Reading would keep me awake. I have to finish a book. I was one of those kids who would sneak under the covers with the flashlight reading. Luckily, we have Kindles now. It’s got the black light behind it, and no one else cares that I’m reading. The dog doesn’t care. Tom doesn’t care, and I can read and then say, “Now I’m done. I’m ready to fall asleep.”

I did the same. I had a little Sony tape player but you could tune into an FM station and a little red light would come on if it was tuned in properly. I used that little red light to read because I didn’t want people to know.

It is so your parents wouldn’t know. With podcasts, you can listen passively, and no one knows.

Tracy, where can people find you if they are interested in learning more about Podetize and want to check out? Can you list some of your podcasts for us?

They can find me on Podetize.com, which is where you will find links to Feed Your Brand and The Binge Factor. You can go into any player and type in my name, and it’s Tracy Hazzard. When you type in Hazzard with two Zs, you will find all of my podcasts. There are ones on blockchain and on 3D printing, as I mentioned. There’s one called Product Launch Hazzards that’s on how to launch a product because I spent 25years designing and developing products for mass-market retail.

There’s a whole tutorial on how we do things and who we use there. We’ve got New Trust Economy, which I mentioned was the blockchain but The Next Little Thing has reviews of products because people are always asking us what we buy or what we use. We only do them around the holidays and will do another holiday set again. We give people tips on what we are going to buy for the holiday.

We have fun with shows. We try them out. We start a brand new show every single year so that we know what it’s like for our clients to start a new show. In 2022, we started a private podcast called Worthy News and Notes, which you won’t be able to find on any player. It’s only for our investors. If they invested in our company, they have a private page to which they can go and listen to us. It’s a weekly touchpoint. If you are taking revenue in and want to have touchpoints with your clients, you could do a private podcast.

If you are taking investors in, one of the things we hear so strongly is that the founders they have a lack of trust in, don’t believe in them the most, and won’t invest more money in, are the ones that don’t communicate well. We said we were going to defy the odds there. We are going to communicate in our mode of choice, which makes sense. If you invest in a podcast company, you should now be forced to listen to a podcast. We are helping them learn about podcasting while we are keeping them updated.

Tracy Hazzard, thank you so much for coming to the show. It has been a pleasure to talk to you.

It has been absolutely my pleasure. I love The Recognized Authority.

Thank you.

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Thanks for reading. If you gained any insights or tips from this episode, please leave a review. It would help us out, and it’s very easy to do. It helps. It’s much appreciated.

Important Links

• Apple Podcasts – The Recognized Authority
• Professor Schwartz – The Recognized Authority past episode
• The Binge Factor
• Feed Your Brand
• 2Bobs
• Increase Your Visibility And Create A More Authoritative Podcast – The Binge Factor past episode
• The Specialization Podcast
• The New Trust Economy
• Shane Snow – The Binge Factor past episode
• Dream Teams
• Podetize.com
• Product Launch Hazzards
• The Next Little Thing

Watch the episode here

The Recognized Authority Podcast With Alastair Mcdermott