How To Grow Your Platform with Tracy Hazzard from the Promote Profit Publish Podcast with Juliet Clark

The paradox of today’s world is how nothing is ever fully new while the world continues to change. That is why when it comes to creating products, what you need to do is not necessarily come up with grand ideas. Sometimes, a few tweaks could go a long way. You need to start designing disruptive products. Tracy Hazzard visits Mark S A Smith’s Selling Disruption Show to talk about how you can disrupt product design and, at the same time, share some examples of what she has done before. Tracy also taps into the importance of listening to the market, introducing the concept of intentional invention. Tune into this great episode to find out more about disrupting product designs and growing your company further into the future.

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You have all sorts of modalities, but your specialty is podcast. I want you to talk a little bit about why you do it the way you do it because you make it easy. I have my own podcast a couple of years ago and it was darn hard.

I will tell you the firsthand wasn’t easy. It’s because it’s not easy that I said, “This is ridiculous. We need to reinvent the whole process and we need to look at how it works and what we can do differently.” We started a podcast that is WTFFF?!. It stands for Fuse Filament Fabrication. It is not a swear and if you don’t know that, then you’re not the right listener. We hit on something valuable early on. We screened out people before we ever even got them listening. It became this attractor point. We started that in 2014. We have over 535 episodes and I’m about to retire my role as a co-host on it and turn it over to somebody else. It’s not a part of my core everyday business, so I’m going to turn it over to somebody you probably know, Steve Crimi. He’s doing some work with Tom on the 3D Print site. I was like, “It’s logical. You guys should take it over and do it from here,” so they are.

It was excruciatingly difficult. Back then also, it was a little harder. There weren’t as many courses on how to podcast and there weren’t as many blog talk radio packages you could buy. I had to read all the books, read between the lines, figure out what they were trying to sell me and what I should do. This is my specialty because I always joke that I’m a how-to girl. I like to figure out the how-to, but I like to figure out the how-to in the fastest path. I call the critical path. The least number of things that you need to do, but the things that are most critical for the success and for the ultimate outcome you want to achieve. We did that, and we launched our podcast in six weeks. Since then, we can do it in as little as two weeks. We’ve refined it down to the system of, “This is all you need to do. That’s the perfect amount.” People would come to me and go, “Will you just do it for me? I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to read these books and I don’t want to learn it. You have a course, but I don’t even want to go through it. Will you do it for me?” They started throwing their business at me and I said, “We should start another business,” and that’s how Brandcasters came about.

One of the things that we did that was so different was we didn’t just podcast. When I was reading between the lines, I realized that many of those early podcasters came out of the blogging world. It was the fact that they had these power blogs and Google rank sites that was giving them the power that they needed. The podcasting was in fact a lazy way. For me, that was exactly the case. A lazy way to make sure that you’re putting your content out there, that the blogs are coming out every single week. Sometimes in the case of way, we did it every single day. On the flip side of that, I was like, “I didn’t want to do video because I didn’t want to have my hair done.” I was not willing to do a daily video. That was way too much work for me. I was like, “I can talk about anything.” It became this lazy, easy path for me to do it. Many people think that’s what it’s going to be, but if you don’t have the infrastructure underneath like posting the blogs and doing all that work for you, then it does become arduous. It becomes difficult and time-consuming.

Grow Your Platform: It doesn’t matter what you like, it matters what your core clients, your listener, and your audience wants.

The last thing you want is to be editing audio or doing something like that. This is a case where you have to think about it as an investment in throwing a little money. It doesn’t have to be a tremendous amount of money, but throwing a little money so that you save a lot of time. That’s where we make a lot of mistakes. We think we have more time than money when we’re starting up when we’re building our platform. This is a case of there’s so much information that you don’t have. Editing your podcast and doing that is not the way to go. You could start it up yourself. We practically give our course away for free because we want you to start it up successfully, but don’t edit it. Don’t spend time on that. Use the service of any kind even if it’s not mine.

Talk to me a little bit about what you do as far as when you’re setting it up, like all of the things you do. Why is it so important to have that transcription you do into the blogs?

We call it Brandcasters. That’s the name of our business, Brandcasting, if you want to call it that. What we do is it’s the audio or the video because you can start from either, it doesn’t matter. We do a lot of videos. Product Launch Hazzards is another podcast. That one is completely video-based. We do a Zoom. We start from that as the format, spin it off into a podcast, then put it into a blog post on a website that is properly configured, a WordPress website. I cannot stress that enough that we have tested out Squarespace and Wix. There are a bunch of click funnely-style websites that are out there that make it very easy for you to manage your website. I get that, but it does not have the same Google power. If you want to be found in search, and that is the key here found in Google search, which is one of the most powerful search engines on Earth. On an offer, because it’s technically in the cloud, you want to make sure that you’ve got a site that just isn’t blocking that for you. That’s what some of these other sites do.

We find that to work the best, but you need to put those blog posts consistently and constantly to get Google’s attention. They also need to be long. The more you do of that, the harder it is. That’s more work for you. If you can do this in an easy process where you’re repurposing what you’re doing, if you’re taking this webinar for instance, you’re going to turn it into the podcast and edit the audio properly for a podcast because people aren’t seeing, they’re listening. You have to be a little careful with your editing and then we go from there to a three-level transcript. That’s what I call the human transcript. You cannot just have a machine do it. It’s terrible. It makes you look bad. Just don’t do that. You can start from there, but you’ll spend hours and hours editing it. It’s worth the effort because when you use the transcription services that are out there, it’s twice as much money to do a human version but I’m telling you it’s ten times the labor to proof the robot version. Do the human version first and then from that, we go through it.

Grow Your Platform: The information you bring is so valuable because it’s helping to move the needle up on what’s working, how we can take the strategy to the next level, and keep it going.

We edit it and we make it. We edit it for all the weird things that happen, like the “uhms” and “ahs” that gets tracked by the transcriptionist and the weird things when you repeat your words because it happens. When you’re talking to someone, you tend to repeat words. It doesn’t sound good when you’re listening to it and it definitely doesn’t read well. We try to edit those. You do that and then what we do is we format it to look good. You want it to look good. I don’t want to say, “Juliet says,” “Tracy says,” “Juliet asked.” You don’t want it to read like that because Google’s not going to like it, number one, but people don’t want to read that. Because Juliet’s the host, she has the authority and the command. Hers will be in boldface and mine will be in lightface as the answer. That’s how we format it, so it reads well.

We make it look like a pretty blog post, insert images and all the good fun stuff like that. Click to tweets, tweetables, all the things to break up because at the end of the day when we’ve recorded this, it’s probably about 6,000 to 10,000 words. You do somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes. When you do that, it’s a lot of words and you can’t have that just all be text. Someone’s going to look at it and go, “I’m never going to read that. That’s way too long.” You can think that. That is totally valid thought, but I can tell you that Google reads it. Whenever we’re talking about platform, authors or podcasting, all of these things are being searched, categorized and tagged by Google. When someone says, “I’m looking for this. I’m looking for podcasts for authors,” they’re going to search and they’re going to start finding that through your information that’s sitting out there. Most of our podcasters or video casters have 60% to 70% and sometimes even 80%. A couple of mine have much more from Google than they do from YouTube or from the podcast itself because they’re newer. 60% to 70% on average of their listeners, of their viewers, of their readers, of everything comes through Google and not through iTunes. That’s where people fall off because you cannot just stop at the podcast. It’s not enough traffic. There are not enough listeners there yet. It’s growing and it’s growing every single day. We get a lot from there but you’re going to get more from the search.

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Promote Profit Publish
Juliet Clark