Podcast Like A Pro with Tracy Hazzard, CEO and Co-Founder of PODETIZE From The Mediacasters With Julie Lokun and Corinna Bellizzi

Are you interested in starting your own podcast? You’ve come to the right place. Join Tracy Hazzard as she joins Julie Lokun and Corinna Bellizzi of The Mediacasters to share how she started her podcasting journey that quickly turned into her becoming a pioneer and thought leader in the space. Learn about her transition from designing products for household brands to becoming the CEO of Podetize and get expert tips on how to get podcasting right. Tune in to learn industry secrets on reaching a larger audience, monetization, and what works in the podcasting space.

Listen to the podcast here

Juls, how are you?

I am doing good because we are going to get all Dukes of Hazzard, aren’t we?

I wish we could have both of the Hazzards on, but we are super thrilled to be joined by someone incredible whom we have been collaborating with for a bit of time. That is Tracy Hazzard. She is the Founder and CEO of Podetize, our preferred platform for hosting an incredible matriarch, running a company a lot differently than many other people in this space and one of the only I know to be female-led. So much podcasting on the technical side is led by men. We will get to meet her.

We got a woman in the house, Tracy Hazzard. She is amazing. She is so smart. It blows my mind.

I can’t wait to talk to her about that first show she started, specifically in this hyper niche of building 3D printing. Tracy, we are going to welcome you to the show. Thank you so much for spending this time with us.

I am so happy to be here. I love media casters. Who doesn’t want to talk about casting media?

Julie, you initially thought too that we were almost like waving a magic wand, casting spells, and helping people to reach more individuals.

The facilitator of dreams. It is about dream making.

When you can create ripples of voices out there, and it is cascading into them telling other people and inspiring others because of their show, to me, that is the best business to be in. I do not have to know the thread all the way through it, but if I am setting off a ripple that is going somewhere, I love that.

As we get started Tracy, I would love to know a little bit more about your history. You have been on the product side. You have worked to develop technologies. You have a pretty incredible history and landed in this world of podcasting. You became so passionate about it that you essentially built this new and different enterprise. Let’s talk about that. What led you here?

I have a big history in product design and development. For me, everything is a product. It does not matter what I am approaching if I am designing software, a physical product like a brand new microphone, or a system of how to run my business or my podcast. All of those things are designed at the same time. That is my passion. It has been from the day I graduated college and I met my husband and partner.

That explains the connection to 3D printing. You got people that are super passionate about 3D printing. They could essentially become creators of whatever they could imagine in their own homes. I love that. I personally have friends who have 3D printers in their homes. I am constantly curious about what is the next thing they are going to build or what is the next blueprint they are going to offer to other people in the 3D printing space.

That is why we called our show WTFFF?! which is What the Fused Filament Fabrication. It is not a swear, even though that is what my mother thought for the first year that I was doing the show. Fused filament fabrication is the geeky term for 3D printing. We did by naming it. That was tap off of WTF. Marc Maron just had Obama on his show. It was popular. People were searching for it and then they would see ours pop up. When you start typing WTFFF, the FFF will show up as the next one on the list, so we would show up there. That helped us, in conjunction, get visibility for a show. If they did not know what it was, there was that curiosity factor. If they did know what it was, they clicked it every time.

That is how we up with 100,000 listeners within a year. It was so much fun to do that first show. What was more fun was seeing what it did for us and our business. It was unexpected. It blew so much up in our worlds. It is done the same for the two of you. This is a common find for a lot of people. For us, that was 2015, which was pretty early on in the scope of podcasting, where our show was blowing up and getting that visibility. We were written in a lot of articles. I got an Inc. column with Inc. Magazine writing on innovation because of it.

Podcast Like A Pro: 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.

You are an innovator. How do you go from 3D printing to a podcast? It seems like there is a disconnect there.

Yes, because it is visual. 3D printing is a physical object. The real reason is I did not want to have my hair done. It was the silliest thing. Live streaming had not taken hold back then. It was just this experiment. Everything was still so structured in video and it was so expensive still at that time to produce. We did not want to take the time to do that.

We would do this audio show about how we did it, what we were working on, and who was fascinating us in the 3D printing world. We would do the show five days a week. We would talk about these things and then we would offer them up to go to our YouTube to see the print that was running on our machine at any given time or go to Instagram and check out the photo of whatever the object was. That was how it went.

We also increased our social media and our following on YouTube. It expanded along with the show. It was a fundamental of, “I know you want to see this. Here it is.” We just stuck it there. We did not do anything with it but talked about it on the show and it worked for us. We realized that the power of that platform built in podcasting was where the power was. Most people did not know that. They thought I built a podcast and people listen and that is where everything lies. It was not for us.

You have done a lot of trade shows, too, in your time and so have I. One of the most innovative booths I ever saw was in the 3D printing space, in the algae space specifically. A company had chosen to bring the 3D printer there and they were printing out a 3D copy of Yoda using algae-based plastics. He was a perfectly green Yoda.

People would come back by the booth over and over again throughout the trade show to see the progress that had been made on Yoda. This particular arena of innovation inspires that childlike curiosity in us. With a show name like WTFFF?!, I would have grabbed that. That brought people into 3D printing that probably had no idea what it was back in 2015 as well.

We did it as a business test and this is where a lot of people come to us. We knew the industry was shifting. We had been what we call ghost designers, designing for big companies behind the scenes, like Martha Stewart Living, Costco, and all kinds of different places like that. Being that ghost designer, no one knew who we were.

We saw this Instagram world and thought, “We need to get out front of that or we are not going to get enough clients in the future.” Imports were changing. We were an expert in that. How are we going to go about this and create this future business for ourselves? 3D printing seemed one of those options but it would mean we were the end-product producer.

In this case, it would be a design file, but they would have to be as inspired by us as designers as they would the product itself. We realized we needed to have that celebrity model, that influencer model and we thought, “Let’s try podcasting. Let’s see how it works. If we find something that works here, then we will figure out where to go from it.”

What we found quickly is no one would ever want to buy designs from us. We thought there would be fourteen-year-old boys in their garage being our audience. We were not 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. We had STEAM organizations that were actively trying to add the art, which we had. Add the art into STEM makes it STEAM.

These were ongoing movements that were happening at the same time. Some of it was timing and luck in that sense. 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 tip that. Six hundred and fifty episodes later, we had Hewlett-Packard as our sponsor. All these things went on from it. It cascaded into building something that could have been a bit business, but it was not the business we wanted. The business that attracted us was podcasting and keep doing that to develop that into a podcasting service business.

People would come to us and they would say, “WTFFF is so amazing. How do you do it? Can you do it for me? Here is my credit card. I will pay whatever you want.” That is how it started for us. Our first ten clients were like that. We said, “We have to design a system and a process. Where are we going to take that? How are we going to go from 10, to 100, to 1,000, and 10,000 clients? What is that path for us?” That is when we designed a new business. When we sat down to do it, it was a purposeful decision. It was not a side hustle and then it expanded. It was, “We are going to do that purposefully. We are planning every step of that way.”

When you designed WTFFF as your first show, you were already thinking about SEO. One of the things that helped you to stand out at that early stage as you are working with podcasters to build their platforms so that they get the right people into their audiences and continue to grow their exposure, you focus a lot specifically on SEO.

SEO is powerful, but SEO is not just Search Engine Optimization via Google. It is also any bot and any search engine that exists anywhere. When we are in an app like the Apple Podcast app and/or Spotify’s app, there is a bot that is controlling that search, like what is coming up when you are typing into the app itself. We knew this from working on Amazon. Optimized listings for Amazon products are critical.

You have to know how to title everything, how to put your bullet points, and how to attract the consumer to them. More importantly, you also have to know how Amazon’s algorithm works so that you show up on the first page when someone types something in relevant to the product that you are selling. We understood how important it is to make sure that you did not put things out there without understanding who is controlling what gets seen and that is that association power that SEO brings to everything.

It was at the core of everything we had ever done. When we design a product that was on a shelf in Costco and the Costco shelves are gigantic, if the product was too small, it would not be seen. Sometimes we designed bigger boxes for things than they needed, even though that sounds like a waste environmentally. If it did not get sold, then we did not do our jobs. We would have to come up with ways to be thinking about this as how are things being searched for and being found? We call it being seen, heard, found, and rewarded. That is our motto for everything that we do, whether it is designing a product or a podcast.

You were pioneering podcasts. I am not even sure the acronym WTF was in its glory as it is now as we are texting it every single day to our friends.

I see it as an interesting path. You found this success in podcasting and you have taken it to exponential levels. Where is that born?

It is Tom and me together and the way we approach everything. It is that designer’s mindset that we came out of college with. We both went to Rhode Island School of Design, which is like an Ivy League design school. It costs that much, as my dad would say. 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 is touching things and the decision-maker in the process.

It is not that we designed food because we never do. If we were designing dog food, it is important to make sure the dogs love it, it is healthy for them, and all of those things. The real importance is to get the dog owner to see it, find it, and buy it for them. We have layers of people we have to go through for everything that we do in the world.

Moms control a ton of stuff that their families get in that process. Kids’ things have to be designed so that they are not objectionable to moms. No matter how many times my girls will come to me and say, “Mom, I saw this on YouTube and I want it.” If I object to it, it is not going to happen. It is not coming into my house. Understanding these gatekeepers is a critical part of the design process and designing out objectives is a part of the process as well.

Our services and our technology become easy to sell because we have already designed out the problems from the beginning and we are open to redesigning along the way, which is not always comfortable for a lot of companies and people. Our process is built to learn continually, figure out what is not working, and make adjustments for it. We are not perfect. We are new. We are a business that is only a few years in. That is young. That is still a startup stage. We are doing it on a budget because we refuse to take investors before now. All of those things make a difference as to how you approach it. You have got to have that process where you can do that compounding growth.

I love that you speak about the agility of leading your business, understanding those bumps in the road, and always recreating. What is on the horizon for you next? There must be something big.

We have 108 employees. We have tipped over that point where you have to take everything that you do within the company as seriously as you take it externally. That means that we are redesigning our training systems. Before we could do this one-on-one training and that was perfectly fine. We have to have systems for those trainings plus one-on-one support. We have corporate communications.

I just sent out a memo. I said to Tom, “I never thought I would have to say a memo about how to communicate, teaching people what the protocol for communication was within my company.” I thought it would be understood, but it is not. It is like, “Here is how you use chat. Here is how you use email. Here is how you use this,” and sets a tone for how we want to run our company, which is a little bit different.

You have to train people and put them in systems internally and externally because they make a difference to your clients. If our team is better at communicating inside, we are going to be better at serving the client on the outside. We want to make sure all of those are in place. That is the real core of what we are doing, plus we are in crowd fundraise mode. There are a lot of those external pieces where you have auditing happening, SEC regulations, and investors scrutinizing what you are doing.

It brings you to a whole new level of professionalism that you have to move into faster than if you were bootstrapping your organization all the way through and funding it yourself. There is freedom in that bootstrapping funding because you do have the ability to say, “That is not perfect yet. We can still manually handle that. We do not have to have the system for that yet.” The minute you get into, “We have to have documented every single little receipt, even though they are all here in this email box.” That is fine for me. It is not so fine when you have to have audited financial returns presented to the SCC. You have to look at that as everything gets scrutinized.

Another company at your stage would likely say, “I am going to go the traditional investor route. I am going to submit my company up in front of all these VCs and have all that scrutiny.” You made a choice to go in a different direction. I personally loved that because, for one, it means that you are not going to have anyone investor that is strong-arming you to do something differently. I wanted to hear from you how, as Tracy Hazzard, CEO of her own company in the Podetize world. This is the whole podcasting world.

Podcast Like A Pro: When you are developing a show from your business, your model, your way, you know that better. There’s an audience to resonate against. There’s something that they want from you. They’re going to ask you for more.

Let’s introduce Podetize, the amazingness of Podetize, and why we love ourselves and Tracy Hazzard. What is Podetize?

Podetize is the largest post-production company of podcasts. We have produced more podcasts than iHeartRadio has produced. Our shows are all independent. They are all independent podcasters on our show where they are taking controlling and doing all the creative in that whole process. We do not do that. We handle everything from once you record, hosting, and syndication. We have software, services, and group support.

What I love about our company is that we have said, “We are not going to leave anyone behind. We are going to develop group coaching programs. They are all going to come with your subscriptions.” We made everything a part of it to keep that support going because we found that that was one of the biggest gaps for most podcasters being able to keep going. This is how we run the company. We are Brandcasters, Inc., which is our corporate name, but Podetize is our registered trademark and front-facing brand.

We are The Mediacasters and we had no idea. Great minds think alike.

It was just a corporate name. Podetize came out of the fact that we lost a URL. At that point, it was about monetization. We mixed podcasting and monetization. We came up with Podetize and it was the best name. It fit exactly what we were doing and resonated with the audience to who we were talking to. Our clients came back and said, “We love this because it is an alternative view of monetization and it is more than ads.”

Let’s talk about that because it is the number one question that comes up in any community about podcasting. How do I turn this into a money-making process? People have this idea that they can suddenly start podcasting, put their ideas out there, and become Joe Rogan. That is not going to happen for probably 99.9999% of people. It is not to say that your dreams can’t be realized, but success comes from different spots in the world of podcasting. What is your take on monetization as it relates to podcasting?

The reality is that the numbers speak for themselves. Ninety-eight percent of podcasts do not make money from advertising at all. It just does not happen. It is not even possible. It does not mean that they do not make money for their show, for their business, or what they are doing, but they do not make money in advertising. For the 2% that make advertising dollars, the minimum threshold for it to be worth their while is 20,000 downloads per show.

At that, most of the ad systems or the processes treat it like radio. They treat it only the forward-facing catalog is worth anything. The back catalog is cheaper and not worth much. That is a mistake because we know we have binge listeners. Binge listeners start at the first episode and listen all the way through because a lot of our podcasting is not about what is newsworthy and only talk show stuff that cares about the future and what is next on our show. It also cares about what we talked about before. Our audience cares about those things.

There is an overall structural value that has changed. Some of them are starting to look at them more like a Netflix series. The problem with that is when your iHeartRadio, Wondery, or any of those companies out there that are building these types of shows as vehicles for advertising, that is how they start. They are like, “I have this advertiser, Coca-Cola, or whoever they might be. We need a show to put that ad on.” That is how TV and radio have been coming for decades in the industry.

I was watching the documentary Amy Poehler did on Lucille Ball. The whole reason it happened was because Philip Morris agreed to bankroll her show. That is the whole reason she ended up with I Love Lucy. Think about that. Nothing in Hollywood or in those places happened without an advertising sponsor driving that. If they are driving that, then what is the chance of your success rate?

We were talking a little bit more about funding and going the VC route and everything. In VCs, they have 9 out of 10 failures. That one success is a unicorn and makes them loads of money. The product design that I came from had 7 out of 10 failures. Home Shopping Network, 11 out of 15 failures. It is high in those industries of failures when we are developing commercial products and vehicles for things.

When you are developing a show from your business, your model, and your way, you know that better. There is an audience to resonate against. There is something that they want from you. They are going to ask you for more. Our 3D print show that we were talking about before, they asked for more. They asked us to do longer shows, shows on educational topics, and help develop a curriculum to improve.

This is one of the things that I loved about that business. We were in so many different countries and Africa was one of them. Africa and Brazil were having issues with power supply, so they would have rolling blackouts and brownouts. 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. Sometimes, the prints that we would design would take 12 to 20 hours because we designed complex large prints. 12 to 20 hours, your chance of having a blackout in Africa is high. They could not print our designs over there.

We worked with some of the manufacturers. We were able to be a liaison to point out this problem for them so they could put in a pause and a save if the power went out. It was a coding thing. It was super simple and cost them nothing. Now they had a 3D printer that was viable in another country. All because we heard it on our show. Those are the things that are powerful and where we can get to and make a difference. That 3D printer company made more money because they had a new market to sell into. You can make a monetization difference in your industry, in your world, and in your own business.

What you are also speaking to is 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. It is not necessarily always a monetary payback, and maybe not an immediate monetary payback. It is something that could then become a partnership or something that develops from there or establishes a new career path for you.

For instance, when I started Care More Be Better in January 2021, I was thinking, “I have been in this world of sales and marketing for nutritional supplements for a long time.” I want to work in more 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 will work as a corporate social responsibility advocate, consultant, or something along those lines.

I still have not pulled the trigger on anything like that, but it was a way for me to explore that and also have the conversations I wanted to have with people I might not ever have had access to without the show. By creating the show, I was suddenly able to interview thought leaders like Paul Hawken or Mo Gawdat, who are internationally renowned, bestselling authors and movers and shakers in their spaces. It meant that I was rubbing elbows with people that I both admired, respected and then getting this personal satisfaction.

You raised your industry authority and thought leadership. You are making a difference and it is making a difference in your career. When I was doing the 3D print podcast, they asked me to give a speech at an LA trade show and it was like a big maker fair. It was not a small audience. I must have had 200 people in the audience. I gave a nitty-gritty, granular speech about pricing your 3D print designs if you are going to go selling your designs, pricing your services, and doing this.

I came out of the consulting and design world, so this is something I knew. The head of a new section of Inc. Magazine saw me speak there. She invited me to have a column in Inc. Magazine for this. I wrote them a column. I wrote over 400 articles for them on not 3D printing but on innovation in general and how you do things. This is what they asked me. “Write about these nitty-gritty things that everybody needs to know and learn.” That was a great opportunity for me.

It was fun but every time I turned around, I said Inc. columnist. Even now, when I say former Inc. columnist, people still use it to invite me. They invite me to speak because of it. It had a long-term residual value. That is where we do not anticipate what we put out there. If we have done our job of making it SEO, we made it so that we are searchable and we are there for people. We are easy to find and we are always there, hundreds of episodes and articles later.

That authority and thought leadership can’t get taken away from you very easily. A good example is when Hewlett-Packard came to ask us to sponsor their show. We had stopped podcasting for the 3D print because we had been so much on it. I had three new shows I had started here. The Binge Factor and Feed Your Brand had already been well underway. Those are my podcast for podcasters. I was onto other things. Frankly, 650 episodes of 3D printing, how much more can I talk about? It was like what I thought.

I was done. I felt, “This is pod feeding. I put my time in. I am done with that.” When Hewlett-Packard came to us, we had stopped podcasting for about nine months. I said, “Why do you want to advertise with us? Why do you want to have us?” They wanted to sponsor a series and ask us to do some interviews. I said, “First, I am going to charge you a lot of money because I am retired from that podcast. Why do you want me to do this?”

They said, “It is because we spent the whole year trying to get you off the first page of Google and we couldn’t.” You do not realize the strength of the sustainability of the thought leadership you create is your long-term value. Those that quit their podcast and decide, “I can’t afford to keep it live,” do not find a way to keep their podcasts live are making a huge mistake. This is portfolio value for you long-term.

You are doing so many amazing things and let’s not be remiss. You launched your first podcast right after you had your third baby. You are juggling all those things, being a thought leader, and using this as a cache for your expertise is so inspiring to me. It is giving me all these ideas that Corinna should be a little bit nervous about. I said to her, “I want to do a true-crime podcast or something.” She is like, “No, Julie, no,” like a dog. The next day she was like, “I am going to start another podcast. It is going to be a documentary about my family’s journey.” I am like, “How come you get to start another podcast and I do not?”

It is addictive, right?

A little bit. I get an idea and then I am like, “I could run with this.”

We start up new podcasts every year for our business. It is our model. That is why I have seven and we are about to start our eighth. All of them are not live. We do not record WTFFF?! anymore. It still has residual value. It still makes this money. I still get people reaching out asking to advertise on the show, which I can do. I deploy them and it is done. They get advertising. It is easy for me to utilize that, but it is not something that I have to concentrate on every single day. It is upon request.

I have Product Launch Hazzards and the New Trust Economy which is about blockchain and cryptocurrency. I started that with a co-host because how could you pass up the opportunity to have a co-host named Proffitt and Hazzard? Does that not sound like the best cryptocurrency podcast you could possibly have? She has two F’s and two T’s and I have two Z’s in my name. It made it perfect.

Podcast Like A Pro: You can really make a monetization difference in your industry, in your world, in your own business.

Monika Proffitt manages the show now. It is all hers. She is still doing some amazing things, defining NFTs and things that I do not know about. I get to listen to my own show that I help start, but I get to listen to it and go, “That is what that means. Now I know more about that.” My curiosity in that field helped me move that one forward. There are all these little ones that we start 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 have got our launching systems and our systems and processes are working.

Also, we might want to transition and try something. We are trying a private podcast for our crowdfund investors, so only the investors will get access to it. We wanted to launch it but we have come up with a slight roadblock of something that we have to figure out how to block from an algorithm so that we can make it available and you could listen to it over some apps, not all the apps.

We wanted to block it because if you syndicate to Apple, then it automatically syndicates to all these other smaller podcasts. They do not have locks for private podcasts where Apple does. It created this barrier for us to understand how we need to go about syndicating to make sure that you can keep something private if you are charging for it, or in our case, we want to keep it totally exclusive. We have 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.

There were technical difficulties, but we learned that and now we have a model that somebody else can use and we are launching a show. We are also testing out what that is like. Let’s say you have a community like The Mediacasters Community and you say, “We would launch a show within this,” how much does that community contribute to your listenership beginning?

If you decide to then expand it outside of that, how much does that happen? If you kept your podcast only within the media, your mighty networks, and kept it within that, what volume would it do and how much if you open it up beyond that? When we close out our round, we will probably open it up beyond that and open up that podcast as well. We will see what happens because that is a great case study and test.

Everything in podcasting seems to change every month. There is a new player that comes into the game with another app or there is a shift in what is working. I appreciate that constant commitment to staying new. I will also say I am preparing to launch a podcast and support a business that I am connected to in the nutrition space. Being able to tap into that industry knowledge from you is something I am grateful for.

You guys are an advocate for using the 4,000-character limit that podcasters are allowed to use in their descriptions. Some of the platforms do not pick up all of it. Stitcher is one example where they might take the first 2,500 characters or something like that. Generally speaking, you want to use close to all of those 4,000 characters for that SEO reason.

I was skeptical at first, too, because, as a marketer, I was like, “They only want the little blurb and you want them to see the little blurb.” If you look at most of the platforms, you will notice that they say just a little blurb and then read more and you can choose to click on that and read more.

Most people do not choose to read more.

You want that first bit to be your punchline. The moment that I shifted to having a full description for Care More Be Better, filled out that 4,000 characters, written to optimize for SEO, and maybe spoke about some of the concepts in several different terms, then I might vernacular use in a typical marketing document. Written out this whole way, I suddenly went to search for myself under social impact sustainability or all these different terms on Google Podcast.

I would be in that first set as opposed to several scrolls through where you have to keep going to see where I might crop up in this thing. It was immediate. From that, I started to get selected. A team in Ohio decided to use my podcast as a curriculum for their high school class that was learning about sustainability and climate change. It all happened as a result of shifting how I was approaching podcasting and my blogs on my website to support the podcast. All of that came from you guys.

Keep in mind that they have no idea how many audiences you have. None of that matters because they see you showing up first and they see you showing up again and again in all these different places. For them, that means authority, even without the backup of how many friends or audiences you have. It does not matter. That, to them, is a sign of authority. I love that it is working.

Google is queen and everything I do for my businesses is based around Google.

That is why we recommend YouTube, frankly. YouTube is owned by Google and we embed them into your website and your blog, and you are going to get bonus points. Why would you skip the bonus points? Why skip these things when we are independent? This is why we do this. iHeart, Wondery, and Spotify’s corporate shows can afford to be lazy about using forces and characters because they control the algorithm. They can push themselves out. They have an in.

Podcast Like A Pro: The strength of the sustainability of the thought leadership you create is really your long-term value.

Us, independents, do not have an in. We have to use what is available to us. If they say there are 4,000 characters, there is a reason for there to be 4,000 characters and we should use every bit of it. That is how we feel. Our job is to make sure and understand how that works and advise you to do something that takes advantage of that. The repeatable success thing is what I care about.

I have experienced wonderful growth on Podetize. It is amazing. It is super easy to use. The numbers speak to what a great job you guys are doing for us little podcasters.

There are little things I have learned. If I have more than 300 episodes, I am going to need another stream.

If you get more than 300, all of a sudden, Apple won’t show those older shows.

You got to move the volume over. That happened to us when we hit our 650. What we found is that 300 is still too many for people. We try not to do volumes any bigger than 200 episodes. If we can do them in 100s, we would do them that way. I recommended it. It is just too much for a person.

We got slow ourselves down.

Do not slow down. Create another feed. A mistake is somebody says, “I will start a new feed.” Instead, what you want to do is roll your old episodes into the new feed and keep your current feed because that is where all your subscribers are. You do not want them to have to start out. What you will find is that aggregates over time. The different volumes will end up with their own listeners and listeners will go, “I finished,” and join the next volume and the next volume. You end up with listeners across all the volumes.

You make it easy because with every subscription, you get five feeds. That is awesome. It enables you to do this. I love that. I have always got sound advice from your team. I appreciate your community. I am happy to be one of the many people who is an official investor in what you are doing.

You are a Podetizer. We love having you a part of our community. We love supporting the Mediacasters group because we strongly believe that your support makes the whole industry rise. Where you need to get your support, please go out and seek that. That is what we want for everyone.

Build something bigger.

It can be lonely, but it is never lonely with Tracy Hazzard and Corinna Bellizzi by my side.

I love you, too, Julie.

Tracy, we thank you so much for spending this time with us, for your support of The Mediacasters, and for everybody in the world of podcasting. All I get from you and your team is that you are here to help. Even here, I listen to your podcast. Brandcasters and The Binge Factor are great. You give people sound advice and I appreciate that. You have got me as a listener for life. I look forward to that.

What is the name of your next show?

It is Podetize but it is worthy news and notes because we are talking about the industry. We are talking about what is going on in the world, and the world of podcasting.

At the end of every episode, we ask all our illustrious guests to say, “Let’s kick it.”

Are you ready?

Your turn.

Let’s kick it.

Important Links

• Podetize
• WTFFF?!
• Care More Be Better
• Paul Hawken – Previous episode on Care More Be Better Podcast
• Mo Gawdat – Previous episode on Care More Be Better Podcast
• The Binge Factor
• Feed Your Brand
• Product Launch Hazzards
• New Trust Economy

Watch the episode here

The Mediacasters With Julie Lokun and Corinna Bellizzi