Selling Products & Building An Audience With Tracy Hazzard From The Profit With Podcasting Podcast With Noah Tetzner

Building an audience is crucial for any podcast that aims for longevity. Without this capability and without the ability to bring value to your audience, a podcast is most likely doomed to fail. In this episode, Tracy Hazzard is interviewed by the host of the Profit with Podcasting Podcast, Noah Tetzner. Tracy discusses how building an audience helps with sustainability. She also gives a small peek at how she helps podcast clients set up, launch, and improve their shows with an eye towards the long-term. Learn more podcast industry insights from Tracy and Noah by tuning in.

Listen to the podcast here

The topics of this episode are generating product sales through your show and building a niche podcast audience and insights about the future of the industry.

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My guest is a prolific podcast host or co-host of five different shows with over 2,600 episodes and interviews as the CEO of Brandcasters, Inc. Podetize.com. She makes it a practice for all executive teams, herself included, to start a new podcast every year. She’s a former Inc. columnist and has a lustrous experience in media. I’m so excited to be joined by the one and only, Tracy Hazzard. Tracy, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Noah. It’s fun to get to talk industry with another industry expert.

Thank you very much, Tracy. It’s truly a real treat to be joined by you. There is so much going on in the podcasting industry now. I am blown away by the opportunities that podcasters, marketers, consultants, CEOs and so forth find themselves confronted with. Before we get into that, I would love to hear about your own personal story regarding how you got to where you are at this point in time and space in the podcasting industry. For those unfamiliar with you, could you take us briefly along that journey that led to Podetize.com?

My husband and I had a design business. We designed products that you buy every single day, and still nowadays at Costco, Walmart, Target and things like that. We did that for 22 years at the point that we realized that the industry was changing. We could no longer design for Martha Stewart when she could buy straight from China and then have her team do the styling. We weren’t set up to be that person in the middle. We had to figure out how to shift our business, which is common for a lot of my clients. You get to that point where the industry is moving around you.

We realized we were either going to have to step out front and be the design celebrities or we were going to have to do some completely different business. We decided to test both at the same time, and we were right at the cusp of 3D printing becoming desktop-capable. We’ve used 3D printing in our lives and businesses, but it was expensive. This was this opportunity to use it to make end products. We could be both designers and celebrities making these great 3D print product lines or skill up what we were doing with it and use it in a less expensive way for our clients. We decided we would dive into it.

We bought a 3D printer and did all of this, and it was terrible. Everything we designed turned out plastic junk. I thought there’s a real story here because if we’re experienced with twenty-plus years of design and can’t get something Instagrammable out of our 3D printer, then who can? We said, “There’s a story here. What should we do?” My husband’s like, “Let’s do a YouTube channel.” I was like, “I’d have to have my hair done.”

YouTube wasn’t casual and live streaming didn’t exist. This is in 2014 and we said, “Let’s start a podcast because I’d been listening to some and this sounds like we could do this. We could add videos of the machine.” We call them video accents, video bonuses and things like that. We said, “We could do that.” That’s what we did. We started a podcast in about three months. That was all the research and everything we did. When we launched in May of 2014, we ended up by October 2014 having 25,000 audiences and we were featured in Forbes.

The podcast was called WTFFF?! This is the geeky term for 3D printing, not the WT part, but the FFF is Fused Filament Fabrication. Within a year, we were at 100,000, and people kept saying to us, “What are you doing? Will you teach me how to do it?” I said, “I don’t want to take a course. I don’t want to teach you. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

After I would tell them, they would go hand me a credit card and go, “Will you do it for me?” That’s how we ended up with our first ten clients. That’s exactly what happened. It took us until 2017 to decide to spin it off into its own entity and we had 100 clients at that point. We were like, “I guess we’re totally in a different business now.” It took another year before we shut our design business down.

Building an Audience: Our formula worked because we were at conferences where people were getting continuing learning. They were already in that mode of being coachable.

Those initial clients and relationships, were those contexts you had in your design business or those people you were introduced to through WTFFF?

I did a lot of speaking on the Circuit on Innovation. My podcast got me my Inc. column on innovation, and that got me a lot of speaking events. These were people I met at entrepreneur conferences, tech conferences and various places that I spoke with. A lot of them were other speakers on the stage who was like, “I’ve got a podcast and mine’s not doing well. I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast to go along with my books.” They all were authors and I was this podcaster speaking on stages where no other podcaster was speaking. That’s what happened. It was not in the podcasting industry at all.

The funny thing is, as I was listening in to your interview with Dan from Podcast Movement, the thing is, I’ve never been to Podcast Movement still to this day. It almost always happens that when those conferences are going on, I’m speaking at some other conferences somewhere else that’s in a different industry or area. That’s how my journey went for where I was located. We were located in front of a lot of aspiring podcasters who weren’t in the know and that was the difference for us. That’s what happened. Those first ten clients, all but one of them, are still podcasting with us nowadays.

For those of us who work in this industry, my experience and yours have been different. The people who do well in podcasting are those who are coachable and generally come from outside of the industry. There are a lot of people who have been doing a show for a little while. They listened to all of the podcasts like ours and they think they know the way. You have to be coachable to do well in podcasting.

I think you do as well and that’s why our formula works because we were at conferences where people were continuing learning. They were already in that mode of being coachable or they wouldn’t come to the conference, to begin with. It doesn’t make sense. You get a lot of people who are distracted and going after the next squirrel. That happens at those conferences too. We did a survey at the beginning of January 2020 to check on why our company’s podfade rate was so low compared to the industry.

We surveyed 1,000 people total, 500 of our own clients, and 500 from the industry, in general, to understand what was going on. Coachability, interest in continuous learning, participation, support, or having someone they could tap into and ask questions was the number one thing they cited as the difference between those who didn’t podfade and those who did. The second thing that we found was that they had a strategic business focus, which is something that we felt strongly.

It’s like, “If this doesn’t fit your business, lifestyle, where you want to go in the future, your mission and your messaging, you’re not going to stick with it.” It’s going to be something where you’re like, “This is cool.” You hit 11 to 23 episodes, which is where most people quit in the industry and you’re going be like, “That’s it.” The third thing was those that didn’t have production support and capability. I saw an article that came out saying that a podcaster has to wear five different skillset hats in order to do their job. You have to know about audio, graphics and copywriting because you have to post a great descriptive paragraph and title of things.

There are all these things that you need to learn, like being a great marketer. That’s too much for most people. Our clients have full production services. They have all this stuff ready. They have complete classes if they want to do it themselves on every single detail about how to do it perfectly and we keep them updated. That support makes a big difference. That’s why people don’t quit because also they come in and they go, “I don’t have the skillset for this and this is way too much work.”

Time is our most sacred asset as podcasters because, as you say, we’re expected to wear all of these different hats like copywriter, marketer and prospecting, but Podetize handles all of that. From graphic design to editing and production, all the highest echelon of quality that one could find in the industry. I’m a huge fan myself. Don’t you have some guesting program to help people secure interviews?

We’ve got some new tech coming too so that you can help yourself there. That’s going to premiere in 2022. It’s coming out and will be a part of your hosting package. You will automatically get access to it, but it’s what we’re testing behind the scenes. We found from helping our clients guest on other shows, not getting guests, but guesting on other shows, that there were some key criteria to what made a good show.

I partnered up with a few publicists who would pull lists themselves by going through the Apple top charts and places like that. They would come up with these lists of twenty that they wanted to have their client on. I said, “Let me match that list. Let me go and find my own twenty lists.” You put your client on 40 shows, which is what they wanted. They wanted a big rollout for book launches and things like that. You put your client on all 40 shows and then see which one delivers you the most book sales at the end of the day. My list of twenty beat them every single time that we tested this out.

The reason for that was simply these were podcasts that were deeply in the niche. They were podcasters who were more likely to be successful. They were easier for them to get their clients put on. That was also another thing. It’s easier for you to do yourself if you want to solicit to be on those shows. They shouldn’t require someone to go in through some producer to get to that show. That makes it all easier and more effective. We took the formula we were using behind the scenes and we turned it into an AI that’s now working for us. In 2020, you’ll have a portal to be able to access that.

I’ve talked about its benefits on this show before. Tracy, you’ve done a lot of guesting on other shows. In your opinion, what are some of the best reasons why you would want to guest on another podcast?

If you don’t have enough authority. In other words, if you need to be side-by-side with someone who has higher authority in your industry or niche, then you should do that. That’s the number one reason. I want to be seen side-by-side with you, Noah. You want to be seen side by side and that’s why you invite me on. It goes both ways. When we have a mutual authority going on, it’s the best reason to do a podcast. I will do and help start-up podcasts because I’m in the industry, but you don’t have to do that.

That’s not the mission for you, especially if you have limited time to guess. The second thing is you want a show with a blog or at least a website that is their own, not Anchor, Libsyn or any host website. You want it to be yours. If that host has that, then I’m going to get a great powerful backlink that is a press-style backlink. I want to put it on my press page, so we cross-link each other and now I’ve got a super digital footprint authority, power and building as well. That’s the big thing that I look for in most shows.

The third reason is, “Can I have a good conversation with someone?” Frankly, I don’t want to say the same thing, again and again, every time I go on some show. I want to have a new conversation to make it interesting and exciting for me and for whoever might be listening to it who might be attracted. I’m looking for an audience match and a conversation match.

Building an Audience: If it doesn’t fit your business, lifestyle, mission, or messaging, you’re not going to stick with it.

What are some tips that you would give to readers who are thinking, “I want to appear on other shows. I want to plant my flag of authority. I might even want to grow my own podcast?” What tips would you give them, whether that’s pitching or how to maximize those interview opportunities?

We found that the standard way of pitching me doesn’t work. You put out one sheet that’s all about you and we flip that when we coach our clients. We flip that to being topics that are of interest and, “What I can do for your show? How big is my circulation of LinkedIn followers? How many views do my posts get?” That information about what the host is going to get from having you on their show is more valuable. We flip the pitch from being me-focused to being show-focused, which means sometimes you have to customize the pitch.

We template the language so that we know we’re going to have, “Say a sentence about this, about the host, and what we’re going to bring in from the show.” We know what’s going to go in there in that templated email, but we’re customizing the pieces that belong to this particular show, so it doesn’t sound cookie-cutter and something you sent out a mass mailing to everyone.

There are a lot of shows that I host on my platform and of my clients who get emails all the time. They never have a guest on their show, but they’re getting blanketed with it. That’s like, “I love your show. I read it all the time.” If you did, you wouldn’t be sending me an email that says you want to guest on my show. That’s a dead giveaway that someone doesn’t care. They think that the shotgun approach is the way to go. That’s the first thing that we do.

The second thing that the biggest tip is to be clear about your purpose for doing it. If you’re out there hawking and promoting something and have a deadline and a launch, podcasting is probably not the best thing for you. You should probably do news rounds and talk shows because they’re much more timely. Podcast launch on all dates.

Some of my clients record out 6 months or 1 year in advance. It’s not going to work for you if that’s your plan. If you’re planning enough in advance to do something with that and allow that slow burn of publicity, then you’re going to do better. That’s an approach to why you’re doing it. Repurposing is essential. If you’re not going to share it, put it on your website and do those things, why are you even bothering? You’re not getting the maximum value out of it that you can.

I’m curious, Tracy, and I would even love some of your expertise on this. If I’m going to guest on other podcasts, I have a value exchange like an email opt-in or something like that so that I can build my mailing list. When I guess on other podcasts, I offer those readers a free eBook in exchange for their email addresses. Is that something that readers and I should be doing or might that come across as self-aggrandizing to the podcast host?

It comes across as digital marketing to your audience. They get it. They’re like, “Someone’s trying to get my email.” Our audiences are super smart. They know who does what and who’s doing this. My advice and what we teach our clients is to only send people to your website. If you’ve got things that were like, “You know that book you talked about is cool. Can I give one away?” You might say that on the show, “I’d love to give one away. That sounds so valuable. I’m going to send people to my show site and I’m going to do that for you.”

I always let and we always recommend that the host does any of the promotions or any of the things that they would like to offer or do because then it comes across more as if I’m curious as the host of the show, then my audience is going to be like, “Tracy’s consuming that, then I want to consume that. If Noah’s got it, I want it.” It’s because they trust us as the host of the show, first and foremost. Plus, our readers can’t remember other people’s web addresses and stuff like that. They’re lucky they remember our show name because it’s so automatic on our apps.

It’s all about relationships. Readers aren’t these faceless and nameless robots. These are individuals consuming your content. That’s why that example that you shared of that list of twenty podcasts that people were guessing on did better than the 40 podcasts because those podcasts were filled with audiences of real people who were in that niche, industry or topic that was very relevant to them.

We have clients and we turn them down. We tell them, “We’re not the right fit for you.” If you want to guest on shows and have only shows that have 1 million or 500,000 readers, then we’re not the place for you because your approach is already wrong by numbers. I can say that nano and micro-influencers on Instagram do better. I can see that they sell more products at the end of the day than the bigger ones because the conversion rate is higher on the audience that they’re influencing. It’s the same thing in podcasting. If I say you should try this tool, they will do it at a great rate.

We did our 3D print podcast for a long time, and we rarely, if ever, recommended a particular unit or thing that we didn’t try out and use ourselves. When we did recommend something, it had a high return on investment for that advertiser or whoever we were recommending. A lot of times, we didn’t charge for it. We were doing it to see what would happen. We used to have an average of 37% return on conversion.

In other words, if we would have 37% of the audience that read to our particular episode, take action, go to our website, click the link or download whatever it was. Usually, they were free. We try not to sell anyone anything. It was not in the model we did. If you did have something valuable as a free download, 37% of 1,000 readers is awesome and of 100,000 readers is even more awesome. You could get high returns. We then started charging top dollar for our advertisers when we did finally take some.

What I love about Podetize is you understand that it’s not about how big your audience is. That’s quite frankly irrelevant a lot of the time in a podcast. There are so many opportunities that come along with hosting a show, whether that’s prospecting and building relationships with ideal clients or partners, building relationships with people who could give you media coverage or planting your flag of authority, so on and so forth. What are some of the advantages to hosting a podcast that you highlight at Podetize that your clients tap into through your coaching?

We look at it as an integral part of your business. We spend a bit of time with our clients at the front. We get a lot of people who have a podcast, and they moved to us. We don’t have the opportunity to reset their show, but we take a look at all the technical details to make sure they’re right because so often they’re not. The longer it’s been since you launched your show, they’re more likely to have technical errors in them. It’s something simple like back when I started my first show and we couldn’t use 4,000 characters in our description.

If you don’t use all 4,000 characters, you’re not as searchable as a show launching nowadays that fills that space. It’s simple. There are only three things that are searchable under the Apple algorithm. If you’re not using it all, you’re not getting enough keywords in. Those technical things have to be foundational. Beyond that, if I don’t strategically match it to, “What do I need most of my business? Do I need leads? Do I need investors? Do I need credibility?” If I don’t match those things, I’m not going to get what I expect out of it.

I have clients who have 100 audiences and generate tens of thousands of dollars a month because of the right audience. I have some who don’t care about their audience at all because it’s the guests they invite on the show that is their strategic move and that’s what matters to them at the end of the day. I have others who care how many audiences they have because they’re trying to continue and move all the authority they had on TikTok over to podcasting so they can be multi-platform.

It depends on where your strategy needs to be. We are customized about how we do that and how we look at that. I have over 1,000 shows that we’ve launched already. I can see the patterns of what works and what doesn’t work, which is hard to do if you’re trying to do this all on your own. Those patterns matter because sometimes you think, “I think this sounds good,” but you didn’t realize that relies on you having a giant mail list or on you already being good.

If we try to follow Joe Rogan’s model, the reality is he had media experience before he started anything at all. He moves into podcasting and video and his YouTube is gigantic, but his value of that Spotify paid for in that show of over $120 million had nothing to do with his audience or advertising worthiness. It had the fact that he had the formula to YouTube, which is what Spotify wanted. If you saw the announcement from Spotify about them allowing and doing video within their platform, this is what they wanted to figure out.

That’s such great insight, Tracy. I know you’ve hosted other podcasts, but I think WTFFF?! is such a great example for the sake of our readers. To me, it’s a great example of niching. You did that show. What are some of the opportunities that came from doing that show?

I said before that I got my Inc. column, but I was asked to speak at an event in LA and pricing 3D print objects. It’s something down, dirty, and technical. How do you price art is what they’re asking me to talk about. I talked about market-based and cost-based pricing and why cost basis is a stupid idea in 3D printing because plastic costs next to nothing. You’re already running your electricity. There would be nothing to its cost if you based it on that. People would pay pennies for something you worked hours and hours on to develop and design. That’s what I talked about.

An ad editor of a new part of the Inc. Magazine online portal wanted to start one to compete against Fast Company. They were putting in this new innovation column and she said, “We want this down in dirty, nitty-gritty stuff. Would you write for us?” It hit on something I always wanted to do. I always wanted to be a journalist, but it didn’t end up my path. I thought I’d go to art school, which is what I did. I went to Rhode Island School of Design art school. I was going to go to grad school and get a degree in journalism and work in magazines. It didn’t happen.

That wasn’t the path I went down, but it tapped into something I always wanted to do and try, so I said yes. I did not realize how hard that publication side of it was and how much work you had to put into promoting your own articles. They don’t do it for you. Eventually, over the years, the algorithms changed to that. That Inc. column itself got me so many speaking opportunities in conjunction with my podcast and then starting new podcasts every year would get me a new industry I could talk to.

Building an Audience: A podcaster has to wear different skillset hats to do their job. You have to know about audio, graphics, and copywriting, among other things.

I had one on called Product Launch Hazzards, which was the closeout to my business and design because I wanted to share all we had learned with those inventors and innovators of the world. It’s a 150 episode section. I’ll do a new one if I feel like one is worthy of it. I should do a new one on supply chain problems. I get an email on that podcast that still is a high audience base because someone will find it and read all the episodes in a week. I still tend to have anywhere between 200 and 500 audiences every single week on it.

People reach out and email me, thanking me or asking for a resource I mentioned on the show, saying they can’t figure out where to find it. I was like, “I have to do a better job of making this self-serving on my website if you’re asking me questions.” It’s fascinating for me to email the link to them and send it, and they’re very grateful. Those niche things have continued to work for me. I did one up because I was curious about blockchain and got invited to interview Steve Wozniak. I’m a geek, so interviewing Woz was a good reason.

I had no experience in blockchain and cryptocurrency, but he was speaking at this conference. I started a podcast so I could air the interview because I could have written the article, which I did, but I thought, “Why not have a podcast so I can air the interview?” That’s how that came about. That one’s called The New Trust Economy. Staying niched has worked well for us. It doesn’t work for everybody. That’s not what they want, but it has worked well for us.

That’s the mark of a true journalist. It sounds to me like you’re inherently curious. You’re starting new shows about different niches. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when you first start these shows, you aren’t necessarily the expert in that niche, yet you’re still hosting a show about it.

In 3D printing, if you asked me anything technical, I didn’t even know how to turn on the machine. Tom, my partner, and husband was the one who turned on the machine. We were a great balance. He could be the technical expert on how to do things, but I was the design expert in what the market wanted and other things. You can be an expert in an area and then still be curious about the growth of the technology or the pace of the industry. You can be both at the same time. Sometimes, I am an expert.

When I talk to other podcasters on The Binge Factor, a lot of times, I’m cycle analyzing their show. I’m saying what they’re doing well, asking questions and probing so that my audience can get success tips that I don’t lecture that are examples of what’s working. That’s another structure of a show. I’m always trying different formats and seeing what’s working. Now, we’re doing a brand new show we launched not so long ago. We call it The Next Little Thing and it’s a review show. Lots of people are out there were getting harder and harder to promote certain types of products and categories.

For instance, if you are in the health and wellness field, you can’t advertise on Facebook for nutraceuticals and other things like that. I wanted to give my clients examples of ways that you might do this in an authentic and successful way. We’re not advertising nutraceuticals on our show or reviewing them. It’s one of the examples of it. I have this Hidrate bottle that lights up and tells me that I forgot to drink water. It’s sitting on the side of my desk, reminding me to hydrate. I bought them from all of my success managers, my marketing team and everybody as a gift last 2020. We’re all on our desks and Zoom all day long, not taking enough in. I thought it was a great gift.

That’s something I can highlight on my show, talk about why I bought it and how I gave it out as a gift. We put links to that and we’re testing out the different ways to link to it to say what’s working and getting the conversion. We’re not even in a partnership. I don’t have an affiliate arrangement with Hidrate. I don’t care about it. I want to see what method of my sharing is working so I can tell my clients, “This is the way to go. This is where you’re going to get the highest conversion. It’s the least friction for your audience to do something from.” That’s how we do things. We test them out, and we look at them from those perspectives.

That is a database results-driven approach. What have you found thus far? Let’s say you host a podcast or guesting on another podcast. If you’re promoting a book, a product or a resource, how is the best way to do that? Traditionally, it’s always been linking the description of this episode. Some people I’ve ever seen do SMS and text this number. Do you have any insight or recommendations as to what is the best way?

It works for me to never sell and do that. That’s not my model of it. It’s to serve and serve. I was on Pat Flynn’s show. Smart Passive Podcasting is the godfather classic of podcasts. He was on my show and he invited me to his show. We did an exchange, and I got more clients from not saying one thing about my business, except for its name. Pat mentioned it, but beyond that, I didn’t. It was because all I did was serve and point out things that they hadn’t heard from other people before. That’s my area.

I’ve had authors on my show or written articles about them and interviewed them where they are like, “You need to read my book for that.” That comes across so obnoxious on a podcast that it will never work. The things I’m sharing with you are things that I share with my client every single week. We do weekly coaching calls with anyone who hosts with us.

You can spend $49 a month with us and you’ll get four weeks of coaching. That’s an amazing deal, but I’m sharing with you every single one of those tips. You see what I did there. I revealed how I talk about what we do without making it sound like a sales pitch. I said, “We have weekly coaching in here.” I’m talking about it in the context of a story of how it’s used. That is a way to serve.

Somebody might say that you’re giving away all of your expertise for free here on this interview, the same expertise that you give away on your coaching. There’s something about that when you give and serve people. Those are the people who will buy from you.

I live in this place of knowing that I have more value tomorrow. That’s because I’m an innovator. I’ve lived in that. Tom and I have 40 patents that are issued and commercialized. That puts us in this elite spot of inventors who made money off of their shows, podcasts, innovations, technologies and products that we’ve made. We live off of that. That’s a big difference when I know what that is, and I know that there will be something tomorrow.

As I told you, we got something new coming. I’ve got five new things coming for 2022 that are going to shock the industry. We did them because they came from a deep-seated need that the big players are not observing in the marketplace. Spotify and Apple will never see it, but we independents who are struggling to put our shows together have these needs. If I can solve these problems in a smooth, non-cookie cutter way, that’s important to me.

Each of our businesses is different and each one of us is at a different stage in our entrepreneurship, business, and personal journey. We need to make sure that everything fits those at the different stages. When I can live in that, then I can give things away. The other part of it that I know from talking to thousands and thousands of vendors who are like, “How did you achieve so much success?”

I’d say to them, “It’s because I talked about myself and found out whether or not the market wanted it.” If I didn’t talk about it and then get feedback on it, I didn’t understand whether there would be any market proof. We don’t bring something out that we don’t already know going to be successful. It’s why I can have a higher hit ratio than anyone else because I dropped them before we dumped a lot of money and time into them.

You’ve shared so much advice and insight from your array of experience here, Tracy. Podetize is truly shaking up the industry and it’s so exciting to see.

We’re like the sleeping giant. That’s how I refer to it. What people don’t realize is we have launched more shows than iHeart. More of those shows are still podcasting where iHeart has a very high podfade rate because they do a season and then don’t continue on their shows. We have more of that. I can’t say our shows have more audience than them in any way, shape or form. That wouldn’t be accurate, but we’ve launched more, so we’ve learned more in that process, and there’s a largest in the world of having launched shows.

We have 97 staff members around the world with expertise in all different areas and that deep knowledge where they know instantly when something stops working. When Apple has hit its glitch, we knew across the board that this was happening to every client instantly. We knew this wasn’t an isolated incident for you personally, or you were getting a summer slump, which used to happen before the pandemic. You weren’t getting that. It was magnified by outages from Apple. We can see those patterns and things, and I want to share that because I want to make sure that you don’t feel alone in this podcasting world. That’s the worst thing ever.

I mentioned something along these lines in my interview with Dan Franks. I realized that none of us are necessarily fortune tellers here, but where do you see the industry going? I got into it in 2018 and I already feel like it has changed in many ways.

We’re at a fork that is split off here. We have the Spotifys, the iHearts and Apples concentrating, and even Amazon. Amazon is going to kill in the podcast industry and no one realizes it. That’s because they have extreme, deep knowledge of what people listen to in terms of books and content. If they translate that, they can defy the odds that iHeart hasn’t been able to in the development of shows. Amazon has the knowledge to do that. Spotify doesn’t. They may get it in a couple of years, but they don’t have the data that Amazon already has because they’ve been in music for too long. They don’t see that long-tail content.

Amazon is going to kill it from that perspective. We’re going to see these entertainment advertising level shows that are only 2% of the podcasts being put out there nowadays. We’re going to see them all fight over that. We’re going to see this independent side of the 98% of us who are doing independent podcasts. Podcasting is not our only thing. We’re blogging, doing videos, live streaming on Instagram, and doing all of those things together. Podcasting is one component of it.

We’re going to see more and more of that side of the industry start to disappear. It happened in the 3D print industry. As the money went towards the high end of it, then the low end either consolidated or disappeared, and the ones that were left were financially sound companies, to begin with. That makes the difference, but they had a better plan for how to keep you using their stuff, how to keep your 3D printing and how to keep you podcasting in this case. That same thing is going to happen, and I see that because I’ve covered innovation for a long time. It’s exactly how industries go from that disruption phase into that stable, sustainable phase. We’re going to have some interesting shakeup on the independent side, and we hope to be the leaders in that.

That’s my biggest concern. Will the death of the indie podcaster come eventually? Will these big giants push us out or will there always be those of us who’ve learned to adapt?

Building an Audience: Be clear about your purpose. If you’re out there hawking and promoting something and you have a deadline or a launch, podcasting is probably not the best thing for you.

I don’t think it’s possible for them to push us out. We thought that would happen when Amazon went into bookselling. We thought that it would happen. There are more self-published books nowadays than ones published by big publishing houses. I don’t see that as happening here either because I think there’s the strive for that. You’ve got to think about what’s going on in the world from a social perspective.

Podcasting is the last bastion of free speech. We’re not regulated on the indie side as long as we don’t care about being on Spotify’s platform or Apple’s platform because they can choose not to play our show, but our websites can’t get shut down. They’re private and they’re ours. People choose to listen to our podcast. We’re not forced on the airwaves, so it’s not radio either. People can say what they want on their podcasts.

You don’t want to disparage and harass anyone. There are still laws in place, but you have the ability to have free speech here. That is why it’s going to grow now because we’re in the stage where that free speech is so desired. There are podcasts companies that have policies about that, but we don’t. You might be putting together a risky podcast. We’re going to warn you of the risks of what you’re doing if you’re doing a political show, a show about sex, nutraceuticals and things that people suspect health things. We’re going to warn you what those are, but it’s still on you at the end of the day to make the decision about how you want to run your show. It’s your show. We’re just advisors.

That’s so great and encouraging. I’m hopeful for the future, especially after talking with you here, Tracy. I love to point readers to Podetize.com, spend some time on that site and consider how it can help you along your own podcasting journey. Outsource your production and some of the other time-consuming elements of hosting a podcast so that you can repurpose content and get the most bang for your buck out of these valuable interviews or episodes that you’re recording. Tracy, I am so thankful that you came to the show. I’ve learned so much. I’m so glad we could connect. Thank you for coming to the show.

Thank you, Noah. I had a lot of fun.

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Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this show, please leave a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. You can always get in touch with me. My email is Noah@ProfitWithPodcasting.com. I’d love to hear from you. Join us here for another episode.

Important Links:

• The New Trust Economy
• The Binge Factor
• The Next Little Thing
• WTFFF?!
• Dan  – Past episode with Dan Franks on Profit With Podcasting
• Show – Past episode with Tracy Hazzard on Smart Passive Income podcast
• Product Launch Hazzards
• Apple Podcasts  – Profit With Podcasting
• Noah@ProfitWithPodcasting.com

Watch the episode here:

The Business Infrastructure Podcast with Alicia Butler Pierre