Should I Do A Podcast? With Tracy Hazzard From The Speakers Who Get Results Podcast With Elizabeth Bachman

With podcasting exploding the airwaves in recent years, many people are jumping in and moving towards becoming thought leaders using the platform. However, podcasting is, unfortunately, not for everyone. One question thus remains – is podcasting for you? On today’s show, podcasting authority Tracy Hazzard joins Elizabeth Bachman to answer this question. Known as the queen of podcasts, racy is the co-host of four top-ranked podcasts and the founder of the largest podcast production company in the US, Podetize. She explains why a podcast can help promote your image, whether you are an entrepreneur or a corporate employee, when the right time is to start monetizing it, and why a podcast might NOT be right for you.

Listen to the podcast here

This is one of the classic questions, how do you monetize your podcast? I’m doing this partly because I’m endlessly curious and partly because there are issues that I care about that I want to learn about. I’m going to interview some smart people around that. My main work is business advisor, executive advisor and helping people do speeches.

I think the question should more often be, should you monetize it? That’s the real question because monetization implies advertisement. That’s advertisement and sponsorship. We believe in alternative monetization. It’s how we’ve built our whole system. It’s why we train everybody the way that we do. We want you to get value in your core business or your core goal or core community growth. We want those short-term goals to start being achieved quicker. That way you’re starting to feel a sense of, “My community’s resonating with me. There’s engagement happening. I see my business growing, so something’s working here. I see my mission growing. My Facebook community’s growing.” It can be that model.

When To Do Podcasting: Putting yourself into your audience’s shoes, understanding what their pain is and what they’re looking for, and then making your show about that is the ideal place to be.

I see that I’m getting traction and things are moving here, but when you shift into advertising and sponsorship, you shift into this idea of selling out your audience. You start to sell other people’s stuff, other ideas, other products. You distract, unless it’s truly core to what you’re building or unless you’re building a true influencer show. An influencer, the way that I define that is someone who is out there building community and relationship, not things and not stuff. They’re going to share other people’s stuff. They’re going to find the new latest thing in whatever the area. 3D printing for instance. We didn’t have any of our own stuff. We were truly an influencer in that marketplace. 

However, everyone in the industry was talking tech and we said, “I think that there’s a play here to talk about what the value of design. If we can get the value of design, then people would get the value of designers. Now, we’ll have services to sell and we’ll have products we can sell. Won’t that be great?” It’s a good thing I did that. I chose to start a podcast to test out that idea versus build an entire company full of products and design staff to be able to service and create 3D print products for people. I would have spent a fortune to find out no one wanted it. That’s what we found out within five months of doing the podcast, no one wanted to buy design services. No one wanted to buy products that were predesigned. What they wanted was to learn how to do it and they wanted to learn from people who knew what they were talking about.

When To Do Podcasting: If you’ve never done a podcast before, definitely go and guest on someone’s show just to feel how it is.

That’s where our value lied, in educating. We had up to 100,000 listeners at the height of the shows. We have done over 560 of them. If you think you can’t talk about something for a long time, you’re wrong because you will be able to. That was such a valuable lesson, but if I had switched my company, I would have bankrupted. I would have changed the model of business in such a magnified degree that I would have blown up my staff and done all of that and we would have found there was no market. A great time is when you think you have this idea, but you want to test it. How can you do it in a low-cost way that costs you a microphone and a computer you already have and all you do is just start talking? There are great ways to do that.

You may not need to go into full-blown podcasting. Maybe you live stream it and test it out. As it starts to get traction, you say, “Let me syndicate this live stream into a podcast and let me see if I can grasp that audience and if there are listeners out there,” because they are different. Some people are visual and some people are auditory and some people prefer the written word at the end of the day. Some people still do.

One of the things I love about this is I’ve heard you talk about how some things in marketing are working and some things aren’t and why podcasts are such a useful thing now. I’m sure by the time podcasts to become old hat and the market is saturated, there’ll be something else and I count on you to teach me. Tell me what it is, Tracy.

When you’re talking about, especially like women who are experiencing the glass ceiling and corporate life or they’re bumping up against, “I’m not being heard, I’m not being seen. I’m not being found.” That’s what I hear again and again and that’s the perfect time for you to sit back and consider, “Is there something that I so badly have to talk about and share and say that needs to get out there that would be valuable, that would change the way the world is working? It will change the way the system’s working.” If that means I have to step out and be the one to do that, maybe this is the right media for you.

Watch the episode here:

Speakers Who Get Results
Elizabeth Bachman