Spotlighting Women In Podcasting With Tracy Hazzard From The Marketing Your Podcast With Hector Santiesteban

Don’t underestimate the value of women’s voices today. And podcasting has been providing women a platform to raise and elevate their thoughts, expertise, and stories. Tracy Hazzard joins a group of women doing the most in the podcasting industry opposite Hector Santiesteban for the Marketing Your Podcast. In this episode, Tracy unleashes her expertise as she dives deep into the essentials of podcasting—from key trends and statistics to recording, marketing, and promotion. She shares her insights on women in the podcasting world, how they drive listenership and leadership, and produce more empowering shows and episodes. It is truly invaluable to have a space where women’s voices are recognized and heard because it pushes for many more to join and share their own experiences. So follow along to this powerful episode as Tracy brings forward the value of women in the podcasting industry and more!

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Listen to the podcast here

Welcome. It is a very special episode because we are spotlighting some women in podcasting. We’re going to let some of our panelists come on up. We have a wonderful group of ladies who are going to be sharing it. I wanted to pick my adjectives appropriately. They’re a bunch of badasses. They’re all podcasters. A lot of them run their own businesses. A lot of them help podcasters specifically. This is going to be an exciting opportunity for us to chat. I want to give a special shout-out to Marisa Eikenberry for helping put this together. She has been a big helper in leading this charge and also some others as well.

The reason that we do these is to bring a sense of community. As we speak, there is a bunch of podcasters meeting in person that had a big podcast conference and that’s fantastic. It’s so important for people to go to those. We wanted to provide something virtual and something that people can access from their homes because, as podcasters, we are often so siloed. We’re doing this on our own and it’s something that can feel alone.

We wanted to do these to bring some community and offer some insight. There would be some great ideas but more importantly, I would encourage you to get connected with people that are here. With that being said, it looks like we have some people who are here. I’m going to go ahead and get started with some introductions but I’d love for Marisa, Pixie, Nola and Deanna to go around and quickly introduce themselves if you can. Give a little background on maybe your show or what you do. Marisa, would you mind kicking us off?

I’m happy to do so. I’m Marisa Eikenberry. I am primarily the Web Developer for the Kevin Eikenberry Group, a leadership and learning consulting company. In addition to that, I edit three of the company podcasts, The Remarkable Leadership Podcast and Talk Like A Leader and also cohost Long-Distance Work Life with Wayne Turmel. That’s a little bit about what I do and I’m excited to be here with all of you

We’re excited to have you. Let’s hop over to Pixie.

Thank you for having me. I am the host of Next on Stage One podcast, which happens to be an adult nightlife podcast where strippers, entertainers and sex workers get together and tell their stories to people who may or not be interested in the nightlife. I also host Project Podcast with Pixie, where I teach other people how to podcast. I’m building a community of podcasters to share and relay information to one another and I use Twitter Spaces to do it. My third and final podcast happens to be Pop Culture Perspective where me and my cohost Mr. J from Next On Stage One, relive a lot of interesting comic book stuff, nerd culture and everything. We break it down in a friendly manner for people like me. That’s what I do.

Nola, will you give background on what you got going on?

Sure. I’m the host of The Janus Oasis, which talks about the future of work. I offer consulting services regarding hybrid and remote work. I help organizations that want to do that better. The podcast allows me to explore hybrid remote but also what other things are factoring into the future of work.

That was how we got connected on LinkedIn. I was enjoying your post on remote work and the revolution that’s happening. I appreciate that.

That’s how I met Marisa. I’ve met Reena before but I’ve never spoken to her. Thank you for connecting us. We needed to spark.

I’m excited as well. Deanna, let’s hop over to you.

Hector, thank you for putting this together. I’m very excited to be here with all these fabulous ladies. I am the host and Founder of Label Free Podcast. I’ve got over 300 episodes. It started as a passion project and has become much more. I’m also the Head Coach and Founding Partner of Female Podcasters Network where we empower women such as all the ladies here to use their voice and to help them grow their podcasting profile and persona. I also produce another podcast for a client of mine called Because, Bikers Matter. It’s a different genre and focus. I’ve been a part of the podcasting space for years and have loved the community and the inclusivity of it all.

If I’m not mistaken, you work primarily, if not exclusively, with women podcasters to help them get started and get going.

Correct. I have one climb I own that’s all-male dominated in the motorcycle community but as the head coach with the network and the network’s free to join, it’s a great place for women to network and stuff like that. Yes, with that in particular, I work with only women.

That was a big reason why I thought it would be so valuable for you to be here because you have a ground-level perspective. Thanks for making some time.

Thank you.

Maria, do you want to share a little bit about what you got going on?

I’m excited about this. I don’t know any of you. I put this on my calendar. I would love to mix it up more with other podcasters. It’s so amazing. Any of these social media audio platforms have so many diverse groups and you can think of so many people. You then come into a space like this and look around. It’s like, “How cool is this? More new people to meet.” I love it. My show is called Strong Body, Strong Soul but I’m happy to listen to you and see how everybody’s doing. I know Pixie.

Thank you for joining us, Maria. You have impeccable sound. I would like to know how you get great sound.

It’s a pain. My equipment works differently depending on what platform I’m in or on.

You’re going through your external mic. I am through some cool stuff.

I’m on a Samson mic and I have a RODEcaster. I cannot get them to work in Twitter Spaces but they work fine on Wisdom and Clubhouse. Go figure.

I will need some training on that later. A big pain in my neck is the poor quality that comes through on recordings. Looks like Reena hopped in. I want to see if we can give her an opportunity. Marisa did a little bit of research and I hope that I’m okay not putting her on the spot here to share some of it. One of the initial things that sparked this was I saw a study from the Edison Research Group. It was only about 700 podcasters that they surveyed. Out of those 700, only 30% were identified as women.

I was shocked by that and that’s probably because I’ve grown up around a bunch of strong women in my life. I was surprised because I’ve been acquainted with so many strong, powerful, amazing successful women in the space, Deanna and Pixie, all these people. We wanted to have this space to bring some light to it but then also try and find some solutions or things that we as an industry can do to get that 30% closer to 50% or whatever that number needs to look like.

Maybe it even becomes an industry that they take over. I would welcome that as well because the industry has its issues that women can bring their solutions to. I don’t want to talk too much. I want to give a little opportunity for Reena to introduce herself. She’s going to be leading the discussion a little bit after Marisa shares some of her research. Reena, we all went around and gave bio on what we got going on. Do you want to say a little about your show or business?

I’ve been honored to have Tracy Hazzard, Deanna and Pixie on the Better Call Daddy podcast. That is exciting and I’m excited to connect with the rest of you. I’m the host of the Better Call Daddy podcast. The way that my show came about was I used to work in reality TV show casting. I wanted to take those skills and apply them to the podcasting space. In the beginning, I started as shocked and on. I wanted to share these stories with my dad and then have him weigh in. I’m a daddy’s girl. I’m a mompreneur of four kids. That is part of my brand too. I talk a lot about mompreneurship. I also am a big fan of helping people get seen and heard, get on other podcasts and find guests for their podcasts. I’ve worked in PR and marketing for most of my career. That’s a little bit about me.

It is great to have you here and it’s very much a LinkedIn party that we have going on here. We’re converting some people here. Tracy, you are last up. Do you want to give us a little rundown of what you got going on?

Sure, thanks. I had a little bit of difficulty not realizing Twitter Spaces was only available. I’ve used it before from a third-party app so I didn’t realize it didn’t work. Tech support all around. Thanks, ladies. I appreciate that. I’m Tracy Hazzard and I’m the CEO and Cofounder of Podetize. We are the largest post-production company in the podcasting space. I have hosted seven podcasts over time. The most current ones are The Binge Factor and Feed Your Brand, which is related to those interested in podcasting. I’m here about all things podcasting. I live, eat and breathe it here.

We are all cut from the same cloth so I’m excited to dive in. I’m going to turn it over to Marisa. She’s got some things that she wanted to share a little bit and then I will throw it over to Reena for a little discussion. Marisa, are you ready?

Yeah. In preparation for this, I was trying to do some research because I also didn’t realize how underrepresented women were in this space. I did find a slightly different statistic than Hector did that it’s of the most popular podcast that 30% are hosted and led by women but 12% are cohosted by male and female hosts. I could not particularly find one for overall podcasts so I’m not quite sure about that one.

Some of the other statistics that I found too are from Buzzsprout. Female listenership reached an all-time high in 2021. We hear all the time that podcasting is up and listenership is up. Granted, I know that we’re going to get into some more discussion later but I wasn’t sure if anybody had any thoughts on why they think that maybe some of that female listenership is up. Isn’t it just we’re getting back into the world and some of us have decided that we’re staying at home? I couldn’t necessarily find anything like that. I would love to hear if anybody has any thoughts about why that might be.

Listenership isn’t up. It’s down every year in the summer. It happens every year. You think, “Lots of listeners will be up this time of year because they’re traveling on vacation, in the car and doing that.” It’s been consistent every summer except for 2020. We can see this because we track hundreds of thousands of episodes and see what’s playing and what’s not and where their podcast statistics lie.

However, the total number of listeners is way up year over year. They’re frustrated because fewer new podcasts are launching. The podcasters that are out there are producing fewer shows as each year goes by. Those of us who’ve been podcasting consistently and constantly are at a great benefit because there is less of our competition around for people to find us.

Those of us who have been podcasting consistently and constantly are at a great benefit because there is less of our competition around for people to find us. #MarketingYourPodcast #HectorSantiesteban #podcastinterview Click To Tweet

I know that there’s a statistic that I see a lot about how 90% of podcasts never make it to episode three. We’re already in the 10% by getting episode four, let alone years and years of podcasts.

We should all be so proud. When you make it past 25, you’ve achieved that beyond the 73% of podcasters that quit their show prior to that. To me, 25 is the metric of whether or not somebody’s committed to a show.

That was my goal.

I’m almost there. There are other statistics I found too as far as gender statistics and listening to podcasts. We’ve got 43% of men and 39% of women in the US listen to a podcast. It’s not a lot. We, as people in the space, think, “Podcasts are everywhere,” and all that. In some cases, that’s true but there are still a lot of people that have heard of a podcast but never listened to one, especially for our demographic.

One of the other things I found too was that 49% of podcast listening happens at home and 22% happens during commuting. I’m sure that changed a lot with 2020 and stuff. I listen to podcasts a lot when I’m commuting but I don’t commute as much anymore as I work remotely. Does anybody else find that to be true for them too?

A lot of people started their podcasts during the pandemic so I’ve found and witnessed a lot of growth between individuals. The curiosity behind podcasting has been up because people are at home and they’re willing to share this social audio.

I also think it matters with your show. Entertainment shows, yes, certainly they’re much more of that style of commuting shows but those of us that have business podcasts, podcasts that are being used to educate to help people move forward in whatever that is, our listeners are consuming them wherever they are, whenever they have time. I get messages a lot from women in my community that they were putting their makeup on in the morning and listening to my show. You never know where they’re going to find the time. My husband and partner do it when he’s washing dishes. He’s listening over our Alexa device. You never know where people are going to be listening.

I do it when I’m doing housework as well because I need something to occupy my mind when I do mindless tasks and that’s when I listen to podcasts too. I never listened when I was commuting at all.

I hear you there, Nola. If I’m doing anything mindless, I need to be listening to something and it tends to be podcasts.

This is Maria. It depends on what content I’m listening to. If I’m listening to a heavy-duty entrepreneur podcast, I want to be taking notes sometimes. I tend to get frustrated if it’s too full of quality information. If I am driving or doing something mindless, I want to be able to take notes sometimes. If it’s pure entertainment, I’m okay moving around and stuff. It depends on what I’m consuming.

That’s why I like podcasts that offer transcripts. Transcripts are helpful for that kind of stuff. I like to listen and get an overall general impression and then if there’s something that I need to go back to, I’m going to look for the transcripts. That’s something I need to get better at on my podcast. I’ve done some of them but transcripts are a competitive advantage.

I can speak to that because this is what our platform does so well for our clients. We build up their website and their transcripts and the transcript-style blogs, what we call verbal SEO blogs. The side of that is that we see a much higher significant listenership on the web where they’re listening to that episode within the blog post on the website, in the episode blog post. It goes straight to your Google power at the end of the day.

Women In Podcasting | Tracy Hazzard | Tracy Leigh Hazzard-Getting Interviewed With Hector Santiesteban

Women In Podcasting: We see a higher significant listenership on the web where people are actually listening to that episode within the blog post on the website.

If someone’s listening to your episode within your website, then you’re getting a lot of sticky power to that. We see a higher degree if you’re looking at your statistics and you say, “How many people are listening on iOS and how many are listening on an Android?” With that website of it, ours is about 4 to 5 times higher than the average person’s because of the transcript-style blog.

That’s a great point and shows, as we were saying, the importance of transcripts and the importance of having your website for this thing. I have one last thing that I learned when I was doing my research and then I’ll throw it over to Reena but I didn’t realize this. One of the reasons that podcasting is so popular is because of a woman podcaster, Sarah Koenig, who collaborated with WBEZ in Chicago to produce and host Serial.

Many of us have heard of that show, if not have binged all of the episodes. It started in October 2014 and had over 5 million downloads by the end of the year, which is incredible to think about. I wanted to throw that out there too that one of the reasons why we know about podcasting is because of a woman. There we go. Reena, I’ll go ahead and hand it over to you.

Thank you, Marisa. I would love to talk a little bit more about Serial. Why do you think that show was so successful?

I’m guessing here but we see all the time this idea that true crime podcasts are super popular. People are very interested in them. It grabs hold of people. I’ve only listened to season one but the way that Sarah does her show is very impactful and engaging. It didn’t feel like she was reading something off with the interviews and all that. That helped. That may have been part of the reason why it became so popular. Even when it came out, there were a lot of people saying, “Have you listened to this podcast yet?” Word of mouth was also huge.

It’s a misclassification to say that true-crime podcasts are a thing. They happen to do better than other entertainment-style podcasts for quite some time. Although the comedy ones are taking over if you look at the numbers. Jason Bateman has a funny one. Dax Shephard is funny. There’s a bunch of shows that large celebrity comedians are taking over and doing. They’re shifting the numbers on that side and we’re going to see a decline in true crime. The reason the true crime did so well is that they’re easier to do the thing to leave people hanging so that they’ll come to the next episode. You get people binging much easier on a true crime show than you do on a talk show.

True crime did so well because it's easier to leave people hanging so that they'll come to the next episode. You get people binging much easier on a true crime show than on a talk show. #MarketingYourPodcast #HectorSantiesteban #podcastinterview Click To Tweet

I’ve also heard that there’s also less true crime relative to other industries. All of those make for a perfect storm. Reena, I promised myself I wouldn’t do this as much but I wanted to inject one thing from the earlier conversation. It’s whether or not we should be promoting or helping people not only to find our shows but it seems with listenership down and this whole thing, do we need to be getting people excited about the podcasting or getting people on podcasting in general and then they can find our show?

If they don’t even listen to podcasts, we’re not even in the realm. I was curious if you thought that it was more important to be focusing as an industry on promoting individual shows or do we still need to be educating those who are not listening to the podcasts on what is out there, what podcasting or listening to a podcast is all about?

I’ll jump in and answer if that’s okay, Reena. To me, that is the big miss. Shame on Apple and Spotify. They’re not out there promoting podcasting in general and all the great indie shows that are engines running and doing fantastic things. I talked to a podcaster who’s doing a show on note closing and reached 1,000 episodes. That’s amazing. Note closing real estate is so niche and yet, 1,000 episodes in, they’re doing extremely well. We should be proud of that. Apple and Spotify, the big players out there, are the ones who have the budget, time and advertising ability to say, “What did you get from podcasting? How great is podcasting out there? How much wonderful impact?” Instead, the only thing they do is promote the same old shows again and again.

I would agree with that. Is the guy that you’re talking about Scott Carson?

Scott Carson, exactly. He celebrated 5 years and 1,000 episodes.

That’s a big accomplishment. How many people do you see like that?

Not many. I have many women who’ve done the same thing. It’s different niches and it happened that I spoke to Scott. You should be excited. When we hit 700 episodes in one of our shows, we were off the charts excited. I know that the impact that we had was tremendous over the eight years we did that show. We need to be proud of those people who have accomplished things like that. There’s no one out there promoting that.

I was on an IG live with Angela and she has been doing that for a couple of years. She’s amazing. I was trying to convince her about turning that into a podcast. Since we have a lot of podcasters in the audience, what would you tell somebody who has gotten good at one platform, how easy that could be to reformat into a podcast?

I’d say go for it. To repurpose your content is powerful and you find a whole new audience in all the other platforms. It’s important to have a presence, take all that content and put it into a podcast. It can’t hurt. Maybe a couple of extra steps but it’s another way to build your brand.

Also, it is super important, like Twitter Spaces, what we’re doing here, and what we do on LinkedIn, all of this can be repurposed as bonus content for either a podcast, Patreon or any other way that you can. As long as you control your IP, Intellectual Property, you can put that out there to the masses. Not every platform is going to work the same. If you own it, have it, create it and can reformat it for these different ones, your reach is going to get even bigger.

Instagram is big on the Reels. Facebook is big on the long post and Facebook Live. There are a lot of different ways that people need to know about how podcasts and listen to podcasts. We are at the forefront. If you can get somebody to take a bite size part of your content, listen to it and then expand upon it, you are going to do so well on any of the platforms. What I suggest is that you focus on one platform, build it and then slowly work on another. You have to learn how the algorithm works for each platform and don’t spread yourself too thin. If you can’t manage a whole bunch, it’s better to be super focused on one.

That’s great advice, Pixie. I’m so glad you said that. Strategy is the most important thing. If the audience on IG is the same audience you want to reach that is supporting your business, then you’re going to be committed to your podcast. Otherwise, the podcast is a side hustle. It’s an aside and you’ve got to build an audience over there and it’s a lot more work. However, if it’s in line with that audience, it’s best to get off a platform. If you’ve got it working in one place, it’s great to move it someplace else.

My view on this and have done this for a long time is that when you can take it home, when there’s a place where you can put it on your home base, your website and do as well with it there, that’s going to be the best option because tomorrow, Instagram or Twitter can change their formula and all of a sudden, you don’t have access to that audience anymore. Moving that home is the best way to do it and podcasting is so easy, great and an easy way to do that. Make sure it’s strategically right for you.

Women In Podcasting: Putting your show on your home base or website will be the best option because tomorrow, Instagram or Twitter could change their formula. All of a sudden, you don’t have access to your audience anymore.

What are some other unforeseen challenges that you have seen in creating your shows, like things that you wouldn’t have expected but since you’ve learned along the way?

Mine has always been not being invited to the table. I’m brash and spicy. Not everybody gets my sense of humor. I’ve almost had to barge my way in, grab a chair and pull it up to the table. Do not be afraid to lean into who you are, create a community around you and build what you enjoy. I get quiet sometimes in professional spaces. I get that Imposter syndrome. However, if you realize how amazing your story is and you lean into it and tell people exactly how you want, you bring out the best quality, sound and audio. You are talking to the people you want to talk to and they’re going to respond in such wonderful ways. Do not be afraid to go after what you believe in.

I love that, Pixie. I feel like you’ve mastered Twitter. I don’t know too many podcasters that go all in there.

I love Twitter. Twitter has been amazing. This space is able to voice my opinion. My profile, if you go and read it, it’s spicy and then if you see my post, they’re not safe for work. However, if you get to hear me and hear the way that I talk to people in Spaces, it opens up doors because you think you’re going to get one thing and then I sucker punch it with another.

That’s part of life. This is Maria. I love your attitude in here, Pixie. A lot of us, if we concentrate too much on one little niche subject and we don’t let our personalities out there, unleash. Your followers and audience is going to like you even more and they’re going to respect that. Even if you piss a few people off along the way, it’s like they’re not meant to be your listeners anyway. It’s all right. That’s what I say.

I was going to add to what Pixie was saying. My biggest challenge is I’m a cohosting newbie compared to pretty much everybody here but I have been doing backend editing for the other podcasts for years. One of the things that I had to learn quickly when I started cohosting was I needed to take up space. Not as far as being a cohost and on the show but also in the podcasting community. I never felt like I belonged there.

It was like, “I’m an editor. I work on the back end. It doesn’t count,” but it does count. It does matter. Even people who are reading, even if maybe you’re not hosting or cohosting and you’re doing the backend, that’s important. Without the backend people, there would not be a show. I want you to know that you belong in the podcast community and you do take up space and it is worth it.

Did you find any statistics? You were looking into whether the people behind the scenes if it’s male-dominated as well. Did you manage to find any?

I looked so hard for that information. I can’t find it. I believe that it’s probably also pretty much the same as the hosting statistics but I’m guessing on that. If anybody has those statistics or has any insight on that, I would love to hear about it because I searched for a while.

When you go to the conferences, what are the conferences like?

What I would say, Nola, about that is these are all secondary sources but because a lot of early podcasting came from the radio industry, which is very male-dominated as well, unfortunately, that has bled over.

I’m going to share our statistics. I’m the CEO of my company. We’re a predominantly women-owned company as well. We are majority women-owned. We have 108 staff members around the world and we pay women more than we pay men here. It has nothing to do with the fact that men aren’t valued. It’s just the fact that we happen to have more women in leadership. 11 of our 15 teams so our video, audio, blog, social share and graphics, all of those teams, are run by women. Women are in leadership positions in our company.

It makes a difference in terms of the makeup of your company over time. We do end up with about a 65% women-to-male ratio in terms of employment here. We also have tipped the scales because of that in the makeup of our client base. The industry is running, I don’t remember the exact last statistics but it was under 40% or somewhere between 36% and 37% women podcast hosts. We doubled that. We’re at about 60% somewhere right around there.

I had another question that has come up in a conversation that I had as far as unseen challenges. I feel like a lot of early podcasters are trying to figure out which direction to go in their show. When you first get out there with your podcast, everybody wants to be your guest. I feel like one unforeseen challenge is how do you say no to all of the people that are constantly pitching you. Does anybody want to speak about that?

Go ahead, Nola.

I’m new like Marisa too. I started in December 2021 so I’m not the expert. The way that I’ve had to deal with that, Reena, is I’ve created my private community on my networks for my podcast. I’m charging for that and I give podcasts guests access to the community so it’s got a dollar value. I want people who are going to be in my community that is going to be a fit for the community and have the potential to add value there.

It helps me say no to people that I don’t know and that I have no idea whether you’re wanting to come on the podcast because you want to promote something. That’s not what my podcast is about. My podcast is about ideas, concepts and what’s possible. It’s not necessarily about pitching a product. For me, creating that private network that has a dollar value helps me say no.

I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve done thousands of interviews. I do recommend this to my clients too. In the early days, I practiced a yes policy. You don’t necessarily know when you’re first starting your show, like in the first six months, what’s going to resonate with your audience and you. Everything about it is not all dialed in. You’re exploring it and experimenting.

I tended to say yes in the early days and I recommend saying yes in the early days as long as you’re positive they’re not a mismatch and/or they’re not going to be selling your audience. Those are my two requirements. If it’s a health and wellness and I don’t have a show about health and wellness at all or it’s not something we touch on, then I would say no. If they plan to sell something or if it seems like they sell something and I do check them out when they apply so I’ll check out and see how they were on somebody else’s show, I will say no if I think that there isn’t a way to control that. That’s it. That was my requirement in the early days.

After that, I get very dialed in and detailed. I say no a lot but I ignore a lot more than I say no to because 90% of the people who reach out to me are agencies and not real people. If it’s not the real person taking the time to reach out to me, then they don’t deserve a response. Typically, it’s a bad email, to begin with. You can tell where it’s a chat message and it seems like they haven’t listened to the show before. From that, I ignore it because that doesn’t warrant a response. They didn’t take a realistic amount of time to ask me to be on my show.

With that being said, I’ve been using PodMatch and I love it. Their AI is doing a good job over there of making the right connections. You’re not inundated with them offline so you can be clear in your messaging and say, “I don’t think this is a fit and here’s why.” You can have a quick little conversation about it. What I do is practice and if they’re not right for me yet and I’ll explain what it takes to be right for me, I try to refer them to somebody else whom they will be right for. It had served me so well because those people, even when I denied them on my show, sent me somebody even better. That’s how I practice my guessing. We need to practice great guest etiquette on our end so that the guests are better when they come on board as well.

We need to practice really great guest etiquette on our end so that guests are better when they come on board. #MarketingYourPodcast #HectorSantiesteban #podcastinterview Click To Tweet

I love everything you said, especially the ignore. I’m doing more of that too, especially if it’s from a publicist. A cold outrage, you’re right. If they’re not even reaching out to you themselves, then that is okay. Has anybody else had success on PodMatch or any other guesting sites that they want to mention?

I love PodMatch so I’m like Tracy. I’ve had great success with it. Their AI system does a good job matching people up that would be a good fit for your show. I also take the option of speaking to other shows so I’ve been able to expand my reach by going on other shows as well. I use Podcast Guests, which is a great platform. They will highlight your show in their newsletter. If you need an introduction, I can introduce you to Jessica, who will send you the form to fill out. I also use Matchmaker. Matchmaker is okay. It comes in spurts and those are the ones that have been pretty successful for me. I agree. I’m ignoring a lot more than I respond to because I get inundated by the public, all those people as well.

This is Maria. Are all of you noticing more emails coming in from odd publicist podcast promoter-type people? I love that idea of ignoring.

Maria, it’s a great idea for you to use a different email address in your RSS feed than your personal address. I might have Info@TheBingeFactor.com as my email and my RSS feed so then when emails come in there, I know if they’ve used the feed to pull my information rather than somebody referring them to me and using my actual real email address.

I get approached on LinkedIn mostly and Twitter.

Is it from individuals or publicists looking to place their clients on shows that they feel like they might match with?

Honestly, it’s seen people that I know. I have had some publicists but not that many. I started in December 2021 too. I have 30 episodes and it’s a new podcast.

The number one thing is when you have a guest on to make sure that your personalities match and that the conversation’s going to flow because there’s nothing worse than trying to pull information from someone or have them take the ball and run with it and they don’t even leave the host a word in there. That’s the worst. I’m like, “This isn’t a webinar. This is a conversation,” and all that stuff.

People approach me on LinkedIn and they’ll pitch me to be on the podcast. My response is, “I need to get to know you. I need to know if I’m going to like you so engage me with your content.” I like LinkedIn. I like engaging with people on Twitter and having those conversations ahead of time. I’ve got a history of following people for a long time before I ever talk to you or connect with you directly. It’s like, “I want to see what you’re about before I’m going to get you live to talk to me.” That’s the way that I operate. I haven’t had a problem getting people that I want. It’s not like I don’t get told no but the people mostly that I’ve approached, because I already have some version of a relationship with them, I’m being told yes. It’s effective.

Social audio is a great place to start. I’m telling a lot of people that are starting their podcast journey, “Get on social audio because it will help you find your podcast style too, having conversations with people that you don’t know.” You can have a valuable conversation out here and then say, “Come on to my show and we’ll talk about what we were talking about.” It’s practice ground for some. It’s great.

LinkedIn has added audio too so I’ve been exploring LinkedIn audio. This is the first Twitter Spaces that I’ve done. This is my practice. Go big or go home.

It’s perfect because, on LinkedIn, it’s not recorded so if you mess up, “Oh, well.”

That is an interesting difference between the audio spaces. This is cool.

Do you have any other tips or strategies around social audio, Maria?

I’m into repurposing if I can and I find that Wisdom and Clubhouse’s audio quality is a lot better. Here in Spaces, the quality isn’t there. In LinkedIn audio, you can’t record anyway. Every conversation doesn’t need to be recorded. It’s so silly people are having a fit about not being able to record. I have had people on Wisdom with me. I enjoy the Wisdom app because of its one-on-one nature of it. I don’t necessarily want ten people in a conversation like that. As a listener of a podcast, that’s a big mess to me as a listener. It’s fascinating. With podcasting, with any kind of content, you create what you enjoy listening to.

On Clubhouse, I used to hook up Clubhouse to my actual microphone so I would record through that into whatever I had the Zoom device or anything like that. What I was saying is that I record my end of the conversation because in some of those spaces, like Clubhouse, you’re not supposed to record. That way, I would be able to utilize them as a teaser. My team would take a little clip of it and say, “Here’s what you missed on Clubhouse this week. You don’t want to miss the next one.” You can use it for promotion purposes.

I agree except on all of these platforms, it’s pretty much common knowledge that once you speak in a social media or audio space, the host is able to use it. You are agreeing to have your voice recorded.

You’re right. In some of the spaces though, people don’t realize what they’re saying or anything or the way that it’s recorded is not great quality. We would record through a higher recording on our end so we could reuse what we said.

When you’re in a social audio conversation on Clubhouse or something, that’s not necessarily a podcast episode. On Wisdom, it can work because you do have one person with you. All talks on Wisdom are recorded whether you want them to be or not. On Clubhouse, you have the option like here on Spaces. You can turn the recording feature on or off.

On Clubhouse, unfortunately, once in a while, I’ll have somebody in a room and they don’t realize they’re being recorded. I never would repurpose somebody’s voice unless I had their permission anyway but there are a lot of bad actors out there so you never know. I say put good stuff out there that you’re proud of anyway. You never know where your voice is going to end up. That’s my idea on social audio.

We should always assume we’re being recorded somewhere.

Pixie, would you mind sharing? You have taken over the world with your Twitter Spaces. I don’t know if you are aware of the genius that you have been. There’s so much genius behind it. I’d love to get your insight. What are you doing that’s creating so much community and people are coming back? Can you talk about how you’ve built what you built with Twitter Spaces?

I started here on Twitter years ago. All of these followers that you see on my page, from the number 600, have been because of Twitter Spaces. I got to tell you, they rolled it out and I started jumping into Spaces. I had no idea what I was doing because I was a new podcaster. This social audio was all new. It was exciting. It was like the Wild, Wild West of audio. Nobody knew how to unmute themselves or what it was doing. We would get rugged. We didn’t have a cohost in the beginning.

Now we got two and all of these amazing emojis. You could go directly to the person’s page as soon as you could hear them talk. It was like, “This is amazing. I could see myself as a podcaster. I could host my podcast through Twitter Spaces. I could do a lot of audio and interviews and connect with people here because everybody I know is here on Twitter.”

It was a natural progression. At first, I didn’t get the hosting abilities. I only got the speaking abilities and I thought that was pretty okay. I could jump into a lot of things. You saw a lot of NFT spaces and follow-for-follow. Make sure you get one million followers. There’s a lot of junk and spam. I was like, “We don’t have a podcasting space.” I started hosting spaces back in July of 2021. There were probably six people in the whole group. That was it. It was a very small, intimate group of people that were willing to answer my podcasting questions. I have a lot. I always do and it worked.

I played with times, days and as much of the audio as I could and then I realized that I could record. I could get my audio from the Periscope because that’s where this is built. I could get my recordings, edit them in Audacity and have a podcast. I was like, “This is great but what kind of podcast do I want?” People seem to resonate with, “Let’s ask podcasters other questions. Let’s dive in and have a deep discussion.” In October 2021, I launched the Project Podcast and it was all built here on Twitter Spaces. It blew up. I got to 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, to 10,000 followers in 2022. The numbers and the growth are here on Twitter if you’re willing to use the new audio platform and put yourself out there.

I’m not doing anything new. I’m putting myself out there and having a discussion like what we’re doing here, bringing beautiful minds together in a civil discourse where we can say, “Yes, I like that,” or “No, that didn’t work for me.” It’s so beautiful because you can repurpose that content. I always told everybody that I was recording. Every Twitter space was like a podcast. I introduced myself. I always did a reset of the room and then closed out the room.

I probably have 50 different recordings sitting on my laptop of Twitter Spaces. It’s so amazing that the community that has been built from podcasters is helping other podcasters. I’ve had over 100 people in a room before wanting to know more about podcasting. We’re doing amazing things. We need people to get on board and help one another. Learning, teaching and growing are probably one of the easiest ways to get somebody to know what you are all about.

It’s so cool what you said. A lot of times when we’re on social audio, people will come up and right away, they’ll go on about their credentials and everything. What we need to do is hear who they are and what they’re talking about. I love what you said there. We need more listeners and more conversations like the one we’re having here. As you were saying at the beginning, Hector. Seriously, many people still don’t know what a podcast is.

There’s a big misconception. Everybody thinks they need to be a podcast host. We need to let people know what they are so that we have more listeners too and be approachable and kind people. It’s a microcosm of what can happen in the world at large, the whole idea of collaboration, sharing and hearing people that think differently than you. Either you like it, as Pixie said or sometimes you don’t like it. It makes you surer of what you do believe. Conversation is so important. I love it. That’s all.

Congratulations, Pixie. That is so incredible in such a short amount of time. You said that you have a lot of questions. Do you have any now?

I always have questions. I don’t consider myself a professional, to be honest. I consider myself a crap poster and infamous here on Twitter, not taking myself seriously. It’s interesting to see when I jump into professional spaces because I do have to bring a little bit more of myself and allow myself to go, “I know what I’m talking about. I’m not a crap poster.” That rubs people wrong.

I’ve been kicked out of rooms because of what my profile says. It’s so interesting to see that when the space wasn’t for me and I created my space, people are willing to come to hear what I have to say. If I go to them, sometimes it might not be the space for me. I want to encourage people. If you are not finding the right climate or community around you, build it for yourself. If you want more women in podcasts, invite them. Bring them to the table. Show them that they can do as much as you’ve done. Encourage them to be part of the spaces because this is lovely.

I feel like that transitions nicely into something that Nola wanted to talk about. How can we open the door for other women and non-binary podcast hosts? How can we be more inclusive? Nola, do you want to talk a little bit about diversity and inclusion?

I wanted to go back to the thing about radio. If what Hector mentioned is the fact that radio is very male-dominated and when podcasting first started, like those people transitioned from radio into podcasting, this means that this is an ongoing issue that has existed. When did radio start? Was it in the 1920s? This is a deeper issue beyond female representation and podcasts. How do we make it more diverse and inclusive so that we’ve got gender inclusion, non-binary but also people of color with different backgrounds? How do we amplify those voices and make them more approachable that way?

Honestly, does it come down to sponsorship, like looking at where the money goes in the industry? I’m new to podcasting. I don’t know everything about this. These are questions that I have. A lot of these are self-funded podcasts. With the money that’s in podcasting, do we look at the sponsors and what their diversity and inclusion strategies are for their companies and then call them out on the podcasts that they’re sponsoring and the fact that they don’t necessarily sponsor diversity?

You hit that right, Nola. The money and podcasting are going to only 2% of the podcast and all of that is predominantly almost 80% male in terms of the money in the traditional media model. One of the things we’re working on is looking at the valuation of podcasts in a different light so that you can say, “I did the math. Joe Rogan is supposed to have eleven million listeners.” That’s not true. He has about 2.2 million podcast listeners. He has eleven million in the audience when he used to have a YouTube channel. It’s very different. He cited that statistic. It’s not like I found it behind the scenes. He says that. When he moved over to Spotify, that’s what he ended up with.

I read an article that said that if it were eleven million, it would be like Taylor Swift dropping an album every single day. The reality is that it’s not equivalent. If Taylor Swift dropped an album, there would be hundreds of millions of girls out there going to buy stuff and begging their parents to pay for stuff. The men who are the predominant audience of his listener base don’t spend money. What are the advertisers doing over there? They’re not gaining a lot of conversions.

If we had a female who was doing 200,000 listeners, their listeners are going to convert at a much higher rate in terms of sales volume for those brands that are advertising on it than 2.2 million male listeners who are under the age of 20. It’s very different in not the demographics of the audience but the action that they take and what they do with that.

My goal at my company, the technology and the things that we’re trying to build and figure out is how to discover what podcasts are more valuable than others. What are those characteristics of that that have nothing to do with download numbers at the end of the day and that has to do with audience interest, audience conversion and keywords that matter? What can we do to make sure and change the model by which monetization happens? That’s my ultimate goal within a year and a half.

I love what you said, Tracy. This is Maria again. We all know it’s a societal problem with the gender issue. I was talking to Rose Horowitz who is a journalist out here in Twitter Spaces and such. She’s done various shows on gender inequality in broadcasting, media, news and journalism. In men’s voices, people have the impression they have more credibility even amongst female listeners. We need to continue conversations like this and more companies like yours, Tracy. It is true. We need confident women out there supplying valuable shows and information and getting to those audiences more powerfully.

Thank you, Maria. I don’t want all of you to underestimate the value of your voice. I am booked up through Thanksgiving for live speaking engagements. They are coming to me because they do recognize that they need diversity. They need more women in the BIPOC community. They need more of that. It’s being recognized at the event level. We need to step up and make sure that we’re taking advantage of those opportunities. When we do it, we’re also going to give case studies and shout-outs to other BIPOC, other women and podcasts that are underserved in terms of the value that they’re receiving.

Don’t underestimate the value of your voice today. #MarketingYourPodcast #HectorSantiesteban #podcastinterview Click To Tweet

Congratulations, Tracy. That’s amazing. Have you seen any other spaces where women are gathering and having conversations like this?

To be honest with you, a lot of the space that I’m speaking at is all NFT, crypto and blockchain, for which I wrote a column for Inc. Magazine on disruptive technologies and a lot about blockchain. It’s a logical place for them to come to me, thank goodness, but it had been silent for almost two years and I hadn’t had anyone asking me to talk or speak about that.

That area is growing. There’s a lot of community over there. Continuum.Market is working in that space and it’s run by a woman, Kristina Bruhahn, who’s also a podcaster. There are spaces like that that are making community differences. Stepping up and saying to event planners, “This isn’t the way it should be. We have other people or speakers we can suggest to you,” that changed it for me. The tech space has been low for a long time.

Does anyone else know any women’s groups that we should be supporting or be a part of?

Twila Dang. She helps women in podcasting and once a month, she does a Twitter Space for women in podcasting.

The other is JJ Ramberg in Goodpods. Goodpods is run by a brother and sister team. JJ is amazing and she’s put a lot of effort into the app. It’s one of the most beautiful, easy-to-use listening apps out there. I use it when I’m doing my listening. I have to do research on all the listening apps but when I’m doing my listening, I use Goodpods. We have to remember that if consume these things, we need to support these wonderful women and the BIPOC community working in podcasting.

JJ is great. I interviewed her. She came onto my Facebook group with me. I have a podcasting Facebook group and it was like, “What is Goodpods?” A lot of people don’t know what that is too. It was fun to have JJ on a live stream. It wasn’t a podcast interview necessarily but there are a lot of powerful women out there.

I tried to do a Clubhouse room called Women on the Mic and that was with Rose Horowitz. It would be fun to get more rooms like this going across these platforms because we don’t know where people are. The more momentum it builds, the better. Let me know if you ever do more stuff. I don’t have a lot of followers here on Twitter. I haven’t been on Twitter very long but I love social audio. It’s so great to have conversations where we aren’t sitting here reading off a script and trying to self-promo our shows and stuff. It’s like, “Let’s make the world better.” It’s cool. Thank you.

I want to hop in. I don’t want to be the one to end this conversation. I want to thank all of our panelists who have given their time. On a whim, I sent out a message to some people that were recommended hoping that they would grace us with their presence. Typically, we do these and the idea is for everybody to have their beverage. I raise a glass to you, ladies, for being the shining example in eliminating all the excuses and for people to follow behind.

I want to thank you for that. I’m sure all the other podcasters that come behind you feel the same way. I want to let the conversation keep going but I want to acknowledge any of the panelists. Thank you for your time. If you want to hang out and keep talking then, by all means, thanks so much for all this. This was fantastic.

I want to acknowledge you, Hector. This is what I know. It does sometimes take men recognizing the value of women to be able to help raise our voices and elevate that. Thank you for recognizing that and bringing that forward. It’s invaluable and we appreciate you for that.

Thank you.

I have a question. Do you make use of the communities here on Twitter? Are you a member? I see several podcasting communities here. I was wondering what your thoughts were on how communities were working here as far as support for podcasters here on Twitter. Does anybody have any feedback on that?

I didn’t know they existed.

I can send you a link. They exist. The one podcasting community I’m in is very dry. There’s no real interaction in there.

I found that too. It’s more for self-promotion.

The one that I’m in is a non-self-promotion, more of asking questions but it’s dry and you don’t get very many people interacting. It’s like there’s a Twitter space community and it’s also dry. I feel like hosting spaces gives personality to what’s going on. For me, communities are not hitting the mark.

Anybody else? I haven’t had that great experience with communities. I’m not sure if they know exactly what the intention is or where it’s going. It would be nice if everybody was all in a community talking about what should we talk about on Friday at our podcast space but I don’t find a lot of conversations happening in there.

I don’t know anything about the communities. I also wanted to ask Deanna. She has a women’s podcasting group that she does. Maria, if you could talk a little bit about your Facebook community? I have found starting a Facebook group has been my most engaged sounding board.

We have a network. We have about 2,000 women that’s in the network and you’re free to jump in there, share your podcast, ask any questions and connect with the ladies there. It is free to join. We do review swaps on Mondays. We do a guest swap on Wednesdays. There are a lot of people that do make connections and it’s been very successful for a lot of the ladies.

As a founding partner, I’ve taken over social media. We’re slowly starting to grow our social media by telling the ladies to tag us so I can share it to get more involvement and so women can keep supporting each other and empowering one another. It’s massively growing and it’s very organic, which is great. If anybody’s interested in the link, I’m happy to send it over. All you got to do is sign up and you’re good to go.

Thank you. I’ll follow up with you. I have a Facebook group and it has almost 6,000 people in it. It’s called Podcast Support Community. I inherited the group when it was about 2,500 members big. I didn’t even know how that happened. I just became the admin. I reached out to the admin. He quit the group because it was becoming too much of a link-drop place. I changed it. It’s a public group on Facebook, which means everybody can see the posts but you have to be a member to be featured on the page in the community. I see Dionne Sanchez is there in the audience. Dionne is a member of the group. She has the Words of Heart podcast. It’s a mix and I love it because it is podcast creators and podcast service providers.

I allow people to come into the community if they are selling stuff too. My number one rule is no DMs without permission. You cannot link-drop on other people’s posts and stuff like that. I’m strict. People get mad. I make everybody be nice to other people first or I will not approve their post on the page. I am about it doesn’t matter what your topic is. I want everyone to help each other out. It’s to learn and evolve as podcasters, not just link drop.

That’s my Facebook group. You are all more than welcome to go there. I find the same problem at Clubhouse too. I can be in a room with a bunch of people that I like and I don’t necessarily want to follow 100 new people. Those off-platform places are great places to mingle. I love mixing it up between modes of communication whether it’s video, audio or stuff like that.

I’m curious if any of you want to talk about where you would like to expand. As with Pixie, I feel like you’ve gone all in on Twitter. Maria, you’re managing a Facebook group of 6,000 people. That’s insane. Have you thought about other platforms that you would like to expand to and any strategies there?

I’m expanding into TikTok because I want to get better at the visuals but it’s weird. It’s touch and goes. My podcast is 1 hour and 20 minutes long every time we record and TikToks are 7 seconds so I don’t even know.

I’ve delved into TikTok as well. I have two TikTok accounts. One is for silly stuff either to promote my podcast or do silly stuff with my kids. The other TikTok account is more meditation-based. It’s more my photography, videos and breathing exercise stuff. You won’t see my face on that particular account. It is pretty stuff. I don’t know what I’m doing over there either. It’s not like I’ve gone viral or anything. It’s like Pixie said, just testing.

A lot of people are starting to do live streams as you’ve seen on YouTube, Facebook and stuff like that. They’re calling them podcasts when it’s a talk show. There’s this growing phase where people are starting these things and calling them podcasts. Educating the public is a big part of what’s going on around the world too. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing a podcast on video too but it is primarily an audio medium, if that makes sense.

We do video podcasts. We see them mostly being much more successful over on YouTube than on TikTok. Tiktok and YouTube shorts, we utilize those all the time for the promo clips. We utilize TikTok as a promotion for the long tail episode or video. I do see that working fairly well for most podcasters. I do have quite a few TikTokers who then came to podcasting because, like Pixie was saying, they craved the long form. They were tired of the seven-second thing and they wanted to do something more of a deep dive so podcasting was the logical alternative for them and video casting, the whole thing. That seems to be working out well as a platform growth for them. I do see growth there.

What we’re exploring are deeper ways to utilize LinkedIn. The LinkedIn newsletter has been tremendous for us. That sounds odd but we embed the YouTube videos right into them. We link them directly to our blog pages and podcasts. The newsletters, when I started it, we got 1,000 subscribers to the LinkedIn newsletter within the first week. It does have a nice little push on that. We’re working on expanding our LinkedIn group and making it maybe public coming up in the future. People who are Podetize clients can only participate in that LinkedIn community but we’re going to expand that and open it up.

That makes me want to follow your newsletter.

It’s the same thing.

Talk about that.

I only make content once a week for, let’s say Feed Your Brand or The Binge Factor. The Binge Factor is interviews while Feed Your Brand is topics. One topic was about the high value of your podcast show description. It’s a nichey detailed topic. We record that. We do 15 to 20 minutes of that, then we upload it to our podcast and make it a video as well. It goes video, audio, blog and social share. About two weeks later, it gets repurposed as an article in Authority Magazine.

If it’s an interview, it gets put there. If it’s a tip article, it gets straight out into the medium. From there, it goes to the LinkedIn newsletter about a week after that. It’s all the same content. Plus, we have shorts, video clips and all the promo pieces that are coming out of it. We only sit down and record for twenty minutes and everything we need for probably a month is created from that.

What would you tell someone who was thinking of creating a newsletter?

It has to be well written. You can’t just post your transcript there. That’s not going to work. You need to sit down and make sure you write it like an article, tease them into it, get them excited with your opening paragraph and put a great headline on it. The headline is essential to getting anyone to read anything. It can’t be something that was like, “I got what I wanted out of the headline so I didn’t read it.” You want to leave them hanging from the headline so that they need to read it. It’s all about enticing. Lucky for me, I’ve worked as a writer for a decade so it’s a little bit easier for me to say, “You can do this too.”

Women In Podcasting: A newsletter has to be well-written. You can’t just post your transcript there. You need to really sit down and make sure you write it like an article.

It’s not as easy as that. You can hire people to help you with that. You can hire people who are good copywriters or who are good at creating great headlines. The major tool that I use to screen my headlines is the CoSchedules Headline tool. I don’t think it’s even $200 a year for it. You can do hundreds of headlines over the course of the year. I love the tool. I will type anything in there and you’ll see its ranking rating. It’ll teach you how to write a better headline.

CoSchedule is like Buffer but a bit more expensive. It’s a scheduling tool that a lot of agencies use. They built this amazing headline tool that’s super easy to use. You type your headline in there and it starts to tell you, “You need more emotional words. You need fewer words in your title. You need more words.” It’ll give you a rating based. It has live changes. It keeps up your rating. If you’re looking for a judgment, I can get a headline that ranks between 70 and 80. It’s perfect. It will do what it needs to do.

Before you used that tool, are there any other tools that you used?

There are lots of other tools that lots of people use and there are even some that are automated copywriting and stuff but I’ve never been a fan of it. This is the only one I’ve consistently come back to using again and again. Not that you shouldn’t have some Grammarly help and stuff like that on occasion but it doesn’t change the way you write it.

What I do know is that writing from your podcast, writing the same topic, what you know about and using what you said there, if you hire a ghostwriter or a copy team, they already have the essence of what you’re going to say. You can hire someone and be more successful doing that than you can hire someone to write blogs for you with no context as to what your opinion is and what your viewpoint on the topic is.

Does anybody else have thoughts about blogs, newsletters or tools that they use?

I’ll say from a transcript perspective that I use Adobe Premier to edit. We do video and audio so I’m using the Adobe suite for that. I will say for those of you who are using the Adobe suite, they do have a transcript option that will go through and write the whole transcript for you. You need to look at it because some of it is not going to be exactly accurate but it does help get a lot of that done ahead of time. Once you get your transcript edited, you can click one button and then you have captions that you can add to your episode as well. I’ve found that to be a big-time saver and it’s a huge money saver because we were using Rev for that before.

I’ve done a deep exploration and Marisa’s right. The Adobe version is good. They do have about 95% accuracy, which is the guideline to what you should be using from a transcription service. Rev is right up there. I have to say Deepgram is coming up with better pricing and even better transcription ability. They might be the ones to watch for.

I haven’t even heard of that. I’m interested, too, Tracy. You were talking about monetization a little bit. Are you having conversations with brands about considering partnering with more women?

We are working from a different angle on it. I thought that was the way I would go but it was such a difficult conversation because, at the end of the day, they’re mired by their view of statistics. They believe in the IAB model, which is the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which downs your statistics. I have a syndication hosting company so I can see what they do. If I switch my show to IAB compliance, I’m going to lose thousands of listens per month based on their formula which has nothing to do with real place or not.

It’s not of interest to someone who’s an independent podcaster or in the early starting stages to do something like that and be compliant. That’s a problem with big brands. They have this perception that podcast advertising is branding only and doesn’t have any conversionary value because they’ve never done it in that direct response marketing model. We said, “This is going to be a hard road for us to convince them otherwise and get enough podcast advertisers for our podcasters. What else can we do?” We’ve adopted a new partnership with a company called Consumable and we’re excited about it.

I’ve not even publicly announced it. Although we have a relationship and everything’s going forward, I’ve not put out a press release about it yet. We probably will. With Consumable, what you see is a banner advertisement on a streaming video. You might see them on Hulu and other places like that. They also put them on big-name websites like CNN.com, ESPN and WebMD. They run banner ads on the side. They have big-name sponsors who are looking for content. What we’ve done is created a partnership where we can put and get discovered podcasts within the niche.

Women In Podcasting: We’ve created a partnership where we can put and get discovered podcasts within the niche.

If someone wants to advertise on WebMD and they want a health and wellness podcast, I can serve them up through a special feed in our system. We have this multi-feed system that we built into our platform so we can do this. That gives a clip of your show and feeds it out to this Consumable feed that’s being fed there. What happens is I can’t pay you for that because I’m not getting paid for that but I can make sure that your show is getting discovered and showing up on WebMD.com.

We are putting in a backend system where we take photographs of that so that you can then share that screenshot and hopefully, that will get you more advertisers in the future. The second thing is the advertiser who’s paying for that space, let’s say it might be Kaiser Permanente or something like that, pay for that space that those podcasts are playing in. Kaiser might come back and say, “That podcast was played hundreds of times. I’d like to sponsor that show because that one was played so much more than the others that were in the feed mix.” They have an opportunity to look at it based on content response and not listen at all. I hope we’ll be able to flip the switch on how podcasts are discovered and how they’re monetized and chosen by big brands by doing that.

That’s exciting and amazing. Thank you for sharing that with us pre-announcing it. That’s cool. I feel like you have very much mastered partnerships. I would like to bring that up a little bit because I feel like I’ve had some good opportunities through partnerships and that’s helped grow my show a little bit. I had a reality star reach out to me and ask me if I would do 50,000 impressions and she would do 50,000 impressions and you can track that. For me, that made sense. I was like, “As long as it doesn’t matter how long it takes me to get that.”

She gets that in a day. For me it would take longer. She was good with it and I was good with it. I had a celebrity that I wanted to have on my show, Jerry Springer. I reached out to him and was like, “She’s going to be promoting me. If you’re considering going through with letting me interview you, you should do it while she’s promoting you because she’s going to get you to reach.” That worked out where I was able to interview him and I was able to partner with her. Can anybody talk about how partnerships have been beneficial for them?

I look for partnerships for the network to offer to the ladies that are part of the network and so far, it’s been working out pretty well. Different things that they can use to market. I have partnered with somebody on Twitter that will auto pretty much almost automate your Twitter posts for every episode you put out and other various opportunities for them to either improve their speaking. They’re going to do speaking engagements for an affiliate with Steve Lowell. I’m not sure if you know who Steve Lowell is but we’ve partnered with him and his team. It’s things like that to help them improve their brand, voice and everything that they’re doing within their podcast.

I don’t know who Steve Lowell is but that sounds cool. Everybody could use it in improving their speaking or brand. That sounds like an awesome partnership. Can you talk a little bit about him and how you connected?

Yes. He reached out to me, I don’t even remember which platform but to be a guest on my show. He went through my interview process and then we booked the time to record. He’s shared the stage with like Jack Canfield and some other big names. I released this episode. He’s a high-impact speaker coach type of deal. It costs $30,000 to work one on one with him but he offers a program monthly so membership that people can join. It’s a group setting instead of one-on-one but you’re still going to get the same benefits and learn his particular style. He was very dynamic. I loved the conversation and what he’s doing and what he offers. He was a pretty cool guest.

I’m always cautious about partnerships, Reena, shared audiences and everything. I take it slow because I need to make sure that there’s a value exchange that is going to do my audience well. Even though I have a 400,000-person list, I would never email that list to anyone unless I was sure that they were going to get tremendous value.

That’s where I have to be cautious about those types of partnerships. I make it a practice not to do any partnerships with someone who’s not a client. If they’re not a Podetize client and not experiencing what they’re doing with us every day, then I’m not going to do more than a, “Let’s do a show together and interview each other.” That is as far as it goes.

I also then draw the line at, if they’ve got a product and I’m not using it, then we have a problem. If they’ve got a course or a program, I need to explore that and make sure that it’s right for my audience. We don’t have conflicting viewpoints because that can also confuse my client base. I am careful about these partnerships. Sometimes they take a long time to pull into place and make them happen because of that. When they work out, they work out tremendously well for everyone involved.

I’m excited to follow your journey with the Consumable.

They’ve been around for probably 15 to 20 years doing website advertising when banner ads first started coming in.

I’m going to check them out. That’s very interesting. Have you ever tried the product model of different CPG brands or anything like that?

I had a partnership with Hewlett Packard when we had our 3D Print podcast but what I found was better with that was rather than running their ads on our show, we partnered with them to run a special series. We did a 25-episode special series. We charged a lot of money for it. We did about eight interviews behind the scenes with people that would never have come on camera or the mic before from their company.

We got to talk to them about sustainability, distribution and all kinds of geeky topics that people in our audience would be very interested in hearing. What it did was it created this tremendous long-term value and a third-party endorsement of Hewlett Packard’s 3D printing program. Coming from us, who had over 650 episodes at the time and had done the podcast for over 5 years at that time, it was an endorsement that lasted.

The reason they chose us wasn’t because of the download numbers. It was simply because we ranked on the first page of Google on every topic you could say 3D print podcast with. That’s what ended up getting their attention and partnering with us. It was one of the best and most fun partnership programs we did.

Have you tried to replicate that ever?

We’ve recommended it to other clients who’ve done similar models but for our purposes, we’re not podcasters as influencers. It’s not our model of business. For The Binge Factor or Feed Your Brand, I’d never do that because it is Podetize-sponsored and my job is to make sure that people fall in love with me, Podetize and everything that we do through the process of listening to those shows. To put other people’s ads on there would never work. It isn’t a model for any of our other podcasts.

That’s everything I’ve got. Does anybody have any questions? I see David. Should we add another male voice? David, what do you think of all of this?

I’m pretty new to what you are talking about. My podcast is more Apple-influenced and technology-based so I’m not in the advertising part as of yet. I’m still been exploring that option but that sounds great from what I’m hearing.

Take the time to plug your show. Tell us about your show and what has your experience been like.

My show’s called In Touch with iOS and that’s focused on Apple-related stuff like iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and all that stuff. I get a lot of guests from the Apple community. It stays focused on a lot of things influencing the technology world and Apple specifically. It seems like I’m getting a little bit of traction. I’ve been doing a Patreon campaign and Buy Me Coffee, that kind of stuff and starting to get a little bit of traction on that. I haven’t explored any of the advertising stuff that you have been talking about yet. It’s a fun show. I do more for the passion for technology that I have and so far so good.

David, are you blogging and YouTubing it?

Yes, I have a YouTube channel. I post the audio portion of the show when we record live and stream it. I keep it up there but I’m working on doing more editing of the shows. I jumped into TikTok and looked to put some shorts on there. I’m starting to explore a little further in the social media realm. YouTube is a big place. The eyeballs are there. I have the need to grow that audience so I can start monetizing that. I’m nowhere near yet but I have been dabbling a lot of social media and trying to get it out there.

What about the blog?

I haven’t done anything blogging, per se. I probably should. I have a website and a lot of the show notes and information for what we talk about in each episode. It’s a weekly show so I have a lot of information in there each week about what we talk about. I haven’t explored going into any blog and having the time. This is a side gig.

I suspect it’s going to be powerful for you as you go forward, especially as you decide to monetize it because the number one thing we do when our iPhone’s not working or something’s not going right is we Google it or Google will service us up something that’s a blog or something in YouTube. Those are the two places that get served up before a podcast does. Dialing that in and then also making sure that your episode titles are helpful questions, and answers to questions.

They seem to be. In one episode, we talked about Focus mode and I always try to put a topic related to an iPhone issue. I agree with you. Blogging is an important thing to do. Putting it in conjunction with social media and doing all that other stuff is important. It’s starting to grow further. It was a hobby but I’m starting to see some traction so I know we’ve got some work to do.

Congratulations and good luck. Keep going.

I appreciate that.

I want to jump in and thank everybody again. We got to all the questions on there. I want to thank everybody for your time. This went well beyond my expectations. I originally put out a post because it felt like there was a need to do this and I had no idea that it would turn into this. I appreciate your time. I encourage you to go and get connected with everybody.

We mentioned that this was a LinkedIn party so follow them on LinkedIn or Twitter. Subscribe to their shows. Let’s hope that this can be the spark for future collaborations. I hope maybe in a couple of years, we’ll all look back and say, “Remember we were all on that Twitter space and that was the time when it came together?” The possibility of that is very great. Thank you so much for doing this again. We’ll see you at the next one.

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Marketing Your Podcast With Hector Santiesteban

Tracy Leigh Hazzard