Creating a Better Podcast Promotion Plan - podcast episode cover

Creating a Better Podcast Promotion Plan

Jul 13, 20241 hr 9 minEp. 5
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Episode description

One of the weakest parts of my podcast workflow — while also being something I get the most questions on — is my post-publish promotion plan (try saying that 5 times fast). So I thought in this “build in public” live stream, I’d create a plan, as well as the workflows to support that plan.

Originally Streamed April 24th, 2024

Learn more at https://podcastworkflows.com

Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome to the stream. I am going, well I meant to be a little bit early. Gonna go check and make sure the stream is everywhere it needs to be and see if everything's working properly. Alright, I am live on Twitter, that's good. Let's check YouTube. That's the big important one and it doesn't appear. Oh, yeah there we go. Great. So there's YouTube. If you are joining, let me know. Say hello. Let me know where you're coming from. And if you're gonna have any

questions about creating a promotional plan today. Oh, I gotta log into, I'm not logged in Twitch. What's going on there? This is like if I had a producer and I wasn't my own producer, this is the main thing that I would have my producer do. This is big and annoying. Obviously, I can't just log in to Twitch. Gotta get that six digit code. The worst form of two factor authentication. Let's see if I go to my channel. Here I am. Yes, very good, very good. And finally LinkedIn.

Am I on LinkedIn? This is the place where I probably need to be most ardent about checking because as far as I know, as far as I can tell, comments from LinkedIn do not come through on On Ecamm Live. So let me make sure to get the comments up and over here. All right, great and grand. Okay, so what I'm gonna do today for this live stream is probably find some music to play because this is going to be really more of a planning session where I

kind of work and talk through a little bit about what I'm doing. And it'll be fun. It's kind of forced work for me, right? Something that I might not do otherwise that I'm happy to do on a live stream while maybe fielding questions from people who are attending. So again, if you're coming in here, let me know, say hello, where you coming from. Do you have a podcast? Do you not have a podcast? If you do have a podcast, you know, tell me about it. What are you struggling with?

All sorts of stuff like that. I'm just setting up my environment here. And then the last thing I need to do is change the sound main multi track so that you can hear the music. I will also check on a separate device. Nice. So let's do this. This is pretty loud. I'll lower this a little bit. Music. We go. All right. Let me know how that sounds to people actually on the street. Probably a little bit lower. Okay, cool. So let's do this. I don't really have anything

prepared. I'll probably just bring up like a notion document. I think it's probably what I'll do. And we also make sure that you're not hearing the music twice. I don't think you are. But let me, you could be. So let's just go through close anything. Again, let me know if you're on the stream. Say hello. And let me know what you want to where you coming from. That's a good one. Sorry, my brain's like a little bit melty today. It was a weird day.

I what did I do? Oh, I was late to bringing my son to school because I dropped my daughter off at the daycare and somebody had a dead battery and I wanted to help them with the dead battery. And I apparently don't understand how jumping a car works. It's like I sparked a lot of things. It's a new it's a relatively new car. So and I just assumed everything was kind of the same as the old car and it wasn't so anyway, little little thrown off today. Okay. So, you know,

I'll just bring up a notion document here. Yeah, this will be good. My showing anything I shouldn't show. Let's go back into light mode and share the screen. So, yeah, sure is. Okay. So this is my podcast planner. And what I could probably do is is we got under checklists. So I do kind of have a pseudo SOP here. I also just rebranded the podcast. That went very smoothly. If you've been following along, that's what most of my

live streams have been about. And that went a lot more smoother, more smoother, a lot more smooth than I expected it to go. So really happy about that. I'm going to bring up there's no way I have the LinkedIn app here. I'm just going to bring up LinkedIn on my other screen. So I don't have to keep switching back and forth. See if anything's coming through there. Music's still a bit loud over here on LinkedIn. Thank you, Liam. Shout out to Liam. So let me find Apple Music.

Lower it a little bit. Also lower it here. Music So we'll see if that's better. Getting things set up, situated here. Volumes down there, right? I guess I can lower this and turn up my microphone. That might also be. Music All right. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you, Liam. Appreciate as always your help in troubleshooting these things. Livestreaming is hard, y'all. Okay. So let me do this and then this. Music Okay. So okay. What I'm currently doing for a promotion is not a whole lot.

I'm mostly just emailing my list. So the process for... You kind of see this is like kind of an outdated SOP. Music This is apparently only read part of the comments. My least favorite thing about live streaming on LinkedIn is that the comments don't show up as comments. The comments don't show up as comments and I cannot see the whole comment in the notification bubble, which like super drives me crazy because I can't see that now. But I'm going to guess,

Liam said... I don't want to guess. So I apologize, Liam. I can't... great. Much better. Fantastic. Yeah. I like that you can stream on LinkedIn. I guess this is just like Joe's druthers about streaming right now. I like that you can stream on LinkedIn and like absolutely hate like how clunky it is. And like maybe the app is better. Like maybe I should just get the LinkedIn app. Maybe I can check it on my phone where it maybe it's better there. But yeah, I can actually

see comments on the phone coming from the amazing Chester County, Pennsylvania. Wonderful place, Chester County. Really good people living there. Yeah. Okay. So let's let's get let's actually get into this now. I've got I think I've got everything I need up here. I'll go to Twitter. I won't go to Twitter. Okay. So this is this is mostly the same SOP. And it's the post production stuff. Like iTunes summary. So this is like kind of dated. The actual SOP is somewhere in my VA tasks.

But the thing that I the weakest part of my game is really the sharing after the fact. Part of it I think is because I've deprioritized social media a bit. I don't feel like it it helps me in any way, shape or form. And so I don't think the effort is is worth it. However, you know, in thinking about, you know, I wrote a piece over on podcast workflows about how short form video springing up here. I say short form video is kind of like asking

people to run a marathon. If they but they just want to take a walk. Or asking people to listen to your podcast in in short form video or on social media is kind of like asking them to run a marathon. When all they want to do is take a walk like they're not ready for that yet. But there is as I conclude here there is utility to creating videos. You know, it's it's a way to introduce you to a new audience. And I think that could be very helpful.

And so I want to I want to do the promotional stuff better. So I'm going to brainstorm a little bit, maybe think through some automations. I'm probably going to get quiet because I want to really think through this stuff. And so this is really like a watch me work kind of session. So yeah, I think like and again, if you have any questions that come up, I have stuff all around me. But I'll probably, you know, probably start easy and just like ask

chat gpt and then go from there. I think that's probably a good place to start. So let's bring up chat gpt new chat, close the sidebar because I don't know what else is in there. Like client work or whatever who knows. Okay. Yeah, so I'm going to get quiet and work. I'll bump up the music a little bit. Can I do that? Maybe move this like here. Can I tilt you up a little bit more? No. Okay. I want it out of my way, but still accessible. Like that, I guess is good.

Yeah, I figured. So guest appearance is really good. I can share a page. This is for a podcast. It's not the episode is not out yet. But I do have a page like this where there's an opt in and then there's a little learn more get in touch section. So I'll usually mention my podcasts there. Now fun fact about this page is that if if you just go to it without a podcast defined the welcome message goes away and so does the learn more about me. So it's just

like a standard opt in page that turns into a landing page. If I name the podcast, which is neat. I'm like weirdly proud of this. So if you want to know how I did that, let me know in the comments. I'm happy to share. And in the meantime, I will go around the horn and check places where there could be comments. Jay Klaus like this. Hey, Jay, I don't know if you're watching, but hi. Now where was I? Yeah, so I mean, like, yeah, good guest appearances.

That's definitely an important thing to grow your podcast. Social media marketing is where I want to do more. But like, yeah, this stuff is all really good. So that wasn't like what are some audio clips with visuals, that's not great interactive stories. So this is this is I think, you GC live streams. Okay. Yeah, okay, not a big fan of what I'm getting here, which I guess I should have realized. So let me create a new page called

So, yeah, so let's start here. Obviously, there are things I know I want to do. And if I go to the browser over to Riverside, right, like we can, and actually I told Monica, so this is a, this is something I recorded today with Monica pitch, it's coming out in about a month. But I told her I would send her the magic clips that Riverside generates, just to see, right? Because this is the I don't think the juice for short form clips is worth the squeeze.

Like if you're gonna like find them and edit them. And again, like maybe this is not me doing social media very well, I don't think I do it particularly well. But I think I probably could do it better without a lot more effort, maybe. That's like kind of the stuff I'm thinking about in this. And I would love to automate it as much as possible. Monica actually talked about a really good, interesting method for promoting the show through automation.

And so, okay, so let's do this. Why do I look like the Neil deGrasse Tyson meme in all of these? Okay, so let's see. Let's see how this is. Yeah. What are my triggers? Right. What are the tasks that can happen based on the trigger? Can I just see that? And I don't know what they're called until I see them. Right.

And like seeing that list, like also kind of tells you what you can do, right? Like, sometimes I'll just go into shortcuts on my phone and like see what shortcuts an app has donated to be like, oh, can I, I don't know if they still, that's the terminology still, but you know, I'll see like what I can do with shortcuts in a specific app because that could give me ideas for stuff, you know, automating stuff on my phone. But I have used

this app, your AI thing. So that's like an incomplete thought. Right. That's not what we want for social media. So let's see, maybe this one's better. Here I look like a weird, sweaty reporter. Me too. This is great. I love hanging out with geeks. Most of the time I hang out with people who are like really big thinkers, big concept people. And then when I talk about geeky stuff, their eyes glaze over and they kind of look like they're going to pass out.

Yeah, they want to be geeks. Yeah, I think my friends do so Chris Lamar, my friend, Sean Heskath and Jen Bourne, they work in a place called or they have a company called Motivation Code that talks about like what drives you, right? Like, and so like there's like this big survey you take. And there's one called the visionary, which you just want to be the big thinker. And then there's the achiever, which like wants to do the things and wants to be recognized.

So it's okay. This is more in line with the stuff that we talked about, I think. Is this all me talking? No, so fire it, if it's not doing its job. Yeah, because pain is worth the outcome. Right, right. And I think like reframing it that way is super important because like, if your website is not performing the way it should, then you're doing your website's job anyway, right? You just don't think of it that way. Or you're losing business.

So you can't do as much of your job. Because yeah, like, and you could have no like if your receptionist is rude to a customer, you will hear about it. Somehow, right? Or if your project managers are not actually answering their email, or if the, you know, tradesperson that you Yeah, like these are just okay. I think, and

yeah, I don't think I'm really going to make this a crucial part of the promotion. I think a better thing, a better way to spend my time here would be to actually like do a summary like a, so this would be like a one to two minutes. Okay. Now something actually Jay Klaus something that Jay, I'm going to finish this thought and then bring in Matt's comment.

Something Jay Klaus talked about when I did a deep dive on his show was how they spend a lot of time making the first 90 seconds clipable so that they could take the first 90 seconds of a podcast and more easily clip it. I don't know if he's still doing that, but I think that's an interesting approach because you're not really doing double duty. And so I could also rework my intros a little bit and do that. Oh dang cheap viewers on stream boo. Thanks, Bandhammer guy. Okay, so let's

bring in Matt's comment. Am I seeing this? Is it here? No. What if Angel Hernandez was a podcaster? This is a really good question, I think. So if you don't know, okay, that's gone now. Great. So if you don't know, Angel Hernandez is maybe the worst ump in baseball. But I will say Herschel Walker Herschel. Nope. Oh man, the other the umpire from the other day at the Yankee game. Hunter Wendelstadt really giving them a run for his money. I think if Angel was a podcast,

Angel Hernandez was a podcaster. The phone would probably ring off the hook a lot during the show because he'd just be missing calls, just missing calls from people who are calling into his podcast. So there you go. Matt, thank you for setting me up with that joke. I appreciate it. Okay. I wasn't planned either. I thought of that one off the cuff. I'm pretty proud of that. Let me know what you think, Matt. That's the caliber and quality that you were expecting

from a stream such as this. Okay, let's bring the music back now. Okay. Okay. This is another thing I need to consider too, because right now, my guests get an email that is sent from WordPress. It's a custom plugin I wrote that when the episode is published, it just sends them an email with a link to the episode. And this is fine, but you know, I can't include much else. Like, I guess I can make a Dropbox folder and put it in like post meta, but

is that something I really want to do inside of WordPress? Right? I think what I'd rather do is, okay, so let me tell you from a automation standpoint, where I think I could go with this, I guess maybe that's the, that's really something else I should think through, right, is I have this information and these statuses and one of the statuses is published, right? And when I check aired, the status is set to publish, right? And so like that is a automation in Notion.

Oh, yeah, I see. Okay. When status is set, it's ready for scheduling set cover initial status. When air is checked, the status is published, right? So it's just easier for me to quickly check that and have the status, but the status is helpful for the Kanban board so I can see where everything is, right? Kind of where everything is living. So that's really helpful and then something I would love to do, which maybe I'll just head on over to make. Beef this up for you.

Something else I want to explore while I'm here too is I use cast magic for the repurposing stuff. And so it could be that it does a good job of getting clips. I generally don't think that AI tools do a good job of writing for me. At least not better than I would do it. And the danger that I feel I would run into is is it better to be done or not done? Like, okay, even if AI does a worse job than I do,

as long as it's getting done, is that good? I don't think so in this case, right? If it doesn't sound like me, if it's not my authentic voice, I don't think it's better because I don't just want to post on social media for the sake of posting on social media. I want to post on social media in such a way that will get more people to follow me, hopefully subscribe to my newsletter or listen to my podcast, right? That's the ultimate goal here. It's not just to arbitrarily share stuff,

which I think is what a lot of clips, especially audiograms are doing, right? They're not making content for the medium. They're just making content saying they made it. So let's see. Uh, what is this one? RSS feed. Oh, interesting. Okay, so I might be able to let's do this. I don't need that anymore. The feed is not going to be that either. Okay. I promise I'll tell you what I'm doing. Okay. Do I not just do that? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I'm looking for here. Oh, I see. Oh, I see.

Okay. The Avisa number as part of the like iTunes enclosures. So what I was hoping I could do, which I might still be able to do is update a notion record based on the RSS feed. So like when when an RSS feed publishes or when a new item is published in the RSS feed, it checks for an episode number, which I guess I could process the link. Um, I like get the number in this link, but that's very, uh, it's not great.

Because if that happened, then I'd be able to kind of add some more stuff to my notion base. But it doesn't look like I can do that. Okay. So let me jot this down. Oops. Okay. Okay. Yeah, this is I think going to, oh, well, yeah, if I could do that, but I could, I can grab the record, which will have the guests email address. Okay. But it doesn't seem like, like if I look at RSS fields, okay, so like this will always everything before with will be the title that we find in notion.

Right. So if I go to notion upcoming, I guess I'll be published. Um, building native apps using no code as a team of one. Um, because my VA knows to like take this and then add with and then the guest name. And the guest name is actually a separate field and WordPress too. So I guess. Oh yeah, maybe I don't have to rely on the RSS feed here. Okay. So, what WordPress says? So it's this one, except the name is different. So let me add a API key. I'm going to do this for a minute.

Uh, okay, let's go to streamline solo, prenuer. Oh man, you know what? I'm pretty sure the make integration was was crashing the block editor for whatever reason. And the whatever reason is that I deleted a bunch of post meta stuff when I cleaned up the website when I moved it, which I want to talk about on a members only episode of the podcast. Um, so let's see. Well, I guess I can show you this. So make connector.

I'm going to delete this and then reinstall it because if they did it the right way, which maybe they did, um, then they should also delete all of their data. So it's like kind of like we're starting from scratch. So let's find out install, I'm going to activate and then I'm going to open a post in the block editor. Nope. Oh my gosh, it's so bad. Yeah, it throws this error uncaught. So bad. So except now that I know it's this plugin, can I actually like fix something with it?

Oh, maybe. Okay. Okay. Uncheck all. Yeah, I probably could. Oh my gosh, there's so much. There's still so much. So much. So much crap. I don't. I don't want to get on this rant. But God, WordPress had such an opportunity to like redesign a lot of things when they rolled out the block editor, like keeping anything associated with a post in post meta. Maybe I don't know using more tables. Maybe I don't know. I'm not a software engineer. I am. I'm a software engineer.

And it just kills me. Just kills me. That like all of the so that I mean that's mine. That's mine. But like Starfish, that's gone. Like there's all of this meta that doesn't exist anymore. So like now I need to go in and delete all of this stuff. If I want to clean it up, I guess. Um, like, okay, this this stuff doesn't matter anymore, because that was when I was using castos. I mean, this is really episode number. Those are good.

Guest name and guest email. But all those things. Okay, so now let's see. I'm on and this is a rabbit hole for sure. But it could be good. It could be good. Let's see. Hey, that fixed it. How about that? Okay, cool. So now I will get my API key. Uh, from here. Man, that like super duper kills me. All right, and then we'll go back to make. And there we go. Wonderful. This also doesn't need to be every five hours. This could be Monday's for sure. Like I mean, I mean, what's this?

Oh, this is taking a long time. Maybe it's not. Maybe this is a completely normal amount of time. Okay. Liam, I think you're probably gone by now, but thanks so much for being here. As always, I appreciate it. If you're still hanging around, I mean, it appears more people have joined. Um, and you have any questions about podcasting in general or WordPress? Let me know. This is not right. This is why it took so long. This is fine for testing.

Um, because it does have the post meta and I can see status is publish. And that's really the thing. This actually is not going to, I need to delete this. Great. Okay, whatever. Notion, get database item. That's not going to work either. Search objects. That's probably what I want.

If you're just joining me and you see the title and you're wondering why I'm putzing around and make, it's because part of my promotion process wants to be, no, uh, I want part of my promotion process to be sharing more assets with the guest. And so, um, I right now I have a custom WordPress plugin that emails the guest when their episode

goes live. And, um, uh, and what I would like to do is include more information about, like include, I'm sorry, include assets, like, maybe a link to the video that I record because I don't release the video, but I know a lot of people like that. Um, images that I create because people will often ask me for that. Um, yeah, there we go. That's what I want. And so what I'm doing here, one, um, what I'm doing here is searching objects, let's set up a filter. Anytime a new

article, a new episode is published on the website. I store the data. Yeah. I store the data in the WordPress site as well, like the episode number, because I also have the redirect automatically created. Um, and so I can associate a record in notion with a post in WordPress that way. Um, and then I guess I could like create a feel like, but I don't need to do

that. Uh, no. So this is, oh yeah, map, right. Um, this is where it gets hit, like data, I guess this is the database ID is what I want here. And then update the, uh, status. I don't need to update the status actually because I have a checkbox. It's called aired. Okay. So we'll test this part. And we'll test this part by, um, unmarking this week's episode, which is Greg Wasserman as aired. So now it's here.

I could also, I mean, I could also just look, I don't know if I could do that actually, right? Do like a day comparison here. Notions, automations are very limited, which is, I know it's new, so I can't be that frustrated by it. Like, um, it didn't even really exist until recently, which is like one of the reasons I decided to move to it. Um, but like there's still,

I don't know, it's a little weak for, for me. Um, okay. So Greg Wasserman, my expectation would be after I run this automation that it shows up here. So first let's update this. Oh, can I not change this? This is taking a long time. This is going to like blow up all of my operations, I think. Oh no, but it should only grab five. I think it's ignoring it. Watch posts updated. It still has to go through all the posts.

Well, we'll see what happens here. I'm going to get a bajillion errors because this is going to error out, I'm guessing. No, that's right. Okay. Okay. Could not find page with ID. Okay. All right. That works better than I expected. Can I look at the ID here? Like is there a way to see that in notion? Why would you want that? Okay. CD44 CD44 bundle page ID. Okay. So here. Yeah. Don't want that. I want the page ID. This one. Okay.

Hot dog. It worked, my friends. It worked. Cool. So here's what I'm thinking from here. I can send an email once this episode airs to the guest because the guest's email is also included in this information or is in notion, right? Like one of those. Is it actually? No. No. That's strange, but it should be included in the metadata here. Yeah. Great. That's wonderful. So I'll send an email from here. And what I'll probably do is I guess maybe add more fields to this.

Yes. Like there's some stuff I don't really need here. Oh boy. It's after three. Oops. Photo I need. Campaign I don't. Nothing matters. But maybe I create a Dropbox folder, which I have my VA upload assets to anyway. And then I send the guest an email. And I send the guest an email with all of that information in it. Okay. Dan Cox coming in with a question. There are a couple of questions. So let's do this. Hey Dan. Okay. Thanks for being here. I started a weekly pod and can occasionally

promote on various listservs. I'm holding off on this until I have more episodes. So there's more content for people to check out the show. And then currently I have three episodes. Any thoughts on how many episodes I should post before promoting it in these places? Thanks Joe. Your pod and videos have been super helpful. Dan. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. The kind words. And honestly, I think so I do get that you want to have a little bit more of a catalog

where you're sending people to right. So I but I think that if you're promoting individual episodes, just promote them right like as they're ready because your call to action could either be join my mailing list right like on the episode page you can have a one and you know this podcast

is just getting started and want to know when the next episode comes out. Join my mailing list or subscribe wherever you get your podcast right at this point you want to show people that you're you're committed to publishing and so you want them to get you want to them to subscribe as quickly as possible. And so I don't think that there's any problem with promoting with three episodes in place. If you do want a number, I think the number I would pick is probably eight or nine because most

podcasts don't make it past eight or nine. And so well most podcasts don't make it past seven. So, you know, I think that if you're at eight or nine, you're showing people, Hey, I've got two months worth of content now. If it's a weekly, I think you said it's a weekly podcast. Yeah, I've got two months worth of content now for you to check out. And I've also have dedicated to doing this for two months. So I'm not just like a fly by night podcaster, I'm in it for the long haul,

that sort of thing. But I think like right now you're good, definitely promoting it to your audience. And if you have access to these lists serves, I think like, Hey, promote the first one now and see how it does, right? I'm gonna say like, Hey, I just launched this new episode, like this new podcast. I currently have three. The first episode is about this, I think you'll really like it. If you do be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, you can find all

the links here, right? I think that's probably the best, or a good way to do it. Because it's never too soon to promote something, right? And you want to build hype as much as possible and getting people on board and listening as early as possible will will definitely help you as well. So really good question. Thank you for asking it. And I will say my kids will be home

from school in less than 10 minutes, probably. So I'm going to wrap things up here. I think my biggest takeaway here is that I think creating assets is going to be important for me sharing them with the guests is going to be important for me. But with that automation I made, I could probably also look at automating the posting to social media, right? Like there are tools I could use like typefully to maybe share those assets. And I'm doing more video stuff now. And so I think like

maybe doing a talking head video about the episode, right? Maybe talking about early on in the stream. I talked about finding the right package, I talked about the content, I talked about the game, I talked about finding the right packaging, I'll Jay Klaus. And so I think like doing more of that, maybe I could post those videos via the Twitter API, but I'm not confident in that. So

that's probably going to be something my VA does. But I think doing stuff like that where I create these discrete pieces of content for social media, I didn't even I said I'd look at cast magic and I haven't even done that maybe that's for next time. But I think building this automation is a really good first, excuse me, first building block. Because it will allow me to automate more of the sharing while not just having it AI generate stuff and post it, it'll be like stuff that I create

or my VA creates that will automatically get shared in a timely manner. Dan, thank you for being here. Matt, thanks for being here. Liam, I know that you were here earlier. Thanks to everybody. So I really appreciate you joining the stream. I'll stick around for about 30 more seconds to see if there are any more questions or comments. I'm also checking here on LinkedIn and we'll do the same thing on Twitter. But I don't see anything else coming in. So thank you all so much for being

here. I really appreciate it. And until next time, I'll see you out there.

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