Hello, hello, and welcome to another live stream here on the YouTube channel. I hope you're doing well. I'm really excited to talk about this topic today, how to get feedback, how to actually get listener feedback. And so I'm just going to do the quick check around the internet to make sure, yeah, we're good, we're live, grand. So if you're watching, let me know where you're coming from, say hello.
Of course, if you have any questions about getting feedback, that's what we're talking about today. If you are watching on YouTube, Twitch, or Twitter slash X, great, I should be able to see your comments here in EKM Live. If you are watching on LinkedIn, I may not be able to see your comments, so I will be periodically checking that over there. I never can actually, I'm always confused on where to go, but that's okay.
If you are commenting over on LinkedIn, rest assured, I will answer them the best I can as often as I can. But let's dive into this. First of all, again, if you're joining, say hello, drop a comment in the chat, let me know your name, any questions you have about feedback, let me know your podcast. I'd love to know what your podcast is and how we can listen. So all right, let me bring up the old outline here. What did I say we were going to talk about?
Well, first of all, I wrote a blog post about getting feedback, so I'm not going to revisit that here, but you can find that over at Podcast Workflows. And so the main topics I cover in that are basically ask early, ask often, ask everywhere, and make it easy. So I'll walk through some of these and then I will look at Fan List and how I'm going to try to use that for my own podcast. So okay, let's dive into it here. So first of all, getting listener feedback, you want to do this, right?
You feel like podcasting can feel like you're yelling into the void, right? It can feel like a very one way relationship where you are talking and nobody is listening or at least nobody's responding, right? But I know that's not true because when I listen to podcasts, I will sometimes yell at the podcast, but I won't write into the podcast to let them know what I was yelling. Usually it's like something that they can't remember and I know the answer to it.
So either way, your listeners are there and you want to try to get feedback from them. So it's really important for engagement and building a community and getting your listeners to feel like they are even more connected with you. And so you want to try to get feedback.
And the way I was thinking about it over the weekend was I was sitting in my kitchen, my seven year old daughter comes up to me and she looks at the cupboard and then looks at me and then she looks at the cupboard again and then we're just sitting there in stunned silence and then she goes, are you hungry? And I said, Trees, I'm like, if you want something, just ask for it. And she said, can I have something to eat? So the lesson that I always give my kids is don't ask, don't get.
And it's the same thing here for feedback, right? If you don't ask for feedback, you're not going to get feedback. So if you don't ask questions, if you don't ask your listeners to write in, then you are not going to hear from them. And so those four things that you need to do, ask early, ask often, ask everywhere and make it easy, those are the ways that you can hear from your listeners, get more engaged listeners.
And something that I teased in my newsletter that I don't think I put in the blog post, right? But today we're going to kind of talk about how to get more feedback. We're going to explore fan list, which is a really interesting tool. And then I'm going to tell you how you can use feedback as a flywheel to get more listeners. So let's go through those four again really quickly with a little bit more detail, right? Ask early. The first thing that you should do is ask early.
I mean this in two different ways. The first way is ask literally early on in the episode, right? Don't wait until the very end when you're signing off and you're like, okay, thanks for listening by the way, right back. No, people are gone at that point. Ask earlier in the episode. I think within the, you should have your first call to action within the first five minutes of the episode and it should follow the first win or piece of value that you deliver for your listeners, right?
So, uh, too many podcasts, repeat stuff. We talked about this last week on the live stream, but it's like they'll do, you know, my guest is Bill Gates. Bill Gates was the founder of Microsoft, uh, and left that company in whatever it was, 2006, and now does philanthropy. He is well known for his reading weekends or whatever they're called. And today we're going to talk about what he's doing with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Let's bring in our guest right after the intro.
There's like an intro and then it's like, Hey Bill, thanks for being here. This is Bill Gates. He was the founder of Microsoft. Uh, today we're going to talk to him about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. That is so much stuff before there's an actual piece of value. And so I could see why you'd be hesitant to ask your listeners for something before you actually deliver value for them.
So I would say give them the best piece of advice right up front. The people who are actually interested in your content are not going to leave because like, well, I got the best tip tidbit piece out. They're going to want to listen.
So you might say like, Hey, I interviewed Bill Gates in this conversation and, um, we talked about a lot of things, but one of the things he talked about is his, uh, his reading vacations or I forget what he actually calls them, uh, where he goes away for a week with just books and just reads the whole time. Um, and the reason he does that is for X, Y and Z. Here's how you can do something similar, even if you don't have a whole week, right, to get away. Uh, and then so, oh, okay.
Wow. Yeah. So I can, I can do like an Airbnb for like a day and a half and bring like a book or two to read, right? I can at least have a small amount of time dedicated to reading and enrichment, right? Cause that's the way he does it. So you do that and then ask for feedback, right? You've provided value now ask for the feedback. What do you think of that? When do you get reading in? I'd love to hear from you.
You can head over to streamline.fm slash feedback to leave a comment or let me know what you're thinking, right? So right there you get, you give them value, then you ask for feedback. And so that's the first way of asking early is give value and then ask for feedback, ask your listeners what they think people love giving their opinions. So like if you tie the feedback to something that you're talking about, right?
This is like how a lot of the tech shows I listen to do it or like, um, uh, uh, baseball today with Chris Rose and Trevor Ploof, uh, they have like a sponsor. It's a factor question of the week, right? Right in, let us know. We'll read your name, whatever, but they're tying it to some topic that they've talked about this week, right? So that's the first way of asking early is literally early on in the episode before you start losing listeners.
The other way is, or the other form of asking early is ask way before you will want or need it, right? So this applies to, uh, specific feedback questions or campaigns, right? If you want to do a Q and a episode for your listeners, uh, don't just ask in the, the episode before, right? Give it a few weeks and say like, Hey, I'm, I'm working on a listener Q and a, uh, you can go over here and ask your question or like ping me on Twitter or whatever. Right.
So do that because some people will want to write in, but they won't hear. They won't maybe hear that latest episode, right? If you only ask in one place, then very few people, unless you have a massive audience, right? This, this all applies to like the small independent podcaster like me, like probably you, um, who struggles to get feedback because the huge podcast, they're going to be hearing from people no matter what, right? People are just going to write in and give their two cents.
Um, but like, if you have like a smaller audience, especially like a polite audience who's not just like trying to like nail you to the wall for some weird comment you made, um, you're going to have to work a little bit and, and be repetitive, right? Which is the, which is my next point, right? Um, so first of all, sorry, I had to mute myself there. Um, so, uh, first of all, let me know in the chat, right? Are you asking for feedback? How are you asking for feedback?
What do you want to hear from your listeners? Maybe that's the most important question. What do you want to hear from your listeners? Let me know in the chat. I'll, I'll read some comments and bring them up on the screen here. I'll also check over on LinkedIn to see if any action's happening. I don't see anything. Um, so we'll, we'll keep moving along. Um, the next thing is ask regularly, right? So regularly that it feels like you're doing it too often, right?
Marketing people, independent creators, entrepreneurs talk about this all the time. You will get sick of your own message way before anybody else does because you're the only one who's hearing it all the time. If you ask twice in an episode, maybe people who are really paying attention will hear it twice, but they're not going to care, right? But a lot of people are doing something else while they're listening. So they may only hear it once or no times, right?
Or if they happen to skip that episode, then they're not going to hear it at all. And so you want to ask multiple times in an episode and you want to ask across multiple episodes, you want to be consistent here, right? I think this is one of the things that I certainly struggle with. And I think a lot of podcasters struggle with is we want to ask our listeners to do everything. Hey, subscribe over here and give us feedback over there and follow us and join my mailing list.
And honestly, I think you need to pick one. I've been saying this for a long time. Pick one call to action and repeat it. That could be join your mailing list, right? It could be join your mailing list. If you don't want it to be join your mailing list or if you want to, you know, get people to opt in on the feedback form, then it could be ask for feedback. I might say one, maybe two, but again, like I'm softening on that position and I'm not convinced it's a good one.
So if you are, if you really want to hear from your listeners, then you should make that the main call to action. Ask regularly. Ask towards the beginning around the middle, around the end. If it's general feedback, then tie it to something in that episode. Hey, my guest Greg mentioned that like you could use AI to organize your thoughts into a book. I obviously disagreed. What do you think? Let me know right in at streamlined.fm slash feedback, right?
That is the sort of thing that you can do in an episode because you're keying in on something you said and then you are giving your listeners specific information or a specific directive. All right, you're not just saying like, let me know what you thought, right? Like an open-ended question like that requires mental energy and people might not do it. They might not be compelled to just like generally let me know what you thought, but people have strong opinions about AI, right?
And so that would have been a really good time for me to ask for general feedback or for specific feedback, right? Again, make sure you build in multiple asks. You might think you're promoting too much, but tie it to value, right? Our feedback will make this upcoming episode better or I'll read the best comments on the air, right? Like those sort of things show people that you're listening and you care and it adds value for them.
And it kind of creates this discussion through which you are the conduit and that starts to build community. And so I think that, you know, ask regularly, ask often, ask early and ask everywhere. This is something that I didn't put a lot of thought into until I had my own feedback episode. But for a recent episode of the Streamline solopreneur, I put out a call for questions, right? What questions do you have about time tracking? And I didn't follow these first two rules enough, right?
I didn't ask early enough. I didn't ask regularly enough. But I did ask everywhere, right? I asked on Twitter, Facebook and threads. I asked on the podcast and I asked my mailing list. I said reply, you know, reply with your questions, comment with your questions. And most if not all of the feedback came from those other places, right? There are people who listened to my podcast, but like didn't catch the call to feedback or didn't catch the question, but are interested.
And so then they reached out in one of these other places and asked questions about what app should I use? How do I make this? Somebody said like, how do I make it so that it's not taking more time than it's saving, right? Or how do I make it easy so that I actually do it? These are all great questions. And so let's, because I mean, let's face it, right?
Most responses came from those other like those social places because it's much easier to interact in those places than it is to interact directly with the podcast. And that's really my last piece of advice and the impetus for this live stream and why I'm going to check out fan base, our fan list. Because you should give them several ways to submit feedback, right? I have what I think is a memorable URL, streamlines.fm.feedback, but that's a mouthful.
And if you don't have like a WordPress website or a Wix website where you can easily spin up a form, then that's going to be tough, right? If you prefer like type form or Google forms or, you know, air table, something else. Another thing I own is streamlinedfeedback.com, which is a great URL. I can't believe somebody doesn't have it already. But streamlinedfeedback.com goes to streamlined.fm.feedback. Actually it's something I picked up while I was writing this blog post.
So that's probably going to be my call to action moving forward. Because streamlinedfeedback.com is a lot easier to remember than streamlined.fm.feedback, right? And then that points to my feedback form. You can also use services like other services like Speakpipe or Fanlist, which we're going to look at to get audio messages from your listeners. Tools like Zoom, I'm sorry, Loom or Telby allow you to get video messages from listeners. Make sure to ask on social media, asking your newsletter.
And if you can enable comments on your website for podcast episodes, right? So you could say like, hey, over on the show notes, streamlined.fm.slash427, go there, get the show notes and leave a comment. What did you think of this episode? Those are all ways that you can get feedback. So I just named like seven, really like 10 ways to get feedback from your listeners. And you want to make it easy for them. This is what I would say to freelancers when I was helping freelancers.
I would always tell them this, if someone wants to pay you, make it easy for them to pay you, which means if you have Stripe and they prefer PayPal, offer them to pay with PayPal, like make it easy for them. And I would say the same thing for people who want to give you feedback. If someone wants to give you feedback, make it easy for them. Don't make them go to some other place or submit this thing or whatever. Let them just at reply you on Twitter or Instagram or whatever, right?
If they don't feel like typing out everything they have to say, allow them to submit an audio message where they can talk, right? Then you have the added benefit of playing that on your show if you want. So that's what I think. I'd love to know what you think about this so far. Leave any comments. I'll check LinkedIn one more time and then we'll actually dive into FanList. Okay, so I don't see anything over on LinkedIn. Okay. I'm a little tired, my friends.
I did another live stream earlier today. And so lots of energy being expounded here. Okay, so let me bring this up. Okay. So this is FanList, FanList.com, formerly pod inbox is what this was called. And it allows you to create a fan page. I should say like this isn't sponsored. This is just a tool I came across and I thought it'd be fun to tinker with on the live stream. So I don't know that much about it. I don't have talking points or anything.
I just have what I can glean from the landing page. The cool thing about it is it's free, right? So we go to pricing. It's totally free. And then you just pay, you pay 7% on any earnings. This is like they allow you to monetize as well. Plus straight processing fees. So you're looking at like 10% if you don't want to pay at all, right? But they also have, gosh, is that the only, I thought they had other pricing tiers. That like get rid of the exorbitant fee. But maybe not.
Maybe that's just the way they're deciding to do things. Gumroad, that's exactly what Gumroad does too. But I like this because if you don't want to use it for monetization, then you can use it for free. So I've already created a username and password for this. Or a page really. Oh, right. Okay. And this is the page that I have, right? So it's pretty, it's pretty sparse right now. But it does give people the ability to record. Oops, I'm going to sneeze. Excuse me.
I stopped taking my allergy medicine because I thought everything is in bloom. And while that was a regrettable mistake, apparently. So this is the page we got the record button. And then we have a chat room so people can leave messages here. If you want to try this out and see how it works, the page is fanlist.com slash streamlined, which I will drop into the chat here.
So if you want to leave an audio message or participate in the chat room, I guess that's pretty dangerous because it'll come up on the stream, but whatever. You can do so at that link. Okay. So the other thing I really like about, well, let me go back. Back here. Let me close all these. So you have these page settings so you can turn on different features inbox. This lets people leave messages on my fan page tips. This allows people to leave tips, let fans purchase perks, become a member.
I can also display my sponsors if I want to. So this could be another value add for my sponsors and then live chat. So these aren't enabled because I haven't connected Stripe yet because they wanted ID verification, which is weird because I've had this Stripe account forever. But I can, you know, I have everything. Well, I won't turn this on because I haven't put much thought into this yet. And then you can change the title and the link if you want, create a header banner and a cover.
I can add a one minute long video explaining to people what this page is and what they should do, so I should probably do that. And then a welcome message and a theme color. I can also add links, right? So listen on. Yeah, this, I mean, this is a good idea. So I should, I should configure this. So streamlines.fm. And then easy peasy. You can just copy these links over. Now they, oh, they automatically removed it. That's nice. Spotify.
And again, if you have any questions, feel free to use the actual inbox or the chat over here on YouTube. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about feedback or tools. Well, Google podcast is nothing anymore. And YouTube. And then links. So this is what is this email address? No website. Streamline.fm. Instagram. This is streamlined.fm. Though I don't, not really very active over there. Twitter. Just my personal Twitter. There's a, I do have a Facebook, but I'm not going to do that.
LinkedIn and the old RSS feed. Okay. So we've got that, we have notifications, we have my team. If I view this page now, listen and connect. Oh, that's cool. I like that. So we have all of this ability now. Okay. So we've got the page set up. We've got, I can connect to my Stripe account. I'm not going to do that here. I can see a list of people who have written in messages or anything like that. And I can integrate with MailChimp, which is not great.
This is one of those things I wish was better, right? I wish they had more integrations or an API or like a make or Zapier because here is where this could fall apart on me. I'm going to keep it. I'm not going to be, right? And like, I mean, you know, don't bite the hand that feeds you or whatever. But this is a place where I would like to see more improvement right off the bat. I can add sponsors and then widgets are something that you can add to your website.
So you could see I have a button here. Can I customize the text? Bottom right. Bottom left. I guess not. Leave a message. No, I can't customize that. That's okay. And if we go to the actual feedback page, you'll see that this button is already here. And people can click and leave a message, right? So you click, it'll get, it'll ask you to, if you haven't done this already to verify your, or give access to your microphone, then you
could choose the microphone you're recording with, and then you can hit start. We'll count you in. Hello. I am leaving a video or a voice message for the streamlined solopreneur. Click stop. Listen back. You probably can't hear that. Oh, maybe you could. Click save. Okay, so this I super hate, right? This could be a deal breaker for me, but you have to have a username and password. Yeah, I kind of super hate this. Because I imagine that people
will abandon right here. If I want to make this as the, and again, this is the first time I'm trying this, I haven't tried this yet. Like I, this, this is the point of the live stream, right? So I kind of look into this. But if we're talking about like a good user experience, we want to make this as easy as possible for listeners and forcing them to create an account to leave a message is not as easy as possible. Right? So it's, I
mean, that's the saying, right? If something is free, you're the product. And this is clearly a way for them to build their user base. Because look, there's no, there's no reason, right? There's no reason for them to need you to sign up. Now let me see. Maybe this is like a way to prevent spam or whatever. So let me see. I'll take this, I'll open this in an incognito window and see if I want to record here, test check one, two. It's going to count
me in. This is a test to see if I have to create an account when I record here as well. Stop recording, save recording, sign up. I hate this. I'm not going, I'm probably not going to use it now, right? Because I don't think users should be forced to create an account just to write into me, right? And this is the, probably the benefit of Speak Pipe, right? Like, yes, you pay for Speak Pipe. Or maybe you don't. I mean, there's,
there might be a free tier. Let's see. Subscription. Okay, so like you do get a limited free plan. But for $12 a month, paid annually, $15 a month, you get, you know, a bunch of extra stuff, including, including ConvertKit integration, right? So this is tough for me. It might not be tough for some people. Like some of you might be wondering why I'm making a big deal of this, but I, I don't think I should force my listeners to create an account on a website
that they might use one time just to send a voice message. I think that there is maybe a better solution for me. Now, if you are using some of their other features here, right? And this, again, this is like for me, if you're using some of their other features here, like monetization, the ability to leave tips and stuff, create a chat room, then that's more akin to building a community. And that would require people to log in, right? So I'm not
saying this is for nobody. But if I'm just trying to get audio messages from my listeners, then that's not, that's not for me. So that's like a, that's a bummer because I was, I was really excited about this actually. I thought that it would be a really good tool for adding a little bit more interaction. Right? So now what I might have to do is, is see if, well, let's, let's explore this in real time. This is, there's nothing going on on LinkedIn.
Let's explore this in real time. I use gravity forms, audio recordings for gravity forms. Okay, so it looks like they use a third party service called pipe, or they have an integration with pipe. Wow, which is expensive. More certainly more expensive than free. Record audio and
video, right? So I mean, like this is, if you're willing, you know, if you want this then use gravity forms, maybe it's good, but it seems like, first of all, if you're going for free, and you don't mind that your potential, that your listeners have to sign up for an account, you know, fan list might be the way to go. I, I wonder, it doesn't seem that I can turn that off, which is like a huge bummer. Just a huge bummer. Like there's no way to
allow people to leave anonymous feedback. Yeah, because I want to collect the email address. Right? I mean, that's what it is. So that's a huge bummer. That's okay. All right, so fan list probably isn't going to work out for me. You know, I might look at other competitors. I really just want like a little audio widget for people to leave a message. And I don't want to, you know, this, the other thing I could do on my feedback page, which is this,
no, this is the other thing. I don't even really make the feedback page easy to access from the homepage. So like that little like floating widget thing could be nice. But the other thing I could do here, right, is well, so this is actually a notion form. This isn't even a gravity form. Because I wanted to go so this is like I kind of set up a dumb system
here. If I'm, if I'm really being honest with myself, my friends, I just wanted to try out this, because people fill out this form and then it automatically goes to a notion database. So I don't need to so that I can, I don't know, never have to check that feedback. This is like if I got, I don't know, if I was giving a ton of email, then this would maybe make sense where it could bypass my, my inbox and just go to a place where I'm checking it.
But I don't get a ton of feedback right now, right? I haven't implemented. Or maybe I should say I'm starting to get more feedback because I did get great feedback for the time tracking episode. But I'm not getting it on a regular basis. And so like this doesn't solve a pain I have. But like I could just, I could let people upload an audio file. But like I want to make it easy, right? If this is all in the pursuit of ease of use, this part is easy.
Having them create an account is not and maybe I'm over if you think I'm overestimating it, leave a like, let me know in the chat or leave a comment if you're watching this after. Maybe I'm making too big of a deal of this and people are, and people will just sign up for an account if they have to. But I, that's a step that I prefer to not require. So all right, let's wrap things up here with creating a flywheel of getting more listeners, right? So Pat Flynn
famously says that people love to hear their own name. And one of the things that you can do when you get feedback is make sure to mention the name of the people who send in the feedback unless they request to be anonymous. And then tag them on social media, right? Say like, hey, thanks so much to whoever for, you know, thanks so much. Thanks so much to Alex for writing in and asking a great question about time tracking. I answer it in this episode,
right? Alex will share that episode because he knows now that I've mentioned him, right? And if he shares it to his audience and more people listen, and then maybe more people will give feedback, right? So I think, I think the key here is having a good system in place for people to leave you feedback. I think the best thing, if you don't have a website or a system that allows you to easily spin up a form is buy a domain with Namecheap and
point it to a Google form or a type form or whatever kind of form you prefer, right? Or you can use a service like Fanless, right? If that part doesn't bother you, maybe I'm making too big of a deal. I'm definitely going to ask my friends about this after. You'll be like, Hey, am I making too big of a deal of this? Like, is this like a weird crazy thing? Then maybe I'll continue to do it too. But that's a pretty, I'll say it's a pretty
nice service. So have a good system in place for people to easily give you feedback. Ask early, ask often, ask everywhere. And then when you share that feedback on your show, make sure that you share it on social media so that people start sharing that episode where they got mentioned. And then more people are readying in to leave feedback and give you ask questions and things like that. So I think that's probably that's probably worth
its own blog posts for me to kind of work that out. But that's everything that I have. I haven't seen any questions come in. I'll check LinkedIn one more time. But if you are watching, I'll check Twitter too, just to make sure I don't know, sometimes Twitter questions like don't always come in. So I'm sorry if I've been ignoring you. I don't, it doesn't
appear that I've been ignoring you. I'm not seeing anything here. I think Twitter is probably mad at me, maybe because I keep calling it Twitter, but like my stuff has not been doing well. So, all right, anyway. So thanks so much for tuning in. I really appreciate you. If you're watching this later, leave a comment with any questions you have or let me know. Am I being really weird about about the account thing? Like, is that is that weird? Am I being
too strict on that? Let me know. Thanks so much for tuning in. And until next time, I'll see you out there.