How to Boost Your Marketing and Money through Podcasting with Tracy Hazzard

Transcript

Karin Conroy:

This is Counsel Cast part of the Legal Talk Network, and I’m your host, Karin Conroy. When you face a complex case outside your expertise, you bring in a co-counsel for next level results. When you want to engage, expand, and elevate your firm, you bring in a marketing co-counsel. In this podcast, I bring in marketing experts who each answer one big question to help your firm achieve more. Here’s today’s guest.

Tracy Hazzard:

Hey there. I’m Tracy Hazzard. I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Politicized, which I founded with my husband and partner, Tom Hazard. And we focus on how you can make money podcasting with your core business, with your core services, your products, your books, your coaches, your coaching programs, anything out there that is your own stuff. That’s kind of our specialty, this business to business model of marketing through podcasting.

Karin Conroy:

Oh my gosh. Okay. So first of all, Tracy, thank you for being here. This is going to be a good solid info filled episode because there’s a few areas of marketing that are kind of mysterious. People go to the Magic eight ball and they’re asking the questions because it seems so mysterious, I guess is for lack of a better word, and podcasting for sure is one of them. And I know this because of the conversations I have, but also because one of our top performing episodes of the last couple of years has been our episode with Simona about how to monetize podcasting. So here we are. This is going to be answering all those questions that we know people are asking, but also figuring out how it works and pulling back that curtain of, because I’ve spent a lot of time doing some research on what are the questions people are asking around podcasting. And it’s kind of big picture, high level questions. How does it work and how do you make money? And so here we go. This is you in a nutshell, like your whole business. So let’s start first, the title of the show is How to Boost Marketing and Money Through Podcasting. And so let’s start first with your first biggest tip about how people are making money with podcasting.

Tracy Hazzard:

Well, first off, it’s a mistake to think that people, there are a lot of people out there making money from their podcasts. There are very few people making millions of dollars off their podcast. Very few, like a 10th of a percent. That’s how bad it is in

Karin Conroy:

That kind of range. And that’s it.

Tracy Hazzard:

Yeah, exactly. Joe Rogan and Brene Brown and anyone that Spotify overpaid for their podcast, they did extremely overpay. They paid for their brand and their trademark and all of those other things that come along with it. Their brand recognition, not the actual money that is made off that podcast. So they were hoping that it would cascade into more business and that would make them more money right’s, a different model’s. Yeah.

Karin Conroy:

Let’s stick into that really quickly because first of all, how do you know they overpaid? And this kind of comes back to the picture, the bigger question of how do you quantify what you should be paid in general? And I think a subpart of that question is are we even getting paid for the podcast, you and I normal people, or are we talking about money in a different way?

Tracy Hazzard:

Yeah, I mean, we really are talking about money in a different way. And even in that case, I say they overpaid because if you expect it to make 140 million in ad money and make a return on investment, you want to know why Spotify is not profitable and they had to lay off a bunch of people. It’s because that didn’t actually transact in that way. It’s never going to make that return on investment in ad dollars. It doesn’t mean it didn’t attract a lot of members to their portal and they were making it in other areas of their business, but it’s not trackable to the show itself producing that in ad dollars. And the number one reason is because Joe Rogan was extremely popular and profitable on YouTube, and they removed his show from YouTube and they cut him down from 11 million followers to 2.2. He says it himself on his show that he now only has 2.2 million listeners.

Oh my gosh. So if he cut it down from that much, there’s no way you could make back that money in add dollars alone. That wasn’t the purpose of it. So they paid for it in brand value, not in actual transactional value of what they expected to make out of it. That’s the difference. And so very few people can build up a brand value that’s like that. We all know that especially your lawyers out there trying to get that onto the bottom line in a sale for your acquisition for your clients, it’s really hard to get those intangibles.

Karin Conroy:

But that’s not really where we’re going to aim this topic in this conversation because let’s just start with that not being the goal. The money that we’re talking about is not about how many listeners I need, how many downloads, how many people are doing all of that. So a lot of the questions when I was doing the research for this and looking Googling and looking where top questions are around that idea. So I think there’s this basic assumption that the money is being made through clicks and downloads and subscribers and likes,

Tracy Hazzard:

And that’s the mistake right there. First off, if you’re going to do that and you have a business that your podcast is based around or on, so if it’s in any way a marketing vehicle for your personal brand or any of your programs or businesses, then you’re making a mistake following that model because you’re going to devalue your brand by chasing ad dollars because you’re going to chase somebody else’s distracting your audience instead of the things that you could be making much more money off by being a direct conduit too.

Karin Conroy:

Okay. That the difference right there. Yes. Okay. I’m going to underline that really quickly because by chasing ad dollars, what you’re doing is putting ads for your show on other shows or accepting ads onto your show that like you said, are a distraction and kind of water down your brand and make you look a certain way that probably doesn’t align with your brand. And so to just kind of reiterate that by doing that, you are kind of turning off your potential clients who each one of those clients has a lot more potential revenue and money than one ad click,

Tracy Hazzard:

Right? Well, podcasting, this is the thing. The mystery about podcasting, the mystery about podcasting is simply this. Podcasting is the only poll media, everything else is a push. You can pay to boost your videos on YouTube. You can pay to be seen on Facebook, you can pay for any other positioning, you cannot pay to make your podcast seen to listeners. So you have to pay somewhere else to get those listeners. And if you have to work that hard to get listeners for your show by marketing, your business, marketing, all the other things you need to group your marketing, you’re not just going to market your podcast, you’re going to market it as a part of something else bigger that you’re trying to attract an audience for. And of course, you want them all to be aligned for the right audience or you’re going to be working too hard as it is.

So if you’re going to do that, those people that finally click the subscribe button, it’s not easy. They click that subscribe button on their podcast app and they chose to listen to you. Now it’s pushing to them. You had to go through all that stuff. And now what they’re looking for is you not dumb ads from Amazon Kindle that had nothing to do with it. And they’re not a reader, they’re a podcast listener. So this is the misalignment mistake that happens. But also when you chase ad dollars, you start to go after these companies where they promise you lots of ads, and what they do is they cram ’em on the front of your show. So it’s sometimes two minutes before your content is ever played.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Insane. Is

Tracy Hazzard:

Your audience going to wait around for that?

Karin Conroy:

No, they don’t. I recently was kind of going down the rabbit hole of looking at what, oh my gosh, I’m blanking on his name. The big guy on YouTube, Mr. Beast, Mr. Beast, how he puts together his videos and he goes second by second, those first 30 seconds, he plans out first before he even plans out the rest of the content. And he has said that he can’t make that to his standards of being worthy of a good hook. He cancels the whole project. So if you lose those first 30 seconds, forget it.

Tracy Hazzard:

Forget it.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. There’s no point. So if you are handing that over to advertisers, what are you doing? That makes no sense. So let’s take a step back and with this in mind that, okay, ad revenue, this is not the goal. This is not how we’re going to make money, and it’s not how you’re going to work with your brand. It’s going to be a mess. So where then, how do you start and then plan back from that other goal?

Tracy Hazzard:

So first off, you got to think about your core business, about what it is that you’re selling, what it might just be you. You’re trying to build trust in you so that clients will hire you. And that’s a perfect way to go about it. But here’s the thing. We have to think about what is it that we want to present out to that client? We have to be focused on the audience that we’re trying to attract here. So do we want them to learn that we’re extremely trustworthy? Well, what are the characteristics of trustworthy? We’re consistent. We’re constant. We show up when they need us, we’re available to them, we’re accessible. And yet, so much of what you do out in your podcast, what most hosts do in their podcasts is counter to that. They say, oh, I’m going to follow someone’s advice and I’m going to do a season.

Karin Conroy:

Clients

Tracy Hazzard:

Don’t have legal problems in seasons. Yes. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, right?

Karin Conroy:

Yes. I love that.

Tracy Hazzard:

So that doesn’t work. So feel I’m going to take my holidays off.

Karin Conroy:

I just pictured this potential podcaster and they’re putting it together and they’re like, I’m going to make the next serial podcast, the serial one that really kind of got podcasting off the ground. I am going to be the next serial. And no, that’s not where you start. That’s not what your goal is.

Tracy Hazzard:

No, it’s just not. It’s not going to work for that. We have to be out there just saying we’re going to be authentically who we want to be seen in the world, right? Yeah. Brand building is you have a hypothesis of what your brand value is and you put that out there. Every single thing that you do puts that out there. Every word that you write, every title you create, every video, every social post has a curation model around how you think, but it’s really not about you. It’s about how that audience is going to perceive it. Because the brand is actually perception. So how did they receive what we had to say and did it have the effect that we want? And if it didn’t, let’s switch it. Let’s adjust it. That’s the great part about podcasting that people don’t realize is we don’t have to stick our stake in the ground and put it in cement here. You can make a change and your entire feed can change tomorrow. Yeah, that’s a fabulous, flexible thing about this media type.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. That’s what we have

Tracy Hazzard:

To tap into. So

Karin Conroy:

The first thing I’m hearing is figure out your brand. So I will say lots of our clients come to us and they have not got that figured out yet. So if you don’t have the brand, and I like to say, because a lot of people get real in their head about what that means and how they define that. And it’s not your logo. It is your reputation.

Tracy Hazzard:

It’s your reputation. It’s the reason clients refer. You think about it that way. What do they say when they refer you? That’s really where your value lies. But it’s okay to not know who you are in that brand model. That’s why I call it a hypothesis brand. You can go out there and try things and say, Hey, am I the lawyer for millennials? And maybe it just doesn’t resonate. And what you find is that you’re starting to attract

Karin Conroy:

The wrong ones.

Tracy Hazzard:

No. Or you’re attracting boomers and you’re like, oh, maybe on my message is resonating there. And so what you’re starting to attract, that’s where you start to fluctuate. My very first podcast that my partner and I started was in 3D printing and it was called W-T-F-F-F. So it was what the fuse filament fabrication. It’s not a square. But if you didn’t know that FFF was the term for 3D printing, you wouldn’t pick our show.

Karin Conroy:

No. And

Tracy Hazzard:

So we were already dialing in an attractor point to somebody who already knew something about 3D printing. So we’ve already done something that made the attractor clear. Now we thought we were going to have a bunch of 14-year-old boys in the garage as our audience. Very quickly we found out we had middle aged teachers in the Midwest. It was just all over the place. Retirees in the south, we had them from all over the place, and they were the ones reaching out to us and asking for more information. And so very quickly we learned, oh, okay, well this is still good. Our title’s still working, but let’s adjust our content for these types of audiences. So we built more education, we built more business content, we built more product design assistance. We just built more things in it that they wanted and we adjusted our brand, but it was really us they were attracted to. And that’s the great part about podcasting. If you are the reason clients are hiring you, then you’re still there.

Karin Conroy:

So I want to clarify that you adjusted the brand. You didn’t start over and you didn’t start with nothing. You started knowing that you were going towards these 3D printers. You had a very specific technical term that would pull them in. So that’s not nothing that took a lot of strategy and thought and planning. And you aimed at a certain group, and this is where marketing comes in, where you aim, you collect data and then you revise. But that mean that you just throw spaghetti at the wall with nothing. You started with a very clear aim of what you were talking about, where your expertise was, what, and then as you got that feedback from the audience of who was actually showing up and listening, then you redirect. But it’s not starting from zero and then figuring it out as you go along

Tracy Hazzard:

Because that’s going to be a mess. No, it’s never starting from zero. That’s mess. But you’ve already been in business, it’s very likely that you’re not starting your practice from scratch here. You’re just fresh out of college, you just got your law degree. That’s not probably the case here, but if it is, there’s a model for that too. It’s called do research and figure out who you want to be like and then just model after them and see if that works for you. But if you not, you have some of your best clients. And if you say, oh, my best clients have been former sports college students, whatever it was, that’s what I want more of. Go after them try to create that.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. But also if you don’t have this, if you don’t have the brand, if you don’t have the positioning and messaging, that’s where we come in.

Tracy Hazzard:

Yeah, get some help. Please get some help.

Karin Conroy:

So you can’t start from zero and then think that there’s going to be any level of success on any end if you don’t have your brand in place first, and then throw it out towards your audience and then figure out what’s happening next. So we have figured out the brand, we’re aiming at a certain audience. How do we figure out, this is where I think a lot of people get worried is how to then talk to the audience and convert them. And so I think a lot of people just leave it off. They just don’t want to come across as this is salesy, but how do you talk in a way that helps them to take the next step?

Tracy Hazzard:

So that’s a great question. And before I answer that, I just want to say the one thing that I don’t want you to take away from what we said here is that the brand is you. I do not want you to create the Tracy Show just because you named your law firm after you or whatever it is that your financial services firm after you does not mean that your podcast should be named after you. In fact, it’s the opposite. And we have significant numbers that say, when you don’t name the show after you and you don’t put your picture on the cover art, you have a 10 times better opportunity to gain listeners than someone who does interesting 10 times better.

Karin Conroy:

What’s the deal with the cover art picture? Because I feel like, so I of course have my picture on the cover art, and I didn’t do a lot of research on that one little piece. Tell me more about that.

Tracy Hazzard:

So because it’s a pull media type, when I search in an app, you don’t look like me. I’m less likely to click on that.

Karin Conroy:

Fascinating.

Tracy Hazzard:

And how many of your clients actually look like you? Yeah,

Karin Conroy:

Very.

Tracy Hazzard:

Especially you’re a woman in a heavily male world, right? Well, I

Karin Conroy:

Will say a lot of our clients are women law firm owners, mainly because That’s great, mainly because there aren’t any other women agency owners like myself.

Tracy Hazzard:

Well, and see if that’s an attractor point, then that’s the one case where it can work. We have a couple of podcasts where them putting their picture on it, assigns it to a culture or a group that makes it powerfully important for their audience that they’re trying to attract. But if you’re trying to do a much more generalized approach, it’s not going to work as well. Think of it like the blind auditions and the voice or something like that. Oh,

Karin Conroy:

I like that. Yeah. I’m pic picturing. Yeah. And I’m picturing a criminal defense attorney who’s in an urban area, and he is a middle-aged white guy, and a lot of his clients are neither of those. If you are doing, I know really, we had a guy on who does a DUI practice in North Carolina, and he’s amazing, but I know a lot of his clients are not at all his same demographic and he doesn’t, I’m not sure if he has this picture on there. That would be interesting to see.

Tracy Hazzard:

Yeah, and I can tell you that you can change it. You can change the name of your show, you can take your picture off of it and see what happens. And we’ve done this for people and we see a significant change because people are out there searching for their problems, and when they’re making a very quick choice based on the cover art and the title of the show, because that’s mainly what those podcast apps show up. Their search engines are actually just so bad that there isn’t a lot for them to choose. And so that’s just the one thing I wanted to say there onto that idea is, but when we’re really thinking about how we’re going to grow the shows, make money, do all of those things stay that attractor, we really have to have that outward focus at all times. We’re thinking about how the audience is receiving this.

If we’re going to sell to them and we’re being pushy, that’s a turnoff. We want to do it in a way where we’re doing it conversationally. If you’re taking interviews on your show, you work in a story and you say, and then you preface a question from that story, what would I have done different? What could I have done to have a better outcome? That’s a really great way to kind of frame that up, or you say I just did here, which is what I was demoing to you, is that our clients, we know from experience with over a thousand clients that we’ve done this with, that you’ll get 10 times better results if you remove your name and your picture.

That shows experience, that shows social proof in what we did. Without saying that, now I’m not a big fan of name dropping. It’s something we actually avoid. We’re the only podcasting company that will not put who our clients are on our website, and we won’t put the famous ones. We’ll put people who put testimonials. Yes. Because they usually push ’em at us and say, Hey, please use this, but we don’t do it. We don’t pay for it. It’s not something we seek. I don’t want to do it, number one, because I don’t other producers and other companies poaching my clients, number one. But number two, we have a focus that your voice, your show is yours. It’s not mine. Just because I produce things for you or publish them doesn’t make them belong to me. And there are a lot of companies, it’s a differentiator. So every other podcast hosting company in the ecosystem, Lipson, SoundCloud, Podbean, Buzzsprout, all of those other companies compete against Productize. And our differentiator is we make sure that we can’t steal your authority, that we direct traffic to your website, that it can’t mistakenly go to us, and that you won’t do something dumb, send more traffic to Apple because they don’t need it.

Karin Conroy:

Right, exactly. And to just kind of go back to this idea of how to convert, because I feel like this

Tracy Hazzard:

Is, I just did it right. I just did. Right, exactly.

Karin Conroy:

A hundred percent. That was a perfect example of it. And the follow up to that is what happens, not what happens. I’m trying to get at when you don’t do that and when you don’t have that call to action and express it to me, we mostly start with website projects with most of our clients, and that’s one of the places, just as a comparison, when I’m looking at a website that I can tell right away where it’s not working and why it’s not working, it’s because they have that fear around this conversion and the call to action, or they just haven’t quite figured out how to do it. And your law firm is a business, and so if this isn’t being done, you are losing so much money. So I feel like a lot of people have fear around that, but then they also think that the podcast, they think of it in terms of the ad revenue that we talked about, set that aside. That’s not the thing. And so they haven’t figured out how valuable it can be in terms of that kind of a conversion. Do you see that too?

Tracy Hazzard:

Yeah. And look, you are converting your listeners versus converting your guests, which is a different model, right?

Karin Conroy:

So

Tracy Hazzard:

You could have a guest conversion model. So I have a lot of FINRA certified. They have to go through finra, financial planners and other things who have podcasts, and we have to be really careful because if we had to go through FINRA to review all of their podcasts, it would be ridiculous. So what we do is we design a different model of show to begin with. So we design a model of show where they find out who their best referral partner is, and it might be CPAs who work with business owners who’ve just sold their business.

Karin Conroy:

So

Tracy Hazzard:

Now we structure a show about CPAs giving advice to business owners who just sold their business, which helps them publicize that. But what the CPAA is now doing is creating a connection with my client, the financial manager, to make referrals. So now they become referral partners. So by him giving them publicity, they have this reciprocity and conversation and build a relationship, and so they start to then refer more business to ’em. So he does 52 weeks a year, has an opportunity to have 52 conversations with someone who could become a referral partner

Karin Conroy:

If he gets

Tracy Hazzard:

Five new ones a year, that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions in business for him. Sure. That’s a

Karin Conroy:

Genius way model

Tracy Hazzard:

Is a great model, but it’s different than worrying about how many listeners I have.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. Well, and honestly, I feel like that really relieves a lot of the pressure it does of the whole production of your podcast because it’s like, I don’t care. That’s not at all. The focus here is the likes and subscribers and all of that stuff. We’re aiming in a different direction

Tracy Hazzard:

Right now. You still have to do a really good job of sharing the show and promoting because that’s what you’re offering them. That’s the give and take. So you want them to have a conversation with you about referrals. You’ve got to give them something to get that reciprocity moving. So you have to be good about repurposing your show. And I am a big fan of video, audio, blog and social share. If you’re not doing all of those things, you’re wasting your time podcasting seriously, because it’s a great vehicle to get all of those things in one. So why not fill your website, fill your social channel, do it with your original voice and capture the video while you’re recording. Because why not? It’s too easy today to not record video and audio at the same time.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, exactly. When I was looking to start this podcast, I was like, listen, if I am going to invest this time, money, all this effort, I am going to maximize this is raw organic content, and why would I not record the video? Because we all know that is the best growing avenue for wherever you’re sharing any kind of social media platform on your website, on Google. Everybody wants some kind of motion. And so I’ve got it here, why would I not record it? I guess some people are self-conscious about it, and then don’t do it. Don’t do the podcast at all. That seems silly.

Tracy Hazzard:

And then think about that model of that guesting model where you’re really creating the relationships, primary importance to you. That’s one layer. But if you’d structure the show, not about you, but about the CPAs who are working and really about who the CPA a caress about. So that’s these people who just sold their businesses. And so if you’re now focusing on them, they’re likely also to have listeners who skip the CPA A and come straight to you.

Karin Conroy:

Yep. That’s awesome.

Tracy Hazzard:

So it’s going to work in your favor anyway as you build that up over time. Yes. So it’s always a stream a model, but you want to do layer by layer. And year over year podcasting is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s going to take time to build that. And what we see really clearly is that there’s a tipping point at 25 episodes. Oh, interesting. When you hit 25 episodes, which is about a half a year, think about it that way. If you do a weekly show and this, if you don’t do a weekly show, it will take you three times longer, right? Yeah. So the weekly show has a compounding effect, and this is, so at about 25 episodes, you will see people start to engage with you. Interesting. People will reach out to be a guest on your show. People will reach out and say, I heard this episode.

Do you have something on this? You’ll start to get engagement from it. Then when you hit 52 to a hundred episodes, so you start to get into that second year of it, then you’ll start to see a lot more return on investments. So you’ll start to see offers for speaking engagements, offers to write articles. There’ll be lots of other residual benefits that start to come with podcasting when you hit that level. And you’ll hit and get binge listeners at that time. Binge listeners, which is my specialty, I have a show called the Binge Factor. And binge listeners don’t come until you really have 50 episodes or more. Because think about it this way, if you were searching through Netflix and you saw a TV series that only had one season, you’re like, I’m going to wait. I’m going to wait, see, I’m going to see what people say.

See if they get picked up. Yes, I see risky, and this is why series like, well, the X-Files who have, what do they have? 13 seasons or something like that? Or crime? Yeah, there’s a ton of crime shows that have 13 seasons or more. When you get to those level, the reason they have continual audiences is because they’re like, oh, I’m looking for something that I’m not going to have to think about what I need to binge on next. I just need something to plug into that I’m going to be happy with. And that’s what’s going to happen with your show. So my 3D print show has 650 episodes. Oh my gosh. We stopped doing it in 2019, late 2019, and in 20 right before the big podcast boom during Covid, right? But we had done 650 episodes and our business was now in podcasting, not in product design and 3D printing.

So there wasn’t much point for us to do it. Plus it was a part of a website that continually made money. So for us, there was a passive income model to it. It became that. But what happened was is that Hewlett Packard reached out to me at the end of 2019 and said, Hey, we’d really love to advertise on your show. We’d love to do a partnership with you and have you do some series with us. And I said, we don’t publish anymore. And they said, I know, but we’ve been trying to get you off the first page of Google for over a year and we can’t do it. So we just decided to join you. Oh, wow. We, that’s amazing. I know. It was amazing. So we worked for six months, and at the height of the pandemic, we launched a special series with them of 25 episodes. Oh, cool. 12 brand new ones we recorded with access to people within Hewlett Packard that we could have never gotten access to. So gosh, it was fun for us to record it. It wasn’t boring. This was really a great curiosity for us. And then we repurposed 12 that matched up to those episodes from our catalog, and we updated them, we re-edited them, we added some new information onto them, and we put that whole 25 episode series, and then we put a special ad on to webinars for them within that scene.

Karin Conroy:

Nice. Okay. So

Tracy Hazzard:

It became power even after the fact.

Karin Conroy:

So when it comes to monetizing and money, the two ways that I think most people aren’t even really thinking in terms of podcasts that you were mentioning is number one, this whole idea of your referral partners and pulling them in and basically capitalizing on their networks and pulling them in and showing your expertise to their network. So that is so much smarter because you are just aiming like laser focused to people who are your potential clients. Because the one thing about podcasting, if you were trying to be the next greatest podcast and just send out be that huge multimillion download, what’s the point of that? Those are not your potential clients unless it’s an ego project that’s not at all what you’re trying to do, and that’s a waste. So this is much more targeted to aim at your referral partners clients. And then the other option is to look at your network, build up your podcast in a way that attracts complimentary advertisers or supporting companies that you can work with that once again, much more targeted within your sphere of where your clients are, and then work together with those. That makes so much more sense than just trying to throw everything out there to just YouTube and capture whoever you can there. That makes no sense.

Tracy Hazzard:

And so much of what it is that you’re competing against is paid marketing out there, and we think, oh, podcasting’s free. This is what people think. But so they’re not investing money. So if you’re not going to invest in a good team to help you produce a great show to help you market it, to make sure you’re repurposing it in your social media channels, creating blogs, we create video full length in YouTube. We create video shorts and YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. We create the podcast itself. We create a full length blog, which is show note transcription style, but it’s not quite a transcription. We’ve worked really hard with Google to format this in a way that works for SEO, but then we also write articles that we could seed to publications that are trades and in our niche, but our purpose to give them advice, give them some marketing advice or give them whatever the advice is in the legal world that you’re out there giving.

But it’s also to drive traffic to the podcast because an article isn’t enough. You have to drive them somewhere. And when I drive them to my company, they think I’m going to sell them, but if I drive them to my podcast, they know they’re going to get more information and then they connect with us, and then they grow to know and trust us, and then they want to do business with us. We used to have people come to us and they’ll be like, what do you sell in 3D printing? And we were like, we sell to multimillion dollar companies services to produce products. This isn’t something you’re going to be able to. And they were like, well, can you create a course? Can you create a book? They wanted stuff from us, and that’s a real power position and influence in your marketplace, but it’s the one that gets you more speaking engagements. But the other part I think most people forget is that, look, if I only have 30 listeners a week, that’s 30 people I’m talking straight to who chose me, wanted to hear from me. That’s way, how do we do that today? I don’t know. I have trouble getting 30 people to show up on a webinar.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. So before we go to the book review, I just want to, this whole year we’re focusing on really digging into the marketing funnel because I feel like this is something, not everybody, it’s very straightforward. It’s a very clean way of thinking about marketing, but it’s not something everybody talks about because it’s a little bit boring. It’s kind of like charts and all that stuff. So very quickly, I’m just going to describe the marketing funnel as a triangle. The widest parts at the top, and the way we describe it and kind of simplify it is that there’s three sections, top, middle, bottom, and then there’s two subsections in each section. You need to be making sure that of all those six sections, you have a plan, you have a strategy, you have activity going on. And in those different parts of the funnel, you are talking in different ways because people are thinking differently about what they need, where they’re at in that decision process. So that’s the marketing funnel. Can you talk a little bit about where podcasting fits? Because a lot of what we’re talking about comes back to this idea that a lot of potential clients talk to me about being a air quote thought leader. So where does podcasting fit? And I have a feeling it’s in a few spots within that funnel.

Tracy Hazzard:

That’s where I look at podcasting as the whole part edges of the funnel, if you want to think of it like that. And I look at it as being sort of an easy warmup to move them from one section to another.

Karin Conroy:

So it’s like the So grease in the funnel.

Tracy Hazzard:

Yeah, it’s kind easing them into the next section because it’s an easy ask. It’s free, it’s easy. It’s also, you’re not emailing me. You’re not pushing To me, this is a really easy way for me to access you and learn about you without feeling like I’m obligated or in a funnel. And so it’s a little bit simpler way to do that. So I’m a big fan of keeping it, but I want all the pieces to be tied together. I want it to be clear, meaning the things that you’re talking about are leading them through the funnel. The guests that you’re having are in alignment with that. Everything that you’re doing, how you’re repurposing it, how you’re linking back, what you’re putting in, your little notes that are in your videos, that are in the podcast episodes. Everything is leading them to be able to find you go through the funnel and connect with you. And so often that’s the part they don’t have their act together on, which is where am I leading them when they go and they look at my episode description and they want more information, if the only thing I’m doing is sending them to my website, that’s too general. I need to give them something specific and relevant to what I just talked about. So if you just talked about intellectual property and you’ve got something about intellectual property, lead ’em to the next episode, lead ’em to a checklist, lead ’em to a direct contact with you.

Karin Conroy:

Also,

Tracy Hazzard:

Your calendar. Make a calendar. Exactly. So you want to grease the wheels to wherever they are in the process. And my main reason is is that lots of people think of podcasts as the top of the funnel.

Karin Conroy:

Yes. Awareness.

Tracy Hazzard:

Awareness. And it is a part of that. But it’s also what I found is that it is the best way for me to close clients because I get in their ear nine times out of 10 when they have a phone call with my team, they’ve already decided to work with us. They just have a question.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, exactly.

Tracy Hazzard:

That’s fantastic to lighten up that process on our sales

Karin Conroy:

Teams. Exactly. I think, and I just was going to expand that you said that a lot of people think of podcasting only as that top awareness. I think a lot of people only think of marketing in general, the top as the very top agree, awareness and interest. That is the whole goal of marketing is those first two steps. And that’s why I’m focusing on this funnel this whole year. We’re going through all of the different steps of the funnel, and then we’re going to talk about it in all the podcast episodes, and then we’re going to go through it again halfway through the year. We’re going to repeat because the middle and bottom. So the middle is getting them, they’re aware, they’re ready to convert, and then they convert. And then the bottom, this is where I feel like most people miss out, is they’ve already converted. Now they’re a past client. What are you doing for them? How are you nurturing that relationship? What are you doing? And we all know that nurturing and getting a repeat client is so much cheaper, more effective, and brings in more money than trying to go get a whole brand new one.

Tracy Hazzard:

And that can be a strategy in of itself for your show. Absolutely. We have a show called Feed Your Brand, and we record it as a live stream every single week at noon Pacific time on Wednesdays. It’s live everywhere on all the social platforms. And at the same time, all my clients are in Zoom with me that are interested in asking questions and getting one-on-one coaching. So I’m live streaming, but I’m not answering questions from the livestream audience. I only answer questions from my Zoom group. So I live stream it. I’m demoing how we record. I’m doing a topic that’s in general awareness for how to market your podcast, how to make money, something that they would need. It’s not for people who don’t have a show yet. It’s usually for people who already have a show. That’s my focus on Feed Your Brand because you want to continually feed your brand, and how do you keep making it work for you? That’s the idea. And then what happens after we record it is we say, Hey, if you were our client, if you were hosted on ize, that’s all it takes to be able to access is 29 bucks a month to be able to access us every single week and ask us your burning questions around anything marketing, anything podcasting. All you got to do is be a member. That’s it.

Now we’re going to go and we’re going to help those people. And so they missed out. So now we do our outward marketing for the funnel attraction at the top of it, but we’re nurturing our audience and we made ’em feel special. We walked away from the leads to nurture our clients.

Karin Conroy:

Nice. That’s amazing. So

Tracy Hazzard:

Imagine how you could create a platform for that. I know a lot of attorneys who used to run a meetup once a month for inventors and other things like that, and they would bring in guest speakers. Your guests on your show are perfect for that. Yes. Invite your clients in to ask those questions. That’s a great idea. After the podcast recorded, there’s so many ways you could nurture them. And you know what it does is it puts you front of mind, and I guarantee you, they will refer you to their friends and your referrals that you get from your existing clients close way faster than anything else.

Karin Conroy:

Absolutely. Of course. Yeah, that’s just, that’s psychology. Okay, so it’s time for the book review, and I know you have a really interesting one. So without further ado, we have a library on the site. We’ll link to all of that stuff. Everybody already knows about that. So Tracy, what’s the book you have to recommend today?

Tracy Hazzard:

So Shane Snow is one of my favorite authors. He’s been a tech writer for a really long time, and I’ve had him on my show, even though he wasn’t a podcaster. I was like, I have to talk with him about how you create binge-worthy articles. Oh, cool. So I’ve talked to him personally. He’s just really interesting. And one of my favorite books is one of his older ones, smart Cuts, smart Cuts. Smart Cuts is this idea that there’s a direct path to doing it. There’s a direct path to cutting cake that gets you the most pieces. I love that, that there’s a direct path to do it. You just have to make the right cuts to make that happen. You just have to take the right path. And sometimes it requires thinking through. And so that’s actually what we’ve been doing over the last couple of years and how we are revising the way we funnel and the way we market today is utilizing the Smart Cuts methodology and doing it is saying, we don’t need more people in the top of our funnel.

We need more action takers at the top of our funnel. And so what we did was we started to really dial in and get really right with how are we going to find those people? How are we going to test their action taking? What are we going to do to get them into it? So we actually do not, we are probably one of the only podcast producers out there who don’t focus on getting clients who haven’t started a show yet, because 75 to 80% of people will quit their show before they ever reach 11 episodes. So my chances of success with them and the longevity and the sustainability of what I can do for them is low.

So we let them have to find us by referrals, by other things for the new people, but go for existing podcasters who’ve hit that magic 25 episodes or more and are saying, okay, this is working for me. This feels right for me now. Now how do I make it better? How do I promote my show better? So we have all of these new things that we now talk about, we’ve messaged differently. They’re not new. We’ve been doing them for our clients for years, but they are now messaged differently to talk to them, to get them to take action. And so, oh,

Karin Conroy:

That sounds like an awesome look. It’s

Tracy Hazzard:

Really looking at that conversion point. How can I make sure that I deliver on the thing that matters most to you in everything that I provide from the free content out there to the actual services and products and the messaging I use to create those.

Karin Conroy:

Okay. Awesome. That is Smart Cuts by Shane Snow. That’ll be on the show notes, on the show page in the library, the whole, that sounds awesome. I love, I was surprised by how much I loved the organization operational efficiency class that I took, getting my MBA, and I just love kind of getting rid of all that extra stuff and finding more efficiencies. It’s awesome. Okay, so Tracy, we covered so much all the things about podcasting, but what’s a big takeaway? What’s the main takeaway that you’d like people to get of all of the different things that we’ve talked about? I feel like there’s a lot there. What’s the one that you really like people to get?

Tracy Hazzard:

So another one of my favorite books in the law space is called Rembrandts in the Attic, and it’s a legal book that is, it’s about intellectual property. It’s about finding those things. Well, your podcast is your Rembrandt. I mean, hopefully you think of yourself as being that valuable. If you’re that valuable to your marketplace, you’re not going to go wrong. You’re going to really be a great lawyer for your clients, a great financial manager, a great podcast expert, a great marketing guru. You’re going to be that if you’ve got all of this information, and this is what happens so often is you put the podcast out and you’re like, that’s it. You don’t think about how am I going to save that? How am I going to put that on my website? What am I going to do with this? You treat it like this one-time thing, but it has long-term real residual intellectual property value for your website.

It’s copyrightable. You must put all of these things in a place that doesn’t disappear tomorrow. That means not a TikTok, that means not an Instagram story, those disappear, no Snapchats, right? You want something that has long-term value. So the three places I want you to put your information, the things you’ve worked, sharing your brilliance, and it includes every time you guest on a show, it includes that. I want you to put it on your website. I want you to put it in a blog. Now, you can’t go blogging somebody else if you’ve been a guest on their show without their permission, but you can put a short description of what you did on that show and link to it, share even the audio file. I also want you to put it in YouTube because YouTube is owned by Google, which gives power to your website.

But also YouTube is a library. So you own the channel, it’s in your law firm’s name, it’s in your name, or it’s in your show’s name. And that channel is an archive that’s easy for somebody to go through and see all the videos that you’ve done so they can now go through your stuff in one place. It’s not so easy on social. So I want you to do that blog. I want you to do the video and then I want you on the website, want you to keep your podcast live. I mean, look, if you’re paying for hosting and then you decide to archive your show, go put it onto a free site. Just keep it live. Do not discontinue those links. It has long-term value. You were on a show somewhere, you referenced your show, and now we can’t find it anymore. That’s terrible.

So that 3D print podcast, after we did that stuff with hp, we still have it. It’s still out there. It’s still live. I used to get a hundred thousand listeners a month at the height of when I was promoting. Oh my gosh. But I still get 10,000 listeners. Oh my God. Every single month to that. That’s amazing. And I get thousands of people coming to my website for more information that is referred to in that or hitting my YouTube channel and watching a short video that shows the machine working or shows whatever we talked about on it. So there’s long-term value there. And what I’ve seen, I’ve had some clients who are like, we sold our company and we sold our show to this other company, and the company immediately discontinues all the blogs. Oh, yeah. They just lost all that residual SEO value, all those keywords, all the organic traffic that they had built up over time. They lose it all overnight like that, but they also lose the minute they discontinue that podcast, it’s all gone.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah. Well, it’s like imagine if you were on friends, if you were one of the people on friends and think about how much money they have made just residually, they made way more money residually over the years than they did, and they were making a lot of money when the show was on. But when you add up what they’ll make over the course of their life of that show, it’s way, way more. And obviously we’re not talking about those kinds of numbers, but that basic idea,

Tracy Hazzard:

That basic idea and that idea that you put this information out there and as long as it’s still valid. So you do have to scroll through it. I mean, I do a cleanup once a year. I’ll go through and I’ll say, these people went out of business. I’m going to take, I discontinue things. I delete them from my feed. Certain things

Karin Conroy:

Are outdated,

Tracy Hazzard:

Certain things are outdated, and their company doesn’t exist. It’s giving a 4 0 4 error. Anyway, let me get rid of it. I do clean that up, but I don’t really change what I said because if what I said now is timeless enough to be valid tomorrow, and somebody’s getting advice from that, that’s still giving me authority in the marketplace, and that’s what we want. We built this authority. It’s a platform. We don’t want to take off pieces of the platform because we just decided we didn’t want to focus on it anymore.

Karin Conroy:

Right. Okay. Awesome. Oh my gosh, so good. I feel like this is going to be the inspiration for so many people to start a podcast and think about it differently. This is not about all the things that we said. It’s not about getting this likes and subscribers and everything. It’s about your reputation getting out there and pulling in the people in the right way that supports your brand and your reputation. Awesome. Tracy Hazard is the CEO of Politicize, which is the combination of podcasts and monetize, which is our topic today, how to boost marketing and money. Thank you so much for being here. This is an awesome episode.

Tracy Hazzard:

Oh, thank you.

Karin Conroy:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Counsel Cast podcast. Be sure to visit our website at Counsel Cast dot com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.

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