20-minutes is all it takes for step ONE: syndication

This first step is one that EVERY person publishing a podcast should do.

And it’s only going to take about 20 minutes or 30 minutes and is a one-time action.

The fancy-big word for it is: syndication.

I’m not talking about real estate investing, I’m talking about putting out your content over multiple platforms. For podcasting, that means through the various directories…

• Apple Podcasts, formerly known as iTunes
• Stitcher
• Google Podcasts
• Google Play Music
• Player FM

You know, all those places.

If your podcast is not on every channel it can possibly be on, being distributed wherever people may go to find your content, then you’re missing out on some potential audience members.

Now granted on some of those platforms, your potential audience may be quite small, but one listener is one listener. You never know who it is who will be the one who shares your content to others who are in your niche.

Who’s going to be the big influencer who picks up your content and thinks it’s the greatest thing and shares it with their entire mailing list of 10,000 people?

You never know who that’s going to be – and you never know where they’re going to find you. So being on every directory or every platform that you can be on through syndication is a powerful thing.

Now, how do you do it?

Well, I recorded an episode back on episode 79 that walks you through all of the directories that I believe are good for you to be in. And there are actually some more that have popped up since the time that I recorded that episode.

Go find that episode. You can click above to get to it.

The show notes are quite extensive – so you could just go through the show notes alone and do what it instructs you to do. But you may want to listen to the audio as well because I threw in some extra stuff there.

But you can do it yourself in about 20 minutes. Now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

It makes sense to share your evergreen content forever – on social AND in your own episodes

Let’s turn a corner to some other approaches to repurposing your existing content that – combined with all the things I’m sharing, could help you go viral with your podcast.

Think it through on this one – you’ve already recorded some great podcast episodes. You may have 20 or 30 or hundred already published. I would venture a guess that much of what you’ve already published is still current is still usable now.

So you may have what they call evergreen content content and that’s something you can be and should be repurposing.

For example: Let’s say episode 4 of your show had great content a guest shared with your audience and the things that they shared and the tips they gave are just as relevant today as they were the day they shared them.

You could let that great conversation fade away into internet obscurity, OR you could continue sharing that content.

You should do it over social media using an app like buffer or Hootsuite or Edgar or eClincher – and you should be recirculating that content in various ways in its original format. The reason it’s so important is because you likely have new listeners who have never heard that particular episode. They’ll be interested to know about it.

But there’s another way you can get this content in front of your audience in a new way.

When you’re recording a new episode about a content you’ve addressed previously, you want to take a minute to go find that previous episode before you record so you can have it handy in your notes.

That way you can refer to it – because many people are listening to that episode because they saw the topic you’re addressing, they are ALREADY interested in it. Those people will often pause right then or go to your show notes and click on that link because they want to hear that episode as well.

But they can’t if you don’t tell them about it.

You’ve got to build a habit of making new listeners aware of past resources that can be of benefit to them. Who knows, they may find that particular episode so helpful that they share it with someone else, and you may gain a new listener from that.

So be a diligent podcaster by creating notes for your podcast episode that you can then reference and point people back to previous episodes.

Have you ever tried to BUNDLE your episodes into topics?

I BET if you look through your catalog of published episodes you’ll find various episodes, published at different times, that are all about the same topic. Perhaps you did a bunch of episodes about social media that have been spread out over the last six months or the last year, and all of that content is still relevant is still applicable.

It would be very effective and perhaps even game-changing for some of your listeners to bundle some sound clips from those various episodes into one new episode, and made it the social media master class episode or something like that?

Or even better… here’s how you could monetize that content:

Bundle those entire episodes together and sell them as a course.

I can hear what some of you might be thinking (because you think so loudly)…

People can get that content for free… why should I expect them to pay for it?

One word: CONVENIENCE

You would be amazed at what people will pay for because it’s convenient for them. Think about your own purchasing habits and you’ll probably find evidence of it in your own life.

You’re making it easy for people to not only find, but to benefit from the content you’ve produced. They don’t have to go looking for all of your content, they just have to pick that one course on the topic they’re interested in and pay for it.

And here are a couple more tips to make it easy for them to say “Yes” to your new product…

1. Add additional resources like action sheets or show notes reformatted into a pdf ebook. You can come up with valuable, complementary resources so that it’s a bigger, better resource than it was originally when you first produced it. Consider this BONUS content.
2. And make it a an easy payment for them to make like, $29 or $39 for the entire course. I call fees of this size “forgettable fees.” Think about it – $29 – I’m going to spend that much on coffee this month, probably – and I won’t think anything of it. You can position your new product in a way that makes it easy for purchasers to see it as a no-brainer decision.

Why isn’t anyone doing “quick tip” episodes from old interview or episodes?

Let’s move on – to another repurposing idea that could move you toward “go viral” status…

I refer to this as my “Quick Tips” episode strategy.

If you decide to implement this strategy, I’d really like to hear how it goes for you. So far, I haven’t had any of my clients take this strategy seriously. Maybe you’ll be the first?

Here’s my description of what a quick tips episode would be…

Say you’ve got 30 interview episodes that you have recorded over the history of your podcast –  with various guests. Why not go back through those episodes and find those pithy, powerful, intriguing things that they’ve shared. You might call them the “golden nuggets.”

Just slap your good old standard intro on the front end, do a 30 second voice over explaining that this is a quick tip episode, and then insert the actual clip you’ve chosen.

You could even have your music playing behind it. Don’t be afraid to make it unique, to make it a little bit different than your normal episodes. And here’s the beauty about it: because they are “quick tips” the could be as short as 30 seconds or a minute and a half long, or two minutes long.

It’s just a little short, quick tip episode that you could insert into your normal podcast feed to provide more content for your listeners and tease upcoming episodes at the same time.

I think could generate lots of interest.

If you share these on social media, you could use an Audiogram. You’ve got more content both for Apple Podcasts and the other directories to pull from – AND for social media sharing.

A bonus benefit to Quick Tip episodes

You have yet ANOTHER opportunity to highlight your amazing guests and reach out to them to team up on sharing the episode.

You make them look good. They help make your podcast look good.

And if you can be strategic about these Quick Tip episodes and include your guest’s call to action or offer to your listeners in the audio clip you choose. That means you could drive revenue traffic to their website (which they will NEVER forget), or to YOUR affiliate link with them if you have one.

Make your existing content work FOR you – and for your guests. It’s a form of generosity on your part to feature them again.

If you like the “Quick Tips” idea, you’ll LOVE this one

Right along the line of my “Quick Tips episodes is something very similar – but a little bit different at the same time. This is a strategy one of my clients uses that I think is ingenious!

Jeremy Weisz has a great interview-based show called Inspired Insider. He conducts interviews with Founders and CEOs of big companies like Quest Nutrition – companies that have really made it big.

In those conversations he draws out some amazing nuggets from these people that you won’t hear anyplace else.

Jeremy uses the interview audio that will go into his feed as a “full” episode and pulls out “mini-sodes” (my term, not his). They could be three minutes long, seven minutes long, or 15 minutes long – just depending on how the audio works for his purpose.

He chooses a pithy, powerful little piece of the guest’s story – maybe it’s a dramatic, or a serious setback they experienced – the emotional portions of the conversation.

Then he formats them as “One Question” episodes (because they are all the answer to ONE specific question he poses to every guest). Jeremy publishes these smaller episodes on Tuesdays and then he publishes a longer version on Thursday.

And here’s the kicker: the Tuesday and Thursday episodes don’t relate to each other. In fact, shorter Tuesday episodes are a week ahead of the publication of the Thursday episodes. You can think of them as a “teaser” for what’s coming the next week.

At this point, Jeremy’s not even saying that the full interview is coming next week (probably a good idea to do that), he just puts it together as a mini episode.

Do you see the benefits of this approach?

#1 – you’re giving your audience more content.

#2 – you’re giving them a kind of a precursor or a taste of the great content that’s coming

#3 – you’re giving yourself content that you (and your guests) can promote.

It’s kind of like the Quick Tips episodes, but not so involved..

A “Best of” episode idea a member of my team came up with

This next idea came from a guy who works on my team – Jonathan Messinger. He’s an incredible podcaster himself, he publishes a great podcast called “The Alien Adventures of Finn Caspian” – a children’s show.

Johnny was working with one of our clients who was having trouble getting back on track after having missed some episodes. Rather than explain it all to you myself – I’ll just let Jonathan tell you in his own words (and you can hear him tell it on the audio for this episode).

Hey, this is Jonathan, one of Carey’s editors from Podcast Fast Track. I thought I’d talk a little bit about a project that I did with one of our clients. It was a lot of fun and really easy to do. And it’s all about sort of repurposing content.

So basically, what it was was that this client was traveling a lot and was having a hard time keeping up with her podcast schedule. She was coming up on publishing her 50th episode, so I shot her an email and I said, “Hey, how about doing a best of episode?”

One of the funny things about that was that while she was into the idea, she felt kind of bad about picking her favorite guests. But I had been editing her show for about a year and so I had favorites that I had been listening to, and stories that I knew.

So what we decided to do was that I would pick my favorite episodes and my favorite stories from those episodes that I remembered – the ones that kind of stuck with me the most.

We tried to go for some variety, so we had stories that were funny. We had stories that were very serious, or very dramatic. We had really great moments where the host and the guests were really jiving really well and it all kind of worked well.

Basically, I clipped those moments out of each episode – it’s really easy to do because of Podcast Fast Track’s timestamp method on the show notes. I could find the clips really quickly. Then I sent those clips over to the client, she listened to them, and she recorded 15 to 20 seconds introducing each clip.

That was it.

Then I took her clips and her introductions and wove them in. So it created this episode, that told the story of the first year of her show. It was really fun. And it was really cool because it was an opportunity for us to work together – really together – and be kind of creative partners.

Isn’t that a creative idea?

I’m telling you, these people that work for me come up with these great ideas… and I love highlighting them for you because these guys and gals are geniuses. They come up with stuff like this from working with clients everyday – things that are actionable and practical.

And like Jonathan said, this “best of” episode really didn’t take that much time.

So you could do this yourself. It’s a great approach for repurposing some of your content

Why not add your audio to YouTube with an original graphic?

YouTube.

Now there’s kind of a debate going on about whether you should put your audio content on YouTube with a still image over the top. I do it because I often find myself listening to things on YouTube while I’m doing something else.

In other words, I’m not watching – I’m listening, like I would do with a podcast. I think other people do the same thing

So personally, I think it’s fine to put your content on YouTube, just put a different graphic on each individual episode so they stand out visually. And if you want to do the extra work: you can use Auphonic or Headliner to add more images that rotate or change throughout the video.

OR – if you’re doing interviews and using Zoom – you can post the video version of the same audio conversation.

I did that recently for one of my episodes with Derek Pando from Zoom – it’s Episode 111 where we were talking about using Zoom.us to do recordings.

Get the idea?

But YouTube is not the only video game in town. You can put your podcast episodes on places like Vimeo and DailyMotion as well – these are all video websites. You could even upload them on Facebook as videos for that matter.

BUT – WARNING – Facebook is a little more difficult to  make this work because they frown on what they are referring to is “fake video.”

What they mean by that is that you’re not actually uploading a motion video – it’s just a still image with audio underneath it. That’s a case where the rotating images I mentioned earlier may be the way to go.

If you’d like to know more about the debate about whether you should or shouldn’t do this YouTube strategy for your podcast, you can listen to Episode 104.

Could your podcast audio be turned into a book?

You may have listened to Episode 95 with Jim Kukra. He explained how his company, Book2Pod is taking books people have published and turning them into podcast episodes – using technology that is text to speech stuff – using robot voices and things like that.

Why couldn’t we kind of reverse engineer that thing and make our audio into books?

You’re just wanting to repurpose content to get it out there to gain that audience, to head toward going viral as a podcaster. It doesn’t matter to me really, if your audience is a reading audience or a watching audience or a listening audience.

They are your audience. Period.

You want to be able to create resources for them that THEY find helpful.

So if you utilize a transcript service like Rev.com or Temi or Otter Voice Notes (some of these are VERY affordable and fairly accurate) you can get a transcript of your audio, pay a VA or Fiverr freelancer to do the editing and formatting, commission some cover art, and have an ebook in no time.

If you DO this, be sure you include website links and contact information for yourself and your podcast in the front pages of the book. Why the front pages?

Because the online ebook platforms like Amazon often have a “Look Inside” feature that shows the first portion of a book. You want them to see your info, even if they don’t wind up buying your book.

Get it?

Here’s a creative idea from Dave Jackson about highlighting your podcast at events

It may be hard to believe, being a podcaster yourself, but there are still LOTS of people out there who don’t even know what a podcast is, how to listen to one, or where to find them.

Seriously, it’s true.

On a recent episode of The School of Podcasting with Hall of Fame podcaster – the one-and-only Dave Jackson, Dave was talking about attending events where your podcast topics are relevant to the topics of the event.

Okay, so say you do a podcast about dog grooming and you’re going to a dog grooming convention. You could put an outstanding, knock-it-out-of-the-park episode of your podcasts on a cheap little thumb drive, brand it with your podcast website address and hand those out to people you meet.

I’d also suggest that somewhere in the audio you give step by step instructions for how they can find, subscribe to, and listen to your podcast regularly.

You see, you’re giving them first-hand knowledge of what a podcast is and how to find it. And it’s about a subject they are already interested in (they ARE attending a dog grooming convention, afterall).

Thanks for sharing that great idea Dave – and congratulations on your Hall of Fame induction (it didn’t look like it hurt too much).

And by the way – if you haven’t hear it – Dave recently played his induction speech at the end of a recent podcast episode.

And also – Daniel J. Lewis’ intro of Dave was incredible. Daniel, you did a great job. You guys are the best.

No matter how you repurpose, you need to market effectively!

I’m sure there are hundreds of other ways that any of us could repurpose our podcast content that haven’t even crossed my mind.

BUT I FEEL THE NEED TO SAY THIS: All of these approaches take time, they all require effective and savvy marketing, promotion, buzz-creation (I’m not talking about marijuna, either)

People are not going to find these great resources that you create unless you help them by targeting the exact people that will find them beneficial.

How do you do that?

Well, here’s a little tease for the next episode. on episode number 115, I will be speaking with a guy named Tommy Walker.

Tommy is a content strategist and audience finding cyborg. I’m telling you, this guy knows his stuff and I’m going to warn you ahead of time – he’s going to help us understand just how hard it is to do this effectively.

He’s going to share how the principles that fuel effective content marketing and marketing in general – things like audience identification and audience acquisition – can and should be applied to podcasting.

So for those of you who are eager to figure out something that really works, Tommy is going to bring the goods in the next episode.