A truly massive content archive will usually cause one of two feelings:
- Unspeakable delight about the opportunity
- A sucking dread at the thought of the work involved in repurposing it
The difference between those feelings? Strategy and organization.
This episode of The Company Show is all about strategy and organization and how you can use them to make sure your content archive fills you with more joy than terror.
My guest this week is past mistress at the art and science of understanding the role that content plays in a customer’s buying journey. And her process of content tracking and annual content audits is positively aspirational.
Racheal Cook is the founder of The CEO Collective and host of Promote Yourself to CEO and she has helped thousands of women entrepreneurs design predictably profitable businesses without hustle and burnout.
We had an amazing conversation that covered a lot of ground. Listen to the episode below or continue reading the blog post!
Tune in to the full episode to learn about:
- effective content strategy and organization
- evolving your content and podcast
- the power of evergreen content
- treating your podcast as a library of assets
- content management and planning
- attract listeners through multiple channels
- building a nurturing content ecosystem
- tracking audience engagement and acquisition
Don’t forget to join us for our free monthly strategy calls on the third Thursday of every month!
Content Strategy and Organization for Effective Podcasting
The strategy comes in two parts: when you’re deciding what content to create initially, and when you’re looking at how to strategically reuse and repurpose that content within your business.
When you understand your high-level purpose for podcasting, your Business Podcast Blueprint, and use it as the decision filter for all of the other actions you take and choices you make, then your content and topic strategy is all about what’s going to help you most effectively do things like
- establish thought leadership
- cultivate relationships
- nurture and engage your audience
- convert strangers and listeners
- generate content you can use throughout the business.
You can sit down and look at your editorial calendar for the months to come and think, we really need a few more really strong pillar pieces to get some of the new IP developments we’ve made out into the world. Or, we’ve gotten a lot of attention from authors lately, so let’s make sure that we’re creating some more content that’s going to help them along the process of becoming better clients for us.
On the organization side, it’s critical to have a comprehensive record of what you talked about, when, and ideally, why. We like to create an episode guide for every show that includes episode titles, guest names, keywords, key moments, and links to all of the raw unfinished assets.
When it comes time to repurpose or to identify any content gaps that we want to fill in order to better serve our podcast goals, having a central brain of all of that information makes it really, really easy.
An understanding of your clients’ and customers’ buying journey is a big part of this. Different people need different information at different times in order to make a decision. And there are also different lengths of time it can take people from one source or platform or another to build enough knowing, liking, and trusting to want to do business with you.
So tracking your content and how well it performs and what impact it makes on things like sales cycle length and conversion rates is massively helpful when you’re making your content decisions about what to create next.
Burnout & Business: Racheal Cook’s Journey
Racheal: “I have been in business for a very long time. I literally just filed my registration payment again to the state.
I started my business 15 years ago today. As far as officially filed the paperwork, April 3rd, 2009 was when I officially filed the paperwork for my business. We all start a few months before we officially get legit.
Basically, I started my business coming out of 2008. I burned out really severely, had some severe health problems. I was in the world of consulting. I did what a lot of MBAs do. I finished my MBA. I went right into the world of consulting. I worked the 80-hour weeks. I lived out of a suitcase.
Within a couple of years, I was having major health problems. I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. I was having severe health challenges, severe anxiety. I was having panic attacks to the point where I was in the hospital 10 times in 10 weeks in the summer of 2007. I was like, I’ve got to do something different.
What ended up happening for me is I found myself on a yoga mat, as you do after a major health crisis. And I was literally crying on a yoga mat to my teacher who became my dear friend and she was like, Racheal, I know you don’t want to go back to consulting, but could you help me? This studio is brand new. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it open. I’m really struggling.
And in 2007, 2008, there was nobody talking to owner operated businesses. If you wanted help, you had to go to, your local SBA, but they weren’t really equipped to talk to owner operated businesses or businesses with a very small number of employees. They were really equipped to talk to quote unquote small businesses that were 50 to 500 people. Vastly different.
So that was my light bulb moment. I was like, Oh, here’s somebody who is asking for my help. And instantly I went into consultant mode and I was like, let me see your PnL. What’s your break even for a class? How many mats can we fit? What do we need to do here? And we turned it around very, very quickly. And that became the nudge I needed.
It was like this little nudge from the universe saying, Hey, you can do this. There are people who need your skillset and they don’t have access to it. They literally can’t afford to go pay a big consulting firm. Even the local small business organizations don’t understand their businesses. And so that’s how I started.
I started my business. It was originally called the Yogipreneur and I started in the yoga world. And I started in yoga world because that’s where I was and that’s where my first referrals came from. And over time, what happened for me is the yoga world started me as the Yogipreneur. I was teaching marketing. I was talking about business strategy. I was talking about how to understand the business side of running a yoga business.
And if you’ve ever known people in the yoga world, they’re not just a yoga teacher or run just a yoga studio. They’re a yoga teacher and a life coach, a yoga teacher and a nutritionist, a yoga teacher and a Reiki practitioner. So I started to branch out simply because my message was getting out to more and more people.
So by 2014, I knew I needed to shift away from the brand, the Yogipreneur, because I was just at that point, it was holding back people from working with me because they were like, I’m not a yoga teacher, but I’m a photographer. And I was like, okay.
So I ended up shifting to a personal brand and then it became The CEO Collective. And we fully went into the brand, The CEO Collective in 2020. It evolves. What you start with might not always be what you end with.”
From Yogipreneur Radio to Fired Up and Focused
Racheal: “Bringing it back to podcasting, at the time, my yoga teacher Arlene Bjork was one of the first yoga teachers who started recording her classes and putting her classes out on iTunes.
Then it was a podcast of her class. She would literally record it. I remember this was back when we didn’t have any fancy equipment, but she would have a little mic and a fanny pack. And then I would record the intro and outro. And every week we would publish a new class that was absolutely free on a podcast stream. And it was one of the first ones you could find.
So then when I launched the Yogipreneur a few years into that, I started what became Yogipreneur Radio. And Yogipreneur Radio was, I want to say 2012, 2013, that was the first podcast I’d really had.
It was so incredible because I got to talk to all these incredible people in the yoga world and share their experiences. But also I was sharing what’s working depending on their type of yoga business. Cause not every yoga business owner had a studio. A lot of them were private teachers or were collaborating in some way.
I had some who were teaching very specialized yoga for cancer patients or yoga or all these different needs, all these different specific niches, yoga for runners. And I was just finding all these cool things that were happening.
That was my first introduction to podcasting myself was Yogipreneur Radio. Then a few years after I started that, I launched a free challenge. This was 2014 and I remember it was 2014 because it was January of 2014 and it was actually that week between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s kind of like no one knows what day it is.
I was getting ready to launch my signature program and I had done the whole traditional online launch, three video series, blah, blah, blah and I just decided to scrap it all and I created this challenge called Fired Up and Focused.
At the time, I was insane because I said, you know what, I’m going to do a free video challenge every day for January.
But I just had this feeling. I had done a survey of my audience and the biggest thing I was understanding is it’s not that they didn’t know what to do, it’s that they felt like they didn’t have time. They were just, how do I prioritize everything?
So I ended up launching this challenge called Fired Up and Focused. And this really became the thing that made me fall in love with podcasting.
I had been recording this free challenge, and at the time, I’ll also give more context, I had four-year-old twins and a one-year-old, and I decided a week before I launched it that I was going to launch Fired Up and Focused, and I was going to record a new challenge for every single day for the month of January 2014. I was insane.”
Continuous Podcast Evolution
Racheal: “I have one of the twins here, they’re 14 and I can tell you, I still don’t think I sleep a full night every night. But I decided to create this challenge. It was the tipping point out of just Yogipreneur into a broader audience because it kind of just took off.
And basically what happened for me is I was sharing kind of my productivity strategy, like how I set up my calendar, how I put boundaries in place and every small business owner needs to understand, how do I prioritize my work? How do I get work done more efficiently? How do I figure out what is the high value task? How do I stop procrastinating with things that don’t actually move the needle and focus on things that do move the needle?
And so what happened is I recorded that and it was such a huge hit. I think in the first round we had 5,000 people take it and I ended up taking all of those videos cause I, of course, recorded a slide deck and a video for each one.
But what I did was I took all the audio out and I published as a podcast, as a standalone podcast. I was like, if I have the video version, some people like the audio because I love podcasts. And so I took all the audio out. I made a quick little intro episode, here’s what this is, go through it and I launched it as Get Fired Up and Focused.
A few months later, I took all the transcripts and I edited them into a book, which you can still buy on Amazon, Fired Up and Focused. So I had every possible format. I had a video challenge, I had a podcast version, and I had a book challenge. And that is what kicked everything off for me and really shifted me into a broader audience.
But it also showed me, holy cow, people were finding my podcast now. And I just dropped all, it was 30 episodes at once. I was just like, people are going to binge this. So I just dropped it on. I was like, Hey, if you love the challenge, you need a refresher. It’s here. And then people kept coming back and asking more questions. I just kept on.
And so the podcast went from Get Fired Up and Focused to we, when we were like, Oh, we should make this an ongoing thing. I rebranded it to Uncomplicate Your Business. That was probably 2015. I rebranded it to Uncomplicate Your Business. That’s when I really started publishing weekly episodes. And then I think it was 2019 I, I shifted to Promote Yourself to CEO.
It’s the same podcast feed. I just want to be clear. I never changed the podcast feed. I still have the same feed. If you go all the way back, you’ll find the original stuff. We just rebranded it a couple times, which is okay and it’s normal and it’s fine, everybody.
If your business evolves, you change your name. The people who are subscribed to your podcast, they’re probably going to be interested. I have founders that are still interested in what I’m talking about.
And so what’s funny is I still have people who knew me from my Yogipreneur days. I still have clients who knew me from those days and they have followed me all the way through.”
Staying Fresh with Evergreen Content
Racheal: “What’s hilarious is I look back through it and so much of it is actually still the same.
I actually do this regularly. I look back through my content. I audit my content. We repurpose a lot of content. When you have hundreds of episodes—at this point I have had a weekly episode drop on my podcast every week, pretty much since 2015.
That’s hundreds of episodes. And the last audit we did, we did an audit last year and I was like, holy cow, I could repurpose content for two and a half years and not repeat. And it would still be valuable and it would still be relevant to people.
A big piece of that is one, I just record content that is, it’s not about the latest tips and tricks. So that’s a big shift. I know a lot of people, their podcasts are about what’s new on whatever. And the challenge with that is that content has a shelf life. It’s not going to last a test of time.
I would say 95% of my content is really evergreen content. There is very little that needs to be updated because it is based in business strategy that works and has worked for the last 20 some years I’ve been in the world of small business. So it really makes it easy for me to reshare it and repurpose it.”
Unearthing Gems from Your Content Archive
We were doing something similar recently. We were in the process of writing the book that we’re currently working on, going through all our old content, finding exactly what you’re doing. What can we repurpose that we’ve already done that doesn’t have to be written from scratch?
And I found something that I feel is so precious. I’d almost forgotten it existed. It was the first time we wrote about the Business Podcast Blueprints, the model that we produce podcasts on, from even before we had that language.
It was the first seeds of the idea that was repurposed again and again and again and involved into something that has become such a structural element. I’d love that you have that as a regular practice, auditing all of your content. It’s such a smart idea.
Managing Podcast Content and Planning Ahead
Racheal: “When it comes to podcasting, it is easy for me, I will say, because I’m a verbal processor. I can literally sit and talk about anything for any length of time. Not a problem. Give me a microphone and I will just download my hyper fixation, which is small business and entrepreneurship.
But sometimes you get tired of yourself. Sometimes you want to go on a break. Sometimes you have another big project.
Currently I am in the process of recording a massive amount of content for our clients. And because I knew I was undertaking, basically going through the last 15 years of my work and pulling that together into a new signature framework, I was like, okay, I don’t have bandwidth to do a podcast right now. And so that’s when we audited everything.
We were literally like, we can run this series in January, this series in February, this series in March. I am currently running content that was recorded a year or two or three ago. And people don’t even know because you have to remember even your most devoted listeners, can use a refresher.
They tell me this because the same people who took the very first Fired Up in Focus challenge, every time I talk about a concept for that challenge, they’re like, thank you so much. I needed that reminder. Thank you for reminding me about my model calendar. Thank you for reminding me about boundaries. You’re reminding me and bringing me back to habits that continue to help me grow my business.
It’s kind of like you can’t be told to drink water enough. The more you’re reminded of it, you just are like, oh yeah, let me go fill my water bottle.”
The Value of Repeating Content
We are so familiar with our own content.
It really is a lot of repetition when we think about our own things and what we’ve created, but it’s just not the case for everyone who is outside of the company or the production team.
It’s not as integrated into their lives or way of thinking so it can be so valuable to make that available again.
Racheal’s thought on this:
“This is a thing I tell people all the time when it comes to content.
When I’m encouraging my clients to build out what we call their client growth engine, which is their marketing strategy, their sales strategy, and their client experience strategy—I tell them your potential clients are not paying as much attention to you as you think they are.
And you have to remember most potential clients are going to find you and make a buying decision within what, six months, a year? So you probably, if you have been in business for any length of time, you have a library of incredible content that is still valuable. So why would you let it be couch potato content where it just sits there and does nothing? You can bring it out again.
It’s still going to be relevant to them and they haven’t heard it. Most of them haven’t heard it. So this is one reason I have really shifted into probably at this point, even when I shift back into recording some new content, my biggest focus with new content is to fill in some gaps in our overall content.
Because I have a framework, the 90 Day CEO Operating System, I was able to identify like, okay, I haven’t really recorded podcasts on team as much as I would like. I’ve been very mindset heavy, leadership heavy, marketing heavy, but I need a little bit more about team.
So I already know where the gaps are in my podcast. I know that there’s some content about vision and about where your business is headed and making your business an asset. So I know there’s some gaps I want to fill. But I’m not in a rush to be like, oh, I’ve got to do them this week. I can do that next quarter because I’ve already got stuff I can share until then.”
The Content Library: Building an Asset That Keeps Giving
Racheal: “When you create this much content, I think one of the most underrated things, this is the work no one really wants to do. But it’s the spreadsheet that tracks what has gone out, what category does it fall in.
We all have content categories or content bucket, whatever you want to call it. What category does it fall under? How many people listened to it, et cetera. We track all that.
And then what we do is every year or so we go audit and we go, *okay, if we’re going to run that series again—*and everything I do is in a series every month kind of has a theme, then I can go back and say, is there any part of this that needs to be edited or updated?
Sometimes it’s as simple as literally the series we’re about to run this month as we’re recording right now, we’re going to run a whole series on how to set your revenue goals. Well, the last time we ran it, the branding was a different color and I had different pictures.
So all we have to do is swap out the promotional things, but the actual audio is fine. The show notes are fine. The transcript is fine. There’s nothing else that needs to be changed other than the graphics to promote it.
By tracking that in a spreadsheet, it makes it really easy for my team to be like, oh, we got this. Racheal, you don’t even need to do anything.
Spreadsheets: The Content Command Center
We are such a big proponent of spreadsheets over here at The Company Show and Podcasting for Business. The episode guide, we call it the central brain of the podcast, and it’s got every bit of information that you’ve described.
You should never have to ask the host for anything. It should absolutely always be in that episode guide.
Racheal’s thoughts on this:
“When you have it all in one place, one, it makes it really easy to repurpose. It makes it really easy to review and audit.
There are times where I will have to record something new, but I already have a transcript. If I have a transcript, I can record that new thing with very little effort. It’s a very easy thing for me. If I was like, oh yeah, I did this episode way back when, we need an updated version, and I didn’t know where any of that stuff was, that’s going to be so much harder.
It’s making it way too hard. So I look at all of these things, I tell people all the time, think of all of these things as assets. An asset is something that you do the hard work once, you build it once, and you should be able to leverage it multiple times.
If you own a home, your home is an asset. It appreciates in value over time. You can come back and update the kitchen. You can repaint the walls, but the asset is there. And that’s what your podcast should be like. It should be a library of assets where you can return to it again and again.
I really do think of it like a library. This is my thought leadership. This is the work I want to be known for. So I want to make sure that everything is going to last as long as it can. And even the best books will have a five-year anniversary edition and a ten-year edition—even literature that lasts a long time will publish a new update. And that’s fine.
But if you think of it as an asset from the get-go, you record it that way with the intention that you can reuse it in the future.”
The Client Journey: How to Attract Listeners Through Multiple Channels
Racheal: “I think of everything in a series of content. And the reason I think this way, I’ll back up for a second. I am very much interested in aligning my marketing and my sales with my client journey.
All of us, whether we realize it or not, are going through a buying journey when we are on the hunt for a solution to a problem or a way to achieve a goal or fulfill a desire. It does not matter if you are looking for a lip balm or lip gloss, or if you’re looking for a new coach, you still go through the same exact process.
So the first step of that process is attract. This is when you’re getting in front of brand new people for the very first time. They have never heard of you. They have never heard of your business. They have never heard of your brand. They don’t know anything about you. But they do have a problem and they are searching for solutions. And there’s different ways that they can find those solutions.”
Search
Racheal: “So in our framework, they can search, they can go into Google, they can go into Pinterest, they can go into YouTube and they can search, how do I blah, blah, blah, and fill in the blank. And that brings up results.
So search is actually an incredible feature for podcasters. I heard this years and years ago at a podcasting conference. I knew that voice search, audio search was going to become a thing. And we’ve seen now that even iTunes is saying transcripts now available, search is here for podcasts.
It used to be based on keywords only, but now those keywords are being automated because they’re able to search the content. So search is a huge way that people are finding solutions to their problems. They’re searching for them.”
Other people’s audiences
Racheal: “The other big option is other people’s audiences. So what I’m doing right now, being interviewed by Megan, this is me getting in front of Megan’s audience. Anytime you’re getting interviewed, anytime you’re public speaking, if you’re networking, if you’re getting referrals, someone else is introducing you to their people in some way, shape, or form.
This is really powerful if you are a subject matter expert because you have the opportunity to share your expertise. It’s my favorite. And I find that people who listen to podcasts, love listening to podcast interviews.
When they hear I have a podcast, they will type right into whatever they’re listening to, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever. They’ll go, oh, Rachel just mentioned her podcast. Promote Yourself to CEO. Let me go subscribe so I can listen to some of her content.
So it’s a very seamless transition for them to find me on Megan’s podcast and then come find my own podcast. So if you’re a podcaster, being interviewed is one of the best ways to grow your podcast and transition them into more of a nurture content.”
Advertising
Racheal: “Then there’s advertising and advertising is relevant in podcasts. We are seeing this even more, we’re starting to experiment with how do we advertise our podcast? How do we advertise on other podcasts?
Again, these are things that can work in multiple ways. They can work in multiple platforms, but I tend to find that once you can plug into how your potential clients like to get information, and if you can keep them in that same type of format, they tend to be happiest.
So it might not work as well if I went, where I was doing public speaking and then trying to get them into a podcast because I don’t know if they’re podcast listeners. But if I’m available on search on my podcast, they can search topics and find me.
If I’m showing up on other people’s podcasts, and if I’m advertising on podcasts, I’m amplifying the opportunity that podcast listeners are going to find me in my work. So that’s the very first step. Very first step is how are you getting in front of people?”
Building a Nurturing Content Ecosystem
Racheal: “This is why just producing your own podcast isn’t enough. Because when you just produce your own podcast, you’re primarily going to go out in front of an audience of people who already know you. So that’s nurture content.
People already know you who are in the nurture bucket. They’ve already followed you in some way, whether they’re following your podcast or subscribe to your podcast or on your email list, they’re following you on social, whatever it might be. That is where your content is primarily going to go out, is nurture.
It might have a secondary attract if it’s optimized for search, or if you’re advertising it, or if you’re pointing people directly to it. But for the most part, that’s going to go out to your existing audience. And that content is more specifically geared towards getting people to really make a decision.
Is this someone I trust? Is this someone I like? Do I believe what they believe? Am I aligned with them? Is this someone who I’d like to help me solve this problem, achieve this goal, fulfill this desire?
So that’s why all of our content is a series because every month I have a different topic that I know my potential clients are interested in and I’m walking them through a series of content on my podcast to help them see what is the big idea here, what is my perspective, what is my point of view, what is a problem we’re solving?
What do I need to know about that problem? What are the potential mistakes? What is the small win? What are the actions I can take to solve this problem? What case studies do you have about this problem? And then inviting them to actually learn more about our work.
So that’s a summarized, shortened, condensed version of how this framework works. It’s a little bit more comprehensive because there is, in between attract and nurture, we also talk about engage, which is getting them to take an action step.
I love that action step to be getting on my email list. But often, I see the actual behavior of a lot of our people is they find me on an interview, and they go follow my podcast. So they’re engaging by subscribing to my podcast.
So my job on my podcast is twofold. It’s to nurture those people, walk them through this content series where I’m really comprehensive covering a specific topic, but also it’s to get them to engage on my website by opting in for something.
So every single episode of my podcast, I basically self-sponsor it and I will send people to a free resource, a free training, a free checklist. I will say, go to my website and download this thing, and that gets them on my email list, which is my other biggest asset.
My email list and my podcast are my two biggest marketing assets in my business. If social media went away tomorrow, it would not hurt me at all, as long as I have my email list and a podcast. Which is pretty awesome because I don’t love posting on social every day.”
Taking Control Through Email and Podcasts
Your email list and podcast, they’re your platforms. They’re things that you own rather than digital sharecropping—where you’re building a business and building your audience on someone else’s land.
If you’ve got so many of your critical business functions happening on a platform where someone can change the rules on you at any time, that’s a very high-risk behavior.
Here are Racheal’s thoughts on this:
“Just like your email list, and I’ve done this, you own your website. I’ve moved my website from different hosts to another host, a different platform. I own my podcast. I’ve moved my podcast, different platforms regularly, and I can still publish it and get it out in the world. So it is an asset that you own and you have more control over.
Social media while it is great, I’ve been in business long enough that I have, I rode the wave, I surfed that wave as hard as I could—but at the end of the day, for me, I’m more of a long form content type of person.
I do short form content because it is getting in front of people right now. But even then, I am using TikTok a lot right now and that’s getting me in front of people. I look at that as an interview. I literally look at that as a podcast interview.
I have my video team with a list of questions, and they ask me questions and they record me talking and I am just like, yep, this is just like if I’m getting interviewed in a podcast.”
Longer Sales Cycles and Sophisticated Audiences
Racheal: “It’s interesting. The way that my business works, we do coaching and consulting with women entrepreneurs and small business owners. Our signature program is a 12-month commitment. So we do not work with super beginner business owners.
That was an intentional decision after many years of working with super beginner small business owners. But we are looking for women entrepreneurs who are a bit more established, who are at the tipping point of going from being truly a one-woman show to building a team and having more infrastructure and building a business that’s bigger than just them.
With that knowledge, my sales cycle is a little longer. If you are working with someone who’s super beginner and you have a lower price point offer, that sales cycle can be very fast. Mine tends to be on average about three to six months.
But I will say, this has been an interesting thing, and I’ll weave in TikTok as the example. TikTok has been fun for me. Like I said, I look at it as interviews. I record it as if I’m doing interviews. And that has just made it, I guess, for my brain, easier to manage.
I talk about the podcast on TikTok. I reference it. And I have seen that people go from TikTok to my podcast and buy within two weeks—for a 12-month high-level coaching program. So it’s not that the sales cycle can’t be faster. I just find that when you’re working with a more established, more sophisticated audience, they tend to take their time making buying decisions.
So I’ve built that into our entire framework to make sure that as they’re taking their time, each month on the podcast, we’re not talking about all the same topics over and over again. We’re varying them. So we’re kind of able to address multiple areas of their business.
And so they’re constantly feeling like, okay, she gets marketing. Okay, she understands boundaries. Okay, she understands higher level strategy, and that usually is about a three-to-six-month cycle.”
Tracking Audience Engagement and Acquisition
Racheal: “When they sign up on our email list, we can tag and track that a lot. So I can see exactly where they entered on the email list.
Let’s say they went to my website and I was talking about revenue goals on the podcast and they opted in for our get paid calculator on the show notes page. I can tell they opted in on show notes page versus if they opted in on the main landing page.
So we can track that way and that’s really helpful. But honestly, the funniest thing is I will have people who apply to The CEO Collective cause it’s an application process and I can’t find them on my email list. And so then I look at their application and they’ve said, Oh no, I’ve listened to you for a year or two.
So sometimes that happens. Yes, we can track based on where they opt in from the website, but also we have in our intake, where did you hear about us? And I talk to them. I know where my clients are finding me because they literally tell me. They’re like, oh, I’ve listened to your podcast for a few months or a few years. And so I always take that information in.?
Challenges and Rewards of Podcast Tracking
Racheal: “It’s hard to track sometimes.
This is the one big complaint about podcasting is it’s not as easy to track as other things. On my website, I can tell in my analytics if somebody clicked from Instagram to my website or another website to my website.
So if you go to the show notes page of this episode and click, I’ll be able to tell because it’s a referral link into it. But if you just typed in my website, it’s just going to show as a direct search. It’s not going to give me that information.
So this is where having in all of your client intake information about where they found you is so crucially important because otherwise you just might not know.
But for me, the biggest indicator is if they just buy something and they’re not on my email list at all, that usually tells me that they’ve gone through the whole attract, engage, nurture process through the podcast, and they just literally click the link to come buy the thing.”
Megan: “What a joy-filled metric that is, because you’ve done the work. As you were saying before, you’ve created the asset and now it’s out there working for you.
And so you’re getting clients that you didn’t actively have to do direct new work for. I think that’s so powerful for people who are considering podcasting.”
Differentiating Your Podcast from Influencer Content
Racheal: “When you think of it as an asset, it changes the game.
I think this is a big complaint I hear from a lot of small business owners, because we are in the age of full-time content creators and influencers. But we have to remember that those full-time content creators and influencers, what they are selling is their audience. They are selling their audience to advertisers.
So if you’re following a content creator, an influencer, whether it’s on any social media platform or a content creator on a podcast, like these big podcasts, the ones that are the top 10, top 20, they are selling advertising. You are the product.
So what works for them is not what’s going to work for you. They have to continue to create new fresh content because that’s what is demanded of them in order to grow the audience that they have and maintain their advertising status.
That’s not me. I don’t need to be in the top 100 in order to have the business I have. And I don’t even need a lot of people. That’s the other thing. You don’t need a massive audience. You just need those loyal people who listen to you every single week and who come back to you again and again.
Connect with Racheal Cook
Racheal: “The best place to listen to the podcast is anywhere you listen to podcasts. It’s Promote Yourself to CEO. You will find tons and tons of content there. Just dive into whatever tickles your fancy.
I have a great landing page at https://theceocollective.com/hello and that gives you a good overview of all of the amazing free resources and trainings that we have available to you. So I recommend going there, but I am super available.
The platform I’m most active on is Instagram. So if you ever want to reach out, just tag me on Instagram @racheal.cook and say, hello, I would love to connect.
I love connecting with people and hearing about what they took away or what you’re going to implement after listening to this episode.”
Final Thoughts
I just love the concept of an annual content audit to review performance and make decisions about what to repurpose and what to create fresh. It’s one of those things that feels like a big, huge, time-consuming chore, but can actually be one of the best ways to save yourself tons of time and money.
By only creating what you’re missing from your body of work, you don’t invest in duplicate or rehashed materials. And by actively and intentionally reusing what is still relevant and valuable, you’re making sure to keep your IP top of mind with your audience at all stages of the buyer’s journey. It’s just awesome.
So make sure you head over to theceocollective.com slash hello to check out Rachel’s best resources and contact info and listen to promote yourself to CEO.
If you’re in that tricky stage of growth where you’re ready to expand but are still largely working alone, this could be a really key resource to help you jump to the next level of your business.
How to Track New Listeners from Interviews
One of the things that Rachel and I talked about was being able to accurately track things when people are coming into your orbit and the rate at which they take different steps in the buying journey.
Now, you can’t always know absolutely everything. The internet and podcasting in particular just doesn’t work that way yet. It probably will someday, but not today.
You can get to know a lot, however, and one of the speakers at last year’s Podcasting for Business conference, Tom Schwab of Interview Valet, has a great method for tracking leads and new subscribers that come from specific podcast guest appearances that you have.
This is something that’s often very difficult to pin down, so here’s a quick clip.
Check out Tom’s whole presentation, which is just filled with gold and actionable advice, over at pfbcon.com and you can get access to the entire recording library right now if you’re interested.
Next Week on The Company Show
Next week, we’ve got an exciting case study episode coming up with Susan Friedmann, the creator of Aviva Publishing and host of the Book Marketing Mentors podcast.
We’re going to be digging into her strategy, results, and what she’s learned over more than 400 episodes.
Need A Podcast?
As always, this is Megan Dougherty, and The Company Show was made possible by the team at One Stone Creative.
If you know a business owner that you think should have a podcast, do us a favor and send them to podcastingforbusiness.com!
Key Quotes
“You don’t need a massive audience. You just need those loyal people who listen to you every single week and who come back to you again and again.” – Rachel Cook
“My job on my podcast is twofold. It’s to nurture those people, walk them through this content series where I’m really comprehensive covering a specific topic, but also it’s to get them to engage on my website by opting in for something.” – Rachel Cook
“A truly massive content archive will usually cause one of two feelings.: one, unspeakable delight about the opportunity, or two, a sucking dread at the thought of the work involved in repurposing it.” – Megan Dougherty
Resources
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Podcasting for Business Conference 2023 Recordings
Learn about what other business podcasters are doing:
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