It is that time of year again, friends! We’re opening up submissions for speakers for this year’s Podcasting for Business Conference.
The first PFBCon was in 2022, and came about while I, Tom Fox and some other friends were at the always fun and valuable Podfest and realized that as awesome as in-person podcasting events are, they aren’t always a possibility for business owners who podcast as only one of many, many things they have to do every week.
So the Podcasting for Business Conference was born—something all virtual and all recorded to fit in around the work of running businesses that so many people need to do.
And it’s time to start planning for this fall’s edition.
This year’s event is going to be taking place November 14th and 15th with a few special events earlier in that week. I’m looking for 10 speakers who can give specific tools and strategies to help people podcast more effectively, profitably and pleasantly podcast.
If you’ve got just such a strategy to share, you can head here and share it!
To inspire your thinking, I’m sharing several (although my no means all!) of my favorite clips from last year’s expert lineup, starting with some important advice about titles from Alex Sanfilippo.
Listen below or continue reading the blog post!
Tune in to the full episode and get tips and strategies for…
- podcast visibility and growth
- pitching to guest on other shows
- relationship building for sales
- search engine optimization
- Email marketing and collaborations
- Podcast re-recording and editing
- PLUS an exciting announcement and a special offer at the end!
Don’t forget to join us for our free monthly strategy calls on the third Thursday of every month!
One of the best ways to grow your podcast
Alex Sanfilippo: “So many of us get really creative—and I’m not trying to be rude or mean, but we get creative and clever with our podcast title.
But you wonder why people aren’t finding your podcast because nobody knows what the podcast show about everything is. No one knows what that is.
So you want to make it very clear, even in your show title.
And you can change your podcast title whenever you want. It doesn’t mess anything up. You can do it at any point. There’s nothing to it. You literally go to your hosting provider, change it, enter, save, done.
Don’t like it, go back and change it a week later. You can do whatever you want.
But the thing is, you want to make sure that your show title describes what your podcast is about, so that when somebody’s searching for it, one, it comes up, but two, it quantifies the fact that, yep, that’s what I just said I was looking for, and there it is.
The other thing is your description.
Let your description reinforce the title. Put the keywords in there again. Make sure that people know if they’re going to even read it, keep it brief, or at least keep the topic brief.
You can add more below it, but above the fold, you want people to basically say, confirmed, this is what I’m looking for.
The next thing is your actual episode titles.
Something I still see people commonly do is they say season one, episode four, and they spell it out. And then they put the guest name or something like that.
That doesn’t tell me anything. I’m trying to figure out how to eat healthy over Christmas o I don’t put on 10 pounds.
And if it says season four, episode five with Alex Sanfilippo, that doesn’t tell me that you’re going to help me keep weight off during the holidays. That doesn’t tell me that.
But if it says how to make sure you don’t put on weight during the holidays, ah, that’s exactly what I’m searching for and looking for.
So you want to build things that have the exact words that people are searching for. You want that to be in the episode titles and the episode descriptions. Again, the description helps it rank because you can use the keyword, but also reinforces it.
So if I’m somebody who’s looking, I might click the description and I’ll read the first couple of sentences. That’s all I’m going to read. I’m not going to read all of it.
Read the first couple of sentences and be like, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m describing. I’m going to hear that out.
This right here, along with finding one new listener every day is the greatest way to grow your podcast.”
Podcast pitching is about the topic (not you!)
I know you’ve received a bad podcast pitch—one that could have been sent to any podcast under the sun (and probably was!)
That kind of pitch doesn’t fly at the Podwize Group where Angie Trueblood emphasizes low-risk pitches with a focus on the topic that would matter to the host and their audience…
not a list of the potential guest’s accomplishments.
Angie Trueblood: “Carol Cox told me years ago that the reason she loved our pitches is because we always give the host an out.
Contrary to typical sales coaching where you want to use like really closing words, we use words like, we have a client who might be a good fit as a guest on your show.
We always give the host an out because we recognize it’s their decision to make on whether or not this topic and guest is a fit for them, that they know their podcast more intimately than we do.
So that’s first of all, around the language.
The pitch for us, it’s far more important, the topic that we are pitching than anything that we are including about the guest.
We’re almost like content creators and content strategists really figuring out, what’s the topic that’s going to resonate with this host audience that also highlights me, my business and my expertise.
So if you can come up with a really compelling topic, then you just sprinkle in a couple of credibility markers, like, oh, I have a podcast, or I’ve been in business this number of years, or if you’ve won an award—but really that part of it should take maybe two sentences.
The whole pitch is really not about you as the person, it’s about what you can bring to that show.
This has been a couple of years we’ve done it, we’ll put their full bio, but at the very end. So basically after we sign off, we’re like, okay, here’s more info if you want it.
But we didn’t want to fill the pitch with that. “
Connect with your customer before they even find you.
There is nothing wrong with approaching your guest list strategically, and deploying the content you create throughout your business!
Atiba de Souza approaches all areas of his podcasts and business with an eye to creating win-win situations—as efficiently as possible.
Here is how you can us your podcast to increase the know, like and trust factor to hasten up your sales cycle.
Atiba de Souza: “We are a video content marketing agency. Our entire goal is to help you shorten your sales cycle using video. Now, what am I talking about here?
What I’m talking about is the fact that your ideal customer is trying to build relationship with you before they ever actually come see you, before you even know they exist.
They want to feel like they’re in a relationship with you. Now, we’ve all heard this before, and we call it Know Like and Trust—they want to build Know Like and Trust
Guess what? That’s building relationship.
How do you build relationship with someone? You go through things with them. You ask them questions—ad your ideal customer is doing the exact same thing with you.
They’re going to Google, asking questions and hoping that they get an answer. Well, guess what? If you answer it, then you have any opportunity to build relationships.
So that’s what we help you do.
We help you find those questions that your ideal customer is asking, and then answer them and position them on Google search so that you can be found by your ideal customer and they can build a relationship.
And let me tell you what happens.
So for example, we had a doctor who said, Oh my gosh, I just made the easiest $26,000 sale I’ve ever made—because people come in and they feel like they know you, they feel like they love you, they trust you and they’re ready to go.
And that’s the beauty. So that’s what we did.”
An easy SEO hack that you can use:
One of the most popular event types we had at least year’s PFBCon were the Ask the Expert sessions, and Danielle Desir Corbett generously gave a whole hour of her time during one of them to answer all of our questions about SEO for podcasts.
Here is one of her tips about YouTube and how it should be a part of your strategy.
Danielle Desir Corbett: “I’ve noticed the blog posts that have no YouTube videos versus the one that do have YouTube videos—there’s a difference.
The one that does have these videos typically performs better. And those episodes typically have more plays because it’s now in a different place. It’s more visible out there.
So even if you don’t produce videos (I do not produce videos), I still take that audio-video and I put it in my show notes to have that SEO Google juice. So you could still leverage and use that.
Imagine if you don’t have that capability with your hosting platform, you can still look for within YouTube a related video—maybe your guest has a YouTube channel. Take that video and put it into your show notes.
When you have your own SEO checklist, your show notes checklist, YouTube videos are always on mine. So I’m either looking for a video I can put on that it’s mine or a guest or something related that I think is relevant.
Because again, I just want to benefit from having YouTube’s product on my page and for Google to be like, oh, that’s cool. Awesome.”
Don’t forget the power of email!
Next up, Jeremy Enns, who is one of the best podcast marketing strategists working today.
He posits that it’s often easier to get a new email subscriber than a podcast one—but you can marry those two processes.
Jeremy Enns: “For me, it’s usually email—it’s much easier to get a newsletter subscriber than it is to get a podcast subscriber.
Then once they’re on my email list, then I can present them with an ongoing feed of episodes that may be interesting to them.
If I start to collect any kind of like segmentation data, then I can, if I’m on my initial signup form, it says, what’s your biggest podcasting challenge right now?
Somebody says, I want to get sponsors for my show, then in a welcome email, I can say, hey, here are three episodes, my favorite three episodes on getting sponsors for your show.
Now this person who’s just signed up for my email list, they’ve got a curated feed of episodes that are highly relevant to them, that makes it much more likely that they are going to listen to the show in the first place, have a positive first impression of the show, and keep coming back.
So if we’re going to be wanting to getting people on email anyways, I feel like it’s easier to get people in there and then get them into the podcast after the fact, then by trying to promote the podcast, which is probably the hardest thing we can get people to take action on of anything in our content ecosystem as our main kind of promotional focus.
The second thing, once we have developed our system and our strategy around that, the next step is to look at borrowing and leveraging other people’s audiences.
And so finding other brands, creators that have significant overlap or complimentary audiences to ours, and then partnering up with them. This could take many forms—could be promo swaps or feed drops or guesting lead magnet swaps.
There are near infinite ways to collaborate with other people. The limits are your creativity. But we can leverage all of those.
If you can do this, this is really the only strategy that you need in my opinion is collaborations and that you can build your entire marketing strategy around that forever.“
Re-record questions, move your audio around.
We’ve all been in a situation where an amazing guest doesn’t quite…. get the question we were asking, and maybe gives an amazing answer… to a different question.
When that happens, Liz Covart recommends just re-recording the question! Her presentation last year on how to interview experts was an attendee favorite.
Liz Covart: “I would not be afraid to re-record some of your questions if you need to.
We re-record all our questions because we always have to re-record one because maybe the guest, you asked a question, the guest answered something completely different and it’s genius—but the question you asked does not make sense for the answer they gave.
So we may have to insert one or more questions. You do want them to sound somewhat similar; you don’t want to sound that all the time, but there are earlier examples on the podcast where you can hear we recorded one or two.
The best way to do that is to record it in the same space with the same equipment that you use to record the interview.
I also wouldn’t be afraid to move your material around.
Sometimes our guests bring up technical language. So with the task and gang system of slavery, that just came up in a conversation and the scholar just mentioned like, oh yeah, the task system of slavery, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and went on.
Then my immediate follow-up was, you know, for those of us who can’t quite remember our textbooks, could you explain to us what the task system of slavery was?
In that particular case, what I did was I took her answer and then inserted it in the original answer. So when she said task system of slavery, and said something, which is, and gave you the definition—then listeners could follow along with the original answer.
I just cut that extraneous question, that extra question out.
And sometimes you just can’t because of the way the conversation added. But don’t be afraid to ask and leave that follow-up question in to make sure that listeners are really understanding what the guest is trying to convey to them.”
A new economic model for podcast networks
Finally, here’s a note from the Compliance Evangelist himself, Tom Fox, that exemplifies just how much you can do with podcasting when you’re willing to experiment.
Tom Fox: “What we wanted to do was see if there is a different economic model that can be used for a rural podcast network. But as we’ve gotten into it for the past year, we realized that it can be used literally for any distinctive network.
So our closest city is San Antonio. So you could use the same model for a San Antonio podcast network. You could add a podcast movement event.
I met a woman who used this model and it’s where I got my idea from. She had one block in Brooklyn that she had a podcast network around and it was all businesses, but they were consumer facing business.
So it can work with in a wide variety of geographic models
The prior economic model for a rural podcast network was to have one major or mega podcast and whatever the topic might be—hunting, fishing, farming, wineries, birding, golfing, and then have that would basically pay for the entire network and you would have more odds built around that.
We didn’t think we were going to have that sort of national or international podcast out of Kerrville. So what we decided was to try something different.
We founded this in October 2022. We started with three shows. We now have 12, and we have 1,700 subscribers to the network. The significance of that number is there’s just over 20,000 people in our hometown.
And the newspaper that I’m going to talk about, we have a three-day-a-week newspaper, has 3,000 subscribers. So we are fully half of what the newspaper is in one year in terms of subscribers.
This is a list of our podcast network—and I put this here to show you really the breadth and scope. I’ve said this many times, and I will say it at the end of this presentation:
In podcasting, the only thing that you are limited by is your imagination.“
Get Involved!
I hope this has all got your creative juices flowing—and if you have some important learning for a community of business owners, experts, service providers and marketing managers and directors, I want to hear your ideas!
You’ll find all the details and how to apply here. Applications will be open until July 31st. Please, tell your friends!
The Book
While I’m asking for favors, you may know already that I’ve written a book called, shockingly, Podcasting for Business. It’s going to be releasing in early September this year.
This is a project that has been years in the making—we’ve completely codified the Business Podcast Blueprints and created a handbook you can use to design or refine, and optimize a podcast to bring real, bottom line value to your business.
Special Offer!
What you don’t know yet, is that I am going to give an absolutely free PFBCon ticket to every single person who pre-orders it.
If this is something you and your community might be able to take advantage of, send me a note here or find me on LinkedIn—let’s talk.
Next Week on The Company Show
Next week, we’re going to be talking all about sponsorship and what you need to know if you’re going to try and monetize your show or anything else!
Need A Podcast?
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
“The whole pitch is really not about you as the person, it’s about what you can bring to that show.” – Angie Trueblood
“In podcasting, the only thing that you are limited by is your imagination.” – Tom Fox
Resources
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Podcasting for Business Conference 2023 Recordings
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PFBCon 2023 Recordings
Whether you’re a solopreneur, manager of a department, principal at a firm, or a non-fiction author ready to expand into audio, the Podcasting for Business Conference will help you leverage a podcast to meet your business objectives.
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