Remember that time we went full-on meta and did a podcast episode about podcast episodes?
How a podcast can easily become YOUR flagship marketing property, the gift that keeps on giving?
Far be it from us to be hoarders of all our marketing secrets – heck, we splash about that secret sauce whenever we get the opportunity!
The Podcast Anchor Theory
So how does a podcast (helloooo, it’s AUDIO, sillies!!) become your flagship marketing property? Yes, yes, we’re aware that it’s an audio format, which sounds kind of counter-intuitive when talking about Google and search, yes?
NO!
Because you’re going to spin 👏 that 👏 thing 👏 into 👏 as many 👏 pieces 👏 of content 👏 as you 👏 CAN!! 👏
We’ve never really made any formal SEO efforts.
But what we did do along the way is discover that whether it’s our rankings or whether it’s the fact that we get traffic out of complete strangers, we can pretty much attribute most of our podcasting success back to the fact that we spin that sucker into a million pieces!
⭐️ Social posts? ✔️
⭐️ Show notes? ✔️
⭐️ Blog post? ✔️
⭐️ Video content? ✔️
Keyword-rich written pieces help drive organic SEO. Which helps drive people to your website. Which helps drive people to get to know you. Which helps drive people to hire you! (well, in a perfect world! 😂)
Here’s just a sampling of all the podcast anchor theory goodness that’s contained in the full episode:
Transcription Services are *Chef’s Kiss*
“We start first of all with our recording. We send it out for editing, and when we get the audio back, we get a transcript that comes with it. The first thing we do to start creating content for our podcast is use that transcript. Bear in mind, it’s probably generated by artificial intelligence in most cases. So, you’re going to need to give that a SOLID once over – that’s not one of those things that you can just slap on your website and have that work for you. You want to have someone go over it and edit it. Then write the first of the four dimensions – a good set of what are called show notes – really like a quick descriptor of what was discussed in the episode. As far as the writing is concerned, in addition to a really solid set of show notes is that we take that translation and convert it into a long-form article/blog post) because not everyone likes to listen to a 20 minute long episode of a podcast. That gives you the gist of the podcast episode for those that prefer reading. And then you want to also think about how that content translates to graphics and visuals. And once you’ve done those four things, you have a complete package.”
Keep Digging Into that Written Material
“We don’t email every episode to our subscribers, unless we think it’s timely and important. We did do some of that during the COVID lockdown because we wanted to be communicating to our audience and giving them some advice during that time. But often what we’ll do is after we’ve done, say, four or five episodes – especially if they’re on a similar theme or topic – we’ll put that into one combined roundup email, where we’ll talk about how they’re linked together. That goes out as an email. And again, that could also go up as a blog post. So, there’s four episodes, you package them up, and there’s a roundup email, right. And that’s why we call it the gift that keeps giving! Then give a think about an ebook or whitepaper – if you have deep value information in four or five episodes around, for example, cybersecurity, that is automatically the fodder that you need to create that cybersecurity ebook! Also think about shortening up some of the pieces, pulling out quotes that make sense. For Canada Day, we talked about a bunch of things around an episode that we had recorded which was to legislation in Canada for LGBTQ plus communities. It makes it so much more efficient for our writer as well, who gets the transcript, she knows that she’s writing a blog post, maybe an email, she’ll highlight some quotes that we can pull out and use on social media, maybe there’s another little snippet we can pull out, it really does consolidate everything for our creative content creators here as well. So that’s how you would take that one piece – the anchor piece and convert it into the written medium. You see now how creating content is no longer from scratch!”
Just Because it’s Audio – DO NOT Forget the Visual!
“The second thing to talk about is converting into, like a visual medium. Before we get to video, let’s talk small things – graphics and images and things like that. We really invested early on, on some really fun photoshoots, because the 4 AM Report – the whole idea of being up at 4am with stuff on your mind, worrying – that was the theme and the idea behind our show. We decided to lean into that with our photography. We had a few photo sessions set up, we were in our bathrobes and pajamas, stressed out, drinking wine out of coffee mugs, with those under-eye puffy patches, or looking tired in front of the laptop in a dimly lit room….
…they very much exuded our personality. We’re a little tongue in cheek, we really leaned into it, those photos got huge traction, I think more people commented on the photos than the podcast itself. This goes to show how important the promotion in the way you talk about your podcast is equally as important as what you record on your podcast episode. And we’ve used those photos over and over again, and not just for promoting our podcast episode. It became almost a calling card for us. And we got known for these images. So, we’ll now use these images of ourselves in other blog posts or in emails or in our ebooks and guides. You really should be trying to figure out how to use the visuals that have to do with your podcast over and over again, maybe even pulling out a bit of text and the link to your podcast. Then suddenly, you’re going to get a whole fresh new set of traffic going to your podcast based on an image. And if we look at our numbers of listeners versus the number of people who talk to us about the podcast and tell us that they’ve seen us in the pictures – it’s kind of like we joke about our D list celebrity!”
The Aftershow Party! (no, seriously)
“The 4am report goes out at 4am, on Thursday, rain or shine. And then 4pm on Thursday, we record a short 10-minute video of us reviewing what was on the podcast. And then we dive into some little gossipy tidbits about the industry. And we call that Thirsty Thursday. And that’s been really fun. It’s so easy to just get on and talk for 10 minutes live and share your thoughts, and that posts on LinkedIn. It’s what all the big guys do. Trevor Noah, for example, he has his main show. And then there’s a 15 or 20 minute recording after his show. So that’s one way in which we’ve used video, we’ve also used that hook that we’ve got for ourselves, our sort of signature question that we ask everyone, when they come on our podcast is what keeps you up at night. So that line what keeps you up at night has fun, a lot of video as well, right? Like when the pandemic first broke out, we started talking about social distance marketing, and how do you keep that going, and we’d use that what keeps you up at night to sort of bring various points to the front. We really want to encourage you to try and get away from the idea that video is only talking head video. It doesn’t have to be, it could be slides. It could be animations. Don’t just use sad stock images all the time. Really make a point and try to excel. It’s like brand extension. We actually made a video, a little celebratory video, we called the 4 AM Origin Story. And it’s done up like a superhero movie trailer, talking about how, from nothing rose 4 AM report. It’s really funny. And we have two versions of it. And one of the versions of it is really on our podcast product page to try and explain to people the vision behind the show and what you can do in a year. If you have discipline and you do things consistently and you do it strategically, not just the one and done, and you follow the anchor approach.”
Of course, there’s much more on the actual episode, so have a listen if you can, and you can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem during this Covid-19 economic uncertainty, or if you have a guest idea on the topic, let us know. Drop us a line at c+p digital. And as always, sweet dreams…well, hopefully!
