Be Found By The Perfect Reader: Why Authors Need A Podcast For Search & AI Visibility Go Beyond The Launch

Search visibility determines whether your book keeps selling or gathers dust after launch day. You poured your heart into your manuscript, but search engines and modern AI tools crave fresh, consistent content to recommend your brand. Host Juliet Clark welcomes podcast strategist Tracy Hazzard to break down why a weekly show provides the ultimate relevance engine for authors. You’ll discover how audio content drives organic discovery, outranks static sales pages, and feeds eager buyers straight to your book. Stop letting your publication fade into digital silence and turn your core message into a continuous platform.

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Be Found By The Perfect Reader: Why Authors Need A Podcast For Search & AI Visibility Go Beyond The Launch

Welcome to the show. This is one of our free trainings. If you’re someone who likes to follow along and visually see this, please go over to our YouTube channel, Super Brand Publishing. If not, just tune in to this show. I know a lot of you like to actually see what’s being shown as well. Our guest is Tracy Hazzard, and she is a seasoned media expert with over 2,600 interviews from articles in Authority Magazine, BuzzFeed, and her Inc. Magazine column.

Also, her multiple top-ranked videocasts and podcasts like the Binge Factor and Feed Your Brand. She’s one of CIO’s Top 26 Entrepreneur podcasts. Tracy brings diverse views from what works and what doesn’t in marketing, branding, and media from thought leaders and industry icons, redefining success around the globe.

Tracy’s unique gift to the podcasting, marketing, and branding world is being able to identify that unique bingeable factor. The thing that makes people come back again and again. Read actively and share as raving fans and buy everything you have to sell. Usually it’s Mondays I cannot read a bio and now it’s Friday I apologize. Welcome Jonathan, it’s nice to see you here. Tracy, take it away.

I thought we’d tie the Perfect Reader Playbook because it doesn’t really matter if we have a really big audience if they’re not the right audience. I want to make sure that we tie the perfect reader playbook into anything that we might be doing as content creators. Beyond the book, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. I’m going to share my screen real quick, because of course I have a PowerPoint for you. A gamma for you, because that’s what it’s called nowadays, right? Authors and podcasts go hand in hand. A lot of authors I know have podcasts.

A lot of them started before because it’s a great list builder. A lot of them started way after and realized, “I should have done that first. This is a really good idea. It keeps my audience engaged. It gives me current content.” Here’s what we really do not understand and know and most people who’ve been podcasters for a really long time I’ve been a podcaster for over a decade. It’s twelve years now, something like that. We do not really understand the power of what it’s doing today in an AI world. AEO, if you haven’t heard that term before.

It’s an AI engine optimized, and it’s also termed an Ask Engine Optimized. When I ask a question, AI gives me an answer. It’s the AI summary version, mostly at the top of Google. You want to also be Ask Engine Optimized. It’s not just search engine optimized anymore. The problem with our books is that they are a one-time thing. They’re also behind a pay gate, hopefully. You’ve really got it tucked away wherever you’re distributing your book. We do not want to have that idea that we have no way to reach our audience on a regular basis and that once the book launches over, it’s done and there’s no way for us to be suggested and searchable anymore.

We’ve got to have something that is consistent and constant in our platform and in our content creation model. It cannot just be Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all of those places because they have a shorter attention span than my kids. It’s crazy how fast content disappears from those platforms. Some of them are within hours. Within hours of the post that I made about this webinar, about this podcast interview, the post was already obsolete and unsearchable on LinkedIn.

The 2 AM Search Principle

If someone said, “I’m looking for some information about authors and podcasts, I wouldn’t even show up there. How is your book going to continue to show up? How are those perfect readers who are out there looking for support, help? Looking for something at 2:00 AM?” I call that the 2:00 AM principle. Looking for real help at 2:00 AM, how are they not finding you? It’s simply because your search visibility is at an all-time low when all you have is the book itself, the title of the book on your book page.

That is not enough in today’s world. That’s what we’re going to talk about. How can we use podcasting to make that happen and have it really surface that perfect reader attraction model? That’s what we really want at the end of the day. It’s great to have a podcast with lots of listeners, but if they do not buy everything, then it’s not helpful. If they do not follow you, if they do not join your community, if they do not connect with you, then that’s a problem.

That’s what we’re going to talk a little bit about today because we want to keep them coming back. We want them to come back and connect with you and comment with you. We also want you to stay current and relevant. If the topic that you wrote your book about is really attached to a current affair, something that’s going on currently in the world today, we want you to be able to have a place to comment about that, to be the go-to resource for what’s going on in the world today based on your expertise and thought leadership and whatever your book was about.

What I’m going to talk about, I’m going to say, really caveats it. This is really more predominantly effective for nonfiction writers. It’s not that it doesn’t work for fiction. It’s just that fiction has its own referral network. It has its own model of community. It has its own way that’s working. I did not quite address that today. We’re really talking about more of that, like business-type books or a book about faith or books about anything that would connect with someone and offer them this service model where you’re providing them information, lessons, and resources.

The other thing about it is that today they’re talking about human content creation as being a content franchise. I like that term because I think that a franchise is something you make money off of. It is something where there is revenue involved in it. There’s profit involved in that. That’s exactly what we want. We do not want content creation to be a job that doesn’t pay. We’re going to look at that as an overall.

We used to call it a platform, but now we’re calling it a franchise because it is the way in which our human content enters the world and, hopefully, the ways at which we’re going to be paid for it. The other thing is that, obviously, non-Amazon, non-whatever the book referral is, we’re talking about expanding beyond that to make sure that we’re being referred to wherever our book is being sold. I’m going to go on a little bit because our book is frozen in time, but our readers aren’t. Things are changing about them.

This is the one thing that has held me back from getting my book published all this time. Juliet gives me all the time, and much deserved. The problem is my podcast is always fresh content. It’s always new. It’s always relevant. Things are changing so quickly in my industry that a book cannot keep up. I’d have to continually write a book, which is a good thing. For me, I need a place where I can do that. The ideal model is having both. You have your book, which is the model, the path, everything.

Maybe you have updates in between books that are coming through your podcast. The AI bots are. All of the search engines favor fresh content, something that’s current, new. They call it a recency model. They want something that is absolutely current. Unfortunately, your book launch has a date, and it has a date it was published. Your podcast content could have a weekly date, and it keeps you consistent and constant in your thought leadership niche. That helps to continue to sell the book.

The other thing is that after you put a lot of marketing effort into your launches, I know all of you do, because you wouldn’t be here tuning in to this if you were not thinking about how you’re launching your book and what you’re going to do with your next book that you’re going to launch. That excitement around that launch window disappears really quickly. It’s a lot of effort too, but when it disappears, so does your discoverability. We need to have an engine underneath that is going to continue to do that. When we get silent, we become obsolete in this world.

It’s not like I thought leadership still existed and we were still around there. The engine stops serving you up. The search engines stop using you as a resource for people. When that happens, we’re just not. We do not exist. Let’s talk about that AI search engine algorithm a little bit. Static pages are losing. The reason for that is because all of the search bots and all of the AI see a static page as a sales page. It literally thinks of it as a sales page, especially if it’s got a button to go out to your book.

Feeding The AI Relevance Factor

AI discoverability is different. It has a relevance factor that it’s looking for it’s that current, consistent, constant signal that the algorithm is looking for to say, “This thought leader, this brand, is active right now.” They have the strength and authority of being an author. Those two things go together. There are a lot of people who publish lots of content out there, and it has zero authority just because it’s current, because it has no value. It doesn’t have a lot of readers. It doesn’t have that base of thought leadership. It also sometimes doesn’t have a human connection.

Are you a real person? Your podcast and your voice, your videos, all of those things say you are a real person. That also has value. When you have relevance and the human factor, and you put the two things together, human authority, that is what gives you the edge in that AI search algorithm. Authors who publish consistently outrank those who publish once. If you just do a guest interview, that’s just a one-time thing. It’s here. It’s usually easier to get those guest interviews when you’re launching a book. Not so easy in between launches. That’s not as easy to continue to rank long-term.

There are some ways to do it, but it’s very difficult and involves republishing constantly. They do not publish as consistently, and they do not get the ranking as consistently as those that have both. Every day, new content is also a way to stay competitive because your competitors have a video show, have a podcast, have their own articles, have their own subreddit. Some of them, like, all those things are out there, and they’re competing with you by providing, by pushing out their own content on a daily or weekly basis. You’ve got to do the same thing. Here’s the podcast advantage.

It’s fresh every week. It publishes on a schedule, if those AI bots and the search engines do not love a schedule. They do not like people who publish just when they feel like it. They love it when it’s 8:00 AM on a Friday, something’s coming out. That helps to send this active brand signal and trustworthy signal to it so that then they do what we want, which is index our assets. New content becomes searchable when it gets indexed. What it’s getting indexed for is your thought leadership, your keywords, to use a technical term.

If everything within there points back to the themes in your book, or in your next book that’s going to be coming out, then you’ve created a searchable index that gives you that. Sometimes we call it a silo. Sometimes we call it a niche, although my kids call it a niche, and they yell at me all the time for being old school. When you do that, it’s giving you all this direct path that the search engine is now giving you credit for that is going to make you a table of contents, an index, a way to be searchable for what you want to be searchable for.

When you podcast, you’re connecting your one-time publication with this ongoing living thought leadership that makes the two connections stronger and consistently refers to and sells the book. Let’s talk about that perfect reader visibility. If we want to turn our episodes into sales, we cannot just build an audience. We cannot just make a 24/7 machine and have it be good enough. We have to be in the niche now, in the space that we want to occupy. The good thing is that we’re available on the 2:00 AM principle.

The 2:00 AM principle for me is this idea that at 2:00 AM, when I’m really stressed about something, when my kids are having problems in school, when you’re having relationship issues, when your aging parents are starting to lose their memory, or whatever it might be that is troubling you, that is keeping you awake at 2:00 AM. One of the things we do is start searching. We start Googling things. When we start Googling things, there are also a few other areas that we’ll go to for resources. We typically do not watch videos because if we’re sitting in bed next to our partner, that is really visible and also keeps people awake.

We do tend to log in and listen. We’ll listen to audiobooks. We’ll listen to podcasts. It’s one of the higher-trafficked formats that people consume at that high-stress time period. Keep that in mind if you haven’t made your audiobook. That’s one really good reason to have one, especially if your topic is in those high pain areas or areas where there’s a lot of need. It’s important to have an audio version of your podcast, not just a video version of it, because they will turn the video off and just listen to the sound anyway. You might as well have it in a place where you can have them consume it.

There are clickable links, and there are all the things that might drive them back to you and your book. The other thing is that episodes have titles. Episodes have descriptions. We create blogs. That’s what we recommend to all of our clients. Those blogs, those titles, those descriptions, they all become that really rich index human authority content. That’s one way, because we can embed our links to our book through there.

We can refer to chapters through there. We can continually make reference to things that we have to sell throughout that content that puts it at the right, relevant time for us to be able to connect our book or our courses to that perfect reader at the perfect moment in time. Our podcast platform at Podcasters United also has this feature where we can insert audio Ads at any point in the future. It doesn’t have to be the time you recorded it, but you insert those audio Ads right at the moment in time where you just spoke about something that’s highly relevant.

You can change up your Ad, make a direct call to action to make sure that it’s absolutely relevant to that particular topic. These are a lot of things that make the podcast model much more dynamic and useful for an ongoing connection and sales model to your perfect reader. What we’ve seen is that a minimum weekly show is enough to build a continuous funnel driving listeners directly to the book. That one episode per week compounds into hundreds of search assets within two years. We’re talking about an ability to build up your platform and make it stronger for your next book.

The Power Of Spoiler-Free Content

We’re talking about doing that for the course that you plan to sell. We’re talking about doing that for the community you plan to grow. Let’s talk about some spoiler-free, because I hear this all the time from authors. I hear that you do not want to give away your book. That’s because we do not want you to give away your book. We want your podcast to be its own thing. We want it to have its own value that it provides because we want the podcast and the book both to be consumed. We do not want it to be one versus the other. You do not need to give your book away.

You just need to make listeners want it, need it. You want to showcase your expertise, stay deeply in your niche, stay exactly in your thought leadership, where you can go deeper into concepts, frameworks, other things, stories, things that make listeners want to have the full book because the full book is in the proper order. It’s a complete story. It guides me through. It’s not just this little drop that was made on an episode once a week. We also want to make sure that we include things that aren’t in the book. Think of them like special features, extra interviews.

I have a podcast that’s starting from an author right now where there were dozens upon dozens of interviews that did not make the book. It was too long a book. It got cut out of it. There are all these fabulous interviews. For others, the book is a chapter, or it might be written about that interview or about that case study. It’s short, but there was a recorded interview. Now they can have the long form and deep dive into the chapter they’re interested in, and it gives you a call to action to add to the end of your chapter.

The two things can really go hand in hand between the book and the podcast. The other thing is that there are a lot of new things going on in the world. Different things are happening, things that you wish you had added to the book, things that show your depth in this thought leadership area and your knowledge. When you have all that, then they’re more likely to buy the book because they think, “I’m not going to read this book and find out it’s outdated. I know that they’re there for me, and I can go and consume the podcast and get more answers to questions I have that weren’t addressed in the book.”

They know that when you have both that you’re a better bet for them to listen to that podcast show if they’re a podcast-first model. If they read the book, they know that you’re also a better bet because you’re better for them to provide follow-up and other resources for them. I’m talking about author brands as being needed to be future-proofed. The author model is at risk. If Anthropic can just take your book, that sounds like a problem. We want to really think about how we can make sure that we author-proof our authority because they cannot replace you. They cannot replace your brain.

They are only catching a snapshot in time. A little tiny piece of what you think about that’s what your book is. It’s 10 or 20 chapters, if it’s really big. No matter when that book was published, things like constant content are going to be woven in and used in our conversations. It cannot catch up. The AI engine cannot catch up as fast as it is. It actually doesn’t trust the words that are coming out of your mouth today. It has to analyze them. It has to absorb them into its large language model. It has to think.

It has to also wait for somebody to search for that exact phrasing before it decides what it’s looking for, so you’re much more current and relevant to current events and daily conversations based on the content that you create in the engagement spaces you’re in, whether that is your social channels or that is your community that you might be building if you’re building, like, a circle community or wherever you’re connecting with your readers, you’re going to reach them first. That’s really important to remember that you can have conversations. You can have that relationship with your community before the AI gets involved, before search gets involved.

It actually still takes time to flow through that system. On top of that, when you’re that go-to answer, I’m going to look at you first. Most people have that indication, have that inclination. They want to go to a person to get an answer that they can trust. Versus just searching. Today’s search has lots of hallucinations. It has lots of irrelevance. It has lots of things that make it untrustworthy to us. A person that I’ve already read, that I’ve already consumed some of their content, and especially one that has been in my ear for a while, that’s the perfect one for me to go to first to get an answer.

I might go to your channel first, wherever you are, and see what you’re talking about, see if you have an answer for me. Thinking about that, can you create a rich, dynamic answer library somewhere on your website from all the content you create? You absolutely can. That makes you an even easier go-to answer and still ties in that AI model of how people are used to chatting and working. Here’s the real key. If you’ve got an ongoing publicity strategy, if you’ve got a publicist working for you, it is really hard today for publicists to get you featured on the news, to get you featured in new interviews.

It is extremely difficult to get you on a podcast today when you’re not in an active launch mode or when I do not already have a relationship with you. If you have a podcast too, It is so easy because I know you know how to build an audience. I know you know how hard it is to be a podcaster. I know you’re going to be a good interviewer, and I know you’re going to put my audience first. That is a really easy ask. On top of it, what we’re finding is that when you’re a podcaster and an author, the news media and the publicists have an easier time connecting what you have to say with a current event, especially if you’re currently publishing something about it.

If you publish an article today, if you publish a podcast today, if you publish a podcast, an article, and a video, you’ve done all of those three things, then it’s really a lot easier for those publicists to continue to get you those interviews, those opportunities to comment about things in your niche ongoing. That keeps your book relevant. That keeps that book selling long after your launch. What if it’s also your next launchpad? You’ve got a new book coming out. You could test your next ideas. You can nurture your list and grow that list because you probably know that every time you publish a book, your list has to be about three times bigger than it was the last time.

Maybe even more today. I do not know, Juliet. It’s probably got some new numbers. More importantly, you’re going to have a two-way conversation. You’re going to have people that are commenting, reading your book, listening to your podcast, reaching out to you, and talking about where they are and what they need. This is keeping you in direct touch, which is what’s most important for that perfect reader. When you know what’s most important and you’re timely for that perfect reader, and they already have had a connection to you in some way, shape, or form, they consume it.

The next time you go to publish your book, it’s not as hard to get them to buy it the first time. It’s not as hard to get some advanced readers. It’s not as hard to do a pre-launch. Those things become easier in your next launch pad if you’ve been continually touching points with them every time. Your perfect reader is out there searching right now, and you can be the answer. You can be a living, breathing brand. Rather than a static book, as much as I love the book. I really should have said this at the beginning of everything.

If you do not know anything about me beyond the bio that Juliet just read, the reality is I read hundreds of books every single year in all genres. It’s because I have a podcast business, right? I get tired of the media. I want something that is different. I am a heavy reader. I read in every genre. I do a lot of advanced reading for Juliet. I’m currently reading one of her new books right now, and it’s fabulous. I love to read, and I consider that authors are at the top of my list of awe about how hard it is to put yourself out there in that book and how important it is that you have put your thoughts down on paper, that you have constructed a story.

If you’re a fiction writer, I say a static book, and it sounds negative, but it is, as I put it before, a snapshot in time. It’s what you thought at that moment in time. Your brain is still creatively working. I know you’re working on your next book. I know you’re thinking about your next concept. I know you’re thinking about how this thing that happened in the world is relevant to what’s in your book right now, and you want to talk about it. Give yourself a method to talk about it. Give yourself a way to continue to creatively express all those things that are going on in your head now.

Consistency Trumps Perfection Every Time

When you do it, why not make it part of your marketing engine at the same time? Why not do both? Community building, marketing engine, and your future book. The last thing I want to leave you with is this idea that consistency beats perfection. We want a perfect reader. They’re perfect. We’re not, but the more consistent and constant we’re with what we put out there, the more unstoppable we are in our discoverability to those perfect readers than anything else. You need to be present for them.

That’s what matters most to them is that you’re here for them right now. When that book touches them, when they buy that book, they think. They do not look at the date that it was published on the front. They look at it as, “I want this book. I need this book right now.” How else can you show up right now for those perfect readers? Why not have a podcast? I thought I’d answer a bunch of questions because I’m sure there’s going to be a bunch. I made a slightly shorter podcast episode for you at Juliet.

That works. Thank you. By the way, give me a plug. She’s reading The Survivor’s Name, which will be out on January 5th. She truly does have an advance reader copy because it’s not even available yet. A couple of things I want to follow up on. She said you do not have to give your book away for free. Almost everybody on this call is a coach. I encourage you to use a book funnel and give it away for free because that is a way somebody grabs your book that is interested in that topic, and you become the person that they trust because they read that book.

If you’re a coach, giving that book away could actually lead somebody to hire you versus someone else, because, like, “I’m going to call out Amy here. Amy’s getting ready to release Radical Restart.” There are probably a lot of women out there who are thinking, “I hate my job. I hate my life.” That’s 2:00 AM googling, like, “What do I do next?” A book like that you see for free might be something they pick up, and they go, “I like the way Amy positioned that. I wonder what else she has available for me.” The other thing about your books, if they’re a how-to, is I tell you guys I have good stats on this.

Ninety-eight percent of the people who pick it up and read it and say they will do DIY, only about 2% of them will be successful at it. Some of them won’t stick with it. Some of them won’t finish it. They still need to have that task done. Where are they going to go? They’re going to go to hire you and a done-for-you guide status on something. It really does benefit you to give your book away if you are a coach, or you have something that is the next step that you think about. The book is $20. If you give it away for free, and you get a five $10,000 coaching gig, it’s worth it.

I’m a big fan. I should say this before we address any questions. I am a big fan of not giving away books for free in this broad-brush approach. Make them do something to download and get the book. Obviously, make sure that you are using that funnel piece that Juliet’s talking about, because just giving away books at an event or other things. How many of them end up on your shelf and then eventually end up at Goodwill? It’s not the model that she’s talking about creating this very clear funnel where they’re addressing a question, they’re identifying a need, and then the book is a gift.

At the end of that, it then leads them to the next piece of your funnel. You already have their name. You have their information. Make sure that model is in place before you give it away. Otherwise, it won’t get read. That’s the important part. If it doesn’t get read, then you’re not going to get hired in this way. We used to run a course for podcasts, how to set up a podcast. Juliet’s absolutely only two percent of the people ever launched their show from that. The rest of them hired us.

It is. I should have said that the opt-in we’ve given over 700 copies of the Perfect Reader Playbook. I have people on my calendar every week saying, “Run me that report.” I do not know what I’m missing in these ingredients. I’ve read the book, and I cannot do it myself. Help me.” Now open it up to questions for Tracy. I will quit hogging.

Amy had her hand up.

You’re still muted, Amy.

If I’m bringing out my book in late January and my audiobook is not going to even go into production until late spring at best, and I have a year’s worth of weekly interviews, stories that either people who did not or did make it into the book could be giving with me or recordings of some of those. Some of them are not on Zoom, where people thought they’d be all dressed up and whatever.

The audio version will be good for that.

When would you strategically advise that I start my podcast?

Now, because if you’re here before January, you can use the episodes that are tie-ins to the people who are in the book to help them promote the book. It’s one thing when we try to get a pre-sale. We’re trying to get people to promote it, but the book’s not really for sale yet. That is a difficult place. If they do have something that they could consume, you could create almost like a funnel for each of those interviews, each of those case studies or guests in your guest chapters in your book, where you’re creating a podcast episode that has the interview with them.

They could send it to that landing page. It’s a little bit more about them and about how they fit in the book. You could actually create these. We call them episode landing pages, but you could almost create them like chapter landing pages for your book that then sell the pre-sale of that book. You want to get the real story, how the whole story happened, what came out of this chapter, how it fits in, buy the book. You’re going to give that particular person who’s featured in your chapter an ability to sell something that’s more about them than the general book. They’re more likely to do it. You’ve just given them publicity material.

You’re likely to get more pre-sales running a model like that. If we got the podcast started up fast and had that model in your pre-sale and then have the other stories, the other things that you want to cover, you might not need to create content more than once a month with all the excess you already have from that until the audiobook is launched because I know it takes a lot of energy. More importantly, you’ve built up a great audiobook audience because people who listen to podcasts buy audiobooks at a higher rate.

That’s interesting. Here’s another thing. Just pre-marketing the pre-order and getting this huge tangle of people who I interviewed to even consider getting on board feels like a tongue-twister. I have no podcast experience. I’m game, but I have no podcast experience. I’m wondering. There’s part of me that thinks it’s better to wait a bit until after the launch and the launch parties, and the online and the in-person launch parties. Where I can have some organized meetings, a place to podcast, etc., you know, then tell me, have you ever seen people start with just an audio podcast that they might be making in their home office with nothing special and then graduate to a more professional vibe?

This is the really wonderful thing, I think, about podcast audiences. Podcast audiences are really forgiving. Most often, what you do not even realize is that even the video podcasts that are out there and that. YouTube and everybody is actually lying about the amount of video consumption on it. It is not working. Spotify is not getting any video plays at the rate at which they’re claiming it is happening. We’re not seeing the numbers on the other side.

Why Audio Outpaces Video Consumption

Audio is still over 90% of the consumption model. Less than ten percent is the video model. That doesn’t mean that somebody who did not have a great video show doesn’t do really super well, but they’re using those numbers and saying, “Travis Kelce has a video podcast, and Joe Rogan started on video.” He has those first. Joe Rogan, for example, $13 million is his number of viewers, listeners, whatever.

It’s really 1.1 million listeners who listen every week. He was already in the video. It’s different. Someone who starts in the podcasting world, it will be flipped. It will usually be 100,000 listeners, right? 90,000 of them are listeners, and 10,000 of them might watch the video. Even when they watch the video, they usually watch it with the sound, only listening to the sound in the video. They aren’t looking at the video. They’re doing something else.

That’s a good idea.

It’s very common. YouTube knows that, right, and Spotify knows that. It is no problem to start from an audio-only version. We have lots of people who do that. Some of our really best podcasters took it slow on themselves and started with the audio version, got comfortable with that, and added video later. More often they added video because they added social shorts to their model, not because they cared about the long-form video. There are always ways to do that. I’m going to suggest to you that you do not have to do much work at all in the beginning because you already have these interviews.

What I have is the unfiltered. I want to say off the record, on the record. Juliet can comment on this. We ranged far and wide in our interview about how you radically restarted your life.

That’s okay, because you do not want to edit some things that are off the record. You should edit that, but it doesn’t have to be a concise interview. That’s not the point. It’s behind the scenes. It’s a reveal of the conversation. It could only be a portion of it, not the whole thing anyway.

For someone like me who is doing a dozen other things and wants to just do this in the least difficult way, if we have a raw interview, is there a way that I can tell AI, “Go find the five interesting quotes from this?”

The other thing you can do is there are a couple of tools. If you want to, first off, this is an ideal thing to sub out to someone. If you’ve got the budget or an assistant that knows you, have them select the episodes and make suggestions on the transcript part of the interview, not on the interview itself. It’s a lot easier for you to just look through the transcript. There’s a tool called Descript, which is really easy. Basically, you just go in and like to delete sections of your transcript, and it edits the audio for you. It’s so easy. There are ways to go in, and I do it all the time.

I usually do it with a video, not audio only, because Google Gemini is a little more video-centric because of YouTube, because Google owns YouTube. I’ll put the video up, and I’ll go in the little Gemini sidebar, and I’ll say, “If I wanted ten minutes out of this video, what’s the best ten minutes?” It’ll tell me, “Here’s this piece, and this piece.” Sometimes I’ll go, “I want ten minutes that focus on this topic. What’s the best ten minutes?” You can do that as well.

You just have to listen to it and say, “It needs to be eleven minutes because I need to have this introduction to it, or it’s not complete from a listener’s experience.” You’re done. You can even trim it right there. You can even take it, and it’ll trim it for you. There are a lot of easy ways for this to be accomplished today that do not involve a lot of money, that do not involve a lot of time, but it needs a little bit of a strategy and plan.

That’s the only thing that I would say that you want to do. You want to look at it strategically. How am I going to use this to sell my book? You want it to be a part of that marketing plan, because you’re going to do a lot of marketing efforts that are not going to be as useful as this. You’re going to do a lot of things that you’re spending your time on in your marketing that you’re going to look at, and maybe you could trade this out for that. Sending a whole bunch of email sequences after the first one doesn’t work is going to feel like a very big waste of time.

Email has a, what is it lately? It’s a less than three percent conversion rate on a highly engaged list. It’s in the single digits. Most people’s regular lists are probably less than 1% or 1.5%, somewhere around there. That’s your average list. I show that my podcast listening is at least 11%, maybe 13%, is common in just the general listener base that consumes it within the first 24 hours. That’s pretty high. Even if my list was a thousand and I’m only getting fifteen, and my podcast is a thousand, I’m getting a hundred or more, 150.

Totally. That’s a ten X. How do you publicize the podcast then?

It’s the same model you’re going to do with the other people who are featured in your book. They’re going to promote it. If you put both on the landing page that they are promoted on, then you’re getting both at the same time. A podcast runs in its own ecosystem. Podcast listeners are always out there looking for the latest book in their category, in their area, or if you need something and you’re just like you would go search for a new book. The search part of it works on its own, except that podcast listeners are used to not looking for it out there in the world.

They’re looking within the app because they already know that there are charts there. They’re new and notable. They already know how to find something new there. Their listeners, podcast listeners on average, heavy podcast listeners, listen to seven different podcasts and change out half of them every single month. They’re always looking for something new.

Podcasts are also highly regarded as human content, just like some videos are, but videos are suspected right now as to whether or not they’re AI-generated and not, and it’s getting more and more difficult for the search engines to tell what it is because it’s like three parts removed before it gets served up to the search engine. Podcasts are not because the RSS feed is direct. When you have a podcast, the search engine typically puts it first as human-based content.

Here’s the other thing about a podcast with your book as well. If you look over at where your categories are on Amazon, unless you’re traditionally published, you’re probably on those back pages. Usually those traditional publishers are putting out the content that gets you on those front pages. If someone goes over a podcast, first of all, there are far fewer podcasts than there are books.

If it’s properly niched, then they’re already listening to your voice. You’re already talking about your book, and all they have to do is go search for it. They do not have to go through pages and pages to find it. They’ve already heard that authenticity from you. Amy, I heard you say something about, I have no experience with this. You network, you speak all the time. I will tell you, and Tracy, I hope you’ll agree with me. Your first ten episodes are going to suck. That’s just the nature of the game.

Podcast listeners do not care. They just want to see that you improve. It’s not even that. Do not even worry about it. I cringe when my first podcast on 3D printing. When I listened to how geeky and terrible the first episodes were, I couldn’t even. By the time I was done, I had 650 episodes. HP paid me $25,000 to do a series for them. I was a professional, like I was a journalist or something. You do it through. There’s no way not to.

If you do it again and again, I’m very sure that Terry thinks the same thing because Terry’s been podcasting for some time. You get better over time. It just happens naturally. You do know how to Zoom. You do know how to interview people. You do know how to do that. Those skills are translatable, like they are the same thing. I do not worry about that. The only thing that you want to have is just to have this clarity in your strategy, which you should already be getting.

That’s why it’s actually easier to start a podcast with you, because you already have clarity on what you’re launching, what your book is about, and what you want to speak about. All of that is very clear for your brand and your focus where a lot of people who I’d love to start a podcast. They have no idea how to keep it focused. We have a very clear focus here for you. That’s a little bit easier.

What about how long an episode is?

It depends on your industry. Marketing shows, they have the attention span of a gnat. Two minutes is too long. If you’re in a show that’s about relationships or about faith or about, I’m going to say, anything in a personal nature, you do not want to cut it too short. You want to have enough that you feel that you’ve given them time to reflect and think and absorb and go into depth to show that you’re also experienced in this. You do not want to touch that. You do not want to be casual about it. You want to be serious about it. That’s the way we look at it.

Those topics we want to take a little bit longer. My guideline, to be good for the technical side of search, you need to be over 15 to 20 minutes minimum. If you’re doing an interview, I like it to be closer to 45 minutes, and the reason for that’s because otherwise the interview just touches on the surface things, and they make their sound bites as they do on TV, but you do not get into anything that they haven’t talked about before.

You’re not getting into anything new, and you’re not controlling the conversation if it’s fifteen minutes interview. They are controlling the conversation. They’ve got to get their stuff out. There’s not enough time. That’s why I look at that from those perspectives. That’s what we’ve been advising clients for over a decade on, and that has continued to work those times. Every episode does not need to be that exact amount of time. That’s what I want to be clear.

If you have one episode that’s ten minutes and the next episode that’s an hour because you’re dealing with death or something extremely serious, then that’s okay. Your audience is not looking at the time once they already subscribe to you. They may be the first time I go, “I only have 30 minutes. If I listen to it, it’s an hour-long show, and it’s on double speed. It’s barely going to be time, but I can do it.” Believe me, they will listen at double speed until they decide that they like you. They’ll slow it down.

Can I say something about that? What’s hilarious about that is I listen to audiobooks at 1.5. I listen to podcasts at 1.5. When I speak to people, I always think like, “Speed it up. You’re slow.” I’ve gotten used to that pace of listening.

Terry had a question. I saw a hand right there.

You got to unmute yourself.

Is there a value to having a website that posts each of the audio podcasts as they come out?

Building An Owned Content Home Base

That is a great question, Terry. I’m so glad you asked that. We call it a home base. In today’s world, that home base is the only thing you own. If you’re public-owned, the only thing you own. If you’re publishing your episodes only on Facebook, or you’re sharing them only on Facebook or LinkedIn or any of those places, they’re disappearing. The podcast feed is your own ownership. That is important because if they’re listening to the podcast, they’re finding it there. The search engines are not searching through what you said on that show, what you said in your episode.

The search engine is only saying there is an episode or there is a show out there. They’re not understanding all the things that you’ve covered. We do something, and we have been doing this for a decade, actually for twelve years we’ve been doing it because we did it with my podcast first. We call it a verbal SEO blog. It’s basically like show notes put into a public-facing blog, but it’s done in a way that looks like a blog rather than looks like a transcript. It’s not any harder to do that. I’ll let you all in on a secret.

By the end of this year, on our platform, you’ll actually be able to go publish it straight to a WordPress blog from publishing your podcast. You’ll publish a podcast, you’ll click a link, and it will actually publish the blog in the proper format for you. That’s going to happen by the end of this year out of our platform. I’m excited about that because it gives you the ability to not have to edit it, not have to look at it, because it does take time to produce that blog. What we found is that a long-form blog is typically 3000 words if you’ve got twenty minutes in, or 6000 words if you’ve got 40 minutes in, and that amount of words is what search engines consider to be a power page.

That makes you a deeper expert than somebody who wrote a 600-word article on the subject matter. Even though not everything you said, lots of it is like, “Welcome to the show,” and not as relevant, it doesn’t know that. It only knows the count and then the fact that you’re keying into some of these topics. When you can create this really rich, indexed website that you own, it does not disappear from the search engines. It is a continued resource that is referred to by SEO and AEO. Now, some of the tricks are that if you’re dealing with a subject matter that is, and you’re a coach, you can also develop an FAQ of frequently asked questions.

The AEO system loves questions and answers already pre-done for it. Those things you can auto-pull. There’s tools that automatically pull them if you already have that content on your site. There are lots of different plugins and things that you can use that create an even richer community experience for that website that you do not have to work that hard with because you happen to have your podcast episodes. The last thing that’s really great about Homebase, if you’ve got dozens or hundreds of episodes that you’ve already produced, they’re brand new to the written word to that website. They’re brand new to it. You can republish stuff you already had in that blog and get power for it today. Get credit for it today.

I’ve been posting them on my own website since the beginning of making the podcast. I started out with just audio. I created a website for my podcast show that’s just audio. When I went to also do it on YouTube, I set up a separate website just for YouTube to blog the YouTube videos. At the time I did that, it was, I forget what my reasoning was, but it was sound at the time. It was a while ago. Would it be better to have both the video and the audio podcast on the same blog post on one website?

Yes, absolutely. You should consolidate them. You’ll have almost an immediate boost to it because Google owns YouTube. When you put a video into your blog, you get higher points for your search engine algorithm. You’ve now separated and divided that power between the two things. It’s great you’ve got the blog, great you’ve got the episodes over here on that website, and great you’ve got the video on it over here, but you could be putting them together and get a magnified value for that.

Definitely put them together. It’s okay if your channels are not named the same as your podcast on YouTube. Your YouTube and your podcast are not the same names. It’s okay to put that in one website as long as the audience is the same. That’s the only reason I sometimes recommend separating, as if your audience is very different between the two.

Thank you.

I should mention too, when you have it on your website, and you’re with Podcasters United, there’s also a player that’s there that has your first, is it twelve or fifteen episodes?

No, you can. It’s usually about a dozen that show up, but you can scroll down and get them all.

It has them right there.

You can tell that when you embed the audio player what the height of the player is going to be, and that reveals more episodes.

Yes. We have a player, but our player has tabs to it. That’s what’s different about our player than Libsyn’s and anyone else’s. That way, you can create. We did it mainly for coaches. It was so you could play. You can have a tab that starts here. Sometimes we have hundreds of episodes, and it gets very unclear for someone who’s new to our website. Typically, when someone’s new, they end up on the website first. If I’m already a podcast subscriber, I’m just using it on my app.

I just want the latest episode. For somebody new, so we have a start here. You can make a Start Here tab, and you can put the seven most popular episodes that you want them to consume to get a base of understanding. You can have one for your book. That is really all the episodes that are related to the book. You can have your general podcast. You can have them flip between the tabs, or you can create a player that goes on different pages on your site with those different purposes.

There’s a lot of flexibility in how you can construct it. Terry, I have a tool. That does an evaluation of how a website is doing. It’s in beta, and I cannot just publicly give it to you, but I can use it for you. If you’d like to go through Juliette and give her your two websites, I can run them and tell you which one has more power.

Until listening to you, I’ve been in the blog posts. They’ve been fairly short. It’s like I include underneath the video. It says, video excerpt. I have a couple of important paragraphs. Now, hearing you, I realize I need to make it a lot longer than that. How running it through this power test, it’s going to be, I guess, affected by the fact that they’re too short.

That’s only one factor. It’s still going to tell you whether or not the structure of the site is good, and what the taxonomy is for search engine indexing. I’ve got a lot of tools for this. Because you have two different sites, we want to see which one’s performing better from that perspective. It’s not a problem, actually. Consolidating two sites together is actually fairly easy.

I’ll touch base with Juliet on that.

All I need is the URL of the two sites, and I can run the tool for her.

Thanks. I did have one more question. I have a separate website that’s just for one of my books. I’m running a podcast series on that particular topic, and the videos are there as well. The top half of my book landing page is a description of the book and a button to click to buy the book. The bottom is the podcast episodes. Does it matter which is on top and which is on the bottom?

It depends on your stage of selling. In other words, if you’re writing active promoting the book, you definitely want the book on top because that’s what you’re pushing out there, and people are going to come to it. They’ll scroll down, and they’ll see there are other resources. That’s great. You’re giving them more.

Does it make a difference with search engines?

No, as long as it’s there, it does not matter. The reality is that if you later wanted to, at some point in the future, consolidate that book site into the other sites, as long as your topics and your community are the same. You can always do that. I do not have a problem with a separate site for book launching because it’s so sales-focused. It doesn’t make a difference in your search engine because usually you create it brand new. It also doesn’t have a lot of longevity, which your regular website would. It’s perfectly okay to put that site out there, start it up, and then move that series and move everything into your main site later.

Actually, I’ve been posting each new episode on both sites. The site that has all my videos, and the other one is just the books.

That’s okay, too, but you’re going to get hit with what they call double jeopardy. You’re going to get it. One of them will be prominent, and it usually is the one that has the higher overall authority. We think it’s the one we publish first, but that’s actually not the case. Google now looks at it as which site has more authority in that topic area. It will usually be the main website, the one with the most blogs, the most information, the most indexing. That one will get first priority over the other one.

You really should publish on the second site as noindex, nofollow, as the two checkboxes you check on the back end to technically not create this conflict between the two. It takes a while for the search engine to sort that out for itself. It will eventually sort it out and give one priority over the other, but it has to take the time to do that, and it’s longer than you might like when you publish. You want something to immediately go there. Now you’ve created this conflict between the two.

I would say keep your main site with the index because you want it long-term there, and you may take it off of the book site later and just move the book page and consolidate that in because it’s not driving traffic at that stage, especially if you’ve got a lead magnet page or any of those lead pages. Any of those tools that you’re using, GoHighLevel. Any of those, if you’ve created the site through that, it doesn’t have the same power that a WordPress site does. Even Wix and Squarespace are still better than lead pages, for instance. Google assumes when you’re using those other sites that your purpose is sales, and its job isn’t to sell you because they’re not getting a cut.

Thank you. You’re muted, Juliet.

Do you have another question, Amy? I was going to wrap it up, but go ahead.

One sec. Am I on mute?

No, we can hear you.

If I already have, not on WordPress, but I already have a Substack, and I already have a website. Am I going to be at a disadvantage? I’m not going to want to change over everything. I’ve got a couple of thousand people on my Substack already.

Smarter Syndication With Substack

No. Look, podcasts and Substack can go hand in hand because Substack takes an RSS feed. If you syndicate your podcast from Substack out to the podcast, you’re going to hurt yourself. We want to take the podcast and syndicate it on Substack. This is a technical thing that I really will tell you. “Look, do not worry about it. Come see me.” This is something I take. My team will fix that part and make sure it’s done. It is so technical and ridiculous, and I do not want anyone dealing with it. We syndicate shows for our clients all the time.

All they have to do is know how to publish what they record and what they’re doing. The syndication part is just technical complexity. We see people do it wrong on YouTube, too, so that’s the other one we try to help people with. That is no problem. Your Substack is valuable because there are people there. We want them to get your episodes so that you do not have to put them in both places. We want to build it in so you can use your Substack, and you can also publish the episodes as a Substack.

Just a question, if you know about this, I have a really great open rate for my Substack posts. Will each episode become somehow a Substack, or can each episode become a Substack post?

They can. Yes.

That’s what she was saying, when you put the RSS feed into Substack instead of the other way around, then that list, that audience you’ve already built, receives that. I know that was one of your concerns when we talked the other day.

You can continue to publish and write things on Substack as you do and have your podcast also published at the same time. If you’ve got a weekly, you now could have two a week or two a month or whatever it is. You can do this so that you’re not creating double work for yourself.

This could be the thing that’s the weekly.

You do not have to do that anymore.

Also, I love Amy’s stuff, but she’s not consistent.

We want to create that.

I just started doing it weekly. Here’s the other question. If there are people who are in my GoHighLevel funnel but do not read Substack, how did they get a podcast?

You can take various content pieces into GoHighLevel, I think, content pieces. Juliet, you’re a GoHighLevel person, so you would know this better than I do. You can take a piece of content that’s coming in, and you can automatically have it find it from the RSS feed, correct, or find the website?

I do not actually do it that way. When I do it, every podcast gets an email sent out to the list. I do not have Substack. I have a Rasa newsletter. I have people over there that get the newsletter. If they’re just interested in the podcast, I have a bigger list over on GoHighLevel that just gets the weekly podcast. The people in the newsletter get the weekly as well. I do it separately as an email because we always want to touch base. You do not want to be a sporadic emailer. You want that to be consistent, too, so that’s how I do that. The OpusClips from my video go out through social media on GoHighLevel.

Amy, there’s probably, like, and we can just really technically take a whole look at your platform and figure this out. There should be an easy way because the RSS feed is a consistent and constant thing to have it automatically emails you the list from there, or have it zap into, and we just create a little technical thing that runs in the background for you.

These are some things like platform connection points are actually so easy nowadays, but they are a little complex to navigate. Luckily for me, I’ve got a really good tech team, and I’m also the head of our tech. I have a little bit more knowledge. What I do not want you to worry about is that it is totally doable. People do that all the time. What you’re asking for is not rocket science. We can do that.

I’m not a rocket scientist.

No. That’s it. That’s good because we want you in your niche. We want you to absolutely be an expert at radical restart.

I love that title. I do.

She is a lawyer, even though she doesn’t play one on TV.

She radically restarted herself.

Sheets and radical restart.

I radically restarted myself multiple times. That’s why I wrote the book. I was going to retire. I was 64. I was going to retire. I just decided, no, there’s actually something I need to say.

To retire just means you’re going to die. No, I’m just kidding. In my view, if you retire, you’re getting tired again.

One of my interviews said, “Never retire, just rewire.”

I like that. You guys, thank you so much for showing up. If you want to contact us about podcasts, shoot me an email at Juliet@SuperbrandPublishing.com and Tracy@PodcastersUnited.org. Tell them you saw this episode so we know where you came from, and thank you, Tracy. I’m sure we’ll see you.

Absolutely. Anytime, please reach out. We’re Podcasters United. Our job is to make sure that you guys keep podcasting, that you keep promoting your platform and your programs. We’re here to help. That’s it. It’s simple. We’re not making it complicated. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks.

Important Links

• Super Brand Publishing
• Tracy Hazzard
• Binge Factor
• Feed Your Brand
• Podcasters United
• Perfect Reader Playbook
• GoHighLevel
• OpusClips
• Juliet@SuperbrandPublishing.com
• Tracy@PodcastersUnited.org

About Tracy Hazzard

Tracy Hazzard is a seasoned media expert with over 2600 interviews from articles in Authority Magazine, BuzzFeed, and her Inc. Magazine column; and from her multiple top-ranked videocasts and podcasts like The Binge Factor and Feed Your Brand – one of CIO’s Top 26 Entrepreneur Podcasts. Tracy brings diverse views from what works and what doesn’t work in marketing, branding, and media from thought leaders and industry icons redefining success around the globe. Tracy’s unique gift to the podcasting, marketing, and branding world is being able to identify that unique binge-able factor – the thing that makes people come back again and again, listen actively, share as raving fans, and buy everything you have to sell.

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