Juliet Clark brings a treat for you guys! Today, she welcomes a guest with good news and a beautiful media kit tool for authors. In this episode, Tom Hazzard, the co-founder of Brandcasters, Inc., introduces ShowCastR, the media kit tool every author needs today. Tom explains that the player is available for your podcast if you have your show hosted by Podetize. There are many great features and good reasons why podcasters should switch to Podetize. Tune in to this episode now and peek at the beauty of the beauty ShowCastR brings for you.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

ShowCastR Demo – The Media Kit Tool Every Author Needs

This episode was supposed to be our live over on LinkedIn and the software all failed again so I’ll be changing it around. What was supposed to be a live event with a demo is coming out as an episode. If you want to see what we did with the screenshots, please, I invite you to go over and check that out at Super Brand Publishing. If you are not content with reading, please run over to YouTube and check out the screen. Our guest is Tom Hazzard. As a top influence strategist for speakers, authors and coaches, Tom helps major publications, sports stars and entrepreneurial influencers brandcast their original messages via podcasting and video casting.

Tom is a real-life inventor and successful product designer with over 40 US patents issued and pending. He’s been rethinking brand innovation for many years. His latest SaaS and MaaS innovation, Podetize, reinvents podcast hosting, advertising and brand marketing with an obsessive-centric focus on solutions to get hosts seen, found, heard and rewarded in our noisy digital world. Tom Hazzard co-hosts multiple top-ranked podcasts with over 2,000 episodes combined, Feed Your Brand-in CIO’s Top 26 Entrepreneur Podcasts, Product Launch Hazzards for inventors and eSellers and WTFFF?! 3D Printing: The 3D Start Point feature as an exclusive live podcast at SXSW.

He starts a new podcast every year to put himself into the shoes of his clients and is launching a new review show called The Next Little Thing. Tom has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Wired and CNN Money. He also guested on numerous podcasts and speaks at conferences across the country about podcast marketing and multimedia brandcasting. With a constant stream of content and products from his Brandcasters authority platform, Podetize, Tom Hazzard influences and casts branded content and over $2 billion worth of products and innovation in the world. Stay tuned for our talk with Tom.

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Welcome, Tom. How are you?

I’m fantastic. It’s great to be with you, Juliet.

You’re going to show us ShowCastR, which I’m excited about. Tell us a little bit about it, why you guys created it and what you did.

For those people that do not have their podcast but end up being a guest on a lot of podcasts, they usually are provided a link to the show when it publishes that’s on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or someplace like that. The host of the show gives them and hopes that they’ll put it on their website and allow people who visit the website to say, “I’d like to see Juliet’s interview on this show. Let me click that link.”

It takes them away from that website to listen to it on Apple, Spotify or wherever. That’s fine. Certainly, people get to listen to you as a guest on that show but we thought, “Wouldn’t it be better if there was a way to take all of your podcast interviews you’ve been a guest on, bring them together into one playlist and make it available in a player on your website?”

We realized we already had the technology to do this built into our Podetize platform. We just hadn’t packaged it in that way. We then decided, “We can do that.” Now we have and it’s called the ShowCastR player. Even anyone who doesn’t have a podcast, they don’t even have to have all the information for every show they’ve been on.

We can search our database of every podcast and episode in existence, find all of your guest appearances, put them in a playlist and then customize an iframe embed code or Java code player to your brand colors with your headshot. It can be installed on your website for you. It could be on your About page, press page, media page or whatever page you want. People go to your website to hear you on other people’s podcasts and they stay on your website while they listen. How about that?

A little background, back in 2020, Scott Carson was my coach and we had a contest. I wanted to generate more podcast listeners. As we were expanding and being competitive, I don’t know how he had time to do it but he was going over to his site and would have the individual covers from each podcast over on his media page and attached. I always meant to do it. I kept asking your wife, who is his business partner, “How do I do this?” It seems so cumbersome that I never did.

I’m excited about this for authors in the sense that many of them do not want to have a podcast every week but they’re guesting to promote books and their expertise. This is a way to put this on your site, keep people on your site and have it in your media kit. If anybody’s thinking about asking you, you don’t have to go through that pre-interview because people can see you’re credible.

You come across well. You sound like you know your stuff without all of that other work on your website. I’m super excited to have you show people what this looks like and what the process is here. Let me ask you something real quick. When they sign up, they don’t have to give you the podcast. Your little spiders go out and find them.

We have a database of all the 2.5 million roughly podcast shows that are in existence and that’s not even all the episodes and all of the episodes within those shows. A lot of those shows are older and no longer publishing new episodes but it doesn’t matter. We would search on your name, the guest’s name and even if there are different versions of your name or misspellings of your name. We can search on all of it and find every episode that is still out there in the podcast ecosystem available to be played. We will put that in the playlist.

The wonderful thing about this is that some people get concerned, “Are there any copyright concerns or any problems with that?” No, because we’re not taking anything away from the podcast host. All we’re doing is playing the public link that exists for that episode. It still counts as a play in their analytics just like it does if you played it on Apple, Spotify, iHeart or any of those other apps. People are listening to it through your website but it’s playing it from the podcast host’s system where they get credit for the play.

Two things I want to talk about there. First of all, podfade. For those of you who don’t know what podfade is, I’m going to have Tom explain it but this is a great way for you to go grab that episode in case those people podfade. It’s in your library even if nobody’s going over there to listen. The way this works a lot of times is I find a good podcast, I listen to an episode and then I start going back to the old episodes. If someone’s not producing new episodes and when you explain it, you guys will understand, this means that it’s still on your site to listen to but people probably aren’t finding it over on the podcast because it’s faded. Go with podfade.

Podfade is a modern term that refers to people that have a show and were publishing regularly, whether that’s weekly, twice a week, every other week or whatever it might be. For whatever reason, they stopped publishing new episodes. There are a lot of shows that are in that category. I mentioned 2.5 million shows and that’s accurate. There’s more than actually. I haven’t looked at the latest exact number but there are more than 2.5 million shows out there in the podcast world, what we call the podcast ecosystem but only about 350,000 to 400,000 of those shows are still publishing new episodes regularly, showing up for their listeners on and on ongoing regular cadence or whatever that is.

ShowCastR: Podfade is a modern term that refers to people with a show and then just stopped publishing new episodes.

Those old shows that have podfaded are not publishing new episodes. We define a current show as having published an episode in the last month in one sense but sometimes we’ll define that as within the last 90 days. It depends on our purpose of why we’re looking up that information. If they haven’t published an episode in 90 days or more, that’s a podfaded show but it’s still out there and available in the listening apps. The difference is it’s not getting a lot of attention because when you publish a new episode, anybody who subscribed to your show, that episode pushes and downloads to the device they’ve subscribed from automatically that same day it publishes.

That podcast is more top of mind because you get an alert on your phone, “There’s a new episode of this podcast on your phone.” It reminds the listener, “You might want to check it out.” When the shows are podfaded, it doesn’t get attention. If you’re counting on the fact that a show is publishing new episodes, new listeners find it and they might go back as often as new listeners do and binge-listen to all the episodes of a show, then they’ll hear the one you’re a guest on too, that’s great if they’re still publishing.

If they’ve podfaded, that’s not going to happen so much. That’s another reason why we felt it was critical to allow like in your case and suggestion of authors who have a new book coming out and they’re going on a lot of podcasts to raise awareness of that book. Wouldn’t it be great if people ask, “Where can I hear you? What podcasts have you been on? Go to my website. There’s a player right there and you can listen to any of the episodes I’ve been on.”

Maybe they only want to listen to 2 or 3. Maybe it’s another podcast that your PR agent or you have pitched that they should have you as a guest on their show. Are they good guests? What are they like? Direct under your website, they can listen and hear you. The great thing about this on your website is this is a list. You the author or the guest can curate that list. If you have a bad interview, you can pull it from the list. No one has to hear it. You have the ability, even to change the order of them.

I’ll show you here in a moment a couple of examples. We can have different tabs of curated playlists. We’ve encountered people that have been on 250 and 300 episodes of other people’s podcasts over the years. That may be the book they published three years ago, last year and this year. They may have been on the same show 2 or 3 times. If you want everyone to see the newest ones you’ve been on first, the ones for your current book, that can be a list that says, “Interviews on this book or my best interviews.” There are lots of ways that those lists can be curated so you can direct people to the episodes you want them to see.

We have a lot of clients and authors who are in the spiritual world or psychology. They talk about a couple of different things. You could even break those tabs down by what area of expertise you were talking about on a particular show. I do love that on there.

This is an example. I have Tracy’s, my business partner’s, personal brand website or her speaker website and ShowCastR player. This is a playlist. You can click and read the description of every episode and play it. The most recent episodes are at the top of the list and this list has all of the episodes Tracy’s been a guest on. We can play it. This is going to randomly be other people’s podcasts. People may not recognize the music but you play it. That’s an 88-minute episode. That’s a long one.

I know. I was sitting there thinking, “She was on a 90-minute show?”

Rarely but all the times over here on the right of the column, 88, 65, 69 and 54 and some will be down to 30 minutes. There’s one here that’s only a little over fourteen minutes. It’s different formats of shows. You click any of them here in the playlist and it’ll show up at the top so lots of different episodes. Tracy has some different playlists. You see these tabs here, her best interviews. This is a short list that doesn’t even scroll.

This is about a dozen of the episodes Tracy feels are her best interviews. She’s got another playlist here curated of her interviews with other women because that was important to her to feature. She has some different expertise in product design and development and some interviews that are specific to that. You have the ability if you’ve been on, like Tracy has hundreds of episodes, to say, “I’ve got these 8 or 10 that I want to feature differently.” You can do that. I’ll show you another example. This is a customer who had one installed. This is a new page-created podcast featuring Darrin Tully. In the URL, it’s his website/guest-interviews. This is just an example of how an author might do it.

You guys look on the left-hand side by the book. He has a button over there right on his ShowCastR.

That takes you out to Amazon if you click on that link. It opens a new tab. What I want you to notice is see how these colors are different from what we saw on Tracy’s page. We have two different colors, a main color, which is usually what we recommend as your darker color, which here is a navy blue and then a lighter accent color, which fills in this play progress bar and also borders around the player.

You can have this be in alignment with your brand colors. The image that’s displayed here, for most of you, you probably want to be your headshot as the author but it could be anything you want. We have the ability to make this be any square image that you want. The same thing with the title at the top of the tab. It can also be customized. Lots of options there as to how this is done and presented on your website.

I want to ask a question that I don’t know the answer to and I hope I’m not opening a can of worms. What if I’m somebody with whom I have my podcast with another company and I love that company but I’m not with you? Is this something that can be put to collate theirs on their site? One of the unique things that you guys do is that transcription and there’s an article on my site. People consume it on my site but you’re very unique in that sense. Is that something that can be done for people who have a podcast but don’t have this beautiful way of having it on their site and creating SEO for their site?

Are you asking if the player can be used for podcasts that are on other platforms?

Let’s say that I am not a big fan of Tom and Tracy, which we all know is not true. I’m contracting my podcast through someone like Libsyn. I think Libsyn does and there’s Anchor but they don’t do this as you have on my site. I have my show posted over there. I have a player, my YouTube video and my transcribed article, which creates SEO for my site because I’m leading people back to my site. Can this player be put on if they’re with somebody else’s company to bring their own into their site if that’s not a feature they offer?

We do. This player is available for your podcast if you have your show and you’re publishing episodes but it wouldn’t work unless that show was being hosted on Podetize. We couldn’t have the Libsyn show to play in this player. They have their own player, which isn’t customizable in the same way as your colors, the tabs, the curating lists and all that. Our podcasters do that too.

They have their show, their name playlist of their episodes but then they also can create additional tabs and highlight the fundamental first eight episodes, “New listeners start here,” for example but you have to be hosted on Podetize to do that. We don’t have to produce your episodes. You can use us just like you use Libsyn and publish your episodes through Podetize and then have the player.

Here’s the reason I was asking. You guys have and I have something similar. I have my main site where you post everything but then like Tracy’s site that you showed us, it’s her speaker site. It’s not her main site. I have Super Brand, which has the Podetize work but I also have the Author Traffic School, where I would love to have some of those episodes over there. If I wasn’t with you guys, I couldn’t do that.

You could have a guest ShowCastR player for your guest appearances because that’s a separate service that people sign up with us but for your podcast to use this player, you’d have to have your podcast hosted on Podetize.

Everybody needs to switch to Podetize.

There are a lot of other great features and good reasons why a podcaster would want to do that. They can go to Podetize.com and check that out. If they want to book a call to learn more on the homepage of that website, they can do that. Certainly, there are a lot more people out there that have been guests on podcasts than have their own podcasts. Fundamentally, there are a lot more guests than there are hosts and some are both, which is great.

The one thing I also want to share about guests, your authors, your community and about this type of player is it is an iframe embed code or a Java embed code. You’re allowed to put it on as many web pages or websites as you want. A lot of people might have their personal brand website or their business website. They might have a special speaker website. A lot of times, they might have a unique website for their new book that’s launching.

With our player, you can create as many instances of it as you want, as many web pages as you want and even create different colors. Let’s say Darrin here wanted this one in blue on one website and wants another one that’s in some green colorway or some other branding for some reason on another website. You can do that. There’s no additional cost to create multiple installations of this player on different websites and even have different curated lists. Keep that in mind. We do have people doing that.

Sorry for the detour but it occurred to me, what a great tool. It aggregates it. It’s beautiful. It looks very impressive. This is a good thing to partner with if you’re an author. If you’re one of our authors, we have everybody over on PodMatch so this is a good tool. If you’re working PodMatch and you’re getting those interviews, this is a great way to bring them all into one place and showcase.

The more that you have on there, the more podcast hosts understand that you are in demand. This is a topic that people want to hear about and you’re a very in-demand speaker. Speaking is not just from a stage. I’m probably on more podcasts because I choose to be. I’m tired of traveling, instead of being out talking and doing that. Before we say where to find it, how do you work with people on this?

There are two different ways. There’s a do-it-yourself version and a done-for-you version but it’s a lot of work if you do it yourself. I want to be quite upfront. It’s at one level. It’s a software as a service and you’re signing up for an annual subscription for $299 to have the ability to create your identity for your player, add all the episodes to a playlist, get that embed code and install it on your website. You’d have to have your list of, “I’ve been on all these episodes.”

You have to do that research yourself too but then you’re free to go anytime you get an email from a new podcast host. They say, “Here’s the link to my episode.” We have a guided tour set of tutorials that show you how to do this. Regularly, you add another episode to your playlist so you have login credentials to the Podetize client portal to do that.

The wonderful thing is once the player’s installed on your website or many websites, every time you add a new episode to the playlist, it automatically then appears in the player on your website. If you don’t do webpage editing yourself and you might at first have your web person add the code to the website, that’s a one-time thing and you never have to touch the website again. Every new episode will just appear as it’s added to the Podetize client portal.

ShowCastR: Once ShowCastR is installed on your websites, your new episodes will automatically appear in the player on your website.

That’s one way in a do-it-yourself but for an additional $699, which makes your entire total $998 or under $1,000, we do it all for you. All you need to provide is your brand colors, your headshot, whatever image you’d like to use in the player and access to your website so we can install it for you. We go and search the whole world of podcasts for any episodes you’ve been on. We provide you that list so you can verify, “Yes, that’s me.”

I have had it happen when people have the same name. “That’s the other Tom Hazzard. That’s not me so let’s take that one off the list.” Confirm that list. We install all the episodes into our system and the playlist for you, create the player with those colors and have you review it before we installed it on your website, which can be done. We give you a link and it pops up in a browser window. We installed it on your website either on an existing page or if you want us to create a new page on your website for this player, we will do that. You’re then good to go.

The wonderful thing about our service, that done-for-you service, is it includes new episodes going forward. You don’t need to be like, “I want to wait and do this until I’ve done all my interviews for promoting my book.” I wouldn’t suggest that. You want to get value on your website as soon as possible with however many episodes are out there. As you get new ones, we have an email. You say, “Here’s the info for a new episode that was published that I was a guest on. Please add it to my list.” Our team adds it to the playlist for you and it appears on your website. We offer that on an ongoing basis and it’s part of what the annual subscription covers.

For those of you who’ve been through our Author Traffic School, you probably know that one of the things we talk about in module one is a zone of genius. If I were going to be telling you to work in your zone of genius, I would say by number two, keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing, selling books and selling products and services. For an extra $600, let them do the work.

Some people may have only been on half a dozen episodes and it’s not that much work and they’re okay doing it themselves. That’s fine but I would think most authors out there, most people who are seriously guesting on podcasts and intending to keep doing that, it’s not an awful lot of money to save you time and not have to worry about it. With your future episodes, you just email them and we put them on there. Most people are doing the done-for-you version but if that’s not your budget or for whatever reason, you want to do it yourself, then feel free. We’d love to support you that way too.

Don’t limit this to your media kit on your main site. You can use it in many places. If you have a speaker site, go for it. There is a way. If you have a speaker sheet that you distribute when you’re trying to get speaker gigs and this is a tab someplace on your site, you can drop it right into that speaker sheet too so people can access it right away. What do you look like? What are you talking about? That would be another way to use this as well as to drop that in as something to check out.

It’s mobile-friendly too. If you had a speaker sheet, like you suggested and you’re distributing it at a physical event like a paper you’re giving people, you can have a QR code on there that will load the player. There’s a URL. We recommend it’s on your website because then other things can be learned about you as they’re listening. In a mobile situation, you might want to be like, “Where can people get to where they can listen to me in this episode?”

A QR code will load the player in a browser window. They’re not distracted by other things maybe or it’s easier to listen to one of the episodes if that’s what you want. There are lots of ways that this can be used and a lot of people are still experimenting with it. We’re still discovering new ways that it can be used. Some people have multiple websites and different brands. They have a business brand that has one purpose and then they have personal brands that are another purpose. They want a different playlist on each website and different colors.

You can do that and it doesn’t cost any more. There are lots of wonderful opportunities there. To me, the whole point is to keep people focused on you. I see this all the time. You were suggesting what Scott Carson had done and had all these different images and links that take people out to other websites to listen to him. He has a ShowCastR installed on his website. He’s shifted how that happens and we get an email with new episodes when he’s on them. They add to his player but I see a lot of people still doing that.

You’re helping out the podcast host more by sending people away from your site to their site or a listening app. Why not help yourself? Why not keep that traffic on your website longer? The longer they stay there, the more likely they are to learn more about you and be convinced you’re someone they’d like to have on their show or event planners are like, “I’d like to have her speaking at my next virtual summit or be a speaker at our next in-person event.” It never made sense to me to send people away somewhere.

That’s most important for those authors that have workshops that are trying to get into Corporate America, which is hard to get into. It’s harder to get an HR person’s attention on a bring-me-in or look-at-my-speaker-sheet but by sending them this page, they pop in some earbuds and listen while you’re working. That might spark because those people are so incredibly busy and it is hard to get your foot in the door for those corporate workshops. If you’re an author who does that, there’s a possibility too to get them listening to what you’re all about and how you present yourself in that situation. Tom, if we wanted to go over and check it out more, where do we find it?

There we have a page that is in alignment with your brand. It’s Podetize.com/superbrand. That gets them right to this page here that I can share with you that has all about the ShowCastR. There’s a little video of auto-plays where you learn all the benefits. Here’s Scott Carson’s player. This is a functioning player.

Even people that don’t have this yet but want to try it out and see how it works can try it right here. Scott has his list of favorite episodes he’s been on. You can either click to sign up or if for some reason you feel like you need to ask some questions and learn more, at the bottom of the page, you can book a one-on-one call to learn more about it and ask your questions before you buy.

I have a lot of respect for Scott. The reason I hired him as my podcast coach back in 2020 was he was doing this every day and I can’t even imagine the bandwidth to have somebody to interview every single day. It was pretty incredible and that’s Scott though. He immerses himself in something and learns it inside. I watched his AI interview. They can find that at?

Podetize.com/superbrand but even at the top of Podetize.com, it’s in the navigation at the top of the website for ShowCastR, which is the product.

In ShowCastR, there’s no E.

We did spell it wrong on purpose but if somebody were to type ShowCaster, in our system, it’s going to forward there. One way or another, you’ll hopefully find it. It’s right there. It’s a wonderful tool. It’s available. If you’ve got a lot of episodes and you haven’t provided an easy way for people to experience them on your website or you provided a way but maybe it’s not the best way, then this is a pretty easy thing. It doesn’t take more than a few days to get this up and installed on your website so it can be done very quickly.

ShowCastR: ShowCastR doesn’t take more than a few days to set it up and install on your website.

For those of you who are thinking about a podcast, talk to Tom and Tracy first. I love what they do for it. That combined with GPT, I wait for the article to post that they transcribe. I take a couple of paragraphs and throw it in GTP and now I have my marketing for it too. The lovely part of this is Tom’s partner and wife, Tracy will be on our show. We’re going to be having an in-depth conversation about ChatGPT, what you can do with it and what you can’t do with it.

There are a lot of people saying you can do X, Y and Z but it puts out a horrible product and we’re going to talk a lot about that. Tom and Tracy have been using AI for a couple of years. While all of us are new to this space, they run their business on it. They’ve been doing a lot of work with it. I’m excited to have Tracy share the things that you guys have learned and not learned or learned the hard way. How’s that?

We did an awful lot of testing and Tracy is certainly the expert on that. She’s the right one to be talking to. I’ll look forward to watching that interview myself.

I will have the live going then. We failed on the live again now. I’m going to get off and fire my live company. Thank you so much, Tom. We appreciate you taking the time.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Important Links

• YouTube – Superbrand Publishing
• Podetize
• Feed Your Brand
• Product Launch Hazzards
• WTFFF?! 3D Printing: The 3D Start Point
• The Next Little Thing
• PodMatch
• Podetize.com/superbrand
• ShowCastR

About Tom Hazzard

As a top influence strategist for speakers, authors & experts, Tom Hazzard helps major publications, sports stars, and entrepreneurial influencers ‘Brandcast’ their original messages via podcasting and videocasting. Tom is a real inventor and successful product designer with over 40 US patents issued and pending. He has been rethinking brand innovation for 30 years. His latest SaaS (Software-as-aService) and MaaS (Marketing-as-a-Service) innovation, Podetize, reinvents podcast hosting, advertising, and brand marketing with an obsessive podcaster-centric focus on solutions to get hosts seen, heard, found, and rewarded in our noisy digital world.

Tom Hazzard co-hosts multiple top-ranked podcasts with over 2000 episodes combined: Feed Your Brand–in CIO’s Top 26 Entrepreneur Podcasts List; Product Launch Hazzards for inventors and e-Sellers; and WTFFF?! 3D Printing: the 3D Start Point, featured as an exclusive live podcast at SXSW. He starts a new podcast every year to put himself into the shoes of his clients and is just launching a review show called The Next Little Thing.

Tom has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Wired, and CNN Money. He has also guested on numerous podcasts and speaks at conferences across the country about Podcast Marketing and Multi-Media Brandcasting. With the constant stream of content and products from his Brandcasters authority platform, Podetize.com, Tom Hazzard influences and casts branded content and $2 Billion worth of products and innovation around the world.

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