Jim James: 0:32

Podcasts are for everyone. There are literally millions of podcasts on the internet, many of which are the audio products of established media players, and some which have been grown by KOLs. Statistics show that podcasts are becoming one of the best ways to position yourself as an authority figure and to get your message out one-on-one, so here's how you can do that. We are looking into podcasts for a client of ours who is expanding internationally. We're working with them on the traditional media relations, but it occurred to me that podcasting now is a brilliant platform to have in-depth conversations. On average, an article that appears in a newspaper or trade press may only be 500-800 words long, unless we're lucky, but a podcast of 10-20 minutes could be 1,000-2,000 words. Also, with podcasts, we're given a chance to build our character and display our empathy. We also get to build a sense of the personality behind the brand, which is impossible with an article written by a journalist. This is why I'm recommending to my client that we get them on some dedicated trade podcasts. The benefit of doing a podcast is that we can position our client as an authority figure, but we can also get legacy content or content that lasts. Podcasting now reaches over 88 million listeners in America alone, which is one of the largest markets with 35% of all Americans saying they listen to podcasts. They say that by 2023, over 160 million Americans (in other words, half of their population) will be listening to podcasts. In South Korea, 53% of people say they already do listen to podcasts, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report of 2019. In the UK, it's only 21%, and in France, 25%. The point is that it is becoming mainstream for everybody, so podcasting as a medium is here to stay, and it's something you should consider if you want to get noticed. There are over 1 million podcasts available, and some of them are becoming media entities and media channels in their own right, so how do we go about finding the right podcasts? In this particular case, ours is a manufacturing client and we're looking at B2B, so what we've done is we've gone online, and through looking at Spotify and Apple, which are two of the main platforms for podcasts, we've searched for the leading podcasts. In the client's particular niche, there are not that many, so we then did a search on Google, and there is a website called Feedspot with a list of top 10 manufacturing blogs. It's quite niche, and the beauty with B2B marketing is that we can find niches to drill down to. That's why in our SPEAK|pr program, we talk about the need to define the avatar, to be clear about who we're trying to talk to. Back to our client, on the website, I found a podcast called Making Chips for Manufacturing Leaders out of Chicago, Illinois. They've got 821 followers, 1,600 Instagram followers, they've got a domain authority of 33 (on a scale from 0 to 100), and an Alexa rank of 3.3 million. These numbers may not sound like a lot, but this is a vertical to do with plastic mould manufacturing, and let's not forget that all these statistics rank all websites in terms of domain authority. Next, we then shortlisted the top 10 podcasts, some of which are run by companies like Deloitte and HP, some are run by publications that have extended their content into audio, and a few are run by people that have taken up the mantle: individual entrepreneurs, writers, thought leaders, and so on, so we're The next step would be to figure out how to get our client on getting a mix. these podcasts which we can go about in a couple of different ways. One is that the podcast reaches out to the guest. The other is that the guest reaches out to the podcast, and this is more likely because our client currently isn't known as an authority in the podcast world, so we have to reach out to these potential podcasts ourselves. We can do that, first of all, by looking at the profile of the podcast, and they'll all have a desire for quality and interesting guests. They'll have their contact details listed, so it's easy to reach out to them. Many of them are using a platform like Libsyn, and with Buzzsprout, there are links to social media. It's not so difficult, because the whole goal of these podcasters is to be found as well to find a new audience themselves. One podcast I heard explained it really well, that podcasters are looking for other podcasters to connect the audiences together. I shared about the impact of algorithms on platforms like Facebook, that search engines are giving us the information and the websites and podcasts that we're already looking at. So if we're trying to break into a new market, we're going to need to proactively reach out and get on these other podcasts, because they'll have their own listeners. They'll have their own community that may not be finding or being served our content, so we want to demonstrate that we've got a following. Currently, our client doesn't have a following, but they do have a website, Twitter, LinkedIn, and they have their own followers but just not in the audio world, so we need to demonstrate the value our client can bring in terms of thought leadership and content, but also package their community so that it'll be interesting to the podcast hosts. We're doing all of this for a couple of reasons. One is that we want our client to be seen as an authority. The second is that the content from a blog post helps with the search engine optimization of our client's website, because the content that comes out the podcast will have show notes. From a transcript of that podcast, we can turn it into an article which can be shared as a newsletter or as a blog post. I now put mine into Medium as well, and these all help to create backlinks from the podcaster to my website, from my website to theirs, and from my website internally to my website on Medium. The secondary function is that most podcasts are syndicated. When I put my content onto Buzzsprout, it goes to Google, iHeartRadio, Apple, Stitcher, and more. My one podcast gets syndicated across all these different directories, and with those different directories come the links. So, by having our clients speak and adding their contact details to their social media, we can build links for them across the internet. We are creating a place for our spokesperson within the overall world of the internet search engines, so the search engines that are now powered by AI can connect these dots together and identify that my client is being read about on LinkedIn and being spoken about on podcasts. The key point about content online is that it's all connected. It doesn't exist in the silos. And being in a podcast or an article is actually just like being featured, for example, on a YouTube video. It helps create another cache of content for these search engines. Now, how do you get on podcasts? You can do that by reaching out specifically to the podcasters. That takes some research, but there are also some platforms or directories that have been created to make it easier for you to get on a podcast. One is called Poddit, and for free, you can be listed as a guest. You can also pay to upgrade for just$29 a month. You can put more details about yourself, your show, your bio, and your photographs onto their directory. There's another very comprehensive website called Podcast Guests on which, for $10 a month, you could be listed and they will match you with other podcasts within your category which is whatever niche you're in or whatever you can speak about. There's another one called Expert Bookers, and it charges a $499 per month to get you as an interviewee on a podcast. It's a fair amount of

money, but think of it this way: 13:13

Park Howell's The Business of Story podcast has 50,000 downloads per show. Entrepreneurs on Fire generally amasses over a million downloads per show. If you were to get onto one of their shows, the equivalent of $250 or 180, if it's the right audience, that could be give you fantastic ROI for something that lasted only 20 minutes. After that, you get an article, you get audio that you can cut and make into little segments, and you can use a platform like Lately to make audiograms and retweet those. In the SPEAK|pr methodology, we talk about Storify, Personalise, Amplify, Engage, and to Know, and podcasts are part of Engagement. They're part of the content creation and amplification. Creating audio of you and your story and how you make your clients into heroes is an indispensable and increasingly possible medium. You can do it yourself. You can do it with platforms. You can go to people that already have podcasts rather than creating your own. I can tell you, creating a podcast takes a lot of time, effort, and some money, and indeed, the challenge is finding people to listen to you, so I suggest that you leverage the existing podcast network that's out there already, at least to start with, same as what we're doing for our client. This will complement the traditional media relations work that we're doing such as the LinkedIn profile raising and the virtual tradeshow attendance work that we're doing for this client. Podcasting is great. There are over a million shows to choose from, and the key really is to look at the avatar. Identify who your audience is. From that, you can use the tools and the search engines to find out where they are, and then you can reach out directly or use these platforms to help you to find them, and more importantly, to become a guest. The preparation for being a guest is a whole new chapter, and I will tackle that in another article.