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A lot of people go to Google when they have questions or just want to consume media. Since the internet is steadily the main source of media and information these days, podcasting and its audience has been growing by the day. As an expert in product design, Tom Hazzard has become one of the big leagues in podcasting with over 520 episodes in a podcast that he hosts with his wife Tracy. They started out aiming to be the resource point for 3D printing. Their journey was that of the hard way and the right way, which meant several months of researching, reading books, watching videos on YouTube, and learning from other podcasts. The challenges, the wonders and the joys of podcasting, Tom shares it all with the message – why wait when you can start podcasting now.
On the podcast, we have Tom Hazzard. Tom Hazzard is an inventor, entrepreneur and CEO of Feed Your Brand and Product Launch Hazzards. His 3D Printing Podcast, WTFFF?! Podcast, was featured in Forbes Magazine for its incredible content and fast-growing audience. Tom has designed and developed over 250 products over the years that have generated $2 billion in revenue for retail and e-commerce clients. Tom is an incredible guy with a wealth of knowledge on how to build a company brand. He also has a great story behind them.
Listen To The Episode Here
Build Your Brand Now with Tom Hazzard
We have Tom Hazzard. He is the magic man behind the podcast. He makes all this possible. He owns his own podcast company and I’m very excited to have him on.
Tom, how are you?
I’m great. Thanks so much for having me on, Kevin.
You’ve really changed the course of I thought was possible in this. I’m excited to get a little background on you and where you’re from. Where are you from originally?
I was born in Boston and I spent most of my early life, like first 30 years or so, in the Northeast between Boston and New York.
You were out there until you were 30?
A little over 30. I’m not a native Californian. My wife went to high school out here in California and she’s originally from the Northeast also. She grew up more of her teen years in California. We met on the first day of college, and then eventually ended up moving out to California in the town that she went to high school. It was coincidentally.
You met her on the first day of college?
Very first day of college. We were in the same dormitory. We went to Rhode Island School of Design. I was in Rhode Island School of Design and they had expected my freshman year that more people that accepted originally to come to school would not actually show up. They always accepted a few more and they expected some wouldn’t show up. Everybody showed up, so they ran out of housing space in the normal dormitory situation for freshmen. I ended up being the only man in a suite of upper-class women. On my floor was entirely women. I was the only man and they were all sophomores and juniors. There were some freshmen floors, two floors down in this dormitory. Long story short, I ended up having the same RA, resident assistant, as Tracy did and everybody else on that freshman floor, but I was from a couple of floors up.
The RA has this meeting very first day and as everyone sit in circle, you introduce yourself. Tracy says that she’s from California. I was an idiot. I was eighteen. When she said she’s from California, I said, “A valley girl,” which was not a very nice thing to say. It was an insult. I don’t know what I was thinking because it was not a good tactic to try and get a girl like you as well. At least I overcame it. I don’t know if it helped me, but a few days later we were introduced because we had each become friends with common friends. I was in a dorm room playing guitar, which was always a good hook in college. Suddenly, her impression of me changed. Here we are, we’ve been married for 26 years.
Why did you want to go to a Rhode Island School of Design? Was there something in particular you wanted to accomplish there?
Originally, I went there intending to go to school to become an architect because they have a very good architecture school. Freshman year, you take all these foundation courses. You don’t study within your intended major that first year, but I was able to research architecture more in the program. I talked to other people who were in it and I realized I didn’t want to be an architect because there was a whole lot more about building codes and things than it was about creativity. I was a very creative person, so I learned about this field called industrial design, which is a field that specializes in creating designs for consumer products. It could be anything from kitchen housewares to cars to furniture. It’s very broad in the types of products that you might create, but it’s not broad in terms of the process for how you design and create products. That process is consistent. You just decide where to apply it.
What did you want to create because you’re no longer doing buildings? Did your field changed a little bit?
I still have a business called Hazz Design Consulting where we do consumer product design for companies. We had a lot of expertise in furniture. We’ve done a lot of furniture designs over the years, things you’ve bought or seen in Costco, Target, and a lot of mass market products. It was through that business that I created my first podcast and that’s why this actually relates.
How long ago was this first podcast?
It was 2014. Podcasting started around 2004 or 2005 in the early days. It had a surge then it waned a bit in popularity. It’s had a big resurgence in since 2012. Podcasting has been steadily climbing in listenership, in number of shows available, in audience, and in popularity.
What made you gravitate towards the podcast?
In that product design business, we often created prototypes of products. This would be handmade samples in the early days. What happened as technology improved, we would use a lot of 3D printing. We’ve been using it commercially in our business. Around 2009, this desktop 3D printing revolution started because a bunch of patents expired from all these commercial companies that had been doing it since the late ‘80s. Once that happens, what started as a cottage industry became a big, serious industry in this 3D printing economy. You can buy a 3D printer for $250, $350, have one in your home to make things out of plastic, if you want. They go up to many thousands and even commercial printers are tens of thousands of dollars. We had a particular interest in this technology and as desktop 3D printers came to be and we started to get into it, we realized, “There’s not a good resource for people to help them to get information and resources that they could learn and help themselves jump the learning curve.”
There was quite a steep learning curve to 3D printing. We have been listening to podcasts. Then we checked on iTunes, there was only a couple or three different podcasts on 3D printing. They were very tech heavy and not really speaking in layman’s terms to help the average person get into 3D printing. We saw an opportunity, and it started as an experiment, “Let’s start a podcast.” We did it the hard way. We spent six months researching, reading a dozen books, watching 50 YouTube videos and listening to dozens of podcasts on podcasting and learned how to do it and started our own. With the idea that, “Let’s see if we can build a big audience and be that resource, establish ourselves as experts in that field, and maybe we’ll have a great audience we could market something to in the future.” We didn’t even know what we might market to them at that time.
We are about 520 episodes into that podcast and it’s been running ever since. That was our first podcast. The reason that we now have a completely different business called Brandcasters that produces your podcast among many others is that we had to build a team for ourselves, so it didn’t take over our day job. We enjoyed creating the content, recording it, putting it out there for people. We created a resource website where people can go to research things. We have event calendars, we have directors of other companies in the industry. That’s where the podcast lives. We had to build this team so that we could get it done. In the early days, we were publishing five podcasts a week.
Just your podcast. No one else’s?
No one else’s for the three training podcasts. That was to build an audience quickly. It’s a very good strategy if you want to build an audience quickly for the first eight weeks. You don’t have to do it every day. You can record a bunch in a sitting and schedule them out. We did one and published one every weekday. It worked, but to do that kind of volume of content, you need a team. Once we put that team in place and people saw what we were doing, other businesses, people we knew in business, and Tracy speaks business networking circuit, we would encounter all these people who would say, “That’s great what you’re doing. Can you do that for me?” For about a year, we did that on the side of our normal business. We had these people working for us. Eventually, they became full time working out of our design business. In early 2017, it just got so big, it was growing so fast we had to make it its own corporate entity and we did, Brandcasters, Inc. We’ve got a couple dozen full-time employees. We’re doing this for over 50 podcasters and it’s going great.
I’m not even saying this to gas you up or anything, but I feel like when I talked to you, I am the only podcast that you have because I get answered literally right away and all the accommodations are always met. It’s very direct and you are very quick with everything. I always really appreciate that.
It’s our pleasure. We enjoy getting to work with so many different kinds of businesses. That’s one of the things that I’ve gotten out of this personally. Yes, we’ve built a team. I don’t edit podcasts nor do I create the written content on your blogs, which is a very important part of this, but we designed to this business. We put the standards in place and hired the team and direct them with what to do. I’m more involved on the sales side of it than anything. I enjoy talking to different people, learning about their businesses, and helping them market and grow their businesses because that’s what podcasting is for us. A podcast audience is a wonderful and powerful thing on its own, but if you don’t want to do more with it, you’re probably not the right customer for us. We help people market and grow their businesses using podcasting as a tool, but the podcast is a departure point. It’s 20% of what we do. The rest of it is all around blogs and SEO and casting a wider marketing net for your business on social media and on Google. We have lot of fun.
I love how you can talk to somebody every week that knows something that you don’t and the phones are away. You have that person’s complete attention and you learn so much from everybody.
I enjoy bringing that information to a wider audience of people who can benefit from it. Podcasting has become a real go-to source of information, especially for younger generations of people. I do think more people still go to Google first when they have a question. That’s why the blog posts are so important because they come up in Google search. Google doesn’t index or even pay attention to what’s said in a MP3 file, which is what podcasts are. They do something written on your website. A lot of people find the podcast from Google. In fact, on our podcast, about 80% of the traffic we get comes from Google.
I got some of the best advice from you that anybody’s ever told me. It wasn’t a whole profound speech, but I remember when I first met you, I went into Dr. Hoefer’s office because she wanted to do a podcast. I was still in school at that point. I was talking to you and I was like, “I want to get established first as a doctor.” All you said is, “Why wait? What are you waiting for? Just do it and your listeners will grow with you.” That was one of the best things I ever heard because you’re right. Why wait? Sometimes, if you wait too long, it escapes you and you don’t want to do it anymore. It’s one of my favorite things to do now.
I was very impressed with just as an individual that you did take the initiative to go forward and do it. You had starting out getting out of school, you were starting your own practice, there’s got to be a lot of things on your mind and a lot of expenses that you’ve got to deal with. Financially, I know it probably wasn’t the most logical choice. I knew from experience, and from others in business, I hadn’t had very many other doctors do it. I believed it, but I hadn’t had a lot of proof that it was going to produce a measurable return. You took the leap of faith, but I did believe that as you were going to establish yourself as a chiropractor, especially a Blair chiropractor and start a new practice, you need a mechanism to market your business. I knew podcasting and the written content we would create for your website would do that. I was pleased because three or four months ago, you shared with me how many new patients you’ve gotten as a direct result of the podcast.
I have people Facebook-ing me. I was on a Skype call with a girl from Amsterdam. She’s going to be a new patient. She saw the podcast and she says, “I need help.” I Skyped with her and she’s coming over. It’s unbelievable. I can’t even fathom how it spreads. I wanted to get my story out there and tell people this amazing work we’re doing. It’s really interesting when you have certain people on. You almost inherit their following. You bring in a larger following and if they like what you’re doing, they stick with you. I had Dr. Mike VanDerschelden on the podcast. He has a huge YouTube following and I had him on an episode. After that, a lot of people stuck with me. It was really awesome to see.
We know podcasts have a global audience. Anybody can listen to you from anywhere and I imagine a lot of people can’t really afford to fly from another country to go for a doctor’s visit. I’m thrilled to hear this person is coming from Amsterdam. Before you were there in the Metropolitan New York area, I have a family that’s in Westchester County, New York. We go out and visit for ten days, two weeks, every summer. My wife, Tracy, was out there a few years ago and definitely was out of alignment and in tremendous pain. There had been a death in the family and she was out of sorts and not sleeping in her own bed.
Somehow, some things got way out of whack and she was severely impaired. I couldn’t get her any help within like a three or four hour drive. I know the Blair society website and I know where to go research this stuff. I was calling Dr. Hoefer, “Who do you know out here?” There wasn’t anybody. I got her to someone in Connecticut who probably made her worse. We ended up having to fly back to California and get her in precision chiropractic as soon as possible. My point is I understand being willing to go to great lengths to get the help you need, especially once you know what is going to help you.
There’s only about a hundred people in the country doing Blair for cervical. What blows my mind is there’s nobody in New York City. One of the biggest cities in the entire world, there’s nobody.
I know that because I actually researched it. I was from the northeast and I went to high school in Rye, New York. Rye is a great town. It’s a pretty small town by New York standards, only like 16,000 people there. My entire high school graduating class was only 150 people. We’re a pretty tight community. I am very close on Facebook with the majority of my class. I have people post, “I’ve got this problem where I’m looking for a chiropractor.” I’m always telling them to go out to New Jersey and go see Dr. Kevin Pecca because I know you’re the only one there.
We’re doing our best to get it back into the schools. For the chiropractic students, there’s work for you all over the country and the upper cervical department. It’s truly an amazing thing. It saved my life and it’s really cool. How did you originally find it? Was it because of Tracy and the stuff that she’s going on?
It was because of Tracy. For a couple of years, we lived in Pleasanton, California, which is in the East Bay San Francisco area. She had been seeing a neuromuscular therapist. I didn’t even know about Blair chiropractic at the time. This was 2003. She had been in a car accident, had been rear ended. She was in a lot of pain after that accident and went to a neuromuscular therapist thinking that it would help her. That therapist looked at her and said, “I can’t touch you. I think I would make it worse, but I think I know what could help you.” She recommended Dr.Tom Forest.
He’s one of the best. I just had him on the podcast.
We happened to live right there in his town, so it was easy. She went in and that started a huge shift in our medical treatment of our entire family because now our entire family, we are all treated by upper cervical chiropractic. For years, I didn’t go in. Tracy went in first, then after she and our older daughter had been rear ended, both in an accident, they both started going. It was years later, we were living in Southern California. It had to have been 2009, I got rear ended on the I-5 freeway in Santa Fe Springs. My car was fine because I was driving a pretty big car, but it messed me up. Even just slamming my foot on the break with my right foot and holding the wheel and how I braced myself and then got hit, it completely torqued me. At that point, Tracy and Alexandra, my older daughter, said, “You’re going to see Dr. Tom.”
It made it easy because auto insurance covered it all. That’s one of the things that’s very frustrating for me about Blair Chiropractic. There are a lot of different not mainstream medical services, practices that our insurance system disregards them and doesn’t cover them. I hate to admit this because today I completely understand the value of it. I’m a complete believer in it. I see people, especially like you watch a football game or something and you’re like, “He got knocked over.” How do these people walk around without getting treated? I don’t even know. Now, I appreciate it, but at the time, the cost was a consideration for me and prevented me from probably seeking treatment years before I did. The auto insurance only made it easy and after that I’m like, “I don’t care how much it costs. I’m going to get treated.”
You see a lot of people come in and they bring in somebody else, but they’re checking it out themselves. They want to see what it’s all about and then you help out one of their family members. Before you know, the entire family is in the office getting checked.
That’s one of the wonderful things about your podcast is that if you have people that are skeptical, have doubt and skepticism, or they’re on the fence and as to whether this is really going to work for them, you tell them, “Go listen to a few episodes of my podcast.” They hear it from others who are either treating or have been treated. That kind of testimony, that kind of social proof, it makes all the difference when people hear it from others rather than hearing it coming from you.
It’s made a huge difference. A lot of those episodes I have with the other Blair Chiropractors are very real. It’s very straightforward. It’s not a typical scripted Q&A. It’s what they’re going off of their own experience and people really resonate with that.
It’s frustrating to me sometimes because it’s so hard to convince people. I have other people in my extended family who I know need treatment, and they won’t go. My mother-in-law should be treated by upper cervical and she just won’t go no matter what I do or Tracy, who’s her daughter does. A few times, I’ve been able to convince someone who needed it very badly to go.
Did you convince your one buddy to go?
He’s already been. He was used in Rochester, New York as a case study by his doctor, who’s Dr. Gibson in Pennsylvania. I sent him there. I grew up in the Northeast, so I have a few friends that I’ve been friends with since we were eight years old, starting in elementary school, and we kept in touch ever since. My friend’s name is Dan Loewenheim. He is a paramedic in Upstate New York and that’s his profession for many years. He got a on the job injury. Dan is the type of friend that he can call me any time of day and I’m going to answer the phone. He called me and he’s telling me about how much pain he was in and what he had been going through and all the conventional doctors and tests he had done. What he thought was an issue in his shoulder or neck area that was nerve related and he had been to conventional medical establishment. All they could do for him was to prescribe him narcotics to manage the pain. They were not solving the problem and he was dealing with pain. He said it was on a level of eight on a scale of one to ten. I’m like, “Can you drive at all?” He works in upstate New York like in Jamestown area, but he lives in Warren, Pennsylvania. I get on the Blair website and I found Dr. Gibson. I checked with Dr. Hoefer, I was like, “Do you know Dr. Gibson?” She said, “I do.”
She even knew him before he was in practice. She said, “You can trust him. Go to him.” I want to make sure that he’s legit, if somebody is going to drive two hours to go see him who’s in a lot of pain. So I said, “I’m going to call this doctor’s office for you and see if they have openings. You’re going to call and make a physical appointment. It’s going to be expensive, but you need to go do this. Trust me.” He said, “I’ll try anything at this point.” He went and he called me after and said, “I went to that office with this level eight pain, and I walked out at about a two.” He’s been continuing to be treated. He thought his career was going to end as a paramedic because you have to perform certain functions. It’s a physical job. Looking at being on disability and having a very low quality of life to them being very functional and having a great quality of life. He always is throwing all kinds of praise and thanking me. I’m like, “You’re my friend. I don’t care, but I’m glad you trusted me and went.” It’s so sad that people have to get to that point of pain and in that much pain before they would go and try this.
There’s a lot of chiropractors that are trying to sell you $5,000 packages, 60 visits and everything. I don’t agree with that. That’s what I like about Blair. One adjustment can hold the weeks to months to years where you don’t need to be in the office three or four times a week. It’s doesn’t always hold the first time, but it has the potential to. You almost become your own doctor after awhile because we say, “Holding is healing.”
I’ve experienced that too. I have where I’ll hold for six to nine months, even maybe over a year. I still go in periodically because there are other issues, but there are some symptoms when I know when I’m out. I have some young kids and when I can’t pick one of them up without feeling this very sharp lower back pain, I know my C2 is out and I need to get in and get seen. When I explain something like this even to my own mother, she was like, “What is your upper cervical vertebrae have to do with lower back pain?” I didn’t understand it at first either, but it actually makes sense.
Every nerve in your body goes through that C1-C2 opening in your skull. When the head goes off center, the shoulder comes up, the hip comes up in, your body starts to compensate all the way down. You put everything back into alignment, everything balances out. That’s why we have people with just low back pain, we put their neck back into alignment and the back pain goes away.
It’s responsible for our entire family having a much better quality of life. I also have experience with my wife having a couple of children within the last ten years. I’m not a woman, obviously. I’ve never been pregnant, never gone through that. I’m sure people will take what I say appropriately, but I’ve experienced it with my wife. Anybody who is having postpartum depression issues, I would immediately send into an upper cervical chiropractor. I’ve seen it. It makes a huge difference in the quality of life.
Depression in general. I was suicidal and I was a happy person. I had no reason to be sad. I would go to a psychiatrist and I’d be like, “I’m just not doing well. I have every reason in the world to be happy.” My physical body was giving out on me and I had all these symptoms, that’s why I wasn’t happy. It’s tough for them to pinpoint like, “You shouldn’t be feeling like that. There’s something wrong with you. Take this pill to mask the problem.” It was a dark time. Once I got my neck put back into alignment, it’s almost like my world opened up again. I felt connected again. That’s something that’s hard to explain to people because we’re always given a pill to solve the problem, but that’s the only masking the problem.
It boggles my mind to think back through the history of human existence. A lot of people with a lot of issues and were written off probably in many ways throughout history in terms of their issues. There are people that maybe were considered insane that could have benefited from this. It’s only been roughly a hundred years or so that this field of study has been around. I don’t want to live in that pre-upper cervical world.
I know you said you’ve got a pretty good following the first couple of weeks, but was there ever a point where you’re like, “I don’t know if this is working.”Did it just kept exponentially growing?
In the very beginning, I didn’t know how well it was working. I would probably do things differently today, but it took maybe three or four months to get to the point where we had had 30,000 total downloads. That was a milestone that was saying, “We’ve now made.”It in the early days, I felt like maybe only my mom listened. It’s hard because there wasn’t a feedback loop at first, but once you get past 25 episodes, if you continue after that, you’ve made it and you’re going to continue because you’ll be hearing from listeners. You’ll be getting kind of feedback. There was an interesting time when we had to take a hiatus from that podcast because I have an older daughter who was getting married.
I had too much to deal with and I could not record consistently. I told the audience, “We’ve got to take a break. We’ll be back in 60 days.” I didn’t know if we would come back from that, but we did. The listeners stuck with us and it kept going. My experience not only with our podcast, but with all the podcasters we work with and produce, as long as you record content, as long as you continue to do that, then the benefits will follow. There are different results for every podcasters. Some measured success by getting actual business from it. Like you have patients that are coming to see you and become customers. Others measure it by how much engagement they’re having or how they’re growing their followings on social media.
Others measure it by getting investors if they’re in a real estate investment business, to invest with them who found them through the podcasts. There’s so many different measurements of success. It’s different for everybody. I see consistently, as long as you make that time to record content and put out new content every week whether that’s one or two episodes, then everything else will fall into place. If you have the right support system too. You can’t try to do it all yourself. You have a practice you’re building, you have patients to treat. You don’t have time to do much more than record this, upload it, and be done with it. That’s the way it is for most of the people we work with.
Some people get a little discouraged when you see all these famous people with podcasts and they’re reaching massive amounts of people, and people are like, “How am I ever going to do?”You don’t need to do that. If you can change a couple of people’s minds on a couple of things and they start talking, it grows like that. I feel like a lot of people get discouraged because they think, “How am I going to reach the masses right away?”That will come in time.
We have very successful podcasters that are getting 300 downloads per episode, and then others that are getting 3,000 downloads per episode. Even others that are getting 10,000 to 18,000 downloads per episode. There are some podcast’s success stories that are promoted out there of people that literally get 100,000 downloads per episode, but that’s a very different kind of a podcast for a different purpose. You don’t need to achieve that level. I was at the Podfest 2018 Conference in Florida and got some of the current stats. There’s easily 500,000 total shows out there, although probably only 250,000 or so that are active, that are English spoken. Out of those, the average downloads per episode is about 1,500. That is very successful for a lot of podcast. I don’t want people to think, “Podcast, the audience will just come.” To an extent, it will.
I took a three-week break because I was a little burnt out and I just want to relax. I noticed a little dip. You got to have that weekly episode to make everybody happy.
It’s not that you can’t take three weeks off, you absolutely can. You can record four episodes in a day that you publish one a week and then not do anything for a month. You can see a fall off, but when you create this content, the written content for your website and you’re putting up a new long form blog posts every week, Google is doing the work for you and marketing it for you. The things that you’ve talked about, all these different phrases that you spoke that are related to things people type into Google search bar either for their pain points or areas of interest, they’re going to find your posts. They come up in Google search higher and higher in their search over time. It’s going to continue to work for you even when you take a break. It does pay off.
It’s a bit of a long game, but you will see results right away. If somebody wants to launch a podcast and have immediate results, get on iTunes’ New and Noteworthy, which has been harder and harder to do. They highlight for the first eight weeks of a podcast existence. You have the opportunity to get listed there in New and Notable, but it depends on how many downloads you’re getting and how popular it is. There are strategies you can use to get there, but it takes a bigger effort and a little more money. You’re not paying to play, but you just have to pay to create all that content and make sure all the keyword optimization is done for the post. You can get there if you want to, but it’s not critical in most businesses I find.
Putting a podcast out there, spreading the word on social media, using your own network, you’re going to get a good start. Get at least to 25 episodes and you will start to see it. We have a customer that started with us a month ago. They put out 25 episodes over the course that first month. They wanted to accelerate the effects. When we ran their websites statistics, their analytics of the website traffic they got, the number of organic keywords they rank in Google, and that’s one of the biggest measurements and advantages because that means people in Google search will find it. Her site increased by more than 1,000 keyword rankings on Google in a month. She didn’t do anything else. It absolutely works and it is measurable. It’s exciting and the audiences continue to grow. More and more people are listening. There are more ways people can listen. Most cars now have a podcast button.
I think that’s huge too because I feel like the morning commute has gotten exponentially longer for most people. There’s only so much music you can listen to you, just throw in a podcast and it makes it so much better.
You’re listening to what you want to and not hearing all those commercials on terrestrial radio.
Is your podcast strictly 3D printing still?
We have another podcast called Feed Your Brand. That is about supporting this podcast business. We freely offer all the things we’ve learned in all that we do to help produce podcasts and how people get the most out of them. It is about growing your brand, so that’s why we call it Feed Your Brand. It’s on iTunes or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
If somebody has a question on how to start a podcast, they can listen to this and get information? I have so many people that are like, “How do I start a podcast?” I tell them what the base knowledge I have of it, but that’s great that you did something like that.
We decided we needed to offer a resource to help people. Feed Your Brand is the podcast and the website is FeedYourBrand.co where you can go and get a lot of information, see other testimonials from existing customers or some videos from people. We have our own blog and there’s a lot of subjects you can go and search through. We have like a whole one-on-one series and then some deeper subjects. We interview other experts in the field of marketing your business in one way or another. We are focused on business podcasting. If you wanted to create a podcast that was more of an entertainment podcast or something more for fun, a lot of the things that we share would be useful to you, but we’re definitely more focused on helping people who are building a business or a brand or want to fuel those.
You came out with a podcast, you didn’t know what your market was. How did you grow that podcast quick because it’s like a niche?
Podcasts are all about niches. Some people might think, “When I look on iTunes, there’s so many different podcasts about marketing.”If you’re a marketing consultant of any kind, you’re like, “There’s so many about marketing. I shouldn’t even consider starting a podcast.” I would disagree with that statement because everybody has their own point of view, their own perspective, and their own experiences and expertise to share. Depending on who you might interview, if you interview guests and what you may ask them, you can offer something truly unique and different to a crowded market. It is all about niches, but then there are real marketing niches.
3D printing, we thought it was a growing area and we thought a lot of people would be interested in that. We had no idea. This was an experiment we decided to invest some time and money in it, not really knowing, we were just willing to do that. We found that there were a tremendous amount of people out there who needed help, were looking for a resource and hadn’t been finding it. Podcasting was a really great vehicle. We grew it all organically. We didn’t do any paid marketing. We did not have much of a social media following when we started, so it’s not like we could blast it out to a big list.
You just put it out there and see what happened?
We did, and if we were to do it over today, we could accelerate it a lot faster. We did really well at the time, and we got written up in Forbes for building a massive audience really quickly to 30,000 in a couple of months. Now, we do that with a podcast pretty routinely. We have another one called The Note Closers Show that’s a real estate investment podcasts. It’s a niche area of real estate investment.
That’s your podcast too?
Not mine, that’s one that we produce. We launched it from the get-go. That podcast hit 10,000 downloads within three weeks, 25,000 downloads within six weeks. They’ve now achieved close to100,000 much faster than we ever did. We’ve learned more when you want to make it work harder for your business than you do for it. We know how to do that.
How many episodes were you putting out a week on the WTFFF?! Podcast?
We’re doing two. We’re doing one interview episode in one episode. That’s a short subject with just us talking in an area that we think will be of interest to our audience and helpful to them or answering sometimes a listener’s question. It’s fun to have a co-host and to have some dialogue where you’re not just sitting yourself talking into a mic. There are times when Tracy and I are both not available and we need to keep creating content. I’ll record some alone and she’ll record some alone.
I did that one time and I liked it. A lot more work went into it. You got to make sure you know what you’re talking about with no lulls. What’s your process with just the recording by yourself? Those are more difficult for me, I only did one.
I create an outline. I don’t script it. You never want to script it. You always want to be real, be yourself, but you have to know your stuff. I have an outline of bullet points of things I want to cover. It’s also helpful sometimes if you have a story you can relate to help communicate your point. Storytelling is something podcasters really like. It is hard to get good at, and I’m not perfect. That’s why I love podcasting. It’s edited. Your listeners won’t know it. At one point, I lost my train of thought and I’m saying, “Hold on a second,” and then I get there and I continue. Our audio engineer will take that out and you’ll never know it.
That makes it a lot easier on the guests too because I asked some people if they want to come on. Some of them are a little hesitant because they’re fearful of messing up. I tell them, “It’s heavily edited. Don’t worry about it. If you don’t know what to say, you just pause for a second, recollect.” That makes it a lot more opportunistic to get more people on. **Tom, what are your podcasts and where can people find you on the internet?**
Our podcast, Feed Your Brand is available anywhere you would listen to podcasts. If you want to go to our website to get a little more detail and read about it, you can go to FeedYourBrand.co. Our company website for all the stuff we do with podcasts is called BrandcastingYou.com. That’s where you can find all about us and learn how you could start your own podcast.
Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
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