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How Can a Podcast Help My Business?

There are several ways a podcast can help your brand or business.

Share Your Knowledge and Expertise

The first way a podcast can help your business is by giving you an outlet where you can share your knowledge and expertise, shedding a light on your business while giving insight into your industry. You have direct knowledge and expertise that only you can share about the industry and, more specifically, your business. You are an expert in what you do, and this is an opportunity to share that expertise with people who are already interested.

Plus, if you’re one of the first podcasts in your industry, you also have the first-mover advantage over others that may join the podcast space for your industry down the road. Regardless, you have your unique perspective and an opportunity to differentiate yourself from other podcasts and businesses in the industry.

Sharing this expertise on an audio platform helps you build community around the show and your brand that you may not reach on a visual social media platform. Many people listen to podcasts while occupied with other tasks, passively consuming content while walking the dog, exercising, driving, or while working in a way no other digital media can be consumed.

Creating Connections

A podcast can also help your brand or business by creating connections to others in your industry. If you choose to interview guests on your show, you have the opportunity to reach out to and share viewpoints with your colleagues, vendors, and customers to offer a 360-degree discussion of your area of expertise. You also have an opportunity to add value for them, as well as the audience, while you discuss your industry and business. Without guests, you can share customer stories, solutions with vendors, funny anecdotes, and other content that showcase your expertise.

You also reach people already interested in your industry and business with your show, acting as a reminder of who you are and what you do. It’s like nurturing a community of “warm leads” for your business.

Get Insight Into Your Community

When you engage and involve the listeners in the show itself, you also help your business, gaining insight into your community of customers and potential customers.

Can you imagine being able to ask an engaged community what they want to know about your business or industry? This is like having a FREE focus group to tell you how you can better serve them. You can also test new ideas with them, to find out if your latest idea is a good one. When you listen, you’re able to gain insight into how they want you to serve them.

Is there a better insight into the minds of customers than an engaged community of customers themselves?

Create Pillar Content

Finally, for a brand or business that’s creating content around themselves, a podcast gives you a tremendous amount of long-form content that you can use as a pillar for a lot of other content you create. You can re-package and re-purpose the same content across a variety of channels without having to create something completely original for each platform.

Using a podcast as “pillar content” is a great way to have a variety of content created for many platforms and uses.

Hustleburg Episode 35 – Interview with Apex Care Pharmacy’s Dr. Nirav Mehta

“I Saw That There is a Need for Patient Education”

After seeing his uncle’s pharmacy thrive in India, Dr. Nirav Mehta set out to make sure his pharmacy patients have all the information about what they’re taking, possible side effects, and any potential interactions from prescriptions across their health network. With a goal of being St. Pete’s hometown pharmacy, Dr. Mehta works to stand out from the other pharmacies in town. He and his team work to make patients feel welcome, appreciated, and informed about their medicines.

In this episode of Hustleburg, you’ll hear it all from him. As we saw with other professional service providers, like Dr. Jenna Elwart, business education isn’t a part of their training, which focuses more on the rigors of treating their patients. Working hard to differentiate his pharmacy and providing the care his patients need drives Dr. Mehta’s thriving business here in Saint Petersburg.

Fill Your Prescriptions with Apex Care Pharmacy

Connect with Apex Care Pharmacy to make sure you are fully informed by the neighborhood pharmacist about your medication:

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If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode.

Be a Guest on Hustleburg

If you have any questions you’d like to have answered on an upcoming Q&A episode, please take a moment to visit beyondyoursidehustle.com/podcastquestion and ask there. If you’re a St. Pete businessperson who’d like to sit down for an interview, please reach out to us here.

Create Pillar Content for Your Business with a Podcast

By having a podcast serve as long-form pillar content for your brand, you achieve two big things.

What Your Pillar Content Does

You create a library of searchable content that stands out when people look for you and in your industry. If they are not a part of your community already, they will be looking for an expert to answer questions in your industry. You are that expert.
When creating content around your brand, a podcast serves as a terrific way to re-use and re-purpose content for other use, by slicing, dicing, and re-packaging the podcast content and using it elsewhere without having to create more content.

Re-Purpose Content

A 20 minute podcast episode turns into several other pieces of content aside from the audio you publish. It can serve as 3-4 blog posts on your website by transcribing (or using your pre-written notes). Think about how much time you save by editing your spoken word to become a blog post, rather than writing, re-writing, editing, and publishing new, original, written content into a blog post.

Also, utilize your laptop or smartphone camera to record video yourself recording your podcast episode to upload to YouTube to capture those who are interested in the visual as well as the audio of your podcast content. It also offers a way to passively consume the audio on their computer while they utilize other tabs in their browser or applications as they work. It’s an easy way to share video content with minimal editing, only requiring a cut here and there and uploading to YouTube. You then create a channel on the second largest search engine in the world for your business. Having that search engine working for you is pretty handy when you consider that Google also owns YouTube and will be able to index your video for relevant Google searches.

Social Media Use

Take short video clips from your podcast, whether your recorded video or “audiograms” to share to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote your show, share video content highly-valued by those platforms, and share smaller bites of your expertise with your community. That content will also drive your existing community toward your podcast, and you’ll be able to deepen your already existing connection with those that carry over .

In addition to the audio and video that you re-purpose in smaller pieces, you can also create memes for those same platforms with quotes, as well as offer text excerpts from the body of your podcast to your community across platforms. This creates a TON of content from a single podcast episode without minimal extra effort.

This is how we are able to create so much around Beyond Your Side Hustle, creating articles, videos, quotes, and micro-blogs from the larger pillar content created for the podcast. We also record video YouTube publication to answer each question answered thus far on the Q&A episodes.

There is a lot of potential content created from a single episode of Hustleburg, and it’s replicable for your podcast.

Hustleburg Episode 34 – Answering Your Podcasting Questions, Part 2

This episode is a Q&A episode with questions from you about podcasting. In Episode 32, Brett asked for questions and you delivered. The first podcast Q&A episode focused on how a podcast could help your business, how you can use it as pillar content for all the content you create for your brand, and a bit of discussion about video podcasts vs. audio only.

Can You Make Money From Podcasting?

Short answer, yes. You absolutely can make money podcasting, but it takes time. Basically, it comes down to success and popularity for your podcast. You need to have a “flexible plan,” that defines how you will build and serve a community by focusing on topics at the intersection of your expertise and their interest.

You will also need to consider the format of your podcast, which includes presentation, frequency, and runtime. Will your podcast be hosted by you, solo? Will you have guest hosts for a conversation? Will you interview other people? Planning your podcast will also determine a frequency that best serves that intended audience. Whether daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly, your podcast episodes must come out when you say they will. In addition to planning the frequency, you’ll probably need to establish a general runtime. This can vary from a very short (and usually very frequent) episode length of just a few minutes to ridiculously long-form episodes that last hours.

Like in life, there is no overnight success in podcasting. Even celebrities new to the medium need to prove that they can produce episodes consistently.

How Do You Make Money Podcasting?

The most prevalent revenue method for free podcasts are to include advertisements and sponsorships into the content of the show. Ads aren’t going away anytime soon, because they benefit creators of all size, though it benefits the more popular creators than the smaller ones. Podcast patrons are probably the higher revenue option than advertising for creators that are smaller in size. People like to exhibit who they are through what they like, and merchandise for a podcast is no different than a band or tv show. In other episodes of the podcast and on social media, I’ve pointed to the exclusive deals inked by Spotify a lot. Finally, joining a network is another way to make money through podcasting.

What’s the Difference Between Open, Closed, and Free Podcasts?

Free podcasts are pretty self-explanatory. It doesn’t cost anything monetary to listen to them, and they are the largest type of podcast, because of how easily distributed digital audio content is and has been. Anyone can publish or listen to an open podcast. They are based on and distributed through RSS technology. The Michelle Obama Podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, and others that are Spotify exclusives are closed podcasts.

How Do You Distribute Your Podcast?

Today, distributing a podcast is much easier than it used to be. Often, the hosting service you’ve chosen for your podcast does the heavy lifting by creating the RSS feeds, pushing them to the various outlets. Setting up for the major players like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify are only a couple mouse clicks and a copy and paste away. Once you set up to have the feeds distributed to the various apps and platforms, nothing else is required on your part. With each new episode, a podcast creator shares by adding the episode to the feed.

Get Engagement Training in Your Inbox Now

If you’re not satisfied with the social media results you’re getting, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers this training via email.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

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Hustleburg Listener Community on LinkedIn
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If you enjoyed what you heard in this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite player. Each episode is available on its own post, with the entire catalog here. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast catcher. We listen to this show and our favorites on Castbox. It’s hosted by Podbean. We appreciate your attention, and we can’t wait to have you back for the next episode.

Be a Guest on Hustleburg

Hustleburg Episode 33 – Interview with Pop Goes the Waffle’s Sara Fludd

“I Don’t Have to Have All the Answers”

Three years into Pop Goes the Waffle, Sara Fludd is making all the right moves to build her waffle empire here in Saint Petersburg. From how perfecting recipes to using the early days to conduct market research to best know her customers, she’s worked to build a wholesale operation, get the food truck up and running, and grow her brand.

In this episode of Hustleburg, you’ll hear it all from her. Whether adapting to new circumstances or finding the answer to a problem, she shares how to adapt when things don’t go as planned, find the right people to know how to help, and help others find their way, even in the chaos and uncertainty of 2020. Regardless of the obstacles, Pop Goes the Waffle is thriving.

Get A Taste

Ready to meet Blossom (the truck) and Sara? Here are the three events we talked about in the interview:

Get a Free Liege Waffle Courtesy of Grow Financial Aug. 29th
Liege Waffle Pop Up at Blind Tiger Coffee Seminole Heights Sept. 5th
Special Birthday Shrimp & Grits Waffle Sept. 13th
**Brett committed to this pop-up the instant Sara shared that shrimp & grits waffles would be served**

Pop Goes the Waffle

Connect with Pop Goes the Waffle to make sure you don’t miss out on any liege waffles, waffle pops, or the ultra-rare shrimp and grits waffles:
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If you’re not satisfied with the social media results you’re getting, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers this training via email.

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Hustleburg Episode 32 – Answering Your Podcasting Questions

In this Q&A episode of the Hustleburg podcast, Brett answers listener questions about how to use a podcast to help you build a community around your business.

A Little Podcast History

Podcasting has been around for a while, serving as a way to democratize the audio medium for each of us. They reach back to the 1980s, but it was Apple’s introduction of them to iTunes in 2005 that helped to kickstart the beginning of their popularity. NPR is one of the most popular podcast publishers of all time with the smash podcast hits This American Life, publishing weekly since 2006, and the top downloaded podcast of all time, Serial.

The biggest hurdle for most people is answering “how do I listen?” Phone makers have made it REALLY easy of late to just jump right into listening with either Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts. With hopes of being a disruptor, Spotify has jumped into the podcast world with quite a splash, launching podcasts within its streaming app and gobbling up exclusive content. There are plenty of other podcast players out there to match just about any tastes for layout, features, etc.

How Can Creating and Publishing a Podcast Help My Business?

First, you have the ability to share your knowledge and expertise by shedding a light on your business and give insight into your industry. A podcast can also help your brand or business by creating connections to others within your industry. You’re also reaching people already interested in your industry and business with your show, acting as a reminder of who you are and what you do. Finally, for a brand or business that’s creating content around themselves, a podcast gives you long-form content that you can use as a pillar for a lot of other content you create.

Why Are Podcasts a Great Way to Create Content for Your Business?

By having something like a podcast serve as long-form pillar content for your brand, you achieve two big things. First, a library of searchable content that stands out for people to find you. Next, a podcast serves to be a terrific way to re-use and re-purpose content for other media by using the podcast to be sliced and diced without having to create more content. You can create articles, videos, quotes, and micro-blogs from the larger pillar content created for the podcast to be used across all the platforms.

Should Podcasts be Audio-Only? Or Should They Have Video?

Remember that you are creating content for your community, so consider their preferences first. Will you add value by creating a video podcast?

What Equipment Should I Use? What Programs Should I Use to Edit?

To start, go as cheaply as possible. You aren’t in the business of podcasting. You’re starting a podcast to complement your brand or business. First, you’ll need a way to record audio, and that often means getting a microphone. You could also try starting out with just your smartphone. If you choose to edit your audio on a computer, you can find free audio editing software online, Audacity being the most prominent solution. Finally, you’ll need a host for your podcast. Spotify-owned Anchor is pretty robust for a free hosting solution. We use Podbean. The most important thing to remember is that you should be focusing more on the content you’re creating for your community than anything you do to dress it up.

Get Engagement Training in Your Inbox Now

If you’re not satisfied with the social media results you’re getting, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers this training via email.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

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Hustleburg Listener Community on LinkedIn
Beyond Your Side Hustle on LinkedIn
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Hustleburg Episode 31 – Interview with Ace High Printing’s Rick Herbert

“It was literally trial by fire.”

It isn’t every day that you meet a business owner that fell into their line of work. In this episode of Hustleburg, you’ll hear from Rick Herbert, owner of Ace High Printing, about how he went from doing freelance computer networking for a print shop to managing the place in three weeks. He hasn’t looked back and has spent the last 16 years building and growing a successful printing operation.

You may remember Rick from the St. Pete: OPEN for Business chats back in April, where he talked about helping fellow small businesses cope with and survive the uncertainty amid the economic shutdowns. In this expanded conversation, we talk about how he found a niche not being served well and grew it into a thriving business.

Ace High Printing

Make Ace High Printing your one-stop shop for all your printing needs:
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Get Engagement Training in Your Inbox Now

If you’re not satisfied with the social media results you’re getting, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers a this training via email.

Find out more about Beyond Your Side Hustle here:

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Three Weeks to Ideal Engagement on Any Social Media Platform – Week 3

After a week of training the algorithm to serve the right content, you spent another week reacting with context and commenting with gratitude to the content you appreciate that falls within “The Five.”

If this all sounds foreign or crazy to you, go back to Week 1 of this series and start there.

Adding Valuable Comments

You’ve likely “liked,” reacted with context, and commented with gratitude on several thousand posts by now. These are the baby steps to get you ready for the best way to grow awareness around you, your business, and what you do through engaging with others.

There is a subset of users who choose to never read the comments on social media, due to the frustration that many posts generate. Generally, these are casual users of social media who aren’t trying to build a community, so they don’t realize the value of comments.

We are now social media power users, and the next step is to actively engage in the comments of posts we find value in.

This is the time to actively participate in the conversation that is social media. As you are no longer simply a consumer and broadcaster of social media, you engage with the creators that you consume. Their content starts a conversation, and you are responsible to offer relevant, contextual, and valuable comments in response. Your conversations will create a community for engagement and growth, so long as you offer value and they respond in kind, just like real-life conversations.

For Twitter, use replies in the same manner, as they serve as the platform’s de facto comment system.

Share Others’ Content You Find Valuable

Aside from Instagram and YouTube, social platforms natively build re-sharing content into their interface. During Week 2, you commented with gratitude on the content you found value in for the platforms without built-in reactions as you worked on the context of each post.

Week 3 changes that slightly, altering the focus from commenting with gratitude to re-sharing that valuable content with your community, using what you would have commented as your commentary for the re-share.

Here’s how this would work for the various platforms:

Twitter – “Retweet” it with what you would have commented, to share with your community what you found value in.
Facebook – Share their post directly on your Facebook Page with what you found valuable. If you are already scheduling posts, you’ll need to share the valuable post’s link on your page in Publishing Tools.
LinkedIn – Use the built-in functionality to share a valuable post with your community, adding what you received from it.
TikTok – React to the video that offered you value with your own video that outlines your take-aways.

Integrating these sharing activities will help you to share more content from “The Five” without having to create as much of it yourself.

Something you’ve probably noticed throughout this 3-week practice is that we didn’t mention creating content.

Here’s why: We wanted to completely overhaul how you interact on social media.

In Week 1, we focused on overhauling your feed to serve you valuable content that you can engage with. This set up the platform to work for you, instead of continuing to serve the same stuff that wasn’t helpful.
In Week 2, we continued training that algorithm and added the contextual reactions and gratitude. By focusing on context, you not only prepare for better interactions, but you also consider how it fits into your content strategy and which platform would be best to showcase it.
Finally, in Week 3, we started sharing others’ valuable content that fit into “The Five,” so that you include it in your content creation and engagement going forward.

All of them combine to help you create and share more relevant content with your community, building engagement into your online activity, and re-align your future content creation. With this new mindset and activity, you now have a new path for content creation, as well as an engagement plan for any platform you use.

Hustleburg Episode 30.5 – Bonus Episode Interview with Techie Leadership Podcast

First, many apologies that there isn’t a local business interview for you this week. Things didn’t work out with the timing for a few potential guests to have a regular episode for today’s publication.

Luckily, there is an interview with the Techie Leadership Podcast from a few weeks ago that we have as a bonus episode today, like the substitute teacher wheeling in the cart with a TV and VCR.

This interview was quite a bit of fun, stepping a little bit outside the marketing space and talking about leadership and the entrepreneurial opportunities the pandemic has provided. Andrei Crudu was very gracious in allowing us to use the audio for this bonus episode.

The Techie Leadership show notes for this episode:

In this episode you can hear Brett Bittner and Andrei talk about the importance of clear goals, aligning activities, goals and strategies and how great opportunity is oftentimes birth in times of great adversity.
Some value points you can expect:
It’s never too late to educate yourself
Adversity creates opportunity
Aligning activities, goals and strategies
Impacted by vision and driven by purpose
Setting clear mission statements
Book Recommendations:
How to Win Friends & Influence People
Brett is the author of:
N/A
You can reach out to Brett on:
linkedin
website
P.s: Only if you really really want to, and if you really really insist, you can donate on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/techieleadership
Please enjoy our show!

Get Engagement Training in Your Inbox Now

If you’re not satisfied with the social media results you’re getting, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers a this training via email.

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Three Weeks to Ideal Engagement on Any Social Media Platform – Week Two

After a full week of overhauling the way this social media platform serves content, we have trained the algorithm to provide you the most valuable content from our recently scrubbed community. In Week 2, we need to amplify our preferences beyond likes, while beginning a habit of quality interaction with that growing community.

Continue Training the Algorithm

In Week 1, we set up our “New Feed, New You” content service, and we liked thousands of posts from that content that brought us value. Most, if not all, of the “liked” content added value for us in “The Five.”

As we progress into Week 2 and beyond, continue to seek out that content as outlined in Week 1. By maintaining this practice, you ensure that the platform serves you and your needs. Your continued use of relevant hashtags to serve useful content and looking for connections among your favorite relevant creators should also never cease. It is the backbone of your growth and helping find new content to explore and appreciate, as well as a bevy of new connections to engage. These activities should always be a part of your experience on the various social media platforms going forward.

Slightly Change Your Behavior

Instead of simply “liking” posts from the creators you receive value from, choose to react with context, where applicable, or comment with gratitude. We started with liking posts to help train the algorithm to serve you the content you want to see and rid yourself of the content that isn’t adding value. We took off the chains that were holding you back from reaching your potential as an active and engaged participant in the right conversations for your community conversation.

You aren’t done letting your community know the content that adds value to you. We’re just altering how you share with them your appreciation by adding context.

React with Context

If you’ve read much of our work, you already know that content is a very important part of your digital strategy. What may be more important is to understand and create context around that content.

As you continue the efforts of Week 1, add the practice of reacting with context on the platforms that offer the option. So, when using Facebook and LinkedIn, choose the appropriate reaction to the post you appreciate seeing in your feed. This active contextual examination helps you identify why you appreciated their content. For example, when someone shares a career update on LinkedIn, you should opt to “Celebrate” rather than just give it a thumbs up. Being able to point to why you appreciate their content will help you add value in later engagement. By moving beyond the very passive “like” only training we undertook in Week 1, we are setting the stage for active engagement with this simple change.

Comment With Gratitude

You’re probably asking how you should go beyond “liking” posts to train the algorithm for the platforms that don’t support multiple reactions on the platform.

For the social media outlets that simply have a “like” or “favorite” option (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), continue to like or favorite the post. Then, take a moment to offer a brief comment or reply that offers the creator context around WHY you appreciated it. Simply saying something like “Thank you for explaining how that tool works” would be an appropriate comment on Instagram for a video. These comments should be simple and focused solely on the context of your appreciation. This will let the creators know what about their content you appreciated while also getting you in the habit of sharing contextual comments and replies.