Binge Factor Media

Every podcast attacks differently. Where others thrive in doing interviews, some people go for a story based and message-driven show. If you are doing the latter, then this episode will be a treat for you! Tracy Hazzard lets us in on one of her on-air podcast coaching sessions with the host of Connecting 2 Spirit, Susan Norton. Together, they discuss what it is like to produce a show like this, zoning in on how you can get the right energy and authentic control of the podcast listener tone to make more impact. They talk about how you can facilitate the experience of your listeners, no matter if they are new to the show or existing ones. Join Tracy and Susan in this episode to learn more about how to bring an authentic show to different types of listeners at different stages.

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How the Right Energy and Authentic Control of the Podcast Listener Tone Makes More Impact – On-Air Podcast Coaching with Susan Norton of Connecting 2 Spirit

We’re going to do a special coaching session. You get a sneak peek at what it’s like to be in one of our strategic coaching sessions. I’m the Founder of Podetize, and we do a lot of these coaching sessions with our clients, and we’re always looking at the strategy. That’s what I want to bring you. Our guest coaching client is Susan Norton. She has the podcast Connecting 2 Spirit. It’s interesting to talk about the strategy behind a show that is personal, message-driven and story-driven. This is a different show. That’s why I’m glad that Susan was willing to be here so that you could get a sneak peek into what it’s like to think about producing a show like this.

The other reason that I’m glad that Susan is coming on is because she’s right at the start of her journey. At the time of this interview, she only has about six episodes that are live. It’s early on for her to affect change. By the time this is published, she probably will have at least twice that. You’ll be able to know some of the things that she’s enacted from our conversation. You’ll be able to know what the results of those are and how they feel. You can see the difference between before and after. That’s why I love these episodes because you’re going to get to experience what that can be for your show. Part of the reason that we’re showing these is not to sell Podetize here, we would love that if you guys decided to join us there, but the benefit of strategic thinking in starting your show is super valuable. We want to get that across here and that’s why we’re giving you a sneak peek into how this can work.

Let me tell you a little bit about Susan Norton before we get started with her coaching session. Susan Norton is the Founder of Shamanic Services by Susan, and the creator of SPIRIT a Plan for Miracles®. She is certified in shamanic healing work through the Four Winds Society and Dr. Alberto Villoldo. She has studied this medicine path in Peru, Canada, and across the United States. Susan holds monthly live virtual fire ceremonies bringing people from all over the country together for healing and connection. Her specialty is connecting people to spirit. You can find out more about her work at Connecting2Spirit.com. Remember, that’s the number 2, which is one of the issues that we’re going to talk about it in our show. She has an interesting show. She only has about six episodes coming out so far. They are story-driven. She’ll tell a story and take you on a journey. This is one show that you’re going to want to check out. Check out Connecting 2 Spirit. Let’s learn from Susan Norton.

Susan, welcome to the show. I’m excited to talk to you about the strategy of your show. Your show is different than a lot of other shows out there, Connecting 2 Spirit. You have an impact that you want to deliver to the world. What’s that impact?

There are a lot of gifts that we can receive from the spirit, the realm of angels and help. The impact that I like to achieve is to let people access this realm through the journeys and guided meditations, where they have an interactive journey and takeaway health benefits, feeling peace and overcoming fear. To bring that hope and joy, and they’re relaxing but also there are gifts that are given freely.

You want your listeners to have an experience while they’re listening?

Yes, an experience.

That’s interesting because listening to the few shows that you have out at this point and there will be a lot more. No worries for all of you readers out there who want to check it out. There’s plenty, but it’s relatively new. That’s the one thing that I didn’t get from it. There’s no understanding of either in your introduction or an introduction episode. Technically, we’re going to talk about one technical detail that I want you to accomplish because it’s going to set up that experience that you’re looking for here properly. When we open a book and when we pick up a book, we read the book jacket. We want to know what we’re going to get before we open it up.

Podcasts are the same way. I always think of it like bookends, the cover and the back end of the book. You have your cover art and all of those things that intrigued me enough, like a little bit of description. It is that first teaser or intro episode that helps a listener decide, “Is this an experience worth taking my time? Am I going to dive in?” I love the idea for you of setting up what you explained to me here, that you’re creating experience. What is that experience like? Explain that to your users as your purpose for doing this podcast and what they can expect from it. When we give a speech, we tell people, “Here’s what you’re going to hear,” and then we tell them what they heard.

We’ve got to do that first part. We’ve got to tell them what they’re going to hear so that they can feel comfortable experiencing that. Do it in the way that you would introduce an event. Do it in the way that you normally would because I know that you have tremendous experience in this world. It doesn’t need to be long like five minutes. We want to make it what we call a 00 episode, even though it will never be numbered that way. It will always be number one. For those of you reading out there, you also want to tag it as your “trailer.” That’s what they call it.

Podcast Listener Tone: At the end of the day, podcasting is about your beautiful recordings. It is the message that you’re bringing that is more important than the technical side of things.

A trailer is an iTunes or Apple thing. As long as you select that, it appears in the Apple Podcast app, and a couple of other apps use something similar to bring it up to the top as a choice. When we look at your podcast, we could also listen to that trailer as well. It puts it right up at the front. That way, when you get hundreds of episodes someday, it’s still up there and able to be found. You can always replace, change and update it like about every 100 episodes or so, I create a new one because your show changes and you change. That’s a simple thing, but it’s going to help set up what we’re experiencing when we listen to your show. Let’s talk a little bit about your reason for starting the podcast from a business perspective. This is the impact that you want to achieve and what you want to bring to the world. What’s the vehicle and the mechanism for being able to keep doing that?

When people discover this connection, they hear my voice or see the video of it, they can sense that I have access to something that can be helpful to them. If it felt right to them, they could contact me and set up a time for a spirit breakthrough session or see if they’re interested in shamanic training. A lot of people would love to have this access. They can have a session and they can contact me. I’m hoping they will reach out or come to the website and see if there might be something there for them to go to the next level. Even if it’s just joining my email list because we have monthly community fire ceremonies that are virtual where people gathered by the fire. It’s free and open to everyone, and it’s on Zoom. That’s a great first step. There are many levels to enter the spirit pool like the shallow end, coming in or listening to some of these, jumping in the deep end, taking shaman training, or getting one-on-one training. These are stuff that people can do to access these other realms.

You’re not telling them that. In your outro, you don’t even have a mention of where to find you. That’s a little bit of a miss. What I sense is it’s your voice on the intro and the outro. That’s what would be the best way to change. Maybe having your outro be somebody else’s voice so that they can do that slightly salesy promo thing that makes you somewhat uncomfortable. They can let people know, “If you’ve enjoyed this, if you want more stories, if you want to get more of Susan, here’s how to reach her.” It’s an invitation, not a sales pitch. We don’t know how to find you.

I know I need to take business training to figure out fire ceremonies to let people know that I did other things. It’s silly that I have to be told that. I should know that by now.

It’s not silly. You are not alone with that feeling. The thing is that this is a way of getting into people’s minds. You’re opening up the possibility that I might want to reach out to you. I may not be ready at episode one to do that, but I might be ready at episode twenty. I’ve heard it enough that I know exactly how to find you. It’s not difficult at that moment in time. There’s no friction in my ability to go from that thought in my brain to make it happen because you’ve given me all the tools I need along the way. You’re helping your listeners. You’re not selling to them.

Maybe if I made the outro with the invitation, I could do that in my voice. I don’t have a problem with it because these are all gifts. I’m not scared of making an offer if it’s helpful.

The reason I say that is because sometimes having another voice elevates our authority in the marketplace. That’s one of the reasons we have somebody else introduce us at an event. We have announcers at almost every single talk show. Instead of you saying you’re great. Someone else is saying you’re great, you’re worth reaching out to, and you’re worth connecting to. That’s why we like the external voice. We like that voice of authority and that can be a good thing. The decision about what voice, you don’t want it to miss the tone you’ve got going on. You’ve got a nice peaceful tone and a nice resonant sound that’s going on behind it. You need a voice that fits that.

Should they say their name when they do that or don’t bother, that’s someone else?

It’s typical to have an announcer announced a podcast introduction and a podcast close. We have a voice on the show that sounds a little bit like my husband but it’s not. It’s his brother. I chose someone whose voice I enjoy and love the way he has the energy that I wanted. That’s how I picked it. It should resonate with you so that it’s giving across the feeling that you’re going for in your whole show, but he can set a nice tone. You don’t have to change the episodes you’ve already done. You can do it moving forward. There’s no need to fix things that aren’t broke. You’re making improvements and upgrading.

I like that. Thank you.

This is an interesting story. When Stephen Colbert started his show, the very first week, he had his own voice do his own introduction and the backlash from the audience was crazy. The Twitter backlash was shocking. His model of having come from Comedy Central, where you can be this egotistical in your face thing worked for him there, but you move it over into late night and it didn’t work at all for him. He quickly got this wonderful female introducer who nicely contrasts his silliness. It works out great for him. He wouldn’t have found that if he hadn’t done this thing trying to be different and discovered that didn’t fit the model. Podcasting is a media type that is used in this broadcaster world. We do have to fit that somewhat. We can break the mold when we want to, but sometimes fitting and making it our own in that process can work to our favor.

Thank you. That’s helpful.

We want to have people reach out and one-on-ones. There’s a whole process in inviting that, but it’s the experience of the show that you’re expecting to make them want to come and work with you. That’s one of the things that we may need to work into your show, Susan. What we’re doing right here on the show is an experience of that. People don’t understand what’s the value of a podcast strategy session. I’m sharing that with them right this moment. We’re getting specific about your show, but I’m also giving generalisms that other people out there could go, “That applies to me. I don’t have the same intro/outro,” or “This doesn’t apply to me but I learned from that other thing.” Getting people to understand the whole experience of working with you might be useful as well.

It may not fit because what you do may be private and people don’t want to be exposed into that. If there’s a way for people to understand what the experience is like working with you in general, or coming to one of your events, or doing some of these journeys. You mentioned that you wanted to do some shamanic journeys where people shouldn’t be in their car listening or be with their family listening. Tell us a little bit more about those.

I found a way to go into a relaxed place using a drum counting backward. It’s like self-hypnosis. It’s entering a relaxed state and arrive at a person’s paradise. That’s what I learned at a healing place as a technique. When you’re in that paradise, that place of deep relaxation, you drop in a phrase that you want to bring in to every cell of your being. It’s powerful. You come back up. You count down to one. When you enter your paradise, you come back up. You end up with ten and snap your fingers. I started to do that. What happened was I would be on my way down to paradise because I do shamanic services and practices. I stopped in the middle of the earth and I get a healing from the earth angels on the way down. To enter this sacred paradise where everything is possible, I have to be in a clean place. I can’t be with my ego or as a place of super clean and entering your paradise. You’re going to leave all your crap out. On the way down, I get a shamanic healing directly from the earth angels, earth keepers, and earth helpers. It’s comforting because we all have troubles. They’ll hold me and clear up my thoughts. They can even remove blocks and cord things that I do in my shaman sessions. They can do it directly.

Can people come along on the journey with you?

Yes. They also experienced that on the way down. They go down and we drop into paradise. I described mine, but theirs might be different. In this realm, it’s where only good things exist like animals, nature and loved ones. We’re being held and be with nature. If we see a jaguar, we’re never scared because this is a paradise. Everything here is for our highest good.

That’s a wonderful idea to drop those in. When I had my second child, I did Hypnobabies. You could learn the whole thing and they had a bunch of tracks that you could go and do them. You could do those anywhere. They were about learning and then they’d hit the one and it was marked, “Do not do this one while driving.” You could do the same thing. You could have it be whatever special number is for you. I’m sure there is one. Whatever a special number is for you. Dr. Marissa Pei, her number is 8, 88, 88%, whatever. Whatever that number might be for you, that’s when you drop one in. You want them to be special, highlight them, or give a little warning on it.

You could prerecord a special warning. It could be in that announcer’s voice as well. That could be something where it’s telling them what they should not be doing during that time. That could be a wonderful setup that you reuse. You don’t have to rerecord that each time. You record that once and you reuse it every time you do one of these types of episodes. In this particular case, you want to mark them. Most of the time, when I say title episodes, I want you to give them titles. You want it to be exciting and intriguing. You don’t want to have episode numbers and repetition of things. In this particular case, people might be searching them out and knowing that you’re going to be doing one. Once they experienced one, when they want to try another one in a week or whatever that is, you want to mark them special. Mark them right at the beginning like shamanic journeys or whatever you want to call them. Give them something consistent.

Is it okay to mark them like right now I have Journey to Paradise 1, Journey to Paradise 2?

Podcast Listener Tone: Podcasting is a nice, slow, steady, and sustainable burn.

Absolutely. Mark it that way and make sure that you give consistency throughout the rest of it. When you can call it that same thing and if I were to look for the episodes, I know all of those are the ones that you’re going to be guiding me.

The numbers are okay.

In that particular context. Remember, they’re not going to match your episode numbers that will show up in the player. That’s why you don’t want to put the number first because then you would have number and number. It confuses people’s minds. By saying, “Journey to Paradise 1, 2, 3,” you’re giving it at the end of a section. That’s okay.

You had mentioned that I could make a short podcast about what I do in general like the mission, why they should listen and why it’s helpful. Should I do a separate one for the journey one or blend them together?

I would include them together that you’re going to find this and find that. A couple of different types of episodes that you’re talking about and setting up where your story is. This is your real stories. The one about a friend of yours who passed away and you dream of her that night. That resonated with me. I had a dream of this savior dog. In the end, it was telling me that it was okay for me to get a dog. I know it sounds funny but it was one of those experiences where I know the reason I have my dog now is because of that. Wendy Lipton-Dibner’s wonderful dog, Parfait came to me and said, “No, this is what you want. You want love.” It resonates with people. They know that these are real stories. They’re not constructed stories.

You want to mention that in the beginning. You’re not relaying mythic stories. You’re relaying real-life stories. The more you convey that, the more people are understanding what they’re experiencing. Otherwise, we listen to it and we’re not sure. You’re giving us a context for that. Anytime you have something that needs specific context like the reminder and the Journey to Paradise series, where you’re reminding them, “You shouldn’t be driving. You should be sitting in a quiet place.” Whatever they need to be preparing, give them that reminder right there because they may not have realized and it may have been a long time since they heard that intro episode. Giving anything that’s critically important to the episode. Give it at the time that you start the episode.

I was assuming they would read it, but that’s silly because who reads. These journey sharing is like a sweet place when you come back and you’re super relaxed. Maybe you saw an angel, you got a message, and you feel amazing. I should tell this podcast about how I know to bring them out to the world. It’s like, “Don’t keep this for yourself. Bring this out to the world.” It’s interesting how that happened. Usually, after a journey like that, I don’t come like, “Sign up for my website.” Maybe at that time, leave the outro out and leave it off as a courtesy.

You can have two different types of outros. That’s perfectly reasonable. I have three different kinds for three different types of episodes because I need to invite them to do something different sometimes. You can also do it in a promo style. You can always drop in a special message if you need to. A reminder like, “You have been on this journey. You should drink a lot of water,” or whatever you might have. You should maybe also have that. It should be a part of that special closing message. In that particular case, maybe you don’t want someone else’s voice ending it. You want your voice ending it because that’s it. That’s okay to have these be separate from the others in terms of the model they follow. Our episodes do not have to follow the same model every single time.

Variety is good. I look at it like a record album. Remember our old days of having the back jacket. We would study it, listen to them and order. We don’t do that anymore. We skip around. If we listened to them in the order that they were intended, they should take us on a journey. If you get a binge listener and that’s our ideal, someone who finds us and said, “This is what I’ve been looking for. This Connecting 2 Spirit is perfect for me.” They’re going to start at the beginning and they’re going to flow through it with the intention of how you created it. Feel free to move things around in your catalog. Air it because you need it to publish on the most recent day. You make it published now or your subscribers won’t hear it. Move the dates around for new people who come in and find your podcast in months later.

I didn’t know I could do that.

You can renumber your episodes. You have to redate them. I like to give it a week. If I air an episode, I don’t change the date for at least a week. There is something that should happen that subscribers will get them anyway. Technically, it should pop up because they didn’t listen to it yet. It’s set for any show you have never downloaded and you’ve never listened. In case some players don’t work quite like that and there are some out there that have different models for how they do it. Anything within the last 24, 48 hours and that kind of thing. We want to make sure that we don’t mess with the date at the beginning. That’s why I put it out there with today’s date or whatever date I want it to air, and then one week later, I shuffle my episodes if I need to. That is another reason why we don’t number them because then they might be out of order. You can do that and it’s a great idea. You’re orchestrating an experience. As you get more into it, you may realize that certain things need a foundational experience at the beginning. You need to bring them in earlier for people.

Think about their experience and what they might need to understand, prepare, fall over, and hold until they get home.

Do you listen to your own episodes?

I do sometimes but not routinely. I listen to them.

Most people don’t go through and check out even how their episodes look in the feed of a player. They’re not auditing their own show from the user experience levels. I’m controlling my shows. I want them to look, feel, and flow a certain way. That might be important because you’re creating a journey. That journey is going to be how we experience from one to the next to the next. People may go from one to the next. Your episodes are not super long. It’s very likely that I could do 3 or 4 in a sitting. The other thing is people tend to speed episodes up. Make sure that you make a mention not to do that on Journey to Paradise episodes. Make sure it’s set at a one-time speed.

People try to cram a lot of knowledge. I’m the worst offender because I have to listen to many podcasts to try to get experience. I will do that on occasion. I will skip around but specifically in your episodes, you don’t want them to do that because they’ll lose the experience. That might be the only other reminder that’s unique to podcast listeners that you may not realize because you’re not an ardent listener. How are things going for you from a business perspective? You’re not having a lot of events. Do you think this could lead to more online events for you?

It could because it’s going out to the world and it’s available at their schedule when they want. It’s going to increase my visibility. The work that I do with these guys is amazing. With this visibility, it’s going to help people find me more. People are finding me. I’ve been doing this work for many years. It’s getting more powerful. It’s getting faster and changes are happening even faster in a more streamlined way. It’s happening on Zoom. I’m doing remote sessions. These are things that were not even heard of years ago. It’s going to be helpful for the business. I remember to tie it into my business because it’s such a gift in itself. I do it because this is my life’s work. This is what I’m meant to do.

On that side of things, it doesn’t come across. Maybe simply because we’re not being sent to your website to check you out and to find out more about you. I find this a lot in the spiritual mindset style podcasts or anything that has a spiritual connection to it. Sometimes they fail to recognize the stages of the listeners. I may know about it, but I don’t know much about what it means to be a shaman. I may not be well-read or well-experienced in that. If my first experience of it is your podcast, a little context might go a long way. It doesn’t have to be everywhere. It’s good to put that into the introduction.

You could do an occasional episode where you’re talking about understanding this world, realm, what it means, and what impact it can have on me personally, on the society at large, community, and whatever that might mean as to getting to know and learn more. From that perspective, it’s always great for you to suggest resources. What books do you recommend that I read? You can have a mechanical style episode where you’re talking about what shamanism is, and what your spiritual journeys mean in the context of what I’m searching for that drew me to your show. It may be something completely different. I randomly read about you. Someone recommended it. I listened to one of the shows and I thought, “This is beautiful,” and then I start listening, but I don’t have a context for it at all. You might meet my first touchpoint in a world of getting more in touch with my spirit. Take that with a gravitas that requires you to be that true guide that you are and remember that there are people who are beginners. How was podcasting feeling to you?

I’m a little bit stepping in. I’m not sure how all the pieces work to have it come out in a big way. I’m working with Podetize, but even then I’m not sure how the pieces fit. I feel like I know where the starting gate is. I’m barely arriving at the starting gate, and that’s okay.

Podcast Listener Tone: We need to let people who are looking for you find you. The job is to take care of the technical things and make sure you show up.

That’s exactly where you are and that’s okay. Whether you’re working with Podetize, any coach or any producer, the reality is that there are different stages of things. We don’t want to overwhelm you at first and give you all the technical things that you could be doing. It gets you out of your head and out of your heart that you need to record. At the end of the day, it’s your beautiful recordings and the message that you’re bringing that is more important than the technical side of things.

You hired us and trust us. Let us tell you, first off, ask the questions when you’re ready and when it occurs to you, ask them. If we don’t know that you’re even ready for the next thing, you might be ready way sooner than we think you are. We watched 500 plus shows. It’s hard for us to know when everyone’s at the right stage. When you feel you’re ready or you have questions, that’s your time to jump on one of our group coaching calls, send a message to your client success manager, and let us know what questions you have. We can do a little quick audit of your shows, see where things are, and see what’s going on for you. The same thing is that I don’t want you to get caught up in your stats and the vanity metrics side of things. They take time. This is not one of those fast like, “I get ahead and I sell thousands of tickets.” It doesn’t work like that with podcasting. Podcasting is a nice, slow, steady, and sustainable burn. You’re going to get there eventually and we get to make tweaks along the way to help you do what you’re going to do, achieve the outcomes you want to achieve, and take what you can at the moment.

If you try to do everything at once, you will succeed at none. Let’s do the thing that you’re brilliant at which is telling wonderful stories in a great voice. You have a wonderful voice for podcasting. It comes across well. You have great dramatic pauses and the way that you tell that, I feel I’m a part of the story. You’re creating an experience right there. Not a lot of podcasters can do that. A lot are giving lectures and all about themselves. There are a lot of different models of shows out there. We need to let people who are looking for you to find you. Our job is to take care of the technical things and make sure you show up.

There are a couple of little technical notes I made here that I’m probably not even going to tell you. I was going to send them to the team, but I’ll mention them right now so that other people can read them. You need a subtitle on your show. You have Connecting 2 Spirit. The problem is, do I type it in that way when I type into iTunes? Probably not. We want Connecting to Spirit into our subtitle because a subtitle is a secondary search process. When Apple Podcasts or any podcast player search engines searches, they search for show title, subtitle, description, and your name. That’s where they search. For episodes, they’re searching the same things. I don’t know if there are subtitles on episodes, but title and description or whatever you put into that short description field. Those are the only things that it’s capable of searching on. We want to make sure that we’re searching for both spellings.

What you want is a subtitle that should be something like Real Stories About Connecting to Spirit. That’s bad right there off the top of my head. You want to have that Connecting to Spirit be at the end of the sentence or phrase that you’re going to use in the subtitle. If you were to look at it on a player, it would say, “Connecting 2 Spirit,” colon or dash, and then your subtitle. You don’t want it to say Connecting to Spirit right there again. It looks repetitive. We want to put it at the end of the phrase. That’s the only criteria. What we’re going to say at the beginning is, “Journeys and stories,” don’t change it to “Connect to Spirit” if you want to keep it to be “Connecting.” That’s a simple technical thing that we should take care because it will make you more searchable.

Thank you. Build it into the first sentence after. This is the subtitle.

It is its own field.

Keep it short but in that subtitle, make it one sentence that ends in Connecting to Spirit.

Without any punctuation on it. It was like the title of a blog post and subtitle below it. You want the same feeling.

Do I use that in all?

You don’t use it in all. You only use it in the show set up. We’ll put it right into your show profile. There’s a couple of podcast I started, the #GivingTuesdayPodcasts which is my giving back to the podcast community. I’m highlighting some podcasts that I couldn’t interview that started their shows. They’re new and noteworthy. They needed to be mentioned. That was my way of doing that. When I went to review one of them, the name of their show was great. It was Give, a perfect name for the theme of what I was trying to do. When I search for them, I couldn’t get them to show up in the player by typing Give because it was too short and too general. It wasn’t until I typed in Give Philanthropy Podcast that I was able to get it to show up.

Your listeners have to work that hard to find you when they hear about your show from somewhere else that may be said or spelled slightly wrong. You’ve got to do what you can do to make it happen. Luckily, if they find your name, it will be easy because your name is not that hard to spell. It’s easy to find. I’ve discovered that there aren’t a lot of Susan Nortons, so you’re good there. This is why we want to have a subtitle that we want to use because it gives us a more robust way for people who are spelling things wrong to find us.

That’s super helpful.

It’s simple but technical. You don’t need to take care of this. Our team will take care of it. I’m mentioning it to you here so that you have an idea, because they’ll reach out to you and go, “Susan, what do you want your subtitle to be?”

Now I know what they’re talking about.

This is good for all the listeners out there who are watching you do this and who are talking with us. When we are at a certain stage, we have different questions than when we have 100 or 200 episodes under our belt. We’re in a different place of shifting our show, maybe trying to accomplish different goals. It’s right at the start which is exactly where you are and where your energy needs to be which is creating the experience. Make sure that all these little things help your experience and facilitate it because we do have to create a facilitation for experience for different types of listeners at different types of stages who are just finding our show. Be always in that mindset of, what if someone never heard of me before? They just found my show and listened here. Do they know what I’m talking about? Can they put this in context?

Always giving a little bit of context to everything whether it’s within the episode or the series of episodes. That’s important for us to do. Not being repetitive and ignoring the fact that you’ve got people who are already loyal. This is where I get a lot of people who their intros are two minutes long. We’re like, “Cut that thing down for the people who’ve been listening for a long time.” It’s great for new people but not good for the binge listeners. We want to balance the two things, a little slight mentions here and there, nudge them along the journey, and remind them where they can find it. If they’re looking for more information and new to this, they can find it here. That’s simply it.

I like it. I don’t like to be giving too many directions like, “Go here.” I like to be less. I think what’s a good thing to do might be to tell the story, do the podcasts, the ones that are coming up that I feel like now it’s time to tell that story. Maybe create that, go back later, and then if I need to adjust the intro or make a new intro, blend it together later. I cannot worry about it at the time of that. I can be thoughtful about it.

Remember that because you’re using our Podetize system, you can put them in what we call promos or ads. You can drop a section of audio in without worrying about it. You have the ability to be able to post edit without editing or redoing the show.

Dropping the two like, “Here’s a special intro for this one and here is the actual raw footage.”

Podcast Listener Tone: Think of the person who’s brand new that you’re just meeting and the person you’ve known for a decade. Make sure that you’re talking to both of them throughout your episode and the message that you want to convey.

You can use that special message that you create about how to experience the Journey to Paradise. You could drop that in like a promo on those episodes. You never have to even bother to edit it yourself because you’re doing your own audio. All you do is you mark the spot, then you say, “Drop the Journey promo or the Journey introduction here.” You can utilize the system to help you create these extra add-ons so that your experience of recording stays the same.

Let the mechanics and the technical system side work for you. You get to be in the experience. What I want to leave you with is that your audience are real people. These are real stories. You’re talking to real people and you know that. Think of the person who’s brand new that you’re just meeting and the person you’ve known for a decade. Make sure that you’re talking to both of them throughout your story, your episode, and the message that you want to convey. You’re always considering both of their experiences. If you can do that, you can create a brilliant meld of that. That’s going to be your goal for the next recording. We’ll see how you do with that.

It’s cool. This is helpful because I am new. This is a perfect time for me to be getting this information from you. Thank you.

You’re welcome, Susan. Thank you for coming on and letting other people experience your coaching as well.

It’s awesome.

—

I hope you enjoyed that sneak peek into what strategic thinking can do for your podcast, thinking about how you can affect those levels of listener experience based on who you’re trying to reach and what level they’re at when you’re trying to reach them. You can do it differently than Susan. Each strategy is unique to you, your show, your outcomes and goals. Listening to that thought process of how you look at and how you listen to your own show. Think about what’s the effect of that and now apply your own listener personas that you’re thinking about, or your own outcomes and goals of what you’d like them to take action on and achieve, and thinking about melding those two things together. This is a path for creating a great podcast strategy for your show.

I hope you enjoyed getting a sneak peek into the on-air coaching model and the strategic podcast coaching. I hope that you’ll reach out to me and let me know if you’d like to be one of our on-air coaching guests. It’s a great way for you to be exposed in terms of your show, but it’s also a great way for you to take some steps to improve your show and making that listener experience and the outcome you receive from your show moving it to that next level. Reach out at TheBingeFactor.com and apply to be a guest. I’m looking forward to talking with you next time and bringing you more great podcast success stories, more great podcast strategies, and more great new podcasts as we feature our #GivingTuesdayPodcasts as well. Thanks for joining me.

Don’t miss Tracy Hazzard’s Authority Magazine article about Susan Norton too!

Important Links:

• Podetize
• Connecting 2 Spirit
• SPIRIT a Plan for Miracles®
• Connecting2Spirit.com
• #GivingTuesdayPodcasts

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