Binge Factor Media

Reaching the 100-episode mark is such a feat in podcasting. Together with that happiness for achieving this milestone, however, is that burden that comes from thinking about what is next, how do we switch up our show, what outcomes should we aim for next. Sitting down opposite Tracy Hazzard in this on-air podcast coaching is Penny Zenker, the host of Take Back Time, to talk about the importance of making quality time to think about setting better podcasting goals after producing more than a hundred episodes. They discuss some strategies for structuring the show that sends people back to your website, building a list and monetizing it, and creating raving fans who can bring others to you. Plus, Penny and Tracy then talk about the need to engage with listeners and become more purposeful when recording your podcast.

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Make Quality Time to Think About Setting Better Podcasting Goals After 100+ Episodes – On-Air Podcast Coaching with Penny Zenker, host of Take Back Time

We’re trying out a new style of the episode. If you haven’t caught up with us yet, we are doing some coaching. I haven’t been able to do a lot of strategy calls and coaching with our clients in a while. The business gets busy and it’s been harder to do that. We decided to offer up to our special clients, some of them have been our clients for a long time, an opportunity for them to have a refresh strategy session with me. Many of them have already had their podcasts for a while. We’re having a strategy session because what can happen is as we start our show, we have a specific plan for it, then our businesses shift and change.

Especially, when we get to be over 100 episodes or more, we start to have these issues of, “Things have changed. Now, I would like to have my podcasts do something different and achieve a different outcome.” That’s the conversations we’re hoping to have here with our special guests, our podcasters, who are our clients. They’re not here to talk all about what we do here. Although, it may come up on occasion here about something that you can do on Podetize that you can’t do anywhere else. I’ll be careful to mention that. We’re not mentioning that to you in a salesy way. This is not to be a testimonial. It’s for you to get to vicariously read-in and get to read what an on-air strategy session and how a strategy session might help you move your business forward. This is something we do in a group situation once a week. If people want to ask questions or do that, we do it on our group calls for all of our hosting clients, but the one-on-one is a deeper dive. This is what it’s typically like.

Our coaching guest is Penny Zenker. Penny and I have known each other for a while. She calls herself a focusologist. She’s an international speaker, a business coach, a bestselling author, and a productivity expert. Before her 31st birthday, Penny founded, developed, and sold her first multimillion-dollar business while living in Zurich, Switzerland. Later, at the world’s fourth-largest market research company, she managed business unit turnarounds and was a Tony Robbins business coach, helping entrepreneurs around the world double their businesses. She is one of America’s leading experts in the psychology of productivity, eliminating distraction, perfectionism, and self-sabotage to maximize results in every area of your life.

I’d love to know her tips. This is one of my go-to people when I want to up my game and being less distracted and more focused. Her book, The Productivity Zone, was an instant bestseller. Her TEDx, The Energy of Thought, has gained attention around the world. She has a podcast, which I love the title and the cover art. You’ve got to go to the blog post for this episode at the TheBingeFactor.com and check it out. It is Take Back Time. It is one of the cover arts that I use as a fabulous example of both naming your show in such an activating way, and also the imagery that supports that is energizing. You’ll want to click, check it out, subscribe and listen. Let’s learn from Penny Zenker what she’s got going on in her business, how we can help shift your show for the new year, and get something going to achieve some new outcomes.

Penny, let’s talk Take Back Time. You are one of my favorite people to spend time with because I know that when we have a conversation, I’m going to learn as much from you as you get from me. I know you’re here to get coaching, but I know I’m going to learn something like some collab. I was learning that when I was setting up. I was listening to your episode and I learned about the HOLD app. I was thinking, “That solves my problem with one of my daughters.”

That’s what’s cool about your show. I’m going to set this up by saying what I know about the binge factor of your show. That is Penny and Take Back Time is specifically focused on productivities, tools, tactics and tips. I love the tools part and they’re actionable. These are things that you’ve used, tried, and understand intimately. Because you are a productivity expert, you understand how I can apply these. This isn’t just some new, cool things that everybody’s exploring and trying. You’re saying, “This is solving a problem, and here’s the problem that it’s solving.” I love that model.

I’m doing something right.

You’ve gotten to 130 something episodes. You’ve been doing it for a while. How has podcasting felt?

I enjoy doing the interviews, especially when I’m exploring a new tool that I wasn’t even aware of before. I find that it doesn’t matter who I’m interviewing, whether it’s somebody who’s well-known or not well-known. Everybody’s got some great advice to share and tips of what works for them. I enjoy that banter as well. I was online with somebody and I challenged them. I’m like, “That usually goes first in the process and not second.” I like to play that. When I’m in that mode, it works for me. I’m enjoying it. I realized though that I also need to be more purposeful about doing the intro and creating a little teaser at the beginning that I don’t necessarily do. There are things that I know that I can prove on it, so I need to step back. This is perfect timing for this so that I can step back and put together an action plan of what I could do, what’s easy to do and what’s long-term.

That’s our goal now. We’re going to get into some of that. Let’s first start with when you originally started, you had a completely different outcome, goal or plan for what you were doing this for. Things changed because 100 episodes means you’ve been doing this well over a year, into your third year, I would think. You’re looking at this like, “I may have different business goals now than I had when I started it. How is the show serving that and can I achieve a new outcome? Maybe I achieve my goals and I’m ready to move on to the next one.” Let’s not talk about what your old outcome and business goals were. Let’s talk about the new, where you’re going next. What’s the ultimate goal in your business now and how is the podcast potentially serving that?

I’m starting to create online courses. This is where it comes to be purposeful. I’m wanting to create a list and be engaging with the people who are listening. The goal would be to 10x the show and take it to the next level in terms of accessibility. I’ve got some cool things that will support that, but it’s building that list and it’s monetizing it.

This list building model is an important part for a lot of people of podcasting. The problem is that the podcasts subscription base is on the list. You don’t have their email addresses. iTunes and Spotify have them, and they’re not going to give them to you. How are we going to drive them off the show and get them to add themselves to your list? That’s one of our top goals of what we need to achieve in order to get the outcome of having a good list. The good part about your podcast is that it has a very focused topic. You’re focused on experts. You’ve not deviated from your focus on this. As long as your course and everything else you’re building are still in that focus of productivity, then we’re not going to have to worry about any shifting or anything else to the content side of things. You should be attracting the right type of people who are interested in increasing their productivity.

The audience is growing. It’s great that they’re listening, but I don’t know who’s listening and I’d love to know what they want to hear. I have very little engagement in terms of people contacting me. I’d love to have questions from them. That stuff gives me even more energy. Getting some contact with them and getting their emails would be helpful in that engagement.

I’m thinking that we may need a few show refreshes to help make sure that you’re getting full listens through your show. One of the things I saw when I checked out your stats is that you have occasional shows that pop up in numbers. It’s probably because the topic was interesting or somebody shared it well, who is your guest, on the other side of that. It’s typical and in almost every show, you’ll see that. You have a little spike here and you’re like, “Somebody must have shared it well,” or you hit a hot topic. I see steady growth over time, but it’s very slow growth. It gets frustrating for a lot of people that you’re only seeing that steady growth.

However, your website growth is going terrific. On the organic growth of your website, you can see a spike on the days following the launching of your episodes. You launch on Wednesdays and within a couple of days, you see some traffic showing up. They’re hearing something and maybe they’re going to check that out on your website. We want to make sure that we’re doing more of that. How can we structure our shows so that we make calls to action that send people back to our website of which, where your course is located, where your list building is happening. We want to take that away from these lead pages model and send them back to your website to capture them because it feels less pushy. We still have to then, at that place, give them the compelling reason. If they listened, we want to give them a compelling reason to subscribe to your email list, not just to the show.

I also have an app and it’s curated. It’s got a lot of the people that I interviewed, and there’s a way for them to log in and get that access. Would you drive them to the app or to the website?

It depends on what you want to do. Long-term, your best traffic will be over the website because it gives you the most flexibility for where to drive them next and what to do with them. The app may work out for you. In a year, it may not work out for you and you don’t want to maintain it, or you don’t want to do it. Now, what do you do with all those people? If they are legitimately a part of your regular list, and then they’ve chosen to do something with the app because you gave them bonuses or something special, now you’ve got them in your whole ecosystem. You still keep them within your world of being able to influence them and bring them new products.

When you’re trying to do a user drive in the sense, and when you have a new app, you want to get a lot of users. You also want to do the most frictionless thing, which is to send them straight to the app. They are on their phone, they can just download. These are some launch strategy versus long-term strategy issues. You may want to do a launch strategy. What I suggest you do because you’re hosted on Podetize, is that if you’re going to do any kind of strategy where you’re driving them to the app for a period of time, do it like a drop-in ad and not like a regular part of the baked-in part of the episode.

You’ll do those dropped-in ads, and then if you want to change that launch period where you stop sending them to the app, but now you’re sending them to the website, you can remove that ad at a later time. This gives you the ability to capture anyone who’s listening to any of your shows in any order. It doesn’t matter where they are, they get to know about the app. Secondly, it gets you so that if you want to then switch up your strategy and send them to the website, you’re able to have that flexibility. Where, if you recorded in the show, you’d have to remove it.

I have an ad that sends them to my distraction quiz.

Setting Podcasting Goals: Being more purposeful when recording in the beginning is the key.

That’s working for you. How was the quiz working?

I haven’t been able to dig into the stats to see, but it doesn’t look like there are too many people going from the episodes to the quiz. I need to figure out how to maximize that, or maybe it’s driving them back to the website.

There is a quiz fatigue. We’re getting used to the fact as consumers that quizzes are a way to build a list and they’re not doing much for me on the other end. How can we combat that by having a valuable quiz that gives some special and unique deliverable at the other end? This is where we come into play, and also it needs to be quick and short. You need to tell people how quick it is.

The quiz itself is awesome. It’s a distraction quiz. It tells them whether they’re a squirrel or deer in the headlights or a time zombie. It’s fun but I have to make sure that it’s bringing that across. I have to review the ad and make sure that it’s getting that piece across.

Making clear that they’re not only finding out who they are, but get tactics for how to combat that. Maybe you can give each one like squirrels a specific list of episodes, and the tools you recommend for them will be the result that they get from that. You’re driving them back into your content.

That’s a great idea because that can drive people to the show. A lot of people take the distraction quiz from my events when I’m doing public speaking. If I were to send them that list, that’s a great idea.

I created something called a favorites list. That came from one of my interviews here on the show, which I totally love that I get to do an interview and somebody gives me a great idea. I built a favorites list on the TheBingeFactor.com website. It’s my list of if you’re going to start at the episodes, we’ve got a lot of them, and you want to be efficient, start with these 10 or 6, whatever it might be. If you created a curated list, which was specifically for the squirrels or the deers, then that would be fun because they’d feel like they got something special. You can create that as a page that they can go to so they keep the list. You can put it in the email, follow up, whatever they get.

Now, they’ve gotten those and they can continue to come back to them and check them out. It is more likely to make them click on and subscribe to your show once they say, “That one was great. I’m going to go to the next one.” That’s when they’re going to hit subscribe. They bookmark your show essentially. That’s going to help you drive traffic back and forth. I think that’s a good plan. I know your quiz is fun. It’s great from an event, but maybe the ad isn’t as fun and compelling as that is. It’s thinking that through. Test out different ads. You can A/B test them. That’s always a great part. With list building, our challenge is that a lot of people want large lists. What is the ideal list size that you think you need?

It’s not the list size. It’s, how do I do more with what I have? I want to know who they are and have conversations. I said I would like to 10x my show because it’s great to make a bigger impact, but it doesn’t matter. It’s about the quality of people. I already know that if they’re coming to me, then this is the topic that they’re interested in. It’s not a number per se. It’s a quality of engagement that I want to create.

Maybe we want to delve into having invitations to have deeper conversations. Whether that is consulting with you, open Q&A sessions, or different types of things that we might want to do where we’re offering them something special. We’re talking about I was listening to that episode about the HOLD app. I was like, “That’s cool.” You go to the space and to their webpage and it’s like, “I’ve got to get on their list but it’s not out yet.” What if you could have structured a deal that you put a list together on your website and submit that to the people at HOLD? You guys get to the top of the list. If you can give them some kind of exclusivity, then that’s a reason to come and choose, and have more direct contact with them.

That is available. It’s a Chrome plugin. That’s a great idea. I could get on some beta lists or get some other kind of exclusive with the tool or something of that nature.

You are a high-level productivity expert who should be reviewing products. We’ve talked about that in past conversations. Penny and I have talked about the fact that reviewing products, reviewing whether they’re physical products or Software as a Service product. She is a top-level expert in this. You should be connected up with people developing productivity tools. Somehow, we need to get you into a community like that, where they’re coming to you because you’re an influencer on that future. You’re at that top of the list of people who I want to send my book about, my app, my free trial, because when you do a review not only on your show but on your website, that has high value to me from a social proof situation as the developer of those programs.

Getting that through in the process will also serve you well in your goal of speaking more, which I know you had before COVID hit. I’m sure you want to get back to doing a lot more of those in 2021. We want to make sure that that connection point of being that specialized type of media is going to serve you well at getting invitations to those events coming up too. At the end of the day, that’s probably the best way to serve you. How do we do that? There are a couple of strategies, but do you have some ideas?

I have a question first. We had talked about this in the past and I didn’t do that yet. You said multiple channels. Should I pull the tools out and have them as a separate stream or do I keep them where they are now? What do you think?

This is what I call a feeds strategy. We call them our podcast feed. When anyone gets over 100 episodes, it’s certainly time to think about if a feed strategy makes sense for you. You’re on Podetize, we offer you five free feeds so you can create them at will. All you have to do is contact us and tell us, “Send these 10 or 20 episodes over to a brand-new feed. Here’s the information on the new feed.” It’s super simple. It’s like setting up a new show, but you just transfer everything. You can still keep them in your main feed.

Would you do new intros for it?

I don’t always do that. Occasionally, I do. The point of it is that it’s a curated collection that you’re more creating it for your website. Even though you can syndicate it if you choose to, but you don’t have to. If you are creating a syndication of the best tools and apps out there, or the best apps and tools to sign up for, or the best tools to buy on Amazon, it doesn’t matter what they are. If you felt that that was a list in and of itself that people could go through and go, “I’m looking for the right types of tool. I’m going to listen to all of these quickly.” We did this with our show, Feed Your Brand. We’re breaking it off for it. At the time that this episode goes live, it will happen. It will be there already.

We created a one-on-one for someone who hasn’t launched their show yet. They don’t have to go through all this other confusing information when they haven’t launched yet. We felt that one-on-one that starts here made sense to be a syndicated special place. It may not have more than 25 episodes in it. It might have a couple of updates we could add later, but it might be in its entirety a show like that. You could do the same thing of, “Here are some productivity basics. If you are thinking seriously about getting more productive in the new year, here are my favorites and my start list. Check out these seven.” It could be a shortlist because of attention spans sometimes.

I am also thinking of a new feed that I started to ask people the question to pull them out, but I’m asking them what their shortcuts are.

You can create a whole show on the shortcuts. Thinking about strategically what you’re going to do with the pieces of the feed is an important part of it. It’s not the fact that you should do it or can do it. If that’s you out there and you’re getting over 300 episodes, know that iTunes or Apple Podcasts will stop showing your 301. They will drop number one off your list. They show a maximum of 300. You have to create an archive volume. That’s why we built everything the way we did for people who get it. There’s so much benefit for you to decide how to organize your website and treat it like a curated list for a specific type of customer.

Setting Podcasting Goals: Take a little bit more care to make a few notes and to give better instructions to our assistants or our producers. We get much better results that translate into better listenership, an easier job, continual marketing, and increased engagement.

You have a lot of corporate clients who are trying to keep their employees productive. You could have episodes that were solely focused on corporate tools and corporate advice, then market that specifically to corporate HR managers and people like that. You can create almost a section of your website or a section of your blog. You want to think about it like that, a curated list for them. They don’t have to search or do the extra work. You’re saving them time, which is exactly your mission. It’s in all alignment. I love that idea for you. I think that feeds are a great way for you. Because you’re detail-oriented and you know your episodes so well, you’re going to be able to execute this. For a lot of people, they have to relisten to everything and it’s difficult. For you, I know you know intimately what the good ones are. It’s going to be easy. I know a lot about you.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I will get some help to figure that out.

You can get help to put your list together, but you know your stuff.

I know who I enjoyed interviewing with, but it’s the way that it is. When you’ve had many interviews, it’s hard to remember the specifics of each one.

I’ve done thousands of interviews right now. Sometimes I can’t remember everybody’s name or their show, but I will remember the thing about them. It went out of my head and it hit me. It was Paul Higgins episode where I got the idea for the favorites, but it took until now for it to rise to the top of my brain. It should be the case. When you do thousands or hundreds of interviews over time, you do lose your ability to do that. The thing that you took away, you’ll remember. You’ll say, “Where was that one? I want that.” That’s the important part because if you took it away, then that’s valuable to your listeners, especially your active core ones. The ones who should become your clients.

The other part is if you do have a raving fan, a listener who you know has binge listened to everything. Some of us have them. I did an interview with a binge listener on The Binge Factor from one of my client’s show. She was there for The Binge Listener. She never wanted to start a podcast, but she was an avid podcast listener. One of the things she said was that there is a point at which you reach out. If you get that person who reaches out, that one person will help tip the rest of them to start to make noise and ask questions if you do shout outs.

What you want to do is say, “So-and-so reached out to me on Facebook and asked me this question. I think there’s a lot of you out there who are interested in understanding this right now.” You want to tell a slight story about them. Don’t just give out their names. If you were doing one about me, you would say, “Tracy Hazzard reached out to me about my interview on the HOLD app and her daughter who’s eleven was having issues with the hybrid school situation.” You’d give a little story and context so that as a listener, I’m like, “That’s me too. I understand.” You’re describing the type of person. Someone who’s been struggling with this working remotely and dealing with their boss and, “Here’s a tactic or tool.” Whatever that is, you’re describing their situation and who they are, not just telling their names.

The story, people relate to that. It also makes the person who is listening to feel like you’ve got to know them. They then tell their more friends and encourage other people. They become raving fans at that point. That’s a way you can push the engagement model for yourself. It’s to do things out of that, to give them mentions. When we started our first show, WTFFF!? on 3D printing, we made up the questions because we didn’t have any listeners yet. We were prerecording, so we didn’t have any listeners. We made them up. They were our buddies and our friends because we knew our friends would share the show anyway. We gave them a reason to be like, “I was mentioned in there.” You could do the same thing if you need to try it out. You’ve got people in your community groups and how we know each other. You’re networking with friends that won’t mind that at all and are happy to. If you reach out to them, they’ll give you an answer.

It’s like you. You listened and I wouldn’t necessarily know unless we had the conversation. There are people who are listening, unless I reach out and have a conversation, I might not know.

The last thing I want to leave you with is, how are your social sharing? How is that going? How is the engagement? What are you doing on that side? Let’s take a peek at that because what we do after our episodes is as critical to driving traffic back in to build that list as the episode itself.

What I realized did make a difference, because my numbers went down a little and then back up, is when I was doing the headliners. A headliner is a tool that you can pull out a two minutes snip. My virtual assistant, something happened and she wasn’t doing them for a little while.

You didn’t have video clips. That made a big difference.

It made a big difference to have these clips that went out. I’m going to look to do more types of things like that. I’ll continue with the headliners. I also ask every guest what’s their definition of productivity. I’m going to bundle three of them together and then post them with links to their episodes. Maybe some other clever things to put some more tweetables in there.

Do you write articles anywhere? Do you have a column? Are you out there doing some writing?

I’m not.

It might be a good strategy for you. It’s a little more complex with planning and other things, but you’ve got all the good tools now. Thrive Global would be a great place because they do have a whole, how do you save time? It’s a big deal over there and it’s easy to become a contributor for them. It’s not that big of a deal to be able to apply to do that. There’s a whole section on our website to apply. You send a couple of articles and that’s it. I’m sure you will write in a service model and not a self-serving model. That’s all that they care about at the end of the day. Your topic of saving time, whenever I wrote an article on the brain or saving time, those took off no matter where I wrote about them or what they had to do with it. Those are the two things that people care about.

That’s a great way for you to mention people in a follow-up, which gets them to be better at sharing your show and sharing their relationship with you to their communities. If they’re developing apps and doing all these things, and you’re creating mentions, tips or other things, then what’s happening is that their social media is going to take on and start to repost and reshare. That’s going to have a compounding effect out there for you in terms of audience growth.

You’re the source back to that, but they are sharing you and more likely to share you because it’s not just one thing you gave them. It’s a follow-up of other things. We can look at the strategy for that of the things you create in your show from the beginning. That’s what I want to layout and have you think about as the next step here. Think about your show as, “I’m creating a path to all the things that I will need to share my show in the future.” It might be a 30-day strategy, a year-long strategy for what I’m going to do if you want to create that sort of evergreen cycle with things.

You say, “I want to have videos. I want to have the headline or two-minute clips.” I want those clips to be planned though. One is where I’m talking about productivity, and one is where somebody is sharing their shortcut. If you have an episode, maybe there are two clips per episode. You’re thinking about what those are and where they go. You have a clear standard operating procedure. You either get 2 or 3 or at a minimum this one out of each episode that we do based on how the episodes are structured. There’s a quote graphic. That same tip is given in a quote graphic visual. Do you want them in audiograms? One of the things that is an interesting look for you is where are you doing better? Is it Instagram? Is it Facebook? Is it Twitter? That also can dictate the style you should head to.

Instagram does well with audiograms. They’re doing well with standard quote graphics or we call them a slider if they were on a website. It’s the stories so it gets quote image of the guest or tool, and then episode information. It’s like 1, 2 and 3. It’s dynamic, but it’s creating this 1, 2 and 3 from each episode of all the stuff we already have. We have our episode graphic square. We have a quote graphic from our guests. In the middle of that, we have a headshot. Sometimes, we’ll put that or a logo of the company. In our case on The Binge Factor, if I’m interviewing somebody else’s podcast, it will be their podcast cover art.

Setting Podcasting Goals: People don’t want to miss out on something they feel could be valuable to them.

It gives you something to flow through and your stories are naturally created. You load up 1, 2 or 3 images, and your stories for Instagram are done. Thinking about what you’re going to do with them and making sure you build those things from day one. The more work you have to go back to your episodes and build those social assets, the harder it is to share them, the more work your team has to listen and take care of it. We can do them at the very beginning. We’re being efficient with our time, but the outcomes are more likely to be good because we’re not batch doing them. We’re doing them while we’re in the moment of, “This was a good interview and this was something I had as a takeaway.”

When I’m doing it, I’ll make a note saying, “At the twenty-minute mark, Penny said something fantastic.” I don’t know what it is, but twenty minutes is on my thing. I had to look for a quote at twenty minutes. That’s how I do it and the team was like, “I’ll figure it out.” You can do with as little as you can to work for yourself. The more notes you make, the more you do it upfront, the better off it will be for everyone in the long run and more accurate.

That’s what I meant by being more purposeful. It’s good to hear some of those suggestions. This is the same for everybody. You might know this stuff already, but when it comes to implementing it yourself, you need a kick in the head or in the pants. Being more purposeful in the beginning is the key.

When we take a little bit more time, we’re not talking about a tremendous amount more time. We take a little bit more care to make a few notes, to give better instructions to our assistants or our producers, we get much better results that translate into better listenership, easier job, and continual marketing, and the engagement can increase. Once we find that, we spend that tiny little bit of extra time and preparation. It makes a world of a difference overall. That’s what I think is the case when you’re talking about purposeful. You’re also talking about not wasting your time either. We want to make sure we’re treading that line. If headliner wasn’t working, you should stop doing it. If it is, you need to do more of it. Is there anything else before we go that you’re thinking this new year about your podcast? Is there anything that you want to achieve or things that we can have a chat about?

You talked about an open Q&A. I like that thought. Can you maybe expand upon what that could look like or what you’ve seen done in the past?

This is a great opportunity to explore a live situation. Whether it’s a Facebook Live or YouTube Live, a live chat model where you’re not creating a formal webinar or anything. You’re going to say, “We’re creating a conversation about moms and dads to juggle work and school or the school schedules.” Whatever that might be, it needs to be a good, timely, hot topic. You go and do a live or make a watch party. If you’re doing it on Facebook, make a watch party. Do one of those things and see if you can get more people to randomly join because they’re on. You may have to play with the time of day.

For whatever reason, I find Sunday late afternoons work well for me on LinkedIn and on Facebook. I don’t know why it is. It’s against all the normal time zones. If I go live or I post a question, I get more responses at that time. Figure out what it is for you that’s working with the community that you have. Don’t forget to invite your lists that you have, even if it’s small. Invite the list that you have to tell them that you’re going to do these, and they should friend you on Facebook or Instagram. You can do Instagram TV. Going live and whether you’re posting a video and live chatting, which some people can only do that because they don’t have LinkedIn Live for instance.

They’ll post a short little video as the topic. They’ll say, “I’m going to be chatting live with anyone at this time period.” It’s a little harder to get people to show up. If you’ve got a good community, you can drive them there. Other areas like YouTube and other things, they send all your subscribers, notifications, all your friends who’ve got you on their notification list. They’ll send you, “Penny is live.” See if you can generate some questions and answers about, “There’s this subject. What kind of questions do you have? What tools do you wish you had?” You’re going to be continually feeding the conversation, but they’re going to be hopefully engaging with you and asking the questions.

It might be an ideal thing to do through Zoom for some people or through a chat function. Whatever works best for your community that you normally communicate with. If you do Zoom, you can bring somebody on live. Facebook doesn’t let you do that. It’s just you talking and answering questions while people chat. It’s a start to see how you can get them to engage and how you can get them to talk. I think it was Laura Powers who suggested that she starts her month by posting a question. Based on some of the questions, her episode will be developed over the course of that month. It’s one of those concepts where you’re prepping what episodes you’re going to create in the future. It’s okay if they don’t respond the minute you put it up there. It’s okay if they respond over a week.

Something I had toyed with in 2019 was to create themes for each month and then to do something. I didn’t follow through. That’s why a lot of people don’t follow through, it’s harder to do that. It’s much easier, especially now that a lot of people are contacting me for the interviews. I don’t have to do as much work, but it’s much better coming back to being more purposeful and laying it out. It’s worth that little effort that you talked about.

This multi-feed strategy, one other thing that might be for you is to do some real shorts. I don’t recommend that to a lot of people, but you can do a quick little live that’s two minutes long or something into Facebook or do an Instagram TV. Do a little two-minute of, “This episode that is airing this week came out this morning. I want to highlight this one thing about the show and you should listen.” You’re doing a live promo of what today’s is, but you’re giving your view. That video is useful for you as a teaser going forward all the time. Be careful how you word it. Don’t say it aired this morning but, “This episode got me thinking. The link is here.” It’s today’s episode, but they don’t need to know that so that it’s evergreen for you to use the video later. Thinking about that tease of what they want to dive into and learn more about is a good thing. People don’t want to miss out on something they feel could be valuable to them.

New year, new strategies.

Penny, thanks for coming on and letting me coach you, and letting everybody else learn from you. We want to make sure everybody gets to check out Penny Zenker’s show, Take Back Time. It’s a great show. It’s one of my favorites. I wish I had a lot of time to listen to podcasts for my own purposes, but it’s on my favorites list. When I do pick up an episode for myself, I will skim through your shows and go, “I need this one today.” Your website is Tug of War with Time, which is a great concept as well because a lot of us feel that way right now. We are seriously having a tug of war between our kids, our businesses, and our personal lives. We look forward to following up and hearing what you’re going to do in 2021.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

—

I hope you enjoyed our new style of coaching with Penny Zenker. Don’t forget to go to Penny Zenker and all the information on Take Back Time is at TheBingeFactor.com. While you’re there, apply to be one of our on-air coaching guests. You can do that. You can suggest up your show. You can also apply to our #GivingTuesdayPodcasts features. You can apply there and suggest your show. If you want to also select a possibility of being an on-air coaching guest, you can do that there as well. All the forms and everything is under the guesting tab or under the #GivingTuesdayPodcasts tab on The Binge Factor website. Thanks for reading. I hope you learned some things. I hope you thought of some ideas and things that might work for you, some nuggets that might make your show achieve a brand-new outcome here in the new year. I’ll be back next time with more of The Binge Factor.

Don’t miss Tracy Hazzard’s Authority Magazine article about Penny Zenker too!

Important Links:

• Podetize
• The Productivity Zone
• The Energy of Thought – TEDx
• Paul Higgins – past episode
• WTFFF!?
• Take Back Time
• HOLD
• Tug of War with Time
• #GivingTuesdayPodcasts

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

Join the Binge Factor community today:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Youtube