Should I Do A Podcast? With Tracy Hazzard

by | Feb 12, 2020 | Podcasts

SWGR Hazzard | When To Do Podcasting

 

Podcasting has seen a boom in recent years. While it is great to jump-start and move towards becoming a thought leader in your space, podcasting is unfortunately not for everyone. One question thus remains – is podcasting for you? In this episode, Elizabeth Bachman gets the answer from podcasting authority Tracy Hazzard. Tracy is an Authority Magazine and Inc. Columnist, the co-host of four top-ranked podcasts, and the founder of the largest podcast production company in the US, Podetize. Tracy shares with us the reasons why podcasting might not be for you and, if it is a path you should take, what the process looks like that can take you to success. She also discusses why a podcast can help promote your image, whether you are an entrepreneur or a corporate employee, and when the right time is to start monetizing it. Hear Tracy’s expert advice on podcasting and figure out whether it is a path you should take.

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Should I Do A Podcast? With Tracy Hazzard

This is where we interview experts on how to use our presentation skills to get the results that we need. Whether you’re standing on stage or you’re in a meeting or you’re speaking to one influential person, there are hundreds and hundreds of tools that we can use to get the results that you want. Before we begin, I’d like to invite you to go to our free assessment. It’s called the www.SpeakForResultsQuiz.com and there you could take a free assessment. It takes about three minutes to find out where your speaking strengths are and where maybe you could use a little bit of help.

I am so excited to introduce my guest. Here is Tracy Hazzard. She’s an Authority Magazine and Inc. columnist. She’s the cohost of four top ranked podcasts, including Feed Your Brand, which is one of CIO’s Top 26 Entrepreneur Podcasts. She’s the Founder of the largest podcast production company in the US. As a content product and influence strategist for networks, corporations, marketing agencies, entrepreneurs, publications, speakers, authors, experts and probably the dog and the cat as well, she influences and casts branded content with $2 billion worth of product innovation around the world. Her innovative, Podetize, method and platform provide businesses of all sizes, a system to spread their content marketing message from video to podcast to blog and growing an engaged audience and retaining valuable platform authority without a whole lot of time, cost and effort. Tracy, thank you so much for coming to the show.

Elizabeth, I’m pleased to be here and I’m excited about your topic and your focus. Every speaker who comes in front of me wants results. They want it to do something for them. I’m not one of those people who set out to be a speaker. It happened to me. It’s a little bit different.

I love the results. That’s my brand, strategic speaking for results. It’s all about how do you get what you need to be done. It was the same thing when I was working with opera singers. The result when you’re doing an audition is to get them to hire you. The desired result when you’re on stage is to make the audience cry or laugh. Tracy, before we get into content, I’d like to ask you the question I ask all my guests which is, if you were able to share the stage with somebody from history, who would it be? What would you talk about and who would you like to have listened?

I’ve gotten to interview a lot of interesting people and for a long time, my big get was Steve Wozniak, which I did get to interview. When that happened, that was like the big thing. You got me thinking about this. When you say anyone from history, because I’m an art student at heart and I am trained in design and art, it gets me thinking that the person that I’d like to know the most about is Leonardo da Vinci. We see all those beautiful sketchbooks and all these things and I’m a process person. I believe strongly in the process and people you put around you makes such a difference. It’s not all talent. There’s a lot of argument that he’s not the most talented one out there, but his stuff lasts. It’s timeless. We look at that and we go that Mona Lisa is amazing. I think about that all the time. I would love to tap into that and find out more. I can’t say I’d share a stage. I definitely want an interview.

Would you ask him how he did it or how many versions went into the wastebasket that we never saw?

That’s what I want to know. I want to know like, “Was this hard? Was this easy?” For some people, they make it seem a lot easier than it is. You know there are a lot of iterations and work that went into, especially art. You think about how many times you repeat and you train as you’re doing your music as well. I’m sure your opera singers, they don’t stop at 10,000 hours of expertise. That’s the way I always look at it. I believe that there is a way to shortcut your 10,000 hours and I have had a theory about it.

I believe that there’s a way to do it if you adopt the right process. If it’s also something that’s not like I’ve got to get a whole different physical body to do it. If you already have the inclination there, training, adding skillsets on and that’s where I think someone like Da Vinci was amazing. He is trained as a fine artist and he wants to add sculpture and he wanted to add invention on. It’s more logical because you already have a design process and artistic process. You can shortcut a lot of the 10,000 hours and you say, “I’ve got this basis and I’m going to utilize that basis again. Now, all I have to do is learn this new part of the thing that I don’t know.” That makes for lots of innovation and lots of growth.

There are lots of people out there who, no matter how much they want to get the how-to, are stuck on the visionary plane. Click To Tweet

You have a product creation background as well.

The people ask this all the time. How did you go from being a product designer? We were ghost designers. You probably didn’t hear our names before, but we were designing for Martha Stewart and famous brands and companies that you buy all the time still at Costco, Walmart and Target. The reality was when we stepped out into podcasting, it seems so different to people. They’re like, “What’s the deal? Why would you do that?” For us, it was a logical way to step out from behind being a ghost. If you think about that from the corporate world, that’s what you’re one of many. How do you step out and become a thought leader? How do you move yourself out from being a ghost designer or ghost writer into someone who’s at the forefront? That’s what we needed to do in our business to grow into a different age of design, which was where designers were the celebrity, where designers were creating one-off pieces of by 3D printing and all of those things. That’s how we did it.

What we utilized was the same product launching process we’d use very successfully to do over 250 products. We do about $2 billion at retail. That’s what our clients do in the marketplace from those 250 products. We know it works again and again. We took that same launching process and said, “Let’s apply it to a podcast. Let’s apply the same diligent, rigorous procedures to how we launch something to say this is going to work. This is what goes into it.” That was what separated us and what made our podcast very successful when we started our very first one and made everybody want one. That’s why they started asking us to do it and we ended up in whole new business.

You sound like my productivity coach. He’s always like, “Come on, Elizabeth. Follow the process and don’t just hold it in your head. Actually write it down.”

There’s something to be said for that. There are all kinds of people there. There are people who bring vision and all types of inspiration. I love to speak. I’m fun on stage. I know that I’m entertaining. I’m articulate. I know all of that worldly works for me, but I’m not one of those lead them to tears and then laughter and inspirational speakers. It’s just not my thing because at the end of the day, I’m a big believer in tactics and how-to and so I’m your how-to girl. I accept that and I say let’s embrace that and make it a part of who I am and what I do and what I provide to the world. Because there are lots of people out there who no matter how much you want to get the how-to in you, you are stuck on the visionary plane. That is where you belong because that’s where your brilliance is. If I can provide infrastructure for you, if I can provide systems and make it easy for you to do what you want to do, then I’ve done my job and I’ve made more people get their voice out and get their messages heard. I love that.

My dad always used to say there are two kinds of people in the world. They’re the thinker uppers and the getter doners, but you need to work at work together. Tell me why should somebody do a podcast?

Not everybody should. There are people out there who think everybody should. We are not of that opinion. There are reasons for it and I think that’s where you have to sit back and say, “What are my reasons for doing?” If you’re in a corporate job and you have the desire to retire and do something else. We have sports celebrities, for instance, sports players who are current players in the NFL and MLB and things like that. They’re doing podcasts. It’s not easy for them to get them recorded. It’s a lot of work for them, but they’re devoting their time because they know their career is going to be short and they know that they want to have something after that that is valuable to them, that yields them, that gives them a mission and message.

While they have an audience right now that loves them and will adopt them, they want to lead them into following them later because of their passion projects or because of who they are, because of the skills they want to adopt later. That’s a model I think that would work for the corporate world as well. Those that are in corporate positions and want to move into the thought leadership, they want to move into speaking around the world and they want the next stage of their career to move them into a different place. When you’re thinking about that, that’s always an ideal why. I have a why, I also have a goal. I like to put the two things together. It’s not just why you want to do something, but what you’re going to do with it that also matters. Do you have a plan for that? Is this something you want to do? There are people out there who want to start a podcast because they just want to see if it’ll be fun. Go right ahead and check it out. I’m all for experimentation, but don’t have a high expectation that you’re going to monetize this just from having fun out there. You have to put a purpose into place for this.

SWGR Hazzard | When To Do Podcasting

When To Do Podcasting: Sometimes what we want to write and speak about isn’t necessarily the best thing to actually achieve our end goal.

 

As with everything, any presentation especially, you’re wanting to deliver value.

High value at that. We have some who their sole goal is to nurture a community. They have a community, whether it’s around a nonprofit mission or it’s just a community that they built for their marketing company or whatever that might be. They need to nurture that community and continue to provide them touchpoints and feedback and things to keep people active in that community. That active engagement leads to more business or more sales or more things that they want to do in the future. That’s important too.

We have others who use it to make connections. If I wanted to be a speaker on stages, maybe the thing to do is to get to know what event planners want. My whole podcast could be around interviewing event planners and understanding more about them. Now, I’ve got a great database of them and I’m learning about them. There’s always a structure and a strategy that yields the purpose and end goal but it’s not always what we want to talk about and what we think. I liken this to the authors out there who know that they rubbed the wrong book at the end of the day. Sometimes what we want to write about, what we want to speak about, what we want to podcast about isn’t necessarily the best thing to achieve the end goal of why we want to do that.

It makes me think of rule number one for me in terms of any public speaking or presentation is it’s about the audience. You’ve got to make it about them. One of the things I see with speakers all the time is somebody who says, “I have this great story of how I survived this or I overcome that.” That will help you once. It’s got to be more than that. I’m sure you’ve run into that with podcasters.

I have. We get a lot of podcasters who are very self-centric in that process and not consumer-centric. We come from a world of having developed all these products. Your product’s not going to sell off the shelf if it’s not what the consumer wants to buy. I’m a big believer in making that product market fit or that message market fit, whatever that is and making that the essential. Putting yourself into your audience’s shoes, understanding what their pain is, where they’re searching, what they’re looking for and making your show about that. That’s the ideal place to be. We see it and we’ve produced over 300 shows and launched them. What we’ve seen again and again is the shows that are named after the host, at the end of the day, it is an ego boost and an ego stroke, but they do not succeed without a lot of money spent or time and audience pushed spent.

In other words, you have to go out there and seek an audience and use your community and drive that traffic all into you and into the show. Whereas if you name your show about what they’re interested in learning and experiencing and being a part of a community about, it’s way easier to get them to try your show and then go, “I love Elizabeth, so this is awesome. I just found the great place and now I’m an Elizabeth Bachman fan.” That’s the way we want to do it. We want to build a place where when they’re just searching and finding, they’re in their own world, they’re not in your world.

Clearly, this is something that can be useful for entrepreneurs and a lot of people use speaking to market their services. A lot of people use speaking for sales and to do products. It is a different kind of speaking. What would you say to someone who’s thinking about their first podcast? Where should I start?

Especially someone who maybe it’s not their day job, not their core business as you’re putting it, an aside, “I’m going to try this. I’m going to attempt it.” I’m a big fan of hypothesis branding is what I call it or hypothesis marketing. If you don’t try something, if you don’t go out there with the hypothesis of, “I think I have a message that’s going to resonate with a particular audience, let me test it out.” That’s what we started with. Our very first podcast is very geeky. It’s about 3D printing. Why would a couple of designers talk about 3D printing? Because we’re ideally suited to talk about it. It’s the technology we use every day to prototype.

If the advertisements and sponsorships are serving your audience, it's time to monetize. If it's not, then they are not a right fit. Click To Tweet

However, everyone in the industry was talking tech and we said, “I think that there’s a play here to talk about what the value of design. If we can get the value of design, then people would get the value of designers. Now, we’ll have services to sell and we’ll have products we can sell. Won’t that be great?” It’s a good thing I did that. I chose to start a podcast to test out that idea versus build an entire company full of products and design staff to be able to service and create 3D print products for people. I would have spent a fortune to find out no one wanted it. That’s what we found out within five months of doing the podcast, no one wanted to buy design services. No one wanted to buy products that were predesigned. What they wanted was to learn how to do it and they wanted to learn from people who knew what they were talking about.

That’s where our value lied, in educating. We had up to 100,000 listeners at the height of the shows. We have done over 560 of them. If you think you can’t talk about something for a long time, you’re wrong because you will be able to. That was such a valuable lesson, but if I had switched my company, I would have bankrupted. I would have changed the model of business in such a magnified degree that I would have blown up my staff and done all of that and we would have found there was no market. A great time is when you think you have this idea, but you want to test it. How can you do it in a low-cost way that costs you a microphone and a computer you already have and all you do is just start talking? There are great ways to do that.

You may not need to go into full-blown podcasting. Maybe you live stream it and test it out. As it starts to get traction, you say, “Let me syndicate this live stream into a podcast and let me see if I can grasp that audience and if there are listeners out there,” because they are different. Some people are visual and some people are auditory and some people prefer the written word at the end of the day. Some people still do.

When you talk about syndicating a live stream, by live streaming, I assume like a Facebook Live or a LinkedIn Live. Is that what you mean?

That’s what I mean. You save the video and you strip off the audio and you start a podcast. You still need intros and outros and you need some professional things, but it’s not a ton of things. If you’ve already started in the live stream, you known if this is resonating with the community and it’s more than your mom and your dad and your friends and your close family. It’s that extended community of people you know, the network you’re in. If that is resonating and they’re saying, “This is valuable information, I’m tuning in every time you go live,” you’re onto something.

This is one of the classic questions, how do you monetize your podcast? I’m doing this partly because I’m endlessly curious and partly because there are issues that I care about that I want to learn about. I’m going to interview some smart people around that. My main work is business advisor, executive advisor and helping people do speeches.

I think the question should more often be, should you monetize it? That’s the real question because monetization implies advertisement. That’s advertisement and sponsorship. We believe in alternative monetization. It’s how we’ve built our whole system. It’s why we train everybody the way that we do. We want you to get value in your core business or your core goal or core community growth. We want those short-term goals to start being achieved quicker. That way you’re starting to feel a sense of, “My community’s resonating with me. There’s engagement happening. I see my business growing, so something’s working here. I see my mission growing. My Facebook community’s growing.” It can be that model.

I see that I’m getting traction and things are moving here, but when you shift into advertising and sponsorship, you shift into this idea of selling out your audience. You start to sell other people’s stuff, other ideas, other products. You distract, unless it’s truly core to what you’re building or unless you’re building a true influencer show. An influencer, the way that I define that is someone who is out there building community and relationship, not things and not stuff. They’re going to share other people’s stuff. They’re going to find the new latest thing in whatever the area. 3D printing for instance. We didn’t have any of our own stuff. We were truly an influencer in that marketplace.

SWGR Hazzard | When To Do Podcasting

When To Do Podcasting: Go out there and seek an audience and use your community to drive that traffic all into you and into the show.

 

We could take advertisements, but we were very careful and cautious with our sponsorship model to only take advertisements of things that we believed in and use because we didn’t want to abuse the trust built in our audience and abuse that influence. We want it to be true to it. We didn’t worry about making money in it. We didn’t even worry about making costs covered because it yielded us a lot of intangibles. That’s the idea. Truly, at the end of the day, “Is this serving my audience?” If it’s serving my audience, it’s time to monetize. If it’s not serving my audience, then this is not a right fit for me or for them. We look at that.

The intangibles though is I have a speaking career I’d never expected and it came from that podcast. I’ve spoken on stages before. It wasn’t like I’d never spoken before. I did trainings, did other things, but it wasn’t a career path. It wasn’t something I did. I have been on the road speaking everywhere. It’s a little bit easier. They’re closer to home at least, but I never imagined that that’s what my life would be like. What happened was I was asked to give a speech because they heard me on my podcast and said, “Can you give a talk?” I gave a talk about makers making money. I did. That was the name of the talk. It was about makers and 3D printers, learning how to sell products and what they would do and how they should price them.

The Inc. Magazine’s LA bureau chief saw me and she invited me to write a column for them about product design and including technology like 3D printing and other things. That pretty much is the reason. It’s the combination of the two. The Inc. column is a lot of reasons why I get invites to speak places because it has a credibility. It has an authority weight to it that when you compare me against other designers out there, they’re not as articulate. They can’t listen to all my shows, know that I can do interviews. I can also answer questions off the cuff. They know all of that. They see that and they know I also can engage an audience for a long period of time because I sustain 560 shows plus some more, plus all the articles that came out of it. They see that and they go, “Weighing her against someone else, it’s an easy choice.”

Since we’re still talking about monetization, do you consider your speeches are monetization? What kind of results do you get from your speeches?

I’m not paid to speak, although I have on occasion been paid expenses to speak overseas and other places. I do accept that, but I don’t usually accept payment to speak because I know I’m going to sell. I don’t sell in a hard way. I’ve never done that. I don’t believe in it. It’s not my process. It doesn’t fit who I am. I went to go train to do it to know what I didn’t want to do and what I do want to do. Mine’s always an invite to connect with me at the end and it works incredibly well. It’s combination of brand awareness and content awareness. I drive people to my show and my podcasts. Our audience grows and builds and that gets into the community. It is a speak-to-sell model for me. Yes, it does convert. Am I careful about my choices of where I speak? I’m a little bit more off the cuff. If I enjoy the person who invites me and I think their community is going to be great, I’ll give it a shot. It doesn’t matter to me whether there are twenty people in the room or there are 2,000 people in the room. I’ll do either. I find better traction personally when it’s around 50 to 100. That’s my sweet spot. I usually do better in that size room for some reason because I can touch people and reach them more.

Do you consider yourself still a product designer or do you consider yourself a broadcast producer or marketer? Not that they’re mutually exclusive.

I guess I consider myself an innovator. Whenever we approach something, we’re always reinventing and innovating what’s happening in there. We’ve been reinventing the podcast market. We’ve been reinventing how podcasts are launched. We’re reinventing how we produce cover art. Every little detail about it, we’re always at the minute level working on it saying, “Is this working? What’s not working? Let’s throw this out.” We build a process for that continual improvement, but we also build a process to say, “This isn’t working. Let’s hack the system.”

For instance, on advertisement, the average podcast that doesn’t do millions of listens a month because there are very few of them. About only 2% of podcasts make decent money for their hosts. When I say that, they make in the thousands per month for their hosts. Most others breakeven but the average for everyone below that is about $100 to $300 a month. I’m not going to sell out my audience for $100. It’s not worth it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I said, “This isn’t working.” We investigate and we looked at this and said, “Why doesn’t this model work?” It doesn’t work because they pay on how many thousands of listens. It’s a CPM model just like you have in marketing everywhere else like in pay-per-click. It’s always per thousand listeners, per thousand readers on my Inc. column.

When you break down that feedback loop, that's when your product is no longer innovating. Click To Tweet

Let’s say in my 3D print podcast, in the early days, like in the first six months, we had 10,000 to 25,000 listeners. When we had 10,000 listeners, each individual show though, the brand new shows that were going out probably only had 1,000 to 1,500 listeners for those new shows that were being produced. Everything else was on our back catalog. You’re looking at that going, “All these shows back here, they don’t have advertisements on it, but I built a lot of equity back here, a lot of information.” Most of my audience hasn’t caught up or they just found my show and they started the beginning and their binge listening to me and I thought this is a waste. Why would I want to only advertise on these four shows in a given month and give my sponsor who I think is great and deserves awareness only maybe 4,000 or so of my listeners? That doesn’t seem to fit.

I said, “This model is broken. What can we do about it?” Tom Hazzard, who is my husband and partner, the two of us went and said, “Let’s look at this differently. How can we advertise across the entire show catalog, capture all the episodes, sell them on a monthly basis not a CPM basis, based on over 100% of your listenership?” You give total value to the sponsor and to the podcaster so that it is the right thing for you. You now make 100% of your potential value for it. We took what would have been $100 a month and easily 10X that if not 100X that for most people. That’s the model we do now. We said, “We’ve got to remove those ads because we don’t want irrelevant ads stuck in our shows. We want to keep selling them new.” We call it admixing, but it’s our system that we invented and we’re the only ones who do it this way. It came early on from our own view of saying, “This is broken.”

I remember that you’re talking about Leonardo da Vinci and I’ve often thought that he started to design the airplane because he’s drawing birds. He was probably sitting out in the meadow drawing birds and at some point, he had a dead bird and spread out the wing and then they suddenly said, “I wonder how that works.” Isaac Asimov, I believe, was the one who said, “Great inventions don’t come from an a-ha, a eureka moment. They come from a, ‘That’s funny.’”

There are two kinds of approaches that can happen that I found over time because Tom and I have 40 patents between the two of us. The difference though for us is that our patents are all commercialized. We have an 86% commercialization rate, meaning that they make money for our clients or for us. That’s very rare cause less than 2% of inventions make money. It’s very similar to podcasts. Less than making money. When we look at that, what happens for us is that there’s amount of iteration over time. You come to say, “I’ve hit on something that now finally solves that nagging problem I’ve been having or you’ve been having. My viewpoint is different.” That’s one of the things that I prefer. If I can bring out a broader viewpoint into everything that I do, and so I’m now looking at it from the view of my clients and my clients are saying, “I need to make more money sooner. I need to have a revenue stream in my business.” I’m thinking, “We can do that.”

They’re coming to it from, “I want everyone to hear about my great new course, but I only have my four new shows to put it in each week.” That’s not okay. Solving their problems too helps us bring a new viewpoint to how we can innovate, invent something and make something that is making everybody have a higher value in usage in the process. That’s why we believe in high touch. That’s why we have the services the way that we have. We’re hearing from our clients, it’s not a passive thing. You don’t sign up and use software and then we never talk to you. I believe when you break down that feedback loop, that’s when your product is no longer innovating.

One of the things I love about this is I’ve heard you talk about how some things in marketing are working and some things aren’t and why podcasts are such a useful thing now. I’m sure by the time podcasts to become old hat and the market is saturated, there’ll be something else and I count on you to teach me. Tell me what it is, Tracy.

When you’re talking about, especially like women who are experiencing the glass ceiling and corporate life or they’re bumping up against, “I’m not being heard, I’m not being seen. I’m not being found.” That’s what I hear again and again and that’s the perfect time for you to sit back and consider, “Is there something that I so badly have to talk about and share and say that needs to get out there that would be valuable, that would change the way the world is working? It will change the way the system’s working.” If that means I have to step out and be the one to do that, maybe this is the right media for you.

This brings me to a very interesting thing because you don’t necessarily have to have a podcast of your own. You could be a podcast guest. How you get people to find you, you probably ask Tracy Hazzard about this.

That’s a good thing. I always think it’s a great idea for you to start as a guest. If you’ve never done a podcast before and you’re thinking about this might be the thing, definitely go and guest on someone’s show just to feel how it is. You may find you get stage fright. You may not be great off the cuff and it is not a rehearsed thing for the most part. There are very few podcasts that are structured. They don’t do as well, frankly. The ones that are more ad hoc do better.

SWGR Hazzard | When To Do Podcasting

When To Do Podcasting: No one wants to buy products that are predesigned. What they want is to learn how to do it and to learn from people who know what they’re talking about.

 

That makes me think of a lot of the work that I do with people who want more visibility. You can do a pro bono speech, figure out what you want to talk about, get the outline. I would say rehearse your sound bites. What are your nuggets that you’re always going to make sure you’re going to say the important parts? I think of it as jazz. The thing about speaking like jazz, every situation is going to be a little different. Maybe tonight you’ve got a piano and a saxophone and drums and tomorrow night you’ve got a guitar and a flute, but the tune is going to be the same. Maybe you’re doing Someone to Watch Over Me or something like that. The tune will be the same, although the instruments are different. There’s always a beginning and there’s always an end. In the middle, you can. You’ve got a basic melody to follow, but then you can improvise.

It is your ability to improvise and sustain an audience in that improvisation that works for most people. When they sit and are comfortable in it, it makes them the best guests. It makes them the best hosts at the end of the day. You can be listening and crafting your answers in a different way. I have this happen to me. A lot of PR firms will send me guests and when I put them on my show and they do the same thing that they’ve done on ten other shows, there’s no value in that. Getting someone to being a great interviewer to be able to make them break their mold, that’s important too. If you’re on the other side and you’re going and guesting, being able to do that is a sign of a great guest and then you’re going to get more press because of that. You’re going to be invited to do more stages. Maybe you’ll get to do a panel or something like that. One of the most challenging things I did was I had to moderate a panel.

I’ve never done that before. I’ve done interviews where I’ve interviewed a couple of people at a time on my show, but I’ve never moderated a panel live and it was the most challenging talk I ever had to prepare for. When it’s myself on stage, I wing it. I’m comfortable there. I know my stuff so well that I can do that. I like to go to an event and experience the audience and say, “I’m going to tell these stories,” because we’ve got lots of real estate people and we’ve got lots of speakers in the audience. I think my talk as I’m getting to know people. When you’ve cut this panel that like you have no control over, I was like, “I had to be prepared.” It was so much harder than any other talk I’d given, but it reminded me of how important that preparation is and how important it is to be able to improvise when necessary.

One of the panelists was boring and he was interesting in person. When I had talked to him one on one, he was interesting. I was like, “Okay, great.” I’d formulate a couple of questions for him. When I asked him the questions, it’s like he had stage fright and he had the driest answers ever. I was like, “How am I going to pick up the audience after that?” I’m starting to think I’m in charge of the entertainment value now. It totally changed the dynamic. That’s the thing. When you’re guesting, when you’re doing these things, there’s so many ways for you to experience it and say, “What I have to say has value. The audience is interested. The feedback’s great. Let’s continue to do this and maybe now let’s make it my own,” because the best way to move into thought leadership is to make it your own. Oprah is the star even though she interviews the stars.

Tracy Hazzard, this has been so much fun.

I know we can talk about international and all kinds of stuff, Elizabeth. You are amazing at what you’re doing out there in the world.

Here’s part of what we want to do and we do have an episode scheduled about how to be a rockstar panel guest and moderator. I think I’m going to have a panel to talk about being on a panel. It’s not quite the same as giving a speech, but you can still get a result from it. You still need to think about what it is. Don’t just sit back and let the moderator asks you questions. Be strategic about it. That’s coming up. It’s going to be a part of this. Meanwhile, Tracy Hazzard, who is producing this, thank you so much. When I discovered that Podetize was going to take care of all the stuff for me and all I have to do is talk, it’s like, “I can do that.” For me, writing a blog is pulling teeth. You’ll see on the list that there are podcasts for this one that are things that started out as articles that I never finished. Tracy Hazzard of FeedYourBrand.co and of Podetize.com, I want to thank you so much. How can people find out more?

Just go to those two places. Feed Your Brand is our podcast for podcasters, our aspiring podcasters. We’re always bringing in new information there. That’s the best place to get your feet wet and get to know me better.

I’m honored and delighted to have you.

 

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About Tracy Hazzard

SWGR Hazzard | When To Do PodcastingTracy Hazzard is an Authority Magazine, Inc. Columnist, co-host of 4 top-ranked podcasts including Feed Your Brand –one of CIO’s Top 26 Entrepreneur Podcasts, and founder of the largest podcast production company in the U.S. As a content, product, and influence strategist for networks, corporations, marketing agencies, entrepreneurs, publications, speakers, authors & experts, Tracy influences and casts branded content with $2 Billion worth of product innovation around the world.

Her innovative Podetize method and platform, provides businesses of all sizes a system to spread their content marketing message from video to podcast to blog, growing an engaged audience and retaining valuable platform authority without a lot of time, cost or effort.