I've only shared less than five, and everybody just thinks I'm gonna share.

I'm not gonna share.

I'm not gonna share.

And people say that's selfish.

No, it is not selfish.

As a podcaster, one of the biggest challenges is marketing, the

marketing of your podcast episodes to get people actually interested

in them, because let's face it.

Most of us are not.

We're not interested in yours.

We're not interested in your best mates.

We're only interested in the episodes that specifically speak to us as an

individual consuming podcasts, and that can be bloody frustrating, particularly

when you are going to all this effort to put this content together just

for people to largely ignore it.

So in this episode, we are gonna be speaking to a marketing

expert about the best ways of marketing your podcast episodes.

We're talking to Marcus Sheridan, author of They Ask You Answer

and all round marketing God!

Before we get into this episode, this podcast, The Podmaster - helping

you to attain pod mastery, it's really all about that.

It's about helping you to get better at podcasting and get the results that you.

So let me lift the curtain on one of the many tools that I use behind the

scenes to get the results that I'm getting, both for myself and my clients.

One of those tools is something called podkite.

Now, in case you don't know what Podkite is, it is a tool that you can use to

not only track what your episodes are doing, how they're ranking in the charts.

The reviews that you are getting as well as who's listening, not only that, but it

creates simple links for you that you can share with your social media followers.

And on your website pages so that when someone clicks on them, the podcast

episodes that you are promoting will open natively in those specific apps.

And I've got a special offer for you if you are interested in checking this out.

If you wanna get a hold of podcast with 10% off, then you can do so

with my special discount offer.

All you need to do is go to podknows.studio/podkite

Let me know how you get on with it.

All right, let's get on with the show.

If you've not read, they ask you answer a book all about using your website

to directly market what it is that you are doing to your ideal customer.

Then let me just give you the cliff notes.

Marcus Sheridan, the they ask you answer guy is known for having a

worldwide bestselling book, which literally answered that question.

How do we answer the questions of people coming to our website?

But Marcus is an all round marketing guru and a legend.

He knows exactly what you need to do in order to get attention for your industry.

Or business.

So who better to ask for the secrets to getting attention for

your podcast and its episode?

We covered quite a bit of ground in this chat, including Joe Rogan.

What makes him so special and why does everyone else hate him?

I mean, duh.

And also how you can get attention for your podcast episode so that

people actually want to listen to it.

All right, let's get into it.

I, the most classic in the world for this space here is Joe.

Well, Joe Rogan, politically is all over the place.

But because he gets more viewers than the mainstream media.

On average per episode, they just lose their mind.

What Joe is doing it so interesting.

If you look at it without emotion, which by the way folks, you gotta

learn to look at things and take away your dang stinking emotions about how

you feel about stuff and just look at it and say, Why is that successful?

This is what makes smart business people.

You'll look at something and you say, Okay, what's he doing?

Okay, what is Rogan doing?

He has people of all.

Like types on there, all beliefs on there, and he just asks questions and he talks

to them like he's at the coffee shop.

Him and his guests are the only person at the bar and whatever.

They may be smoking a dooby, but still it's the same principle, right?

It's the same principle, which is they're having a relaxed conversation

and he's not passing off judgment on that person, and he's just allowing

them this free space to fully.

Talk without edit.

Can we mimic that same thing?

Well, we can in so many ways.

And should we?

Therefore, going back to the original question, should we

therefore talk about our competitors?

I absolutely think we should.

We should not talk negative about them.

You do have to be aware though, that as you become a thought leader of your

space, and not just talking about your competitors, but all the things that I

teach and they ask you answer because, When people embrace this framework of

they ask you answer, they do become that salt leader of their space.

It just happens when you follow the system.

Well, that puts a target on your back because people get jealous of the

fact that everybody's reading your stuff and they're learning from you

versus learning from your competitor.

So therein lies to catch 22 about it.

But I'll take that all day long.

At the same time, I've had many of my competitors thank me before they

said, Hey, I just wanna thank you for including me in that best of

article that you did, or whatever that, whatever that thing is, right?

And so that's how you become the lynchpin of your space.

That's what I wanna be.

If there's a conversation happening in a space that I'm part of, I

wanna be a part of conversation.

If somebody has a question of worry, of fear and issue a concern, I wanna

be the one they're learning it from.

And I do not ever veer from that.

That's the target.

So that's why we don't have to debate about talking about the competition,

and that's just the way we do it.

And also when you do it, it just makes people say, Son of a gun.

Look at this company.

They're just willing to do it.

I mean, they're just willing to put it out there.

Love these guys.

I wish everybody was like this.

They've got stones.

They are not afraid and people want to do business.

With businesses like that,

businesses that stand for something, isn't it?

It's like you've, you've got an identity, you've got a personality.

You, you are more likely to be someone that someone's gonna connect with on a

personal level if they know what you're about, rather than, Oh, these guys

are really corporate and they don't really sort of ever give anything away.

Do we trust them?

I, I totally get that.

I think that's spot.

You touched there on Joe Rogan, and I don't wanna make this about Joe Rogan

because obviously Joe Rogan is, you know, he's the pedestal podcasting essentially.

He's one of the most successful broadcasters and podcasters, if you

wanna put it in sort of all under the same umbrella of all time.

There's.

As you mentioned, there's a lot of jealousy towards Joe Rogan, and one

thing I've noticed is a real narrative and not just among sort of what

I would call the indie podcasters and the low level podcasters, but

even some of the bigger brands.

You know, there, there's a lot of digging and, and griping that goes on against Joe.

What can Indie podcasters do?

To really just sort of get above that and stop thinking of themselves,

almost like in a negative way of, Oh, we're only indie podcasters.

Cuz that seems to be quite a narrative that's going on where people are saying,

we really, you know, it's not fair.

They get all the, all the success, all the celebrities straight

in the upper podcast, top 200.

Not that really matters anyway.

But you know, there is that narrative.

What would you say to people like that, that concern

themselves?

Man, this happens in every single space.

And every walk of life and every industry and every field, the ones that are

not getting as much attention, many of them, for lack of a better phrase,

piss and moan all day long about the fact that they're not getting the

attention they think they deserve.

If you wanna rise above it all, the marketplace will lead you to that point.

I have never seen in the history of the world complaining lead someone

to become a true leader of their space like we're talking about.

We just have to go and we gotta do something.

Let me, lemme give an example.

I speak, I speak professionally.

I've done it for 10 years.

And when I first got speaking, everybody said to me, Yeah, if

you can get a speaker's bureau to represent you, you're just gonna

like, man, it's what it's all about.

And so I'm thinking, man, it's all about having, I gotta have a speaker's bureau.

I gotta be represented by a bureau.

And then I was thinking, why am I not represented by a bureau?

Nobody's calling me.

How can they're not calling me?

Boohoo?

I was becoming quite successful and still no bureaus were calling.

And I was like, What's wrong with me?

Why are they not calling me?

And it was this continuous cycle.

And then one day, and I'm just gonna be very honest here, because

I don't know any other way, one day.

I had looked down at my numbers and I said, Huh, I've done a

couple million dollars in speaking and I've never used a bureau.

Maybe I don't need a bureau.

Shut a gun.

And then I stopped.

No stop.

I stopped thinking about stupid speakers bureaus.

In fact, today, if y'all bureaus call me, I don't wanna talk to you.

I don't want you to represent me cause I'm freaking awesome on my.

You see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

What good did it do me to Boo who all those years it didn't do me any good.

And so it's so much like more fulfilling.

It's like, what?

What?

You don't need those.

If the internet has taught us anything, it's that.

We don't have to be on the conveyor belt that we were told was necessary

in order to attain the success that everybody else in our space did.

You can do it your own stinking way.

And isn't that awesome

with particular reference to podcast, is it, what should they

be doing to get more attention for their podcasts because they,

Everyone's got an answer to this, Even myself, I've got all the answers.

But I'm asking you now.

You answer.

There you go.

We're on Brad.

How can I get more listeners to my podcast?

Marcus,

let me just give you a couple things that, uh, for, you know, I've

obviously, as someone that gets asked to be on podcasts all time, why do I say yes?

I say yes when I can tell they truly know me, know about me.

Have made an effort to have some type of legitimate connection with me.

If somebody ever contacts me for a podcaster, they're immediately off

the list, All right, burn, gone.

Now, if somebody reaches out to me, but they don't say anything specific to me

about why, In other words, if it sounds like it's a LinkedIn connection request

and not an actual podcast invite, I'm out.

You know that LinkedIn connection request.

Hey, it looks like we have a lot of similarities.

Let's be friends.

Right?

So now I'm out.

I'm out on that person.

But if somebody says something to me that makes it clear that they know my

story and they like my story and like, Look, I'm on the show with you now, Neal.

And why?

Because we developed a relationship through LinkedIn.

You did the work.

I want it to come on your show.

I feel an obligation towards you because you have invested in me.

Those that haven't invested, I don't feel the need to invest back.

Now, what are some, some other things I think they do wrong

that could help them stand out?

Well, I'm not the type of guy that promotes podcasts even on my own.

Why?

Well, you know, my linked.

My LinkedIn is like 99% give 1% promote.

So if I'm doing a podcast a couple times a week, let's say if I'm on somebody's

podcast a couple times a week, that would mean that I would burn that

post from that day promoting some cool thing or some podcast that I was on.

So I'm not gonna promote it.

But what would I promote?

Let's say somebody like yourself, there's a couple rants that I'll go on today.

Just naturally, you bring them out on me.

If you send me a clip of a rant that's perfect for social media,

the chances that I share that now have dramatically escalated.

So in other words, take the extra time.

To create the greatest bits, right set of greatest hits, greatest

bits of that podcast episode.

Send it to the person as a thank you packaged in a way that could

share it online, and now all of a sudden, I will actually share that.

The few times I will share something for myself on a podcast is when.

They created something for me and I've been on like obviously probably

somewhere between 500,000 episodes of something at this point, and

I've only shared less than five, and everybody just thinks I'm gonna share.

I'm not gonna share, I'm not gonna share.

And people say That's selfish.

No, it is not selfish because if you think it's selfish, you don't

understand anything about branding and you certainly don't understand

anything about social media because we all know that person that all they

do all day long is promote their crap.

I'm not that person, which is why people pay attention to my

stuff, which is why I've got a very loyal audience on LinkedIn.

I'm on one stinking platform, LinkedIn.

That's where I do my stuff.

So I've got an agency about 70 employees, and we're doing all this

different type of stuff, and they're constantly saying, Hey Marcus, will

you promote this event we're doing now?

This is my company, my company.

They're saying, Hey, Marcus, will you, will you promote

this event on your LinkedIn?

I'm like, So what's the story?

What, what?

I mean, what's the.

If you don't give me a story, that's cool.

I ain't promoting my own event.

Maybe you show me a video of some person that's talking about how their

life changed because they came to that event last year and people watch and

say, Man, that's an amazing story.

That's so cool.

I can do that.

And then the promotion of the event gets thrown in.

That's part of it.

Okay, I'll buy, but I'm not promoting for the sake of promotion.

Screw that.

No sir.

No, no, no, no, no.

Stop.

Eventually my team's like, Oh, so we had to have a story.

Yes, we gotta have a story.

No story, no post.

I have a business partner at Impact.

We say, with all of our social content.

Would Marcus want to post this?

That's the litmus test.

That the company now uses.

Whereas before it wasn't as thoughtful.

Now it's very thoughtful trying to tell a story.

So hopefully I know that we, The original question was, what can they do?

Well, to me it's about what I said with your guests.

Show them that you know them.

Do the dirty work on the front.

To build the relationship and don't complain and say it's

impossible cuz it's very possible.

By the way, the whole complaining and the negative, and I'm a victim.

It never works when it comes to building your brand.

Just let that dumb stuff go and.

Live in the solution.

Figure out better ways that that guest can promote your stuff.

I'll get a little bit meta for a second.

I teach a lot of sales people and do a lot of sales training.

One of the questions I like to ask sales professionals are, is

this, would you consider yourself.

Effective with asking questions, and most of them say, Yeah, I would say

I am pretty good at asking questions, and that's because they can ask the

questions that are on the script, but then we test them on their ability

to ask questions, and suddenly they realize, Oh my gosh, I'm not nearly as

good at asking questions as I thought.

And so what's one way that you can do this?

There's lots of different tests that you can give to yourself and to others to

see, am I really good at asking questions?

Because obviously if you're going to be a great podcaster, you have

to learn to ask better, deeper questions than everybody else.

And so you have to learn to think in the form of a question, right?

And you can do different exercises on this.

But let me give you an example for your listeners if that's okay with you.

Neal, please.

An example of an activity, and this is something that I do as sales teams,

but you can do, I do it with like managers, leaders, things like that, and.

There's this activity I like to do with companies called the Question Only Game.

And so oftentimes when we get a question, we just tend to answer it, right?

And the problem with that is it never induces any self discovery in our

audience because we wanna sound smart.

So we just, we, we know the answer.

So we answer it.

No transformation occurs.

So how do we, how do we lead to transformations?

Well, it starts with you thinking in the form of a question.

Now this game exaggerates it.

You might.

You might not communicate like this on a day to day level, but it helps you

start to think in the right praying.

And so the question only game works like this.

Here's the activity.

You're gonna ask me a question.

Now I'm only allowed to answer your question by asking you questions

until the point when I'm able to say that's exactly what it.

So it'll be a what is question.

So let's just use a silly example.

All right.

Let's, uh, for the sake of this conversation, let's use

what is content marketing?

Marcus, what is content marketing?

Ooh, I

love this question.

So, have you ever bought anything, Neal, where you found a website about it and

you kept going back to that website over and over again to learn about that thing?

All the time now, what was it about that website that made you keep coming back?

Indecisiveness, but thinking I wanted it.

Yeah.

And so what was the, what was the information that that website was

talking about that other websites didn't necessarily talk about with

respect to that product or service?

It was

giving real life use cases.

Okay, use cases.

Real life.

What does real life mean in this context?

Like what do you mean by How did you know they real life?

What does that

mean?

As in they were demonstrating using it on video or in audio format as well.

If it was a

microphone, they were truly demonstrating it.

You could see it.

What else did.

They talk about or show you or address that other websites didn't

necessarily talk about or address with respect to that product?

Who the

ideal customer for that product would be.

Okay.

Who the ideal customer was.

Great.

All right.

What else did they address?

Any other information that you wanted that they gave you?

Nobody else necessarily gave it.

Pricing.

Fun enough, pricing.

Pricing.

And because they were willing to talk about pricing and because they were

willing to talk about these other things and show you these things, what was the

emotion you felt towards them that you didn't feel towards the other companies?

Trust and that exactly what content marketing is.

I love

. Neal: That's brilliant.

That's great.

Okay.

The shame is only me doing this, but yeah.

Proud of applause

. Marcus: So you see, you see

When people do an activity like that, what happens is they really

struggle because they're just not used to thinking that way.

The problem is we're just not very good at it, and we usually stop early.

So I'm constantly watching recordings of either sales people or.

Or managers or CEOs have one-on-ones or have presentations with people,

and they constantly, as soon as they start to get beyond surface, they

stop and they move to the next thing.

And so because of that, there's never a moment of personal discovery.

There's not a light bulb moment, as we like to call it, with

our audience, with our listen.

And so an example of how you could do this is, let's say I asked you the

question, if you had all the money in the world and you didn't have to work again,

what would you spend your time doing?

Now if you answered that just initially, Neal, what would you

say?

I'd carry on doing what I do because I love it, but obviously I

know that's not the right answer.

, Marcus: It's not a wrong

The key to this is I'm gonna continue to ask you questions.

Now if I keep asking you questions, even to the point of I'm thinking

I'm done, but I keep going, then what's fascinating is you always land

at a place where you did not start.

So lemme give you an example.

I've done that question before.

Somebody might say, I would travel and here's where we end up.

I wanna create very special, unique memories with my loved ones.

It's not that they wanna travel, they wanna create special, unique memories

with those they care about most.

Now the way you know, you've gotten to the core of something, and this is,

this is very important for any, any podcaster, but anybody that wants to

be world class at asking questions.

The way you know you got to the core is either you can clearly

feel it as an emotion or you could paint it as a picture.

Those are the two indicators that you're there.

So notice a minute ago I said, And so because they do those things, what

is the emotion you feel towards them?

And you said, Trust.

That means we're there.

We're whole.

Now because we've boiled it down, we've boiled a complex thing

like content marketing down to one simple word, which is trust.

That's how we know we're there, Right?

Lots of times if I'm coaching a, an individual or team, I'll have to say,

Can I paint what you've, what that person you're talking to just said and they'll

say, I guess you can't paint it now.

I can't paint it.

I can't see it until I paint it or I can see it or feel it as an emotion.

We're not there yet, so keep going until I can paint it.

It's the same thing as a teacher.

If I'm explaining in such a way and they can't paint it, like if I'm telling a

story, this is the test for the story, the storyteller, if you can't paint

the story, Then you haven't told it.

Well.

Yeah.

So these are simple activities that you can do, simple guides that you can have.

And the last thing I'll say about this, here's how you know you're good

at questions and asking questions.

Because oftentimes when you're talking with someone, they'll say something like

this, you know, now that you mention it or you know, now that you put it that way.

Or, Hey, I think I know exactly what I need to do.

You see, these are all light bulb moments and those that are the greatest

communicators in leaders, right, are the ones that induce the most light

bulb moments with their audience.

Here's a tip to help you get closer to pod mastery.

We're talking about target loudness or perceived loudness

using a measure called Loves.

Now, if you really like acronyms or you want to know exactly what the

technical terms of these things that you are doing with your podcast are

loves stands for Loudness Unit Full Scale, which essentially is just a way

that the industry measures loudness.

The entirety of a track.

Now you can control the loves measurement of your audio in

both Adobe Audition and Audacity.

Those are the two main tools that I recommend for

recording and editing audio in.

Although I'm sure if you were to look at match loudness options or

loudness targeting in any of the daws digital audio workstations on

the market, I'm sure you'll find a very similar way of controlling this.

Google it.

For the purposes of this episode, I'm gonna talk you through how to do

it in Adobe Audition and Audacity.

If you're in Adobe audition, it's really simple.

Just go to window and make sure that the match loudness option is ticked.

You'll then see this in one of the pains on your layout.

Click match loudness.

Hit match loudness settings.

And then when you see the dropdown menu match two, Make sure that ITU

R BS 1770 loudness is selected.

Enter your target loudness as minus 16 for tolerance.

Input 0.5 value and the max true peak level should be around about

minus one for the best setting.

If you are using audacity, you can achieve the same thing

by clicking the effect panel.

Go to effect loudness.

Normalization.

Make sure the perceived loudness is selected, and again,

pop in minus 16 for loves.

Click okay.

And you'll notice that everything is now at the correct level.

Hopefully you'll immediately realize the benefit of this, cuz

your listeners certainly will.

Well, there we go.

I hope you enjoyed this first episode and I feel it started

as, I mean to go on talking to Marcus Sheridan about the Secret.

And the tips around marketing your podcast episodes and making sure that

people are starting to take an interest in the stuff that you are doing.

Otherwise, what's the point?

In the next episode of the podcast, we are going to be lifting the

curtain on the podcast charts, specifically the Apple Podcast charts.

And while you need to know in order to use the Apple Podcast, To see success

with your podcast, the pod master is a pod nos podcasting production.

Find out more about us at pod nos dot cot uk.

That's P od K N o ws.co.