Disassembling Your Podcast Media Stack

Your podcast is bigger than the audio episodes you create and your media stack is more than the channels you use to promote and distribute your show. Are you approaching content creation strategically or are you taking a shotgun approach?

Hello and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me Evo. Tara. Podcasters make a lot of dumb decisions when it comes to content creation for things other than our podcasts. I make a lot of dumb decisions when it comes to creating content other than the audio episodes of my podcast. And one of the biggest dumb decisions that we collectively make together is we failed.

Understand. That there's a difference between using media for distribution purposes or promotional purposes. Then using media for content creation and sharing purposes. Let me try and explain what I mean by that. We've all got a podcast. You're working podcast, castor. The reason you're watching this show or listening to this show, or reading my word just because you are a working podcast and you produce, you create content and you distribute content and you promote that content.

Great. We do all of that for our podcast, but what about all of the other media properties that we likely engage with on a regular basis and by other media properties? I mean something other than. The audio files that get consumed by our listeners in their podcast listening app. I mean, things like our website, social media, video properties, email marketing, written word, all these other forms of media that we utilize as podcasters.

Most of the time when we think about these other media channels, we think about them in terms of promotion and distribution. How can we utilize these other media channels to promote the episodes of our show, to maybe distribute the episodes of our shows, but we're not necessarily thinking about them as a place where we create.

Content that lives, hopefully adjacent to our podcast episodes. Now, there's a lot of ways we can think about this, but the reality is you're making, you're probably making content for these other channels all the time already. If you're active on social media properties, you're creating content. Assuming you're actually creating content and not just using those social properties to distribute and promote your own episodes of your podcast.

Because if that's, if that's all you're doing, you're probably not going to get a lot out of this. Or maybe you will. Maybe you'll actually recognize it as something else that we, that we want to do is that we should be doing as podcasters. So I think probably the best way for me to walk you through it is walk you through what I'm doing.

And these aren't necessarily the right things or the wrong thing. You're going to hear a lot of things I'm doing wrong with the way I look at my media stack. So here we go. You may not know this, but this thing that you are either reading or listening to, started out life as a video. Yeah. Start out life as a live video on LinkedIn.

And I'm doing that for a very strategic reason because I want to reach people who are more business minded and business focused and they tend to hang out there on LinkedIn. That's where it begins life. But then I take all of the content, that good content, this meaty content, and I'm writing the article, which you might be reading, and I rewrite it 100% and I rewrite it in such a way to where it's designed to be read only.

You do not have to listen. To the audio. If you're reading his words right now, you can. That's great, but I don't care. It's part of my media stack to make a written piece of content. That written piece of content goes on my website. It also goes on medium.com now, let's evaluate those. How many people read my article on my website as opposed to listen to the episode in their ears?

It's a tiny fraction. It's a very small fraction. How many people go and read the medium article as opposed to listen to it with their ears again, that's a tiny fraction, like single digit numbers sometimes, but other times, not always. I have had some posts that really take off and I'll get hundreds of people who have no idea who I am reading my content, and even better.

Every single medium article that I post has a canonical link back to the article page on my website. That helps in a big way. Now, let's think back to video. I take the video of this, which was originally done live on LinkedIn, and I strip out the intros and outros and I just put the good stuff up both on Facebook, on my Facebook page for my company as well as YouTube.

How well do those do? Terrible. They do terrible. I get single digit views if I'm lucky, and we all know that video views are worthless because people stop watching videos after about 10 seconds, so I get effectively zero. And the reason I'm getting zero is like this content is not designed to be video.

It's not good video to watch. It's my head's stuck behind a microphone and so I'm not using video the way that I could be using video. I am only using those two video outlets, my Facebook page and my YouTube channel as distribution and promotional outlets. I'm not creating good video content. So I wouldn't even consider that really part of my podcast media stack.

That's really more of my distribution promotion. I should be creating good video, but I'm not say lobby. You may not be either. Now when it comes to social media properties, sure, I use social media to distribute and I guess promote the show. I'm not a big social media promotion, but if you follow me on social media channels, you'll see that for some of them.

I'm actually pretty active. Well, one of them. I'm actually pretty active putting out lots of information about podcasting in general in the format and style that I am want to do forward thinking big questions about podcasting overall. That's all my Twitter account. Evo Terra, I spend a lot of time creating content on Twitter.

Not just distributing and promoting my episodes, but actually creating content. I don't do it on either channels. You won't follow me on Facebook and see a lot of information. I do share some news information on Facebook. I share some news and information about podcasting on LinkedIn, but that's really more me resharing other bits of information, not truly creating content.

I'm just not doing that because I want to stay focused on there. Cause my media stack, I keep it kind of small on purpose so that it doesn't spiral away from me. As I'm thinking about content creation, could I do more? Sure. Should I do more? I dunno. The thing is I don't really want to do more because other than doing the occasional guest appearance on someone else's podcast, that makes sense for me to spread the word other than getting up on stages, can't do that for awhile and spreading the word.

I'm pretty content with my media stack being what it is, and I'm pretty realistic about. Understanding the difference between content creation versus promotion and distribution on the media stack. And I hope you are as well. But I want to hear about him. What media stacks are you using? Again, not for distribution and promotion, but where are you creating not your podcast content, and do you think it's effective?

I want to know, ask your friends that are also podcasters, what they're doing. How are they using their media stack to not just promote and distribute their podcast, but to create new things that eventually might bring them a larger fan base overall? That's what I'm curious about. And that's it. Enjoy the rest of your day.

As you think about that, I shall be back tomorrow with yet another podcast modifications. Cheers.

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