Special Guest: Tracy Hazzard, podetize.com, The Binge Factor podcast
Show overview
In this “I soooo agree with you!” podcast episode, I sit down with Tracy Hazard, a true thought leadership expert in the content marketing space. Together, we delve into the intricacies of personal branding, effective marketing strategies, and the dangers of falling prey to trendy marketing courses.
We also discuss the fascinating role of AI in content creation and how it can be harnessed to elevate thought leadership. Tracy shares her own journey of starting a podcast back in 2014, and underscores the criticality of consistency and constant publishing across multiple media types to expand one’s reach.
Tracy’s company, Podetize.com, offers podcast optimization services at an incredibly low cost, which we discuss in detail. The episode culminates with invaluable tips on seeking expert advice and uncovering new and exciting topics to keep your audience engaged.
All in all, this podcast episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to up their content marketing game and establish themselves as a thought leader in their respective industry. – dp
EPISODE 213 | FULL TRANSCRIPT
DP Knudten Well, hello there, NONFICTION BRANDERS. It’s me, DP, and guess what? It’s time for a little program note. You see, what happened was I was like four years into doing this podcast and I was frankly a little tired of the format and tired of doing the podcast in general. So I thought I’d change it up by doing a single guest for a single week and a substantially longer episode going from half an hour to maybe closer to a full hour. Well, guess what happened on the way to changing the format, it became really difficult for me to do because I’m a one-man show here and I edit it and I do everything for this podcast every single week. And doing a longer episode was actually messing with my mojo. I just didn’t have the time, energy, bandwidth, or desire to do the podcast that way.
The funny thing is, I was able to do this podcast the old way easily for close to four years. So I guess I learned something, which is if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So what you’re gonna hear today is a return to the old format style, one guest over two consecutive weeks with two half-hour-ish episodes. It’s easier for me to actually get the damn thing done, but it probably might work for you as well because, you know, the podcast gods say that the average commute is around 20 to 25 minutes. So if my episodes are somewhere around that time period, you can fit it all in in one commute. And so that’s what I’m going back to starting today with a brand-new guest who I’m going to introduce to you right now. Let’s join the program already in progress.
DP Knudten …know her yet, Tracy Hazzard, but I’m already inspired by her.
Why? Because she has really taken the bull by the horns when it comes to who she is, what she does, and how she does it, to create a place in the marketplace, if you will, for her. And also given you a very easy handle to get a handle on who she is, which, you know, if you’re asking me, that’s the essence of personal branding. So Tracy Hazzard, first of all, welcome to the NONFICTION BRAND podcast. But Tracy, I want you to give about 30 seconds on what your handle is when it comes to who you are in the professional world, if you will, and also why you selected that specific niche to own as your own. Take it away, Tracy.
Tracy Hazzard Thanks, DP. Yeah, I think that my special niche in the, I’m gonna call it thought leadership expert space and specifically in that content marketing space, is the fact that I figure out what really worked. Like, I don’t wanna know what’s trendy. I wanna know what’s actually gonna work, what’s gonna convert, what’s gonna change in a business, what’s gonna work again and again and again, and this has been a theme through my entire career so far, is I figure out what people wanna buy again and, and again and again, which means that it’s working for them. And that’s what I’m always looking for. That’s what I bring to the table and that’s why people come to me because when I give my view on something or when I’m suggesting something or recommending something, it’s because I believe it will really work for them.
DP Knudten And I think that’s so very important because there is a lot of people out there selling a lot of different things ranging from ClickFunnel, SEO, blah, blah blah, to this is what you really need to be doing this week right now, a lot of people are freaking out and rightly so about the way that AI is gonna be changing things a whole lot faster than I thought it could, especially for people like me who are writing professionals.
First time I went on ChatGPT and typed in a few facts and said, write a 500-word essay about this. And it came back with something that was not only readable but actually barely well written. I started to freak out and then I remembered something, oh yeah, I’m inoculating myself against AI and our AI overlords because I’m putting myself out there in ways that are actually leaning into my humanity.
But here’s the key, and this is where I want to tie it to what you do as a human. I’ve only got so much time, I’ve only got so much bandwidth, I’ve only got so many dollars that I can possibly spend. And it seems like everybody and their mother are out there trying to sell me some type of snake oil that’s guaranteed to get me into six figures within 30 days. I don’t sense that’s what you’re about. And based on what you just said, you’re probably the actual antithesis of that, which is one, you understand the bandwidth issues everybody faces and the dollar issues everybody faces. And therefore, I’m gonna guess that you’re much more of a let’s work smarter and use your budget effectively using proven techniques. Am I right about this?
Tracy Hazzard I wanted someone to say, this is really what it’s gonna take to do it. And so really early on, I figured out what those gaps in those holes were developed in my system, my process. And then people would go, Missy, what are you doing? Why is this working? And I’d be like, I’m doing this, this, this, and this and this. And then they’d be like, oh, I don’t wanna do that. Here’s my credit card, would you do it for me? Like that’s how our business started. It’s just one of those things where it’s not the easy path, but the path to getting stuff to work for you is so essential. And you cannot get caught up in this thing. The one thing that excites you that they’re selling into you, like they’re, they’re, they’re preying on that. Yeah, they’re manipulating that. And unless your eyes are open to that, you’re not going to understand how I make this work. And you’ll be in yet another failed course, another failed program, another failed book that you didn’t read, <laugh>, like, you know, whatever it is.
DP Knudten I totally get that because right now, you’re a podcaster. I’m a podcaster. We both believe in podcasting and a recommendation we give undoubtedly to a lot of people is, you know, you should check out a podcast cuz there’s no better way to demonstrate who you are, what you do, and how you do it the way you think, the way you talk, your sense of humor, everything short of the way you smell via podcast. However, what you and I know is that podcasting takes a significant amount of time and also talent.
Tracy Hazzard Well, and that’s why I’m actually really excited about ChatGPT and AI. So we just did a live stream about that a week ago with our coaching cuz we, we give coaching topics and, and calls to our entire client base live every week. And we do it because we wanna make sure that they’re up on what’s going on so they can be knowledgeable about it, see what we’re experimenting with, but I’m not ready to recommend it yet. Right? And so I will talk to them about what I’m finding, what I’m doing, but I will say, this is not ready for primetime yet. And what we found with the ChatGPT model is yes, there’s some very cool, really exciting things going on in terms of how good it is and what it puts out, but the reality is this, it’s gonna create thought followership and not thought leadership. We have to add our special spice. And what you did DP was when you went into chap G P t giving it that topic, giving it the information screening what you were asking it for and asking the questions in the right way is where the value’s gonna lie. That’s where your thought, your creative view, your perspective on the world you are knowing what you need it to write is the part that no one can phone in, no AI can do, it can only aggregate what’s out there.
DP Knudten And I think there’s a whole new growth industry out there for people who are professional AI prompt writers. Seriously, if you write the prompt the right way, you can get incredible output, but garbage in, garbage out. And you know, I’m kind of reminded of a bestselling author out there and I don’t wanna pick on him, but you know, he was a former advertising copywriter, so I share some of his DNA and I feel comfortable ripping on someone who makes way more money than I do. James Patterson, he comes out with a new book, he’s really
Tracy Hazzard I didn’t know you were in advertising.
DP Knudten Oh yeah, yeah. I’m, I’m an old copywriter, accent on the old part. But James Patterson, he comes out with a book and it’s an instant bestseller. And if you’ll notice on a lot of his, well all of his books now it’s James Patterson in 50-point type over the title with down at the bottom in 20-point type with Joe Blow who actually wrote the book. And here’s the thing, James Patterson, and again, this is my humble opinion, please, this, we live in a litigious society. This is neither slander nor libel, it’s my opinion based on what I view as a human being.
James Patterson is using AI in the form of another carbon-based human being to do the typing of the book. He’s already got in his head the plot line, the characters, the locations, all of these things. James Patterson has ready to go. He brings in his collaborator, gives him a download of a set of prompts, and then says, go write the book and then I’ll, I’ll review it and we’ll edit from there. And this is not to say, the book is not James Patterson’s, it’s that James Patterson is an actual working model of how people are gonna be working with AI in the not too distant future.
Tracy Hazzard Well you come out a, it’s amazing ghostwriting world, right? And I come out of a ghost-designing world, like that’s where I came from. So I would design product for Martha Stewart for big brands like Costco and Walmart and things like that. So I understood this model of like staying behind the scenes and letting the brand do the marketing and the heavy lifting. But you still had to have the brilliance of the structure of what this thing was going to be, how it was gonna serve the world. And that cannot be done by the ai. That has to be done by the guide. So you can’t have a brand marketing arm or you can have a brand that’s coming up with the thought leadership, right?
DP Knudten And the key is the thought leadership. I mean, if you can be a thought leader instead of a simply what you referred to earlier as a thought follower, that is key. And the thing is, what people need to understand is no one expects you to be a thought leader in something you don’t know about. What do you know? Not just a little bit, but your entire career is based on it or whatever else. You can be a thought leader in whatever that niche happens to be and be incredibly effective. Do you have any specific clients that you deal with that are good examples of thought leaders in areas that people would not necessarily think of when they think of thought leaders?
Tracy Hazzard I’ve thought leaders in like millennial home buying, like that just seems like buying a first home. David Sedona, he’s a brilliant podcaster. How to buy a home brilliant thought leader in tapping into that millennial mindset and getting them to shift it and understand it and then giving them the tools, the tactics, the resources and everything that they need to make a decision for themselves if buying a home is right for them. Like that’s such a niche area and such a, but such a great model in terms of giving the tools that are necessary to make choices on your own. I have thought leaders who are big names, you’ve probably heard of like, you know, people who’ve been out there in the, uh, I’m gonna call them the OGs in the entrepreneur space who like wrote those early books and went on those, those big speaking tours and they aren’t making it because their information is left on that stage.
And it never got reduced to the written word. It never got into Google. There are videos never got cataloged that never made it into a digital searchable world. So today’s young generation can’t find them. Yeah. So they think they’re famous still in their writing on those laurels, but their name recognition, their theories are still being used and built on by those social media influencers you are referring to because they’re not thought leaders, right? They’re building it on stuff that they’ve heard they read or whatever, but they, their ideas are getting lost in the shuffle. They’re getting lost in the shuffle because they didn’t understand how to play the bot game. The search engine is a bot. And I always say that if you do not have your digital authority in place, then your expert authority, your brand authority is never going to come through.
DP Knudten You’re the tree that falls in the forest—and no one’s watching or hears it—so you don’t make a sound. I’m, I’m as big at fault as that, as anybody because I am a content creator who is not good about content in broadcasting in, in a lot of ways. I mean, I can point to my books and my podcast and stuff like that, but I’m not even optimizing those as far as they should be optimized. Why? Because I’m uh, a lot of work. It’s a lot of work and I don’t have a lot of time interest, bandwidth, energy, you name it.
Tracy Hazzard That’s why I have a business, DP. So like, you know, exactly, because you’re not alone, right? Like that’s why there’s so many people. I mean, it’s why I have a podcast production company called Potties, which is, you know, the, the bench factor is the podcast that goes with that. But Podetize.com was born because people are saying, I don’t wanna do what you did, so I don’t wanna do all that work. Can you just do it for me? And that’s literally, we went from 10 to over 1200 clients from that model because people don’t wanna do all that optimization, they don’t wanna do that work.
And the hardest part is, is like yes, you can learn it and I am happy to teach it to you, but the reality is you can’t keep up either who can keep up with the tagging changes on YouTube and the changes to how SEO’s working on Google today, right? It’s all too much for you to be an expert in. That’s what the AI is gonna be for. That’s what resources and service bureaus and marketing agencies that you work with. That’s the expertise that you need to buy and pay for the deep knowledge so that you keep shifting and staying on top of the algorithms.
DP Knudten Yeah. And that’s a constant battle that, and that’s why you need warriors on your side. If you weren’t that warrior yourself. And let’s face it, if you’re out there actually being the thought leader, that requires a lot of time to actually build the database to generate those thoughts, if you will. When it comes down to best times to post or how to tag or any of that stuff. You don’t need to be a genius to do it, but you need someone diligent, disciplined, and very, very skilled at it. And that sounds what you guys are about.
Tracy Hazzard Yeah, it’s all what I’m about. I mean this is the thing that I found over time. It’s almost everything follows these three rules. You have to be consistent and constant in it. If you were writing a column back in the old days of newspapers, you had to post it every week on Sunday or whatever that was, if you weren’t consistent and constant, you didn’t keep up your audience, you didn’t keep up your brand, you didn’t keep up your followers, it didn’t happen. You lost your readers. So consistent and constant is the one principle that is first and foremost. The second principle is that people aren’t you. So even though your preferred method might be talking here on the podcast, they might be video watchers, they might be readers. And having everything in multi-format multimedia today is so easy. It’s used to be so hard. But today it’s easy to do that.
And so really at, at the end of the day, you’re missing out on a market, you’re missing out on an opportunity to help someone learn about you, learn about your ideas and gain some knowledge for themselves if you aren’t publishing it out in all the different media types. And then the third thing that I really think is at the end of the day, I can’t make you record. I tell this to my clients all the time, I can’t make you do these things. I can’t give you ideas for your show. You have to do that. That is the one part I refuse to do for you. Because you know your business, you know your expertise, you know your thought leadership. You just need to do it and take the time to do that part. So that’s the part you have to live in that, in that brand authority.
DP Knudten I wanna remind longtime listeners to this podcast and also people who might have picked up my book, that there’s a concept that I learned from Jay Baer and I’m, you know, he’s a brilliant guy. I don’t know if he invented it or if he’s just one of the many people who use it very effectively, but I gave it a a name so that it’s easier to handle or give it a handle so that people can understand exactly what I’m talking about. And I call it the Content Cascade. Now in Jay’s case, what he does is he does a video and he waxes eloquent for whatever amount of time he’s waxing eloquent. And that becomes the master that then cascades down into multiple different channels and multiple different forms.
So his live video, which typically isn’t fully scripted, it may have copy points that he riffs on, but he’ll take that transcript and then turn it into a cleaned-up, edited blog post that then is sliced and diced into countless different snippets and other things that live interview the audio is then taken and that’s sliced and diced and all that other stuff. So if you think about it, Jay Bear is this executive chef that is creating the recipe and the menu, but he’s got a whole sous chef class of people working with him to get this stuff done and out there. And that is key, especially for people who are genuinely thought leaders, not thought regurgitators.
Tracy Hazzard There’s a big, big difference there. Absolutely.
DP Knudten Oh my god. And that’s…
Tracy Hazzard What, yeah, that’s what you know, and this day and age, it’s like if you can start with the long form, I know that there’s short-form videos really popular, I think we’re gonna get tired of it if that’s my prediction on this. I already hearing that from even the younger generation that they’re a little sick of the short-form videos. So I think it’s gonna happen faster than you think. And so the long form is still gonna be really valuable. But if you go from video to audio to blog to social share and you do them all optimized for each one of those media types, that sounds like an overwhelming lot of work. But the reality is, is that the power of what you did of creating that one piece of content was actually the hard, the other stuff you can sub out, you can take a course, you can figure this out, you can put into a system, hopefully one day you can just get the AI to do it for you. Right?
And just getting through all of that model, but that’s what my business was built on. This idea of taking it from video all the way to social share, doing it in seven to 10 days and doing it at a low cost that makes it cost effective for you to say, my time isn’t worth that. Yeah. And I, you know, that this is my time is so valuable that I, that that is a waste of my time to do, to do all that.
DP Knudten Well color me intrigued, Tracy. Hmm. You say you have this menu of services or perhaps packages of services. Can you give me, let’s just say one word, a I don’t know, a podcaster of several years who only has time to get the podcast done. Can maybe slap it into script or, you know, Otter i a whatever it’s called Otter ai o ao io otter io…
Tracy Hazzard Yeah. One of those, uh, transcription things. Yeah.
DP Knudten <laugh>, yeah. I can get it transcribed, but let’s, let’s just say one word to provide someone on your team that I don’t know, that box of proteins, carbohydrates and fats and, and all that stuff. What can you, a good menu, what can you, what can, yeah, what can you make out of that? And like if you were to, if I were to ask you, could you put a dollar number on that? Like is it a monthly leaf? What?
Tracy Hazzard So we, we decided early on that we didn’t believe in monthly subscriptions because it put people in this mindset of like pressure of like, I’m not using this. And people were hating that model of like, feeling like they left stuff on the table. So we went through the yoga sessions model, so like it’s based on, on the number of episodes you wanna produce, cuz some people produce 25 in a month and some people produce two. So we wanted to give them a range to do that. So we do this in packages and when you buy a larger package you get a lower price. That’s just how we do it per episodes. So as low as $199 an episode, you can do video, audio, blog and social share and you’ll get five different types of social share graphics and clips and other things like that. But you can have up to seven total cuz you’ll get different sizes as well.
So it’s like pretty broad. And then there are technology pieces that we have as well, which, you know, when you get to a size of show like you have with so many hundreds of episodes, it’s really hard for someone new to you to follow you because they have a hard time filtering through all this stuff. So they get frustrated and that you don’t binge on everything. They just listen to your most current episodes and then they’re missing out on some great information they might wanna get back to. So we’ve created all these technological tools in the way that we host podcasts and syndicate them, playlist them, show cast them so that you can use, do like landing pages with them, create support for your book from your podcast episodes. That might be the right ones, things like that. So we try to add the technology pieces and the innovation of that with the production pieces so that they go hand in hand together to do what you want it to do for your business and your brand.
DP Knudten That sounds very interesting. You know, cuz again, who’s got all the time, who does to do all this stuff? Nobody does, except for the people who are like ducks floating across the pond. They see there’s…
Tracy Hazzard A lot of action under there,
DP Knudten <laugh>, there’s a lot of feet going, you know, like, uh, uh, pick whoever your flavor of the week is, or not even the week, but whoever you’d like to follow. Like I’m gonna pull out Sailing la Vagabond on YouTube, this beautiful couple from Australia, sail the world and do all this stuff and, uh, it just looks magical and wonderful. Well, I know how much work that takes and oh my lord, they work their butts off for everything they get.
So the question is, for someone who doesn’t make that their a hundred percent full-time day job, how can you still get the benefit that’s afforded by always on 24/7, the social universe? It gives you access to everybody on the face of the globe who’s on social and who isn’t. Yeah. Anybody who buys certainly is on social. And if you aren’t playing in that space, I’m gonna say you’re missing out. But the, but at the same time, I’ll also say you don’t have to do everything, but…
Tracy Hazzard No, and I still agree. Yeah, go ahead. Like I, I did a big a coaching call early in the year or late in the year about choosing one social media platform to start with because you don’t have your messaging right, you don’t have your systems right. You have a lot to dial in at once. So when you do one thing really well and you figure it out, like you’re doing the podcast and you’ve figured it out, you’ve got a model for this when you’re ready to move and float it into the next thing.
There’s some new learning, some new systems, some new tweak, some new things that need to happen there. But it’s not a reinvention of everything. And when you’re going out and li you know, shotgunning everywhere at once, you can’t figure out what’s working and what’s not. You don’t have the opportunity. It, it’s a true design of experiment out there and you’ve gotta make sure that you dial that in before you, before you continue and move forward into the next phase.
DP Knudten Yeah. As listeners to this podcast will recall the concept of a style stage, what is your style and what stage is best for you? That certainly aligns with your pick one and do it really well, at least to get started. You know, one of the metaphors I use all the time, a little too much is the idea of going to the gym. If you go to the gym and pick up a barbell wing, 500 pounds, you’ll kill yourself and you’ll never go back. But if you go to the gym, you’ll walk in, you grab that five pound weight, do five repetitions, walk out and say, I feel good about myself. I actually got it done. Maybe not to the Olympic level, but I got it done. Well guess what? You come back the next day and you pick up that five pound weight and go, you know what, I’m gonna grab the 10 pound, maybe a little bit more weight and I’m gonna keep going and I’m gonna keep going. And getting stronger and stronger every day by doing, by showing up and doing it can be very difficult. And as I alluded to at the beginning of this, this is episode 200 and, I don’t know, 15 or something like that weekly, with the exception of a couple of hiatus. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m a little tired, a little bit curious about has this seen it’s highlight, you know, is best.
Tracy Hazzard That’s something that happens every podcaster. Like I, I try to get my, my clients and, and people that I counsel on podcasting, it’s like, try to get a look at every hundred or so because if you don’t make it to a hundred, you really haven’t given it enough effort. And I, and I say that with all love that like, there’s so many people who quit early and just haven’t given enough time. But if you’ve given it one to two years and that’s a hundred episodes easily, it’s like you, you’ve given it enough effort to say, is this really working for me? Have I seen the benefits? Have I tried a bunch of different things? So you’ve certainly given it that, but then you hit 200 and you’re now questioning as like, why isn’t it working? What’s going on here? Where, where’s that thing is before you give it up, get a professional audit cuz you’ve now invested quite a few years and you’ve now invested and you actually have more value in it than you think.
And I think sometimes just getting this pro more professional audit view, this idea of being able to look at the value of what you’ve created and maybe the value of opportunity you haven’t taken advantage of yet, might re either reengage your passion for it or at least maximize the value of what you already did. And that’s so much like, you know, I was referring to some of these OGs in the speaking space and the writing about entrepreneurship space and you know, one of ’em had 800 video, they were behind a membership, eight, 800 videos and they were, you know, under 10 minute videos, but 800 of them. And I said, you know what? I think my best recommendation to you is to put ’em out on YouTube, blog them on your website and create this fantastic search and dynamic and then invite everybody into your mastermind cuz that’s what he had as an art of it.
Tracy Hazzard And just invite them in, open it up outta the membership gate. Boy did he not wanna let that go? Yeah. But the value of moving that out into the public domain was going to 10 X’s brand recognition in a new generation. Yeah. And is missing the value and opportunity there. So sometimes you’re not gonna wanna do what they recommend or what someone recommends, but it’s a good idea to get that, that expertise. One of the things that I always hate is this idea that you’re three feet from gold. And my frustration about this three feet from Gold model is not that you were, you, you were three feet from gold. It’s that that guy never got an expert to go and check this out and give him some advice. The idea of three feet from Gold is that you’re supposed to persevere, right? And you’re supposed to just keep going, but the guy gives up, never asks for an expert and someone else comes in, finds out they were three feet from the vein, right?
You should get an expert in before you abandon something. And it is okay to abandon something. I absolutely feel that. But you should get an expert in to evaluate you, evaluate what you’ve built, evaluate what you’ve done. I mean, it’s just so important to have a look at it from an outside perspective because when we’re in our bubble of doing it, it is overwhelming, it is exhausting, you know? So I’m on 2,600 episodes and interviews that I’ve done in the past eight years. So 2,600 to 3000, somewhere in there. I, I stopped counting last year, but somewhere around there. And I’m not tired of it, but I was tired of my topics. I did 650 episodes on 3D printing. If you asked me to do the 3D printing one again, I’d probably scream,
DP Knudten Hey, non-fiction branders, it’s me, dp. Again, we’re gonna leave it here for this week, but don’t worry, Tracy’s back again with next week’s episode where we’ll talk more about how we can really extract all the value from the stuff that we’re doing online. So be sure to tune in next week. As always, this episode is brought to you by my book, non-fiction brand, discover Craft, and communicate the completely true, completely you brand you already are, which is available over at the house of Bezos amazon.com. Just search NONFICTION BRAND and KNUDTEN, k n u d as in David, T as in Tom, E as in Edward, N as in Nothing. And you’ll be able to get that delivered to your door, courtesy of the folks over at Amazon. That’s it for this week. I’m your host, DP Knudten, and I’ll be talking at you again next week with my special guest, Tracy Hazzard. Bye bye.
NONFICTION BRAND podcast episode #213 premiered on Monday, April 24, 2023, and is available wherever fine podcasts are FREE!
