Join Kim Parkinson for a live podcast coaching session with Dr. Lori Bruce, where simple technical fixes reveal game-changing growth opportunities. From cover art specifications to SEO descriptions, discover how small optimizations can dramatically improve your podcast's discoverability. This coaching-style episode demonstrates practical strategies every spiritual entrepreneur can implement to amplify their authentic message and reach more ideal listeners.

Meet Dr. Laurie Bruce: https://www.drlauriebruce.com/

Podcast Growth Clarity Call https://kpcreativemedia.com/growth-clarity-call

Podcasting For Spiritual Women Newsletterhttps://kpcreativemedia.com/podnews

Hello there, beautiful. I am so excited about today's episode. So it is another coaching style episode.

I'm going to be trying to bring these to you every Thursday for the rest of the summer.

And I am super excited because these episodes, if you have not been doing a coaching style episode in your podcast, I highly, highly, highly recommend them.

It's really a win, win, win for everyone on these bits that, I mean, just by you get a podcast episode, you get to show your authority, they get some free advice, they get your expert eyes on whatever it is that you're doing in this particular case, their podcast. And so it's just a really great way to really showcase what you do, how you do it.

And, and, and again, they walk away with something tangible and something that they can do too. So it's kind of a fun, kind of a fun little episode to do. And actually I absolutely love them.

So this is our third Thursday doing them and I have a couple more in the bank to go for hopefully the rest of the summer. And yeah, super excited to bring this episode to you.

So I am interviewing Dr. Laurie Bruce from, from Both sides of the Coach, and she has already had one of these coaching style episodes done before by my coach, Adam Shively of Podcasting Business School. So when she talks about Adam a little bit later on, she's already had him take a look at some of this.

And so it's just a, it's, this is just an addition to that. So I, I kind of stayed away from some of the things that him and her talked about, meaning she has some amazing podcast titles.

So I can, can pretty much guarantee they worked on that. And the name of her podcast, they added on an extension, or in my case, what I call like a pre extension.

So it goes before the name of the podcast and they did a really great job with it. So we did stay away from those and we focused more on other bits that she needed help with. And I'm super excited to bring this to you.

So I hope you learn a few things and I hope that you just take a listen in and use those for your podcast as well. All right, onto the show. All right, so I have Dr. Laurie Bruce here and she has a podcast and it is from both sides of the couch.

So, Laurie, could you tell me a little bit about what your podcast is about and how you have renamed it?

Yes. So thank you for having me, Kim.

I'm a clinical psychologist and I have a podcast called From Both sides of the Couch and where I came up with that concept is the idea that as a psychologist, I love teaching. I love sharing skills related to managing our emotions, being mindful, being present, increasing our joy, decreasing our anxiety and our stress.

A lot of things around relationships and authenticity, authenticity, self, compassion. These are all the things that I love to teach, I love to share with my clients. And of course, there are also things that I'm working on myself.

And so I try really hard to be transparent with my clients about my own struggles with mental health over the years, my own struggles that I've had with depression and anxiety. And so I've personally been in therapy since my late teens, kind of on and off throughout pretty much all my adulthood.

And I feel like it's a really essential component of just being human. I wish that everybody would be in therapy, and I especially think all therapists should be in therapy.

So part of my goal is not only to teach people about these life and emotional skills, but also just to destigmatize therapy. I think the younger generation has done a great job of destigmatizing it, but we still have a long way to go.

So that's kind of where the title came in.

But in my coaching, I've learned that just because your title might be consistent or catchy or you might love it, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to help you get people to find you. And so at the core of what I do is really teaching about mindfulness and being present.

And so I changed the title to reflect the core concept of mindfulness in my title so that if people are searching then for things related to mindfulness, maybe they'd be more likely to find me.

I love that. I do. Yeah. And I. I feel like I am also an avid therapy goer and I also believe that other people should do it.

I've actually been seeing the same therapist as long as my children have been alive.

Wow.

She's such a gift. Yeah, she's a rare gift. Yep. Absolutely amazing. And I. I talk to her once a month and she really.

The nice part is, is they know everything about you too. You don't have to re. Talk about it over and over again. Although that can be helpful.

But, yeah, it's also nice when you mention somebody's name and she's like, yeah, I know who that is.

Exactly. Exactly. You don't have to constantly give context and background and all these different things. Yes. Yeah.

I have just a small handful of clients that I've been seeing for almost as long. I've been practicing for 25 years. So I have a very small handful of clients that I've been seeing for most of that time. And it is.

It's a gift also for the therapist, you know, to watch that person grow and get married, have children, try different careers. I mean, it's really. It is. It's an honor to. To walk that journey with clients. It really is. I feel very blessed.

Oh, that's wonderful. I love that. I absolutely love that. And I do feel like you. Everybody needs a therapist, somebody to talk to.

Yes. Yes. Everybody should be in therapy. State.

State law. I love it.

Yeah.

Perfect. All right, so I did take a look at your podcast, and I love all of you, all of your content, so I love that. Love that.

And also your names of each of your episodes are on point, so way to go. So the name of your podcast is On Point, and the names of your episodes are on point, too. Like, everybody loves the. You know, the.

The keyword rich at the very beginning, and then you have a couple of how to's or navigates and things like that, and those are things that people are searching for. So great job. Excellent. I love those.

Thank you. That's. It's harder than you'd think, man. Coming up with a title that doesn't feel spammy.

You know, that's one of the things that is always in the back of my mind. I want this to be ethical. I want this to be appropriate. I don't want clickbait. I. I don't want to lead with the negative.

Even though, you know, supposedly that gets a lot more clicks. It's a challenge, I think, finding just a title that feels in alignment with what you're wanting to put out there.

Yeah. Yeah. And you are right. I don't like to do any of the negative stuff either. But for some reason, that does always seem to get the higher numbers.

So, yeah, people. People like to see that. That juxtaposition of, like, good versus evil. And so the evil side sometimes wins.

That's true. Yes.

Be the Scorpio side of people. Depends on your zodiac sign.

Right?

So. All right, so I also took a look. One thing I did want to note now. I love the name change your cover art. Have you talked about your cover art before?

As far, I have not. Love any feedback that you can give. I'm open to it. This is definitely not my area at all, so.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. So your cover art has remained the same as your.

From both sides of the couch, which is perfectly fine because I know that you did a title extension for the actual name. I would, even though your title is nice and big and bold, your picture is kind of really little.

So if normally I would say don't put your picture in there or put your picture off to the side.

But, but in this particular case, I do like how big your name is, I would maybe suggest putting another little line about because it's health tips for women.

Maybe like another line that says like health tips for women in there and move you down just a little bit and maybe get you out of the box, put you on the page rather than in the box on the. And I also took a look at Cast Feed Validator and it says now it could be wrong, but it says that your cover art is not the appropriate size.

It's only 500 pixels by 500 pixels, which now they're suggesting 3,000 by 3,000, which would make your picture that I'm seeing on my screen pop more. Because right now you're kind of in the dark, like in your image itself.

So I think increasing that those pixels would really help so that they can see your beautiful face and you can, you can really see you, who you are. Because that's, that's ultimately, you know, like you are your brand. You're creating a personal brand here and, and people are knowing who you are.

So I think, I think just having that little image of yourself in a better, in a better, higher pixel rate would really help too.

So, so I appreciate that very, very much. I have struggled a lot because this is not my area at all. And I've thought about, well, how do I even outsource that?

Like how for somebody who really does know how to do that better than me, how do you outsource things like that?

Yeah, so my suggestion here is, you know, because it's a one off project, right? You're just looking at cover art and you're just looking at making your image a little bit bigger, but also keeping the words with a little thing.

I would just go to Fiverr. I bet it would cost you like 25 bucks at fiverr. You know, because you're talking like one you really don't need. You want it to be a certain size.

You want it to be like 3,000 pixels by 3,000 pixels. You know, maybe you want to change the color or not. You know, that's totally your style. I don't know what your brand colors are.

Make sure that the name of it is nice and big. Add a little banner that says health tips for women on it.

Take you out of the box and maybe add you right to the Bottom and, and just tell them, you know, give them, tell them to give me some suggestions on this, you know.

Yeah, love that. Here's the.

Here's the recording. Can you make some suggestions based on this?

And typically they do.

Typically they do. They're happy to do it. So perfect.

And that's exactly what I need.

Yeah, it's gonna be. It's gonna be relatively inexpensive for one, One image. That's.

Yeah, it's not.

That's a square too. So.

Yes. Awesome. Thank you very.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so the other thing that I also did take a look at and is your podcast description.

Now you have, you have quite the, quite the big paragraph there in your description. I would love to see a few more keywords in there now. Actually, I would love to have it start with a keyword. So you start with I am Dr. Laurie Bruce.

I would love to see it start with, you know, mindfulness or something, mental health or something like that, and go right into it.

First, you can introduce yourself in the second paragraph, but in that first sentence, in that first one there, add some really impactful SEO keyword rich words. And that way, when people are searching on the podcast players, that's popping up because the first way is of course, the name of the podcast itself.

The second is the actual podcast description. And then we already talked about your podcast titles are on point. So kudos to you on that. So love that.

Oh, that's very helpful. That's an easy fix. I can definitely do that.

Yeah. And a lot of the fixes that we have are just pretty easy.

And even the podcast cover art, if you don't like Fiverr, you can go to Upwork, you know, or you can play along. You can play at it in Canva if you really want to. One night.

Yeah, well, that's what I did for. For what I have. And again, I just feel like, you know what? I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Like, I totally get it. This is as good as it gets.

So I would love to have someone who. This is what they do for a living. Just give me a little consultation and throw it out there.

So I think it's. I think that's perfect.

And it's a great way to do it too, is just, it's just get somebody that knows exactly what they're doing and just tell them, I just need a PNG and a JPEG of this and that's it. So. And the last little bit that I would tell you is in this, what I'm looking at is you don't title or, I'm sorry, you don't number your episodes.

Is there a reason why you don't. Do you. Do you choose not to for a reason?

I think I did. I. I believe I started out numbering them, and then I did a rebrand a year plus ago, Got a divorce, wanted to change my name.

I changed the title of my podcast. I changed pretty much my entire freaking life. So I wanted my podcast to reflect that. And so.

And I had deleted some old episodes because it no longer felt aligned with me. And so I think then I thought, it doesn't make sense to keep numbering if I ever want to do that again.

So my suggestion here is maybe now is a good time to go back and number them.

Only because it's so much easier for somebody to find an episode if you're saying to somebody, you know, oh, I have an excellent episode on Perimenopause, because who needs that? I know you guys can't see it, but I'm waving my hand. If you need an episode on Perimenopause, it's episode number 054.

Or, you know, something like that.

So much easier to find than maybe going in and trying to type that in and search for it because it might get convoluted with others or, you know, and also it's. It's easier for people that are hard of sight to be able to look up the number. They can voice number.

They can be like, I'd like to listen to episode 054, rather than having to remember. Having to go and remember. I'd like to listen to episode. What was it called again? Oh, Navigating Midlife. Yeah.

Oh, good. So I can go back and change the title. And basically I'm just starting with the number Episode.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

And if you feel like you have old ones that maybe are not really. Not really pertinent or whatever, you. You don't have to number those. Like, the ones that you had before.

Even if you had numbered them, you might have just omitted them altogether and not had to renumber everything. Like, it's okay if somebody's like, hey, I think I'm missing episode four. You'd be like, no, you're not missing episode four. I took it out. You know.

Yeah, that was my thing. And thinking about it now is kind of like, well, that's silly. Who's gonna be keeping track of my episode numbers? And. Yeah, but.

Okay, that's really helpful.

Well, honestly, a super fan might, so that's. That's kind of cool. If you have a super fan. They might be like, hey, wanted to listen. I wanted to listen to all. And you didn't have an episode four.

But you know what? It's just an easy. That. That would be actually a beautiful thing if you didn't.

Because if they reached out to you and they were like, where's your episode four? That's a warm lead.

You're like, yes, for sure. You know my stuff better than I do. Yeah.

Yeah. That is hot. Like, come on into my circle. Let me introduce you to my world some more. Exactly.

Anything to get those listeners to go from listening to actually, like, reaching out to you. Like, chef's kiss on that. Right. So, yeah. So, yeah. Maybe accidentally on purpose, not number a couple of them.

Yes. See what happens. Do a little test.

Yeah, Right. Why not? Be fun to see. So, yeah, I love that.

Great. Thank you.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I know. I know that you have done a little bit of advertising as far as on social.

When Adam, I did a coaching session with him that he and I recorded, and he really was talking about the importance of newsletters and the importance of consistency and changing the name. And so I've been doing that, and I feel like at this point, I need just a little more clarity about what my next steps are to.

To attract more listeners.

Yeah. So did he talk to you about his 72 hour rule and the whole idea of how to do the marketing in the 72 hours? Am I repeating myself there?

So I'm aware that he has.

He has talked about that. Have I done that? No, but I know it's not us.

Yeah. And I will say, you know, like, I have a va. And so she. I create. I. I pull out the audios that I want her to do, and then she creates the audiograms.

I don't actually have any reels that I do myself, but I don't mind going live.

So I have my own Facebook group and I go live there, and I have another couple of Facebook groups that I. I actually publish that I'm able to, like, I paid to play type thing on those Facebook groups so I can go live on those. And so I will do that. I've never gone live on Instagram. I don't know why. I just haven't gotten there yet. That's okay.

And then I also do what I consider companion, like little webinars or masterclasses that I post on YouTube to try to get more, you know, more people into my world, into my algorithm. And I will say, so I've been doing like one A month for the last. Since April. One a month since April. And.

And I have been seeing some growth on my YouTube channel just based on just. And just the one a month. And it's not like anything that I'm not already talking about.

Yeah.

So that. That could be definitely something. And. And it's not even. Like, in my case, I did.

In one of them, I did have some slides, but sometimes I don't have any. It's just me talking. So.

Yeah.

You know, like. And no. No like, big editing on it either.

Yeah. So not a huge time commitment.

You're investing, and then you just pop it up there. And. And in my. In my. Because I am. Do podcast editing and whatnot. I have a lot of different programs where I can. I can pop that in.

It kind of spits out. This is a good title for you. Why don't you make it look like this or something? So I do some things like that.

So there's definitely a different algorithm and a different way to do it with YouTube. So there's this kind of, like, two different, like, schools of thought, but sometimes they're the same. So it's kind of another.

Another little bit there. And I'm not really big into TikTok, so.

Yeah, no, I don't even have it. I don't have it on my phone or anything like that. I'm not into that either, so.

Yeah.

But you know what else could be really good, and I actually have been really thinking about, like, getting some of my past episodes out into this too, is I've talked to a couple of people over the last couple weeks, and they're doing Pinterest, which you're like, oh, yes. You know, that's for, like, decor and things like that, Right? Evergreen.

Yes. Yes. Jenna Kutcher. I don't know if. Are you familiar with Jenna Kutcher? I purchased actually one of her programs on Pinterest, Interest.

I didn't go all the way through with it. You know, I have a tendency to do that, purchase these courses and don't always finish it. But, yeah, at one point I was like, maybe I'll do that.

Because one of the things I really wrestle with with social media is that we have a lot of psychological research that shows social media is really bad for our mental health.

So I feel a little hypocritical when I think about, you know, creating this space online for where I feel like, in some ways, that's actually not helping people. So I struggle a little bit with how to find balance in that area. I want to market, but I want to do it in a way that feels good.

Aligned. Yeah.

And, you know, if you think of it as Pinterest is more of a search engine than social media, because realistically, people aren't talking to each other there.

Right.

So that could be a good segue for you, having that, like. Oh, that's not really social media. It's just.

Yeah, yeah, that's really true. That's really true.

Kind of maybe a little bit more. Did you just change your title? Did. Did you just change your. Did you just.

No, I didn't do anything.

Oh, my goodness. Okay, so. That is so crazy. Okay, so Apple, I didn't even notice this before.

I thought maybe you did it as we were talking, which is kind of weird because.

So Apple has just from both sides of the couch with your picture in the middle, and then it says Dr. Laurie Bruce at the bottom and very tiny letters it says clinical psychologist, mindfulness coach. But when I looked on POD Link, it actually says, from both sides of the couch with clinical psychologist Dr. Laurie Bruce, your picture.

And then mindfulness and mental health strategies for women. So that might be something to look at. And maybe that also could be because the pixels are incorrect and Apple's not picking it up.

Oh, okay.

I bet that is exactly what that is because. Yeah, I just got surprised because I was like, wait a second, that's not the same podcast cover art I just looked at.

Yeah. Oh, fascinating. Okay. All right, that's helpful. It's all this behind the scenes tech stuff that I swear is just going to be the death of me.

That's helpful to hear that. So I. By updating that, then I won't have any discrepancies. Anyway.

Yeah, I mean, it looks the same. I can definitely tell it was you. I didn't get that right at first.

So I was definitely, once I looked over, I was like, wait a second, did you just do this? But it's. I believe this is. This is just my.

My opinion and my expert opinion here is that Apple did not update your latest podcast cover art based on the fact that it was not the right size. So.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, so fix that and, and, and get that up there and then. And then it'll all look the same, which is great. So.

Yes, yes. Awesome. Oh, good catch. Thank you.

Absolutely, Absolutely. So, yeah, do you have any questions for me? Is there anything else I can help you with on this?

I'm really excited about the idea of leaning into Pinterest.

I know we've talked in our coaching group about Threads, and I do feel a little more comfortable in trying to learn more about threads because it does feel less. I don't know, less addictive or something. I'm not sure what the word is, but I do like this idea of.

Think of Pinterest as more like a search engine, and that feels comfortable to me. I don't have any ambivalence about doing things like that, and so I think I need to really take that to heart and lean into that a little bit more.

Yeah. With Pinterest being basically just a search engine, that's evergreen. So basically it's just like, you know, your podcast is.

Podcast is evergreen as well. And so this is just going to be like, almost like a marriage made in heaven right there.

So with the two of them, and there's no social, like, hey, right, like that over there. So.

Yes, that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the. All the comments and the negative comments and then people spamming it and, you know, all this.

That's a lot to manage, basically. And, yeah, it doesn't. Doesn't feel good. So I could definitely lean more into the. Into the Pinterest.

I think that would sounds like a better fit for me.

Yeah. And there is a Pinterest scheduler. I think it's called Tailwind, and there is a free version of it too. So you could.

Because you've already got a plethora of episodes, you could start creating, like, just a pin. And basically a pin is, I think, like four by five. So it's a portrait style, and it's not complete, like real big, like R E, L big. Right.

But four by five, and you could create them for the old episodes and have them just start publishing up there based on that. So, yeah, it's.

What was the name of that again? That schedule window. Okay.

T A I L. Yeah. Tailwind, I believe, is what it is. And yeah, they. I think they have a free version.

So if you just got one pot, sorry, one Pinterest and you just want to upload to that, I think it's. It's a good option for you to do that.

Beautiful lot.

A little bit more insight in there.

Yes. Yeah. Lots of really great suggestions, Kim. I appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. And thank you for. For being on today. I super appreciate it.

Same. Same as well.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Podcasting for Spiritual Women. If you would like more strategy and tips and same tricks on how to make your podcast better, I recommend that you join my newsletter list.

You can find that@kpcreativemedia.com newsletter until next time.