121. One Thing You Can Do During Episode Planning That Will Make Promotion Way Easier (And More Effective)

Sara Whittaker 0:01

Your Podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business. But how do you manage it all bring in new listeners, and convert those listeners into customers. That's what this show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whittaker, classroom teacher turn podcast manager. And I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. Hello, hello, welcome back to another episode of podcasting for educators, I just want to remind you that we are in the middle of pod Tober. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, we are celebrating two years of this podcast this month. And one of the ways that we are celebrating is I have created a pod Tober scorecard for you that you can grab at podcasting for educators.com/scorecard. And the scorecard has a bunch of different options of tasks that you can do. They're all really simple and really quick. When you complete these tasks, you get points. And when you get points, those translate into entries for a giveaway that I'm doing at the end of the month. So make sure that you grab your scorecard, get it filled out by October 31. All of the directions and details are on that scorecard. And the best part is you don't have to put in your email address to get it just go to podcasting for educators.com/scorecard. All right, let's all state the obvious podcasting is a lot of work, it is well worth it, in my opinion, but it's worth nonetheless, you've got the episode planning, the recording, the editing, the scheduling, you feel like you can breathe once that's done, but then you realize you still have one more step each and every week. And that is actually promoting the episode that you just put out. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news here. But Gone are the days when you could just slap up a new episode graphic on Instagram and call it a day. Same template every single week, just changing out the episode number and the episode title. It just doesn't quite cut it anymore. It doesn't hurt. It still spreads awareness around your show. But we all know that that is not the kind of post that's getting much if any engagement on Instagram. And the same goes for your email. I know that this is something that many of you are constantly trying to figure out how do I share my episode in my email in a way that people actually care about and could maybe result in some clicks? Well, it's the same thing as Instagram. If you're putting out an email every week, that's just sharing the same news that a new episode is out, you're probably not going to see much engagement, I am glad that you're emailing that oh, that's a huge step in the right direction. And just know that you are well ahead of the game just by doing that. So what actually works when it comes to Episode permission. First, this really depends on the type of podcasts that you have. For example, if you have a like just for fun comedy, casual type of podcast, then what you share is going to look very different from an educational podcast. Since most of you listening are educators and have educational podcasts. Let's stick with that theme. If you have an educational podcast, where you are teaching something and most of your episodes, then pulling out one teaching point from the episode is going to be one way to promote your episodes really effectively. So let's look at an example. Let's say that your episode is titled five ways to build classroom community during the first month of school. Instead of doing a post on Instagram that just gives the title of the new episode letting people know that this new episode is out. Or even a carousel that lists out the five ways to build classroom community, you know, one on each slide. Instead of doing either of those things. Try creating a carousel post that just picks one of the five ways and goes a little bit deeper. For example, maybe one of these ways to build classroom community is to create a classroom agreement. So for your carousel, focus just on that maybe the first slide says something like how to create an effective classroom agreement or why are classroom agreements so important or why classroom agreements are the best thing that I did this year, something that's going to hook people in and let them know what this post is going to be about. And then the next few slides would give information it would teach something, maybe how to create a classroom agreement or why it's so important or what kind of results you've seen from creating a classroom agreement. And then the last slide could say something like, this is just one way to build classroom community during the first month of school. You can hear about four other ways inside episode 72 of the classroom community podcast. So you really want to hear hook people in with the content and the teaching, and then deliver the podcast episode at the end. Right? Think about what makes people stop and actually scroll or watch something when they're on Instagram, they want to be entertained, they want to be inspired. They want to be taught something. So how can you pull out one piece of your episode and deliver that to your audience in a way that's going to hook them in, you can use this exact same process with an Instagram reel. And you can do this same process in an email, if you want to kind of stretch out your content over the week. So maybe do a couple of posts that are centered around your episode. Another great strategy is to craft some sort of engagement question based on your episode content. Okay, so using the same example as before, about five ways to build a classroom community during the first month of school, maybe a question that you could turn into a post on Instagram or into a real on Instagram or into your Facebook group is? What is your favorite way to build community during the first month of school? Or what are some of the things that your class has included in your classroom agreements? So some kind of question that's easy enough for people to answer and will prompt them to actually comment on the post. Now, going back to what I was saying, at the beginning of this episode, what often happens is we get our episodes out, we get them scheduled and published. And then we think about promotion afterwards. And when it becomes time to create that social media post or write that email, we don't know what the heck to say, because our mind is somewhere else. Now we created or published this episode maybe days ago, or weeks ago. And now we're thinking about the promotion piece of it. And this idea is now out of our brain. And it's just like looking at a blank piece of paper you don't know, you don't know what to do, you don't know what to create, you don't know what to say. So here's a way to make this process much easier and much faster for you. After recording your episodes, I want you to write that in there. Write down one to two teaching points or engagement questions that you can take from your episode. Zoom in on and use for promotion when the time comes. If you use a content calendar, you can go straight into your content calendar, make a separate column for it on your calendar, jot down that note for yourself. Wednesday, I'm going to do an Instagram carousel, it's going to be four slides about creating classroom agreements. Or if you make your graphics in Canva, you could even go straight into your Canvas slides, I like to have kind of, I create new slides every month. So if my episodes going live in November, in my list of November slides, I can just go in and draft it. While it's fresh in your mind. You don't have to design it right then in there. If that's not your order of operations, but just get the idea down while it's hot. While it's fresh in your mind. You just recorded the episode, you can easily pick out one piece of that episode to focus on for promotion, and start small with this process. Make a goal for yourself. Okay, I'm going to try this out. I'm going to pick out one idea for socials. And I'm going to pick one idea for email. Okay, and remember, we want to think about something that's going to prompt engagement. So any type of question that people could answer, or a teaching point from your episodes, that's what we're looking for.

Sara Whittaker 8:38

Is seems really simple. But it can make a huge impact on the ease of promotional content creation, and it's going to save you brain power later down the road. I know that a lot of us do our planning in very different ways. Some of you back to your content, some of you go week to week, I think probably most of us and this is an assumption I make and I could totally be wrong. But I think most of us even if you're batching, your podcast content, I would be surprised if you're also batching your promotional content. At that same time, it would be amazing if you are and maybe some of you are doing that. But I would say most people probably aren't doing that. They're kind of taking care of the podcast part of things. And then they're thinking about promotion later. In episode 103. I talked about some AI platforms that I've used, and one of those was called Cass magic. I'll put a link in the show notes for it if you want to try it out. But basically, you upload your audio to it and it shoots out a bunch of different content. And one of the best ones in my opinion is labeled as a LinkedIn post. So it's giving you ideas specifically to use on LinkedIn. I don't use LinkedIn. I'm not on LinkedIn, but I really like what it generates for that because it always gives three big takeaways. or teachings from the episode. And this is perfect to use to create a carousel post, or even to include in your emails. So that would be something to try out if this is kind of challenging for you to get started with. If you have a transcript for your episodes, you could also always pop your transcript into chat GBT and ask it to use the transcript to generate content for a carousel on a specific topic. Okay, so try this out, try getting a couple ideas down right after recording your episode. So that when it comes time to create that promotional material, you're going to have ideas waiting for you. And they're going to be things that are hopefully going to engage your audience in a much better way than maybe the content that you're currently creating is. If this episode was helpful for you, I'd love for you to take a super quick screenshot of this episode on your phone, add it to your Instagram stories and tag me at podcasting for educators so that I know you are listening. And if you try out this process, if you create one of those carousels that I was talking about, definitely tag me in it or send it to me so I can take a look. And lastly, do not forget to grab your pod Tober scorecard at podcasting for educators.com/scorecard so that you can get entered into the giveaway. I'll catch you here next week. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. To keep this conversation going connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support and launching, managing or growing your podcast, check out my online course the podcasting for educators prep school at podcasting for educators.com/prep school. I'll see you here next time.

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