Rachel Brenke: Hey guys. Welcome to the Business Bites Podcast. I am your host Rachel Brenke, and this is Episode 75. We are gonna talk about three ways to succeed and protect yourself at podcasting. A podcast about a podcast, what a novel idea. But I know that many of you out there absolutely love podcasting, listening, being on it, being a guest, hosting your own, but of course you know me, I wanna make sure that you guys are being as protected as possible, because there’s so many legal issues that can happen. Now fundamentally, like I’ve talked about on other podcasts, you guys have intellectual property when you’re running a business. A podcast is a business. Whether you are a podcaster by title, as in that’s all you do is podcasting, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but I mean that as the main source of what you’re doing, and what you make money off of. Or, you can be more like me who uses podcasts as an avenue to deliver information and content to your audience, but you don’t necessarily sell podcasting. I don’t sell podcasting sponsorship spots. This is freemium content for you guys to learn quickly and to grow your business in a way that fits into your time schedule.
So we have those that are podcasters, and those that do podcasting as a supplement asset for your business. Either way, it’s really important that you guys listen to this episode. So let’s go ahead and kick in to the three ways to succeed and protect yourself. Most importantly, number one, probably not most importantly, because I’m probably gonna say that about every one of these steps, but the very first thing you guys need to keep attention to is having a proper work flow. Guys, this is something that is common sense. You have to have work flows in anything that you do in business, and podcasting is no different. Now there’s all sorts of formats of podcasting out there. There’s solo-casting, like I’m doing right now to you guys, there is the interview style which you guys have heard on the Business Bites some and it’s a very popular form of podcasting these days, or there’s more storytelling, which for me I kind of sprinkle in my stories in my solo-casting as well, but no matter what I do, I need to have a workflow. And work flows are particularly important if you’re having team members that are helping to do things for you, and you’re not the sole person that’s doing it, just to make sure that everything’s on task.
I do find that work flows, and tracking it in a system is extremely important when you are doing interview style podcasting and you are receiving information from your potential guests, and then getting them engaged and into the podcast and then getting information back out to them, you need to have a proper workflow. For us on our team, we utilize spreadsheet style. Now we did start by using Excel spreadsheets. We have since moved to Smartsheets, which is a more like automated extremely robust Excel on steroids. I absolutely love it. We absolutely enjoy utilizing it. We may evolve as technology changes, but for now we absolutely enjoy it. We have a tracker that identifies from the workflow upon inquiry, people inquiring either to a topic that they wanna hear on the podcast, or inquiring to be on the podcast. From there, I as the host get to confirm or deny that guest, or the topic matter, and then it goes all the way through. Let’s take for example that we’re having a guest coming on. They’re going to inquire or we’re gonna request for them to come on, we get them confirmed, they submit a inquiry form, which gives us some really important information to know whether that they meet our Ava the avatar. If you guys don’t know what that means, head over to Episode 12, RachelBrenke.com/epi12 The Magic of a Client Avatar, and that will walk you through the entire exercise for identifying that.
But from there we confirm them, and we get them signed into guest agreement, which we’ll talk about, ’cause that’s gonna be one of the top three tips here. For there, they sign the agreement, they get scheduled, we create a list of questions, they get on the calendar, we have a whole workflow with that within a Smartsheet that has check-offs, it also tags who is responsible for what task, et cetera. We all can see this live sheet at one time, so that we know what each person is doing where we’re at in the process. In fact we even had a change multiple times in the last year which is great with a growing business. We had a change in individuals that manage these different tasks. And by having the workflow written out in Smartsheets allowed for us not to miss any steps but also to be able to hand it over and tag it to somebody else and they could pick right up where the last person left off.
Second tip for success and that is gonna make sure that your e-mail templates, because you don’t wanna be reinventing the wheel all the time, your e-mail templates and your automated forms, we’re gonna put those together as one tip, all of those are part of the workflow, this way it is consistent. Over and over and over. Everyone receives the exact same information. They receive the consistent experience, and these are our guests that are coming on the podcast again, they receive the exact same experience all the way through. This is from the inquiry form that we talked about, where they put their information, who they are, what they can give to the podcast, what the benefit’s gonna be, to who their audience avatar is, whoever they recommend maybe to come on, and how they plan to promote the podcast as well.
We then get them into having, they sign their agreement, and then we walk through, we also send an e-mail template that has a link to a gravity form, which is a WordPress plugin, they can upload all of their assets, what I mean by assets is they can give me their bio, their headshot, their social media links, any other freemium links, any promos, all that information goes right into this form, so that they don’t have to be hand jamming it in in e-mail, it’s automatedly done through our website. They get a notification of it, we get a notification of it, and everything is stored for access by anyone else, and don’t have to dig through e-mails. What’s great about that is if you are working with a third party company or a person in order to manage all this for you, they don’t have to be digging through your e-mail inbox to find all the guest assets.
So having e-mail templates in there, just know that they’re streamline process, and they are dated, and numbered as number one, number two, number three, the entire step and it mirrors the workflow that is on our workflow chart. You guys are probably thinking absolutely common sense, yeah, it is pretty much common sense, but guys how many of you are probably just off the cuff picking things that you need to get done for your podcast and having no consistent workflow, I highly strongly suggest that you sit down and write out the steps and the information and guide your guest along the way. We used a sandwich method in our e-mail templates, we’ve got some niceties at the front because we are so excited for them to come on, and we’ve got the meat of the content, anything action items that they need to do …