Using A Podcast To Build An Audience With Lance Tamashiro

Welcome to the Real Fast Results podcast!  Podcasting is such
a special medium to use, and it is especially effective when you’re
trying to build an audience for yourself and your business. 
That’s what Lance Tamashiro is going to discuss during this
episode.  You’ll really enjoy this if podcasting is of any
interest to you at all because Lance does really well when it comes
to demystifying this process.  He has a way of making it all
so much easier than you ever would have thought possible. Lance has
risen far up the charts, and it didn’t take him very long to do
this.  He’s right up there with the likes of Pat Flynn, John
Lee Dumas, and Gary Vaynerchuck.  So, who better to take
advice from?  Without further ado, please welcome Lance
Tamashiro. Podcasting the Right Way Today, we’re going to discuss a
couple of items. First of all, I want to tell people how to get
their own podcast set up, but I think that’s the easy part.  I
think the whole thing that holds people up is this idea of
perfection, this idea of enough content, and the best way to get
that done.  My goal for today would be: Make
sure that people know what they need to do in order to get their
podcast up, Know that whatever you have, whatever point that you’re
at, the most important thing is to get this thing up and running.
Just remember that you’ll get better, and you’ll do better as we
go.  So, I think, you know, the mindset stuff and also the
step-by-step in getting there. Why You Should Have a Podcast – Easy
Content For me, I started a podcast, and it got ranked up high
pretty quickly.  That’s true and false at the same time. 
I don’t want to mislead people because I actually started my
podcast, I think back in 2012.  What I did was, I did three
episodes.  One was like two minutes long, one was like 10
minutes long, and you can go see; they are still out on iTunes. I
thought, “I don’t get it… I don’t understand why I’m doing this,”
so I did nothing, and then in 2013, I said, “I’m going to do this
podcasting thing!”  I did three or four episodes.  They
are still out there, and you can go [listen] to them, and they did
nothing.  The same happened every year. I would promise myself
that I was going to do this podcast. I run a mastermind group, and
I offhandedly said, “January of this year, and we’re filming this
in 2016.” A couple of months ago I said, “My New Year’s resolution
is that I’m going to do a podcast once a month.” I said that it was
my resolution because I always break my resolution, so I knew this
still wasn’t going to work.  So, I started doing this, and I
stumbled on this other way of doing it, this other way of making
content.  More importantly, other people that I was able to
connect with, that promoted my podcast, ended up shooting it to the
top.  Now I’m doing three, four podcasts every single week,
and I’ve been as high as #9 in the overall “Business”
category.  I’m usually between 40 and 20; it fluctuates up and
down.  But, there’s a couple of things that really
came out of it for me: They are really easy to do, if you
do it the way that I do it. It gets you exposure to a lot of people
that you would have never gotten before. You know, [we’re] from the
internet marketing world, where it’s like pulling teeth.  You
call someone up, and you’re like, “Will you promote me? Let me
figure something out,” and nobody wants to do it, but suddenly you
have a podcast, and everyone wants to promote you.  I mean,
I’ve had guys like Tucker Max promote me. I’ve had a New York Times
bestseller. I’ve had guys like [Daniel Hall] promote me. 
It’s a whole different thing when they’re creating the
content, and it makes it easy for you. You get to be the
guy saying, “How do I do something cool that you know how to do?”
I’m not a good joint venture guy.  It’s always awkward for me
to meet somebody and try to figure out how to do a joint venture.
However, I’ve found that the podcasts, first of all, give them a
reason to contact you.  So, they’re coming to you and saying,
“I want to be on your show.”  Then, what happens is, you do
about five minutes of getting to know each other, but there’s not a
lot of time before the podcast, so then you do the interview… where
a weird thing happens. After 20-30 minutes of talking back and
forth, with no expectations, framed around this podcast, you’ve
suddenly, in a weird way, built this rapport with them. You know
details about them. It’s like at the bar, guys come up to you at a
conference, and they go, “Let me tell you about me.”  It
changes that whole dynamic.  What I loved about that
part is that afterwards, there’s a built-in follow-up.
There’s built-in reasons to keep a conversation going with
somebody, whether it is a “thank you for being on the show”… that’s
one where you can keep that conversation going.  I do a thing
where I’ll get transcripts made and then send them out to them,
which is another reason I get to keep talking to them.  And
then, the show is live and I’m promoting it now, so you’ve got all
of these touch points where you are able to contact somebody, and
you’re truly doing something for them every step of the way. 
You know, I’ve had people send me stuff in the mail, send books,
send emails to their list. And, that was the big eye-opening thing
for me, it was… Yeah, it’s great to have a top-ranked podcast. Yes,
you get traffic to all the things that you promote.  Yes, you
can get sponsorships. Yet, it was that joint venture and
those connections in places that I never even thought of
before.  I thought my niche was this little, tiny
thing, and it turns out there are people all over that are
interested in my products and services. How to Create a Podcast
It’s really simple.  People thought that it was such a hard
thing for so long.  Literally, what you need is a WordPress
site to start.  People will talk about these services like
Libsyn, which is a podcast hosting site.  They are good to
have, down the road as you get bigger; you don’t need it to just
get started.  The next thing you need is headphones.  I
mean, I started with a $25 Logitech USB headset. I just plugged it
in and started talking to myself. Then you need something to record
with.  I used Camtasia Studio at the time because it was just
something that I already had.  I could record two sides of a
conversation.  I used that because it’s what I already had.
Basically, you just set up a blog and get a plug-in called
PowerPress.  It’s free, and what that will do, is it
just puts a player on your blog.  You upload the MP3 to it,
and it starts to play.  Then, all you have to do is go to
Google Play.  If you search “Google Play Podcasts”, it will
come up where you can submit what’s called “the feed”.  The
PowerPress plug-in gives you that feed, so you just put that in,
and the Google Play and Google Plus will pull it up.  You’ll
be in their directory. Then you just click “Submit”.  It
submits the podcast in iTunes and to Google. A site will come up,
and then you put that same feed into them.  Once you
do that, anytime you put a new podcast on your blog as a separate
post, it automatically pushes out to all of these different
directories.  It’s the simplest,
easiest way to get started.  The hardest part, for most
people, is to start making the recordings and making the content.
Recording a Podcast Is Not as Hard as You Think First of all, you
hear all of these podcasts like mine.  If you need some
motivation for a crappy podcast that does well, go listen to
mine.  I’m not a great speaker, I don’t have anything planned.
I bought my intro music off of Fiverr, and I just use that. 
And, that’s it.  Even when I started, I didn’t even know what
I was going to say.  If you listen to my first episodes, it’s
usually just me rambling on.  What I like about doing
the interview model, which is what I do now, is that I don’t have
to say anything. Literally, what happens, in the way that
I do it, is that somebody comes to me and says, “I want to be on
your podcast.” I say, “Give me your bio.”  I read their bio,
pretty much word-for-word as they give it to me, and then I say,
“How did you get started with…”. Then they start talking through
it, and I say, “Well that’s awesome.  What would you tell
somebody that’s just getting started?”  Then, they tell me,
and I say “What’s a big mistake that they make?”  That’s
it.  I mean, that’s the formula. In 20 or 30
minutes, if you ask those questions, if you think about it, it
gives them the story or what they did. It tells somebody new what
they should be doing, and it tells somebody new what mistakes to
avoid. You’re done and out of there, and you don’t have to say
anything, other than ask those three questions.  You’ll get
more comfortable as you go, and I would say just get started.
Grab somebody you know. Daniel Hall and Jason
Parker were the first two people that I interviewed on my podcast.
It was easy for me because I knew you guys. I say, grab somebody
you know off of Facebook. Grab somebody you talk to on Skype, and
start there and build up that confidence, and then move on. 
But, you’re going to find, “Oh, it’s just talking to somebody…”
once you get started. Recap of What You Need to Start a Podcast You
set up a WordPress site. You buy a domain name. Set it up with your
hosting account and put WordPress on it.  Then, the only
plug-in that you need is called PowerPress.  It’s free, so you
can put a theme on there if you want. However, you don’t have to
because what you’re really trying to do is to get it out into the
directories--into iTunes and Google Play.  You just have the
basic theme on there, put PowerPress on there. What PowerPress does
is, when you make a new post, it will add a section below the post
where you upload your MP3 file.  So, you upload your MP3 file,
and that puts the post out there.  You have to do that before
you can submit to the directories. Make that first post with some
kind of audio on it. Then you search on Google for either “Google
Play Podcasts”, or “iTunes Podcasts”. The third one you want to do
is Stitcher.  So, you’ve got Stitcher, Google Play, and
iTunes, these are kind of the big three. Inside of the PowerPress
plug-in, it gives you a link that says, “This is your podcast
URL.”  When you go to those directories, they’ll have a
website if you Google them, all you have to do is paste that URL
that the PowerPress plug-in gives you in your blog. You paste it
in, and basically, what that URL does is every time you add a new
post, it tells all of these directories, “Hey, there’s something
new.  Add it to your directory.”  Now, any time you want
to make a new one, you just make a brand new post, upload it into
your PowerPresss plug-in, which is underneath your post settings,
and it automatically, magically shows up everywhere that you wanted
it to show up.  And, literally, that’s all you have to do to
get started with your podcast. After that, the big thing is
to decide how you’re going to do your show.  I mean,
is it going to be multiple people; is it going to be just
you?  When I started, it has been just me talking, whenever I
had an idea of something that I wanted to talk about.  Well,
now because the show’s there, people contact me constantly to be on
the show. Because it’s ranked, they find it inside of iTunes. 
Contact all of the people you know and just say, “I want to
interview you.  I want to get you on, and it’s 20-30 minutes,
it’s a piece of cake…” You just record it and put it up there. I
don’t do any editing.  If you listen to mine, there were times
when people have dropped out, and I just finish up the
conversation.  There’s been times when my son has walked in,
in the middle, and I just kind of talk to him.  For
me, it’s kind of about personality.  It depends on
what you want to have on your show, but I don’t want to spend a
bunch of time editing.  You can if you want.  There’s
also services that will do it for you.  If you’re just
getting started, the important part is to get it out
there. Because, if you want to start getting bigger
guests, what they want to see is that you’re actually doing
it.  So, if you have 10 episodes under your belt, they are
more likely to say “yes” than if you’re not even listed. It’s
really easy.  I have had a few people in the internet
marketing space, when I was first getting started, that kind of
blew me off.  Now they all want to be on the show because they
know how much traffic it’s getting.  So, when you get started,
it’s one of those things where, get some episodes out there, and
most people will automatically say “yes”.  Now, here’s the big
thing.  If you want to get guests easy, go to Amazon,
find all of the authors inside of your niche, it doesn’t matter
what your niche is, and contact them.  There is no
author that will not do a book promotion.  You talk to them
about their topic, talk to them about their book and you can fill
up your schedule as quickly as you want to. Podcast Cover Art
Honestly, when I launched mine, I didn’t have cover art.  What
I ended up doing, is I took a picture of me and my daughter, went
on to Pixlr and put in  words.  I just put “Lance
Tamashiro Show” on it.  I mean, you can see it.  It’s
just a picture of me and my daughter with the words on the
bottom.  I didn’t overthink it.  However, now they want
the size to be either 2,000 x 2,000 or 3,000 x 3,000. Again, you
just upload that to PowerPress, and they take care of everything
for you.  This plug-in really does do everything.  You
know, if you walk through the setup of the plug-in, they have it by
menus, and you just fill everything in, you’re good to go. 
And, I think they even have the links now for Google Play and
iTunes to send you to the place that you want to go. If you
want to have a cool setup, I would say go to Fiverr.com and just
search “podcast art”.  There will be a bunch of
people that come up.  Just pay them $5 or $10, get that thing
made, and don’t even think about it.  And, even with mine,
that’s where I got my intro made.  I went in and typed in
“podcast intro music”.  The first guy that came up, I hired
him, and he did my intro and outro. I think it cost me $20 total,
and then I was done.  You don’t even have to think about
it.  I do my recording, and then I go back and I stick that at
the front, and then the back, and then I’m done. I kind of think
the intro music is distracting.  I mean, that’s the big
thing.  I’ve been going back and listening to the other top
podcasts, and most of them it’s like five seconds with them just
talking into it. So my thought at this point is, “I’m going to pull
that out, or at least just really strip it back,” because I mean,
that’s not what it’s about. It’s about the information that you’re
going to give to people, and the guests that you have on. Podcast
Tips If you have a podcast that no one listens to, do you
really have a podcast?  I mean, that’s the big
question with all podcasting.  It’s, “How do I get
subscribers?  How do I get listeners?  How do I get
people on?”  So, the first thing is if you’re starting from
scratch, here is what I did. I had a dead Twitter account that I
never used.  I hadn’t made a tweet on it since like
2010.  So, I had this Twitter account, and I’m thinking,
“Alright.  I’ll just use this and see what happens.”  I
found this software.  It’s a website called
eClincher.com.  What it does, is it basically can make a list
of tweets, and it will just tweet them over and over again, as much
as you want. So, what happened was, one of the guests on my podcast
said to me, “The average lifespan of a tweet is 45
minutes.”  So, if you tweet every 45 minutes, it’s
not like Facebook where people are going to get mad at you. 
It’s not like email.   You’re allowed to tweet every 45
minutes and nobody cares.  So, I found this thing that’s
basically an auto-responder.  Now, every time I have a new
show, I put that into my “auto-responder”, my auto-tweet, called
eClincher. I set it to run every 45 minutes, or 60 minutes, and it
just cycles through.  When I started at like 10 episodes, it
just cycled through every 45 minutes, making those tweets go out,
and then I just add a new one. Here’s the key that I did. 
Every guest that I had on, I would tag them.
You’ve probably seen this on Twitter. You see that every day. 
You see I’m promoting it, and you’re likely to like it, or
re-tweet, or whatever, so your people see it.  But, then what
I do is I use the hashtag.  So, I use #podcast almost always.
My podcast is business-related and entrepreneur, so I use #business
and #entrepreneur.  My Twitter account was, just from doing
that, 200-300 followers a day. Just from tweeting that thing
out.  I mean, constantly tweeting those things out. However,
you’ve got high-profile people that re-tweet it every day because
they like it and because you’re promoting them.  It doesn’t
cost them anything; they are there anyway. It keeps you in their
heads.  I mean, you’re never going to forget that you were on
my show because every time you log into Twitter, you’re going to
see X-number of tweets from me promoting it.  Again, having
guests for me is what blew up really fast because I couldn’t
believe how willing people were to tweet about it, to Facebook
about it, to email about it.  I mean, people with massive,
massive followings. If I were to have approached them and said,
“Hey, email for my product.  Let’s do a webinar.”  They
would have said, “No way,” but because it was this podcast, they
were all willing to do that. I attribute a huge amount of the
growth and success of my podcast to that because, I’ve got a pretty
big mail list, and I’ve got a pretty big following, but I rarely, I
mean maybe twice, I’ve sent out emails about my podcast. 
So, this grew without me being involved.  It was all
pretty much my guests. Here’s probably the biggest tip
that I got from doing this, about getting guests, and getting high
profile, and growing this thing fast.  For me, I always
thought of myself as in the internet marketing space. I found out I
wasn’t, especially for my podcast.  Let’s say you’re in the
dog training niche.  You’re not in the dog training niche for
your podcast.  You’re in the animal-whatever niche. If you
want to focus on dogs, that’s fine, but here’s where I think people
are missing the boat.  They start saying like, “Well, I’m a
dog trainer so I’m just going to train about this type of
dog.”  What they need to do is contact places like the Humane
Society.  They need to contact places like Purina, places that
make dog toys, and the reason is all of these people have a huge
following on social media.  The second thing is that they all
have PR departments that are set up just to get out PR and get
their word out.  So they will do an interview with you, if
they see you have a podcast.  And then, three, that gives you
a lot of credibility to say, “Hey, the guy from Purina was on my
show.  Why don’t you be on my show,” or “the guy from the
Humane Society was, why don’t you?” They will all promote it. 
These big companies will all post it onto their Facebook
pages.  Don’t think of yourself as in this small,
little microcosm niche.  Think about how big you can
blow it up, which is the opposite of what we hear in online
business.  People say, “Pick your little niche and do
that”.  That’s fine, but for your podcast, there’s only 10
broad categories in iTunes. Pick one of those, and that’s your
niche. Then start thinking about what companies, what big players
you can go to. Most of them have big PR departments, and they are
just looking for places to get their message out and will promote
you. Connecting with Lance The easiest way is to go to iTunes and
type in Lance Tamashiro.  That would be a great way.  The
other thing is, if you’re interested in podcasting, setting up
something similar to what we’re doing here today, you can check out
the PodcastCrusher training.  It’s basically a step-by-step
course that lets you look over our shoulders as we set up an actual
podcast that we started from scratch, and you can watch and see how
that’s been growing as well. Resources Lance's
PodcastCrusher Course (I bought this  and use
it myself) - PodcastCrusher Course Podcast Plugin
- PowerPress Podcast Hosting Site - Libsyn
Photo Editor - Pixlr Social Media
Management Tool - eClincher Lance Tamashiro
Podcast - Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Productivity
& Results Podcast Cover Art - Fiverr.com
Podcast Platforms: Stitcher Google Play iTunes.com
Daniel's Real Fast Results Tips: Podcasting

Pick a topic and start asking friends when you can interview
them.

You can use Google Hangout to record your interview.

Make sure you have a good microphone.

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http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results
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