AP 0928: I Co-Host a Podcast; How Do I Drive Traffic to My Own Site?

AskPat 928 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey. What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 928 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

Alright. Here's today's question from Sarah.

Sarah: Hi, Pat. I have a really quick question for you. I've started a podcast with a friend of mine and it's going really well. However, the difficulty is that she has opened the account and it's being hosted on her SoundCloud account rather than mine. I was wondering if you could give me any tips about how to get around this, best sharing practices, etc., and really how I can maximize the podcast and get a little bit of traction off that to bring back to my business.

My website is TheFreelanceNaturopath.com. You've helped me before in the past, and I've always been really grateful for your brilliant advice. If you could give me some tips, point me in the right direction, that would be amazing. Thanks so much for everything that you do. You've really helped to take my business to the next level. Have a great day. Thanks again. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Sarah. Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. If you are . . . Woah. Siri just . . . Let me do that again and maybe you could see what happened. Sarah, thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. Huh. Okay. Anyway, I'm going to keep that in. Siri thought I said “Sarah,” and so Siri, you can be quiet. I have you on “Do Not Disturb”, so I don't know what's up.

Anyways, Sarah. Sorry. Before I was rudely interrupted by Siri . . . seriously. Anyway. Sarah, it's difficult when you're working with a partner and you have these web properties and accounts and stuff and they're on one person's versus another. The best practice is to set up something on a neutral site or within a business account so that you can both have access to it as partners, but now we're obviously past that, so there's a few things you can do.

You can work with your partner to either have that SoundCloud account become the partner account if that person's not posting anything else on there. If they happen to be posting other things on there too, then we have a problem. We're going to see if we can remove those files from SoundCloud and put them somewhere else so that in the future, when people go and download your episodes, they're pulling it from another host. You might want to hook up with a different host company, such as Buzzsprout or Libsyn, and see if they might be able to help you extract and export those files, or, excuse me, import those files from SoundCloud into a different server so that you can both co-own that one.

That's the first thing, but secondly, maybe if that's not possible, there's still ways that you can grow your specific business from that. That is, to make sure that you are always mentioning your website, you're offering people value and getting people to understand where you live outside of that podcast, which is the cool thing about podcasting. People can choose where they want to go after they listen. If you mix up the calls to actions, if you trade back and forth between the two or mention both of them at the same time between yourself and your partner's, you could make that work. The best practice is to definitely have a unique hosting account for the podcast itself. If it's hosted on one or the other, you can run into problems like this.

If it's not a big deal in terms of where it's hosted, and the big deal is really just like, “Hey, how do I get access to your account?”, there are other ways around that to. You could get access to the account without knowing the password by using something like LastPass or 1Password. LastPass is a tool that you can use to have your partner set up an account, and you and your partner would both set up a LastPass account essentially. That's LastPass. What happens is you both get access to this account that then opens up programs that you both allow each other to open without knowing what the actual password is, but instead, using a master password that opens the things that you both want access to. It'll make more sense when you go to lastpass.com, but essentially, you can have yourself log into her account without knowing her password through LastPass and the master password that you both have. She can enable that access to you, and that's something that you definitely want to both have control over too. If that's the case, then you can still be able to go in and upload and maximize efforts there with the podcast without actually having to worry about getting her password if that's something she's worried about. Again, like I said, best practice is to have a neutral space for both you and your partner. It might take some conversation, so I think it's really important that you have these honest conversations with your partner as well and really be honest about that so you can figure out what to do and actually create some sort of compromise or a different strategy.

Maybe if it's a podcast that you just started on the side and it's starting to grow a little bit, you might want to decide to move hosts and actually form a business or a partnership like you should have. That's another conversation as well. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a CPA, so you might want to get in contact with some other professionals to help make sure that's the right thing for you and your partner to do, and to select the right business structure and all those kinds of things.

Just wanted to share my thoughts with that, and hopefully that helps you a little bit. If any of you out there have any thoughts about this too, please use the hashtag on Twitter #AskPat928. Again, #AskPat928. It's hard to change the past. You can't do that. We don't have a DeLorean here that we could go into, but we can change the future, and so getting smart about these kinds of things and planning ahead is always best. If you have to figure things out and be honest with each other along the way, which might involve some harder discussions, you know what to do and you just got to do it. Move forward.

Thank you, Sarah. Best of luck with the podcast. Keep on keeping on. Thanks so much. I want to send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Looking forward to serving you in the next episode. Until then, here's a quote from Yogi Berra. Not Yogi Bear, but Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot just by watching.” I agree with that, but in the online business space, you can observe a lot by also taking a lot of action too. Alright, guys. Thank you so much. Take care. I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.

. . . By the way, there was a clue in this episode.