Health Podcast Summit Takeaways

[00:00:00] The very first Health podcast summit happened in early October this year. East Coast Studio was proud to be a sponsor, and it was really great to see this virtual event full of information and insights specifically for podcasters in the health space. You know, I love the niches that we can get into online these days.

[00:00:17] You can get very relevant content for exactly what you need. Now you can still access all the recordings for free if you haven’t checked it out already. I’m gonna have the link in the show notes, but in this episode I’m gonna share some of my personal biggest takeaways that I think will be relevant to you as a health and wellness podcaster.

[00:00:35] There is so much content, uh, part of this two day event that it’s impossible to go through everything and give all the takeaways, but I’m picking the top ones here for you. This is Profits through Podcasting where we help health-focused entrepreneurs generate leads and revenue for their businesses through podcasting. I’m your host, Joel Oliver. So one of the first big takeaways came from Dr. Hansa Bhargava. Calling this one, be mindful of how you use sponsorships. The last episode before this one, I spoke about the trust recession and how to remain trusted among your listeners and build further trust using your podcast.

[00:01:14] And this is a huge consideration if you plan to take any sponsorship or advertising money for your podcast because you can so quickly erode years of trust. That you had built with your audience, you can do it in an instant, can just be gone. So even though our focus here on profits through podcasting is promoting your own services and your own business or products to generate revenue through podcasting, I did want to lead with this point because it is so critical and I get questions on it quite frequently.

[00:01:45] And also if you watch the Health Podcast Summit session with Greg Wasserman from rss.com, he talks about this as well, using your podcast basically to sponsor yourself. That’s a strategy that we promote here at East Coast Studio and with profits through podcasting, promoting yourself and growing your own business.

[00:02:03] I’ve discussed this in many past episodes as well, how chasing sponsorships isn’t necessarily always ideal. It can work in some cases, but I was putting that out there to basically say, who. Who come to me and they kind of think I’m supposed to be getting a sponsor. Like that’s just a natural progression.

[00:02:20] You have a podcast, you get a sponsor. Not necessarily, if you are selling your own stuff online, that can be plenty to promote and you don’t need to get sponsors because as I’m talking about here, it does come with some potential pitfalls. Now if you do have sponsors on your podcast or you’re considering it, the interview with Dr.

[00:02:39] Hansa Bhargava during the Health Podcast Summit highlighted the importance of clearly defining where sponsors have any influence on your content in facts versus opinions. Things like that should be very transparent, apparent.

[00:02:53] You don’t want people thinking or suspecting that you are getting paid to promote something when you’re trying to pass it off as organic content that you just happen to have someone on from the company or you’re promoting the product just for money. You gotta be very clear. And that leads into the next point.

[00:03:09] Something we see very commonly among our clients in the health space is being very selective over the type of sponsors that you work with. That means you try the products or services for yourself and you love them, or you get great results, even better if it was a product that you were already using, and then you approach them about becoming a sponsor.

[00:03:30] I love. When that happens, if it’s just something you, you’ve been using and you think this is awesome, do they have an affiliate program? And you go and check or contact them and they’re actually interested in sponsoring your podcast, because that is very legitimate. It’s very real. You love that product.

[00:03:44] You’re not only promoting it because they’re paying you and certainly not because they’re paying you yet you don’t even like the product or have never tried it. You know, that’s very important and I see that quite commonly amongst our clients. Anything that they do get sponsored by or they accept as a sponsor is perhaps better worth.

[00:04:01] They have tried it themselves and they, they can wholeheartedly recommend it. They’ve seen the results for themselves, and that’s all they can really say is, Hey, this work for me. I like it. It might work for you as well. I’ve heard plenty of people turn away potential sponsors because they didn’t like the product or they didn’t find that it works, and that integrity is very, very important.

[00:04:23] Your word and your reputation is critical. So never take that trust that your audience has with you for granted. And think very carefully. If you have been considering adding sponsorships to your show or you’ve done it already, is it definitely something you want to do?

[00:04:38] And if so, how to do that properly?

[00:04:41] next big takeaway from the Health Podcast Summit was from Steve Pratt. You must generate attention. So this session with Steve, uh, highlighted the importance of understanding attention, your primary focus as a creator or. Alternatively, an entrepreneur who relies heavily on content creation to drive business is that if you don’t have attention, you don’t really have anything.

[00:05:06] Whether you like it or not, we’ve gotta have that attention. They call it an attention economy. So you could say we’re participating in that as well. But how do you earn attention? Well, you have to provide value to the audience and to earn people’s attention. Think about this. Is it something that, it’s so good that people would share it?

[00:05:25] What compels you to share content, whether it’s an Instagram reel or a podcast episode, or a YouTube video, what has been so good that you just had to share it with somebody else and how do you make your content that good?

[00:05:39] I recently had an episode about AI and the importance of being aware if you’re using ai, not to let the quality of your content slip, because it can start with just making things more efficient. And then before you know it, your content quality has degraded, and then you’re very far from something that is so good.

[00:05:57] It is shareable by the audience, right? And then to extend on attention. Simply making great content isn’t enough necessarily on its own. You need a proper marketing strategy to go with it. So you’ve made this really good content, but just sitting there and no one knows about it. That’s not gonna help either.

[00:06:17] That doesn’t, it doesn’t have any attention. It’s just good content. So you have to ensure that the content not only is exceptional, but then adequately promoted. As well be that through paid or unpaid means, and we’ve talked about that before here on the show, but promotion is very important. When getting any leverage through your podcast, people actually have to know about it.

[00:06:38] And another important point from Steve as well was the balance that you provide between the value. That you give to the audience and your business. People should love to listen to your podcast episode and it should serve you business wise and you can do both. We’ve had some conversations here on the podcast about this specific thing, and I’ve heard it quite a bit where people are a little hesitant or nervous or afraid to promote their stuff, feeling either imposter syndrome, like they’re lacking confidence or they just don’t wanna bother people.

[00:07:10] So they make these great podcast episodes and never once. Talk about themselves. Never give out a link at the end, or a way to contact them or talk about the services they provide, or you know, a lead magnet, that kind of thing. You need to do that. Choose one to do at a time, a single clear call to action.

[00:07:27] But definitely have that in your episodes and it’s fine to do that. You don’t want to go overboard. A mid-roll ad is fine as well. You know, people aren’t gonna take in an episode that’s fully talking about you. It’s gotta have some value in it for them. But striking that balance is important and critical.

[00:07:44] ’cause if you’re not gonna promote yourself while the podcast is not going to do much for you, you’re not really going to be converting any of that attention into anything for your business, which you know, we’re all here to do and that’s totally fine.

[00:07:55] Next big takeaway from the Health Podcast Summit really goes hand in hand with generating attention. It’s actually capturing people’s attention in the first place. So we might have valuable content that is attention worthy, but we’ve gotta let people know that it exists and present it in a compelling way that makes them actually come check it out.

[00:08:15] In the first place, and this is through things like titles, images, and show notes. Steve Pratt, I just mentioned in the last point, and Greg Wasserman again, they both highlighted this in their sessions. There’s some data on the opening moments of content and how highly, highly important that is.

[00:08:32] And how it determines audience retention. So a compelling title and description, letting people know before they even tune in. What is this about? It’s more important than you think 

[00:08:42] if you just have an episode and you have your show notes as the guest bio or a sentence where you’re just talking about, here’s very high level what we talk about this episode, that’s not enough. We wanna have every possible advantage that we can. So a great title, intriguing title, great show notes, image if it’s for YouTube that compels people to come and click your video or tune into your podcast episode.

[00:09:06] So a guest bio alone is not show notes, neither is a transcription ’cause it just doesn’t present the information in a concise way that would intrigue people to tune in.

[00:09:16] The final big takeaway from the Health Podcast Summit is the fact that super serving specific audiences is much better than trying to reach broad audiences with generic wellness content. This was covered in James Lin’s session. He talked about how reaching the right 200 people matters a whole lot more than reaching random.

[00:09:37] Thousands of people. We’ve heard stories about this in the past where people had these giant audiences, but they cannot sell anything. They’ve tried to sell merch or whatever the case and just wasn’t happening because the people didn’t care. The audience didn’t care. They were just taking in random, generic content.

[00:09:53] They had no passion for no real interest in. Whereas if you have a small, dedicated audience that. Can work wonders and you can have a whole business off that you don’t need thousands and thousands of podcast listeners. Okay. We are not TV and radio. We are not trying to serve the biggest possible audience.

[00:10:12] We can know exactly who our audience is and create content to serve them. So keep that in mind. It’s all about getting in front of the right people. And to do that, you’ve gotta know who they are, who is your ideal audience, what are they interested in? What are their problems? What are they trying to solve?

[00:10:28] And then filter all of your content through that. Don’t do content just for the sake of it. Make sure that it’s actually relevant to those people. The ones that are really interested in what you’re talking about, well, likely they’re going to do business with you because they found exactly what they need.

[00:10:43] They’re going to trust you. And then. I ultimately wanna work with you. Do not try to be everything to everyone. Don’t make it confusing about who the podcast is for. It should be very evident to the right people that this podcast, this content is for them. So if you don’t have that picture around your whole business and your podcast and the content you’re creating of who is my ideal client, and understand them very, very deeply, you need to go back to the drawing board and figure that out.

[00:11:11] So those are four big takeaways, great reminders that I pulled from the Health Podcast Summit. But you should check out the two full days worth of sessions. They are available on demand for free.

[00:11:22] I’ll have the link in the show notes about how you can go back and get those sessions and watch all of them or, or pick out the ones that are most relevant to you and what you are doing in podcasting and business.