20: Why You Need an Episode 00
In this week's episode, I'm explaining exactly what an "Episode 00" is, why you absolutely should have one for your podcast, how long it should be, what it should include, and how it should be used.
Take a listen to the episode below to learn more and check out episode 00 of this podcast using the link in the resources section below to hear an example.
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Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Welcome to Episode 20 of podcasting for coaches. As promised last week, today, we are going to talk about why you absolutely need an episode zero for your show. So to start off, if you have no idea what an episode zero is, it is essentially the About Me page version of your podcast. So this will be your audience's first introduction to who you are. So even beyond just giving them this first glimpse of you and starting to form that bond, it's actually really pretty crucial from a technical aspect. So in order to submit your podcast to any of these various platforms, so iTunes, slash Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Google podcasts, any of these places, you have to have an audio file in your feed already. So your RSS feed is basically a bunch of code that pushes audio files out automatically. And that's putting it very, very simply. But what you do is you actually add your episodes to your audio feed and anywhere you've submitted that feed. It's synced automatically, so it picks up any changes. And so a change would be adding a new episode. So in order to submit to these platforms, you have to have an audio file already in your feed, or they're basically going to consider it empty, and it's going to be rejected. So the thing about this is you cannot predict how long it's going to take all of these different platforms to approve your feed, and then have it listed in their directory. It varies from platform to platform. And even within each platform, it varies depending on how many submissions they have, what time of year it is, you know how many people they have working on all of these different things. So well typically takes 12 to 48 hours, it could take up to two weeks. So if you decide not to actually submit your show, until your first episode is ready, and you're ready to officially launch, you could be promoting this launch date and then come to find out Oh, Apple is taking two weeks long to approve this, you're not going to know until you're in the middle of it and you just don't get approved on time, then you miss your target launch date, it makes you seem like you can't stick to your commitments, you're falling behind your flag, all of those negative things in the mind of your audience. So what we do is we use an episode zero as that audio file, and we submit way before you're ready. So we create this episode zero, add it to your RSS feed and use it to submit it to different platforms. That way, you can take two weeks if it needs to, because you're not actually ready to officially launch yet. So no big deal. It just completely removes that entire stress and anxiety point from the process. So in this episode zero, as I mentioned before, it is the first real introduction to who you are, of course, they have you know, the intro that you created the 30 to 62nd little clip at the beginning of every episode. But this is where you really get to dive in and tell your story. I recommend keeping these very short, because this is just a first glimpse is a teaser, it's a trailer is all of these kinds of things that you can use to promote your show. So I recommend keeping this between about two minutes to no more than 10 minutes. And we want you to cover who you are, what your background is what your story is, give some personal details of your life, let them really form that connection with you. And we also want to explain why you're qualified to talk about what you're talking about and why you're so passionate about this topic. We really want the listeners to know you know, the who, what the when the where, and the why we want them to know why you're doing this, how you're going to be doing it. Of course, don't give any details because we want it to remain evergreen. You know, if you say you're going to be releasing every Tuesday, and you find out later on, you know a year from now that that just doesn't work with your schedule anymore, you need to adjust the day, well, then your episode zero is no longer relevant. So keep it evergreen, but talk about what you plan for the show. Talk about why it's so important to you talk about your story, talk about how you got to this point in your life, all of those things that are going to start those little seeds of that friendship that they feel with you that bond that they start forming with you. Again, no more than two to 10 minutes. And you're going to have this ready well before you actually want to officially launch your show. And we do that specifically because we have to have a file to submit to and we want to remove the anxiety of waiting to submit your show until you're actually ready to launch. And then in the meantime, once you're accepted and approved, you're on all those platforms, they can find you immediately. And so even though you're not ready to launch, you can still push people to that. You can say hey, I'm already on iTunes, check out my teaser episode, my trailer episode, whatever you want to call it, get your first little introduction to me and then go ahead and subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss the first episode. When we officially launch you don't Don't have to say a date yet if you're not ready for that point, but you can go ahead and have people subscribing so that they are there and ready to go. You have an audience waiting on you on launch day, as opposed to doing it the other way around for you launch, and then you try to find people. So fairly quick episode today, episode zero is fairly simple. If you have ever written an About Me page on your website, and you've done it properly, where you don't just talk about your business, you actually give some personal details of yourself, then this is going to be basically the same thing. Instead of writing it, you're just going to be saying it, and then we're going to add it to your feed and use it to submit the podcast well before you're ready to launch. And then in the meantime, you can link to that episode, share that episode with people, guide those people to the different podcasting platforms where they can go ahead and subscribe. And of course, we'll talk about that in a few weeks when I go over the podcast launch promotion strategy. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. And next week, we are actually going to talk about how to set up your RSS feed in Lipson. So we're gonna start getting into some technical nitty gritty here. So if you have no idea how to do any of those things work with the hosting platforms that have an RSS feed, you are not going to want to miss next week's episode. Thank you so much again, and I will see you back here next week. And I hope that you have a fantastic week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you're wondering if now is the right time to start a podcast for your coaching or consulting business, head on over to podcasting for coaches comm where you can either take a free quiz or schedule a one on one consultation with yours truly, thank you so much for joining me today and I will see you back here for the next episode.