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Do you feel stressed and overwhelmed by your business? As a solopreneur, it’s easy to get bogged down doing everything yourself and lose the one thing you can’t get back: time. Running your own business wasn’t supposed to feel this exhausting.
Imagine having the freedom to focus on what you love—traveling, spending time with family, or watching a movie in the middle of a weekday—without being chained to your desk.
That’s why Streamlined Solopreneur exists. Each week, host Joe Casabona shares strategies for building a better business through smarter systems and automation. With insights from expert guests, and his own experience as a busy solopreneur parent, Joe offers practical steps to make being a solopreneur feel…less solo.
Every episode gives you actionable advice to create space in your business, and your life, and reclaim your time for what matters most.
Deirdre Tshien: That whole strategy behind it is kind of what I call content tripping, which is how do you actually create all of these? How do you repurpose your one piece of anchor content, which can be a podcast, it can be a live stream, it could be a vlog if you want it to, like some piece of long-form audio video content? How can you repurpose it in a way that gives that content so much life and longevity, but you’re actually creating a legacy out of it?
Joe Casabona: I used to think that promoting my podcast was a matter of tweeting, or Xiting it, and hoping for the best. And while I’ve learned a ton over the last few years of what to do and what not to do, Deirdre Tshien, still blew my mind as we talked about her traffic pyramid.
As the co-founder and CEO of Capsho, an AI tool that helps you create promotional assets for your podcast, she knows a thing or two about how to market and grow your podcast. We’ll get into that, plus podcast discoverability tips that changed the way I approach this very show and my audits.
Plus in the pro show, we talk about what it’s like building a niche commercial AI tool. Oh, and by the way, towards the end, I apparently had a ton of problems with Deirdre’s name, which I have pronounced as Deirdra and Diordra before. But don’t worry, she properly busts my chops.
Look for these top takeaways. There are four tiers to getting traffic to your content according to Deirdre’s traffic pyramid: passive and active organic marketing, leveraging other audiences and paid ads. There are also a ton of ways to improve podcast discoverability, including optimizing title, description, and even artists name for words in your niche and the words that they’re searching for. “They’re” being your target audience. And the name of the repurposing game is dripping out content from your show and giving the episode a long life. That’s why Deirdre is started Capsho in the first place.
We talk about a ton of stuff, all of which you can find over at howibuilt.it/328, including how to get this episode extended and ad-free. Oh, and if you’re listening in Apple Podcasts, this show is now an Apple Podcasts subscription. So you could subscribe right inside the podcast app.
All right, that’s enough. Now let’s get to the intro, and then the interview
[00:02:48]
Intro: Hey, everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps busy solopreneurs and creators grow their business without spending too much time on it. I’m your host Joe Casabona, and each week I bring you interviews and case studies on how to build a better business through smarter processes, time management, and effective content creation. It’s like getting free coaching calls from successful solopreneurs.
By the end of each episode, you’ll have one to three takeaways you can implement today to stop spending time in your business and more time on your business or with your friends, your family, reading, or however you choose to spend your free time.
[00:03:35]
Joe Casabona: All right, I am here with Deirdre Tshien, the co-founder and CEO of Capsho. And I’m really excited to talk about this not only because as we record this I’m working on a new LinkedIn Learning Course called Generative AI For Podcasters, but Capsho has been one of the more useful AI tools for me personally. So Deirdre, thanks for coming on the show.
Deirdre Tshien: Oh, thank you. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me, first of all, and second of all, thank you for saying that. It means a lot to know that we can impact people like you and hopefully people listening to this and our broader community. So thank you for saying that.
Joe Casabona: My pleasure. Actually, a few weeks ago, my interview with Tim Stoddart came out. He spoke at CEX where you and I met, and we had what I thought was a really meandering conversation. I was like, Oh, man, I’m gonna have to really edit and cut and things like that. But Tim’s a pro. So we just kind of gracefully moved between topics, but I wasn’t sure what the angle was. I ran the raw interview through Capsho. And I was like, of course, this is the angle. So it was a big help because we talked for like an hour and a half-
Deirdre Tshien: Wow.
Joe Casabona: …with the pre and post-show. So saved me a ton of time and helped me find the right story to kind of tell with Tim’s episode.
Deirdre Tshien: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for saying that. Like from the bottom my heart not just because you’re saying nice things about Capsho, but because we intentionally built Capsho in that way to help in exactly the way that you spoke about. So, I mean, it does mean a lot.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. I mean, you know, this is something that I help people with. Podcasting is time-consuming, and ways to save time are super important. But we’ll get into all of that later. I want to ask you first, because this came up in our pre-show, what is the traffic pyramid?
Deirdre Tshien: Oh, good place to start. So the traffic pyramid is my framework or strategy on getting traffic, essentially, getting an unlimited flow of leads, whether that’s via podcast, via business, really anything that you’re looking to grow. I kind of stumbled upon this when I was trying to figure this out myself, obviously.
I had a coaching business. It was two and a half years ago that I had that. That was a coaching business that I actually started my first podcast with. And I was struggling. I wasn’t struggling straight because I was no good at podcast and I was certainly not growing my business, we were just doing big, fat zeros for months.
And until I kind of cobbled together, I was doing a lot of nerding out, you know, all of the internet marketers, all of the people that we know, I was reading all the books, I was following all the people and I kind of pieced together this way of whatever was talking about and how they were approaching traffic. And I started testing it on, obviously, ourselves, on my podcast and my coaching business.
I remember it was September 2020, that it was the first month I think we’re probably five months into having started coaching business of big fat zeros when I actually started getting Stripe notifications coming in. And I was like, “Did someone hack our Stripe account?” But that was our first five-figure month and since then we did multiple six-figures in that first year of that coaching business.
So all that to say that this traffic pyramid when I was able to really distill it and boil it down to the exact areas to focus on for me, I was able to really grow my podcast and off the back of that grow my business. So I’m really excited to jump into the traffic pyramid. Should I just go straight into it?
Joe Casabona: Yeah. I’m just gonna reiterate here that this traffic pyramid helped you go from struggle street, right?
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, to multiple six figures.
Joe Casabona: Multiple six figures. What can we call that? The boardwalk like from Monopoly?
Deirdre Tshien: How about from the struggle bus to the first class?
Joe Casabona: Love it.
Deirdre Tshien: Private jet. To private jet
Joe Casabona: To private jet. I love it. So yeah, let’s get into this traffic pyramid.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, sure. So there are four tiers to the traffic pyramid. The first tier, the bottom is what I call passive organic marketing. The second is what I call active organic marketing. The third is leveraging other people’s audiences. And the fourth is paid ads—scaling through paid ads.
Joe Casabona: All right.
Deirdre Tshien: So you can see how it’s sort of signed to all come together. Because I’m sure, Joe, that you do a lot of this yourself. And this is just putting a framework around how we think about it, right? So if I start at the bottom, passive organic marketing is all of the content that we create relatively passively. It goes from our brains or AI onto a piece of paper or onto a recording like this on to a video, right? We just create the content.
I call it passive because it really used to annoy me and frustrate me when I would put all this effort into creating this content and then I would put it out into the universe or I’d like posts on social media or post on to YouTube or wherever it was, I’d publish it, and then nothing really happened. It’s really frustrating because you put all this effort into it and then nothing really happens.
So anyway, that really frustrated me. So I was like, “I’m going to call this out because the thing is that doing that is still incredibly important. It’s rushing because you don’t feel like anything’s happening but it’s because all of this content that we’re creating is the nucleus of everything else that you’re going to become known for. So that’s why I call it passive because we kind of put it out there and then we sit back and we pat ourselves on the shoulders and we’re like, “Yeah, good job. We did the thing.” But we didn’t really because then we have to get into the tier above that, which is active organic marketing.
Joe Casabona: I just wanted to say here I love that you called it the nucleus. Everybody doesn’t see it but it’s still really important. It’s almost like smaller building blocks.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, for sure. And that’s the thing too, because, you know, at the time when I had my first podcast with the coaching business, it wasn’t growing. It just wasn’t. Everyone told me, my mentors told me, other coaches told me that I should start a podcast because the podcast is a great way to find your voice, build your authority, all of that.
But I was like, It’s not really… because I’m economically minded. I’m like, “It’s not actually doing anything for me.” Until I figured out this next tier, which is an active organic marketing part, which is how do you actually get that content that you’re creating, that you have to create, that, as you said, is the nucleus of everything else that you’re gonna do? How do you actually make that active and start working for you?
Because right now, a lot of us and I used to think this, I was like, I just feel like I’m slogging, I’m working to create content without any results. And when we flip that narrative and we’re like, Actually, we’re creating this content so they can actually work for us, then that actually starts to make it like a good use of time. Now you start to make it like, this is something that I should be doing and focusing on more.
The way that we make it active… So I think about this very intentionally, depending on what platforms we want to be on, because there’s a whole host of different ways that we can be doing this. We can make our content active, for example, on search-based platforms, you know, the Googles, the YouTubes, etc. And we do this through being very intentional with our SEO optimization—how do we actually get found?
SEO optimization, I mean, I could just nerd out, and maybe we will nerd out a little bit later. But, you know, there’s so many factors that go into that that is not… like the keyword is just the start. There’s actually so much more that goes into that. So that’s one part of how to make your content active.
Another part is, how do you start to make it visible? How do you actually get it working on the likes of those social media platforms when you feel like you’re just, you know, shouting into the void? How do you actually make it work on social media? And really that comes down to knowing what those platforms were designed for, which is all about community building and engagement.
And when I was able to crack this nut, then, man, social media became a completely different ballgame for me, rather than just being one of those microphone things where it’s like, “Okay, I’m gonna post and repost.” It was actually enjoyable because I was actually getting engagement, I was actually… It was fun. It became fun. So that’s, you know, from a visibility perspective, how you can make your content active.
And then there’s a whole host of other things, too, like how do you do the likes of organic outreach and things like that to actually get eyeballs on your content and on you? So as I said, there’s a whole variety of ways to actually make your content active. But those are some of the overviews.
Joe Casabona: I want to touch on this really quick, right, because I think I have this problem, too, a lot, I think, which is I’ll post and ghost, as you said. Even interacting on Twitter I’m not really intentional about it. I just kind of interact to what I see. But this is almost going to a party and then being a wallflower, right? Like, Oh, yeah, I showed up to the party but nobody remembered I was there for some reason. It’s because you didn’t talk to anybody. You got to talk to people and learn about them and have good conversations.
Deirdre Tshien: Yes, exactly. I would take that analogy one step further with what we do sometimes, which is, it’s like going to a party, getting on stage, shouting out, yelling that you have this thing, for example, you’ve just dropped a podcast episode or whatever. And then-
Joe Casabona: …and then just leaving.
Deirdre Tshien: And then just leaving. That’s actually what you’re doing.
Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s so funny. And Imagine how weird that would be if you just saw somebody who is like, “Hey, buy my book,” and then leave. Like, Who was that guy? What was his book?”
Deirdre Tshien: Exactly. And that’s what we do all the time on social media. Anyway, that is not the way that you need to be approaching social media.
Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s so funny. Okay, so we’ve got passive and active organic marketing. What was number three?
Deirdre Tshien: Number three is leveraging other people’s audiences. So this is kind of taking a little bit of a turn, but it goes by the names like Dream 100. And for podcasts it actually gets to be relatively simple for us, because you know, guesting is something that we just do naturally. Again, that’s one part of it. That’s an easy way to do it. But you know, there’s so many other strategies that we can leverage other people’s audiences.
Like for me, for example, I hold virtual summits every year. I know that there are… I do like blog… You know, I think we’re working on something together, Joe, around collaborating on blog posts and doing guest swaps. There are so many different ways that you can be leveraging other people’s audiences. It’s just how do you be creative? How do you work out what the goal is that you want from it, but also what the goal is that the person you’re reaching out to or wanting to work with? What goal do they have? Also, importantly, what’s the goal of the audience? Like, what would their audience want? And if you can make that work, oh, my gosh, the synergies that come out of that is just magic.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, this is so good. The number one reason that I reject guest pitches is because they talk more about themselves than my audience and what they can give my audience. So you definitely want to do that. The thing I’ll add here is it should be like lookalike audiences to yours. People who have listened to the show have probably heard this, but I’m a big fan of Friends, the TV show Friends. In Season 1, they were getting like 16, 17 million views per week probably on Thursday nights mostly. In the 90s you watched the show when it came out and that was it.
Deirdre Tshien: I forgot what that was like.
Joe Casabona: I know, right? I told my daughter, she’s six and I’m like, “Oh, when I was a kid, we couldn’t just watch whatever we wanted whenever we wanted.” And she was like, “What?” And then in the middle of that season, they did a two-part crossover episode with the cast of Mad About You and the cast of ER, both NBC shows about young 20-something professionals. And after that, they saw 26, 27 million views per episode. So like, finding the right look-alike audiences and doing those crossover episodes or leveraging other audiences is super effective, and has been done for a long time.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah. 100%. And I would say, you know, the reason why… and I don’t know if you do this, Joe. But the reason why I put it as the third tier kind of… and these are loosely sequential. The reason why is because a lot of times when you do reach out, people are going to look at what you’ve created before and they’re gonna want to see that you’ve got some credibility or you know what you’re talking about. So it’s not impossible, harder to make the third tier work in isolation without having done the first and second two tiers,
Joe Casabona: Right. If you’re gonna show up and be like, Hey, I want to talk to your audience about XYZ, then you got to have the receipts.
Deirdre Tshien: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. So that was leverage other audiences. And the number four I think was-
Deirdre Tshien: Scaling through paid ads.
Joe Casabona: Paid ads.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, that’s right. So I think hopefully we all know, and I say hopefully because I surely did not know this. I tried building my coaching business off the back of ads and that was a disaster. So I’m very intentional that we put this on the top because it’s like you need to have your organic strategy dialed in first. You need to know what it is that people actually resonate with. That’s why podcasting is so powerful because it is such a good medium for you to find your voice. You need to find that voice, and then putting money behind that becomes a no-brainer.
Joe Casabona: So we’ve all paid that ad tax I think, right? Where it’s just like, “I have this blog post or this webinar I’m doing so I’m just gonna make ads for it.” But then you have no idea. It’s like paying to get up on that stage at the party shouting “buy my book” and then you go. Right?
Deirdre Tshien: Love it. This analogy just keeps on giving.
Joe Casabona: So good. So you need to have the organic strategy first. So how do you know? I’ve been afraid to try paid ads since the score… Is it like you have a piece of content that’s doing well, or you have… I guess it really depends on the platform as well.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah. So let’s talk about podcasting. It’s top of mind because I just spoke to Mike Wiston, who’s the CEO of mowPod. He did a masterclass and then I’m gonna do a podcast episode with him. But I asked him a similar question like, how would you know? Because his whole business, mowPod, by the way, just as an aside, it’s like a web-based ads platform for your podcasts. So it helps you get listeners through web-based ads. And he has the same approach, which is dial in your organic strategy first before you invest even with mowPod. And that’s his whole business. Right?
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Deirdre Tshien: So I was like, “Okay, cool, tell me more about how do you know? How do you know when this is dialed in?” His viewpoint was very much like, everything’s about trends. So for example, if you can see that your podcast is growing and not decreasing. If people are listening longer in your episodes, then you know that then you’re onto something.
If your podcast is kind of it’s trending down, that’s when you know… like, you really have to dig into that. Why are you losing your listeners rather than sticking on? There’s something a little bit broken there. There’s something that needs to be fixed. Because putting paid ads or paid money behind that is not going to fix it, right? You have to first work that bit out, and then putting money behind it is… it just makes sense.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So if you’re trending up and you’re growing, invest in that. And if it’s trending down, investigate.
Deirdre Tshien: Yes. Oooh. I love that.
Joe Casabona: I’ll link to mowPod and everything we talked about in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/328. So this is really good. Because again, you’re not going to advertise for the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Right? Maybe that’s too soon.
Deirdre Tshien: Sure.
Joe Casabona: But it’s like top of mind.
Deirdre Tshien: Yes.
Joe Casabona: You want to make sure that whatever you’re doing is working before you bring people to your platform.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, that’s right.
Joe Casabona: Cool. Very cool. All right. So the pyramid, four tiers of the pyramids. This is like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is maybe what I’m seeing in my head. Passive organic marketing at the bottom, then active organic up from that, leverage other audiences, the penultimate one in this pyramid, and then paid ads at the top. Love it.
Now you mentioned podcast discoverability. So let’s say that this audience is not quite ready for the paid ads part. Maybe they’re trying to figure out how do I get people to discover me, maybe what’s the active organic, maybe what’s the passive organic? But you mentioned SEO. And I feel like SEO is not often considered in the podcast discoverability side of things. Because I mean, it’s still very young, right? The internet has been around for almost 40 years. Podcasting is still a relative… Even the people who say they’ve been podcasting since like 2001, they were just uploading audio to the internet. Podcasting wasn’t really a thing until several years later still. So what are some of the tenants of podcast discoverability specifically?
Deirdre Tshien: Oh, gosh, I could nerd on this forever.
Joe Casabona: Same.
Deirdre Tshien: There are two parts to getting discovered. And when I say discoverability, I’m very intentionally meaning search through an intent. Someone, they have a question in mind, they want an answer and they’re going somewhere to look for it. Which is different to what I call visibility, which is where I put more social media in. And I know social media has some search functionality, things like that. But really, by and large, people still use it to scroll and discover. They’re scrolling and they just happen to come upon something, right? You need to get visible on those platforms. But discoverability is like you want to get discovered through an intent that someone has.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, for context, I think this was last year someone shared on this show that the lifetime of a tweet is like 21 minutes. Like you just want to be visible for those 20 minutes, right?
Deirdre Tshien: Exactly. Exactly.
Joe Casabona: No one go on Twitter and like keyword searching for your stuff there.
Deirdre Tshien: No. So when we think about search then, let’s talk about the podcast, there’s, in my mind, two main platforms that we want to be creating search capability for. So one is inside the podcast app, inside the player. So we’re talking iTunes, we’re talking Spotify, we’re talking Pocket Casts, any of the in-app players, right?
Joe Casabona: The directories, right?
Deirdre Tshien: The directories. Yeah, exactly. And then the other type of search is the worldwide web. It’s the Google. It’s YouTube. It’s even Pinterest. Like anywhere where people are going to actually put in a question or a keyword to search for something. So those are the two from a podcasting perspective that we break it down into.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, actually, I want to ask you here. Because again, I was doing an audit, and I was talking about how important title description, whatever is, and somebody said, I mean, is inside the directory that important though? Are people just searching for stuff in the directory?
Deirdre Tshien: Oh.
Joe Casabona: I mean, I said, Yeah. I mean, if you’re looking for a podcast, at least if you’re not Gen Z and you’re just kind of like scrolling TikTok style through Spotify, you’re probably gonna go on your podcast app and search for some term, right?
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: Marketing a podcasting, or solopreneur or whatever.
Deirdre Tshien: That’s actually how most people find new podcasts, you know, apart from maybe if they hear an ad for one on another podcast they’ve been listening to. But apart from that, they’re going in and they’re searching in their favorite player. So it is actually really, really important to try to get this or to at least work on it, to try to optimize it as much as possible.
So in speaking to Voxalyze, the CEO of Voxalyze, Alexis, he also did a mastermind and podcast episode on my podcast, Grow My Podcast Show, and he build discoverability in app to five things. The first is the show title. So the actual podcast title, the author… Now, this is an interesting one, author artists because I didn’t actually think about this. But he was like, you know, given that the genesis of iTunes was very much around music, the artist is actually holds a lot of currency in a platform like that. So that actually helps get discovered way more. So that’s the second.
The third is the show description. That’s the description for the podcast at the podcast level, the show level. And then the fourth and fifth is at the episode level. So the episode title and the episode description. So that’s kind of the five levers that we can pull in order.
So I think we know that a lot of SEOness is driven off keywords. So looking at your title, looking at even your artist’s name, looking at your description, how do you use keywords smartly, because we never want to stuff… This is like SEO 101. You know, don’t stuff your titles and your descriptions that show the keywords. But you want to be able to integrate your keywords in a human, natural way. So always think about that.
And then episode title and description is the same thing but hint, and I know Capsho can help you with that. So that actually makes it really, really easy for you to do. So that’s kind of… When we talk about in-app search, those are the five things we think about.
Joe Casabona: I like that. I didn’t even consider author artists, right? Mine used to be same name as my show. And that’s probably where you’re falling down, right? I since changed it to my name. Or if you have a company that you want to be representative or found there, I’m gonna guess probably one of those, you definitely don’t want it to be the same name as your show.
Deirdre Tshien: Definitely not. You want to take a step further almost, Joe, and definitely use your name, but almost then what you do or what is he known for? So if you’re like a podcast growth coach, then you know is Joe Casabona, podcast growth coach, or you know…?? Because those are keywords as well that people are looking for.
Joe Casabona: Gosh, that’s so smart. You’re blowing my mind, Deirdre. I thought four of the five. I include four of those five in my audit. And I’ve just recently started telling people their titles… Shout out to Hollie Arnett, she has a show called Brand Your Passion. And in the audit, I said, like, “Oh, your name is good. It tells people what you do, what they can expect.” But now I would tell her, and I actually included this in a follow-up, I would probably tell her to include her niche. Like, Brand Your Passion, helping x do y, right?
Deirdre Tshien: Yes.
Joe Casabona: And that’s where it’s not keyword stuffing, right? Like if you look at like Tim Ferriss or some other shows where they’re like, the show for solopreneurs and creators and business owners, I’m like, if it’s just a comma-separated list, that’s keyword stuffed.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, 100%. You’re exactly on the right track. Because those are the things that people search for. They’re like, “I want to find something that’s specifically for me as this particular type of courage or business owner or entrepreneur, credo, whatever.” And so the more specific that you can make it, the more niche down then the better.
Deirdre Tshien: And the other thing I would love to get your thoughts on this, because I feel like this is a drum I bang, but like I don’t really talk to other experts about it, is you want to nix “in this show”, and you want to nix “in this episode”. Those are kind of redundant, right? At least don’t start with that. I’m not saying like don’t have the words “in this episode” anywhere. But the first three words of your description should not be “in this episode”.
Deirdre Tshien: Yes. 100%. That’s right. Because again, if we think about… when humans read it, it’s kind of fine. But it’s like optimizing it for the machines, but really in the context of the human. So human reading “in this episode” is not the end of the world. But when you then have the machine overlay, it’s like you are kind of wasting real estate by saying that because it’s just so unnecessary.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Like we all know it’s an episode, whatever.
Deirdre Tshien: Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, definitely I’m on the same page as you. Don’t use those words at the beginning.
Joe Casabona: I want to give a shout-out to my friend Maddy. She has a book called Writing for Humans and Robots. I interviewed her on the show. So I will also link that in the show notes as well as Voxalyze. I want to give that a shout-out because I heard about it on your show, which is called-
Deirdre Tshien: Grow My Podcast Show.
Joe Casabona: Grow My Podcast Show. I always omit the “my podcast” part. But Grow Your Show is a different show.
Deirdre Tshien: Yes.
Joe Casabona: Grow My Podcast Show. I’ll link that in the show notes too. You should just find that in whatever app you’re listening to right now. But I signed up for Voxalyze after hearing about it on your show. And I love it. I’m a huge data nerd and I’ve made some optimizations to my description. Even though my show is going on eight years old, it’s changed a bit and it saw early success. But you got to always experiment, right? It’s a living, breathing things.
Deirdre Tshien: 100%, yes. Yeah.
Joe Casabona: Awesome.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, that’s in-app search. And then should we touch on search engine set?
Joe Casabona: Yeah, yes. And I think more people probably understand this a little better. But again, in the context of podcasts, and not long form, is it just like have a transcript or is there more, right?
Deirdre Tshien: I think about it very, very differently actually, because I do get asked all the time, like isn’t it… And some people actually, which kind of worries me a little bit, they’re just like, yeah, just put a transcript up as the blog, and that’s it. I was like, No, don’t do that.
Joe Casabona: It’s so bad to read.
Deirdre Tshien: Yes.
Joe Casabona: That’s for accessibility purposes, I mean, those terms will show up in an insight search, but you want a verbatim transcript and that’s just not very good for humans or robots to know.
Deirdre Tshien: Exactly, exactly. So this is kind of my hierarchy of, depending on how much time and how much you want to put into it. At a very minimum, for podcasters, have your own show website. At a very minimum. By the way, if you have your own business, like a lot of Capshoian do, then you just put it as a… you know, it’s just a podcasts tab in the navigation. I use Podpage for my podcast website. They make it really easy to edit and put in all the things in.
So for that podcast website—again, you can use Capsho to create all this—but you want to be able to… So it’s the same rules that apply. You have a title that is optimized for your keyword. But the body of it is actually designed to do two things in my mind. One is designed to have people want to listen to your episode. So as much as possible, the way that I think about the podcast’s website content is, what story or what resources can I tell that will actually not necessarily give it all away, but will actually hook someone in to want to press play. So that’s the first thing that you want to do. By the way, I sell this, like, oh, it’s really easy to create. Capsho makes it way easier to create, by the way.
Joe Casabona: Like what I said, in the beginning, was absolutely true. I have a format that I’ll talk about in a minute, but Capsho makes it easy.
Deirdre Tshien: Awesome.
Joe Casabona: Hashtag, not a sponsor.
Deirdre Tshien: The second thing that you want it to do, well, that I use it for is to actually send people back from my episode. I call this the show notes funnel, where I will actually drop a bonus clip. I’ll mention a bonus clip in my episode, I will direct people to my show notes. In my show notes, which is the description in the player, I only have one link on there. And that one link is to my episode page, which is where then when I have all of the other resources.
And the reason is because I want them to go through that journey. When I mention that there is a bonus clip that they can opt into, that’s also lead gen for me. I’m also capturing email. So that’s a big second thing that I want to create with my episode page.
Joe Casabona: I love this because, first of all, it totally works. Like I signed up for your mailing list. I think I’m on there twice now. So if you see me unsubscribe, it’s just because I have two addresses. Like with Arielle’s episode, I think it was like things that people aren’t thinking about to grow their podcast. I’m like, “This is good content.” Totally, totally work. So I love the bonus clip. I use it for members.
But the other thing that you mentioned here was you have one link in the description that goes to the show notes page. I’ve seen more people do this. And I’ve taken a page from Relay FM, like I’ve done a lot of things that they do. I mean, they’re amazing. So this is not meant to be a dig at them or anything. But I feel like the way they do things is still like the way that starting a podcast like circa 2012 is how it was done where you include all the show. And I do this. All the show notes are in the description of the episode.
But I think, like you said, the benefit is you want to get people to an actual page that’s kind of designed for a better experience.
Deirdre Tshien: Yes, exactly. Exactly. That’s why I say this is at a minimum you should have this because it has this neat way of it gets searched. So whenever we optimize, like that episode actually that I did with Arielle and as somebody on community, that ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword that I was the long tail keyword.
Joe Casabona: Oh, wow.
Deirdre Tshien: So it’s so powerful to have you get searched and get your podcast found. But as you said, the other great thing is that you want to design it in a way. So I tried to put a lot of images because with SEO as well there’s other rich media, you want to be putting in images and videos, etc. So I put in images that connect with people. Like the Arielle one, for example, it’s like a selfie of me and Arielle to be like, Hey, this is us at the [inaudible 00:33:35] meet up or whatever. You know, it actually tells a story. And people engage with that and they connect with that. And that’s what gets them sticking around longer.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s so smart too. Because I mean, Apple Podcasts have has made improvements over the last couple of years. But like for a while, you couldn’t even add formatted text to Apple Podcasts. And I had no idea. This is why you should also check your podcasts in all the big apps. Because it was either unordered list or something like totally broke my show notes one day.
Deirdre Tshien: Oh, right.
Joe Casabona: I think that’s super important. I just want to highlight, again, something that I think a lot of podcasters are inclined to do is say my latest episode… Well, I’m about to timestamp this episode hard. Because the latest episode of this show, as we record this, is your writing your business book wrong with Josh Bernoff. And I could have just said like, In this episode, I talked to Josh Bernoff, about how to write a better business book, right? But I opened with, “We live in an age where everything needs to be fast, easy, and in high volume. And I’ve seen people say, “I’m going to write eight books this year. Josh Bernoff thinks that’s a lot of crap.” Like that’s these first two lines.
If someone wants to write a book and has seen the literal person who I saw tweet, “I’m gonna write eight books this year”, if they know who that person is, then they’re gonna be like, “Why is that a load of crap? That guy is a good writer or whatever.” It should hook them in. Right?
Deirdre Tshien: Yes, exactly.
Joe Casabona: I think that’s really important. And like you said, Capsho… or I mean, parentheses other AI tools. But I have Deirdre on the show because Capsho is the best one I’ve used.
Deirdre Tshien: Oh, thank you.
Joe Casabona: Is really going to help you with that. Because I take notes during the show. But if I’m really into something you’re saying, I’m probably forgetting to type it. And Capsho and other similar tools will help you surface some of those things that you forgot too. And oh, yeah, we did talk about that for a while. You can integrate that. Even if you don’t use the exact text that the tool spits out, you can wordsmith it and include some of your own little personal anecdotes or whatever in there as well.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, for sure. I’ll just rattle off the other two at least from there. So at a minimum have a podcast website. Above that, I would say definitely get onto YouTube as well. So YouTube is also another search engine. It’s the second biggest, owned by Google search engine. If nothing else, like I know that there’s debates and I struggled with this, which is like if we have an audio-only podcast, how do you make all that?
To be honest, for my podcast specifically, I’m not really interested in getting people to listen to the podcast on YouTube. I’m actually more interested in getting, again, as I said, discovered, and then just whenever they have… You know, this is a podcast, so it’s kind of like just get discovered, make them aware of the fact that you have this podcast, and then you can help them with their questions and then they’re gonna listen to it, maybe not on YouTube, but it might be on Spotify or iTunes somewhere else. And that’s kind of how I think about YouTube for my whole podcast episode.
But we have something really cool that we’ve just launched. It’s called Creative Studio. In Creative Studio, there’s actually a feature that we have in it called “segments”. And what it does is it will actually pick out sections in your podcasts that answer a specific question that you can actually edit together and create shorter YouTube videos designed for YouTube. So this is like three to five minute, call them clips, they’re not really but it’ll give you guidance almost to be like, these are the parts that you can cut and paste together to create a way more impactful short-form video. Because those are the videos that actually perform the best on YouTube. Short, straight to the point, how-to tutorial style, answer a question content. That’s what we’re helping creators create now.
Joe Casabona: That’s amazing, first of all, because it perfectly [inaudible 00:37:26] up my next question. So I wish I wasn’t going to interject here but I do want to really drive this home because I think that there’s been pushback on whether or not your show should be on YouTube. And like absolutely it should, right?
Deirdre Tshien: Mm-hmm.
Joe Casabona: Even if it is audio only for the exact reasons that you mentioned, but also because YouTube music, at least in the United States, as we record this, is including audio-only podcasts. Like you can do audio only now. And soon you’ll be able to connect your RSS feed. It’s like how Walt Disney, right, how he insisted that their animated films or their animation, like their cartoons should be in color even if every TV in America was still black and white. Because he wanted to make sure their whole back catalog was ready to go when color TVs hit the home. So you want to be there.
I’ll tell you, some of my episodes do better on YouTube than in the… I had one on generative AI for podcasting for my other podcast, which is called The Profitable Podcaster as we record this, but will be called Podcast Workflows because I changed that name like every day. It’s a real problem. I haven’t found the right levers to pull for that one yet. But that episode five times more views on YouTube than it had downloads. So just some things are really going to resonate. And you want to be there. That’s our audience. Like you said, it’s the second-highest search engine on the earth.
Deirdre Tshien: Yes. And just really quickly, Joe, I know that we probably don’t have a lot of time but the third one is long-form blogging, an actual blog. That’s kind of almost, you know… So as I said, for a search engine SEO perspective, start with podcast website. If you have time, definitely get onto YouTube. Again, Capsho can help you with that. It will save you the time.
And then the third one is to have a specific blog for your podcast, which is actually different to the podcast website, because I kind of call the podcast website… Like it is a blog in some form. Think about it as your expert blog. This is you kind of being like, this is what I have expertise in, or these are the expertise that my guests having and this is what we talk about. Come listen, come join that conversation. It’s very you-centric in a way.
The blog that you want to be creating is more centric to your audience or to the people, your potential audience. This is again what Capsho does is we create three types of blog posts. We create the how-to blog post, we create a listicle blog post, and we create a Q&A blog post. Specifically, the reason why we chose those three is because they’re the highest-performing blog posts that get searched and are optimized for search. Because people are searching for those things. They’re searching for, how do I do this thing? Or what are the best XYZ? That’s what they’re actually searching for. If you want to really start to skyrocket your discoverability on search is just to have those other pieces of content on there as well.
Joe Casabona: This is great. I love it. Because it really feels like Capsho, right… Like you want to find the right niche and solve the right problem with your product. And I feel like we’re a lot of AI tools are just like, Hey, we can do this now, Capsho… Like you’ve mentioned it a bunch of times, like, we are optimizing for SEO and we are looking at keywords. And even if you’re… I’m not an SEO expert, even though I’ve been making websites for most of my life at this point. I’m 37 I started when I was 14. That’s a whole thing unto itself, right?
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: It’s really cool to, first of all, talk about these things, because they are really important. I’ve been beating the drum of have your own podcast website. Don’t just link people to Apple Podcasts, especially now because like it’s, I don’t know, 25%, right… Spotify has really eaten their lunch over the last couple years. So you want to have a place that works for everybody, not just like the… even if we look at people who own iPhones, like half the population, right? Like half the US population. Outside the US it’s like 20%.
Deirdre Tshien: Exactly. Yeah, right.
Joe Casabona: So have your own show website. Really love that. There are lots of great tools. Be on YouTube and then long-form blogging. Really important things. I feel like we could do an episode on each of those.
Deirdre Tshien: I know, right?
Joe Casabona: Yeah. So we have been talking for a while. I know we both have other stuff to do soon. We’ve talked about Capsho a lot. In the pro show, we’re going to talk about kind of working with AI in your own commercial tools. But I do want to mention repurposing content. Because I was gonna say like, is it just clipping interesting segments, and Creative Studio is doing that. But is there some kind of strategy or something else to think about when you’re repurposing?
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah. So you can probably tell that I nerd out on marketing. I love marketing, and so do my co-founders. So what you were mentioning about the difference that you’ve personally seen and Capsho is by design, because we’re marketers who built a marketing tool. I’m going to be kind of… I don’t want to put anyone down. But the difference that we’ve seen and difference in talking to people who tried other tools, and you might have noticed this as well, Joe, is that they’ve just come in being like, “Oh, this is AI thing. There’s open AI now that I can access these API’s, I’m just going to prompt some things.”
Whereas we have been so intentional, to the point of we sometimes split hairs on things that we really shouldn’t be, because we are designing something to actually help you promote your show, your business, yourself at the end of the day.
So the way that Capsho does that, the whole strategy behind it is kind of what I call content tripping, which is how do you actually create all of these… How do you repurpose your one piece of anchor content, which can be a podcast, it can be a live stream, it could be a vlog, if you want it to, like some piece of long-form audio video content, how can you repurpose it in a way that gives that content so much life and longevity that you’re actually creating a legacy out of it? The things that we put into, you know, and I’m sure you’ve seen, Joe, we have this block that we call content honey traps… you spoke about how you started your last episode at the time of this recording?
Joe Casabona: The episode that came out like a month and a half ago at this point.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, exactly. That was a hook. You know, we were very intentional to design, we call it content honey traps, but how do you create that curiosity to hook someone in to want to read the rest of what it is that you’re writing or that AI has helped you write? And then from there, you know, we do things like… as you said, Joe, we stop people in the middle of processing episodes to get them to actually identify the topic that they want Capsho to focus in on.
And again, this is very intentional because when we talk about keywords and SEO, this is key. We recommend, hey, here are five things that we’ve noticed that you could focus Capsho in on. But if those don’t work, and you’ve done your own long tail keyword researching and you know exactly what you want that keyword to be, here’s an empty box, you just type that in, and then we will create it based on that.
So you know, there’s just so much of this. It sometimes goes unsaid because we just built it and in the end and we’re just like, Yeah, because we’re marketers and this is surely having fun. But it actually is the juice, it’s the superpower of what Capsho does. So I’m just going to rattle off what Capsho… the types of assets that it creates.
Joe Casabona: Yeah that sounds great.
Deirdre Tshien: We have copy studio. Copy studio helps you create your title and description, your social media captions across almost all platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube shorts, emails, both promotional and engagement emails. And by the way, I should say, for the social media captions as well, it does promotional engagement and educational captions.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, I noticed that. I really liked that.
Deirdre Tshien: And that was, again, by design, because as I said, how you want to use social media isn’t just to like, promote, promote, promote. You don’t want to just get up on that stage and then, you know, eff off after the party. You want to actually stick around and then engage with people.
Joe Casabona: Right.
Deirdre Tshien: So those were designed in that particular way. The emails, again, promotional engagement. And you’ll also get a Youtube description inside copy studio to help with that SEO, you know, search on YouTube. There’s a copy boosts with SEO boost, which is our next tier. This will give you all of the blog posts that I mentioned, so how-to, listicle, Q&A. So you can create those three different types of blog posts for your one piece of content, and you get the expert blog, and you get a LinkedIn newsletter to help you get discovered.
And then on top of that, we have a creative studio, which we launched, just, gosh, about a month ago when this episode goes live. That Creative Studio is designed to help you identify sound bites. And the sound bites are based on what’s the action that you want your audience to take? Do you just want them to become aware that you have a podcast? Do you want to get them to listen to your podcast or watch your video? Or do you want to actually engage them, create engagement? So based on those filters, we actually create soundbites for you.
The segments, the YouTube segments already mentioned, it kind of like identifies key questions, and then it helps you answer that by helping you choose the actual sections of your episode that you can edit together. There’s a script, a short form scripts generator as well and it pulls out quotes. So super powerful.
Joe Casabona: That’s huge. Because one of the things that I get asked a lot is, I’m a podcast automation coach, specifically. I love automations. I love helping save podcaster’s time. And a question I’ve been wrestling with lately, like Justin Moore asked me this, and a few other people, like, how do I automate the promotional side of things? And I’m like, there’s not a lot of good stuff right now. Because like what I do, oh, yeah, I’ll record the video, I’ll put it into script, I’ll highlight the thing, I’ll make it a portrait video, and then I’ll export it. But still don’t find that stuff. And Creative Studio sounds like a game changer. I’m really excited to try that because it’s one of the hardest things to do, right?
Deirdre Tshien: It is.
Joe Casabona: Because you need to, essentially re-listen to the whole episode or transcribe the episode. And oh, does this transcript really communicate what I actually said? Is this a good clip? Where do I start it? Where do I end it? So that’s a game changer.
Deirdre Tshien: Oh, thank you. Yes, we are so excited about this. It’s completely new. As you said, we think it’s gonna be a game changer. So I’m glad that you said that too.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. This has been amazing. I have a couple more questions that we’ll cover in the pro show which you can sign up over at howibuilt.it/pro for as little as $5 a month. But Deirdre, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. If people want to learn more… First of all, full disclosure, I’m gonna link my affiliate link in the show notes for Capsho. Full disclosure. But if they want to learn more about you, where can they find you?
Deirdre Tshien: Yes. So if you want to learn more about me personally, Facebook and LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. Just my full name, Deirdre Tshien, which is the easiest name to spell, clearly. That is D-E-I-R-D-R-E T-S-H-I-E-N. It is incredibly complicated, isn’t it?
Joe Casabona: You’re from New Zealand?
Deirdre Tshien: Australia. Watch about that, Joe.
Joe Casabona: Ngah. Man. We’ll edit that part out.
Deirdre Tshien: We love the Kiwis. I think that they would be more offended by you calling me… Yeah.
Joe Casabona: That has been my experience. It’s almost like Little Brother Syndrome, right?
Deirdre Tshien: Exactly. So yeah, definitely if you want to link up with me, definitely do that. Go there. But I actually want to be able to give them something about cool, Joe. And this is through your affiliate link actually. So we talked a lot about discoverability, podcast discoverability, and the two types of platforms that you can get discovered in. I actually have a really short audio mini-course where I dive into these concepts as well. So that can be accessed for free through your affiliate link where people can also get an extended free trial of Capsho to go along with that.
Joe Casabona: Nice. That will be howibuilt.it/capsho. That’s C-A-P-S-H-O. So howibuilt.it/capsho to get Deirdre’s freebie. Use my affiliate link if you’re interested.
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, do it.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. Awesome. This has been so great. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today. I really appreciate it
Deirdre Tshien: Yeah, for sure. Thank you for having me.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. My pleasure. And thank you for listening. I appreciate it. Thanks to our sponsors for this episode. You can find all of the show notes, all of the great resources we talked about over at howibuilt.it/328. And until next time, get out there and build something.