Tracy Leigh Hazzard

Your irresistible offer should align with your purpose. Focus on providing value first—capture emails by serving, not selling, and let sales follow naturally.

Be upfront about your email list—how you'll use it and what value it provides. A well-crafted newsletter should serve your audience, not overwhelm them.

There has to be something you already have or can create with minimal effort to offer as a reward to your listener in exchange for their name and email. This could be occasional personal communication or an email newsletter.

Consumers, listeners, readers, and watchers are looking for connection and experience.

You put so much effort into making a podcast. It's not that much harder to also have the written word, a reasonable transcript, cover art, and quotes that you've pulled out of the conversation.

The show notes are the hosts trying to convey, “Here's what's in this thing. Here's this journey that we went on in that experience.”

The culture of the space is like all the people together. There's this extra thing, which is all the connections between them and that makes the culture.

Right now, podcasting is the best and most influential place that you can get your message out to the world. Every other platform is having a downgrade in traffic.

If a musician or producer suddenly claims rights to your podcast music after you gain popularity, don’t stress—dump the music and start fresh. It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

You will get more downloads if you publish more content. Additionally, you have the opportunity to raise awareness for your events, programs, courses, books, or anything else you offer.

If you include sales messages in the intro or the first minute, you'll lose listeners. They’ll sense your intent to sell and tune out. Serve first and earn the right to sell.

Optimize your podcast! The podcast ecosystem allows up to 4,000 characters for your description—if you’re not using them all, you’re missing out on visibility, discoverability, and more downloads.

The whole point of the intro is to set the tone, establish the right frame of mind, and reassure listeners that they’re in the right place. It should make them feel at home—comfortable and open to the message you’re about to share.

You can accomplish a lot in just 15 seconds. If it needs to be 20, that’s fine—but keep it under 30 seconds, and definitely not a full minute. The shorter, the better.

Maximize your guest's time by separating the intro from the interview — greet them, build rapport, then dive straight into the questions.

In this day and age of short attention spans, if you don’t grab your audience with a strong tease at the start and instead open with a generic bio, you’ll lose them. It won’t draw listeners in or keep them engaged throughout the episode.

A lot of podcasts truly don't understand the power they have. That's why we strongly recommend not choosing your guests too casually — meaning you shouldn't just take anyone on your show.