E.B. Moss: Hey, it's E.B. Moss, Managing Editor for MediaVillage and I am on location yet again, so excited to be at Podcast Movement in Anaheim California. Podcast Movement 2017, I think it's their fourth year. And of the couple thousand people here, I bumped into Jason Hoch, who is the Chief Content Officer for HowStuffWorks.

I bumped into him right after he happen to have walked up the stage holding two statuettes, awards that he won here at Podcast Movement so I wanted to grab the opportunity to talk to you. Hey, Jason.

Jason Hoch: It's so great to be here.

E.B. Moss: Good to see you. We had spoken in the past before and I'm a big fan of HowStuffWorks, and I thought that we could just chat about what's new for you, what's new in your vision of podcasting, and have a little free-for-all.

Jason Hoch: Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting to be here. If anyone was in Chicago last year, one of the quick observations is this is pretty hot space, there's a lot more people here. A lot more people creating I think interesting entertaining content, and the whole technology wing of things too. Things like dynamic ad serving is part of the track here.

The monetization opportunities, the data and analytics surrounding everything podcast related. That's really exciting because it says it's part of a bigger movement of interest, so we're having all these great new shows and creators come on the platform and we're also able to measure it.

And why is that important? The evolution of this as a really amazing platform and that we can't play tricks with our users. They really do listen to these episodes. They really do want a place where they can listen for 30, 45 minutes, maybe 60 minutes. This is a daily part of a lot of people's lives. Learning how those things connect together both on the execution side, from the tech perspective and then how we create content. It's really interesting to see how all these things are coming together.

The other interesting part is this just has all gotten bigger. So many people, so many listeners are coming and discovering podcasts and making it part of their daily routine. Our goal is to inform and entertain people to really provide that delight in people's lives. Those couple hours of the day, where they may be jogging, they may be commuting, that miserable commute or as we often hear from a lot of our listeners, before they go to bed.

All those things are really important touch points. Early on, we thought, yeah, people only want to listen to the five minute podcast, because they’ve only got so much time in their day. But we were wrong on that; what people wanted is long read for audio. They wanted to deep dive with us. They wanted to have that one on one connection and they're consuming these podcasts like math.

E.B. Moss: Yes.

Jason Hoch: Over the years, we broke this huge catalog of content where you start with one episode and you just keep going, and we really built an organic fan base under that. We look up now, we’ve got over 6,000 episodes of content, that's over 3,000 hours, and we're going to continue to add more shows to our roster and it's just happening everywhere.

E.B. Moss: Well, I think that also part of the appeal is that people feel like they're learning something with podcasts in general and particularly with the suite of content from HowStuffWorks.

Jason Hoch: Yeah, I've always said we never want bad experience informing people. We never wanted to sound like we're reading out of a dictionary or an encyclopedia. We'd like to say we're perfectly imperfect. We walk up two topics that maybe we didn't know anything about, we were very curious about because we've kind of figured that the audience is going to have that same perspective, and we want to surprise people with topics that maybe they didn't really realize how exciting it was until they heard us talk about it.

Do it in a detailed way, again with flaws and all, and actually that's part of the organic conversation is our discovery process about topics from the sun to anything else that we ever decide to cover, and that's part of what makes it so raw and interesting and organic and entertaining frankly too.

E.B. Moss: Yeah, and entertaining because you have a whole slew of, sort of, I'll call them verticals...

Jason Hoch: We do – a whole slew of verticals from food to science to history and beyond.

E.B. Moss: I also saw that you've got some development in comedy.

Jason Hoch: Yeah. This year has been a really exciting year, because we know what we have. We've got upwards of 37 million downloads per month and people really consuming everything that we're giving them, and so we really want to be what we call the home for creative geniuses. As much as it is about offering entertaining options for our listeners, what does that mean as a creator?

We really want to be that home, and so we've made a couple big moves in this space this year. First is bringing in Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur who are the founders of Mental Floss. They founded the magazine in their dorm room in 2002 at Duke University.

E.B. Moss: I'm a big fan of Mental Floss.

Jason Hoch: They started this magazine because they were having conversations in the dorm room about all kinds of brand of topics. Two of the most curious guys I've ever met and I've been friends with them for 10 years. We always looked at each other: ‘How would we work together, and how is this all going to happen?’

We brought them on board, earlier this year, and they've launched the show called Part-time Genius. That Part-time Genius is a look at quirky funny look at some amazing things from the weirdest presidents to the strangest college courses to will we live forever, asking the big question and unpacking some pretty dense topics in a really really fun way, so they offer a complimentary, yet different voice for us.

Secondly, here in LA, we've actually opened new offices, headed up by Jack O'Brien, who is the founder of Cracked.com, he was the Editor-in-Chief and really grew that into a really amazingly popular platform. He's come here to open up that office to startup a series of comedy shows. He's a brilliant guy. He's a great writer, and he's going to have a team of regulars joined by journalists and comedians and actually given the opportunity to be really funny, to riff, to be able to really have that organic funny look at our frankly inane world of politics and beyond.

I think that there's an opportunity to be a little bit funnier and entertaining in this space, and we're going to hit people with a pretty high frequency show and really deliver, I think, something really unique in the space. This is going to be the first of a series of shows that Jack will continue to develop and finding that diamond in the rough talent, and really working with them to develop them, super excited about that.

E.B. Moss: Well, this is a great space to find the diamond in the rough podcasting, gives voice to so many different types of personalities, and then they're becoming stars. We recently did an article on the success story of Two Dope Queens and everyone from, let's take a Guy Raz moving from journalism within NPR over to another show on how things get built.

Jason Hoch: Yes.

E.B. Moss: You're finding a lot of success from other platforms as well, and things are going to and from and back to podcasting, didn't your origins include an early show?

Jason Hoch: Yeah, it is interesting to see the evolution. This is pure digital media. We're always up for change. We've seen things like one of the awards we won last night was for Brain Stuff, and this was actually our first podcast, and it was a five minute show that we recorded in Marshall Brain's closet from his house, and he would just crank up content.

It was very early, and we thought that people only wanted a five minute show, and they wanted something a little bit longer. We kept going with that show and eventually we put it in re-runs and continue to grow, because there were 5 to 600 episodes of this content, and so many people coming on that platform. So, Marshall recorded that show for a number of years. We put it in re-runs, and even though it was in re-runs we continue to find an audience as the podcast, audience grew, that then became a video series and was on YouTube and everywhere else, had multiple personalities and writers and collaborators, and then we actually rebooted the podcast with fresh new episodes based on that video series.

This is the crossover trans-media thing that happens so often and now we're developing new Brain Stuff episodes based on brand new topics and we're going to go to daily show.

E.B. Moss: Also five minutes or have you decided to go longer?

Jason Hoch: Keep it five minutes.

E.B. Moss: Okay, so there's something for everyone.

Jason Hoch: There's something for everyone. I don't think we've made any decisions on this but we feel like there's an opportunity in the smart speaker space, and the smart phone space. You talk about flash briefings. You talk about everything happening there where that shorter content has been primarily influenced by a news drop, if you will, what else is there? We think there's a space for science and technology and history in those topics.

I can listen to one if I want or I can actually binge listen a whole bunch of this stuff because it's evergreen and this is a behavior that we see, again over and over, so let's find new ways to delight people in a way that best fits with the environment that they're in. We just continue to play in those spaces and learn, it's very exciting.

E.B. Moss: You have been with HowStuffWorks for a long time, Jason, right?

Jason Hoch: Yeah, I was with the team from 2007 to 2011. We've sold the business to Discovery in 2009 for $250 million, did a little integration dance with Discovery for a couple years. I left to run digital for WWE up in Stanford, Connecticut. Super exciting time, and they asked me to come back about three and a half years ago.

Right as we're percolating where this podcast thing goes, I said let's start to really embrace this. Let's think a little bit differently than we have in the past, and really get behind this in a big way. We moved offices. We built studios. We started to really see some great results and we saw a growth in our downloads, that was 3 to 4X over the last couple years as all organic growth. All us being ourselves, people appreciating great content, and frankly letting our hosts do their thing. Having mad respect for what they do, their process, their research ...and lots of things pop out of that from live tours to many of these pages on Facebook or in the hundreds of thousands to millions and be able to have a direct connection with them and then for us, one of our advantages is being able to tell those stories in a 360 way.

We talk about video with Brain Stuff. Seeing Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, seeing some of the teams that's actually creating this with video as both a promotional mechanism, a reach mechanism, just drawing the connection. It taps into the nature of podcast, where people feel like they get to know you. They feel they've really connected with you and that's the secret sauce of podcasts.

But for us, it's drawing those connections everywhere without it being a distraction and it being a compliment, and so as more people walk up to all of this, we see them in so many different platforms.

E.B. Moss: Right, so hats off to you on moving things forward so well and I'll wrap it up with a little bit of the business question and ask you to take off your content expertise hat, and put on your futurist hat, and your business model hat: where are things going in terms of move revenue for podcasting, do you ever produce for advertisers or are there new tactics and technologies that are going to drive more revenue?

Jason Hoch: Yeah, I think it's a great question. One of the things that we've seen in other digital platforms is tricking the user, tricking the consumer, it's click-bait this, it's five ads on a page, it's all kinds of things to get more traffic. It's a game that's being played all over the place, and I just think that if you trick users on a podcast platform, they're not going to stick to your podcast. So we have to be real, and so what is the overall appeal of a podcast?

Again, it's that one on one connection, but it is like audio long, it's 30 to 45 minutes. It's not a three second Facebook video, and so people are spending a lot of time with us, they are actually paying attention to the ads or the commercials, and early data bares that out. We're seeing the data that we've seen so far says that people are listening pretty much all the way through a podcast. They're actually doing what we think that they've been doing all along, that they're not actually skipping the ads, that they're enjoying them.

They're just sitting back, relaxing, it's just part of their day. And we respect those borders, we respect the listeners so much that we just don't want to cloud up the feed with all these other stuff. What does that mean for the future of this platform? I believe that this is pretty much the best most premium platform, in which we treated as such. This is not a raise to the bottom, this is that opportunity to really connect with people in a really special time in their day, and so let's make it a premium offering.

This has been really triggered early on with some of the direct response advertisers, they're seeing real results, real conversion, we're getting real data out of this that says “this works”. The bigger agencies and brands...frankly, our industry has not done a good enough job articulating what it is we do, what is our metric, what is our standard, and how do we measure cut in everything else.

We're going to see a transformation over the next 12 to 36 months that allow those measurement, because those agencies are thinking about the language of websites, and video pre-rolls and Facebook reach, and not that it has to be a one to one match, but how do we articulate this in a way that they can understand, that they can advocate for their brands, and they can say here's what you're going to get out of it, here's the results.

Even if you're a big brand, we have some proof points that says this does move the needle, there is awareness. It doesn't necessarily require an offer code but this is an audience that's very very much captivated and paying attention to your message, and so how we capture that, measure that, and report on that ultimately helps all of us. And I think we're in that position now where we have technology investment and analytics to be able to support our story, but frankly we've been all raising our hand, and saying we had all along. Now we've got the thing to support it.

E.B. Moss: You are in a unique position because HowStuffWorks not only builds its own content but you host your own content and you sell your own content.

Jason Hoch: That's right.

E.B. Moss: Your metrics are aligned with what we're seeing from Edison Research and it sounds like podcasting is doing great for advertisers and we're going to rule the world soon.

Jason Hoch: I hope so, I think we've got so much opportunity. Anytime you start to throw some big numbers around, that's when people start to pay attention. When you look at the agency world, you also are finding that a lot of the younger consumers of podcasts, they're the ones actually working the agency saying we need to start paying attention to podcast. And again we have not armed them with enough data to be able to understand how this actually carries over to the brands, and I think we're going to find more specific podcast pies.

I think you're going to see a scale on the size of those pies and real partnerships to figure this out. I don't necessarily think we need to go all the way into turning this industry into necessarily branded content podcasts. I think that part of the organic connection within the shows that we have that are informative and entertaining is pretty substantial so let's focus on that. Let's really deliver a great experience for listeners, but also for the ad partners everywhere.

E.B. Moss: Jason Hoch, that was very well put. Thank you so much for spending time with me, and talking about HowStuffWorks in the world of podcasting in general. I think that you've raised the bar for a lot of the folks here and we look forward to hearing more from you in all verticals and realms.

Jason Hoch: Yeah, thank you. It's going to be a big year. I can't wait to share with you all the upcoming stuff.

E.B. Moss: I'll be listening. Thank you.

E.B. Moss: Alright we're back at Podcast Movement 17, 2017. And now I'm here with Jay Green and Jay is the Senior Vice President Digital Strategy and Analytics for Cadence 13.

Jay Green: Cadence 13, hi E.B.

E.B. Moss: Hey Jay, so this is big news because as of yesterday I believe, it was digital.

Jay Green: Digital Media, yeah we announced our rebranding at 9:30 this morning.

E.B. Moss: That's great, I'm so glad to have the fresh news. Yay, so I know you from working at AdLarge Media, and you and I were also at Westwood One, separately but differently.

Jay Green: Yeah, I think we missed each other by about two weeks.

E.B. Moss: Yeah, that's right. So, we caught up at AdLarge and now I have the opportunity to interview my former co-worker!  So tell me how life is now at Cadence 13?

Jay Green: It's great, it's really been a whirlwind. I've been in podcasting now for a little over four years and it's incredible. It really is, it's a wild ride. I was telling someone the other day that I had never had the opportunity to be in an industry as it's growing. I graduated college and got into radio and it was 1998, so radio had kind of hit its peak already. So it's awesome.

E.B. Moss: Well I've had the opportunity to benefit from your enthusiasm, you taught me so much along the way Jay. Now I'm going to ask you to teach some other people ...

Jay Green: Sure.

E.B. Moss: ... who are listening to this. So that was a little bit about your background, tell me more about what you're doing now with the new Cadence 13.

Jay Green: Yeah, I'd love to. So Cadence 13 we are, for lack of a better term, we are a podcast content firm. What does that mean? It means that we are producing content with many of our 75 shows but then the biggest for there and our core competency is sales and marketing. So not only are we producing the content, but we are selling sponsorships within the show, working with our advertisers, creating segments. But what we've also noticed is, we need to be able to promote those shows. So that's another thing we work with our podcasters is to promote the shows, whether it's on other podcasts, if it's buying social on Facebook, or Snapchat, Instagram, whatever that might be. So we kind of have all courts taken care of.

E.B. Moss: Wow, okay. And so some of those 75 or so podcasts, some of the bigger ones are Pod Save America, and ...

Jay Green: Yeah Pod Save America would certainly be our biggest, really all the crooked media fantastic shows from Pod Save America, Pod Save The World, Bump It Or Leave It. We started really with political and sports, so Tony Kornheiser out of Washington DC is very great, big show for us. And recently we've actually gone into, we're expanding because we've certainly seen, what's nice about podcasting is it's growing. Podcast really started out as comedy, every comedian had a podcast. But now we're actually growing into female podcasts, lifestyle podcasts. So we have some great shows like Yoga Girl, which does extremely well. And actually yesterday we relaunched Girl Boss Radio.

E.B. Moss: Oh, great.

Jay Green: So everybody knows Sophia, and that's doing really well too.

E.B. Moss: Oh, that's good. That's right up our women advancing vertical at Media Village.

Jay Green: Yep, absolutely.

E.B. Moss: We love it.

Jay Green: And Sophia's fantastic to work with.

E.B. Moss: Oh good, you'll line her up for our next interview.

Jay Green: Sure.

E.B. Moss: Okay, good. And so how did the name change come along, what was the impudence for that?

Jay Green: That's a great question. Digital media was kind of a throwback to our executives, we all kind of work together at a network radio company called Dial Global... which became Westwood One. So it was kind of throwing honor to that, the old DG moniker and he was able to make digital media. But as we've grown we've seen maybe it's time to grow from that as well. So the executive's kind of sat down and thought about it and it became Cadence is kind of just we're stepping into our rhythm, we're making our own beat, making our own way. So that's kind of where Cadence came from, and it kind of rolls of the tongue. The 13 I'll make it very easy for you, is as you can probably assume Cadence Media, or Cadence itself, was taken by so many different companies already so they looked at it and our company moved from SoHo into Midtown Manhattan last December and since they made that move so many different things have happened. Crooked Media took off, and Girl Boss, and Yoga Girl took off and we're hired, we're up to 40 people now working for the company and we're on the 13th floor.

E.B. Moss: Oh.

Jay Green: As well as my CEO loves Apollo 13, Legends 13, and different things. So 13 for us has kind of been a lucky number.

E.B. Moss: Oh good.

Jay Green: So Cadence 13 is what it became.

E.B. Moss: Oh, it sounds lucky.

Jay Green: Yeah.

E.B. Moss: That's great. So how would you, we spoke to How Stuff Works Jason Hoch recently, and there is a lot of content that makes the world of podcasting. How do you distinguish yourself from something like that type of sales marketing content production company?

Jay Green: Sure, that's a great question. So a company and content like How Stuff Works they've got their core competency. You know what you're getting with that, it's House of Work, History, whatever that might be. And that's what they're very good at and they've made a really nice name for themselves doing so. With us we started with political, with Crooked, and Sports With Tony, and Fox Sports and whatnot. For us it's really about influencers, we want people who are the influencers ... Whether it's YouTube stars like David Dobrik and The Views From Us, or Rhett and Link with Ear Biscuits. Those are people that people want to listen to, they want to shout to. And that's not to say that it hasn't come with its own growing pains across the way.

I'll give you an example, our Views show is hosted by two gentlemen and as we're selling it, the fit just didn't seem right for whatever reason for the advertisers that we were putting in there. And as we kept growing with it, we looked at it and we said, something's off here. So about two weeks ago they had an event in Los Angeles, that was at 1:00 in the afternoon. At 7:00 am there was a line of 1,000 pre-teen and teenage girls around the corner for this. Everyone said okay, we're looking at this show all wrong, all wrong. And it's funny, but we started talking okay we know who our target is, how do we reach that with two plus 20-year-old guys? How do you do that? So our president John Murphy, asked his 15-year-old daughter, do you know Dave Dobrik and she goes, do you know him? He goes yeah, we represent his show, we produce his show.

She goes wait a minute, dad this whole time you've had his show and I didn't know it? He goes yeah, and she goes what kind of products ... She goes like L’Oréal, or Chanel, anything like that. She goes yeah but it would be awkward coming from them. So we had to pivot a little bit on that, and what happened was now Dave's girlfriend is going to come in and do the reads because it's still the great content but it's a female talking in the show about it. So it taught us to pivot a little bit, which is great. So again, but that's what I'm getting at with the influence and marketing.

You see the eyes light up on her face just like I love this show, this guy's going to talk to me, this is great, this is what I want to listen to. So that's kind of where we're going with all of this.

E.B. Moss: And that speaks also to your insights about ad sales strategy, a big part of what you do.

Jay Green: Yeah.

E.B. Moss: So where do you see things going and how do you, when you don't have a focus group of one with John's daughter ...

Jay Green: Right, of course.

E.B. Moss: ... how do you identify the audiences, and the kind of uptake that you're getting from them?

Jay Green: Certainly podcast metrics have been a big question for everybody. And Apple certainly is doing a great job of opening up those doors so we can start getting more and learn from each other. One of the things we do with each new show that comes on is do a survey of their audience, figure out who they are demographics wise and whatnot. There's certainly other platforms like iHeart and Spotify, which are shows that are on that do provide us from their registration data who's listens to the shows. So from all of that we're able to aggregate and get a feel for who they are.

E.B. Moss: Got it. So a lot of the content that you are selling it's primarily produced, it's bespoke content that Cadence 13 is producing. You have a couple of stand outs as we mentioned, the Vox ...

Jay Green: Yeah I'd say about 80-90% of our shows are produced in house. We have partnerships with the different talent and show creators, which is fantastic. We have a partnership with Fox and Fox Sports where they do produce their own shows, which has worked out very well also. So it's great to have a good mix like that.

E.B. Moss: So let's talk about the future. Where are we doing with podcasting? I know that that's what podcast movement's all about, but what about at Cadence 13?

Jay Green: Sure, the future is definitely very bright. What's great about podcasting is, and certainly what I've seen, is it's not just audio. There's a lot of these hosts and the talent has so much more of a brand where podcasting is only one subsection of that. It could be a large subsection, it could be a smaller subsection. But as I mentioned the Views, they do events around. Crooked Media they do live podcasts all around, there are authors, there are photographers, whatever they might be, different talent. So we're working with all of them to sale not just the audio but beyond that as well whether it's social integrations, or live integrations. So the future is very bright, it's really seeing great growth, and we've seen that from the advertisers as well. Whereas even as little as two years ago it was podcasting, I don't know.

E.B. Moss: Right.

Jay Green: Who's handling that, something give it to another division to handle. And now we're getting like okay, I need you to teach me about podcasting. I want the budget in my department. Which is fantastic, it makes us very bullish on what we're doing and that we're taking the right steps.

E.B. Moss: Any case studies you can talk about?

Jay Green: In regards to?

E.B. Moss: High profile sponsors, success stories?

Jay Green: Sure, let me think about that.

E.B. Moss: I'm putting you on the spot I know.

Jay Green: No, it's all good.

E.B. Moss: But everybody wants to know the case studies.

Jay Green: Sure, look the easiest case study is certainly direct response. With any medium direct response is always the first to doctor because if it works they're going to keep investing. And those are your stamps.com, your Blue Aprons, go in listen and use my code. They're not giving the code to give you the 10% as much as they like, they're using the code to see is it working, how many people are coming from being on Pod Save America, how many people are coming from being on Yoga Girl. If it didn't work they would not be coming back and spending as much money as they are in the industry. So that right there is your ultimate case study.

E.B. Moss: The canary in the coal mine so to speak.

Jay Green: So, so to speak. Then you look at we've certainly had some other major brands such as Sonos has got into the space, Spotify is advertising in the space, we have clients like ADT, major brands that are advertising in the space because they are seeing podcasting as a very valuable tool. This is not a 30 second pre-recorded produced ad where somebody's telling you about a feature. This is our hosts talking about it, and again when I said earlier we're looking for influencers, that's why. Because this is not music, while music is great, look I was playing Springsteen as I was getting dressed this morning. I always have music on, but the music experience tends to be a little bit more passive, it's in the background, the ad comes on in the background, and you'll notice it and that's fine. But with podcasting I want to go hear what John Lovett has to say, what happened with Trump or whatever anything like that might be. And when I'm listening to that podcast for what John has to say, or Sophia has to say, the ad becomes a part of that.

Our ad loads are very small, we're not bulking them up together so they're not intrusive too much and they're making them their own. And that's why they're influencers because I want to hear what they have to say. And the advertiser and the sponsor message becomes a part of that. And that's really what moves it.

E.B. Moss: And will you, or are you, getting into any custom content, branded podcasts?

Jay Green: Sure, yeah we've spoken to a number of agencies about that who are looking more and more to do some branded content. Or say hey listen, I know you're creating a podcast, we'd love to own it completely and just have it. I'm the type of guy who, especially when we're growing medium, all boats rise with the tides.

E.B. Moss: Yes.

Jay Green: I think you really need to look at what Panoply did with GE and the message.

E.B. Moss: Right.

Jay Green: I think that was an amazing use of branded content. And Matt Turck and his team did a phenomenal job of that.

E.B. Moss: Agreed, mm-hmm (affirmative) that's great. And so are there any new ad tactics coming down the road? Is there anything that Cadence 13 is doing differently or plans to do differently?

Jay Green: That's a great question. I think in 2018 we're going to be doing more and more dynamic ad insertion. Still host read advertisements, just it gives the advertisers a little bit more detail on reporting and listenership. So we're going to move in that way a little direction. That's one thing, we're certainly going to look at expanding our roster of talent. Getting more genres open to it...

E.B. Moss: That's great. Alright, Jay Green ...

Jay Green: E.B.

E.B. Moss: ... VP Digital Strategy and Analytics at the now named Cadence 13, formerly Digital Media. I gave you enough plugs with that name I think already.

Jay Green: Yeah, I think you gave me enough.

E.B. Moss: Alright, thanks for talking with me.

Jay Green: E.B. thank you so much it was great seeing you.

E.B. Moss: You too.

 

E.B. Moss: Alrighty, for the third leg of the Podcast Movement podcast I'm talking to someone who is a Kinesiologist/Petroleum Landsman blogger/podcaster. I'm talking to Taylor Bradford, who is the host of Boss Girl Creative podcast.

Taylor Bradford: Yay, hi!

E.B. Moss: Yay, Taylor, did I get it right?

Taylor Bradford: You did, thank you.

E.B. Moss: Yeah, so excited to talk to you. You are part of this podcast where we spoke to, let's just say a couple of big cheeses at a couple of big podcast networks, as mentioned we spoke to How Stuff Works's Jason Hoch, and your fellow panelist today at Podcast Movement, Jay Green, who's now with the rebranded DGital Media, now called Cadence 13, and you, yay!

Taylor Bradford: Yay! That's exciting, thank you.

E.B. Moss: It is, you're welcome. And it's exciting for me too because I came up through the podcasting business just in the last couple of years and became really passionate about it, and well we're both women, and I think that that's a little bit of your story too, right?

Taylor Bradford: Yes. Absolutely.

E.B. Moss: We joked about, or I joked about the fact that you've worn multiple hats throughout your career and think what I learned about you is that your through line is that you're curious. You love just diving into something and then you uncover, or as they say these days unpack-

E.B. Moss: Everything you can learn about a certain subject, right?

Taylor Bradford: Yes. Oh, absolutely.

E.B. Moss: So, tell me a little bit about, well I know from being a petroleum landsman that you were sent to the field to live in a hotel for weeks on end, and what did that lead to?

Taylor Bradford: To blogging, because I was absolutely bored out of my mind. Being in west Texas where there is absolutely nothing but oil, and people that don't trust you because you're there for oil, and just stuck in this hotel room and surrounded by men, so I had no female companions. My industry is very, very male dominated and I needed a creative outlet, and I had started a blog in 2008 and then realized, I had discovered the Pioneer Woman's blog back then and I was like, "This woman could be my best friend and she doesn't even know it." I binge read through her entire back catalog and was fascinated by the platform, and so it re-sparked that creative side in me when I was stuck in this hotel room not having anything to do. And I just started blogging five to six days a week just to have something to do.

E.B. Moss: Okay. And so you started to amass a bit of a following on blogging and you realized that you were passionate about that, and then you learned everything there was to learn about blogging.

Taylor Bradford: Yes.

E.B. Moss: And then you realized that to promote it you wanted to tap into social media.

Taylor Bradford: Yes.

E.B. Moss: And you learned everything there was to know about social media?

Taylor Bradford: Yeah, right. So when I started blogging Pinterest didn't exist yet, and Instagram didn't exist yet, and so these platforms came out, and it's like, "Ooh, shiny object syndrome. Let's go see what this is all about and how it can be leveraged for bloggers, and how we can get our content out there in front of new eyeballs because we all want to grow but we can't grow without people reading." And the social media platforms allow us to be discovered through new audiences.

E.B. Moss: And so one of those tools for discovery and expanding upon the awareness of your blog was a podcast?

Taylor Bradford: Absolutely, oh my gosh, yes.

E.B. Moss: Alright. And then you learned everything there was to know about podcasting, alright.

Taylor Bradford: Yes.

E.B. Moss: And so now fast forward, and you're a freaking panelist a few years later at Podcast Movement, and you're represented by Jessica Kupferman I think, right?

Taylor Bradford: Yes. Yes, I am.

E.B. Moss: Alright. So that brings us to today. So now your podcast, Boss Girl Creative, is all about helping everybody else understand the blogging space and now you've got a ton of followers to your podcast about blogging.

Taylor Bradford: Yes.

E.B. Moss: Okay.

Taylor Bradford: Yeah.

E.B. Moss: And you've started to grow revenue off that as well.

Taylor Bradford: I have, absolutely.

E.B. Moss: So that's our big back story as to why you fit in so beautifully between our two, let's just call them bigger corporate type of entities, with podcasting. So, what was the first thing you did to get started with the podcast?

Taylor Bradford: So, I actually bought some courses, because I need to know, like how much equipment is this even going to take for me to make this happen? I don't have a studio, I'm not going to be professionally produced, and I knew right out of the gate that I was not going to edit my own show. So I immediately started seeking out an editor, and found an amazing guy, he's actually here in Southern California, and he's been my editor for over two years now and he knows me more than I probably know myself, because he's in the shadows listening to my show and editing it and everything.

That was the one big piece that I needed to make sure I had before I launched, was having an editor, that was important to me. I knew I could figure out everything else, and honestly, I just needed my laptop and a microphone, and some headphones. It's not anything fancy, I record in my closet sitting on the floor, like, nothing fancy. I'm not in a fancy studio and have to book in studio time, I'm usually recording at 10:30 pm at night in my pajamas on the floor.

E.B. Moss: It's a good visual, thank you. And it's not too dissimilar, although we're not in our pajamas, although in the listeners mind you can put us in our pajamas, if you want. The beauty of theater of the mind. But we're sitting here in a conference room at Podcast Movement, and people are walking by, and you'll hear some noise here, and I've got a couple of, I'll give them a plug, iRig Lavalier microphones that I've plugged into my iPhone, and that's it.

Taylor Bradford: Yes.

E.B. Moss: We're sitting here, alright.

Taylor Bradford: Yes, chatting.

E.B. Moss: So now all of a sudden, you look at you and you've, as I've said, thrown yourself into this, and your most recent advertiser was Seth Godin, and altMBA, well wow.

Taylor Bradford: Yes. Thank you. It was super exciting to have that email sitting in my inbox, and like, "Hey, he wants to try out your show, and oh by the way, he wants more." So, I can't even describe that kind of an email to see sitting in your inbox.

E.B. Moss: Fantastic.

Taylor Bradford: Thank you.

E.B. Moss: I know you have some others like SaneBox has come in, which I really need to help with my own personal emails, but that's another story. Maybe there's a friends and family discount, will you give a code?

Taylor Bradford: Yes. I will be giving a code, yes.

E.B. Moss: Okay. So, actually that does link us to our next topic. How do you know that you're successful as a podcaster; is direct response a good barometer for you? What kind of feedback are you getting?

Taylor Bradford: So one thing I realized really quickly in the podcast space was there's not a direct loop of feedback. I don't know who's listening until they come forward and tell me, and community is so important for me. So I started, in the very beginning when I launched, a Facebook group so that I could know who my listeners were, and that group has just grown through the years, and I'm in the trenches with them, and I do Facebook Live with them every Wednesdays. It's a Q&A, whatever question they have in their blog, or their online business, or a social media platform, or if something breaks in the news, I'm chatting about that or I'm answering those questions every Wednesday night at 9 pm.

E.B. Moss: Wow, that's great commitment. Also in your pajamas?

Taylor Bradford: Sometimes in my pajamas, sometimes workout clothes, you know.

E.B. Moss: Okay.

Taylor Bradford: Glass of wine in hand.

E.B. Moss: Well, it's clearly paying off, because I know that you were listed in Entrepreneurs magazine of the top women hosted podcasts, which is a huge accomplishment and that must have been exciting?

Taylor Bradford: That was exciting, I had no idea that was even a thing until someone tagged me in a Facebook post and said, "Oh my gosh Taylor, total props for you for this accolade." And I'm like, "What are you talking about?" And they linked it, and I'm like, like I've got to pick my mouth up off the floor, this is such an honor, I'm so incredibly humbled, I can't even tell you. The world is so big, yet it's so small, and that was just ultimately shocking for me to have that, I can't even describe it.

E.B. Moss: Well, it's interesting because everything you're talking about is the connection.

Taylor Bradford: Yes.

E.B. Moss: And community, and creativity.

Taylor Bradford: Yes.

E.B. Moss: And I happen to have come across that article because I also know Jessica through her She Podcasts Facebook page and her own podcast with that same name, which was designed to help female podcasters. So, it's sort of like The Lion King, you know, it's the circle of things. So you're really applying all of your social media lessons also to growing your podcast just as you applied it to growing your blog?

Taylor Bradford: Yes, absolutely. It is so important for me to be the teacher, and also to teach as I'm growing my own business. So, last week's episode on my show, I talk about my own rebrand, and I talk about the journey on why it took me a little bit to finally make the decision to rebrand, but I want you to know that I'm just as human as you are and I have business struggles too, and we're in this together.

E.B. Moss: Now, I just talked to Jay Green about the fact that, as we mentioned, DGital just rebranded to Cadence 13, did he ask you for any advice?

Taylor Bradford: He didn't. He did ask me about Facebook Live though.

E.B. Moss: Oh, okay, alright. After this he might come a-knockin'. So, where do you envision yourself going with this? Do you have visions of a million downloads per episode? You're at a healthy 20,000 or so, which is a great accomplishment in just a few years of this, not even. Do you want to rule the world?

Taylor Bradford: I would love to rule the world, but supporting fellow Boss Girls at the same time. I don't ever want to sit on a pedestal for somebody, I want to be in the trenches with them and help them grow too, because it helps me grow as a fellow Boss Girl, and it's important for me to keep offering the teaching, because there are lot of people that aren't, and it's important to me because I Googled the heck out of everything to learn everything I know, and I want to be able to be the go-to resource for people to say, "You know what? Taylor is saying it straight, and this is step one, step two, step three, and I'm just going to keep going back to her because she's just sharing it all."

E.B. Moss: So tell me a little bit about how you'll voice an ad, what do you put into it?

Taylor Bradford: I prefer to have experience with the advertiser in some manner before I ever actually say, "Yes, I'm going to have this person be an ad on my show." Because I don't want my community, my listeners to ever think that I'm selling out. I want to only recommend things that I am truly, truly passionate about, because if I read an ad and I've never had any kind of interaction with that company, they're going to hear it. And I don't want them to hear it, and so I won't even offer it up as an option to be on my show if I don't have that. So I can get long winded on my ad reads because I'm so passionate about whatever it is that I'm talking about.

E.B. Moss: Well, that's my middle name; long winded. So, I think that I'll cut bait here, instead of being long winded, but this was such a refreshing conversation, to really kind of show the depth and breadth of the podcasters that are here at Podcast Movement 2017. I know that your first one was just a couple of years ago, and as I mentioned, you're already a speaker and I love that you're helping all boats rise.

Taylor Bradford: Yes.

E.B. Moss: And helping other female creatives have a voice.

Taylor Bradford: Yes, it's so important to me.

E.B. Moss: Taylor, thank you so much, that was great.