Latest / The ROI Online Podcast / [FF] Social Media Producer Molly Ann Hale on The Impact of Audio: The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 123

Transcript

[FF] Social Media Producer Molly Ann Hale on The Impact of Audio: The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 123 · The ROI Online Podcast

• 0:03
  Molly Ann Hale: So many people want to ingest content while they're working. But they can't watch something. You know, they they need to be on their computer. So podcasts and audio is perfect for those nine to fivers that they keep themselves, you know, occupied while they're doing busy work with audio. So yeah, I agree with you, I think they are leaving audience on the table.
• 0:21
  Molly Ann Hale: And I mean, look, I love RuPaul.
• 0:24
  Molly Ann Hale: Because RuPaul is like, he's got a TV show, he could, you know, he could retire a million times over already, but I think he did his podcast a because he had control over it. But also, he understood the power that you need that audio to, and it allows you to do so much more, you know, you can really explore inside of the audio in ways where TV and video are there certain rules or expectations or you know, structure around what is expected or how it should go.
• 0:48
  Molly Ann Hale: Whereas an audio like there's so much more room to play.
• 0:54
  Steve Brown: Hi, everybody.
• 0:54
  Steve Brown: Welcome to the ROI online podcast where we believe you, the courageous entrepreneurs of our day, are the invisible heroes of our economy. You not only improve our world with your ideas, your grit and your passion, but you make our world better. I'm Steve Brown. And this is a place where we have great conversations with winners just like you while we laugh and learn together. Malian Hale, welcome to the ROI online podcast.
• 1:27
  Molly Ann Hale: Hi, Steve.
• 1:27
  Molly Ann Hale: Thanks for having me.
• 1:30
  Steve Brown: So what do you get when you put together a stand up comedian that does off the cuff stuff? And then you mash in a little social media expert? What do you get when you do that?
• 1:50
  Molly Ann Hale: Somebody who wears a lot of hats easily?
• 1:52
  Steve Brown: Yeah. Mother, you you've got some funny stuff on YouTube. But we're talking about verbal today we're gonna I'm gonna get to that. But we're talking about verbal, you are the creator, Ambassador, for verbal, it's a brand new platform for audio creators.
• 2:10
  Steve Brown: When you think about how hard it is for podcasters to get their podcast discovered.
• 2:20
  Molly Ann Hale: It's a challenge. It can be very difficult, yes. But verbal, by the way, have a podcast. So I know. Who doesn't these days, though, right?
• 2:30
  Steve Brown: Right. But when when you start a podcast, you're wanting to connect with your audience. And it's like, Where do I post my stuff. And then when you go and you do a search for that, it's hard to find things. And yet, there happens to be this brand new platform.
• 2:44
  Steve Brown: That is for audio, what YouTube is for video, and it's called verbal v URBL. That's, in your you're that person that connecting all the creators to their audience, right?
• 3:04
  Molly Ann Hale: That's right. So I'm spearheading the ambassador program preverbal. And we are reaching out to anybody who has an expertise in some kind of field that they want to share via our platform by creating playlists, or curating thought leaders in their category. And as we're in exchange, we are giving these creators lots of free promotion for their content, their audio, their playlists, their station, across our social, our homepage, our email newsletters and marketing that we do. So we think it's a great way for people to get discovered in their audio to get discovered.
• 3:39
  Steve Brown: Yeah, so when you say a creator, it's not just podcasters.
• 3:44
  Molly Ann Hale: That's right.
• 3:44
  Molly Ann Hale: We've got all kinds of audio from musicians to podcasters, to interviewers to people who just have, you know, there's so much audio in the world that I think a lot of people don't even know what to do with. And we have lots of people that say, Oh, we really love verbal because I have all this audio. Now I can put it in one place, I can catalogue it, I can actually share it on social, which was something that was very hard to do, and make playlists that combines their audio with lots of other kinds of audio to make these more interesting listening experiences.
• 4:14
  Steve Brown: So not only can creators go plop their content there.
• 4:20
  Molly Ann Hale: Yes, we say upload, but pop is funny.
• 4:25
  Steve Brown: And then connect with your audience. But people that love to listen to free audio, they can go there and find almost anything.
• 4:35
  Molly Ann Hale: We have almost all of the audio in the universe and how they started was by ingesting all the public domain.
• 4:44
  Molly Ann Hale: Audio so that that was that was the beginning. And then we have pretty much every podcast you can think of plus a lot of old concerts, historical speeches.
• 4:50
  Molly Ann Hale: It's just a really fascinating world of audio that you it's very hard to find in other places like old time radio, these are things that, you know, the websites that used to house this audio aren't even functioning anymore because the people either let the websites go or they're just you know, they get old and they move on.
• 5:12
  Molly Ann Hale: So we're happy to be a place where we're gathering up all those orphans and serving them up to you guys for free.
• 5:19
  Steve Brown: I was amazed when I was doing the research for this, how many people search for sleep sounds? Oh, yes, that
• 5:26
  Molly Ann Hale: is a big one.
• 5:26
  Molly Ann Hale: That is a big one. And we've got some great sleep sounds craters on our platform. Dream sounds is one of them. We've got yellowbrick cinema. really fascinating genre. And I think because people like to listen to it all throughout the night, it's like just hours and hours of this really interesting soothing music.
• 5:48
  Steve Brown: So you can not only just put your long form content, but you can chop it up into little short bite sized pieces, and then put it in a playlist even.
• 5:58
  Molly Ann Hale: That's right. So one of the functions of our site that is unique to verbal is our snippet tool. And what this allows you to do is take a chunk of any piece of audio that we have on the platform and share it. So you know, before you would listen to a 45 minute podcast episode, and you would say, Hey, friends, I really liked this podcast episode and you, you know, tell them about it. And they maybe would or wouldn't get to it. But now with verbal, you can take the best five minutes of that podcast episode, share it on social and then if people like it, they can come back and listen to the whole episode. So it's really a cool function and allows podcasters to make promos right inside of the platform. So they don't have to, you know, buy all this other software. It just makes sharing and going viral with audio. Easy, which has not been available to creators up until now.
• 6:47
  Steve Brown: Yeah, I think all the times that I've sent, I forwarded a video, or even a podcast and asked someone Hey, listen to this, there's this point in it, it's really good.
• 6:57
  Steve Brown: And they get it and they look at us 45 minutes long. I'll do it later. And they ask them later, did you listen to it? And they always say no, no.
• 7:07
  Unknown: Yeah.
• 7:09
  Molly Ann Hale: And to that point, you know, in the past, as a podcast creator, you were stuck with this old model of the RSS feed where people would have to download your podcast to their computer, and maybe they would or maybe they wouldn't listen to it. At some point, maybe they would. Or maybe they wouldn't get through the whole thing. You know, but now they can stream your podcast anywhere anytime they have Wi Fi. So,
• 7:31
  Steve Brown: you know, the thing that's really exciting about this is like, if you go into YouTube, and you start posting videos up there, over time, you can get monetized after videos are good. That's the model that verbal is creating here.
• 7:47
  Molly Ann Hale: Absolutely, it is exactly the same model. So what I love about this company and what Audra has done is really made available to audio content creators a way to monetize your podcast. And yes, you could say, you know, we had a way to monetize our podcast before we had ads. But you know, the thing about those ads is that you're usually betting on what you have already done. And you're not allowing for something to go viral for you to have many more listeners this month. Also, you know, in the past, if you were buying ads on podcasts, you could not get the metrics on how many people was listening to those, you know how long they were listening for now, with verbal advertisers are going to be able to see people are listening for five seconds, and then they're cutting off or, you know, they're listening all the way to the end. And it's gonna, I think, really revolutionize the way ads are put against audio just like YouTube revolutionized the way you know, commercials were made for video. Because YouTube video, advertisers can see, oh, people are not watching past eight seconds. And so now when you watch a YouTube video, they come at you hard and fast, right up top, you know, they get you in those first three seconds. So I think this is gonna change for audio as well. You know, the,
• 8:57
  Steve Brown: I have a podcast, obviously. And I upload it to buzzsprout. And I watch my downloads from there. But since I went in, claimed my station at variable, I'm getting way more exposure way more listeners than just expecting buzzsprout to do the work for me.
• 9:16
  Molly Ann Hale: Excellent. We love to hear that. Well, we also know that verbal is great for podcasters SEO. And our snippet tool transcribes every snippet that you make. So if you're, you know, putting audio up and making snippets of your audio or other people are making snippets of your audio, you're just getting exponential SEO and that helps everybody.
• 9:36
  Steve Brown: You know, you put up one, when you're talking about snippets, you just put up your one episode, the full episode. That's one URL, okay.
• 9:41
  Steve Brown: But when you cut out, maybe you had four or five little Mic drop moments in long conversation. If you snip those out, you can even do an intro to that playlist and now you have four or five more URLs.
• 9:59
  Molly Ann Hale: You That's a great way to put it, Steve. And it's a great way to think about your content as a creator that you can, you know, get those hot flash moments to get people excited about the rest of the hour or the rest of the half hour and lead with those snippets. So just a great way to promote yourself on social.
• 10:17
  Steve Brown: So let's talk about you You are a producer, you produce some movies, one called unlovable, I went and watched the promo for it. And it seems like it's really cute.
• 10:32
  Molly Ann Hale: It's a darling film. And it didn't win some awards it you know, it did the festival circuit, it was produced by the duplass brothers. And those guys, obviously, you know, they know what they're doing. But it's a very darling film. And the director says Yoon se did a really good job with the material. She's very sweet.
• 10:50
  Steve Brown: So that makes sense, why you would be the ambassador for the all the curators because you have a heart of helping something good get produced and put out
• 11:01
  Molly Ann Hale: there. I honestly love people who create I love creators, I love the process of creating, I love being on a team. And I love being able to create something with others and see it all finished, and you know, have that feeling of we made this together. So I'm I'm very pro, you know, creator, I'm very pro, anybody who's who's following their heart and making art or you know, making content. I appreciate them. And I want to promote them in all ways.
• 11:32
  Steve Brown: So we're one of your ambassadors for one of the categories on the verbal platform for podcasting tips and tricks and stuff. But what are what are you looking for?
• 11:45
  Steve Brown: Obviously, you still have spots to fill?
• 11:49
  Molly Ann Hale: Absolutely,
• 11:50
  Steve Brown: what are you looking for to create, or that would be perfect for what you're looking for, as a verbal ambassador.
• 11:57
  Molly Ann Hale: We're looking for First of all, somebody who creates audio and who is active in creating audio ongoing, and we're looking for somebody who has a an expertise in some kind of thought leadership. So you know, if you've been, you know, studying comedy for 20 years and doing comedy, or if you've if you're a scientist, and you know a lot about undersea fishes, or, you know, you are very deep into music for mental health. And you know, that we have lots of categories that are open. So there's, there's no real, you know, this or that there's there's plenty of space to explore. But we're just looking for people who have some point of view about their topic and can bring some kind of thought leadership in a way that the normal average man just doesn't have words, you know, thought leadership is the way I like to say it, because I think that that is clear, you know, you have some kind of expertise.
• 12:51
  Steve Brown: Yeah, what what I think I really am attracted to your platform, you know, when you think, oh, should I start a podcast? Well, there's this default way that you need to approach it, you think, but with verbal, what you're saying is any topic, you can start producing content for your way that couldn't get discovered in you just be your, your freaky self on there. No,
• 13:19
  Molly Ann Hale: absolutely. And I think that's what YouTube proved for audio, you know, anybody can be a creator. And that's what we want. We have tools on the platform, the app is coming out either like in the next two weeks, and that is going to allow even more functionality for you to be able to directly just talk into your phone, and upload to the platform. So we're not saying you have to have a podcast, we're just saying you have to be a audio creator. And I think we're at a time now before time, where we're gonna see audio influencers, that we don't even understand what that sounds like yet, because we're just starting, we're just at the beginning of this idea of audio, as you know, a world of creation. So, beyond podcast, there is something that is going to happen, but we don't know what that is yet. And it's not until people really start using the platform and snipping things and you know, just get letting their freak flag fly. And you know, podcasts do have these formats. And I think there's something even beyond that, you know, that we haven't discovered yet. So we're open to who those people are. And we're excited to be here to watch it unfold.
• 14:16
  Molly Ann Hale: Well, I
• 14:19
  Steve Brown: can imagine that someone would take your app on their phone, and they just would like in the moment, then you record their thought, whatever that is, they get hit. And in that moment, they just stop and they record it and then they post it. It can be one minute.
• 14:31
  Steve Brown: It can be 30 minutes, it doesn't matter.
• 14:35
  Molly Ann Hale: Absolutely. And there's so many ways you can use the platform that if people really thought about it, like talking about your recipes, or I'm making a playlist right now all my grandfather used to do a lot of limericks, he just wrote tons and tons of limericks I'm having my family you know just record his limericks into their phone and then we're making a playlist of my grandfather's limericks as you know said by the family, and I just think you know, you can really if you just let your mind go There's so many ways you can use it because you can catalog and you can make playlists. And you can make snip. I mean, it's just infinite possibilities.
• 15:08
  Steve Brown: When you think about the business model of shorts, like YouTube shorts or, or the Instagram stories, this is a platform where you can do Audio Stories like that.
• 15:20
  Molly Ann Hale: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And everything on our platform is shareable. You know, down to the snippet. So yes, I love that idea. You can set up your stories.
• 15:30
  Steve Brown: Yeah, you can set up your own station. It can be malines. Limerick station. Yeah.
• 15:33
  Steve Brown: And just when you feel like it recorded Limerick and made him push it there.
• 15:41
  Unknown: Absolutely.
• 15:43
  Steve Brown: You have to pay for hosting. You don't have to pay for all the things that
• 15:46
  Molly Ann Hale: are free, totally free. This is not going to be a subscription model. This is free, free to you free to me free to the players free to the plays.
• 15:57
  Steve Brown: So I was on your YouTube station the other day and I was giggling you. You did this skit where the couple's breaking up? Yeah. And they do a used furniture sale.
• 16:12
  Unknown: That's a good one.
• 16:13
  Steve Brown: Is that from a real story? Is that a real experience?
• 16:16
  Molly Ann Hale: No, no, I've been writing comedy for many years. And that that that gentleman in that video is actually one of my writing partners, Philip Morris, who I think is very, very funny. We actually have a podcast together, cheap plug for. It's called Ramones of the day, where we break down every Ramon song alphabetically from 53rd, and third to the word zero. So if you want to see more of him, you can check that out. It's on verbal Of course.
• 16:41
  Steve Brown: Awesome. All right.
• 16:41
  Steve Brown: So we're listening to Molly and Hale. She's the Creator, Ambassador for verbal verbal is the new platform. It's in a beta stage right now you need to get on that stage that platform.
• 16:52
  Steve Brown: While while it's early. But we're going to ask Molly, a couple of questions here. So I was doing my research, you know, and I'm surprised at how many times people search for what audio book should I listen to?
• 17:12
  Steve Brown: Yeah. And yet, this is where you can go and listen to all these free audio books.
• 17:18
  Molly Ann Hale: Yes, we have tons and tons of free audio books. You know, especially I think, a lot of people like audio books and podcasts before.
• 17:25
  Molly Ann Hale: But COVID really opened up this world of audio to people who didn't want to be trapped on their screens all day, because I think we were all on zoom all day long for work and family and all this stuff. And then the idea of consuming content on the screen. It just it became very burdensome. So everybody wanted to get off their screens, but still want to consume content.
• 17:45
  Molly Ann Hale: And this really opened up the floodgates for audiobooks in podcasting. And now, everybody's going to be traveling and taking road trips. And these things are perfect for on the go, you know, because you can listen everywhere in anywhere.
• 17:58
  Steve Brown: I remember as a kid laying in bed listening to my little portable radio, and it was like, mystery theater radio.
• 18:07
  Steve Brown: Yeah. And then on Saturday, it was this comedy it was it was called chicken man. He was a part time superhero on the weekend.
• 18:15
  Unknown: We might have both of those things.
• 18:19
  Molly Ann Hale: I'm not sure.
• 18:19
  Molly Ann Hale: But we should check afterwards.
• 18:22
  Steve Brown: That I love that one. So when you're thinking about you have a podcast, you have a book you're wanting to get discovered. And you're thinking about how to market your podcast. How would you go about it on a verbal platform?
• 18:37
  Molly Ann Hale: Well, like I said, verbal is extremely shareable. Right, so the snippet tool number one, the more you snip and share your snippets, the more you're going to get people interest in your content through those small pieces of your content. So number one, I would say use the snipping tool as much as possible share on social tag out whoever is relevant to your piece of audio because sharing on social will get you more organic views will get you more likes. So if you have a guest check them out. If that guest you know is a famous comedian, they they work a lot at the Comedy Store, maybe the Comedy Store would would share if you just tag them and let them know that this content is there. So number one snippets and share on social. Number two, I want to say we are really rolling out the red carpet for early adopters and for ambassadors. So that means you know, we build a lot of our own playlists in house. And we're always looking for content to put on these playlists that are very long tail discoverability.
• 19:36
  Molly Ann Hale: Right. So for our ambassadors, if you come on board, we know who you are, we know your content. We're always trying to find ways to put you on playlists to get you in front of people in new ways for discovery. So those are two major things Ambassador Did I say Ambassador um, thirdly, I would say you know, sharing getting sharing with your networks, right or networks are really powerful tools and getting together with other podcasters is a really powerful tool because you have access to their audience, they have access to your audience. So I would say if you're doing those three things like and not even just ambassadors, early adopters on our platform, we are really working to get you seen to know we are in the back of Google Analytics every single day checking out who's sharing us on Facebook, who you know, who is making snippets, who is just talking about us, and we are happy, happy, happy to reshare those efforts.
• 20:31
  Steve Brown: No, I think about people talking about being successful on LinkedIn. And, you know, we think, oh, my goodness, what am I going to say, What am I going to post. But what I see that verbal offers is a way for you, you don't have to post anything, you could actually go and search for theme based content and create playlist of really good information that wouldn't be valuable that maybe these creators don't even have time to do themselves. But it is a way to flip that thinking and to be extremely valuable.
• 21:07
  Molly Ann Hale: Absolutely. So a little SEO training goes a long way. And thank you for bringing this up, Steve. You know, people might be searching for comedy interviews. For instance, if you make a playlist on verbal of snippets of different comedy interviews, and let's say you have a comedy interview show, and you slip in some of your audio. Now, when people go to comedy interviews, and they're searching on Google, they might not even know that you exist or verbal exists or your playlist exists, but your playlist might come up. So just by understanding a little bit of SEO and key terms, you can actually get discovered that way as well. And verbal is an excellent platform for SEO. Like we were saying before, every time you create a piece of audio, you upload directly, you get SEO around the title and the description. Every time you make a snippet, you get SEO around the title, the description and the transcription. So there's a lot of boosts around SEO for anybody who's on our platform.
• 21:59
  Steve Brown: Hey, I wanted to pause right here and tell you about a book that you need to get today. It's the funniest book on marketing. It's called the Golden toilet, stop flushing your marketing budget into your website and build a system that grows your business. And guess who wrote it? That's right. I wrote it. And I wrote it just for you. Because I want to help you get past the last hurdles of setting up your business and getting it squared away. I wrote it so that you can avoid time wasting time wasting money wasting frustration, get the book on Audible. You can get it on Kindle. You can get it on Amazon, but get the book, take advantage of the insights in there. And let me know what you think. And now back to this excellent episode.
• 22:51
  Steve Brown: You know what the folks that I, that ROI takes care of, you know, they're business owners, they're, they're wanting to know what, what's this internet marketing? What's this content that we're doing? And we like, we help them understand the value of a blog. A blog is like this very nicely dressed salesperson that stands quietly doesn't annoy anyone doesn't have bad breath doesn't have food stuck in a tea. And when someone has a question that's relevant about that topic, the blog shows up. And then what's the blog do? And here's some more over here on their website.
• 23:26
  Steve Brown: And I see that these snippets from all of these things can do the exact same thing for you.
• 23:36
  Molly Ann Hale: Yes, that's a great point. Thank you for doing my heavy lifting. So because the snippets are shareable and embeddable, they're perfect for blog posts, they're perfect for websites to help drive traffic absolutely 100% We highly recommend highly recommend.
• 23:52
  Steve Brown: We'd like to take those verbals snippets and then we'll do an embed on a blog just to supplement or to augment the blogs so that it's more effective
• 24:02
  Molly Ann Hale: you know, some some AP news organizations are using this as well because then you can have this audio maybe of the interview of the person or the doctors involved or you know, the police officer who's talking about you can have that audio embedded right in the news article. So a lot of people are finding some excellent uses for it.
• 24:23
  Steve Brown: Yeah, imagine you can listen to the person say you don't even have to watch a video you know i i put my all my stuff on YouTube as well and people go listen to your podcast on Yeah, you don't have to stand there and stare at it
• 24:40
  Molly Ann Hale: I can listen thing if people are they associate YouTube with having to look at a screen so that's why verbal is exciting because right off the bat we're letting people know you know this is all off screen you can you can be cleaning your house you can be driving you can be you know in traffic and you're playing with your kids. It's wonderful for like bedtime stories or you know, keeping your kids active while They're listening, or we were talking a little bit about, you know, Sesame Street and that example that you're giving about, they didn't think the kids were paying attention, because they were playing while the TV show was on, but really, the kids were listening. So um, you know, verbal, I think is great, because they don't expect you to be connected to your screen. And it just frees you up for, you know, multitasking or whatever life.
• 25:25
  Steve Brown: So when you think about internet radio, what's the difference with verbal and internet radio?
• 25:33
  Molly Ann Hale: Well, we don't have the capability at verbal yet to live stream, that functionality will be coming down the road. So verbal for radio folks is best used for replays or for promos, right? If you want to share that you have some some event happening or you know, share that you have broadcasts happening tomorrow, you might give snippets or promos for what that is, but then also just so you can have that content catalogued, so people can come back to it at any time.
• 26:01
  Steve Brown: Yeah, I love that.
• 26:01
  Steve Brown: So what's the what's the future of verbal?
• 26:08
  Molly Ann Hale: I think if you ask the team, they'd say, taking over the world, but I think it's just first of all the big one, it's going to allow creators to monetize their content. You know, which right now a lot of people, most podcasters are not making any money for their efforts, what so ever. So that's, that's a big one. That's a big one. For me, I've been I've been creating content, I've been a comedian, I've been a producer for a long time. And I have, you know, you ask anybody, you don't really see a lot of return on that work. So now there's a place where especially if you get in early and you know to to our listeners now now's a great time to get on because we haven't quite turned on ads yet.
• 26:46
  Molly Ann Hale: You have to you know, but it gets your station set up and get get your bearings on how to use everything. And then when as already, you got enough listens, like bam, you're off to the races, you know. So that's, that's number one. Number two, like I said, I think it's going to open up a whole new genre of audio influencers that we don't even understand yet. Because our idea of an audio influencer is a podcaster. But that has a very strict structure most of the time. So I think there's a lot of weird stuff that's going to come out of this. I think there's a lot of like creative stuff that's going to come out of this that we cannot even imagine yet. I think those are probably the two biggest things that I would say.
• 27:26
  Steve Brown: No, I think about authors, there's folks that write books, and then they publish them on the Kindle platform or the audible platform. Right. And you have to follow the rules that Amazon dictates or audible does. But let's say that you you wrote that book for different reason, you could actually read your book in the app chapter at a time maybe in post it up there.
• 27:50
  Steve Brown: And all of a sudden, you've got distribution going that you didn't have.
• 27:57
  Molly Ann Hale: Absolutely, that is a that is a wonderful suggestion, Steve. And I actually do work with some authors that are getting their content up on the platform. And yes, because also producing an audio book a lot of times can be some money, you know, and if you're using verbal, you can do it all for free if you have a good microphone. So yeah, that that is a wonderful way to use the platform, and we highly support authors that want to put their books up on verbal, because there's that shareability you know, you could take a snippet of your that crazy climax moment or, you know, everybody's got a great first opening page. Right.
• 28:30
  Steve Brown: So I've noticed that it of all the books that are printed on Amazon, I bet less than a third are in an audible version.
• 28:42
  Molly Ann Hale: Hmm. Yeah, I think a lot of people probably don't think is worth their time and money. Um, but for verbal, because it is free. It's just a fantastic way to do it.
• 28:54
  Steve Brown: I wouldn't say from my experience, I did the audible version. And I bet I get to sales to audible two to three on my audible version before I get a print sale. And it's because people don't want to sit down and read like they used to, they want
• 29:13
  Molly Ann Hale: to thing Yeah, nobody reads anymore. So if you're selling I mean, I know a lot of authors and in social media, I have worked with many, many, many authors. It is hard to sell books these days. It really, really is. And so if you're a creator and if you just want to reach an audience, you know, verbal is a great way to do it because I got to tell you video is a lot of trouble. You know, you got to look good, you got to find the camera, you got to edit you got to do all this stuff. Audio, all you need is a good microphone. And now with the app, all you need is a phone, you know, so just takes a lot of the pressure off of the recording of it and makes it so easy.
• 29:50
  Steve Brown: What wouldn't be the difference in verbal as opposed to anchor
• 29:56
  Molly Ann Hale: um, I'm not sure I'm not I don't Use anchor a lot. But I believe anchor is not a streaming platform we're streaming and anchor believe is an RSS feed where you have to download to your computer. Also, I don't know if anger charges, but you know, we're free. And I think that that's that's the main thing, those two things streaming and free, which I don't think any other platform is doing for audio.
• 30:20
  Steve Brown: Yeah, exactly. I think that folks that might be familiar with Aker, they know, they can do it via their phone, they can do these short snippets, and they're hoping to get a little bit of advertising on it. But there's so much more freedom and discoverability happening on the thermal platform that I haven't found anywhere else.
• 30:41
  Molly Ann Hale: Well, what I think is really sexy, if I can is the option to make these playlists out of snippets of other people's content alongside your content. So you're a creator, you can get really, you know, you can get juicy with that stuff and make really interesting playlists that highlight your work, certainly, but add all this other texture and thought leadership that also raise up your work, you know, to put you alongside geniuses or you know, it's very cool.
• 31:09
  Steve Brown: Most of the folks that do content marketing their text First they think about it, or they may think about audio, but I mean video, but hardly ever do they. Audio is like the last thing that maybe Alright, I need to start a podcast. But it's like, you don't realize how many people out there prefer audio only. And you're leaving a lot of people on the table
• 31:33
  Molly Ann Hale: there.
• 31:33
  Molly Ann Hale: Absolutely. Especially because so many people want to ingest content while they're working.
• 31:39
  Molly Ann Hale: But they can't watch something.
• 31:39
  Molly Ann Hale: You know, they they need to be on their computer. So podcasts and audio is perfect for those nine to fivers that they keep themselves, you know, occupied while they're doing busy work with audio. So, yeah, I agree with you. I think they are leaving audience on the table.
• 31:55
  Molly Ann Hale: And I mean, look, I love RuPaul.
• 31:55
  Molly Ann Hale: Because RuPaul is like he's got a TV show, he could, you know, he could retire a million times over already. But I think he did his podcast a because he had control over it. But also he understood the power that you need that audio to and it allows you to do so much more, you know, you can really explore inside of the audio in ways where TV and video are there certain rules or expectations or you know, structure around what is expected or how it should go.
• 32:22
  Molly Ann Hale: Whereas in audio if like there's so much more room to play.
• 32:27
  Steve Brown: I'm interviewed this guy is actually on my very first podcast episode, he has a podcast asking Well, why do you think a podcast is such a big deal that he'd been doing it for years, he goes, people, you're in their ear all the time. And you they develop a relationship with you because you're in their ear. And then you think about people I have to admire you before they hire you. When they they're going to trust you if you're in their your their ear all the time.
• 32:58
  Molly Ann Hale: That is a great point. That is a great point.
• 33:01
  Molly Ann Hale: Yeah. As somebody who's done a lot of phone work, you know, at desks and things. I think we don't realize how intimate that relationship is for somebody to be in your ear. You know. And as somebody who has listened to 1000s of hours of Mark Marin, I can tell you Yeah, I've I feel like Mark Marin is one of my friends and I probably don't have a friend in real life because he takes up that spot.
• 33:28
  Steve Brown: So what's one of the your favorite stations on verbal right now someone that's really doing it right that you would point people to for a little bit of inspiration?
• 33:38
  Molly Ann Hale: Well, there's a station called ROI online.
• 33:45
  Molly Ann Hale: Fantastic Ambassador with a great page. I think any of our ambassadors are, are doing well.
• 33:50
  Molly Ann Hale: You can anybody in our audience here can go to verbal.com backslash ambassadors to see who we already have signed up and who's already rolling and you know, who we're still kind of looking for. But my personal favorites, I would have to say clotet Robinson is the first lady of Motown. She was married to Smokey Robinson and she was an original member of the miracles. And she has a ton of interview audio up there talking about the early days of the miracles and being on tour and you know, Barry Gordy getting Motown together and all they had was a dream and I and a couple of talented 19 year olds, super interesting station. There's another woman I really love. Her name is Mary Birdsong. And she's an actress and she has put up a bunch of audio characters up on the site. And so she's just got all these like, one to three minute weird bits where she does like funny voices and you know, music and that's another good one to check out. But yeah, our ambassador page is a great place to start, because we have lots of really interesting thought leaders to highlight a few, I would say Dr. Thomas Lindley is a deep sea scientist who was on the group of scientists that discovered the smallest fish living in the deepest part of the ocean. So he's one of our ambassadors super interesting.
• 35:13
  Molly Ann Hale: harmar toony is a billion dollar real estate guru. He's going to be curating some real estate stuff on our platform. So yeah, lots of good stuff there on that page.
• 35:25
  Steve Brown: So what's like a couple of topics, we if now was like, they were listening, and they need to hear this, what are a couple of topics that you would love to have a crate ambassador for some weird, crazy topic that you have?
• 35:37
  Molly Ann Hale: Oh, my gosh, there's so many.
• 35:41
  Unknown: Um, this, this
• 35:44
  Molly Ann Hale: is a hard one. I know I look at this taxonomy every day. Well, they're there, I wanted to say there's no limit to how many ambassadors we can have. So we're always open also to adding categories on the platform if you have a specialty that we have not thought of yet, but we're looking for people in beauty and we're looking for people in music, anybody who has any like, you know, music connection or radio connection.
• 36:09
  Molly Ann Hale: We're looking for journalists, film reviewers, people, authors, anybody who you know, writes books or has an into science fiction world or, you know, mystery world. We're looking for some paranormal people, you know, do you have a podcast about true crime? We would love that. So yeah, there's lots of good stuff still to be done. But the weirdest thing, I don't know, probably like a court of appeals. You know, Court of Appeals. 32 and 33 are kind of out there.
• 36:41
  Steve Brown: Yeah. All right. So you're listening to Molly inhales she's the Creator, Ambassador for verbal. And Somali. I like to always ask this question for my guests.
• 36:54
  Steve Brown: It's like, what's the one question that you wished? You could answer that I haven't asked?
• 37:04
  Unknown: Oh, my goodness. Um,
• 37:08
  Molly Ann Hale: hmm. That's so difficult. Oh, I don't know. I wish you had asked me. What's my sign?
• 37:15
  Steve Brown: What's your sign?
• 37:17
  Molly Ann Hale: I am a Taurus.
• 37:17
  Molly Ann Hale: Yes, CUSP, right on the cusp of Gemini, which I think is just enough. But yes, I love being a tourist and I celebrated daily.
• 37:29
  Steve Brown: Okay, awesome. So how can folks reach out to you Molly?
• 37:35
  Molly Ann Hale: Well, if you'd like to connect about being an ambassador, we'd love to have you can reach out at ambassadors at verbal Comm. Or you can go to the website, on the left hand side on the navigation bar, there is a button down at the bottom that says become an ambassador, or you can email us at pr evitable comm or info at verbal comm la discoverable.com.
• 38:02
  Molly Ann Hale: So there's lots of ways to reach us. If you go to the platform, you can find an email and they were a small team. So if you just say hey, this message is from all you don't get back to me.
• 38:11
  Steve Brown: So that's variable Vu Rb l.com. They're an up and coming scrappy, new platform that's going to be what YouTube is to video. They verbal is for audio, you need to get on that platform, you need to start producing content, the share what you love to share and meet the folks that you wouldn't meet otherwise, and make some money.
• 38:35
  Steve Brown: Yeah, I'll make some money.
• 38:40
  Molly Ann Hale: I mean, I've I've had videos up on YouTube for about almost 10 years now.
• 38:43
  Molly Ann Hale: I've made money on YouTube. I walked away from a couple videos came back had a couple million views and thought all right, you know, I mean, don't don't knock it like get your stuff up there, guys. Come on, make some money.
• 38:57
  Steve Brown: That's right. And if you want to follow Molly's YouTube channel, what's the it's Molly's hilarious.
• 39:10
  Molly Ann Hale: Shorts, Molly.
• 39:10
  Molly Ann Hale: Inhale, Molly inhale. Social, including verbal Amalia inhale.
• 39:16
  Steve Brown: All right, great.
• 39:16
  Steve Brown: Molly, you've been awesome guests on the ROI online podcast.
• 39:21
  Unknown: Thanks for having me, Steve.
• 39:22
  Steve Brown: This was fun. And that's a wrap. Thanks for listening to another fun episode of the ROI online podcast. For more, be sure to check out the show notes of this episode. And feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat and I can help direct you to the resources you're searching for.
• 39:43
  Steve Brown: To learn more about how you can grow your business better. Be sure to pick up your copy of my book, that golden toilet add, surprise that golden toilet.com I'm Steve Brown, and we'll see you next week on another fun episode of the ROI online.
• 40:00
  Steve Brown: podcast