4 Simple Steps to AUTOMATE Private Podcast Access for Loyal Fans

So, you have a podcast, but you want to offer some extra perks, some subscriber benefits to your best audience. This could be things like access to episodes a few days early, or maybe you want adree listening for that best audience member, or access to your back catalog, or even premium episodes just for select individuals who maybe join your email list or are part of your community or take some kind of step with you to further their relationship with you and your brand. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that pretty much on any platform and any tool that you might use on the internet via Castos integration with Zapier. Hey there, Craig here from Castos. So, you know Castos as a great podcasting platform. And you may know Zapier as the kind of superglue and duct tape of the internet that connects together different platforms and tools that you might use for your content, for your audience building, and really just for running your business. We at Castos run a whole bunch of stuff on Zapier to connect different pieces of software that we use. And in this video, I'm going to do exactly that is to connect a Google form in this case with Castos to add private subscribers automatically to my hybrid podcast so that when they sign up on the Google form, they get added as a private subscriber into Castos to get those subscriber benefits like early access to episodes, ad free listening, private episodes, and access to the back catalog. Let's dive into the Castos dashboard and configure this and show exactly how it works. Here in our Castos dashboard, we have two podcast setup. One is public and one is hybrid. We're only going to be focusing on the hybrid one here. And let's just click into the settings area to show kind of where you might set up your podcast as hybrid and what those subscriber benefits could be. So here we in the distribution and visibility section, we see public, private, and hybrid. This podcast is already of the type hybrid. And if you want to see what this is all about, we have a pretty good snapshot of it here. I won't belabor the point. You can check it out for yourself. But what we do want to do is set up the hybrid podcast settings to say, "Hey, what are the subscriber benefits that folks who join this podcast will get? " So, I don't have ads enabled on this podcast. But if you did, you could say, "I want to remove ads. I want to bypass Casta's ads and deliver an ad-ree episode to my listeners every time that are private subscribers. " That's a pretty good perk. You also could say, "I want to deliver episodes a few days early. " I like 3 days early just cuz I'm usually not that organized to have things ready a week ahead of time. So 3 days is about all that I can manage personally. But if you're like, "Hey, I got the whole month of content already planned out and recorded and ready to go. " You might say, "Cool, let private subscribers get episodes a whole week early. " That's a pretty awesome subscriber benefit. And you can say, "Hey, I want only my private subscribers of this hybrid podcast to get access to back catalog content. " And that's what I have set up here. Only private subscribers can access episodes that are older than 90 days. So, you can configure all of this, but what we're going to do here is connect this Google form where we just have name and email address to Zapier, which I mentioned Zapier is kind of the glue or the duct tape of the internet to connect these two pieces together. So, Zapier is going to connect the Google form with Castos to add and remove private subscribers to our podcast here. So, we have the Google form already set up. It's public. It's published. That's all good. So, if you haven't used Google Forms before, really pretty straightforward. They're free inside any Gmail or Google Workplace account. I have my Zapier account set up here. And let's set up the Zap between Google Forms and Castos. So within our Zap year dashboard, we say let's create a new Zap and Zap year is going to want the trigger and the action. The action is going to be cast us and the trigger a Google form. So let's type in Google forms and it's going to say cool. Okay, so Google forms, what is the triggering event? A new form response, right? So when someone submits the form and I want to pause here because we're using Google forms just as to me the most ubiquitous and easily understood example of an input into Zapier that you could have. It could be when someone joins my email list in Active Campaign. It's when an entry is logged in my CRM and HubSpot. It's when someone signs up for my community on Circle. It's when somebody pays me in Stripe. It could be anything that you're using as a creator, as a brand to communicate and connect with your audience when something happens is this input piece over here. And I'm just using a Google form as an example of a free and easy way to do this. But you can use any other piece of software almost under the sun. Everybody has an integration with Zapier. Okay. So, new form response account. Uh I got to sign into my account here. Great. So, I've given Zap year access to my Google account. That's cool. And that is this one here. Okay, great. So, now which form do you want to use? Uh, it's this one I just created here, ultimate subscriber signup form.

And so, this title here matches this title here, right? So, that's cool. I'll say continue. And let's test the trigger. Okay, great. Uh, so that is all good. That kind of validated. So now search for Castos as the event. So we had the trigger and then we had the action. Castos is the event. And what do we want to do? I want to create a private subscriber. So again, when a new form is submitted, I want to create a private subscriber in Castos, right? I'm already connected to Castos, but I'm going to open this up to show you if you were connecting from scratch, what this would look like. So all it needs here is my API key. I'm going to go back to my Castos dashboard and to the integrations area and API and then I'll just copy this and I'll take this back to the little Zap year window that popped up here. Plop that in and say yes, continue. Okay, great. Now Castos is connected to Zapier in the proper account and we're ready to go. So we'll say continue here. Now, we just need to know which podcast and then which field from our input. In this case, our Google form is going to be the email address of the private subscriber because that's all we need. So, the only private podcast I have in my casters account is this one called my second podcast. That's cool. And then the email address is in the form. If I click the plus and I go down and say, what is your email? That's the form. That's the from the input the piece I want to tie to the thing that we need in cast which is the email address of the private subscriber. Cool. We have email address. Now we just need name. Very similarly uh select the name field from our form. So that's me. Uh say continue. This is from our test entry. So that's cool. And we'll test this. Okay. Great. Now we've tested this and we'll publish. So now our Zap is on and it is live. Let's go back to our Google form. test this again and see what happens in our cases dashboard. So I'll open up our Google form in a new tab and I will say my name is Larry the listener and submit. So I'm submitting this kind of like I'm Larry and we can see Larry the listener is showing up here and he's been added as a private subscriber. So, what happens to Larry in this case from here? Larry will get an email uh from Castous on your behalf as the podcaster and say, "Hey, Pete the podcaster has just added you to my second podcast as a private subscriber. Click here to either download the Castos mobile app to listen or enter this private feed URL into Apple Podcast or Overcast or a handful of different thirdparty podcasting apps on your phone as a way to listen and receive these subscriber benefits. And that last part is pretty important is Larry in this case, the private subscriber won't be able to listen in the same feed or the same way that he listens to the public podcast cuz he has special stuff subscriber benefits that are associated with this podcast. Now, he'll need to subscribe in a different way to get those extra benefits. But that's really all it takes to set up the connection with Zapier and really any piece of software on the internet. That would be the input. If we want to go back to our Zap here, anything really that is the input here. We used Google Forms in this case, but you can imagine all the different pieces of software that you use to create a private subscriber in Castos to offer these awesome subscriber benefits to your audience members. Okay, I hope that was helpful in walking through exactly how we can set up two free and very easy to use pieces of software with Castos to enable you, your platform, your brand to offer hybrid podcasting and these subscriber benefits to your best audience members. In the 10 years I've been in podcasting, there's nothing that has been so exciting for me as a marketer and as a brand builder as hybrid podcasting as a way to give my audience a way to say, "Hey, I want to raise my hand and take the next step with you as a brand because they can do that. " This premium kind of opted podcasting is really powerful. It's going to take off and you could be early on this bandwagon. Sign up below if you're not on Castos yet. Sign up for a free 14-day trial absolutely free. If you already have a podcast, we'll import it over for you, manage the whole process, no problem. Free 14-day trial link is below. But also, I want to hear how you're thinking about private podcasting, hybrid podcasting, and using this as a way to grow your email list, build your community, build rapport and connection with your audience. Drop a comment in below and tell us all about it.