How Do I Grow My Podcast Audience?

Today on the School of Podcasting, how do I grow my podcast? The most frequently asked questions, and what's the one thing I would do differently if I were to start podcasting today? State your full name.David Jackson. Do you swear that the evidence you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? I do.People may not like it, but it's time to start episode 1000, the School.

Of Podcasting with Dave Jackson.

Hey, welcome to episode number 1000 of the school of Podcasting. We'll reminisce a little later. Right now, let's talk about how do I grow my podcast? And some of the stuff you're not going to want to hear. But.And at times, I'm talking to myself as well. But the first thing is, is who. Who is this for, really? Who is this for?And it can't be everybody, and it even can't be men between 25 and 50, because I've been both of those, and they're way different. And you need to know your audience. Now, this is more the demographics, which is just your age and sex. We're talking psychographics.So the personality, the attitudes, the values, the interests, the opinions, the social status and lifestyle choices, what do these people believe in? We need all of that makes up who it is. You need to know who. So why is this so important? Well, I don't want you to waste your time.Let's say you're, I don't know, making dinner, or you're playing a concert, or you're shopping for a baby. Whatever it is, you need to know who your audience is, so you deliver value.It takes a lot of work, and you don't want all that work to go to waste because the value you deliver is just worthless.And what I mean by that is, well, maybe you served a bunch of meat to vegetarians, and maybe you played death metal to the people that were looking for jazz. And maybe you bought preemie clothes for a boy when it's actually a newborn and it's a girl. Wrong stuff for the wrong audience.And when you do that, you're wasting their time and you're wasting yours. So the first thing is, who is this for specifically? And the second one is, why? Why are you doing this?And if the answer is, I don't know, everybody seems to have a podcast. That's not a good answer. We need listeners, too.Not everyone needs to have a podcast, but maybe you want to be seen as an expert, or maybe you just, you know, you Want to talk to people that you have no business talking to, which I've done repeatedly. Maybe you're looking to grow your influence or sell more products, or maybe you're just trying to get the message out.You can't get any attention from mainstream media. Or maybe you want to build relationships with your current customers and also future customers. And then the last one, maybe you just got an ego.Yeah, some of us, that's the case. I've seen it where I'm like, no, no. I believe I should have a microphone in front of me. And that's a reason. I know people that do that.And so why is the why so important? Because if you don't get your why, you quit. And what's the most powerful way to shrink your podcast? Yeah, quit.That's an easy way to not grow your audience. So we need to know our why, and we need to know our who. Because if we don't get our why, we quit.If we don't educate or entertain the who, we never grow an audience.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And again, there are two things here that every podcast needs. The first one is content. The second one is. Is delivery. So we're going to start off with what I feel is the most important, and that is your content.And I was at CEX in Cleveland. Got to hear Chanel Basilo from Growth in Reverse.Find her@growthinreverse.com It's a great podcast about building your email list, something you should have if you want to grow your audience. And I have said for years that especially if you're trying to monetize, you need to solve a problem. You need to help people save money.And what Chanel did is she took a lot of my items and put them into a great list that's much more organized. So here they are. You ready? In no particular order, your episodes should be doing one of these.Solving a problem, making money for the audience, saving the audience money, saving them time. And then laugh, cry, think, or groan.And if you're, like, grown, I'm like, yeah, you know, you have your hate list, and where you're like, I'm gonna turn it on and see if this guy's still a butthead. Yeah, he's still a butthead. You know, or it should be educational, or it should be entertaining.And then in some cases, it's information you can't get anyplace else, or you are the first person with the information. Those are all things that can make great content. But wait, there's more. E, E A T. This is from Google.And they talk about what they think is great content and is one that shares experience. So when you're like, hey, I was doing this thing and I did the thing and that, what does that do?It basically showcases your expertise and it also reinforces your authoritativeness. And when people do the things that you say to do, it builds trustworthiness. So E, E, A, T. But there's another letter we gotta throw in here.And that is the R word. And you're like, the R word. No, no, this is a good one. That is relevant. This one is so important relevant.And that's basically the audience feels like you understand where they are and here's something useful for them, it's relevant. And when they feel that way, when you are relevant, it's huge. Now, why, again, is it important? Because the listeners have endless options.They could be listening to series, they could play, playing video games. They could be all the other things we know, the distractions.And if your content doesn't connect to their current needs or their interests, they're going to move on. I always say, people say, oh, we have shorter attention spans. No, we don't.What we have is a much improved kind of ability to know when someone is about to waste their time.And so when you start off your show and you're doing 12 minutes of chit chat about Mr. Whiskers, that little rascal of a cat of yours, and the title was how to grow your podcast, they're like, okay, I didn't tune in for this. So when you're relevant, you grow trust through that connection.Because your audience hears you addressing their exact challenges and they feel understood. They're like, hey, she gets me, he gets me. And they're more likely to come back. It also drives action, relative content.It's not just interesting, it's useful. Hey, look at how it works. Who knew, right? And it gives your audience something that they can apply today. Like, okay, what's in for me? What do I do?How am I going to benefit? And then what happens is you build loyalty through that. When you consistently. There's that word consistent. Deliver content that resonates.I tend to call that valuable, but resonates. I like that. That word too. Your listeners start to see you as the go to source, and that's the goal. You want to be the show about your topic.And what does that do? All those things put together, it amplifies the word of mouth. And people share content that feels timely when it's helpful and it's not generic.So relevancy is really, really important. So think about this. Now, this is where it gets kind of hard, because we're going to be talking about good content versus amazing content.But you can get this checklist. If you go to schoolofpodcasting.com 1000 you can get this checklist. And so I'm just going to go through this list again.Your content should be solving a problem, helping the audience make money or save money, save their time, make them laugh, cry, think, groan, educate, or entertain. It should be information that they can't get anyplace else. If it's timely, you scoop the competition.It showcases your experience, your expertise, your authoritativeness and your trustworthiness. And most of all, it is relevant to them.Now, I realize you can't do all of those in every episode, but you want to do as many as possible because if you're doing none of these, you are boring. Don't be boring. Don't be boring. Thank you, Glenn Hebert. I have another R word that we want to bring in here, and I like it. It's called remarkable.And it means your content is so good, people want to make remarks about it. And when I say these things, I'm also talking to myself. I'll throw myself under the bus a little later. But think of it this way.There's a difference between good and remarkable. And I think a lot of us expect our show to grow because it's good. Well, good will get you in the game. It doesn't mean you're going to win.So, for example, let's compare it to a restaurant. You go to a restaurant that's good, the food is fine, and you leave satisfied.But a remarkable restaurant, you go there, the food is amazing, the atmosphere is unique, and you can't stop telling people about that. If you go to a concert, a good concert, the band plays the songs correctly and you enjoy it.A remarkable concert is the band puts on such an unforgettable show that you're still buzzing about it days later. Or let's talk about movies. You watch a good movie, it entertains you, then you move on. I'll give you an example.I have a past to see as many movies as I want right now. And I keep going to the movies. And I can't tell you the names of the movies I've seen because they were all like, I guess that was okay.A remarkable movie. It might make you cry or laugh or get you thinking really deep. And then you go out and you tell three people.There's a difference between good and remarkable. You know, a good gift is like, here, here's a gift card to your favorite restaurant. And you go, oh, thanks. I love Chipotle.But a remarkable gift is someone gives you a thoughtful gift that shows they really know you and you never forget it. There's a difference between good and remarkable, so keep that in mind. I have an example. I was working with a client.They do a trivia show, and one of the answers was Donna Summer, the 70s disco queen. Her actual name is spelled different than whatever you see. If it's a U, it's supposed to be an O. If it's an O, it's supposed to be a U. It's trivia.And I was like, oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting. But it's not something I'm going to go tell somebody. Like, hey, did you know they messed up her name? Where is Josh Liston?Another member of the school of podcasting has a new show called Saki this, and it's all about Japan. And the one had this weird thing where in Japan they will. You can pay a dollar a night to stay in a hotel. It's only a buck. What's the catch?They're going to live stream you. Not the bathroom. That's off. That's off. That's out of bounds. But you can stay in a hotel in Japan for a buck.That's the kind of stuff you go, wait, what? I got to tell somebody about this? Because it's. It's better than good. It's remarkable. It's something I want to make remarks about.Now, the second thing is delivery. So obviously this is things like your voice. So are you obnoxious sports guy? Are you NPR person? You know, are you a person that talks fast, slow?Do you have lots of really pregnant pauses in your talk? But it's also your artwork. It's your website. You do have a website. Let's just hit that one right up front. I do not understand people.Like, I'm trying to grow my audience. What's your website? Oh, we don't have one.Okay, so you're trying to get people to find you, but the thing that Google looks for, you don't have that doesn't. And I'm not talking about a link tree. That's not a website. It has 0.0seo. Talking about a real website.And you're like, of course you say that you work for PodPage. I said that before I worked for PodPage. PodPage just blows WordPress out of the water and makes it easier you still need to be found on the Internet.So that would be another one. But these are all part of your delivery. And again, it doesn't matter if you're doing video and you bought $5,000 worth of equipment.And if your content is not remarkable, what's the point?And likewise, you can have great content, but if you're using your built in laptop microphone and it sounds like you're in a fishbowl that's in a bathroom, that's not going to work either. You need content, you need delivery. Both of them go hand in hand. And without one, you're really shooting yourself in the foot.Another easy way to describe delivery is, is you know what episodes resonate with your audience. You've got the download numbers. Now, obviously we could nitpick and say, well, maybe that one had a better title than the other one.But let's just say we have an idea of what really worked. We can see in our download stats which episodes got the most downloads. Okay, well, set up your website.So those are the episodes that people see first. Put your best stuff out there. And, and this is something that's really easy to do with PodPage.And you can do this with whatever you're using, probably, but why not put the best stuff out there instead of the one episode that you just put out and you were kind of rushed and grandma was in town and it's kind of. Yeah, don't make that the first thing people see that's part of your delivery. Another part of your delivery is your schedule.Whatever your schedule is, just keep it. I always say to record a couple episodes and time it so that you can then pick a schedule that fits your lifestyle.So many people try to squeeze their life into their podcast. That's backwards. You want to squeeze your podcast into your life. Your life is more important, but you don't want to miss if you can.And I'm going to bring up something again that's probably not going to go over well, but unless you mentally have to, you physically have to. I'm not a fan of Seasons at all.Because if you've been lucky enough to become part of someone's routine, like every Friday they listen to your show when they're driving home or whatever it is, but you are part of their routine. It's something that they do and they always listen to you and you're like, I'm taking a break. I'll be back in a month and a half.And it's not like they're going to work, going, well, I was Going to listen to a podcast today. But Carol's on vacation. No, they're going to find something else and that takes over your spot.And you better hope that when you come back from your little vacation that the show they found isn't better, isn't more relevant, isn't more remarkable than your show. So again, obviously, there are those obvious times when you're like, no, no, I was going to have a nervous breakdown. You know. Yes, take a break.But I know people go, yeah, well, the big shows take seasons. Yeah, the big shows have big budgets with big teams. Yeah, I wouldn't do that if I was you. When I travel on the road, it's not rocket science.I record two episodes. And when I know, like, September 26th, I'm going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina.So you better bet, as I look at the calendar right now, it's September 6th. I'm going to start working on two episodes in my head. It's just planning a little ahead of time. It's not that hard to not miss a week.Now, says the guy with no spouse and no kid. So obviously your mileage may vary. Now, according to this study that came out of 1200 people, the first minutes of your show are hugely important.About 10% of the audience will give you a minute to grab their attention. About 40% will give you five minutes, and then the rest they'll give you maybe halfway through. But here's the thing.You get one shot and 41% of this survey, if you blow it, they're not going to give you a second shot. This is why your delivery and your content are so important.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, the other thing to keep in mind, everybody's audience is different. So what I do works for me. What works for you? But there are best practices. But this is where I want to throw myself under the bus.I do a show every Saturday called Ask the Podcast Coach. It's live at 10:30am Eastern. We get about 30 to 50 people in the chat room. It's an amazing time.But if I was coaching myself, we start off, I introduce my co host and he always does this quirky little thing where he'll be like, do you know, it's, I don't know, take your dog to work day or something, and I'll make a weird remark about dogs. And then we try to get it into, you're ready for this. Right after we just chit chatted. We're now going to do two minutes of ads.Great way to start the show. But here's the Thing I'm not going to. Why isn't my show growing?Because if I was coaching myself, I would say, hey, you might want to come up with a tease. Do you know what your first question is? We don't. It's a live show, so it's hard to tease something that you don't know what it is.And then I would say, can we move the, you know, advertising to maybe a mid roll instead of being the first, you know, couple minutes? And I'm like, nope, that's where we do them. And we do them because we want them out of the way.We want to make sure our sponsors get heard, and then we move into the content. That's my choice. I am aware that that doesn't do great things for new people, but that's it.So many people ask for advice and then they don't follow it, which is fine. It's a free country, the last time I checked. And you have free will, but you also then need to go, wait. I keep asking, why isn't my show growing?And these are some of the best practices. And people, you know, have different reasons for why they're doing their show.If we go back to the why, I started that show because I wanted to play with blog talk radio. I did. And then my why became I wanted to offer free consulting for those who couldn't afford my hourly rate. Do I do that? A little bit.But most of it at this point is I'm just having a blast with my co host and 30 people that show up every Saturday to talk about podcasting. And yes, you can get paid in fun. In fact, it's so much fun that I have been giving up my Saturdays for, you know, the better part of 10 years now.I do have a crowdfunding on that that goes up and sometimes is very nice and sometimes. Right now, we've had a lot of people have their finance situations change. So right now it's at a low point, but I'm still getting paid in fun.So keep in mind that as we talk about this today, listen and think, does this apply to my audience? Because my audience is different than your audience. But the point is, if it's not growing, my guess is it's your content or your delivery.Those are the two ingredients that come into play when it comes to making great content. Before we get away completely from making great, remarkable content. Chanel had this great point in her presentation. I love this.She said, your content is not part of the marketing strategy. It is the marketing strategy. And I was like, that Is so true.Because if you think about it, think about your favorite movie, think about your favorite music. When you think about it, there is something that is remarkable about it.And again, I don't think AI is making remarkable content unless it's video, and it's only remarkable because it's not real. But think about your movies and your anything that your favorite. Like my. One of my favorite movies is Dead Poet Society because it's inspirational.I love Robin Williams. It's funny. It's got all those things in it that I look for in a movie. And so that's what we're trying to recreate.We're very similar, I feel, to the movie industry. The movie industry writes their content. They plan it, they record it, they edit it.And then if you're smart, and I do not understand why people don't do this, but Ron Howard will sit in a screening of his movie because he knows when people are supposed to laugh and when they're supposed to cry and whatever. And if they don't cry and laugh when they're supposed to, he goes back to the editing thing.One of the things we do we're going to start at the school of podcasting are called listener parties, where you can watch people listen to your show because you know when they're supposed to laugh, you know when they're supposed to smile. And so I thought of that. We're going to add that, but that's what you want, your content. And then what do we do?They spend lots of money promoting their podcast, or in this case, their movie. And then they hope that people come out of that theater and tell their friends.And I'm here to tell you, the last 10 movies I've seen, I was like, meh, I could have waited till this got home. Instead of paying, you know, 13, $15 for popcorn. So keep that in mind.But when you think about your favorite, whatever it is, movies, music, whatever, why is it your favorite? Because of the content. Not because of the album cover or the movie box or the poster.It's the content of the movie and probably the way it makes you feel. We were talking about this on Ask the Podcast coach and Chris Stone from castahead.net member of the school of podcasting made a great point.He goes, look, anybody can sell lemonade. Only so many people can make lemonade that you really want to drink.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So one of the ways that you can grow your audience is to stop losing the audience that you have. And think of this. You're trying to fill a Bucket, but the bucket has a hole in it.And so in this study, they asked people, what's the reasons that you stop listening before it's over? What are the big reasons? And the first one, the biggest one at 40% was it's just boring. What is the opposite of. Of relevant? Boring.And when you're boring, people don't have any patience for that. And then it gets into at 33%. It started with too much meaningless talk.And later in the study, it showed how some people don't mind chitchat at the beginning. But here's the thing. When do I not care about chitchat? When the chit chat is relevant to the topic.And keep in mind, the title of your episode is a promise. You're promising this is what you're gonna get. And that title should probably be a benefit. Today's benefit. How do you grow your podcast?So the sooner you get to that topic, and if you have any chit chat, it better be about that one time when I did the thing and it relates to the title. Or there's just too much off topic stuff. Now I make fun of myself. I am adhd. You throw in any letters. I got it.If it means I can't pay attention to where I'm just like when I take a tangent, I poke fun at myself. But I usually still feel those tangents have some sort of value. Otherwise I would cut them out. Or the host keeps repeating themselves. That's at 25%.The next one is the host keeps repeating themselves. That's at 25%. The next one, the host keeps repeating himself at 25%. Apparently people find that annoying and they tune out.There isn't enough interesting talk. So yes, there is talk, but 23% of people go, yeah, it's not interesting. What's another way of saying not interesting? Oh, that's right, boring.Or the discussion moves too slowly. I talk about this. I cut myself out a lot when I do interviews because you get to hear me if I left it in.Think through the question, like, I know you used to do this and now you're doing this, but what was the time? And then the thing and then. And you're like, is there a question in there somewhere, Dave? And then finally the question comes out.Cut out all that stuff except the question. And then likewise, we get to hear the guest go, that's a good question, Dave. I think it was in 2021. No, I think it was, when was it?Oh, you know what? I think the thing. And then they finally answer Cut all that out. It makes the conversation goes smoothly.There are no tangents where we get to hear the guest and the host going, I think it was kind of maybe get that out of there. And I've always said, listen to the question. If you do interviews and did the guest answer the question?Because sometimes they answer the question, but they didn't answer the question. They just provided an answer and then did the answer provide value? If it doesn't, the. The question and the answer go out. So keep that in mind.It helps speed up the discussion. Or if you ever watch the View on tv, those people talk over each other to where you can't understand who's saying what. That's really annoying.That's why you want to have separate tracks when you record interviews, because you can mute one of the person. You could go, okay, we got two people trying to say something at the same time. Who said the best thing, I'm going to mute the other one.And then the host refers to things you have no context for.And so this is where, especially if you're interviewing a friend or if your co host is a friend and you have lots of inside jokes and then all of a sudden they're talking about, man, remember that thing with the blue pen? And the other guy goes, flu. And you're like, I don't get it. Blue pen.Or my favorite, when they start talking about something on the screen because it's really a YouTube show. And they're like, oh, look at this in the upper right hand corner. And the guy's going, oh, dude, look at that. Oh.And you just get to listen to everybody go, ah, for a minute and a half. Again, it's an audio show. You, you might want to cut that part out, you know, or the hosts are trying to be too funny. They're just trying too hard.And I hear this a lot when I do podcast audits where people are trying to come out of the gate funny. And so instead of saying, I'm Mary, I'm Jill, I'm Bart, and I'm Susan, whoever, right?They have to try to say something funny, you know, I'm Mary, I'm Susan, and I'm Bart, and I need a beer because my cat is, yeah, thanks, Bart. Just all we need is your name. We just need to figure out what you sound like.So in our theater of the mind, we can figure out who's who and let's move on. But instead we're now going to stretch out that five minute timeline. And you guys haven't even introduced Yourself because of the.Yeah, so don't do that. Quit trying to be so funny. But the thing, there is a stat in here that says, again, the chit chat, 42% don't mind it. I think that's chit chat.That is relevant. But even that says keep it short. Now, the problem is they didn't define what short is, but keep that in mind.But they did say that many people of this 1200 study said that you get one shot, and if you blow it, 41% of those people are like, yeah, you're not getting a second shot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When you can tell me the eye color of your audience, you're doing something right. There are all sorts of ways. There's email, there's Facebook groups.I would not put my community, because that's what we're here to talk about in a Facebook group. We had Paul G. On the show. He lost 80,000. Some people in a Facebook group just, poof, went up in flames. There is now.I found a new tool called system. It's email. This thing does everything but your laundry. And they have a free version that doesn't really have that many limits.And one of the things it does is community. So if you want to build a community for free, then I realize you go, Dave, Facebook's free. Facebook.I got kicked out of my own Facebook group for saying, lunch with Dave starts in 20 minutes. They said I was spamming my group. So I would not build a group on Facebook or any free service. Because you don't own it. They do.You're kind of renting it. But when I look at successful shows, almost all of them have some sort of community so that you can directly connect to your audience.Glenn the Geek, frequent person on the show, frequent guest. He has a Patreon group that he has trained to be brutal and let him know when he's being boring because the show is for them.And so that's a great use of any kind of group, whatever.You're using some sort of community to get feedback, but also you can see what they are talking about, what they're asking about, and you can get ideas, not that you're guessing. I wonder if people want to talk about this, you know what they want to talk about because you see it in the community.So one way to make great content that is then remarkable because you have a great delivery is to start with content that you know your audience wants. I spent a lot of time on Reddit. I spent a lot of time in Facebook groups. Not there to.I Do chime in a fair amount, but really I'm there to read and see what people are stuck on. So when you know what your community wants to talk about, it takes the guesswork out of it.Now, if you can also by any chance do this in person, do it in person. I don't know why, it's just different because I got to hang out with Shane Whaley from Spybrary in Cleveland. I got to hang out with Katie Brinkley.We'll talk about her in a second. There's just something about breaking bread with people or just hanging out in person. It's different. It just is. It's a, a deeper level of connection.So if you can connect with your audience, do it. If you can't, then, okay, go to something like Zoom. If you can't do that, then, you know, there's always one to one communication via email.But the more you can connect with your audience and again, it goes back to helping you know who is the, who you're talking to. You're really going to make better content. And the better the content, again, it is your marketing strategy, the more it's gonna grow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, if you don't have a community, then I would highly recommend, number one, you buy the book the Audience is Listening by Tom Webster. It's an amazing book. That is a remarkable book and that will help you make a survey. Now Podpage has a built in survey.If you're using WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or whatever, this will walk you through making a survey. Because again, you don't want to feed, you know, meat to the vegetarians. You don't want to serve death metal to the jazz people.And a survey will do that. And so it's something I've been looking at. I've done one at the beginning of the year. It's always testing that. And just a quick story.My brother once bought a ceramic frog and he bought a patch and sewed it to some sort of like fishing hat. And all of a sudden everybody thought my brother was into frogs.And the next two years, every birthday, my aunts, uncles and cousins are buying this poor guy a frog. There was only one thing nobody asked him, do you like frogs? And he didn't. He just didn't have.Every time he got one, he's like, oh, thanks, it's a, it's a frog. Yeah. So you always want to be asking your audience for their opinion. I love, I'm. Maybe I'm weird, I think I'm weird, but I love Getting notes.I got two notes this week that were amazing from Mark King. He does a show called the Impact Investing Roadshow. And he said there were two things. There was one.He said, you know, that whole unlimited consulting. He goes, that kind of diminishes it. He goes, from an outside point of view, it just sounds like you got ton of it. Oh, here we got.You need more water. Here it is. Think of it like music. Music right now. When I was growing up, back in the day, I would buy an album on vinyl.I would listen to it front to back and back to front and front to back. While I read the liner notes, I looked at the artwork. And why did I. Because I had the radio.I might have had cassettes back then, but it wasn't this just non stop stream of music. Now, you know, a band I love puts out a new album. I listened to it maybe twice on Spotify, and I'm like, what else you got?Because I'm ready for something new. And so I think in this case he's saying, when I say, hey, unlimited consulting, it might devalue it. And I went, hmm, that really made me think.And then the other thing he said was, dave, we know you're the podcast guy. And he goes, but like, for who? Like who? Who do you. And I'm kind. And again, this is where if I go, well, everybody.Well, I just said, when you say everybody, it's not an acceptable answer.I do work with entrepreneurs, primarily a lot that are trying to, you know, run a business or something of that nature, because those people have a budget. But I've also helped mom and daughter do a show about reading the Bible. So I am kind of everybody.But it made me go, hmm, maybe I need to pick one just for marketing people so they can go, oh, this is the guy we're looking for. So don't be afraid of notes. Now, not all of them you can put into place because somebody might suggest something.I do a call in show called Ask the Podcast Coach, and somebody gave me two pages of notes that totally were off my vision and my goal for the show. And I was like, hey, thank you for the notes, but no. So keep that in mind.But you always want to, when you receive a note, go, does this have any validity to it? Like, try to step outside of you and look at it from just a logic. Does this make any sense? And I go, yeah, it does. I got to think about this.So be open to notes. And sometimes it's hard because our podcast is our art, man. It's my art. And you just spent 14 hours on it.Now you want to change it, but don't you want to make it resonate with your audience? Don't you want it to be remarkable? Of course we do.So we need to listen to those notes so that we can make that recipe for our audience that just has them going more, please. Because again, our content is not part of the marketing strategy. It is the marketing strategy. My other advice, to grow your show.And this sounds kind of, you know, rude trying to think of the word here. Do the work. And that doesn't mean you're not doing work, but you're not doing the work you need to do. A classic example.Jordan Harbinger gets bazillions of downloads. It's a great show. And one of the things that Jordan does is he reads the book. That's what I mean when I say do the work.If you have an author on your show, read their book. Now, as someone with a book, I can tell you it is night and day difference.When you get interviewed by somebody who has not read the book and they've read the back jacket, they might have asked Google LM to a Google notebook to see if they have anything on it versus the person that actually read the book and in some cases quotes it like verse and chapter. They're like, hey, chapter four, page three. You know, I wrote this four years ago. I don't know if I remember that.But the questions in the discussion are always better. Why? Because somebody did the work. And look who doesn't love a shortcut. But the goal here is quality, not quantity.And so many times we're trying to focus on quantity. We're going to batch record, we're going to do all this stuff. But really, this is from Tom's book. The audience is listening. It's.There is only quality. That's the thing that matters. And so when people talk about consistency, I'm like, yes, it's great to be consistency in schedule.You stay as part of their routine and that's huge. But I think it's more important to be consistent in quality of content so that it's remarkable.I would much rather get a episode that was somewhat late that was amazing than an on time episode that was okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So again, I'm not here to throw you under the bus, but just realize there are sometimes there are reasons why your show isn't growing. I'll give you an example. I keep trying to do an Akron podcast. The problem is I don't have time. I Just don't.I would love to interview local businesses. There are all sorts of things I should be doing, but I'm not. And consequently, that show is not remarkable. It's okay.It's very inconsistent and consequently it's not growing. But I can't get mad about that. And I could quit and go, well, if I can't do it right, I'm not gonna do it. I totally understand that.I have quit things for that reason, but this one, I still wanna play in this space. So again, I'm not saying this to go, see, I told you, you're no good.No, I'm just saying let's identify why our show isn't growing and see if we can't figure out a way to improve those areas. So don't get discouraged. I'm just letting you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I always say downloads. The equation is downloads equals value in the content. We might say resonate, resonation, maybe. But let's say value multiplied by smart marketing.And smart marketing to me goes back to who is your audience? And then going to where they are. This is very generic. Making friends with them and then tell them about your podcast.And this could be a business card with a QR code, all sorts of things like that.But knowing who your audience is, going to where they are online or offline, making friends with them and then telling them about your show, that is marketing 101. And so smart marketing is partnering with other shows like yours. Don't treat them like they're the competition. Embrace them.Because you can listen to your show on Monday, they can listen to their show on Tuesday, and you share an audience. So that is a great place to cooperate, maybe on an episode together and then play it on both episode where you both cross promote each other.You can buy ads in different apps. And then, you know, if I'm a business show, I might want to advertise in the business category there. Why now? Why is that smart marketing?Because we know the people that are in a podcast app are podcast listeners versus a postcard campaign that goes to somebody's mailbox. We have no idea if they even know what a QR code is. So we want to go where podcast listeners are now adjacent to that. Not as good.But if you have a hyper niche show and somebody has a hyper niche newsletter, we got one out of two. We know they love that kind of stuff. And then they might be podcast listeners.This is where a website comes into play again, a website where people can click, play and listen. So that way if they have no idea what Apple podcast is, what Pocket Cast is. They can listen on your website.But when we want to market, especially if you're going to pay for marketing, you want to target people that are your target audience and are listening to podcasts. That's a way to save money.So just the further away you get from knowing that they listen to podcasts, the less likely they are then to actually get return on your investment. Because you paid money to put your show in front of a bunch of people that go, what's a podcast?Now, if there is an actual physical group of people that are in your genre, see, when they hold their meetings again, go to where they are and then maybe contact the organizer and go, hey, is there any chance maybe in a meeting I could sit up and explain how to listen to a podcast? You never know. And they might say no. In which case, if you go home, I'm pretty sure you're not dead and you live to face another day.Now, is rejection fun? But no.But my guess is in that room with a bunch of people that are talking about the thing that you podcast about, you're going to make some friends. And that's the other thing. I still consider myself somewhat of an introvert. It comes out at different times.When I was at the Cleveland event, I got my name tag.There are all sorts of people sitting at tables and chairs that could have easily gone to a table and sat down with somebody and go, hey, how's it going? Instead, I went to the chair furthest away from everybody and sat down. And that's when I noticed I'm like, oh, I'm doing shy Dave.I'm not here to be shy Dave. I'm going to pretend to be outgoing Dave. And I moved over and started talking to somebody. And again, I live to see another day.And the more I do that, the I am less uncomfortable. It's not that I'm more comfortable. I am less uncomfortable doing that kind of thing. And I'm just here to tell you, you can do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Another thing we need to talk about is there are so many ways to benefit besides downloads. We get obsessed with those things.And so what I'm going to tell you next, I got to tell you ahead of time, be aware when you go into this section because it can be really deflating. And that is if you go into podcasts with AN S podcast connect.apple.com you can go in and see.Now, these are numbers of only people that use Apple products to consume your podcast. And under the Stats, you can see how far people listened to. Now, I'm an old teacher, right? That's my background.And where I come from, 50 is an F, 60 is a D, 70 is a C, 80 is a B, and 90 is an A. So I want my completion percentage to be 90, right? That's an A.And so when you look at it potentially and see you got a 52 or a 30 or a 70, it's up to you. Decide to decide, is that good? For me, I'm looking for 90 now. I occasionally get 70s. I occasionally get 60s.You know, again, this can be a kick in the pants.When I taught customer service, I always said, when you get a complaint from a customer, this is an opportunity to build loyalty like no other thing on the planet. When they say, hey, you know, whatever, this is too salty, and you hand them some salt and you solve the problem, they're like, you're the best.Thank you so much. So when we see negative things in our stats, that's just feedback. That's an opportunity for you to go in and change it.And sometimes it takes a while to figure out what they need to get those numbers up. The other thing is, don't feel bad. Like, I get a fair number of statistics in Apple.I think if you get less than 5 views on Apple, it might be less than 10. There won't be enough data. That is a kick in the pants. And then you can also go into, I believe it's podcasters.Spotify.com it might be creators now.That's their dashboard. And you can again see how far people are listening. You can also see how many people click through.So that'll give you some feedback on your album art. But this is all feedback that you can use to improve your show. Don't look at it as, oh, I'm such a failure.It's like, oh, somebody's giving me feedback to make this better. But the problem is, we want it now. We are very, very impatient. So I wanted to go back to an old episode that I talked about this before.You may have heard of this one comedian. His name is Jerry Seinfeld, and of course, now he's doing great.But a lot of people don't realize he was on the Howard Stern show and talked about this. I want you to think about this. I'm going to put this out there. It took him four years to get on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson. Four years.That's a long time when you're dying to get to someplace. When he got on the Tonight show. He was remarkable and had everybody laughing. He was on the Tonight show for nine years.Now, for those of you keeping track at home, that means it was 13 years of doing stand up before NBC gave him his own show. 13 years. So when you're like, hey, I've been doing this six months and I'm not on Carson yet. Carson's actually dead. That would be weird.But you get the point. It takes a while. Then the fun thing was the first four years. So again, that's 17 now years. The first four years of the Seinfeld show, it did awful.It was almost canceled after the first year because the audience hadn't found it.And so realize there may be times when you have great content and you have great delivery and you have a great website and you're doing the social posting and you're going to where your audience is, and it's just not moving yet. And this is where I will point you towards Nashville, Tennessee. Nashville, Tennessee, is a great city.And if you go to any bar in Nashville, Tennessee, they probably have musicians up there playing their own songs that are absolutely amazing. And why aren't they on the COVID of Rolling Stone? You got me. Because they're amazing.But sometimes it's timing, sometimes it is, you know, just dumb luck in some cases.But realize that your podcast leads to relationships, and those relationships lead to opportunities, and those opportunities lead to more relationships, and those relationships lead to more opportunities. It is a very small snowball that starts to run. I'll give you an example.This was so cool to see when I went to the Content Creator Expo in Cleveland, and that was a remarkable event. Two days after that, I was like, man, that was cool. I want to go back. When's the next one? And there's a really good guy named Jay Acunzo.He is a kind of a speaker teacher, storytelling coach. Really good guy. I've read his book, and I was excited to meet him.And so after his presentation, I saw him afterwards, and I just thought we'd do a little fist bump. I'm like, hey, Jay. Loved your presentation. And we kind of fist bump. He's like, hey, great, I'm Jay. And I'm like, yeah, I'm Dave Jackson.And he said, oh, I'm supposed to meet you. I was talking last night and we brought up podcasting, and somebody said, oh, Dave Jackson's here. You should talk to him. And so I said, who is.Who said that? And he said, katie Brinkley. Well, Katie's been on this show podcasting these two relationships Love Katie.I got to see her at Podcast Movement and at the Cleveland show, along with Jeff and Lou and a bunch of other people. But it's those relationships.And what was funny is as I'm starting to get acquainted with Jay, and we're talking about his book and what he does and everything like that. Katie walked by and she was like, oh, oh, it's happening, it's happening, it's happening. It was so funny.But I'm just here to tell you, it takes a while, and that's why you have to love your topic. And that's why, for me, one of the key ingredients in the heart of a podcaster is the need to serve. Not the want, the need to serve.Like, they just love serving. I was talking with Kim Newlove this week, a member of the School of Podcasting who will be writing a book about local podcasting.When that's done, we'll have her on the show. But she was teaching a podcast class. I have a lot of podcast consultants at the School of Podcasting. It's a great, great group.And she got to teach a live class. And the rush you get when you actually see the light bulb come on is like nothing else. That's what I love to do.I love to take people who say, look, there's no way I can do a podcast. I hate technology. I'll never be able to do that. And then, you know, a month later, they're crying on the phone going, I'm an Apple. It's great.There's nothing that replaces that for me. I love that. So keep that in mind. That. Do it for the fun, do it for those kind of things.When you can help your audience, when you're saving them time, when you're saving them money, when you're delivering value. And I get it. There will come a point when you're like, look, I've given all I can give, and they're not giving back.And maybe that's when you're like, you know what? I had fun. It's not fun anymore. And maybe I'll put this down. Or maybe it's time to really monetize, and you're not doing that. Right.There are things you need to do, but just remember, you monetize an audience, you don't monetize a podcast. Almost. I mean, there are exceptions to that rule, but most of the time, you're monetizing an audience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, Dave, you said at the beginning of this, you're going to talk about the one thing you would do different. What is it? Well, in the last 20 years, I've started over 30 shows, and obviously most of them are dead. I think I have five shows now.I have school of podcasting. Ask the podcast coach, your podcast consultant, the future of podcasting and occasionally building a better Dave. So that's five.And if I were to do it again, and it's an easy. A really easy kind of slippery slope to fall into, I would do one show, and it would be amazing.It would be the show that, like, hey, if you want to learn podcasting, that's the show. That's the show you got to listen to. And it's hard to do that when you're writing show notes for show number two and three and four and five.And it's easy to fall into because, well, the first show you thought was going to be hard, and now you know how to get into Apple and Spotify and all that, and you understand media hosts and artwork and all that stuff. And so you can fire up a podcast in about 10 minutes. Piece of cake. Well, guess what? Writing the book isn't the hard part.Getting people to read it is hard. And then in the same way, launching a podcast, not hard.So to those people that are charging you $7,000, come on over to the school of podcasting, and I will save you $7,000. Launching a podcast is not hard. Getting people to listen to it is the title of this episode. That's the hard part.That's why we're talking about it now. But realize There are only 24 hours in a day. And so, yeah, it's easy to do an episode.And you've got AI doing this and that, remember, is AI making remarkable content. Hmm. Something to think about.And keep that in mind that maybe it's better to do one show that is amazing, that, like, hands down, nobody can even touch. I think that's what I would do differently. There is a show I do, your podcast consultant.I started it to see if a short show would maybe with some of the same content I talk about here. Would that be better? Do people need short content? And the answer was no. Makes no difference at all.I've had people say, I love this because it's about long enough for me to walk around the block because they're all nine minutes or less. But in the end, there weren't a ton of people going, I would love to hear about podcasting if they weren't all an hour long.No, because there is no such thing as too long, only too boring. Thank you Valerie Gower. So I do. Ask the podcast coach. I do that one for fun.And again, for people that can't afford my services and for the crowdfunding, to be honest on that one. The future of podcasting I do, because Daniel J. Lewis is one of my favorite people on the planet. And that show is kind of sputtering right now.We're running out of topics, but that's why I do that show.But in theory, I should, you know, if I were to do it again, I would do one show that I was madly just passionate about and make that the show that when somebody asks, hey, I'm looking for a podcast about this topic that everybody in that little bubble for that genre goes, oh, man, you gotta listen to this. Because there are shows when somebody says, like, what's a good show? I can say Darknet Diaries, because that's Jack. Jack was on this show.And when I asked him how he grew his audience, this is what he said.

My big thing is if you can make the audience love the show so that they have to go tell someone else about it, then they're going to become marketers for your show and your show is going to spread.And so I'm always trying to find ways to just make the show better and better and better for my existing audience, because I know my existing audience is my best marketing tool. And I wasn't asking listeners to rate and review me on Apple Podcasts. I was asking people to tell your other friends to listen to this show.Call, text somebody right now. Hey, I just listened to this podcast. I think you would really like it. And that was my call to action at the end of some episodes.

And I'll have a link to that full interview in the show. Notes. Jack gets around 400,000 downloads an episode. Yeah, that's amazing.And since I got sworn in at the beginning of this episode, I need to let you know this actually isn't episode 1000. I think it was somewhere in the 7 hundreds where I skipped a number. Like, I went from 778 to 7 80.So technically it's not a thousand, but what's an episode? I know I've pulled a lot of episodes from the feed because they just didn't deliver value.A lot of interviews I did with companies that no longer exist. So there are a lot. If you go in and like, hey, there's only 960 episodes in your feed.Yeah, there's a lot that I pulled because they just didn't deliver any value. So thanks so much for tuning in. 20 years has been very weird.I remember Things like Clamor, Pod Show, Meo, Podango, Wild Voice, MyPodcast.com, audiometric IO, Opinion, Podcasting, ZCat, and Wooshka, all of which are gone at this point. I remember when Clubhouse came on the scene and it was going to kill podcasting. Nope.You know, what we need to do is realize there are two big players on the stage right now. You got YouTube with a big budget and a big bullhorn, and they do weird things like, hey, the duration of a short is now zero.So if you have zero duration on a short, it now counts as a view. And then they came out and said there were 200 billion views. To which I go, what?And then Spotify likes to sometimes not provide all of the stats up front.So when their headline came out that you can now, you can now play music in your podcast, asterisk, not on the website, and also only in the app and only after we approve an episode. Oh, and one more thing. Only those people that pay for Spotify and then they canceled that whole plan like six months later.So be very careful with those big companies. And that's why I love Open rss. Open rss. If you don't like me, and you complain to some app like, hey, that Dave Jackson's a jerk.Then they decide to kick me out of the app. I'm on a bunch of other apps because I'm open rss, and as long as I got that and you know how to copy and paste, you'll never stop me.And so I plan on doing 20 more years. Let's see, that'll make. Well, I'll be old. I'll be sounding like this, welcome to episode 2000 of the School. It'll be great.So I really do, you know, a lot of times we get caught up on ourselves and you're like, look at what I've done. Well, really, it's not what I've done, it's what you've done.You know, because if it wasn't for you listening and, you know, all the questions of the month and all the feedback and things like that.And I mean this not to get emails to me, but please, when you listen to other shows and somebody gives you value, this is one of the things that I'll guess I'll talk about it here. Yes, there are downloads and yes, you can go in and see how far people.But also one of the things I look for are unsolicited emails when somebody or a comment or whatever it is. But when Somebody without me saying, send me an email sends me an email. It's like, hey, that last episode was awesome.I remember once we do a meeting every Friday at the school of podcasting, and Nancy May was like, hey, you've been on fire lately. Didn't ask her about it. Just out of nowhere, unsolicited. Those have been good episodes.And I need to start tracking those because that's a really cool metric. Unsolicited shout outs, or whatever it is, whatever you want to call it. That's a good signal of, hey, that's resonating. I'm doing good content.I'm making remarkable because they remarked about it. So thank you for listening. Thank you for, you know, chiming in. I do this show for you and I told you I love notes.If I can make this show better, I will hear your note. If it's in the same kind of vision of what I have for the show, be more than happy to make changes to you.And if you have something you would like me to talk about, you know, a lot of people like, oh, you've done a thousand episodes. I'm sure you've talked about it. Some things are worth bringing back. They're worth bringing back.And as I listen to Jack there, I'm like, I need to have Jack back on the show. I need to go back and look at some of the guests that really just slayed it and have them come back. I know. I want to have Courtney Elmer come on.I talked to her podcast movement. So we got a lot of great things coming on and we got a thousand under our belt. Ish. And I can't wait to do more.So this one's been a little longer than usual. Thanks for making it this far. I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters. It's what I do. Been doing it for 20 years now.Can't wait to see what we're going to do together. And until next week, take care. God bless. Class is dismissed. You know you liked what you heard.You know you liked everything and now you made it to the end. Go tell all your friends. Hey, this is Doug from King's X. And if you like what you hear, go tell someone. And may the groove be with you.