Ask Arielle

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  0:00  
 welcome to the podcast. Super Friends, five podcast producers from across North America get together to discuss podcasting.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Today on the show, we are joined by Arielle Nissenblatt, founder of the earbuds podcast collective, and one of the most trusted voices in podcast marketing. She's helped countless creators grow their shows, from indies to networks. Tireless champion of the audio world and storytelling, newsletters, social strategy, cross promotion. She knows what works, and she's here today to share it. So thanks for joining us. Arielle, thank you, Ariel, Mr. Blatt, sounds like this, and that happy to be here. I felt like I needed a little quick intro, so wanted to do that. You got it.

Arielle Nissenblatt  0:50  
A lot of people might also remember you from your time at squad cast and being the head of community there, yeah. And then descript, yeah. That was those were some good times back then. And being being being head of community. What's it like, by the way, to be a head of community for wherever you can, I believe, tell us what you're doing now as well. Sure. Yeah. So now I am working at a company called autoly, and within autoly, I am in charge of a project called pinwheel, which does chat shows and interviews and other types of content for thought leaders or CEOs, leader types who want to reach their audience in a number of different ways. So obviously, my focus is on the podcast side of things, but I'm also finding that a lot of people are interested in making clips. So having a clip first strategy is an interesting thing I'm looking to and having a lot of success with and being head of community, I'll switch to that. It's awesome for when I started at squad cast, it was 2020, and it was in the heart of the pandemic, and I had started a podcast, actually, and I was using squad cast, so I had messaged the founders of squad cast, because I'd met them at some conferences over the years, and I just said, Hey, I'm using the product and I love it, really. That's it. No other, no other motive. And then if I saw a few months later that they had a job opening, and it turned out to be a really great fit. And because I use the product and had spoken with other people who had used the product, I was unnatural to chat with people about what they liked and didn't like, and what kind of features they wanted, and how could I relay those requests to the engineering team. So I really enjoyed the autonomy, the autonomy that I had to meet with people all over the world who are using the product, and then to take that information that they were giving me and use it to create online events where they could learn more. And then I did similar things at descript as well, with a with a product that did more than just remote recording, but also had that element as well. 

Matt Cundill  2:52  
Earbuds. Podcast Collective is something that arrives in my email box and many other people every Sunday night or there abouts we will. The first thing we're going to talk about today is, is newsletters, but tell us about yours, and then we're going to ask questions about your news, about newsletters in general. 

Arielle Nissenblatt  3:08  
I write a weekly podcast recommendation newsletter, like you said, called earbuds. It goes out every Sunday night, sometimes Monday, as you alluded to, if I am busy the night before, and I've been writing it since 2017 every single Sunday or Monday. So it is, you know, huge archive situation at this point. And there are themes all over the place. Anyone can curate a list, and they select a theme and then find five podcast episodes on that theme. And anyone can curate a list. You don't have to be a podcaster. You can be just a podcast lover. You can be somebody who used to be a podcaster. Wants to show off a podcast that your friend is on, whatever. But you can include one of your own shows. So it's a great way to get your show out there to more people, but also to just find new podcasts to listen to from a listener perspective. And then I also write a few other newsletters. I just love the medium of newslettership, so I can definitely talk more about those. And I love experimenting with different podcast recommendation

Arielle Nissenblatt  4:10  
projects. So another thing that I do is I have this Instagram channel, which I know you're a part of, Matt, but yeah, my whole Mo is, how can we curate podcasts so that the right people find the right ones for them.

Catherine O'Brien  4:24  
I also am a subscriber to your the earbuds and and I actually many, many years ago, actually curated a list for the newsletter. So thanks for that opportunity. Can you talk about a little bit about we sometimes, when we're talking to podcasters, we're always talking about, like, what is talking about, like, what is the thing that really moves the needle for a long time with marketing, we've really believed that, you know, people buy, they people still buy from email. Is, can you talk a little bit about, like, Is this one of those things where anybody who has a podcast, they should have a website, they should have a newsletter. Do you have any thoughts about about that 

Arielle Nissenblatt  5:02  
you'll find that my advice or my answers to a lot of the questions that I'm going to be asked are It depends, and I know that that is a frustrating thing.

Arielle Nissenblatt  5:12  
I... I do, however, usually recommend that you at least have an email capture form on your website or linked in your Instagram bio, or wherever it is that you're most active on social media, doesn't necessarily mean that you have to use that newsletter service that goes along with, you know, the captured emails that you have. You don't necessarily have to spend time coming up with a really nice, you know, format for the newsletter and publishing it consistently, maybe you use it strategically when you have a live show coming up and you want to sell tickets, but I do recommend that people grab email addresses as people float by the social platforms, because

Arielle Nissenblatt  5:53  
we don't necessarily know who is listening to our show unless they raise their hand and say, I'm listening to the show. So if you go and subscribe to my newsletter, and it says in all of the wording around my newsletter that I now have, I now have permission to contact you. That's a really great way for me to now be in touch with you and to maybe get information from you, or to be in community with you. Whereas on the podcast listening apps, you get stats on the people who are listening, but you don't necessarily know who they are. You definitely don't have their email addresses, so even if you don't make a weekly version of your newsletter, I think just grabbing email addresses is important. 

Johnny Podcasts  6:33  
Ariel, I've always been a big advocate that the email is a great tool. I think what probably the best tool for back and forth engagement between listeners and the hosts, especially for Q and A, what we want to hear more of on the podcast, what we want to hear less of from the podcast. For podcasters that haven't jumped into the newsletter route yet, I know that there's a handful of these newsletter tools out there, like,oh, sub stack. I think kit convert is a big one. Now there's one that's like beehive. I was gonna say it's a bumblebee related one. Where do you recommend podcasters start if they wanted to build out a newsletter today?

Arielle Nissenblatt  7:11  
So it depends if you just want to capture email addresses. I think substack is super easy and free, and you can make yourself a nice looking landing page. The issue that substack has is that it becomes the idea that you have a substack, whereas I think we need to be seeing this as you have a newsletter, and it happens to be hosted on substack. In a lot of cases, the whole there's a machine basically around substack that you don't necessarily need to be a part of, especially at the stage of I'm just capturing email addresses, and maybe thinking about what a relatively consistent message out to my to my subscribers would be. So if you just want to get that, like, if you take one thing away today, and it's like, I want to start a newsletter where I'm capturing email addresses, and eventually I will be in touch with the people that subscribe. I would just make something free for yourself on sub stack. You can also do that on beehive, especially if you eventually down the line want to use a different service. A lot of these platforms are free up to a certain number of subscribers. So I use beehive for one of my newsletters, and I pay for it just because I'm past the number of subscribers. But I know a lot of people who just started out, and you can customize a lot more on beehive than you can on substack. So that those are some of the benefits there.

Arielle Nissenblatt  8:29  
MailChimp is great if you are definitely selling things. They integrate really well with with shopping services, and they really optimize for clicks, and that you can create automated campaigns and drip campaigns that help you sell to a potential you know, to a listener who might come to your newsletter because they're interested in a service that you are providing. And then maybe there's also a merchandise service in there as well, or a merchandise offer as well. So I think the different email service providers have benefits. But for the most part, if you're not sure what you want to do with this maybe newsletter, select something free, select something that's easy to customize, and overall, ask yourself or first, this is my advice for everything. Subscribe to a bunch of other newsletters, first that ones that you probably listen to their podcast and see what they're doing, and see what you like, and see what you want to do, that that might have been inspired by them, and see what you don't want to do because maybe it's too much work, or because it's just, you know, it's not going to work for you. 

Jon Gay  9:36  
I'm glad you brought up sub stack Johnny and Arielle, because they're starting to offer podcast hosting, and I think it's a sort of a symptom of this world where everybody is trying to be all things to all people. I had a client ask me, Well, I have a sub stack, and now they're talking about hosting my podcast. Like, do I need to get off of simple cast? And no, thank you for thank you for rolling your eyes, because that was my reaction too, and I'm more just like nervous and.

Arielle Nissenblatt  9:59  
Yeah, it worries me, and also why it's on us, right? I'm not going to blame your client there for not knowing that, but I guess it's on sub stack, maybe for not being clear about that. I don't know. 

Jon Gay  10:13  
Like, if she's got a sub stack, it's obsessed, it's successful. And I'm like, okay, yeah, if you want to repurpose some stuff as podcasts and send it to me. We'll put it out on your simple cast, where it's already connected to Apple and Spotify and everything else, as opposed to having to, you know, try to move stuff around and, oh, well, they're doing this, and now I should be only in their ecosystem. And... 

Arielle Nissenblatt  10:34  
it's, it's, it's, like I said, the sub stack machine is very strong, like I recently went to a coffee podcast morning event in New York, and there was somebody there from substack on the marketing team. And it is true that if you can figure out the substack machine, you can really foster a huge following there, and maybe that following stays on substack and you're able to make money through sub stack, or through offers that you post on sub stack. But I think for a lot of people, especially in the situation that we're talking about, you're probably going to want to see sub stack like a newsletter platform, not a sub stack. And what she what she mentioned, is that, like, you can go live on sub stack, and they're really pushing lives on sub stack, as you can imagine, like everybody is going live with video is something that people want more of, that platforms want more of. And

Arielle Nissenblatt  11:28  
because of that, if you go live, then they they're more likely to feature you, and then if they're more likely to feature you, then you'll get a bunch of followers. And then those followers might turn into newsletter subscribers, and then those newsletter subscribers might turn into paid subscribers, and on and on, and it's really just a funnel. It's like anything is, yeah, well, I was gonna offer the loving counterpoint that one of the things about if you do host on substack, every podcast that I subscribe to that is on they use substack as their podcast hosting. They also have a feed that is for paid people, and that just makes it a lot easier. So you're not sending them off to locals or Patreon or something like that. It's all in the same feed. So that is, like one advantage. So to your point that if you're being funneled, then it does make it a little easier. If that is the model that you're going for, no, it's huge. And I think if you can go for that model, that's amazing. But I just think most people can't. Most people, most people have this, this, you know, huge potential, total addressable market, and then they don't necessarily know how to capture them, or their content is not good enough to warrant people, right? I don't know, subscribing and wanting to pay for extra content, yeah. So if you are at the stage where you can bring people into a funnel, and that funnel is paid you then to get to decide, like, do I like what sub stack is offering me? Or do I want to move people to Patreon? Or do I want to move people to my own platform?

David Yas  12:51  
Arielle, let me ask you a question about podcasts that are already seasoned to some degree. Let's say you have a podcast and you've done maybe the newsletter thing, or you've done something to engage listeners, and they're responding with great emails and details. And I really like these things about this show, and it's like, great, and you've got subscribers but followers, but they're in the hundreds and not the 1000s, and you're seeing kind of a plateau. What? What's give us a couple pointers for maybe mobilizing your the ambassadors or your show to grow your audience further. 

Arielle Nissenblatt  13:25  
Yeah, first question in response to that is, what is the show we can go? We can go hypothetical. What is the show? And is it possible that that is an okay number of follow, engaged followers and subscribers, because I think we have this tendency, and this is, you know, definitely exacerbated by this age of tech where your startup has to keep growing new users who pay more and more and more. What if 1000 downloads per episode, where you're hearing from between two and 5% of them each episode is enough for you to keep making money and being happy and and that's just the case. So first, I encourage people to ask themselves that, like, do you want to grow for the sake of growth vanity? Or do you want to grow because you the current set of subscribers you have, the current set of engaged followers you have, are not the ones that you want, per se. So just think about that first, and then, within that, yeah, there are definitely some things you can do to engage your already engaged followers and make them sort of ambassadors.

Arielle Nissenblatt  14:29  
First, I think that this is definitely slow, but it is worthwhile. Is being in touch with the people that are constantly raising their hand to be in touch with you, asking them for a phone call. I have five questions that I would like to ask you. It's not going to be a long time. It'll be 15 minutes. It's really very quantitative. I just want to know your reaction to these things that I've been testing out, and I'm going to take that information and apply it to my my larger listener base, or my viewer base, or whatever your audio.

Arielle Nissenblatt  14:59  
Experiences. And what that does is it's obviously not a statistical sample, a statistically significant sample of your audience, but those are the people that are excited, raising their hands. They want to be part of the community, and they might represent some other people in that community. And you can even be transparent about that, if they tell you, you know, I really didn't like that, that segment that you did, it was way too long, then you can, next time you do that segment, say you might have noticed that this segment is a lot shorter. That's because I got feedback from some of the people who are very active in our community. If you disagree with that, then you need to become active in our community, something like that. So I think it's not always easy to get these people to raise their hands and give their time. But if you want to get your existing excited people to be excited in a louder way, there needs to be also a reckoning on the content that you're putting out. You know, is the content something that is genuinely a thing I can only get here, or is, you know, can I go elsewhere for it? And do I really? Do I really need to be, you know? Do I really need to be, like, loving this one specific podcast? Or, more likely, do I listen to a bunch of podcasts on a topic that that I love? Because that's what listeners tend to do. And if that's the case, how do I want my listeners to engage with my content? And how do I make one of those people, rather than 50 of them, a person who reaches out to me quarterly for an audit of their business or whatever, whatever it is you're offering,

Johnny Podcasts  16:37  
Ariel, you've mentioned the word community a bunch, especially in that last answer for creators I mentioned earlier, the email is a great option to have individual back and forth from host to listener, in addition to a newsletter or even within the newsletter ecosystem, I think it's really smart to try and encourage community amongst your listeners to find each other, to talk about your show, live in that ecosystem together. Is there a place where you recommend building something like that? Is it Facebook pages? Is it discord where you're all you're actually creating community where it's not just you and one listener talking back and forth, doing feedback, it's everybody together.

Arielle Nissenblatt  17:23  
Not every podcast lends itself to the listeners being in touch with each other. So that's the first that's my first point is, like, if you have a daily news show that is five minutes long, that is a perfect commuter show, I don't expect those people to want to discuss with each other about how amazing that five minute episode is. But if you have a show about a specific like degenerative disease, God forbid. And there's a lot of people who want to talk about that. That's great, that's I mean, great. That's a thing, and they should have a place to connect. And the first thing I would do is ask them where they want to connect. I would not create a space for them and then tell them to go to that space. I did this when I was working at squad cast. I

Arielle Nissenblatt  18:00  
asked very in a newsletter that we were putting out every week, we had a weekly be in touch with the community newsletter where we featured people and we talked about what was the latest and greatest with the tech and what else is going on in the podcast industry. And there I started planting the seed that I was starting an official community, because a community exists no matter what for your podcast, they just might not be in community with each other. There's a lot of different ways that you can corral them. So a community existed of people who are using squad cast. Some of them were in touch with each other because they just had posted about

Arielle Nissenblatt  18:32  
squad cast over the years, and then they were in touch. And maybe they maybe, if the product is big enough, they've created their own spaces. But in squad cast case, there were a bunch of people who were interested in starting this community, so I posted in our newsletter and on social asking basically, when would work for you guys for a town hall so that we can discuss what a community looks like. And we ended up having an hour long discussion where I asked questions and got answers, and then afterwards, synthesized those answers, and from there, sent out a survey to really confirm with people and really get double triple opt ins from people where they wanted this community to take place. So I asked, Do you want to be in community on Slack? Do you want to be on Facebook? Do you want to be on mighty networks? Do you want to be on circle.so do you want to be on you know, there's so many different places you could possibly be, and sometimes it's more complicated if you, if you do, choose a third party option. So maybe something like Slack is worthwhile, or maybe, maybe there's a way for you to have community right within the app itself. You never know, depending on the capabilities of it. But the bottom line here is to ask the community first to gather, before you gather them and assume that they want to have been gathered because they have so many places that they could be on the internet. They're listening to so many podcasts. They're watching so many TV shows. They're part of so many in real life communities at this point that they might not want to have like a prompt thrown at them every Friday that they.

Arielle Nissenblatt  20:00  
Don't really need to respond to, you know what I mean? There needs to be a reason that this community exists, and you are not the one to tell them why that community exists. They're probably the ones to tell you. And if it's hard to get people to, let's say, Leave ratings and reviews for the podcast, you're probably gonna really have a hard time getting them to join a voluntary community. 

Johnny Podcasts  20:20  
 And oftentimes they're such super fans of the show, they'll create that community themselves, and then you'll find out about, like I said, Yeah, so that that can happen too. And that's sometimes even better. And that's, I would think that's the best case scenario you don't have any work, because the risk you run is, okay, I'm doing this podcast. One the content has to be so good that every all of this stuff trickles after it. Then it's the newsletter, then it's the community building after that, and it's like, well, hold on, we might be spreading ourselves too thin. So I think that's the best case scenario. 

Jon Gay  20:48  
Real quick. Ariel, you mentioned ratings and reviews. I'm on a kind of a crusade to tell my clients Stop begging for ratings and reviews. It's not a good call to action in terms of community building. What is the best call to action, in your opinion, at the end of a podcast? I think you should change it up pretty often, and I think you should also consider depending on how you script out your podcast. 

Arielle Nissenblatt  21:13  
So I have a podcast about podcast trailers called trailer park, the podcast trailer podcast, and it is not currently in regular production. But when it was I challenged myself every episode, when I was scripting it out, and I would never do full script, I would do bullet points and other ways to kind of signal to myself that I want to say something along these lines, but not exactly I did. I did it from scratch. So each time I challenged myself to

Arielle Nissenblatt  21:42  
rewrite or say in different words what it was that I that I wanted to, that I wanted to float. And the reason for that is because it makes you not say the same thing over and over again, and it makes it a little bit more interesting for the listeners who might be very apt to skip, to skip over something, if they're just hearing the same thing over and over again in the same exact words at the same exact place within your show. So I usually say like, depending on what your show's about. Obviously, everything here is depending on what your show is about, depending on your style, depending on your relationship with your listeners. For for me, for trailer park, the way it worked is that I knew every episode I wanted an intro where I talked about what the show was about, who I am, why I make this show,

Arielle Nissenblatt  22:27  
what's going to happen on this episode. Play the trailer for this episode, analyze the trailer for this episode, talk about submitting your own trailer to be featured, and then talk about my sponsor and then sign off. But a bunch of those can be rearranged in different orders throughout, not always all the time, but

Arielle Nissenblatt  22:45  
the call to action that I was pushing at that time was

Arielle Nissenblatt  22:49  
submit your show to be featured on trailer park, the podcast, trailer podcast, but I think it's you obviously don't want to hit people with Too many calls to action in the same breath. But if your calls to action are a little bit disguised, then they're going to hit different people who desire different things or who need different things. So you want to get your show featured, submit trailer park podcast.crd.co,

Arielle Nissenblatt  23:13  
but if you want to be a sponsor, you can also get information on that in the show notes. You'll also find that we're running a contest. I'm not going to say all of these things back to back, because that is very overwhelming, but I'm going to give each of them their own time throughout the show, or I'm going to save one till next time, because it's an overload at this point. I think there's no

Arielle Nissenblatt  23:32  
one best place to send people, especially, I'm sorry this is such a long answer, especially if you are somebody who, like, is a business owner and or you're like, let's say a college advisor, and your your thing is that you work with parents on getting them to pay to get your kid into a good school, or whatever. I don't even know In that case, you might want your your goal might be to get people for 15 minute calls, to get parents for 15 minute calls to convince them that they should pay for five hours of consulting.

Arielle Nissenblatt  24:07  
So maybe that's your call to action, and maybe that's just like, literally email me or text me or whatever.

Arielle Nissenblatt  24:14  
But it could be very different if you're like, assessing ADHD in adults, and you want people to take a quiz, and that's your call to action.

Catherine O'Brien  24:22  
 Before we leave the community angle for a moment here, I wanted to step back to your answer that you were giving just a moment ago. We were You were leading us beautifully into the idea that a community in in some ways, it's supposed to spontaneously form itself, right? You're there is an element of bringing people together, but you also want to it makes sense. You want to have a community that makes sense. So if people are already gathering, that's when you want to sort of capitalize on that. As you already saw, I'm the queen of the loving counterpoint. I a little bit pessimistic. I'm a little bit, you know, glass empty kind of person. So I'm wondering if you could just maybe help us manage our expectations about community. One of my favorite, one of my favorite YouTubers, had a crash out about, you know what community building is hard. It is not, it is not easy. It's not it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit of some of the just the low lights, maybe.

Arielle Nissenblatt  25:13  
 Oh yeah. I mean, I feel like, I feel like, I definitely sing the low lights pretty, pretty strongly. I don't think that you should be starting a community. I think the community should be presenting itself to you and then you gather those people. I think too many people. This was, this was much bigger in like, 2022 2023 I have to start a community for my podcast. What the hell do you mean by that? Does anybody know what you mean by that? Because most likely it's a different thing for different people. And you can't just start a Facebook group and hope to send people to that Facebook group. It is not worth it. It's not worth your time. It's not worth their time. Like, I have started half ass communities as well, where, like, oh, you know, the plan for this community is that every Wednesday, I'm going to ask an audience engagement question. Every Thursday, I'm going to feature a different podcast that is active within this community. Every Friday we're going to do a merch giveaway. But each of those things require work in and of themselves. I think people don't realize this. I need to start a community. They'll say, I need to start a community for my podcast. In order to grow my show, you need to start a community, and then you need to grow that community in order to grow your show, there's, there's just so much like all of those, all of these pieces of advice that we hear like, Oh, you have to go viral on Tiktok, you have to start a blog. You have to do this. You have to do that. Those are all making content in and of themselves. Those also all need to be marketed. So, yes, don't just listen to people who say, don't just listen to people who say,

Arielle Nissenblatt  26:41  
like, you have to do this thing. You have to start this thing. You have to do what you have bandwidth for, and what your listeners or viewers are actually asking for. And if you don't know what they're asking for because they're not actively telling you that, then you have to go to them and ask them. And that might be, it might be disappointing, because they might not have that many opinions, because they listen to a lot of podcasts. Yeah. Well, and you, you also really made it clear, like, what makes sense for your audience? There's a lot of like, what makes sense some things do not make sense for particular audiences, and that, I think that's a sort of a piece that always needs to be assessed as well.

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  27:21  
The podcast Super Friends support podcasting 2.0 so feel free to send us a boost if you're listening on a newer podcast app. Find the full list at new podcast apps.com

Arielle Nissenblatt  27:32  
There was a question that I saw about AI in newsletter writing a great question. Arielle, if you wouldn't mind giving us just a few examples of the way it can help podcasters. And I know that's open ended, but so is AI. So yeah, I am an advocate for using AI for scaffolding and organizing, but not necessarily for the creative work. So the way I've been using it lately is in terms of scaffolding. One of the things that I love to take advantage of is like AI and chatgpt specifically, or one of the services like chatgpt, can organize your life a little bit more like I'm really not an organized person, but if I say I got all of these responses to my form on trailer park podcast, dot, c, r, d, dot, C, O, and there's 300 of them. And I need to figure out what trailers I want to feature for my next season. I can put the entire submission form, or all of the answers into chat, G, P, T, and I can say, can you rank these based on I use it mostly for the purposes of organizing myself and scaffolding what a project might look like. And specifically, I can put all of the answers to

Arielle Nissenblatt  28:50  
a submission form into chat GPT, and I can say, you know, can you put these in alphabetical order, if that would be a helpful thing for you, or can you put these in term in order of when it was submitted to me. It really depends on what I asked in my submission form, and then I can just really ask it to put this in an order of I am going to of the way that I might run this season, so I'll use it for things like that. I recently had to look up a bunch of different conferences for a company that I work for to figure out where they might be, where it might be worth spending their money. And I asked chatgpt to make that list for me and also make a recommendation. And then I went through and I clicked on all of those things, and then made my own recommendation, and then replaced the chatgpt recommendation with my own, but I used it to scaffold what I thought needed to be known for this company that I was working for. So like I said, I have this newsletter that I write every Sunday, and I have a podcast that goes along with that newsletter called feedback with earbuds. But I have not been active with the show feedback with earbuds for a long time, and instead, what I started to do recently is beehive also now allows you to start a podcast similar to how substack does. So you.

Arielle Nissenblatt  30:00  
It's basically just through RSS distribution, like the newsletter is, but it's a separate RSS feed. So I turn that on, and then I don't necessarily want to read my newsletter out loud every time, so I allow a fake AI voice to read it for me, but I ask them to do a summary. So I press a button that says, summarize this newsletter, and it usually summarizes the newsletter into about a minute and a half where it'll say this week in earbuds podcast collective, the curator is this person. They chose this theme. Here's why they chose this theme. The first episode is this, and it's not a human. It's a robot based off of a human reading this out loud, and that is available on the web version of my newsletter each week, as well as in podcast listening apps. So that's one of the ways that I use AI. I think that's helpful and allows you to have a an audio component if you didn't previously. Or, you know, it can go in both directions. I know a lot of people use it for thinking about ideas of people that they should interview. I'm not a huge fan of that. I think you should probably do that research on your own. But, you know what? Let me take that back. I don't want to tell you what you should do or not do. I like to challenge myself to do those things because I'm afraid my brain will atrophy if I leave it all up to AI. But it is a possibility. Well, here's a friendly amendment to that. You know? Why not ask chat GPT for 50 ideas of good guests on this subject, and then now you have a starting point. Yeah, you're the one that curates it. I mean, I think it's great for that. It's a great if you're trying to jazz up the content of a podcast and you want to think of a new segment that isn't like, yeah, icebreakers are the same stuff we always do. Or, like, you could throw all of your ratings and reviews into chat GPT and say, Can you analyze this and let me know, what am I missing from my show? What are people saying? Can you can you give me a sense of the tone and feel of these reviews? And are people mentioning that I'm missing something, or people mentioning that it's too long, too short? If that's the case, can you ask me some questions to figure out how I might be able to change that in coming episodes. Yeah, yes. And you can type, put a transcript into chat, GPT, and say, analyze this podcast. And I've done that before. And you know, you don't have to agree with everything it says, of course, but it'll give you suggestions on everything, like this this, the host repeats himself. The host seems to go back over ground. I'll see myself out for the moment on that, though, I think a lot of people are freaked out by AI, fine. Everybody should know that you can push back like, like you said. You might not agree with everything. You can say, I don't agree with that. I mean, I the other week, I'm a New York City Tour Guide. I recently got my license, and I've been giving tours, and

Arielle Nissenblatt  32:41  
I asked chatgpt, I said, I'm giving a tour of the Financial District in Manhattan. Can you give me a list of sites and landmarks that are, like, over indexed on tours and where I might be able to go that people don't go to as much but still has interesting history. And I had it do that for me, and then it gave me stuff that was like, super obvious, like, super obvious, like, like, the the New Freedom Tower. And I was like, Hey, I asked you to do this, but you, but you gave me the opposite. What's your thinking behind that you can ask them that, like, you can go back and forth with them. Oh, yeah. Arielle, I have a

Speaker 1  33:15  
question from a podcaster. This is an audio question was sent in. Hi, Arielle, my name is Alexandra Wyman. I am the host of forward to joy, a podcast about the grieving process. I lost my husband to suicide in 2020 I was wondering what works. I feel bombarded by the amount of advice given online. How am I to know which one will work and how long I need to stick with it before I know? Thanks, Arielle, my

Arielle Nissenblatt  33:40  
favorite type of question. So sorry for your loss. I am a fan of giving three month experiments and then analyzing those experiments, but I am also a fan of not taking advice from anybody who claims to know the absolute truth about anything. So it kind of depends, and that should be me too, like you should question even the fact that I just said that. So I guess it kind of depends, like, if somebody's telling you you should spend money to do this or to buy this product, or to, I don't know, audit your show. I think there's a lot you can do for free in order to grow your show. I know there's a lot you can do for free in order to grow your show, I highly recommend if you're not already subscribing to podcast

Arielle Nissenblatt  34:25  
marketing magic, which is a great newsletter that happens to be hosted on substack, and it's run by Tink media. My friends at Tink media and a lot of free advice there. Lauren Purcell, who's one of the founders of Tink media, and I put out a yearly blog post on podcast marketing tips. She also has done 100 podcast marketing tips. And these are a lot of free resources that are available to you that you don't need to spend money on. But even I understand that time is money as well, and the to relate that back to your question.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
And

Arielle Nissenblatt  35:01  
how often do you How long do you spend on an experiment? I think, I think it's all about tweaking little things and then analyzing those tweaks. It's about guessing and checking. It's about

Arielle Nissenblatt  35:13  
asking for feedback on some of the small things that you have tried, but not making any huge overhauls of the content and really sticking to, ultimately, the idea of, what do I like to do when it comes to making this podcast? And that can be the content, and it can be the marketing. What do I have time to do? What do I have bandwidth to do? What do I have money to do? And what can I offload? And all of those questions will, I think, guide you in figuring out where you want your little tweaks to go, here and there. But I think the most important part, a most important question within that, is like, what do I actually enjoy doing? Like people ask me this a lot when it comes to social media, do I have to be on every social media platform? And my answer is, No, you have to be where you can actually stand to be first.

Matt Cundill  36:00  
I really love the 90 days three months, and looking at your show in quarters, is your show doing better and having that really long runway to look at it, because I think if you go week to week, you're going to get stuck in traps like, like spring break or Thanksgiving slash Christmas. Yeah, and it's just not enough data. Yeah, yeah. You have to give your audience time to consume the stuff you're putting out there. I wanna take this opportunity to jump in with a social media question. Since you brought up social media the proverbial do you have to be on every social media? Great answer to that one. One of the reasons that I first learned about you in particular is because you are a very good tweeter. You were, it seemed like you were extremely well. Was okay, sorry, past tense, not past misses. That's something totally different. Don't forget.

Arielle Nissenblatt  36:48  
But here, yeah, okay, so question, you seem to be really strategic in how you posted on social media. Can you share with us a little bit of your social media philosophy or approach? That would be great. Yeah, I have zero plan. I've never had a plan in my life. I'm sorry. I don't buy it. Come on, lady, I wish jeans. Oh my God. I want you to know that the biggest offense to me would be that people thought I was gatekeeping. I have insane ADHD, and I post whatever comes into my brain at whatever moment that it comes into my brain. And it just so happens that it all falls back on the idea of, like, the question that I asked myself is, what is a helpful thing I can post today, and often that is good content, and that's it. Like, I, I know this sounds so insane, like, oh, like, so humble, like, I'm really just like, I am a mess, and I haven't, I have a thought about this thing, and then I post about this thing. And because my thoughts are all over the place, it happens to be a well curated bunch, if you look at, like, a month's worth of content. So it'll be like a little bit of self promotion, a little bit of how can I, you know, share the latest news from Apple podcasts and how it might impact your creative process. A little bit of, I'm going to this event. Are you going to this event? A little bit of, here's a podcast that I listened to and loved, and you might like it too, right? So, and there's more categories within that, but I've never really defined them. I think, like, if I were a strategic business person, I would probably say, you know, let's look at a year's worth of my content that I posted on LinkedIn now, and let's figure out what categories those things all fall into. And then what does well, what you know, gets a lot of comments but doesn't get a lot of likes. What do I want to optimize for? What gets me business? And then how can I do more posts like that? That would be a really smart thing to do. And honestly, I could probably do that on chat GPT. I could say maybe not chat GPT, but there's probably another large language model that could ingest my LinkedIn or my Twitter and say these posts did well, and here's why, or you can do the analysis of it yourself, but I do not do that. I wish I did. It sounds genius, and thank you for prompting the idea.

Catherine O'Brien  39:00  
Okay, so I'll believe that you're not a gatekeeper, but the fact that you're saying you're that you're doing it as a mess, that gives just hope for us all here on the I think so. I mean, I think, like, I post this a lot on social media, or on LinkedIn, specifically,

Arielle Nissenblatt  39:14  
a lot of people go on LinkedIn only when they need a job or when they need to promote something, and that's a mistake, like, my strategy is be active on there, even when you don't need to be active on there. It's sort of like when you're dating and things are going well, more people seem to want to be dating you. I don't know if anybody understands that reference paradox, yes, yeah, yeah, it's a paradox. But it's like

Arielle Nissenblatt  39:38  
you need to be be willing to give

Arielle Nissenblatt  39:42  
both to the community that you're a part of and also

Arielle Nissenblatt  39:47  
just for the sake of of being active, so that when the time comes that you are in need, you're not just asking for something. And I think that's one of the ways that I

Arielle Nissenblatt  39:58  
encourage people to be active.

Arielle Nissenblatt  40:00  
Especially recent college grads, when they can really start with a blank slate of like, I can post about X, Y and Z. I can be known as the person to post about X, Y and Z. Ask yourself, what's something I can post today that I know about, that other people don't know about, and if you need to, you can say that 90% of people don't know about 10% of people might know about that. I can give, you know, unique context to

Arielle Nissenblatt  40:24  
or what you know, what can I say today on on LinkedIn that promotes somebody else? Because when in doubt, you can always say this person is doing a great job. So those are some of the things I ask myself. If I am thinking like, Oh, I haven't posted in a while. What can I post? I'll be like it was so fun to come on this live show. I'll probably post that after this is, are you saying Be positive instead of negative? On social media, only, on LinkedIn, only.

Arielle Nissenblatt  40:53  
I love LinkedIn. Now, I used to do this thing on Twitter where I would post, like, a challenge that I was doing for myself. Like, for the next week I will, I will rate and review every podcast that I listen to, and then I would like do screenshots and post those on Twitter as well. And again, that's like interesting content, because I'm holding myself to a promise. I am recommending other people's podcasts. And I mean, I just think it's, it's like a fun thing that you might check into, and every time you post on that thread, it pops back up to the top of the feed. So I'm going to try something similar on LinkedIn, where I I'm going to write something like for one week, I am going to listen to every press release podcast that's sent to my inbox and review it

Matt Cundill  41:43  
and see if that translates to to LinkedIn. It might not, because it doesn't have the same process with threads and things like that, but I am curious to see how that goes. And that's like to give you a sense of how I think about this kind of stuff, it's flying by the seat of my pants, but it's an idea that I think might be interesting to people. Well, I've given us, you've given us gems in there. I mean, that's you have some specific things, some specific thoughts there. And just the last point is also what you're saying is helpful. It is helpful to other creators. It is helpful for other podcasters. So there's, like, that silver lining in there as well. Sorry, Matt. I just have one question, just because we're still just a little bit on the social thing, and there's that pressure that a lot of people have to create videos and reels. Because, you know, it was Jay necklace, friend of the show. Steve Goldstein, friend of the show, yeah, who you know, said, Listen, this is the number one way people are finding out about your podcast. And it used to be word of mouth. I feel, I feel a tinge of sadness about that. Yeah, I want to allow you to feel that sadness. Thank you.

Arielle Nissenblatt  42:49  
Okay, Steve Goldstein teaches a class at NYU that I've gone to and taught at, and I always ask his students about their podcast slash YouTube discovery habits, because it's a really interesting group of kids. They're like sub 22 and a lot of them don't use apple. A lot of them don't use any of the podcast listening apps besides Spotify and YouTube, and even then, they mostly watch podcasts. And that might mean that every once in a while, if they're in a situation where they can't watch, maybe they'll put the phone in their pocket and listen and Oh, oops, now I'm listening to a podcast, but they're not thinking, oh, I want to find a new podcast to listen to, but that is just those that I'm not saying. That's just those students, but that's those students. There are still people who like to listen to podcasts as audio only. And I'll argue that when I was in college 1011, years ago, it was a similar situation. People wanted to watch and then there were randomly people that would be like, huh, I just discovered the idea of listening to podcasts where I can go for a walk and consume this content and not have to look at a thing. I think that that is still the case. Now it's still going to be a smaller percentage of people who prefer audio only, but they do exist, and somebody who once preferred visual for this specific creator might at one point want audio only from that specific creator because they're driving, because the person happens to be on a road trip. So clips are great. They're great because it extends the funnel with which somebody might be able to discover you, and then eventually that funnel gets smaller and smaller, and maybe they've become your listener.

Arielle Nissenblatt  44:29  
But I think, like,

Arielle Nissenblatt  44:31  
I also think like, I was listening to an episode of attach your resume, which is an interesting show about the Creator economy, and one of the hosts, Eric silver, was talking about how or the one of the host was talking to his guest, Austin Walker, about how

Arielle Nissenblatt  44:46  
the the phrase pivot to video has

Arielle Nissenblatt  44:50  
has a Wikipedia page, because every few years, there's a new pivot to video. We're always trying to pivot to video. It's like a joke at this point that the platforms are just pushing you to make video, because that's.

Arielle Nissenblatt  45:00  
Means that you're spending more time and energy and probably money in the process, and that does better for them. And ultimately, there are always going to be people who want to listen. And though, if that's who you want to talk to, that's who you should talk to if you want to maybe find some people who are interested in the the video elements of it, that's also great. I think ultimately you need to ask yourself, if you care where people are finding you or just that they're finding you. That good point, I'm

Arielle Nissenblatt  45:29  
going to jump in with the question that I've been dying to ask you, Arielle, but if you're not, I'll give you the out. If you're not, I have a diplomatic answer. Go ahead. Okay, all right, you've been seeing me in our internal chat here. Spend a lot of time at squad cast slash descript. I feel like there's this Cold War going on. Others too, but mostly squad cast slash descript in Riverside, where they keep changing the UX to try to one up each other. And for me, as a creator and a producer for clients, I've maintained a subscription to both because I feel like one month descript might be better and one month squad cast of Riverside might be better. And if you have wondering if you had just any insight from having worked in these places to you know, who keeps moving my cheese and why? Yeah, I do. First of all, do you still have a subscription to squad cast, or are you now using rooms in descript? I actually it's funny, you ask. I used squad cast last hour to record a client. The counter looked a little wonky, but it's but they but it seems to come out. Okay. I have not braved the transition to record into script just yet, and same for me, I haven't either got it. So I haven't used squad cast in more than a year, and I've only used descript rooms, and I like it. The process is clean, and if you're already using descript, it's very easy to do, and it drops your files into descript right after you stop recording. So that was launched when I was still working there, and so I was part of some of the testing of it and giving feedback and things like that. I also now use Riverside pretty often because I'm either guesting on a show or one of the companies I'm working for uses it to record with guests. And I think that you are spot on John, which is that one month one is better, one month the other is better. And that is just always going to be the case when it comes to

Arielle Nissenblatt  47:22  
browser based remote recording engines. It's a lot of energy and it's a lot of things going on behind the scenes that most people don't understand. And because of that, it's not really up to Riverside or to squad cast or to descript or to boomcaster or to Iris or to any of the other remote recording platforms. It's not really up to them. What's happening with the browsers, and little tweaks can be made that throw off the reliability of it. And because of that, I'm not saying you must maintain a subscription to both or all, but I do think the quality is always going to go sometimes this is better, sometimes this is better. You're going to get pissed off at this one. You're going to cancel your subscription. You're going to go to this one. Eventually you're going to get pissed off at it. I think we it. I think we all need to cease fire on on this Cold War.

Matt Cundill  48:07  
I have five subscriptions to five different things, and I use 20% of each one.

Unknown Speaker  48:13  
Well, the math works out.

Arielle Nissenblatt  48:15  
Thank you for paying everybody. Well,

Arielle Nissenblatt  48:20  
no, and I just feel like it's okay. We know squad cast. Reason I keep using squad cast as opposed to descript, is because several of my clients have squad cast accounts. They've made me an admin. I can just toggle back and forth and get the grab their recordings. Riverside doesn't have that. So now I've got my One Password app that's got all my users and passwords for all my clients, Riverside accounts, and then Riverside Riverside editor versus squad cast editor, and then magic audio versus studio sounded just, they keep just bouncing back. Yeah, I know. And it's like, probably at this point they should just do a little diplomacy between themselves and figure out, like, how are we going to differentiate? But hey, I don't work there anymore, and now I just get to enjoy and watch. And what's been ready, what's been really hard is, like, sometimes people will be like, Oh, I don't like squad cast. I'm gonna use Riverside for this. Like, Ariel, here's a riverside link. And I'm like, uh, and I try to fight back against that, and then I remember that nobody's paying me, so I have to stop doing that. Eventually we all end up back on zoom with David, yes, yeah, with David

Matt Cundill  49:23  
Ariel. One of the things that was said on stage in London at the podcast show was the amount of time you need to dedicate to marketing your podcast. And I think this is a piece of therapy. I need to really tell podcasters before they start. And it was said, don't know if you said it or somebody on stage with you said you need to spend the same amount of time this. This is Lauren's favorite quote, Lauren, yeah, Lauren fasell The messenger, but you need to spend as much time marketing your podcast as you do creating it.

Matt Cundill  49:56  
That's heartbreak for many people, but it's so true. Yeah. I.

Arielle Nissenblatt  50:00  
I mean, take it with a grain of salt. It really just means probably spend a little bit more time marketing than you currently do, and if easier to picture, build marketing into the creative aspects of making the show. So is there a segment that you can add on to your episodes where you feature another podcast that might be interested in featuring you, because then you're doing marketing and you're doing production,

David Yas  50:28  
that's a great idea. I hadn't because, because normally I think you think of inviting guests on the show that have podcasts, but Right, yeah,

David Yas  50:38  
exactly. It's a heck of a lot quicker and easier to have a podcast of the week that you recommend and then send your episode to the host and say, Hey, we were delighted to feature you, yeah? Or you coordinate it ahead of time and say, we're going to feature each other. Yeah? Either. Do you find that that that reciprocal kind of thing is a thing podcast, it is. I find that most people are aware that

Arielle Nissenblatt  51:05  
listeners tend to listen to more than one podcast on similar topics, and because of that, there's audience overlap between these things. And so if I have a podcast about ADHD and adults, and you have a podcast about depression and adults, there's probably going to be some overlap there. We should probably be swapping with each other in some way. And it feels like most people at this point know that collaborating is not going to take away audience from one audience, from one side of things. It really just ends up lifting all boats. Oh yeah, there's plenty of listeners out there. That's the refreshing part for Matt and I, coming from the radio. From the radio world, where radio is fighting for competing, shrinking piece of the pie. And like you said, podcasting is rising a tide lifts all boats. Yeah, you can't listen to two radio stations at the same time. Well, you could, but it would probably drive you insane. Same with podcasts, though, but you can queue it up for after. Well, I'm saying, yeah, if there are two shows, you don't have to choose. It's not like my two podcasts are on at the same time. I have to choose, right?

Arielle Nissenblatt  52:05  
I'm gonna call the line about using AI as scaffolding. Ariel, I've been looking for the right word as I tell people to use AI as a framework to kind of get you as a starting point. Scaffolding is the absolute perfect word. I love that. I'm so glad. And sometimes scaffolding can look really nice, and sometimes it just looks like it needs to come down.

Matt Cundill  52:22  
Would you like to hear John? Oh, go ahead, Catherine,

Catherine O'Brien  52:24  
 I was gonna say I know we're getting close to time here, and we've already established that you and I are the pessimists here. Can you give us any sort of bright, bright lights that you're seeing for podcasting in the future, things that you're looking forward to for the the entire industry? 

Arielle Nissenblatt  52:40  
Yeah, everything. I still think it's the most creative medium. I still think that people are inherently collaborative in nature, and that shows grow when we work with each other. If you take one marketing tip away from this, it's find five shows that you'd like to collaborate with in some way, and most likely they'll be willing to do it if they get back to you. You know, that's not a guarantee that they're going to get back to you. Sure, I am constantly. I was actually just talking about this this morning. I would say, like, every three months, I am reminded that it's so amazing that this content is free. Asterisk, yes, of course, there's extra stuff you can get with by paying or joining somebody's Patreon or membership platform. But so much of it is free, and so much of it is amazing, and it's so great for people who like to consume media through their ears, or primarily through their ears, like me, I was not a big reader growing up, when I unlocked the ability to consume and synthesize content via my ears, I became a smarter person, so I'm excited still for more people to discover that. Ariel, thank you. You've been very, very generous with your time. We know you've got an event to go to tonight, and Thanks for Thanks for spending lunch time with us today and answering a number of our questions. Thank you for having me. This is really fun, really good questions.

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  53:58  
Thanks for listening to the podcast super friends for a transcript of the show, or to connect with the super friends go to the show notes of this episode, or go to sound off dot network,

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  54:10  
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