How We Evaluate Podcasts

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  0:01  
Music. Welcome to the podcast. Super Friends, five podcast producers from across North America get together to discuss podcasting.

Catherine O'Brien  0:13  
Hello everybody. It's time to take a good look in the mirror. The podcast mirror, that is if you are going to do an audit on your podcast. What are the things that you are going to include? That is the question today for the podcast, super friends. My name is Catherine O'Brien. I'm tuning in from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Let's go around and introduce ourselves, Johnny, starting with you.

Johnny Podcasts  0:34  
Hi. I am Johnny. Podcast of the official Johnny podcast.com, so after this episode, go check it out. Brand new. Website. Very excited.

Catherine O'Brien  0:42  
This episode is brought to you by Johnny podcast, Johnny podcast.com up in the very warm North Matt,

Matt Cundill  0:49  
100 degrees today in Winnipeg. Manitoba, known for its land of the ice and snow, will be 30 on Saturday and snowing again, so we're in for the wild swings. Matt Cundill sound off. Podcast Network,

Catherine O'Brien  1:04  
big yikes on that swing there. Matt and Jag,

Jon Gay  1:08  
Mirror, mirror. Podcast on the wall. John Gay from jag in Detroit. Podcast, just outside Detroit, Michigan. Great to be with you. I was

Johnny Podcasts  1:15  
waiting everybody at the end. Yeah.

Catherine O'Brien  1:19  
We'll workshop that afterwards, we'll, we'll fix, fix that in post. As we like to say, Indeed, well, well, hey, this is a great question. If you have a podcast, or if you've been doing podcasting for a while, it's good to take a look and see what you've been doing and see what's working. What could be better? Sometimes, we like to say, one of my personal mottos is version one is better than version none, but you don't want to get stuck at version one. So it's always a good opportunity to take especially as we're heading into summer and some of those summer months, it's always good to take a look at your podcast. What you're doing? Are you achieving your goals? Are you on mission? So we're gonna go ahead and break down lots of different ways that you can audit your podcast, and from the mind trust of the Super Friends, what that would include? The things we'd like to encourage you to include in an audit of your podcast, we've broken it into a couple of categories with some fun sub categories, and just because we all know what we're doing, we're going to start with the tech side of things, and that is really looking in if you're going to audit your podcast, looking at the sound quality, the video quality, the overall technical achievement of your podcast. Let's go Johnny first to you, because I know this is an area that you're totally passionate about. If you were doing an audit, where, where would you start with these, these elements? Yeah.

Johnny Podcasts  2:36  
And before I get into that, I just wanted to say off the top, because I know you'll all agree with me. I don't think podcast hosts do enough, a good enough job of auditing their own show. I think all of us, you know, we've all hosted shows at one point or another where you're spending so much time making the show that once it's out, you're like, oh, okay, it's out. Thank goodness, excellent. Move on, onto the next thing, and you hardly even go in. And I think Matt's a really big advocate for this is actually listen to your episodes, not only to talk, to check the things like the technical quality, like we're going to chat about right now, but a lot of other things that we can cover, that we'll cover through the rest of this hour. So just keep that top of mind. Go listen to your episode after this episode. Just listen to it all the way through, and listen for these things as we go through them. The number one thing is, is audio quality, because this is a podcast. It's an audio first content medium, and the audio is the king. It is the number one thing. Even if your video looks amazing, if your audio sucks, no one's gonna listen to it. I just had a a former client. I was chatting with him. I did a show with him, like five years ago, and he had pod faded. He changed industries, and he said, Hey, I started a new show. Check it out. And I'm not gonna put him on blast name wise, but I'm just gonna talk about the what his mindset was going into it was, we need to get views and downloads first, and then we'll sink some money into the quality of the show. And I checked out their YouTube channel. YouTube channel looked great, pretty thumbnails, great concept for a show. And then I clicked on the video, and it's two people talking on Zoom, no microphones, no headphones, one of them sitting this far away from their computer. The other one's right up on there. And I told him, I said, if you're looking at if I'm a listener, and I'm deciding between two shows that I want to consume, and one of them has both hosts have a microphone. They have nice lighting. Their audio sounds like it's been produced, to some extent more than zero. And the other two people are just talking into their computer exactly like you guys are. If the content is exactly the same, I'm choosing the former, and every single person on earth is going to do the same thing, just because there's simply too many options out there for you to not have a podcast that includes the basics, which is a microphone, and we've talked dozens of times on the show, you can get a Sampson Q to you that plugs directly into your computer for 60 bucks, and it will take your your sound from a zero, which is you just talking to your laptop microphone, to a seven, and then there's all. All the post production processing that you can do, that stuff that's available on your own with AI, or if you were to hire producers like us to do this for you, the audio quality is imminent. So what are we looking for? And then I'll pass it off. The number one things that I'm looking for is, do you have a microphone? Great. Check that. Let's just say that's base, base level. Have you selected your microphone too? Have you selected your microphone? Yeah. Have you selected your microphone before you hit record? Before you hit record? The things I'm looking for in a podcast audit is, Do I hear echo if there's more than one speaker, am I having is there audio leveled across all the speakers? Do I have to crank up the volume to hear person A and then crank it way down to hear Person B, because one person's way louder or way quieter than the other person? Is there a lot of background noise? Were you able to remove that at all? Is the large does it sound like you're recording in an airplane hangar, which I had one client do last week, and that took a lot of work to get rid of things like that, where I should just hear your voice like I'm watching a Netflix show on TV. The technology today and the skills that are out there with people like us, you can have such good quality audio just from home, like the four of us are doing right now. If

Jon Gay  6:08  
I could to jump off of what Johnny just said when it comes to the A, B, if you're the same content versus and one is good quality and one is average or poor quality. For me, it's an inverse relationship between sound quality and content in terms of what's listenable, the better your quality, your the better your sound quality, the let me reverse that. Actually, the better your content, the more I'll put up with meh sound quality. Sure, I'm a big Patriots fan. If Tom Brady does a podcast and he does it, calling into a phone over zoom, I'll listen to it because it's Tom Brady. Chances are, if you're watching this, you're not Tom Brady. If, in other words, if you have the worst quality content you have, the more the worst the worst quality audio you have, the more home run your content needs to be. If both are met, I'm gone. Audio is an instant tune out to so many people, unless you are absolutely giving me life changing advice that's going to make me Scrooge McDuck diving into a pile of gold coins at the end of the day. If your audio isn't great, I'm gone.

Matt Cundill  7:17  
I want to add in a little bit about loudness. So the first thing I listened for is Echo. Johnny covered that we can't have echo. So a lot of the time you got to have the right microphone. I might not even have the right microphone right now, I'm still using a condenser microphone, and there's a little bit of echo in the room. We're working still to squeeze that out. It's an ongoing process, so always go with the suggestions that have already been made here. The Samson Q to use the dynamic mic.

Jon Gay  7:41  
Sure. MV, seven. Thank you. And what is Johnny Technica, 20 100x

Matt Cundill  7:46  
Yeah, the ATR 20 100x is another great one. And then the other thing I do listen for is loudness. And so How loud is the podcast? And you might not think that's a big deal, because it's it's all leveled and even, but in Spotify and Apple, ask you to use the lufts. I'll let Johnny explain what luffs are. That's where I would go. But between minus 14 for Spotify and minus 16 for Apple, those numbers are different, by the way, because Apple sort of set minus 16 because it's works in conjunction with the other features that come on on the phone. I know sometimes radio, so my radio producing. People want it, they'll put it at minus 11. And I have to correct that. I said, No, we really need this down in this area. It'll

Jon Gay  8:26  
turn the knob off.

Matt Cundill  8:30  
It's, um, a lot of it just really comes down to you could have some, you know, if you're listening on an airplane, airplanes are noisy, so you want podcasts to cut through in your headphones. It could be there's some dynamic ad insertion that's coming in. You don't want the ads to blow off your ears. So those are the standards that are set when it comes to luffs. And now with the explanation of luffs, here's Johnny

Johnny Podcasts  8:51  
luffs,

Matt Cundill  8:52  
loudness units, full scale. Yeah,

Johnny Podcasts  8:55  
I know. I was just, I'm buying time for me to talk. Are you googling this? No, I actually, I hear you typing. I actually wanted to use chat GBT. I want to do chat GPT to break it down for newbie, because love, I'm not I don't have a degree in audio production. I'm all self taught. So the way that I approach it in all the stuff that I produce is I shoot for minus three dB on everything. So whenever I'm looking in my DAW I use Logic Pro X. I have a limiter put on the end of every mastering chain, meaning, you know, that's technical speak for whenever I produce all of the audio, there's something at the very end that blocks all of the audio from crossing above minus three decibels. Some people go zero decibels. Can't go over zero. If it's going over zero, it means that you're peaking and that your audio is, you know, you've seen that guy with the really loud speakers driving his low rider down the highway, and it's just he's blown out your speakers. That's what you've done with your audio when you're crossing above zero. DB, so when I go into chat, GPT, and I type in break down luffs in podcasting for me, like I have no clue what is love. We have the explain, the explainer on the little Chiron down below, uh, why loves matter and podcasting. Think about watching Netflix then switching to a podcast. If the podcast is way quieter or way louder, it's jarring. Lufts helps standardize loudness across all shows and platforms. Now here it says you should target minus 19, and we all know chat GBT can make mistakes. So if we're going 14 for Spotify and 16 for Apple, split the difference and go for minus 15. There's a lot of plugins out there that are free that you can attach into your post production software, where you can it'll show you the lufts average of where you're at, and you can target it, you can set it for minus 15. The Little equalizer thing will bounce up and down the sound out. It will hit that minus 15. If it's not hitting it, you need to boost your gain. If it's going way over, you need to reduce the volume on your podcast. So I know it's kind of all over the place, but, I mean, I've done a lot of research into trying to understand what lefts are, and they're very confusing. But so I think shooting for minus 3d, three dB has been really successful for me and for the shows that I work on, stay

Catherine O'Brien  11:05  
in the green and the yellow. If you get into red, you're in trouble.

Jon Gay  11:07  
That's a great way to sum it up. Yeah, it's funny that chat GPT told you minus 19, because if you have a mono file on one channel, minus 19 in mono equals minus 16 in stereo in two channels. So that's worth mentioning as well. Most software I know I use, Adobe Audition, for example, will have a loudness guide that will allow you to set the loudness at a certain level. And if you get geeky with production, it's important to note, yes, the amplitude that Johnny's talking about, minus three, minus one, zero. That's a good barometer. But if you have heavily processed your audio, if you have put a lot of effects on it, it can be louder, even if the amplitude or the waveform is shorter. So you might be in a situation where it's only at minus six, but your lufts might be hot. It might be minus 12, it might be minus 10. So that that's important to understand how to read this with either your software or a plug in software you're going to buy or get for free.

Catherine O'Brien  12:08  
We've gotten much deeper into the left than I ever had imagined we were going to be doing in this audit. But does anybody want to speak a little bit about video? And you know, we've all been on the journey of adding video into our podcast for our clients and doing video editing any, any sort of words of wisdom about it from the audit perspective on video,

Johnny Podcasts  12:29  
yeah, basic stuff. I mean, I've been doing video for podcasts Since 2020 so I'm like, five years into it, and you don't have to get as deeply technical as what we're talking about with lufts. When it comes to video, you can use your laptop camera, if you're if that's all you have access to I've often recommended the continuity camera for your iPhone. You can set that up and it works as a wireless webcam. And these cameras are really, really nice, and they work great right now, I'm using a DSLR camera called the Canon EOS r1 100. It plugs in through a USB C cable. You buy, you download some software from EOS now that works as a webcam, and I feel like I have much cleaner video than the two things that I mentioned before, things that you should be looking for, that you can change really quickly without going out and buying a new camera. Is, am I centered in the frame of the shot, or am I way over here? How's my lighting? Is my lighting? Am I? Am I too dark? Listening on audio, I turned off the lights in my in my office, and now the camera is compensating a little bit. But do you have too many lighting? Your lights should go behind your camera, facing you. And then if you want to take it even a step deeper, there are people that will say, Oh, put a light in the background, one light in the corner, just sort of like background lighting, and it should be very subtle, little things like that. And there's stuff that you can do in post production to help fix things like that, like lighting, like centering, stuff that you can fix for your guests. But there's stuff. This is stuff that you should look for on your on your hosting side of the platform, you should have it set up to where it's the same every single time your background try, shouldn't try not to. Every background change every single time try to be in the same location. Have a nice background. Things to look at. I've got a Jordan Jersey behind me. Catherine has a lot of fun stuff behind her. Jack has all of his credentials behind him. Matt has the blue Canadian sky behind him. Have something interesting to look at. I've talked to clients where they're so worried about their background that it takes away from their content. And I tell them not to worry so much about that. I say worry more about the content. But since we're doing the audit, we'll go deep into this stuff. Have interesting things behind you make it appealing to look at, because while it is a podcast, we the viewer, is going to glance every now and then at the video screen

Jon Gay  14:50  
to piggyback on that as well. A lot of a lot of software, of remote recording software, like Riverside descript will offer you green screens just like zoom will do. So I'm not particularly a fan of those. If you are in a situation where your room is set up and you just can't have your background on the interwebs, that's fine, but I do find that a lot of these backgrounds green screens, there's a little bit of blur. There can be a little haze. I know, for example, my bald head, there'll be a little bit of a like a pixelated blur right around that. Matt's pointing to his bald head as well. I like to avoid the pre made green screens if possible. And if you can to Johnny's point, set up your room in a nice way that that's going to show up on video and have that natural background as well as something artificial floating around you.

Johnny Podcasts  15:36  
Blurring the background, I think blurring the black background looks really cheesy too. It's, it's that's very like corporate teams work call where you don't want to show that you're actually on vacation in South Carolina, but you want to make it look like you don't want people to know exactly where you are. It just when you're podcasting, you're letting people into your life to an extent. You're putting your personality, you're putting yourself on display, and your background should reflect that a little bit. So things that represent your personality in the background make it feel comfortable and inviting, to an extent. I think that's really important too.

Catherine O'Brien  16:12  
All great tips in this first sound quality and tech. We actually this is the first area where we have a sub category within the tech and sound, and that is presentation. One of the different things about podcasting is show art. We have the opportunity to have your show, have a nice piece of art that goes along with your show. Each episode could have its own art. These are displayed in different ways in the various podcast apps. There's also a sub genre to the genre, which is the thumbnail game that Johnny alluded to earlier. Let's talk a little bit about show art, Episode art, and how those might go through our audit, Matt, let's go and start with you.

Matt Cundill  16:51  
Well, it's a lot because it's it comes with the packaging of the show. I call it the packaging. And so I think the artwork is first artwork for your show. How does it present? An apple? You know, it used to be very easy and just going to Canva and do it, but Canva, you can sort of tell when the artwork is being done by Canva. So, you know, we want to upgrade that a little bit. We want to get some sharp colors. There's some tools out there. I think it was called only pods.com. Has a an art verification. You can put your artwork in there and see how it will present in Spotify and in Apple podcast, which represents 80% of where the podcast downloads are going to come from. So do you want a white background? How is the red going to come out? Do you have too much writing in it? Do you have, and this is my favorite, a microphone in the artwork. If you have

Johnny Podcasts  17:43  
an, oh, I know it's a podcast, yeah, if

Matt Cundill  17:47  
you have a microphone in your artwork, you need to quit and, well, that's

Johnny Podcasts  17:51  
one of the things. That's one of the biggest things, where it's like, oh, this was made on free Logo maker.com

Matt Cundill  17:57  
Yeah. So especially if you ask, if you go on Fiverr and say, Make me podcast artwork about something, you will likely get a microphone back, because that's what those people think a podcast,

Jon Gay  18:07  
yes, yes, chat, CPT, or Yeah,

Matt Cundill  18:09  
totally. Can

Catherine O'Brien  18:11  
I interrupt Matt around this? Aren't you the one who said you pointed out the fact that the microphone is talking about the hosts and not the listener. It's probably stronger to have something if you're going to have something like a clip, Arty kind of thing, the headphones really represent the listener of the podcast, as opposed to the I think you you dropped that wisdom on us at one time, just because who is this for here?

Matt Cundill  18:37  
Yes, headphones me. You have to think about the listener when you're when you're making this stuff, when, even when you're doing you know, for everything that you know, for everything that you do here, you're doing this for the listener. I would probably say, when it comes to artwork, think about that 1970s and early 80s, that album rock, the cover of an album. A lot of people think of a book, which is why it has too much writing on it. So they were thinking book. A lot of people think show promo, like, you know, a billboard that would be slapped up somewhere like that, has too many words on it. So really, I think the best comparison would be, think Fleetwood Mac groomers. Think Boston. You know, when you have the opportunity, what is inside this particular show that is going to make me gravitate towards those classic album covers start there. Don't put too much writing on it. You don't have to put your name inside the artwork either, because it's going to appear on the outside in the author field on Apple podcasts. So you've got a little bit more room than you think. So that's what I would say to do with artwork. The next option with artwork is, do you want episode art? Not everybody wants it. Needs it, but I'll tell you, it makes everything look better. So it's like having a brand new book cover for every chapter of for every episode or every chapter of whatever it is that you're creating. It also shows really well when you're scrolling. So if you do the scroll through Spotify, if you do the scroll through Apple podcast, you. It looks like there's, there's some different colors and sort of a little bit inviting for somebody to come in and check it out. And I think the big steel here is, is Apple CarPlay or Android Auto to have. You know that artwork appear on somebody else's car. Think about this. You're creating a piece of artwork that is going to sit in prime time on someone's car, right? You are, I mean, what a piece of real estate that is for your show to

Jon Gay  20:26  
have, real estate that radio stations were fighting for a century.

Matt Cundill  20:30  
Yeah? And, you know, I'll think, I know we talked a little bit about slides last time, and, you know, the Jacobs Media Tech survey, but a lot of people use the metadata and look to metadata, and if it's appealing to them, they're gonna, they're gonna want to, want to stick with it. One more little thing, that little sidebar to to good artwork, is Google. So when you go to search for anything, the images pop up. The image is served as that. And if it's, if you've got the right you know metadata associated with the artwork it will show that'll

Jon Gay  21:03  
be alt text for an image, yes, metadata for right? Matt, yeah.

Matt Cundill  21:07  
I had a there was a major podcast actually, one day they were on YouTube, and they said, let's check out what Tom like. This is up to they Googled it, and it was the sound off podcast artwork that actually was flash right in front of the YouTube audience. And so somebody wrote me and said, That's a great get for that to have happened to you. Yeah, that's very cool. So don't skip out on any of that stuff. I think one more little part about packaging is chapter markers. I don't use chapter markers a lot. However, I know some other people here who do,

Catherine O'Brien  21:37  
yeah, I've started, I embrace them. I was not a big chapter because I don't personally use them. This is, this is a problem I have, is like, I don't personally use it. That doesn't mean the audience doesn't appreciate them or like them. So, yeah, that's that is something where I've gotten a little bit more proactive about including chapter markers. I am one of those people that I I try. I am a maximalist when it comes to Episode art, show art, I think that all of those are really important, because let's just flash back to the very, very, very beginning of the podcast. Super Friends, one of the first things that you guys did for me is a show that I worked on very, very hard. I worked a lot on it. You all said to me, this art is not clickable. And that has, that has been sort of a forming moment for me and a lot of the things with with podcasting, we are competing. We podcasts are in competition for other forms of information, other ways of delivering information, other entertainment forms. Is this clickable? Is a question I think that every podcaster should be asking about their thumbnails, about their episode art, about their show

Jon Gay  22:43  
art, but quick, quick follow up question on artwork. I usually tell my audience that people connect with faces. I encourage them to use a picture or their face in those their show artwork, and oftentimes a guest headshot in Episode artwork. Agree, disagree. People

Johnny Podcasts  22:59  
like people. People like people I've also heard contradicting theories from two sources, one being a professional podcaster, so full time living from podcasting who received information from insiders at Spotify, people who work at Spotify in the podcasting section, who state do not when you're creating your cover art, not necessarily episode specific art, because I'm a big advocate of guests on the episode specific art. Cover art, unless you are a, a, list, B, list, celebrity, it. Having your face on there is actually detrimental to the clickability of your show, meaning, I don't know who you are, I don't really care. I'm here for your content, not interesting. Oh, I don't know how much of a believer I'm in of that, because there are shows that I work on where we created the artwork, where it worked out really well to have the person on there, yeah, and other cases, it works really well to have really beautiful like Matt. I think Matt's analogy of a book or or album cover art is is much more the direction for the average podcaster. I did. I did kind of want to go. I do love the idea of the guest specific episode artwork. And there's a couple reasons for that, and I'll expound on other reasons. Leap. You know that lead from that, when I produce an episode for a client, I am creating every aspect of the episode with the idea which is conscious, which is contradictory to popular belief that whoever's listening to this this is their first time listening to this podcast. Yes, ever, not necessarily. I'm not discounting the the loyal listener that's tuning in every single week. I'm creating this episode for the person who is scrolling across this for the very first time. So who's the most likely person to listen to this for the very first time? That's the guest of that episode. Boo. We have their beautiful, amazing headshot. I've cleaned it up in Photoshop. It's layered with the correct branding on cover on the episode specific cover art. Their name is spelled correctly. It looks really pretty. Boom. That's the first thing they see. Why does that matter to them? We're bringing that guest on in one part of the hopes that they're going to share this episode with their network, they are much more likely to share this if their face is front and center and they look beautiful, they look handsome, they're they look great on the episode of cover art right away. The second thing after that is the show notes. We're describing in a lot more detail than normal, because, again, I want to give as much information as possible to the person who is potentially scrolling, because they're likely to look at those show notes first before clicking play. Which leads me to then my next point is why the chapter markers are so important. If I'm looking at a podcast that I've never listened to before and it's 95 minutes long, we've talked a gazillion times on this podcast that we're asking the listener to give up their most valuable resource, which is their time. If I'm giving you the chapter markers, I'm not asking you to commit to all 95 minutes. Oh, look at 57 minutes and 35 seconds. They talk about the one thing that I know about this guest already that I'm really interested in. I can jump to that right away. Now I'm so pulled in. I've listened to the rest of the episode. Now I'm going to go back and listen to the first 50 minutes as well, because it was just so compelling. I'm doing whatever I can to give as much information as possible to that person so that they will just maybe click on that and become a new listener.

Matt Cundill  26:42  
That's think, I think with a lot of the things that we talked about, these are all easy wins. And so it kind of breaks my heart a little bit when people don't cash in on all these easy wins. I was

Jon Gay  26:54  
gonna say to Johnny's point, the the old cliche is the the most important 30 seconds of your podcast, or the first 30 seconds of your most recent episode, and that's you're you're targeting, like you said, Johnny, anybody who has not heard your podcast before, make it esthetically pleasing from the thumbnail. Make the show notes and chapters easy to follow. I've been guilty of doing chapters on YouTube, but not Apple and spot or not Spotify, I should say so that's a good note for me as well. You really need to make sure that that first 30 seconds have strong content. Give me, tell me in that first 30 seconds why I need to be listening to the rest of that episode, whether that's a piece of content that's repurposed as a cold open, whether it's a teaser for you will Today you will learn X. Today you will hear the story of why give me something in that first 30 seconds, or I'm gone, if I'm new. And can

Johnny Podcasts  27:43  
I Catherine one more point? Yes. For the for the average podcaster out there, you're thinking to yourself, Man, well, this all sounds really great from the packaging and presentation standpoint, but I don't really know where to start. I don't know what my podcast should look like. I don't know what I should title it. I don't know what the show notes should look like exactly for my specific show, you can go one of two directions. There are people that do this for a living, marketing agencies, branding agencies, and I've seen that go really well, and I've seen it go really poorly, from the really poorly example, I saw a show that paid a lot of money to have a whole branding suite made for them by a big, prestigious company that said, we'll make the most amazing, specifically, YouTube thumbnails for your show, and revisited the show about six months later. Our YouTube views are dog doo. Doo. Why are we? Why is no one? The interviews are great, but we're not converting from someone scrolling across the video to them clicking on it and watching it and becoming a fan. So they went to social media. They said, What's wrong with what's wrong with my podcast? Why? Why? Why aren't I growing here? Every single comment was the thumbnails suck. They're horrible. They're awful. So what did we do after that? This person went and said, the most brilliant idea that this is all building up to of my whole spiel. What's everybody else in your niche doing? Use that as your launching point. How are they titling their shows? What do their thumbnails look like? Now, don't rip it off exactly and copy it exactly, but use that as your inspiration, because every niche is different. The finance niche is different from the arts niche. The Arts niche is different from the broadcasting niche. The broadcasting niche, is different from data. Look at what the podcasts you want to emulate are doing, and do that steal to an extent of what they're doing, but use that as inspiration to get started their show notes and thumbnails, the way they title the types of guests they have, how their podcast actually sounds, the way that it flows, the way it looks on video. That there's so much there's so much content out there now that you can just look at what your favorite person is doing and say, I would just want to do that. How are they doing that? Go from there, right? A little

Catherine O'Brien  29:48  
reverse engineering. And I think that this that falls under the category of steel, like an artist, I'm making air quotes where it's like that idea that you're not ripping it off directly, that you're you're looking at what. Your intended audience is already responding to and trying to give them more of what they want. That's that's where I think they steal like an artist. Thing comes

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  30:14  
in 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

Catherine O'Brien  30:26  
Well, I think we have audited this. This is we have gotten a great audit. Start to our audit here. I just want to spend a couple of minutes on the next item, which is the very podcasty way of saying, be everywhere. Be everywhere. If you were doing an audit Jack. How would you just get your clients or your podcasts to be everywhere? What does that mean?

Jon Gay  30:47  
I think that's a misnomer, because a lot of times you hear, Oh, listen wherever you listen to podcasts. To me, every podcast needs to be in three places. Apple, Spotify, YouTube, probably in reverse order. YouTube, it probably is number one for consumption and discovery. Now with Google only YouTube for a search, but be in those three places you can go. You can go everywhere else. It's not going to cost you anything, aside from a few minutes to link it to iHeartRadio, to Geo seven, to Ghana. Thank you the two in India. I'm

Catherine O'Brien  31:18  
still holding on to Zune. It's not

Jon Gay  31:22  
going to cost you anything. It's not going to hurt you any hurt you. But you know, generally, you're gonna have less than 2% of your listeners from those places. So be on Apple, Spotify and YouTube if you have the time, great, but be in those three places. That is where the lion's share of your listeners or views or podcast consumption, we should say is going to come from so you know, to say, wherever you listen to podcasts, well, there might be an obscure app that somebody listens on podcasts on. You might not be there. So I always encourage folks at the end of the podcast for their call to action to say, share this with somebody you know. Because obviously, personal recommendations are huge in podcasting, as we've discussed, follow the show for free. You know, I like to say follow for free, as opposed to subscribe, because sometimes subscription costs money. Follow the show for free in Apple Spotify YouTube, or wherever you're listening right now. So those in the audio version, Matt pulled up a note here that Ghana and tuned are not accepting new podcasts right now, so we're kind of stuck there. So Apple Spotify YouTube, Apple, Spotify YouTube, Apple, Spotify YouTube, and

Johnny Podcasts  32:22  
then taking that a step further, put those links to those other platforms in the show notes. So all three links. So for your YouTube description, Apple and Spotify links should be in your description on the audio side, put a link to your YouTube channel and then in big bold letters. So subscribe on YouTube, here's the link to the channel or that specific episode, because a little nuance and or a little like diving into the weeds there is, when you upload your video for YouTube, you're getting a link to share it immediately. So you could schedule it from two weeks from now, you're still gonna have a link to that episode. The links for Apple and Spotify don't generate until that episode actually goes live. So on the audio side, you can put that YouTube link into your show notes, schedule the episode and have it go out. You might have to go back retro actively and add it to your YouTube description. It's a little extra work. I think it's worth it. One more step that I've been doing with the introduction of video for Spotify, that I've been doing for some clients, is, let's say we release an episode on Tuesday. We're doing the full audio episode on Apple and Spotify, and then on Friday, I'm pulling eight or nine minutes from the video side, uploading a video, putting that out and saying, Hey, this is from episode, you know, whatever came out on Tuesday. Here's the link to it on YouTube if you want to subscribe. And hopefully we can get somebody over who's like, oh, I actually prefer my podcast on YouTube. I didn't know they're on YouTube. Here we go. I can jump over there, by the way, this episode is awesome. I'm watching the whole thing on YouTube now.

Matt Cundill  33:43  
I would like to have a loving counterpoint to Jag. Okay, I heart and Amazon, that's easy,

Jon Gay  33:52  
yeah? I heart will take you about 30 seconds to do once you have the account. Yeah?

Matt Cundill  33:56  
Again, these are things. They're easy wins. You do them once, and they're done, less of a win would be, you know, the geo seven and the Ghana, although Ghana is, of course, not accepting anything these days, that's what I found. They're, they're willing to take it. They haven't added a single one of my podcasts in in over a year. Now,

Jon Gay  34:12  
I should say, though, that, you know, I shouldn't have overlooked Amazon because people are listening on Alexa, but Matt, is that? Is that a thing? Or, I don't know if people listening on Alexa, 2%

Matt Cundill  34:21  
Oh, Alexa is definitely

Jon Gay  34:25  
sorry. I don't have one in this room.

Matt Cundill  34:28  
Actually, in this room, it's known as something else. I actually turned it off so that I could say Alexa freely.

Johnny Podcasts  34:34  
Canadian slur. No, it's,

Jon Gay  34:37  
it's, Hey, you Hoser, yeah, we can

Matt Cundill  34:41  
address her any way we want these days. I think the other thing is, like, when you have that, Tom Webster once said, you know, wherever you get your podcast is just, you know, a bit of a misnomer, because what if people get their podcasts on SoundCloud, and then eventually we've discovered people were finding their podcasts on YouTube? I think the call. All these days is, you know, find us on Apple podcast, Spotify YouTube, if it's applicable, and insert your website. So your website, my question, yeah, if you have you first of all, you should have a website. That's an easy win, right there. I know it's you need to have an address on on the internet, and then send them to your website where everything's available, where you know your YouTube is there, your your your links to Apple and Spotify and whatever

Catherine O'Brien  35:29  
that was gonna be, I was gonna try and sound very wise and say, How are we all feeling about your podcast having a website? But you just got in there, Matt, and gave the answer, that is perfect. So that is a great way to be everywhere

Matt Cundill  35:41  
again. It's another easy win. It costs a little bit, and you do have to manage the website, but I recommend pod page.

Johnny Podcasts  35:47  
I was going to say, though, I was going to say, Matt knows a wonderful site that you can do for free, because not everyone wants to build one on WordPress or web flow. And then Matt remind me, can you buy the domain, the custom domain, and apply it to your pod page.

Matt Cundill  36:01  
Yes. So I bought my domain through GoDaddy, and then they're actually quite helpful in getting it attached. They walk you through the steps,

Johnny Podcasts  36:09  
yeah. So and when it comes to buying domains, you can buy them on any third party website. It's likely not taken but if it is just add the word pod after it, or podcast after it. If you want to do the.co you can try and do the.co or if you want to, you know, break the bank and buy the domain for, you know, basketballdiaries.com you can, but you can also buy basketballdirect pod.com too. That's

Catherine O'Brien  36:38  
great, okay, and I think, you know, what I like to is, in this auditing section of being everywhere, we've actually kind of broken it into a prioritization. You've got, we've prioritized which are the most important places to be, and then you can, you can always build on your success. Like Matt said, you the a lot of these things that we're talking about, you get done. You progressively get them in on and they're one and done. You develop your workflows and you go right around them. So that is a great section. Great way to close this part of our audit. Okay, now I want to go into my favorite part of the the auditing, and that is content, content, content, content. Matt, we are I'm going to give a shout out right on the Start Here. I think that there is a podcast episode. You recently did an interview with Valerie Geller. I think that is a must listen for everybody in podcasting. Excellent, excellent episode. Great interview. She talked a lot about storytelling, developing hooks and building audience. We're going to come into building audience in our final section of our audit. But I'm wondering if you could just give us a little bit of an insight into the interview you did with Valerie.

Matt Cundill  37:47  
Yeah, so even earlier, Johnny was talking about one of the things that Valerie is very big on, and that's the self check. So self check, listen to your show back. Listen to it all the time to see how you would listen to it as a listener, but she's got these three sort of things that she's always been hammering home to radio people for years, and that's tell the truth, never be boring, and make it matter. And so if you can get all three of those things down, you're off to a great start, and it's a lot harder than you think, and you tell the truth, are your facts right? Are you like talking and saying, Well, allegedly, or apparently, or maybe, or something, I think you should be prepared. She also said, anything you can record, you can make better. And we're all recording largely, unless you're live, of course, at which point you should have all your, all your prep done, making it matter. Is this something that the that the listener really cares about? And how do you make it matter? Can you speak to the listener by using you and really encourage it, and getting that sort of one on one feel with the whole thing? If you're talking about yourself all the time, that's not going to be very interesting. So you want to find a way to make it matter to the listener. And you know, never be boring. You know, it's boring. If it interests you, it's going to interest them, right? So is this something that you're truly interesting, interested in, or are you just talking about true crime because you heard it was the number one category. People can know and hear that stuff. So those were some of the things that you walk through. But there's, there's many, many minutes of great tips into this, into this episode that I did, and worth a listen. Matt, yeah.

Johnny Podcasts  39:23  
Another, another piece from the content side. One question that I get every single time I talk to a podcast, or whether they're seasoned, whether they're new, is, how long does my episode need to be? And it covers the full gamut. You know, I have a client who says I cap it at 35 minutes. Because beyond that, I don't think anybody listens, because that's how I listen, which goes to Matt's point of, do it how you how you consume. That's how you should make your podcast. Is how you listen to other podcasts. And I always give the feedback when they ask how long it should be. Is as long as it needs to be? Yeah. So if you feel like you have totally, uh. Tap the well, at 25 minutes short episode, but it's full of gold and we're done there. If you're still going at two and a half hours, and you're like, I want to keep going, but I feel like I should cut it off. You can chop up the episode into Part A, B and C and release it over a couple weeks. That's totally fine, too. Or release it all as one big deal, but don't cut something off just for the sake of time. And on the other end of that, don't stretch something out to fill time just because you feel like the episode needs to be longer, because then you start getting into the boring territory. And I'll tap I'll cap that off with what Matt said about being interested. A lot of the podcasts we're probably talking about are guest driven shows. Don't bring on a guest just because you feel like that's what the audience needs to hear. Talk to somebody you're interested in talking to, because people will have people can tell, if you're bored, I can't tell you how many podcasts I've produced, or they brought a guest on, where they brought them on, just because they needed to fill a release slot. They thought that they would be good for the audience, and they are so bored, you can just tell, within five seconds, they do not give a hoot about what this person does or who they are. Your audience isn't going to either jack

Jon Gay  41:00  
that I always get that question, and I always tell this story about how long a podcast should be. One of my favorite clients, Peggy Burkhart National Bone Marrow Transplant link, they do a podcast to provide folks who had a bone marrow transplant the valuable information they need about how to survive post transplant. And one of the very first episodes we did, we interviewed a well known oncologist here in Detroit at one of the big cancer centers here, and we were planning on 30 minutes. Went down with our recorder and our two mics. This guy was extremely well spoken. He explained things in layman's terms that were very easy to understand. She went through her questions. He answered them succinctly but brilliantly. She looked at me and said, How long was that? And I said, 15 minutes. She said, What do we do for the next 15 I said, nothing. We're done. Yeah, because he we got all the content out and we gave somebody 10 minutes back on their day. Like you said earlier, Johnny, time is the most important, only finite resource that we have. So don't stretch, don't you know, once you're done, you're done. If you've, somebody's giving you gold, and you end up running, you know, 4560 75 minutes. Okay, but don't feel a need to stretch. Please. Don't stretch if you don't need

Matt Cundill  42:12  
to. Can I give a shout out here to Valerie Geller, and that's please, please do. So the book just came out, and, you know, for years, this has been sort of the Bible for radio people, but it has now been updated. Now been updated. And it is, it's it's heavy. I actually have it sort of in front of me right here, but it is. It's so chock full of it's like 450 pages, but so much of this speaks to what we're doing today. And you know, being, being an effective communicator. It includes social media. It includes podcasting. It includes radio, YouTube, how to do video, how to make transitions between all these things, even if you're not good at it. And it also has a section on AI as well.

Catherine O'Brien  42:55  
Yeah, that it was i Yes, get the book. But also I really strongly recommend that people listen to your interview with her, because anybody listening to it would walk away with just a lot of just very solid tips. Especially the thing that I keep thinking back to is just her emphasis on storytelling and very practical ways. Some of some of us are gifted storytellers. Other people have to develop that skill, and she just did some very practical ways of approaching an event, so that even just the thought of thinking, think how you could describe this event three different ways, that is very helpful in a storytelling capacity, because that is setting the tone for how the rest of this telling of whatever you're talking about is going to go so I just, I thought this was a great Interview, and it was just a very, very practical I do want to throw and since I'm such a big, passionate person about content, one thing that I do want to recommend that podcasters think about in terms of an audit for their own podcast is, I always think it's very important, especially if you're doing an interview, that you know what the hard questions would be before you go into the interview. So one on one hand, we're talking about for knowing what the audience wants to hear or why they might be turning in. But I think it's also really a good practice to think about what would be the hard question in this circumstance, or in this in this interview, and how can I how can I get there? So I've had some experience just I'm thinking of a couple of different times where I knew there was sort of an elephant in the room question. It's very important that you take that on at some point. Now, of course, you can move into it. You can build up the rapport, but as long as everybody knows that you're going to get there that's actually building trust with your audience, that you have a perspective of the topic or whatever you're talking about, where not only are you covering all the good the good stuff, but you they can trust you to go and do the difficult thing too. So I always want podcasters to think about what is going to be the hard question. How can you get there? What, you know, what do you want to gain from from doing that? So I that's just my sort of little bit of a contrarian thing that I always want to include for people, especially when you're talking in in this kind of capacity. Well,

Jon Gay  45:14  
what you talked about is, you know, not over promising and under under delivering Catherine is building that trust is the audience going to trust you to ask the important question? Or if you tee it up at the beginning of the show, if you do a recorded intro later, or a cold open and say, All right, yeah, we're going to ask about, you know, this person may not want to talk about it, but we're going to ask them about it and see what they have to say. Don't ever, ever, ever tease something and never deliver. That was something don't deliver. Yeah, that was drilled into our heads in radio is never tease something that doesn't happen. Johnny, you're muted. Johnny, sorry,

or his mic died. Okay. He says, continue on without him. Matt,

Catherine O'Brien  45:57  
did you have something you wanted to say about any of this? Or I can, I can definitely take take the control back. Here, you

Matt Cundill  46:02  
can definitely take the control back. I thought what jag said was It was absolutely right. Just you gotta, there's gotta be a payoff, right?

Unknown Speaker  46:11  
Yeah, yeah. You know,

Jon Gay  46:13  
even when you're trying to be funny, I had a mentor teach me that if you're telling a funny story or a joke, the longer that runway, the bigger the payoff has to be, so better be right. If you're going long, you've got to deliver at the end. You

Matt Cundill  46:25  
know, we were talking about the length of we were talking about the length of podcasts. And, you know, I like the one James Cridland has always suggested, which, as long as it needs to be, but never longer, right. Should give everyone something to think about. I get

Johnny Podcasts  46:39  
finished with that. Catherine, sorry, I was

Catherine O'Brien  46:41  
gonna say, this is like the Michelangelo of podcasting. I just remove whatever isn't the stone and there's, there's the statue underneath. Johnny. Welcome back. Before

Johnny Podcasts  46:49  
I was so rudely muted, I was gonna say, Isn't there a fine line that you kind of have to walk when we talk about this whole asking the hard hitting questions? Because at least in my experience with a lot of these guests that come on, I try to let them know, like, Hey, this is all edited. And the hosts will say, like, I'm not gonna ask any gotcha questions. Like, you're very successful, you're very big time. We want you to enjoy yourself. I think that I wanna caveat the advice of the loving pushback of don't take that advice to be, you know, you're not trying to be some kind of gotcha person, because you only get so many of those before you sort of destroy your reputation. And as people start to figure out who you are, yes, those things may get a garner a lot of clicks, they may get you a lot of views, but your reputation starts to take a hit if you push too hard on those. Like, if you're I'm talking about the extreme things, like, let's talk about your extra marital affairs. People don't want to talk about that when they're coming on their podcast to talk about how they built their business. So there is a line that you want to walk. Yes, you want to pull the most interesting content out of those things. And you can talk about controversial, controversial content. But I think that a lot of people who are on the guesting carousel in the podcast world, are very, you know, conscious of, I think cancel culture has kind of died for the most part, but there are people want to avoid really controversial topics, and so, you know, find that line right? Well, if

Matt Cundill  48:16  
you make your guest uncomfortable, I'm sorry if you make your guest uncomfortable, the listener is going to be uncomfortable, and it's not going to be a good show. Yeah, they'll bail. They'll bail.

Catherine O'Brien  48:26  
And in full disclosure, and thanks for setting me up for this, Johnny, is every situation that I've been in where that comes up, we've talked about it beforehand that that has been a part, that's been a part of the pre interview, or the invitation, or at some point saying we also would like to cover x, because we think that that is critical to it even. And as we all know, there's some people who say, Well, I won't talk about that. Or they all set the boundary and say, that's nothing that we are I'm willing to discuss. Or what have you. Like Matt said, not to make anybody uncomfortable, but like, let's say you're talking you know, Johnny, a lot of your clients are business focused podcasts talking about failures, businesses that go belly up. You know, I've talked to we've talked to people where, you know, somebody was disgruntled, and, you know, covering those things is important, because otherwise the audience knows that you're just giving them a rainbows and kittens version of things which isn't real. And, you know, I believe in leaning into the authenticity of podcasting. And, yeah, but you're right. In full disclosure, every time we've had that situation come up, it has been discussed before. And yeah, we're not, we're not in this get you with a guest.

Johnny Podcasts  49:39  
The guest is in as a part of the conversation. It is not the host blindsiding the guest for shock value for the audience. Yeah, that's the distinction.

Catherine O'Brien  49:48  
And yeah, just one last little sort of note of nuance on this is this is really where podcasts shine. We've all talked we've talked about it, and it's we've seen. This is the new standard. Is that you need to be able to for people. Let's say people in public life need to be able to stand up to those longer form off the cuff. We go into territory. We go into all the territory kinds of interviews the public is judging those things. So this is an area where podcasts stand out from other forms of media and a podcaster can make the most of that situation, fair to say, very fair and any other content, little things I want to also just be maybe on a fun note before on content, how are we feeling? Audit wise. Audit wise on things like standard questions that you ask every every guest like a closing question, developing hooks that get people to stay to the end. And my favorite, a lightning round. I love, I love a lightning round. How are we feeling about those things? Audit wise, in the content realm, well,

Matt Cundill  50:56  
let's start with the matt, Yeah, I'm ready to go with the first 45 seconds. You've you've got to give the first 45 seconds to say why you listen to the next 45 minutes. You can't read the LinkedIn bio, and you can't and your first question cannot be, Tell us. Tell us about yourself. All that stuff is just that's recipe for disaster, can't

Johnny Podcasts  51:16  
you? Can't you go you can't you meld in the tell us about yourself with doing some pre research beforehand and finding something really interesting, and just kind of drilling down on that, being like, you worked for, you interned for Steve Jobs, I need you to talk about that rather than like, Where'd you grow up? Right?

Jon Gay  51:33  
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, the reading of the LinkedIn bio, or the reading of the bio sent over, like, if you can give me a sentence or two out of it to tease something that's really interesting about them, that's fine, but that's something I've been coaching my work with several of my clients on, is it's easy to read the bio, but you really want to condense that down and get my attention a lot faster than that. Yeah,

Johnny Podcasts  51:54  
and that's where you utilize AI. Great tool to use is, yeah, you have the transcript of your episode, and you say, I need you to help me write, not write. I need you to help me write a really compelling cold open for this episode. I don't want to focus on their bio, but based on the information that you read from this transcript, what do you feel are really interesting points that I can hit on, and let's try to develop the script that we can use at the top.

Catherine O'Brien  52:20  
I also do like and there's ways to be creative with it so it doesn't get stale. I do love to advise people to develop some type of hook that will bring people to the end of the show. So whether that be there's a couple podcasts I listen to where there's some sort of like funny, the hosts do some sort of joke at the end, where people pay off. That's actually Ira Glass from this American life. He credits that the they would have a running joke about using an out of context clip at the very end, and that actually got people to listen to the very end. So, you know, there's, there's different creative ways to doing that. I personally am fond In a interview type of show. I'm fond of the what's one, you know, what's if you were going to tell somebody to get started today on what we've been talking about, what's the one thing that somebody could do today to get started something along those lines? I think that's always a good payoff, because it, it kind of brings a little culmination of everything we've been talking to. It's a little bit of inspiration of what you can, you know, what somebody could tackle today at separates the most important from the lesser important. So you can do things like that. Will that will bring people all the way through the interview. Because we all know that the very end is where people drop off constantly.

Jon Gay  53:35  
I want to give Matt credit here, because this is where, this is a tip that I picked up from him very recently that I've passed on to my clients. Avoid to your point, Catherine, one last question before we wrap up. As we wrap up, those keywords are, those phrases are death and the choice of consumption of your podcast. Oh, they're done. I'm out. I'm one of the next thing in my life. So avoid those you can say, I to your point, Catherine, I do want to ask you, what's the one piece of advice you give to our audience, something along those lines that most people can understand, that you're wrapping up, but as soon as you say you're wrapping up, or you say it's your last question, you've lost the consumption for that last five minutes of your podcast,

Catherine O'Brien  54:14  
plus you're making it a little special jewel. Yes, Johnny,

Johnny Podcasts  54:17  
another way that people open their podcasts is you kind of have your scripted open from the host, where they kind of explain what they're going to get, what their listeners gearing up for over the next hour. So the majority of the stuff that I see and that I work on now is is using clips from within the episode and bringing that to the front. And I think that that is what a lot of podcasts do. I think it's successful, but it only works if you're using the right 3060, 90 seconds, and so you're asking yourself, okay, so I know that I need to pull a clip from the middle of my show. What do I do? Which clip? Where? Why? How? Look for a few key indicators. When somebody laughed. This is what I look for. Personally, if somebody, the host or the guest, laughs, if there's a if they cry, some people cry on podcasts, any kind of emotional response beyond Wow, that was mildly interesting, something that kind of is above, there's always a moment. There's always something. Sometimes there's one, sometimes there's five. There's always a moment where there's an emotional payoff and a reaction from the host or the guest. And why do you want it? Why are you looking for that? If it made the host react emotionally, then the audience is going to react emotionally, because this all ties together. The host is making it for the host, which is also for the audience. I'm doing what I'm interested in, therefore the audience is going to be interested because I'm talking about what I care about. This is what they care about. This is the emotional hook that I want to use. We're finding that cut it down to 90 seconds. If it's a five minute story, you can cut it down to 9630 seconds. Yes, get that at the front. Chop, chop, chop. Go really quick. Cuts. Make it really fast, really punchy. End on the laugh. End on the really emotional pause where you go, Oh, my God, that was, that was heavy music, lights, we're on, we're in, boom, let's go. Well,

Catherine O'Brien  56:09  
speaking of, let's go. Okay, so we have audited the content. I think that was really, that was a good we went through. We got some good content ideas out of there. What is the one thing we can learn about promotion today? Okay? I just another category, no particular order, promotion, audience building. Let's hear from our auditors. What would you look for in a podcast to see if they're doing all the right things for promotion and audience building? Jag. Your eyebrow is telling me you are poised to answer this one.

Jon Gay  56:41  
Did they give me away? I didn't. I could never play

Johnny Podcasts  56:44  
this is one tell if you watch the video episode. So I will always his eyebrow just shoots through the roof when he's ready to go.

Jon Gay  56:49  
Apparently, I cocked my head to one side too when it was Yeah, and it looks like I think you're nuts, but I'm actually just really listening to you. It's just this tick that I've had since I was watching Sesame Street. My mom tells me, anyway, the solicit at the end, I was having a conversation with the podcast about this today, actually not asking for ratings and reviews as your go to thing. Now, I want to put a caveat on that, because if you are, if you are focused more on your YouTube growth than your audience, than your apple Spotify audio growth. I'm okay with asking for ratings and reviews, because that will help you in YouTube's world. Ratings and reviews will drive YouTube's algorithm. They will not drive apple and Spotify algorithm, Apple's algorithm. And correct me if I'm wrong on this is based on some people who are subscribing and following your show, and honestly, people aren't finding your show off Apple charts. They're finding it by Google search, they're finding it by clips on social media, and they're finding it by word of mouth. So don't worry about Apple and spotlight. It's cool to show your little five star review. It's good for social proof. It's not going to grow your show. Ask for ask for someone to pass your show along to somebody they think will like it. Ask for somebody to follow the show for free and the platform of their choice. Those are much better ways to build your audience. And of course, an email newsletter is gold if you can get that as well and build it that way. But do not ask for ratings and reviews as a growth strategy for Apple and Spotify

Johnny Podcasts  58:20  
on the YouTube side, it's the easiest thing in the world to figure out how to get those little moving graphics of the little Subscribe ticker that pops up. The mouse moves over it. They click the subscribe button. It changes to subscribe. A little confetti thing goes off on the screen. Whenever I'm doing YouTube podcasts, I put one of those at every 10 minutes. That's just boiler plate. There's custom you can customize them. You can do the basic one where there's no logo or branding on it. Or you can get deeper and have your actual YouTube avatar on there with the name of your channel, and then the subscriber count get something on the screen, those visual cues where it's like, oh, by the way, that way, it's not constantly me cutting in, by the way, make sure you subscribe. It's a little visual reminder, just a gentle nudge there. Other way, other promotional outside of YouTube is, are they promoting it at all? Is your show shareable? Short clips, I think, are just really valuable for the majority of podcasts, not just for like, oh well, we have to have a presence on Tiktok. We have to have a presence on on YouTube shorts. The way that I think about it is my hardcore audience is going to be the ones that look at the shorts and are going to be really into those, because they want more content beyond the full episodes. Those need to be really shareable to their friends. Jag always hits on the word of mouth thing. What's easier? The easiest form of word of mouth, with all of us being online, is, I have 60 seconds of my favorite podcast. Here you go, here's, here's the proof that I'm telling you that this podcast is is valuable and worth your time.

Jon Gay  59:49  
Text at some point, yeah, easily, sure, Matt,

Matt Cundill  59:51  
so I would ask the Creator how they are interacting with their audience, and are they really. Connecting this podcast to the audience. So what's the podcast about? It's about widgets. Well, are you involved in the widgets Reddit group? There's a good place to go. Is there a widgets convention? Maybe you should be attending the widgets convention and passing out cards, where, Facebook is another great place for where you can go and find, you know, people talking about widgets, I think, you know, interacting and being really marketing is about being really involved. That's that's really all it is. Deep down, when you break it down, it's not about clicks and billboards and all that other stuff. It's just finding a way to be involved and to get in front of an audience and a potential audience. And when you get there, then the other stuff begins to kick in, which are the socials, which we now know definitely grows, podcasts, those reels and clips or whatnot. Number two, as Jack pointed out, it was, it's word of mouth so and then I think a lot of things we've talked about here so far today is, is about making your show recommendable. Yeah, right. Is your show recommendable? It will be if you've listened to the last hour of the show so far, we're gonna make it recommendable, and then, once it is recommendable, your promotion and audience will take care of itself. I

Jon Gay  1:01:09  
think one recurring theme that through all of the pieces of advice you've given over that last hour, your show is not about you. Your show is about your audience. That's something they teach baby radio DJs and I would teach baby podcasters and season podcasters the same thing. You can turn that mirror on your audience and make that make it about them. What's in it? For me, if the audience is getting something out of the show, it is recommendable. It is shareable. All the things that Matt just said. If you can do that and make the show about the person listening. Not Hey, all of you out there in podcast land, but you, you the one person listening. You make that connection. You're well on your way.

Johnny Podcasts  1:01:50  
Another thing is, who is in the majority of podcasts that are out there? Who is the most likely number one person that's new, that's gonna share your show? Guess who was just on that episode, right? If I just text, if I just email them the link to Apple and Spotify and say, Here you go. Your episodes live, you're missing a huge opportunity here. Here are the things you should be sharing with your guest every single time that an episode releases the episode specific artwork, because their face is on there. They look pretty. They want to share that the YouTube thumbnail. Their faces on there. The text is really pretty. It's big. I can post it online, at least one or two short videos for that. They can post on their Instagram, they can post on LinkedIn, they can post on YouTube or X. Other things would be, what else do I share with them? Oh, I always share a 15 minute version, the first 15 minutes of the episode. Why? LinkedIn is a massive platform for the business community. LinkedIn has a video cap of 15 minutes. Really wanted to share this episode of this podcast that I was just on. Here's the first 15 minutes for your preview. Here are the links to the full episode if you want to consume it. And then the last one would be, what's the last thing I shared? Oh, a compressed version of the full episode. If you upload your episode, your video episode, to YouTube, you're probably putting up like five or six gigabytes. On the higher end, you can get into, like the 60s and 70s. If you're doing like a 4k podcast, YouTube compresses that video down. Once it's all uploaded. You just go into your YouTube studio dashboard, you can re download your own video, and it's compressed. It usually less than a gigabyte. That can go on, that can go on x, that can go on a newsletter, that can get embedded on a website, but it's the full episode. Share all of those things with your guests in a Google Drive folder, and it's make it really easy for them to just download something and throw it on their socials.

Jon Gay  1:03:44  
If I could make a tangent off of that, Johnny, if the guest is not super tech savvy or a big into podcasting, you would be better off to give them some best practices. For example, I was sharing all the links with guests for a chamber of commerce podcast I was doing, and it was, here's how to share on face, one click, share Facebook, one click Share LinkedIn, and they would just share it, and it wasn't doing anything I have started emailing, not quite to the extent that you do, although I love what you everything you're talking about. Yeah, that's great. I'll send them a download link for the short for the minute clip, and I'll say best practice is to post this link to your social media and then link to the episode in the comments. The algorithms tend to like that. So I'm specifically outlining here is how the best way to recommend, a way to share

Johnny Podcasts  1:04:29  
it, yeah, and that that just you only have to do that once. You don't have to rebuild that for every single guest every single week. You just make it once, and then you drop in the specific link to those assets and copy paste into the email. One thing I would caveat though, Jack is don't copy the link and then put it in the social because I've seen people that say, Hey, I was on this brand new podcast, and then it's a dropbox link to a short,

Jon Gay  1:04:52  
yeah, yeah. That's That's true. The link has got to be your

Johnny Podcasts  1:04:56  
device. Actually upload that into the post. So the video, so you're posting the actual video, not a Google Drive link. And I have had to put out a lot of fires when it comes to that just are like they got, they got no clue, and that's okay. We're all learning instructions.

Catherine O'Brien  1:05:13  
My little push here is warm calls. First, a lot of us work on podcasts that are that have, they already have a built in audience. If it's a branded podcast, they if they're a business or an organization, they already have members or people who are customers, and those are the people you can tap into first. If you're starting out and you have no audience, you have no people who are your super fans, then you know, okay, that's this might not be for you, but always look to make that warm call first the people who are already your customers, who already know you, who already like you. And that is a great way to get started. You're not broadcasting, you're just you're giving, trying to deliver something to the people who are already your fans. And that makes it a lot easier that can get the ball rolling when you start to ask for referrals or word of mouth or all those kinds of things, is just start with, start with your the people who already know you make that warm call first. Well, I feel like we have audited we have just provided nothing but gold here on these auditings. Pardon me, audited. Audited to death. We've audited it. We've audited it all okay. Well, let's say goodbye now and now. It's an appropriate time, because we are ending the show. I can now say we are ending the show. So let's go around and say goodbye, starting with Jag.

Jon Gay  1:06:33  
Goodbye. Jag. John, gay jag in Detroit. Podcast, jag, indetroit.com

Matt Cundill  1:06:39  
goodbye, Matt, goodbye. Matt kundal, sound about Podcast Network, Winnipeg, Canada.

Catherine O'Brien  1:06:44  
Goodbye Johnny podcast, goodbye

Johnny Podcasts  1:06:46  
Johnny podcast. You can learn more at Johnny podcast.com and if you're looking for a new podcast that you want to listen to, there's a wonderful music podcast called past 10s. Your top 10, a top 10 podcast. At time machine. Podcast.com, Time Machine, top 10. Time Machine,

Jon Gay  1:07:09  
good night. Moon. The beautiful

Johnny Podcasts  1:07:10  
and loving. David Yaz,

Catherine O'Brien  1:07:13  
thanks for bringing him in. Yeah, I I bricked it on that one, and

Johnny Podcasts  1:07:18  
I still don't know the name of it.

Catherine O'Brien  1:07:22  
Well. We'll take care of that in post like, like everything else. Goodbye. Catherine O'Brien, branch out programs. Branch out programs. Got home. Thanks for being with the podcast, super friends, and we'll see you next time.

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  1:07:34  
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)  1:07:45  
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