Podcast Pontifications

Your podcast is followed by lots of people who don't listen. So is mine. So is everyones. Is that a problem to be solved? Or just a reflection of the complex relationship people have with on-demand content?

I wonder how many of the subscribers to or followers of your podcast have followers remorse? And by your followers and subscribers, I of course mean my followers and subscribers as well. 

By followers remorse, I mean someone who took the time to add your podcast to their listening app... but now they kind of wish they hadn't. For whatever reason, your show is no longer for them. But they haven't removed your show from their listening app.

You and I would just unsubscribe or unfollow, right? Well... we're not most people.

Compare the download metrics from any podcast's hosting provider to the listen metric from the podcast apps and the behavior of the "middle" subscriber or follower emerges. 

In most cases, middle listeners had every intention of listening to every episode of the podcast they subscribed to or followed. But now they're not

Maybe they got everything they needed from you and your podcast after listening to just a couple of episodes and are keeping the connection in case they have new needs.

Maybe their interest in the topic your podcast covers slowly waned over time.

Maybe they discovered and prioritized a different podcast or a different set of podcasts that better fits where they are today. 

Maybe they're very good at triaging their podcast listening app, deliberately choosing which episodes to listen to, using their own decision tree or sorting methodologies to make decisions you just can't know about or influence.

Maybe they keep the subscription or following active as a show of solidarity for your show or yourself, like some fort of a badge that says they are part of your tribe.

Or maybe they view your feed updates as transactional, keeping you and your show top of mind for them, and weirdly happy enough just to know you're still producing content because maybe someday they'll listen.

What should we do about these middle followers, if anything? 

Should we wish for a way to clear out those who've stopped listening just so our listening stats match up with our download stats? No, I don't see much value in that. 

Should you try to convert as many of these middle followers to dedicated listeners as you possibly can? Well, yeah, of course. But that's something that's probably not very much in your control. 

But that doesn't mean you should stop trying. 

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! 
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout.
• Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today!

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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.

It's created and hosted by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show.

If you received value from today's episode of Podcast Pontifications, return some of that! We call it value-for-value, and there are many ways to show your support.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

As an experienced podcaster, it's only a matter of time before you're called on to teach what you know. But what will you teach? And is it designed to make the next generation of podcasters better? 

From time to time, I've been asked to "teach" podcasting. Often as a guest lecturer but also in workshops, seminars, and other tightly-focused programs I've been involved with over the last 17 years. 

Because of when I learned how to podcast—at the beginning of podcasting—everything I know about podcasting was learned on the job. Like others of my generation, we brought the accumulation of our skills from various careers, disciplines, and interests with us to podcasting. Few of us wanted to be professional podcasters back then.

But here we are, some two decades later with a slew of classes and workshops that formalize the educational processes for students who want to become tomorrow's professional podcasters.

And where will the organizations that provide those classes and workshops find people to teach those classes? You and me, baby.  So what kind of educational experience would you provide if you were tapped to use your skills to teach a podcasting class?

Will you teach a very tactical and practical class so your students can make a single type of podcast? Maybe just a single podcast episode?

Or will you go wider to teach them a range of skills necessary to cover the entirety of podcasting so they feel empowered to explore their own creative interests? 

Both have value. Which kind of podcast teacher will you become?

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! - evoterra.link/gumball 
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout. - evoterra.link/buzz
• Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today! - AdvancingPodcasting.xyz

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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.

It's created and hosted by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show.

If you received value from today's episode of Podcast Pontifications, return some of that! We call it value-for-value, and there are many ways to show your support.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Buying a house and finding a new podcast have more in common than you'd think. You aren't always in the market for both, and there's a problem if you have too many of either. Can lessons from one inform the other?

I remain skeptical that anyone will ever build the YouTube of podcasting. But the Zillow of podcasting? Now that's an interesting proposition, weird as though it may sound.

Zillow flipped the script and put would-be homebuyers in complete control of the "discovery" part of home buying. Today, anyone with an internet connection can use Zillow to view almost every property for sale, almost anywhere in the entire country. 

So what does this have to do with podcasting? Especially when most podcasts are publicly listed in every app and directory along with millions of other podcasts?

Zillow's trick wasn't just giving homebuyers access to a lot more listings. It was how Zillow unpacked and exposed data—lots of data—for every property. That's what a Zillow-like service could bring to podcasting. 

How about recommendations that are (finally) based on criteria you either establish or are inferred from your listening activities that give a much higher degree of certainty? The recommendation engines in podcasting today are rudimentary at best. Imagine a new discovery system that atomized, ingested, and analyzed podcasts, making push-based discovery demonstrably better.

Or how about a sort of "open house" for podcasts that lets the listener experience what it's like to "live in" a podcast for a while. Some type of lower level of commitment than subscribing to or following a show could be attractive to listeners who don't want to risk the hassle of unsubscribing to or unfollowing a show that wasn't a perfect fit. 

Those are just two quick examples of the benefits a service like this might offer podcast listeners. But there is a slew of challenges.

The good news is that most datasets are public and have adequate APIs. But the bad news is that those data sets are woefully inadequate to perform the type of analysis needed here. Anyone seriously trying to develop a system like this has to invest time and resources to create new complementary data sets. Who's going to pay for that?

A service like this wades into very treacherous waters. Just like Zillow pissed off many of the extant real estate industry big networks, powerful podcasters, or dominant listening/discovery platforms, may see this as a threat and fight against it.

But the biggest hurdle to overcome is the one that makes this a winning service: listener adoption. This new service cannot be incrementally better than what listeners go through today. It has to be orders of magnitude better. Like Zillow was.

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! - evoterra.link/gumball 
• Podchaser.com
• Is Podcast Listening Too Big Of An Ask? - podcastpontifications.com/episode/is-podcast-listening-too-big-of-an-askpodcastpontifications.com/episode/is-podcast-listening-too-big-of-an-ask
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout. - evoterra.link/buzz
• Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today! - AdvancingPodcasting.xyz

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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.

It's created and hosted by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show.

If you received value from today's episode of Podcast Pontifications, return some of that! We call it value-for-value, and there are many ways to show your support.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Successful podcasters know the importance of making content your audience loves. But your podcast has more than one audience—audiences with different needs. Are you making content for all of them?

Business-minded podcasters often have a binary concept of a listener: A person is either a listener or they are not. It's how a lot of businesses think about their customers; Someone either is a customer or they're not. 

But taking this simplistic view of a podcast's audience often leads to poor podcast planning and implementation A better approach is to create three different podcast audience buckets, not just two. 

Group 1: The Never-Have-Listened

If someone has never listened to your podcast, you're probably not going to win them over with amazing podcast episodes. This group needs content that lets them know your podcast exists and also makes it easy to sample and then get more of. 

And that content has to be supported with the marketing budget that it deserves.

Group 2: The Dedicated Listener

Yes, make excellent podcast episodes. But go further, creating content designed to live where your listeners live as they enjoy your podcast.

And that content has to be supported with a community building and engagement budget that it deserves.

Group 3: The Dippers & Dabblers

Most of your audience doesn't listen to everything you put out. So this group needs a compelling reason to listen. Content from you that's fit for their purpose, not just fit for yours. 

And decisions on which content to make needs to be supported by a budget for research and measurement tools.

Three very different groups with very different wants and needs, so a single audience engagement strategy just won't work.

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! 
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout.
• Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today!

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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.

It's created and hosted by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show.

If you received value from today's episode of Podcast Pontifications, return some of that! We call it value-for-value, and there are many ways to show your support.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

We don't often think of listening to podcasts as problem-solving, but it happens. A smart podcaster knows how to present solutions to their audience, as well as who else is helping solve their same problems. 

Problems, broadly speaking, fall into one of two camps: acute problems and chronic problems. 

Acute problems for podcast listeners might be things like needing just the right information to file their taxes this year. Or that their facing an 8-hour flight and need to be entertained or informed. Or maybe they need your help finding the new laptop that fits their needs best.

Great titles, excellent packaging, and getting right to the point will be appreciated by your listeners, as you're helping them solve an acute problem.

But each of those have similar chronic problems. It's not filing taxes this year, it's solid financial planning or money management. Maybe that's a flight your listener takes every week? Or they aren't buying a laptop, but are responsible for the tech needs for large organization.

To service chronic problems like those, you'll need higher-concept episodes, not just "how-to". You'll need a deep catalog of content. And you'll need to brand you as a trusted source as much as your podcast.

And I know you'll be shocked by this, but the reality is your audience is made up of people with both chronic and acute problems. How do you solve for that?

 But you're not alone, and you don't have your audience's undivided attention.

You compete for your audience's attention as they turn to YouTube, books, and more to solve their acute problems or stay on top of their chronic issues.

The best you can do is make the best podcast content that you possibly can, and accept that a good swath of your audience will dip in and out of your content. 

You can't solve every single problem for every single member of your audience. But you can work to make sure you've covered as much of the problem landscape as makes sense for you and your podcast.

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! 
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout.
• Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today!

------ 

Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.

It's created and hosted by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show.

If you received value from today's episode of Podcast Pontifications, return some of that! We call it value-for-value, and there are many ways to show your support.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Many podcasters say they want to improve their shows. One easily overlooked area of improvement is you. Specifically, your ability to tell better stories with your episodes. This mnemonic device can help.

One of the most crucial skills a podcaster must possess is the ability to tell stories. Your ability to tell stories is more important than the timbre of voice, your equipment stack, and your marketing efforts. 

Fortunately, storytelling is a skill that can be acquired, with many practitioners offering workshops, classes, and one-on-one training. One of those practitioners is Dawn Fraser. I learned a clever mnemonic device from her that will you can tell better stories on your podcast—S-T-O-R-Y.

S is for stakes. Not the why of the episode, but the want of the episode. It's the hunger. It's the expectation you set for your audience that keeps you on track and keeps your audience locked in place.

T is for theme. The main through-line or meat of the story. It's your topic, angle, and where you're taking the story. If you know your theme, you can trim away the excess bits so that only the best parts make it into your episode.

O is for organization. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But sometimes, starting in the middle and guiding your listeners through a less obvious path makes for a better episode. 

R is for recreating. Your audience wasn't there when the thing happened. They're here now, relying on you to summarize points and recreate scenes to make your story work as a podcast episode. 

Finally, the Y is for you. You are an integral part of every single story. You are our proxy. You get us deeper into the stories you tell on your podcasting episodes. We want some of your personality and even biases in the episode. 

With some odd edge cases aside, every podcaster is a storyteller. 200,000 years have shaped the human brain into a story-receiving vessel. Podcasters will do well to remember that.

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! 
• Storyteller Dawn Fraser
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout.
• Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today!

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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.

It's created and hosted by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show.

If you received value from today's episode of Podcast Pontifications, return some of that! We call it value-for-value, and there are many ways to show your support.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Appealing to the needs of your listener base is key to making a successful podcast. But there's one listener who has slightly different needs than the rest. Make sure you're fulfilling their needs too.

What is it that you get out of experiencing your own show as a listener?

If your answer is "I don't listen to my own show like a listener, just as I produce the episode, and that's enough.", then I'm afraid we can't be friends. 

For those that do: why do you do it? What itch does it scratch for you? I've a few possibilities to consider:

Listening Back Can Make You A Better Podcaster

The craft of podcasting is one of continual improvement. And while I'm sure you listen to other podcasts to learn other techniques, you can't know why certain decisions were made by those other podcasters. 

But you do know the what and the why of your own specific choices made during your own production process. Listening back to your episode when you're not in production-mode lets you evaluate whether or not those choices worked out in situ. 

Listening Back Can Reassure You Are A Good Podcaster 

Podcasting, like any creative endeavor, can leave you feeling quite vulnerable. Listening back to the way listeners listen can boost your self-confidence, give you the self-affirmation you need, and give you proof that yeah, you are good enough to keep going!

Listening Back Can Keep You Humble

Podcasting is often done in isolation, where it's easy to become a bit too full of yourself. This problem is compounded if you're not getting much or any feedback from your audience. It's up to you to keep yourself in check! 

Listening For Defensive Reasons

Someone is listening to your show. It might be your peers. It might be your competition. It might be your prospects. All groups of people you want to make a good impression upon. Listening back gives you confidence that you're putting your best foot forward.

Listening Back Can Keep You On Mission

Everyone has their own reasons why they podcast. What True North they're trying to reach. What greater purpose their podcast serves. You need to check the final product to make sure you are producing a show that is the perfect fit for who it is for and is, in fact, why they are there.

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! 
• 3 Clips
• Email me!
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout.
• Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today!

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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.

It's created and hosted by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show.

If you received value from today's episode of Podcast Pontifications, return some of that! We call it value-for-value, and there are many ways to show your support.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

For as public a medium as podcasting is, a lot of information about specific podcasts is private. But private doesn't necessarily mean secret. How different would podcasting be were we more forthcoming?

#podcasting

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash 

https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/the-case-for-making-private-podcasting-data-public   

How would the podcast industry change if podcasting better embraced transparency, making currently-private information public?

Let's start with the obvious: audience size. 

Imagine a world where the size of a podcast—every podcast—was a matter of public record. A world where you could size up the competition or see how many other fans are loving a show because audience size data would be attached to each and every show.

Social media already does this with pubic follower counts. And any podcast that has advertising representation publishes how many people they reach on a monthly basis. 

There's nothing special about podcasting that requires us to keep the information about audience size a secret. Other than how we'd count it. That, and pride.

Let's go further, maybe to financials? The money-in / money-out of a show? A lot more controversial. But not without precedence. Publicly-traded companies publish their financial information. So do some long-running podcasters like John Lee Dumas and Pat Flynn. It's purely hypothetica for all podcasters to do this. But it would promote a much healthier view of the realities of building a profitable podcast.

We can also make crediting people more public. Services like Podchaser and the tag can be leveraged to show just how connected and interwoven podcasting is, beyond the pretty voice behind the microphone. 

But remember, this is a thought exercise. There are terrible people in the world who prey on others, so I am in no way suggesting that anyone should drop their guard from any real threat they face every day.

But with all deference to that reality, I do think that some data points from podcasting could be made more public for the betterment of all podcasting.

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! 
• Giving Your Podcast's Listeners A Public Voice With PodInbox 
• John Lee Dumas' income reports
• Pat Flynn's income reports
• Podchaser
•   tag from Podcast 2.0 namespace
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout.

Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today!

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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. New episodes are released four times a week, providing ideas and questions every serious podcaster should be thinking about.

It's created and hosted by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come. Allie Press assists with the production and transcription of the show.

If you received value from today's episode of Podcast Pontifications, return some of that! We call it value-for-value and there are many ways to show your support.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

If you've ever snail-mailed a friend, you've paid to get someone's attention. In the future would you allow your listeners to pay you to get your attention, podcaster? Spoiler alert: you probably already do.

More often than not, podcast tech always seems to be looking for a way to get podcasters paid. And many podcasters are keen to try out new monetization options.

But the idea of monetizing a podcasters attention, if you will, tends to be a pretty polarizing topic. If you see this as an additional revenue stream, it's a positive thing. Yet if see this as just one more consequence of late-stage capitalism that further divides the world into the haves and the have nots, it's a negative thing.

I think both are valid positions. It's an ethical conundrum, to be sure. But one we're already wading into. Most social sites have some sort of a badge or icon identifying the special-ness of a select group of users and marking them as "better" than the rest, giving their posts and even direct messages extra heft. 

More specific to podcasting, listener-support services like Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, and myriad other similar services are used by podcasters allow for special tiers, some of which give members-only rights to those who pay enough. Like a members-only message board or assigning priority status to messages sent from members who pay for the privilege. 

Seen in that light, allowing someone to boost a voicemail message to the top of a queue with a contribution of funds doesn't seem all that nefarious.

But I am not naive. I know that there are huge opportunities for abuse and asshattery. My hope is that the developers that implement services like this are taking that into consideration and working to shut down as much as they can. 

Yet even with the risks and uncertainty, I think the idea of listeners paying for a podcaster's attention is a space worth keeping our eye on.

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! 
• Giving Your Podcast's Listeners A Public Voice With PodInbox 
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout.
• Serious about podcasting? Join the Advancing Podcasting Community today!

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Few things make podcasters happier than a slew of emails from deeply engaged listeners filled with praise for the latest episode. Good work if you can get it. But should you expect and encourage it?  

Do you want more engagement from your listeners? Sure. But do your listeners want to engage with you? Well...

Keep in mind that for almost every type of creator—books, tv shows, movies, Michelin-rated chefs—engagement with their audience is rare. And engagement during the time of creation is unheard of.

Some of the perceived need for podcasters to get immediate feedback stems from the podcasting versus radio fight that's going on two decades now. Our RSS feeds could out-distance their radio towers. But they could have live callers. And we couldn't. Boo.

Should we podcasters give up on the idea of getting more engagement from our listeners? No. But we probably should better understand what engagement opportunities we do have.

Not all engagements need to be live. And I'm encouraged by the efforts of companies like PodInbox who are improving podcast-specific forms of engagement.

But at the same time, maybe podcasting already have enough engagement from listeners?

Searching, finding, subscribing to or following, listening...  These are forms of engagement that our listeners are doing right now. And honestly, it's the kind of engagement that podcasts are best set up to receive. 

I almost hate to say it, but the majority of your audience will not get any benefit from engaging more deeply with you or your podcast than they already are.

It is very natural for us to want more engagement from our audience. But we serious podcasters need to first make sure we're giving our audience good reasons to engage with our content in the first place.

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Links

• Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to Gumball.fm! 
• Giving Your Podcast's Listeners A Public Voice With PodInbox 
• PodInbox - A place for your audience to ask questions and share their stories.
• Over 100K active podcasters trust Buzzsprout.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.