Are We Making It Too Easy To Listen To Our Podcasts? - The Podcast Report Episode #33

The podcast report, episode number 33. Are we making it too easy to listen to our podcasts? Show notes, links, conversation, more@the podcastreport.com 33. It's the podcast report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. All right. It starts with the big idea. If they have no reason to subscribe to your show, they are not going to subscribe to your show. My name is Paul Colligan. I'm a author. I've got a number of books about podcasting out there. I've been in podcasting since the beginning. I love this industry. I've loved this industry since day one. Two audiences for this show. Number one, the podcaster. I've got a number of podcasters listening to this every week. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you so much. And I'm glad we are helping make your podcast better. And then of course, there are those of you thinking about getting into podcasting. Those of you who know that the whole podcasting dialogue has to be, must be, should be, needs to be more than where do we host this thing and what might microphone do we use? The podcast report is a massive plane, not a deep one. I'm not going to end up on any list of the top podcasts of X or anything like that. I'm helping podcasters do podcasting better and are thrilled to do so. So why this topic? I mean, making it too easy to listen to our podcasts? Isn't that kind of ridiculous? Well, first of all, itunes rankings, now, itunes rankings are not everything by any means. They're not the most important thing by any means, but they are an indicator. They are important. ITunes Dr. A lot of traffic. And it's a metric that, you know, we can leverage in the press, we can leverage with our audiences, we can leverage in media and whatnot. And, you know, well, we don't know how iTunes rankings work. That that number is secret. If you have heard a specific number or whatnot, that's based on conjecture, that's based on people guessing. That's based on what people have seen. I have run, you know, more than a dozen people up the charts, and every single time it is an issue of subscription, it's an issue of how many people subscribed over a certain amount of time. And, well, if we don't get subscribed, we're not going to run up the charts. Important. Now, the logic as well here in this play. You see, the thing is, if somebody comes to my WordPress site for my podcast and listens to an episode, if that's all they do that's lost. You know, the power of the podcast report is not that we're talking today about are we making it too easy to listen to our podcast? But the idea that every week we get together and examine podcasting opportunities and talk about the issues that are happening in the podcasting space. Once someone subscribes, then every episode comes to them. When it comes out, spam free, directly, immediately. I want the long term. I don't want the one off. I want subscribers, I don't want listeners. And if I'm doing something to make it harder to be a subscriber than it should be, well then, gosh darn it, I need to stop. So let's look around. Where are examples? What can we look at? Well, number one is YouTube. If you don't know, I've done a lot of work in YouTube. I've done some bunch of books in YouTube, some consulting in YouTube. It's a good place to look. The metrics are easier, the numbers are there, we can see completion rates. There's a bunch of stuff there. And one day we'll do an episode about what YouTube has taught us about podcasting. But first of all, a piece from YouTube statistics page. And this is just a quote. Of the hundred plus channels that we funded in 2011, 86 of those channels are the top 1% of all YouTube. 25 have one plus million subscribers. And collectively they're getting over three fourths of a billion views a month. Subscribers is an issue. Getting over a million subscribers helps bring down tremendous downloads. There's the case of PewDiePie. And if you don't know who PewDiePie is, it's YouTube.com P E W D I E P I E. He's hard to describe. He's a gamer. I don't get him, but I do dig his numbers. Looking at his site today, 34 million and change subscribers. Most recent video yesterday posted 2.2 million views. This is the type of stuff that people, you know, die for in viral. And this is what he got from yesterday's video. You know, that happens because he's got millions of subscribers. You know, it's just obvious. Now I was looking at, let's jump out of YouTube. I was looking at the stats for a client of mine. 1.2 million downloads verified by Libsyn. Not some crazy stats thing. More than 5,000 downloads yesterday and 14,000 downloads at the release of the most recent episode of the podcast. Now I looked at the referrer sources and there wasn't a single referrer Source over one hit. I. E. There. There's no big page where everybod downloaded this from. When you. When you look at the stats for the show as a whole, Apple core media was 1.2 million downloads. 95%. ITunes was 40,000 downloads. The first browser in there was 2177. Chrome was only at 963. Between the two of them, they're barely 3,000 of 1.2 million. Now, you don't have the full specifics there, but the fact of the matter is most people are coming to this podcast from, as we know, from Apple Core Media, coming either from them streaming it in Safari, which just isn't this audience, you know, or the podcast app, or, of course, itunes. Internally, pretty much the same thing. They're getting massive numbers from their subscribers. No work now. They're not really advertising this podcast yet. It's getting thousands of downloads every single day. Why? Because they focused once on getting the subscribers. We have a lot to learn from this. We should do a lot to this. And it's not just podcasting. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. It makes business sense. There's a great book. It was funny, it was out of print for a while, and I paid a great deal of money for it. And then it actually came from ebay smelling like smoke. It was so bad, I had to put in the garage for a couple of days called Getting Everything youg Can out of all youl've Got by Jay Abraham. And the basic concept is, you know, a lot of people look to find new customers, new listeners, you know, new whatever. And what you've got, you can get a lot more from if you're strategic about it. And it's a business book, but at the same point, it's a podcasting book. Because, I mean, if we've got something listening, if we got something, if we've got someone listening, we should get them subscribing. So why aren't they subscribing? Well, number one, they're not subscribing because of our blogging legacy. A lot of podcasters came from blogging, and a lot of podcasters are being taught by those who came from blogging. And we have this idea that you need to come to the website. I've hit this on past episodes, but this idea that the important thing about your podcast is the destination. And if you're selling ads, well, maybe that's important, but maybe it's not. And you can go back to previous episodes where we took a look at that, but we've got this blogging legacy that is causing us to think, you know, it's all about the destination. Of course, when they come to the destination, it's rude to make them go somewhere else to, you know, subscribe to the show. So there's that, and there's our destination obsession. Everybody wants to have, well, you must have a website. You must have your own personal website. And there's some reasons to do that, and there's some strategies to do that. And we've hit that on past episodes. We'll hit that in future episodes. But the fact of the matter is, I don't care where you are listening to my voice right now. My job is to get you, the podcaster, to think about what you're doing. And if you're at my website clicking play and looking around, that's fine and dandy. But if you were in a car listening to this on your way to work, hey, look at the road. Hands on both wheels, you know, all that good stuff. If you were at the gym, great. If you're in a plane, great. Wherever you are, that's where I want to reach you. That's the power of podcasting. It's not the destination, you know, And I think of my clients podcast, and boy, it's. They're not getting into the website, that's for sure. This client is over their destination obsession, and I think we should be as well. And then the third problem is I'm going to call this the sexy SoundCloud problem. SoundCloud has made audio online exciting, has made it sassy, and a bunch of us are doing what we can to make sure our SoundCloud situation is optimized. And a lot of US are embedding SoundCloud. And SoundCloud has all this features and people can make comments, and it's gorgeous and it's wonderful, but it doesn't speak to subscription. It doesn't speak to getting people to subscribe. And the power of podcasting is not in one particular piece. It's in clicking subscribe, and every time a new episode comes out, being updated. Our blogging legacy, our destination obsession, and Sexy SoundCloud is doing more damage than good. And we got to be careful. We got to think about it. So what am I doing? Well, in my podcasts and in podcasts that I'm working with, clients that I'm working with, you know, we're looking at reasons to subscribe. I gave you those numbers, you know, from the existing client. Well, a reason was given to subscribe. I'm really working on that I'm working on that language. If you have any language, if you have any examples, if you have anything you've done that helps people to subscribe, do pass that along. I'll give follow up information at the end of this episode. Please do that. I'm looking at some tech. I'm looking at some tech. We're even designing some things that will reward subscription. And how is that possible with the limits of podcasting? It is if you think big. And we're looking at that right now. And then the other thing I'm doing about doing, I'm actually considering killing players at the website. I'm killing options at the website. You know, if you give somebody a lot of options to do something, they kind of stare at all the options. I want subscribe. You know, this customer with the person I talked about earlier, you know, boy, 5,000 downloads yesterday, 14,000 at the release of the most recent episode. No marketing to speak of specifically to the episode. They rewarded subscriptions and it works really, really well. And you know, there's no options at the site to play. They send them to itunes to subscribe and it is working for them. So what I'm doing, giving them a reason. I'm looking at some new tech to reward and I'm considering killing the players and considering, you know, eliminating or limiting some of the options at the website. What you can do is much the same. Definitely give your audience a reason to subscribe. You might want to consider making the buttons less accessible. You might want to consider taking SoundCloud out of the equation. That might do better things for your subscribers. Yes, I wish it was easier to measure, you know, subscribers specifically over time. And no, you know, do some good a B testing. We don't have that, but I think over time we'll do well. And then you definitely want to reward subscriptions as well. At the very least, give them a reason. But do what you can to reward. I think we might be making it too easy. You know, if they click and play, no reason to subscribe. Let's get rid of that. Let's get subscribers. This is the podcast report all over social. If you go to the podcast report.com Facebook,/, Twitter,/, whatever, you can follow us there. Would love likes on Facebook, would love followers on Twitter. All that good stuff. Head out there and do that. That'd be fun. If you want to comment on this episode, you can head out to the podcast report.com forward slash. If you would like a mind map, the mind map that I'm playing from here and a transcript of this episode. Go ahead and text EP33 to the show hotline at 503-897-1290. If you like to leave a voicemail message there, you can definitely do that. I've got a couple of links for you. I've got links to the YouTube stats that I mentioned. I've got links to the Jay Abraham book and it's cheaper now. You can get it on Kindle and I'm adding this to Notes right now. But I'll also get you a link to PewDiePie so you can take a look at what he's doing. Fascinating stuff there. Boy, this guy's a subscription machine. Next episode the podcast report should be fun. I'm open for suggestions. If you've got ideas, please send them along. Would be great. Always fun. You can, you know, mention the website or social again. The podcastreport.com pickyoursocial network. We are there. Twitter YouTube are probably your best. Definitely subscribe to the show. You don't have to be itunes. You can go to the podcastreport.com iTunes or Stitcher Pocketcasts if you're on a Microsoft phone slash tunein will work for you. Spreaker/iheartradio overcast. I'm not in Soundcloud yet and I told you I'm beginning to crack the nut, but it might not necessarily be in their player. Believe it or not, the website for the show is the podcastreport.com Email is the podcast report outlook.com if you got a review any I'd love one at itunes or Stitcher. Those seem to be my favorites. I think this one is important. I'd love to hear your thoughts about it and I can't wait till you send them to me. Talk to you next week. Bye.