Do The Podcast Directories Matter Anymore? The Podcast Report Episode #19

The PODCAST REPORT Episode number 19. Do podcast directories matter anymore? Thepodcastreport.com19 hey, this is Chris Break from.

The Chris Break Show. This is John from the Chris Brake Show. We are from the Chris Brake show live every Thursday night at 8pm Eastern on Radio fubarradiofubar.com or go to chrisbriggshow.com for past episodes. We just want to jump in here real quick and let you know that Paul Colligan is a close personal friend of ours and he has our explicit professional endorsement as being a guy who definitely knows a lot about podcasting. If you want to have a successful podcast, follow what this guy is about to tell you. So again, this is Chris Brake from the Chris Brake Show. This is John from the Chris Brake show and you are listening to the Podcast Report with Paul Culligan.

Yep, an introduction from another podcast on the Podcast Report. That's something I agreed to in a previous episode and the offer is still open. If you'd like to promote your show in my show's pre roll, go ahead and send me that promotion to the podcast report@outlook.com make it a little less markety, a little less pushy than what you heard this time. But these guys went first and gosh darn it, I love the first movers. I love the people who take action. But anyway, let's get onto the show. Big idea for today's episode is simply the podcast directories or the marketing equivalent of the phone book. That's right, the marketing equivalent of the phone book. All that hype and excitement about the podcast directories and they're just not that important anymore. We're going to explore why on today's episode for this first time ever, my name is Paul Culligan. I am the author of the business Podcasting Bible, the author of the number one top selling podcast strategies. I'm actually a six time best selling author. I've been part of podcasting for a long time, pretty much since the beginning. Love this industry. That's part of why I do this show. Two audiences for this show. The podcaster. You heard one introduce me at the beginning of this. That's great. I love podcasters. They're a passionate, exciting group and the goal of this podcast is to help you all do better, help you think bigger, help you achieve more. The other audience is just people thinking about getting into podcasting. Those who are sure that the podcasting dialogue has to be more than what microphone do I buy and how big do I make my album art. It's not a massive play, but it's a deep one, full of exciting, passionate people and I'm thrilled to be part of it. We're building a fun little community here. Consider interacting either at the website or through social or some of the links I shoot your way. But anyway, let's get to the topic. When you look at the how to podcast stuff, and this is books or podcasts or articles, or when the newspaper picks you up or whatnot, there's debate and focus and hundreds of pages and hundreds of hours all recorded about these podcast directories. Which one do you get into? How do you get into them? How do you optimize for them all these things? Well, the reality is it's a lot of debate and it's a lot of wasted energy. The simple numbers just dictate and a little logic dictates that this isn't where you want to put your focus. Focus on your content, focus on your audience. Yes, the podcast directories make it easy to find you, but that's just not enough. You want to focus on 80, 20. What are the small things that you're going to do that are going to make the biggest impact now? Itunes. I don't care if you adore Apple and think it is the second coming or hate Apple and think it is the symbol of the end of mankind. Apple, itunes is the 800 pound gorilla. Not only are they going to bring you most of your audience, but their directory is going to be picked up by some of the other podcast directories. So get in there. But that's it. That's not your big worry. Yes, fill out the forms once and we'll chat to that. Focus on that. Don't focus on the minutia, don't focus on optimization of the directories. Get set it and forget it. Because the reality of what you have is this. The information of your podcast, the content that you are sharing with the world, the message that you have, and we spoke in the past to the market, the message and then the media. That is the stuff that is so important. That is the stuff that distinguishes you. Nobody gets up in the morning and goes, I really want to listen to a podcast about X. They get up in the morning and go, I love the topic of X. And cool, check this out. There is a podcast about it. This is a subtle distinction, but it's a really, really important one. If you focus on the content, you'll realize that and you'll be at a better place. The information you have is more valuable than the format that it's Presented. Now, most of your podcast directory audience, most of the people who found you as a result of a podcast directory, really, honestly, at this point are podcasters. And even for a show like this, a podcast about podcasting, you'd think I'd be all crazy and optimizing the directories, but that's not it. I want podcasters who are talking about podcasting to be part of this. That's why the podcast report has a kindled book, and if you don't know about that, we've got a previous episode about that. That's why the podcast report is really heavy on social. That's why I'm doing the pict these types of things. The idea of people who like podcasting is fine, but the idea of people who like the content and the topic and what it is that you are doing, that's more important. You see, let's look at the historical perspective here. When something new comes out, when a piece of technology comes out, you need a guide to it. I actually have some books on my shelf, physical printed books that are guides to the Internet, that are what websites you want to visit and that type of thing. And they're absolutely hilarious. But at the time, they made a lot of sense. Google was barely the gleam in somebody's eye, and the search engines weren't that good. And gosh darn it, it was such a new thing that people were heading to books and looking for external places to find out about this Internet. But now nobody goes to the bookstore to figure out what's on the web. Nobody goes to a guide to look for something. That's what Google is, and that's what Google's done. That book was good for anyone that was in the book. I had websites that were in these books, and I got traffic as a result of these. But that wasn't the end game. It was my content, and it was my information that got me in that book. It's my content information that gets me the reviews, that gets me the links, that gets me the clicks, that gets me the audience. In short, these books used to matter a little bit, but they really don't matter at all anymore. And it's a lot like the phone book. You know, phone books used to be the biggest way to find information about what's happening in town. But let's face it, with smartphones and social media and that kind of stuff, the phone books don't matter anymore. Now I'm getting to the point to where I show up to my house, and if some lame company's Dropped off a phone phone book at the front door. I get frustrated and I get upset. And yes, there's a small segment that still looks to it, but man, if I'm a local business in town and I'm worrying a lot about the phone book, I'm missing who my audience is and what the realities are of this new world. So podcast directories are the same thing. Podcast directories are the phone book. Podcast directories are the what's on the web book. Podcast directories at one point were key, but they're not that big anymore. Now, if you're an existing podcaster, I give you permission to stop worrying about the directories, which is really nice. And if you haven't podcast yet, you started about it. Spend five to ten minutes getting yourself optimized, but then that's it, you're done. Then start focusing on your audience. Well, Paul, wouldn't a good listing in itunes be great? Yes, but a good interview and a good piece on another podcast about your topic would be better. A website about your topic that says, hey, by the way, we're updating you via voice, via video on a regular basis, that would be better. What do you do? Well, if you have a podcast, consider polling your audience, figuring out how they learned about you. I bet you would be really, really surprised. And if you got the type of podcast where everybody came as a result of finding you in a podcast directory, that's great. But I bet if you did a real poll to your audience, you'd find out some really, really interest. If you don't want a poll or your audience isn't big enough yet to get really good numbers from or anything like that, that's fine. Just sit down, grab a piece of scratch paper. Or if you want to do this on your iPhone, iPad, Android device, whatever it is, don't care. But just think about five other ways that you could market your podcast. And that could be marketing online, that could be marketing offline things that we've chatted about in previous episodes. Here, the podcast report. Just take those five ideas, add to it the podcast directory, and then just order them. And what you think what you know would have the biggest impact on your audience. And bring the most people to do to bring the most people to you. If you do that, I think the results would be really, really interesting. Just arrange them in order. The results will surprise you. When I'm doing how I'm doing this, itunes and stitcher got 95% of my direct refocus. I really haven't worried about any of the rest of them, I'm doing automated social follow up, you know, to continue my push there. At the end of this, I'm going to ask you to review me on itunes and we'll talk about what that does per chance in a later episode. But that's it. That's all I'm worrying about. The directories. I've got the artwork for each episode that goes out with the quote. You've seen them. That's probably one of the reasons why you're here. That gets more attention. The social follow up gets more attention. The building of the show in such a way that social follow up makes sense gets more attention. You know, speaking in front of audiences, writing books, getting interviews, all these things get more attention than the directories do. Because, you know, gosh darn it, the directories don't matter. And that's it. You know, I'm producing the content that my audience wants. I'm getting it out there and I'm letting the places that my audience spends time at know about my content that happens to be available by podcast. If I instead just push this fact that I got a podcast about X, I wouldn't be doing as well and I wouldn't be seeing the audience I'm seeing here. And I tell you to do the same thing. Go to itunes, look at the top podcasts. Why are they doing so well? Is it people looking for podcasts or is it content that people love? You can do the exact same thing. Now, I know I'm going to upset some people here and I'd love some dialogue and thought about this. Twitter, if you want to comment, we're at Podcast rpt. That's Podcast rpt. The podcast report was just too many letters for Twitter. You can go to facebook.com thepodcastreport if you want to chat about it there. Or you can just hit the podcast report. 1 9. What I did there is I've got this information, I've got the quote and I've got the tweet this. But I also started a thread over at the podcast community at Google about this topic and I asked them where they spend the focus of their attention. We'll see what happens. I think it'll be interesting to see what the response is. And of course you can head out to thepodcastreport.com 19 to comment there as well. If you would like the mind map and the transcript for this episode, go ahead and text Ep. 19 as in episode 19 to 503-89-71290. You can also call that number and specifically request the transcripts from episode 19 or leave a voicemail message. It's fun to have voicemail messages. It's fun to add other people to the podcast you heard at the beginning of this. But please do subscribe to the podcast. A lot of people don't understand fully that the power of podcasting is not that look, Paul, put some media online, but that you can subscribe to that media online. And that every time I've got a new episode. For those of you interested in podcasting, that comes to you. I don't care if you subscribe on itunes. I don't care if you subscribe on Stitcher. Tune in wherever you are, but subscribe. Make it easier on yourself. If you like this, you want more. If you don't like this, let's be honest, you wouldn't have listened as far in this as you would have logistics. You can listen to the show at the podcast report slash itunes, the podcast report slash Stitcher, the podcast report Pocketcast, Tunein slash Overcast. I'm not on Soundcloud yet. Still cracking that nut. I should have some thoughts there soon. But definitely, definitely do subscribe next episode. I'm not going to tell you yet. It's a fun one, but you're going to want to subscribe and get get it now. I am on October 21, 4pm Pacific and if you've listened to this after that time. Oh well, that happens. But I'm doing a live podcast recording. I'm taking what I learned from the episode with Dave Jackson on Spreaker and I'm giving an attempt at rebooting re looking@askpaulcolligan.com and if that if you're around for that, it'd be fun to have your thoughts and interest there. That'll be a live recording of a podcast, something that will explain explore on future episodes. That's it. I gave you social, I gave you the phone number. If you want to email me, it's the podcastreportoutlook.com if you want to make a comment. We monitor all this stuff because we think all of this stuff is important. Thank you so much. Podcast directories are just the modern version of the phone book. They're there, but they don't matter. Your podcast deserves more and you deserve to give it more. Thank you so much. Talk to you next week. Bye.