Here's Why - The Podcast Report With Paul Colligan Episode #28

Hey, Paul, how come you're doing that thing? Well, here's why. It's the podcast episode number 28. Show hotline is 503-897-1290. It's the podcast Report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. Hey, it's Paul. It's the Podcast Report. Welcome back. It is 2015. Man, this has been fun. A lot of things have happened since we last visited together and I will chat about some of them here and some of them in future episodes. But this is episode 28 of the podcast Report. You can find the show notes and everything you need at www.thepodcastreport.com 2 8. The show hotline is 503-897-1290. The Big Idea for today's episode, even though I'm going to be answering a number of your questions, is simple. If you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, you actually might want to stop. All right, what is the podcasting report? My name is Paul Kolig and I'm the seven time internationally best selling authority. Books like the business podcasting Bible, Podcast Strategies, how to Podcast coming out very soon. I've been part of podcasting since the beginning. I love this industry. I've loved it since day one. And I'm thrilled to offer this as my gift to the community. I have two audiences for the show, the Podcaster. A number of podcasters listen to this. Thank you. Appreciate it. You've told me how this has made your show better, given you more attention, focus, that kind of stuff. That's great. But what's really exciting to me, especially now in 2015, is there's a whole audience of people thinking about getting into podcasting. People who realize that it's more than what microphone do I use or that type of nonsense. It's people who are ready to take action, get to business, and that's what this is for. This is not a massive play, but this is a deep play. So welcome to the Podcast Report. Today's topic, I'm calling this episode. Here's why. Why this topic? Well, there's been a lot of emails. There's been a lot of social contacts. There's been a lot of different questions about why I'm doing some of the things I'm doing in side of the podcast report. And since I've tried to be as transparent as possible, try to be as open book as possible, I thought we'd start the new year out with kind of why I'm doing what I'm doing to maybe encourage you to kind of question why you're doing what you're doing and maybe change things if you need to and go at it strategically. So that's what we're doing there. There is a method to my madness, and I love to share it, and I don't get a chance enough to share it. So that's what I want to do on this episode. In addition, I would love to start a dialogue. So what I'm doing is not what everybody else is doing. How I'm doing it is not how everybody else is doing it. If you'd like to comment, I would love that. If you visit the podcastreport.com28 go ahead and make comments right there on the website. If you want to follow me at Twitter, my personal Twitter is Oligan, but this particular show is hepodcastrpt. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get the full podcast report over at Twitter there. You can head out to the podcastreport.com to links for all the social stuff, but let's start a dialogue. All right, so before we do that, two things happened since we last got together, and they have been really, really, really cool. Number one, and you can see this@the podcastreport.com I am now featured at iHeartRadio. This episode, this show is now available at iHeartRadio. As a matter of fact, some of you are listening to this right now at iHeartRadio, and you're going, well, of course it's @iHeartRadio. Why wouldn't it be there? Well, the fact of the matter is, not all podcasts are at iHeartradio. Now, what has this done for my audience? What has this done for my numbers? Well, I'll tell you this right now. Limited downloads. We'll explore this in a future episode when I do some more promotion, that type of thing. But I'm at iheartradio and there's a certain audience, there's a certain segment that is going to be impressed by that. Now, a number of you have asked, Paul, why are you doing Spreaker embeds of all the things you're embedding on your website? I could see you doing Libsyn. I could see doing Stitcher, but why Spreaker? Well, I did Spreaker because of the iHeartRadio connection. And some of you are going, oh, wow, that's why he did it. Some of you are going, what the heck is he talking about? If you head out to episode 10 of the podcast report, thepodcastreport.com 10 have a full interview there with Dave Jackson for the School of Podcasting. Thank you, Dave. It worked. You're a good man. Far better than I deserve. Anyway, I'm @iheartradio, the connection speaker. We spell it all out, what this means numbers. I'll let you know soon. I'm loving the cachet. And we'll go from there. So that's number one, number two, and this one's hilarious positioning from Apple. There is actually a link now at Apple for how to podcast. It has a number of shows. It has Dave's School of Podcasting in there. It's got a bunch of shows. But what's interesting is they put the podcast report in there as well, which is amazing. I'm honored. Well, Paul, that must be shooting your downloads through the roof. No, best I can tell, and of course, the whole world of podcast Statistics is maybe 15 to 20 more downloads a day. Part of it is that of course, I don't have any new episodes that have come out and that type of thing. So I don't have the best metrics, but it's not producing a huge bump. And the funny thing is I've gotten contacts and people who go, yeah, I'm a podcaster. I found you inside of itunes and I've joined it. But there's. There's just not a lot there. Now, if that's all Apple can send to me, 15, 20 more a day by. By highlighting me. Boy, that's not enough for me, and it should be enough for you. And you got to look at other ways to promote yourself. We've chat about that on future episodes, but that's there. But Two cool things. IHeartRadio, positioning from Apple. I've got links to both of these things if you want to take a look@thepodcastreport.com 2 8. But let's get to the meat of this. The here's why part. All right, here's what I'm doing. A couple of things. First one is the Spreaker inbreds. I've gotten social and email from a number of you. Why are you doing Spreaker? What in the world do they bring? Do you like them? Spreaker is an interesting player. There's some things I really like about them. There's some things I really don't like about them. But of course, the big thing, and again, we did this on episode 10, was just the connection with iHeartRadio. The idea now that I have distribution on an app that My mom has heard of. Not that my mom would listen to the show, but it just helps get me out there. And part of the process was, well, Spreaker, seeing that I'm serious and any downloads I could get from Spreaker, and by doing the embeds that will help, I'll probably change it up. I will probably go back to probably Stitcher. And I want you to think about that because it's a really important issue. What embeds matter. Pretty much everybody embeds at their website. But the fact of the matter is those stats don't count towards itunes, certainly. And if you're having them, just download straight from your file, from your storage, really the only thing you got is the storage numbers there. But if you do something like Stitcher, or you do something like SoundCloud, or you do something even like Spreaker, at least those downloads will count to your numbers. There's and might help bring things out. So definitely one question you want to ask yourself is what embeds are you doing and how does that benefit you? And it's not going to be the hosting company, per se, unless you've got some crazy download payment plan that's happening, which doesn't exist. So I know that's not real. All right. That's why we're doing the Spreaker embeds. Second thing I've done, some of you have noticed this specifically, some of you have asked what it is that I've done. I've moved to Tumblr for my website. Yes, I've moved to Tumblr. Now, the past episodes we chatted about, does your podcast need a website? We're going to re explore that in a future episode. I've got a really interesting metric that we want to take a look at. But the fact of the matter is I went to Tumblr for a number of reasons. Number one, I'm going to put in some automation. Publishing the podcast has to be automated. Tumblr's got some great possibilities there. We're going to examine that in future episodes. The metric thing I spoke to, we'll probably do in next week's episode if we don't do the week after that. Here's the deal. I'm a podcaster, I'm a content creator. I don't need to worry about keeping my website up, or I don't need to worry about keeping it, you know, hack free and all that kind of stuff. I like someone else doing that for me. The mobile Tumblr does is nice. The automation that Tumblr does is nice. The interface that Tumblr does is nice. It's not perfect yet. At the time of this recording, actually search didn't work, which is really annoying. But I moved to Tumblr because, gosh darn it, it's working for me and it's serving my content for me. All right, next thing, I'm doing the Riff strategy. Some of you have noticed this, some of you have asked about this. What's the big idea here? Some of you have seen on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. I've got kind of the thought, the big idea of the show I introduced in today's episode, that if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, you might want to stop. That's the riff for today's show. What I'm doing is I'm getting those designed in a social media friendly graphic format and then doing distribution of the concept with a shortened link URL to today's episode. So for instance, you will see and some of you maybe came as a result of that, and if you did, did come as a result of that, that would be fascinating. Please comment on the website appropriately. But you know, somebody in Twitter, somebody in Instagram, somebody in Facebook, somebody in Pinterest is going to see an attractive square graphic that says, if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, dash, you might want to stop. And then down at the bottom, thepodcastreport.com 28. I'm doing the riff strategy to introduce myself and my content to a non audio audience. People who are looking for audio are finding me, but people who aren't looking for audio, who are looking for other things, this is a way for them to find me. And it's also really interesting metric to see what gets passed along. Some of my Instagrams have gotten a bunch of likes, some have gotten zeros, some things have gotten passed on a bunch, some haven't. And it's interesting to see which ideas resonate with my audience. And so that's part of it. I'm going to be integrating the riffs into Tumblr as well because it only makes sense for me to do that. But that's why I'm doing the riff strategy. Do I design them? No, of course I don't. I've got an assistant that does that. You know, do I got the publishing and that kind of stuff? No, that all goes out automatic. Some of the themes that we're chatting about here, so that's spreaker Tumblr riffs. The next strategy is the Kindle strategy. Now, a lot of podcasters, they take their transcripts and they make their transcripts available right at their blog. They do it as SEO fodder, you know, spider food, for lack of better term. That is a fascinating strategy in my opinion. SEO is getting less and less important. Social is getting more and more important. I'm not doing it for that reason. But right now, if you go to Amazon and you search the podcast report, you'll see a Kindle book that is 9.99. That is the transcripts from the first 15 episodes. Now, this is episode number 28. So obviously the one with the next 15 episodes should be coming soon. It's going to be a little bit delayed because we've got the podcast book coming out, which I want to chat about in a second. But what's great is there will be times when, first of all, a bunch of people bought the book. Thank you. If you're doing that as a way to support me, great. If you're doing that, because if you're interested, that brought you into the show, great. I might spoil the excitement for some of you. There will be times when I bring it to a discount. I probably won't ever do it free, but I will do it at 99 cents, when, of course, I have the ability to change all of these things. But when the how to Podcast book is released, I'm going to put this down at 99 cents, maybe get people to buy multiple things from me. The multiple editions part is going to bring me gravitas. When people look to Amazon and they look to my Kindle page and they see, wow, he wrote the business podcasting Bible and he wrote podcast strategies and he wrote how to Podcast, which we'll chat about in a second. And he's got these transcripts, all these books about podcasting. That's the kind of stuff I want. The fact of the matter is, it's very little additional work. I'm performing this podcast right now. I'm doing it as an outline from a mind map. If you want to get a copy of the transcript, by the way, yes, I do give them away for free. If you want to give a copy of the transcript, go ahead and text ep28 as in episode 28, and you'll get the transcript and you'll get the mind map for this episode. So I'm on Kindle because it's so little additional work. Now let's talk about the book strategy I am launching. It's Supposed to come out on February. Actually. I'm going to pull this up on my calendar right here. Looks like the Launch date is February 24th. We've got the big book, how to Podcast. Now, I did a promotion for this earlier and we hit number one in four different countries. We've sold a bunch of the books, which is fun. Next. The part is that we have to deliver it. One of the goals is to use this book, is to bring new people into the fold for this show. I'm certainly going to promote my show in that book. And anybody listening to this, the week this is released won't have come to the show as a result of a book. But the great archiving nature of podcasting is somebody in the future might be listening to this episode going, yeah, I found your book. And that's why I'm listening to this show. And boy, gosh, Paul, if it worked for me, maybe it will work for me. And that's exactly what we're doing with the book that's gonna bring new people into the fold. I'm actually looking to sponsors to give it away for free at industry events, which is something that I'm looking to do. I haven't done it yet. I promise I'll report on that in a future episode if that happens. But it's an interesting idea. I've already hit number one with that. So when this thing goes to the general public, I can put number one on the front cover. And then here's the other cool thing that I'm doing that's really fun. And. And when this releases, this thing is going to have a chock full of bonuses that are going to be worth many more times than the price of the book when this thing comes out. So it's going to become the no brainer. I mean, wow. I'm looking at learning how to podcast book cost me 10 bucks. It comes with $150 worth of bonuses. And this is legitimate stuff. This is stuff that you and I are paying for right now. It's going to be cool and the book strategy is really exciting and it's going to be a ton of fun. See, for me, this kind of goes back to the transcripts, but transcripts are an asset, not SEO fodder. I'm going to use them for my Kindle book. I could add them as bonuses to the book if I wanted to, but that's where we're going there. Think about that. You don't have a podcast. You have a body of content. That body of content deserves to be Distributed in whatever way makes the most sense to your audience. And for some those of you listening right now with earbuds in your ears, that's how it makes most sense to you. But some of you right now are reading the transcript from this, and that's how it makes the most sense to you. And take your body of work, expand it past a podcast, and you'll be at a great place. Next thing is the SoundCloud plan. A number of you have come to me, you know, why aren't you on SoundCloud? All the cool kids are at SoundCloud. Well, the fact of the matter is, number one, the people I trust, metrics wise, are telling me that there's not really a big impact coming from SoundCloud unless you promote SoundCloud. And of course, if you're promoting yourself, you're going to be the impact wherever you promote yourself. So SoundCloud is this amazing entity. I don't see to be anything that fantastic. However, over Christmas break, I finished up a really big consulting contract for a podcaster. And one of the things we did was moved their entire Library over to SoundCloud. And I've been able to use that as a lab. And I've learned a bunch about SoundCloud just from that. We'll probably be moving over. Well, no, sometime this year definitely will be moving over to SoundCloud. I'm almost at a plan, but that's what's there. Finally, the last thing I'm doing this year is I'm definitely looking at live. I'm looking at live audio, which is part of what this iHeartRadio spreaker connection is about. I'm also looking at live through video. You know, YouTube Live is getting more and more interesting. YouTube Live. Actually, I just got my account at YouTube turned on. I can now do a paid channel if I want to. I can now do pay per view if I want to. And so definitely looking at that would be really, really interesting. So that's what I'm looking at doing this year. Again, to recap or why I'm doing what I'm doing again, this episode's called here's why. So I told you why I'm doing the speaker embeds, I told you why I'm doing the Tumblr thing, I told you why I'm doing the riffs, I told you why I'm doing the Kindle thing, why I'm doing the book, why I've delayed on SoundCloud, and why I'm thinking about Live. So what do you do with this? Well, number one, I called this episode. Here's why. I just told you why I'm doing what I'm doing. In the past episodes, I've told you the same. There are a bunch of podcasters who, you know, turned on a Michael Wilde ago and started talking, and they're not necessarily sure why they did that. I want to encourage you, my audience, to just why are you doing what it is that you're doing? I mean, this should lead to this. This should lead to that. If you're doing this because it's going to bring you a bunch of listeners. Is it bringing you a bunch of listeners if you're doing this? Because it's really going to help with the search engines. Is it really helping with the search engines if you're doing this because it's going to bring you more sponsors, is it really bringing you more sponsors? Take a look, examine what you're doing and see if it's worth it. Is there something else you should be doing? Maybe take one of the strategies here. Maybe take a strategy you've seen from another podcaster and do that yourself. That's what you could do with this. So there's your content. I would love your thoughts. Again, I am@twitter odcastrpt. Go ahead and follow that. We're@facebook.com the PodcastReport. The website's definitely up. The PodcastReport.com episode two eight for this one. If you want to call the show hotline 503-897-1290, you can call, leave a message. We love voicemail. You can also text EP28 to that and we will get you the transcripts and the mind map from this episode, which is always a lot of fun. I've got some links up at the website. The podcast report 28, the how to Podcast book link is up. The episode where we chatted about you in the book, I don't think at this point we could probably squeeze anybody in the initial release, but definitely some bonus issues there. That was episode 26 of the show. You can go ahead and listen to that. I've got a link to that as well, a link to iHeartRadio so you can see what that looks like. And a link to itunes is definitely there. Next episode, we're gonna be chatting about a new metric for podcasting. It's probably what I'm gonna do next episode. I won't force myself into that, but that's what we're looking at. Viewer voicemail. Don't have any for you to listen to right now. But if you want to call in again, the show hotline is 503-897-1290. Would love to have you call in and chat there. You can listen to this show. You can subscribe to this show. You of this show. One of the benefits of podcasting friends is not this one off thing, it's not this embed thing, but this thing that the content comes every week on a regular basis. Thepodcastreport.com iTunes if you are a iOS user, Stitcher if you want to go that way, pocketcast if you want to do that, tunein if you're one of those Windows phone typesreaker, iHeartRadio, Overcast and eventually, as I promise very soon, SoundCloud. All right, this is the PodcastReport.com our email address is the PodcastReportLook.com if you want to do an ID for the show and send that to me, we'll add it. Check us out Twitter, Facebook review at itunes if you'd like. With that said and done, I will let you go. Thank you so much. Chat with you next week. Bye.