Skype Cloud Recording Just Released - The Podcast Report SPECIAL EPISODE

If you have no plan for podcast discovery, do not complain if your podcast is not discovered. It's the podcast report. Episode 150 show notes, links, conversation and more@the podcastreport.com 150. Yes, this is the episode about Pandora. I'm finally doing it. I've been excited to do this for a while. I have been saying episode after episode, blog post after blog post, book after book, that as podcasting progresses, the organizations like Pandora that have already made the connection between devices connected to the Internet that bring us music, they will be bringing us podcasts as well. We are at a really good place. Paul, why does this matter in the grand scheme of things? Well, those who know about your show have already found you. This is what we chatted about in the Google episode. A couple of episodes ago, Google users were not listening to your show because Google didn't have an official app. There were other apps. People who know you exist, people who are looking for you, people who, who want more information from you are either listening to your show or have made a decision not to listen to your show. But what about those people who don't know that you exist? What about those people who have not heard your message? Where do they find you? Yeah, now we know that there are strategies you get on other shows, like minded shows. We've chatted about that in the past. You get press. We've chatted about that in the past. I've got several clients who speak on very big stages who when they say something sly like, oh yeah, we cover that in depth on my podcast. When they do that, a bunch of people pull out their phones immediately and subscribe to their show. They get an audience that way. But how does someone discover you? That's what I think Pandora can bring to the table. And I want to chat about that. This is a special one off episode of the podcast report. Season six is rare enough, wants to get out soon, but I just wanted to get this episode out even before that. And music's going to be different. Voiceover is going to be different. It's, it's really a special episode. It's neat that we got this on episode 150. I'll probably make this the last episode of season five. We'll play with that itunes tag that lets you say it's a bonus episode. We'll do that. But. Well, I'm not going to give the entirety of this episode to those who are listening to it on all the traditional places. I'll tell you right now, the entirety of this episode is Only going to be available in the podcast app or podcast option at Pandora. If you want to skip to the ending of this, you can head out to the podcastreport.com Pandora and that will redirect you to the podcast report. Get this at Pandora. If you go to Pandora and you click the Collect button, that will bring this podcast into your collection. And pick some other podcasts as well, but definitely pick mine. Would love to have those numbers. Would love to have the bump that comes from that. And that's why I'm making the entirety of this episode only available on Pandora. But we'll get the setup and you can decide here if you want to keep listening. If you want to know why I think Pandora is so important, I'll tell you. It's a lot of things. First thing, we want to follow the money. It's really interesting. I don't know if you know this or not, but Pandora was recently acquired by Sirius xm. The satellite people. These satellite people have had a lot of money and have been focusing a lot on the bringing content to people. Not through traditional terrestrial. Right now they have been focusing or in the past they've been focusing strongly on those satellite. But you know what? They bought Pandora. Why? Because people who are at Pandora know that I'm not limited to my local radio station. I'm not limited to what is within my broadcast reach. There's a whole Internet out there. As a matter of fact, I can just tell Pandora what it is that I want and Pandora can bring it to me. Then I can give Pandora a thumbs up or a thumbs down and then they can give me more of what I like and less of what I don't like. Oh my goodness. This is the greatest podcasting option ever. Follow the money. First, follow the size more Pandora users in North America regular than there are podcast listeners regular. What? Yes, Pandora has done a better job. Now part of it is again, when you go to the Follow the money, Pandora has been able to put in ads and make money off of this, which we'll chat about in a second discovery. Pandora has an engine where you can say, I like 80s music, I like hair bands, you know, I like country, female singers with a sultry voice. Whatever it is you say that you like, then Pandora brings it to you. Oh my goodness, Paul, wait a minute. Could people say that they like podcasts in my topic and then Pandora brings me to that person? Yes. This is a potential new audience and this isn't the Google promise of people looking for information are suddenly going to subscribe to your show. They might. That's interesting. Play with that. But this is a demographic of people who are already listening to audio, already picking what they want, already giving the thumbs up or the thumbs down. Now bringing them you. The other thing that's really interesting about this Pandora thing is that we now realize we're everywhere. We're on Apple, we're on Google, we're on Amazon, we're on Spotify, we're on Pandora. Now we can truly say, listen to this show, follow this show, collect this show. We'll chat about that in a second. Wherever you listen to audio. So now this is where I'm going to do it. If you want to listen to the rest of this conversation, I'm going to have you head over to podcastreport.com Pandora I want you to click the collect button. That is the way Pandora, at least at the time of this recording, is telling people how to subscribe and it makes sense. Click to put into a collection and once you do that, you'll be able to listen to the rest of this episode. You can jump ahead and we will have a great time. Yes, I am doing this to get more subscribers and followers on Pandora. It is a strategy that I absolutely, completely and totally recommend that you use. But regardless, if you want to hear the whole thoughts and Pandora on Pandora and what all this means, you got to head out to the podcastreport.com Pandora. Welcome back, Pandora listeners. This is so cool. All right, so now we've got a podcast episode that is only on Pandora and you, the Pandora, are the only person who's listening to this. You're not getting to see if you're on the Apple system, if you're on the Google system, if you're on the Spotify, whatever it is, you're getting this only because you're at Pandora, which is I like this. Now, I want to stress that this is different than other podcast directory announcements. This isn't just another place where your show can be found. This is your show being found in a place where people are looking to discover new content. There's been this great debate, does podcasting have a discoverability problem? I don't care. But the fact of the matter is here's a chance for your content to get discovered. This really, really makes me excited. And again, we chatted about the numbers in the earlier part of this. The fact of the matter is Pandora's got a huge reach. They've got money to spend, They've got a proven revenue model. It's all there. Let's do something really, really cool with this. So the podcast partnership, we're doing a couple of things with our clients and I want to share them with you because nothing's proven. This is really early. Pandora brought in a couple of shows. They were nice enough to bring in mine. They have opened up the submission process, sort of. If you are at Libsyn, you can email robson.com to get that destination open. I just don't know how the other platforms are doing at this point, and that is my bad. That is not necessarily a despairing comment towards the other podcasting hosts. But Pandora has a destination on Libsyn. That's what we're using and that's the setup there. But we are directing people to Pandora to listen, to bring up those numbers. Because the fact of the matter is, let's face it, this is going to be an algorithm. And if people go to Pandora and they say they want to listen to podcasts about podcasting, I want them to come to this show. I want them to find this show. So this little trick where I'm getting you to come over to listen to the whole podcast here, that's part of it. We're going to be doing the same thing with our clients. We're going to direct people there. But it is. Yeah, that's obvious. Go on to the next step. We're getting a few of our clients to consume on Pandora. I know others will be doing the same thing, looking at the stats, looking at the consumption, looking what this does, how this brings you up, how this does different things in the stats. That's all to be followed. We're looking at commercials. Pandora allows local sandwich shop here in town to advertise on Pandora. Are they going to allow me to advertise my podcast on Pandora? That's really, really interesting. And then the last thing we're doing, and we've been doing this for a while, largely because we knew this was coming and it's really important. But we're calling it the igedit. The igedit. And that stands for instant gratification. And here's the thing. In Pandora, you might hear a couple of bars of a song and you know instantly, yes, this is a song I like or this is a song I hate. Pandora has taught very, very quick response time. People make a decision really, really quickly. The thumbs up, the thumbs down is in their car as they're driving or on their phone as they're running, or I'm sure people probably figured out how to tap it into their earpods. The fact of the matter is they need to know what your show's about really, really quickly. Does your show quickly get to the heart of the matter? If you rewind at the beginning of this, you know, I chatted, I said, if you have no plan for podcast disc, complain if your podcast isn't discovered. I have made this episode specifically about podcast discovery, a huge issue for podcasters, and now they know exactly what they're going to get in this episode. A few seconds later, I mentioned that it was the Pandora episode and then I went into the content, but bam, we are cutting everything so that there is that hook, there's that instant gratification. There is that moment where you know exactly what the show is about. If your show has been one of those shows that kind of introduces who you are and what you do, and even if you don't have commercial, if you cannot get to the point very, very quickly, they're going to give it the thumbs down because these are people who like to get to the point. These are people who are used to that. So we're directing people there. We did that in this episode. We're doing the instant gratification, the IG edit. We're getting a group of people to consume on Pandora to figure out what's going on, how it works, that type of thing. And we're going to be looking into commercials. We are doing that for our clients. I would recommend you think about all four of these things. Now, some more elements is we've obviously submitted to everybody. Pandora, we've gotten that through. That's already set up through Libsyn. And again, wherever you need to submit, go ahead and do that. We're doing some deeper research. I'm sure this will be not the last episode where we check about, chat about podcasting. We've got a little bit of our secret sauce in the mix of all this. There's some stuff behind the scenes that I'm going to save only for the client base. But there's more than enough content here. To give you one thing, though, that happened internally that's a lot of fun is with the announcement of Pandora, our top 10 list, which has not changed in a while, changed. Pandora quickly got into our top 10 list. Now, what's our top 10 list? We recommend 10 directories that all of our clients get into. We recommend that you focus on the top 10, then don't worry about the rest, worry about the content. And, well, if you want to copy that list, you can text Top 10, Top 10 or Top 10 to the show. Hotline at 503-966-8066. You can see the rest of those. That's the worksheet we hand out to our clients. But Pandora, we're already seeing better numbers for this show, even though this show hasn't had a new episode since this whole Pandora thing happened. So, yes, these are people finding me on Pandora already. This is going to quickly kick some others. Well, it kicked. I won't tell you who it kicked down, but you can take a look at the list again. That's 503-966-8066 text top 10. You can either spell that out or give the numbers. Okay. We don't know a number of things and this is important. We don't know what Pandora is going to do. Pandora could do commercials. Could not do commercials. Pandora could have a ranking system. Could not have a ranking system. They could stay with this idea of collect, or they could say subscribe, or they could. We're in the early game of this. We don't know what they're going to do and we got to follow it. And if you stay subscribed to the podcast report, preferably on Pandora at this point, to be honest, if you stay subscribed to the podcast report, we'll make sure to follow up with you and let you know exactly what it is that they're doing once we figure it out. Number two, this is really big. We don't know how much money Pandora is going to spend on marketing this. Now, you have to remember that every time Pandora plays a Britney Spears song, a Van Halen song, a Beethoven song, they have to pay these record holders royalties. When they play my podcast, they don't have to. When they play your podcast, they don't have to. So it could be very strategic for Pandora to spend some marketing money on this. For them to take their ads that the unsold, of course, but for them to take their ads and promote podcasting and promote this opportunity, we don't know how much money they're going to spend. We don't know how much they're going to market this. We don't know what they're going to do. Spotify went really slow on this. Kind of waited for the podcasting community to act on their behalf. We don't know if what's going to happen. Still interesting to watch, but it's a good idea to try to get in there first. We don't know how to. Other podcasters are going to respond. You know, are all podcasters going to jump on board? Is this Going to be a real feeding frenzy right now. I'm telling you, a lot of podcasters that I've heard, they're kind of like meh. They're kind of like, well, it took Spotify forever. They're kind of like this, they're kind of like that. Well, here, first of all, was chatting with one client, we were looking at his numbers, and, you know, a year later, a third of one of his episodes was coming from Spotify. That particular episode, that specific particular topic worked with that particular demographic on Spotify. And a third, I'll tell you, that's number two with a bullet. And so people are saying meh to Spotify or to Pandora because they were saying meh to Spotify. We really want to think about this. And so there needs to be a. I don't know what the right term is. I'm thinking for here, there needs to be enough podcasters promoting this for it to get really well embraced. And. But here's the thing again. More people using Pandora every month and listening to podcasts. So if they can discover your podcast and they don't necessarily discover your competition's podcast, that's not necessarily such a bad thing. So not knowing how other podcasters are going to respond, there's the good and bad to that. Finally, the last thing, we don't know, and this is huge, we don't know how the Podcast Genome Project stuff will be used. Now, what does that mean? In Pandora, they have this thing called the Music Genome Project, which is basically that thing that allows you to say, hey, I like hair bands, I like jazz music, I like this, I like that. And then it builds the playlists for you. They've got this tech that helps you build the perfect playlist. And I'll tell you, I have radio on Pandora, I have radio on Apple, I had it on Spotify for a little while, I had it on Amazon, I had it on all these devices. And Pandora always got my tastes really well. They've always done a really good job at that. And if they can fine tune that, if they can work on that, inside of the world of podcasting, the potential for this is huge. Now, I've heard a lot of podcasters pooh pooh the idea and say podcasting is too complex or you're not able to rhythmically figure out guitars and that type of thing. Yes, that's absolutely true. But they know more about listener habits and cross referencing other listener habits and how that does than anybody else does. They've been doing it for a long time. They Do a really impressive job at it. So we don't know how the genome project stuff will be used, but we know that they're talking about using it. We know that it's their competitive advantage, and we know that if it does well, it's going to help your podcast get discovered. What we know the big deal here is we know to follow the money. These guys got bought by Sirius, who I don't understand how that organization's still around, you know, but the fact of the matter is they have grabbed Pandora, they have grabbed this vehicle, they have grabbed this paradigm, and they're gonna ride it into whatever is next. Most people that I chat with who don't know what podcasting is, recently I've been asking, do you know what Pandora is? They say, yes. And I tell them the podcasting is going to be on there as well. If Pandora figures out how to make money by putting ads in between podcasts, they figure out how to get more people listening to music because they come in for the podcast category. If they figure out they've got options to make money, they've got options, they've got money behind them. This is something that needs to be followed. And Pandora, call me. I'm willing to at least try to spend some money in your system to figure out what we're going to do with podcasting. It's an interesting space. Follow the money. I'd love to hear from you. This is a shorter episode. This is a bonus episode, but gosh darn it, this is the next step. It's going to be fun to see what happens here. We'll start out season six in 2019. I'll give you my 2019 predictions. We'll take a look at what happened with my 2018 predictions. I did pretty well, but a couple things you could do. Number one, if you. No, not if you. You are listening to this on Pandora. And what would be really cool, what would be really powerful, and what I'd thank you very much for is if you could share it inside of Pandora, Share it on Facebook, share it on social, share it on Twitter, share it with your friends, take the link, post it on Facebook, all that stuff. I would love it if you could do that. I would definitely love it. If you haven't already to click Collect or. Yeah, Collect. That's their subscribe name at the moment. If you want to reach out on social, I'm@the podcastreport.com, twitter, Facebook, Google. But that's kind of dead, isn't it? Boy, that's been interesting. We should chat about that in another episode. I would love the social. The big place are Facebook and Twitter. Instagram as well. Actually we're playing with. We've done some things to greatly increase our Instagram audience and what we'll be sharing in a future episode is once we get to 10,000, I think we can do that pretty easily. I will share with you both how I got to 10,000 and what the results of that whole swipe up thing does inside of stories and whatnot to get more people to come to your podcast. That might be another really interesting discovery place. So let's chat on social. Let's interact about this. If you think I was sleazy only to put this on Pandora, well first of all it worked because you're the only one listening to it and you are on Pandora. So you know, hats off. I won't do this for all of these. It's something I wanted to try on this one. Reach out. Let's chat on social. If you want to email, it's the podcastreportoutlook.com thepodcastreport.com 150 will take you to the page and the show notes for this. This has been fun. 2018 has been fantastic. 2019 is going to be amazing. I'm looking forward to catching up with you and bringing you some tremendous things for you and your shows. Chat with you soon. Bye.