What Do The Changes To The iOS 11 Podcasts App Mean To Podcasters? - The Podcast Report

Focus on what these have and you will provide a better experience for your audience. And remember, it's not just the audience that's listening today, but it's the audience that's coming in the future. This is going to become the new standard. Your job isn't to get people to listen to podcasts better. Your job is to provide a better podcast consumption experience. And that is exactly what Apple is doing here. You are listening to the Podcast Report with Paul Colligan. Here's Paul what do the changes to the Apple Podcasts app mean to podcasters? It's the podcast report episode 130. It's also episode one of season five, show notes, links, conversation and more@thepodcastreport.com 130 a lot has happened since we last chatted here to catch up quickly before the content podcast movement 2017 happened. Fantastic. Looking forward to 2018. If you're going to be there, let's make sure we meet. IOS 11 is out. The iPhone X is out. The new podcast app is out. The Apple Watch 3 lets me make phone calls with my watch. They're out. We'll be chatting about the podcast app episode. On this one we'll be talking about other things from Apple and in future ones. And don't worry, they're not the only ones with cool new tech. But some great stuff came out this year. Launching a new website. Actually, it's launched thepodcastreport.com looks a lot different than it used to. This is a template for other projects we're going to be doing. There's a lot there that you might want to take a look at. Head out to the podcastreport.com, you'll see it. If you head out to the podcastreport.com 130, you will see the giveaway for today's episode and the beginning of another product that we are working on for profitable podcasters like you. We are back. This should be weekly. The season should go a while. We'll be chatting about that in future episodes. We'll have some fun there. Got a new production team. I used to do this podcast all myself. I no longer do that. You'll be hearing about that soon. But before we go any further, it's the tip of the week. Today's podcast tip is simple. Tell your audience to subscribe. Smart podcasters, though in the know, know that podcasting is about subscriptions and the best audience comes from subscribers. But your audience might not know. Your audience might not realize that they can have you sent to them automatically. When the show is released spam free, and you need to be there to tell them. So much of the podcasting space, sadly, is head out to my website, Click Play. Go to itunes. Click play. Nah, subscribe is the power. And if you tell your audience subscribe, you'll have a better audience, you'll have a better served audience, you'll have a bigger audience and you will help do more for podcasting. So tell your audience to subscribe. So Apple made some huge changes to the podcast app with the release of iOS 11. It didn't get the attention, the changes didn't get the attention it deserved. I was actually even surprised that at podcast movement, more wasn't made of it. But it's tremendous. Huge. And it's what I want to chat about in this episode now, when the announcements were made and when the changes were, you know, way back in the beta stages, I made a document for all of my clients on the changes and what they meant and sort of how they can, what they can think about it, what they can do, how they can act. And I decided to make that document available to you. So if you want to head to the podcastreport.com 130, you can opt in and grab that document. It's just the big ideas discussed here, but it's the type of thing that you want to print off, put on your wall and take action on pretty soon. So the big issues, and we'll hit them pretty quickly, is there are podcast seasons now, there's stats from Apple coming at least at the time of this recording. There's a show type that changes the game. There's an episode type that will help in a bunch of areas. There's a best of the podcast option that you want to think about when marketing and programming your show. All of these together become really, really important. So again, if you want to get a worksheet of all these. Thepodcastreport.com 130 but let's chat about these. The first thing is podcast seasons. I could not be happier about this issue. Seasons have been around for a long time in podcasting. I think one of the biggest or one of the biggest names to sort of make a big deal out of them was Michael Hyatt. And he did 100 episodes of season one and then changed his whole model, went from audio to video and did a whole bunch of things with season two. And I'll put a link to Michael Hyatt in the show notes. But the thing about seasons that has been so powerful, even before Apple supported it was the idea of getting a bit thematic about your show. There are a lot of people who get up in the morning on a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Monday or a Saturday, and they think, oh, crap, I got to get another episode out. And we know those shows, we feel those shows. We've listened to those shows. We've stopped many of those shows in progress. If you build your podcast as a season, it changes the game because now you can think, well, if I'm talking about underwater basket weaving and I want to think about the eight things they need to know about the type of material that you use in basket weaving. That might be season one. And now you got eight episodes, you outline it, you go from there. Season two might be breathing techniques, there might be seven breathing techniques. So you do season two of seven episodes, and then number three might be social media tips for underwater basket weavers or whatnot. But the fact of the matter is, it's a great way to just kind of put your show together. And then as you send your audience, you can say, hey, we chatted about that heavily in season two, and they can go out to season two now. In the old days before all this happened, we basically just called the seasons off. And, you know, this is the start of season five. When I declared the end of season four in the last episode, it just was what it was. Well, now that we can define shows as being seasons, you see those results in itunes. As a matter of fact, if you go to itunes and you look up this show, you'll see, especially if you get it right when it came out, you'll see it's the first episode of season five. The season four stuff will be listed below it. Season three after that, etc, etc. It's just a fantastic way to chunk together your podcast content. So many of us have looked at itunes and just seen 300 episodes. And what do I do with that? Well, chopping up in seasons is great. Now, knowing that Apple will support this is fantastic. There has been rumors that there will be soon click to download options where you can say, grab all season two with a click for a road trip or that type of thing. Anyway, it's there. Podcasters have been doing it for a while. It's now supported, it's shown in the results, it's shown in search, and it's something that you really want to take advantage of. That's podcast seasons. Now, the second thing that's really key, and this is not out yet at the time of recording, but it's coming imminently, probably it'll come 30 seconds or so after I release it. I'll tell you in a future episode when it's up. But Apple now is going to start giving us stats, better stats than we've ever had before. In the past, we basically had to guess isn't the right word. We've been able to. We've been required to take our download stats and get the most that we can from there. Now, the nature of podcasting, the nature of an MP3 download, is that, you know, it's pretty much an all or nothing situation. We don't know how far they listened, we don't know how many subscribed, how many download, how many streamed. We don't know these things. And Apple is going to give that to us now. We're going to know for every visit to the homepage how many people ended up subscribing to the show. If you've listened to the show for any time at all, you know how important subscriptions are. You're gonna know how many people streamed, you know how many people download. This is gonna be interesting. The implications of stats are huge. Now, a couple things to think about when it comes to stats. Number one, they will only be Apple stats. You're not gonna get stats from other places because this is just what itunes is gonna report to you. And whereas Apple is, you know, a good chunk of your audience, it's not going to be the entirety of your audience. So don't think that that's the whole picture. But you're going to start to see trends as they give you things like how long people listen. You know, if the majority of your audience drops off at about 30 minutes in an hour long podcast, you know, it's a pretty good bet that they're going to be doing that in Google and Stitcher and these things as well. These stats from Apple are huge. Start thinking about it, start deciding what you'll do about it. Be willing to make a change. And maybe that's when you go back to the season. Maybe if your show has been an hour long and everybody drops off at 15 minutes, you know, maybe that jump from season one to season two is the time. But this is going to be huge. You're not going to get email addresses, you're not going to get names, but you're going to get a lot more than you've ever had before. And to put this into perspective, a YouTube guru friend of mine that I was talking this through said, you know, and I quote, man, you're going to have more stats than we do use these stats, realize they're only Apple, they're coming very soon. The third thing on the list, and I love this one and I'm almost ready to launch a new podcast just because of it. But we're going to be able to have show types. Now, a lot of people know this by default. A lot of people haven't considered necessarily the implications. But podcasts play when you subscribe the most recent episode. One of the reasons why I tell Scream from the Mountains that when you launch, you don't want to launch with 10 episodes because they'll download episode 10 and they're going to do what they do by default. And yes, they can click to download episode 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, but they don't. The average audience click, subscribe and listens to the podcast that's delivered to them. And that's okay on a news type of podcast. I don't even necessarily know here in the podcast report if I would want you necessarily to start from episode one. But there are serial types of shows. Obviously the serial podcast, which was huge, which was a storytelling show, but there are shows that you want your audience to go in a specific order. And you can now set that inside of itunes. You can say, okay, I want you to start with episode one, then episode two, episode three. Or you can start. Have them start with the most recent episode. The big thing is that you're in control. And the best example that I can think of in explaining this is basically you're a lot more like audible. Now, if you combine this show type with the seasons and the ordering, you can now tell a narrative story. And that could be a narrative story in storytelling, like serial, or that could be a narrative story in training and in programming. And some of the things that I do here on the podcast, maybe we'll make season six all about SEO and season seven all about the opt in process or that type of thing. We can do that now. So you can set your show for episodic or you can set it for serial and you can be more like audible. Another thing inside running now is episode types. We have in the past basically had episodes, and that's fine and that's dandy. But now we've got three kinds of episodes that are really interesting. We have the full episode and this episode today, what you're listening to right now was saved as a full episode. And most people will normally do full episodes, but you have two others. You have a trailer episode, just like trailers in the movie theaters. You can release a trailer episode. And this Might be a really interesting way to keep your fans happy between episodes. This might be a way to take an extended hiatus like what I obviously took with the show this time, and keep the fans in the loop, get them excited about what's coming. But then the last one, and this is new, and it's funny because a lot of you have not treated it as new, but really is it's the bonus episode. Now, a lot of people have just thrown in a bonus episode between major episodes, but the problem is they've always been treated the same way. Now, knowing that bonus episodes are truly bonus episodes, it becomes interesting. The best practices aren't there yet. We'll be examining these. But being able to tightlier define your podcast experience, the series, the type of show, the type of episode, all of this is exciting. Now I have received a ton of social and email from you and many of my clients saying, how do I set this up? Most of the podcasting platforms now have this in play. If they don't run away from them, Libsyn does. Libsyn was one of the first. That's where I put all my stuff. That's where I put all my clients stuff. But most everybody has it now and if your host doesn't run away, that's really the only way to put it. So seasons, stats, show types, episode types, four very big ones. Now there's another one that has gotten no press, has gotten no attention, but is really interesting. And that is the concept of the Best of the podcast. If you search shows right now inside of iTunes on the iOS device. And again, this is the iOS app, not iTunes on the desktop. But if you search on the iOS app, there's this idea of the Best of the podcast. And they pick an episode and they decide that that episode is the best of the podcast. And why they decide that, I don't necessarily know what the reason is that they decide that I don't necessarily know, but it's there. And this is interesting because I'm going to search right now, I'm going to search all podcasts for the podcast report. Calligan. So looking inside the podcast report, inside of the podcast app on my iPhone right now, I see season four, I see the past episodes and that's fantastic and that's good. But what's interesting is down at the bottom it says the Best of the Podcast. And for some reason it picks my March 16, 2015 episode. What kind of podcast are you making? Episode 37. And it picked does video make sense for the audio podcast episode number 38 why it picked those, I don't know. It's already changed. There was a previous episode, the one I did with Brian Kurtz was showing up in Best of Podcast earlier to that. So we don't know what Apple is doing but that Best of the Podcast is going to show up. My guess, it's going to be top downloads, it's going to be top reviews. It might be some of the stats they're looking at at how far down people listen. There's going to be some testing that needs to happen and you know, we'll probably get you some information later episodes. But realize now that you're going to have some best of episodes that popping up in itunes. Realize that people are going to be going back to your history and finding things. So don't create an episode that was only good the third week of June 2015. Have a means and a mechanism inside of your podcast to bring people back into the fold. Interesting stuff. Keep your eye on this one. It's going to be huge. So again, to review quickly. Podcast seasons a lot of us have been doing it sort of haphazardly, sort of in name only. It's now part of the system and it's pretty fantastic. Stats from Apple, tracking how far they listened, how many subscribed, how many download, how many streamed, all the stats. We've been wanting to make really good decisions. We'll definitely be doing a future episode about that. And if you're listening to this, you know, in the past, head out to the podcastreport.com and see what we've said about stats show type. Letting your audience download the podcast in the order that you'd like them to and not needing them to have the knowledge of how all this comes together is fantastic. Allows you to be more like audible the episode type. Now you can play with bonuses in between major episodes. You can do traders to keep the fans happy. Again, it's a better situation. And then the best of the podcast treating your podcast like a media entity that it really is really, really exciting. Now again, if you head out to the podcastreport.com 130 you can grab the download that I gave my clients that has these put these up on the wall, figure out what they mean to you and when this is all over I'll give you all the social media directions for how to contact. But please do. We'd love to continue this conversation and especially if you just went to the podcastreport.com 130 tell me how you were going to use these will be interesting but this is important. You're not your client. You might not be interested in this. You might think, oh, it's just extrovert. Who needs tags? I just want to serve my audience. Do these tags, set these things up, focus on what these have, and you will provide a better experience for your audience. And remember, it's not just the audience that's listening today, but it's the audience that's coming in the future. These will become the expectation. People will want to download a season. People will want to get bonuses. There will be those who don't want to get bonuses. They just want to get the main stuff and traders. This is going to become the new standard. And if you jump in now to do it, you're going to be at a good place. Your job isn't to get people to listen to podcasts better. Your job is to provide a better podcast consumption experience. And that is exactly what Apple is doing here. So that's the review. That's what's going on. You can grab the worksheet@the podcastreport.com 130. My clients have done a lot with it. I hope you do the same. Wow. We're done. Thanks for listening. It's good to be back. If you don't think this issue of the changes in the podcast app are a big deal, you don't understand the numbers of podcasting. Consider grabbing the worksheet. Make sure that you utilize, make use of, have an answer for, have a strategy for everything that we chatted about. If you do, head out to the podcastreport.com 130 and pick up the worksheet I gave to my clients. That's probably a good idea as well. We love the social interaction here at The Podcast Report ThePodcastReport.com Facebook ThePodcastReport.com Twitter ThePodcastReport.com InsertSocial Platform of your choice. We'd love to hear from you. Love to give you the chance to interact with other listeners of the show. Another thing we'd love to have you do is simply subscribe to the show, if you know what that means. Great. Head out to the podcatcher of your choice and subscribe to the show. If you don't know what that means. Basically, all the big programs, itunes, Google, Stitcher, all of these platforms give you the ability to subscribe to the show like you'd subscribe to a magazine or a newspaper. And then the minute a new episode comes out, it comes to you automatically. 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