What Will Podcasting Be Like In 10 Years? The Podcast Report Episode 21

What will podcasting be like in 10 years? It's the podcast report show notes today's episode. Thepodcastreport.com 21 it's the podcast report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. Hey, it's Paul Colligan. And this is the podcast report. This is episode number 21. What will podcasting be like in 10 years? The big idea is this is you want to see podcasting's future. You can actually see it right now in your email inbox. Yeah, in 10 years, the podcast is going to feel a lot more like email than anything else. This idea resonates with you. Go ahead and tweet this. If not, wait until the episode ends and you might do the same. All right, before we get to the topic, who am I? What is this? My name is Paul Calligan. I'm the six time bestselling author of the business podcasting bible, the number one top selling podcast strategies and a bunch of other books. I've been inside of podcasting. I've been part of this since the beginning of the. I love the industry, have loved it since day one. Two audiences for the show. The podcaster. If you're a podcaster, welcome. Hopefully I'll point you in the right direction. If you're not yet a podcaster, there are a lot of you, you're thinking about getting into it. This show is for you. This show is free and the show is hopefully no, this show is, gosh darn it, pointing you in the right direction. The show is not a massive play, but it's a deep one. We have a lot of fun with this. So why this topic? Why would I aim to say what podcasting is going to look like in 10 years? Well, a couple of days ago, Todd Cochran, one of the originals, one of the first, he released a thing in his blog about a decade of podcasting. He's been doing it for 10 years. He's had a great time doing it and I've had a great time doing it. And those of us who've been this for a while, we have been having a great time doing. Got me thinking. Well, what has happened the last 10 years? My first episode of this podcast was about what has happened in the last 10 years. Well, what's going to happen in the next 10 years? There's an amazing book right now by a guy named Peter Diamandis called Abundance. If you haven't picked up that book yet, please do so. It is amazing. Honestly, the title got me a little. It sounded a little secret, kind of thing to it. It's not. It's a book of science. It's a book of where we're going. And it's amazing. And Peter is amazing. I've had the chance to get to know him a little bit. Just phenomenal stuff. But anyway, he's got this thing called Singularity University, and it's an organization that helps businesses kind of get ready for the future. And this organization helps people build businesses 10 years into the future. I thought, well, that could be fun. What about podcasting in 10 years? I mean, let's plan for the future. I am in this to win this. You are in this to win this. And I'm doing a lot of consulting right now about the long game of podcasting. Not just those first 10 episodes, but where are we going to be in 10, 20, 30 years? Talk about podcasting in the next 10 years, shall we? Let's do it. All right. Podcasting where we came from. When this started, I'll be honest, it used to be ridiculously, ridiculously hard to get a podcast. You had to download these third party programs with weird names with chunky interfaces, and it was silly. And you tried to tell somebody how powerful podcasting was and they liked the idea. But then you showed him some of this stuff and they're like, yeah, yeah, not yet. I mean, when Todd's book came out, itunes wasn't even part of the podcasting equation. And once podcasting got a little bit easier and we could do it on our ipods, harder on other devices, obviously syncing as easy as it was in the big picture, this was hard. A lot of people couldn't get with the idea that dock your device before you want to go for a ride or before you want to go through a walk or that type of thing. There were just, for lack of a better term, they're basically too many steps now. IOS has made it incredibly easy. We did an episode about this a couple episodes ago. The fact of the matter is it now comes with all the iOS devices. I mean, this is tremendous. IOS has made it incredibly easy, but Android and Microsoft haven't made it totally easy yet, but it's doable. Stitcher is there on Android. There are a bunch of devices and options on Android. I actually sent out, I had one of my researchers do some stuff on the Windows Phone side of things to see if there are any other options than tunein radio. And there are. There are a bunch of podcasting options for even the Microsoft platform. IOS, Apple has made it incredibly easy, has included it with the Devices and Android and Microsoft are not that far behind. All right, Paul, but why are you comparing it to email? Well, email is the one tech we all know and is the one tech that I imagine all of us have had a bit of a history yet with. And it followed in many ways pretty much the same pattern that all tech follows. And it actually follows in many ways pretty much the same tech that podcasting started. When I first heard about email, it was tremendous. But who was I going to email? And it was difficult to get email running. And I came into the web before the days of, well, I came into the Internet before the days of the web and an email client wasn't even thing and it was difficult and it was hard. Now email is free and easy to get and a lot of us have a lot of email addresses. And what's funny is a lot of us have a lot of different ways to manage our email. At the time of this recording, Google has released a thing called Google Inbox, which is supposed to tame the beast. Right now I think I got the beast pretty tame, but I'm willing to take a look. I'm waiting for a preview. But the fact of the matter is there's a huge future in making sense of email. There's a huge future in sorting through email and these things. Nobody questions email anymore. Nobody asks, do you have an email address? If anything, they ask, do you check your email anymore? The future isn't making sense out of all this. The web did the same thing. Boy, getting on the web the initial days was hard. I remember you might laugh at this, but I had to sit down with my wife one night at dinner and say, hun, there's this thing called the web and it's going to change the Internet that I've been playing with. And here's the thing, we're going to have to pay $6 more a month for our ISP account. And you know, we had to look at the budget to figure out if we could afford it. Boy, I'm glad we did. The web at one time, hard to get onto, nobody was there. Now it's everywhere. Social media, the exact same thing. You know, who am I going to send a Twitter to? Who are my friends on Facebook? What am I going to do? But now it's there. But you see, here's what's happened, and this is key. Just because a message is sent doesn't mean it's received anymore. Yeah, a lot of us have email, but a lot of us have thousands and thousands of unread unanswered emails. A lot of us have social media accounts. I see people on Twitter who follow 3,000 people, and there's no human way possible that they could keep up to date with the stream. There are just crazy amounts of content screaming bias that we cannot take. We can begin to try to manage the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the top of it. But it's too much. There's too many webpages to look at, there's too many emails, there's too many social media responses. That's why we got products that are helping us to sort through it. That's why we've got products that are helping us to figure out the best of the best. It has happened before, it will happen again. And the same thing is happening with podcasts. I mean, think about it. Podcasts are getting easier to make all the time. There are products, there are tools, there are services coming out, there are books, there are processes. Now, doing it right is a whole other story. But getting an email out the door is easy to do. Getting an email, receiving email is easy to do. The hardest part now is for the listener to sort through it. I mean, how many podcasts do you have on your client right now that are waiting to be listened to much the same way? Emails that are waiting to be read, newsletters that are waiting to be read, you know, social media messages that are waiting to be consumed, RSS streams that are waiting to be read. Just because a message is sent doesn't mean it's received. And here's the thing. Just because a podcast was downloaded doesn't mean it was listened to. And this is very, very key. So for the listener, it's really hard to sort through this stuff and figure out what's important. For the publisher, it's really hard to rise above the noise. You know, any podcasts there are about podcasting. You know, there are a lot of people talking about this. There are a lot of people doing this. And if you're going to rise above the noise, it has to be strategic. There was a time when, you know, I only had 10 friends emailing me, and every one of those got through. Or I only had 10 friends on a social network, and every one of them was part of the process. But now there's so much stuff that rising above the noise is absolutely key. Now Facebook has handled it by charging for it. You want to rise above the noise at Facebook, you gotta pay. That's made some people mad, but that's made even more people a heck of a lot of Money, because the challenge now is rising above the noise, not getting the podcast out the door, not choosing a microphone, not choosing a host, but getting the thing to rise above the noise and getting people who have downloaded it to listen to it. That is where we're going. That's what we're going to need to do. So what's going to happen is right now, email. We got it on our phones, we got it on our tablets, we got it on our TVs, we got it on our computers, we got it everywhere. Getting email is not hard. Podcasting is going to be exactly the same. Some of us. I'm actually not guilty of this. I'm pretty good in my email. But I've got some dear friends who, you know, they. They fear going to their inbox because there's so much content they have to sort through. It's kind of a reminder of what they haven't done. And, well, podcasting can be the exact same thing. And if our audience fears going to the podcast client, we are not going to get consumed. Right, so what do you do? Well, first thing you do is you teach people how to sort of. They'll appreciate it. You give people the content that they need and only the content that they need and don't give them anything else, they'll appreciate that. If you show people how to grab the best nuggets quickly and easily and you make it doable and attainable, that's a powerful service to your audience and something you really want to consider. So teach them to sort. They'll appreciate it. Number two, make a show that rises above the noise. There is a lot of noise, and there is noise in competition. There is noise in delivery. There is noise in wording. There is noise in the phrasing of this. You know, it's funny, an article came out a week or so ago about podcasting, and a whole bunch of the pontificators were like, well, it's never changed. It's never been bad. It's always been good. And it has. Numbers are great. If you look at the numbers for podcasting over the years, they have continued to rise. They will continue to rise. The numbers will get better and better and better. But I'll tell you, those who are worried about. About what people do with the term or can't spend that time on getting an audience. If somebody comes to me and says, paul, I'm getting your newsletter, I know it's an email newsletter, I don't have to say it's an email. You know, if somebody says, hey, I got Your latest, you know, message. I know how it came. I don't have to make sure, well, was that Facebook or was that podcast or what was it? And it wasn't a Netcast because, you know, the numbers haven't changed. Regardless of what people do with the term, part of the noise is what people do with the term. Part of the noise is where people put their focus and their attention. Don't worry about what people call it. Don't worry about how people receive it. Just make sure that they can get it and that yours rises to the top and you're going to be in a better place. Now, here's what I'm doing and I recommend you do the same. Number one, I'm building a list external so that I can rise above the noise. Starting episode 25, everybody who calls in for a transcript to the podcast report, we're going to start pushing an SMS message to them telling them the latest episode is ready. And don't worry if you've done it before and you don't want sms, you'll be able to click stop and it will stop immediately. But that's one thing I'm going to do. And, you know, we've seen it before. I mean, how many times you got an email from somebody and they texted you about the email? How many times have you got an email from somebody and they text you and they call you about the email? They want to make sure that the email gets delivered. I am building a list external to my podcast to make sure that I rise above the noise. And you probably want to consider the same thing. I'm also focusing on subscriptions quite heavily because this is key. I've chatted this in past episodes, but, man, I don't want somebody just coming and listening to episode 21 of the podcast report. I want them subscribing and getting it every week. And this rising above the noise. So I'm going to continue to focus on subscriptions. I'm teaching my clients to do the exact same thing. It's not a piece of audio, stand in time, one moment in the Internet world, YouTube kind of thing. It's subscriptions. That's where the power is. I'm also exploring the app game. Getting an app to rise above the noise is much the same as getting a podcast to rise above the noise. So why are they going to install my app versus other people's apps where I do have apps like messaging and push notifications and these types of things that are already going to be there. But I'm definitely exploring the app game. Because again, I have to rise above the noise and I have to let them get it however they get it. And if I help them get it better, I will be at a better place. All right, Podcasting is going to look a lot more like email. I really believe this, but I'm sure there are some who don't. I would love your thoughts on this Twitter podcast rpt. I know podcast report would have been better, but that wasn't gettable. Please follow me on Twitter. Make a comment accordingly. If you'd like to jump on over to Facebook facebook.com thepodcastreport you can of course go to thepodcastreport.com 21 for this episode. If you'd like the transcripts and the mind map of this episode, go ahead and text EP2 as in episode 21 to the show hotline 503-897-1290. If you'd like to leave a voicemail message about this topic, go ahead and leave that at that phone number as well. If you're international or can't text me, don't worry, give me that information. The beep will make sure it happens. The links I've got at the notes for this episode are just the two that I mentioned. If you head out to the Podcast report two one A Decade of podcasting, the link to Todd Cochran's blog is there. And then I also started a thread over at the podcaster community in Google to see what they'd say the future is. I thought that would be fun. So I've got a link to that as well. Subscribe to this podcast if you are a podcaster, you subscribe to this podcast. Use this part to kind of learn how to do this for others. But if you haven't yet subscribed or you haven't followed this show or whatever your podcast client or whatever your show client is having you do, make sure you set it up so that every time we release a new episode, it comes to you automatically. Right now these are coming out every Tuesday and I'm having a blast doing it, but I want to make sure you get the content when it comes out. I'm doing everything I got to make a podcast that rises above the noise, and if you've been listening this far, you believe that I'm doing that. So please subscribe to the show or follow the show, or do whatever it is that your client makes it possible. Now where do you listen to this? If you're on iOS, go to the podcastreport.com iTunes that's easy. They're the 800 pound gorilla. If you're not on iOS, it's OK. Okay, we still like you. The podcastreport.com Stitcher is a great place to do that. One of my Android favorite clients is Pocketcasts. You can see me there at the PodcastReport Pocketcasts and spoke to Windows Phone a little bit earlier. You don't have any big directories, you don't even have Stitcher. But you do have Tunein, so we're there as well. ThePodcastReport.com TuneIn Spreaker is another interesting one. ThePodcastReport.com Spreaker having some interesting results with them. We are overcast as well. Not yet at SoundCloud. Don't worry, it's coming. We got plans for it. How could I not do with what we're doing today? So if you got it in you, I would love a review at itunes. I don't need them. I'm not going to tell you some crazy silly thing that it makes my results better or that kind of stuff that hasn't been proven. But it is good to know what people like and it is good to know what people think. A comment at itunes lets the world know socially that it's there. And I would appreciate that. If you want to do a comment over at Stitcher, we would do that as well. Just landed over at Spreaker, so if you want to do that at Spreaker, I guess that's good too. Whatever the interaction makes this fun. The podcast report@outlook.com is the email address. Make sure you get the podcast report in there. If you've listened to the past couple episodes, there have been a few where I've had one of you do an ID for me and you know that's where hey, this is so and so from the so and so show where we do this. You're listening to Podcast Report with Paul. If you want to record one of those, shoot it to me@the podcastreportoutlook.com I will put it on a future episode. It'd be a lot of fun. Let's chat about this. What do you think the future of podcasting is? Pretty sure it looks a lot like email thepodcastreport.com thepodcastreport.com Twitter or Facebook if you want to chat about it more. Talk to you next week. Bye.