How to Spot Podcast Predators and Protect Your Show’s Growth

This is Feed Your Brand with hosts Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard.

Hey everyone, welcome to Feed Your Brand. I'm Tom Hazzard along with my co-host Tracy. Today we are going to talk about the dark side of podcasting, how to spot podcast predators and avoid them. And I'll tell you, there's an awful lot of them out there. How many emails do you get a day or a week, Tracy, about that is from a podcast predator?

Well, I would say I probably get 10 times more DMs than I get emails, but I probably get 3 a day.

I definitely get at least 1 a day, sometimes 2 a day.

Yeah.

And a lot of them are pretty easy to spot. And maybe some of them I don't even see because they go into my junk folder or my unfiltered folder. But if they're good and clever, they get into your normal inbox. If it's an email, it's only one way it happens, right? And then if it does get into there and I, clearing my inbox, go through it, it's really a judgment call that needs to be made. Is this worth my time? Is it not? Right?

Absolutely. You know, here's the thing, Tom, that I see again and again from all of this aside, is that there are many podcast companies out there who have decided that to solve this problem of the dark side of these spam emails and all these producers going— coming at you and all these solicitations to get reviews or downloads or all of those things, the answer is to shut down the email, to remove your email from the system. And it's because our emails are public that this is occurring. It means that they can find us on social. It means that they can send us emails. But the reality is, is that's not the answer. The answer is, is that we need to stop supporting all of these junk emails and junk DMs with any kind of business or any kind of credence. We just need to mute them, delete them, get rid of them, and then they're gonna stop when it no longer works. So I try very hard not to give it any credence at all. But the answer is not removing my email address because when I do that, I make myself inaccessible to my listeners and that's harmful. And we'll never gonna do that here at Poditise, at our company. We are never going to hide the email addresses. I think it doesn't do anyone a service to do that. If you feel that you're getting too many of these, create an email address that is just for the podcast and put a heavier spam filter on it, screen it really heavily, put an assistant on it, whatever you wanna do to make sure that just the listeners get through and nothing else gets through, if that's what you want. And really pay attention to it that way and fix it from that format. But removing it altogether is a huge problem. So that's the first thing that I wanted to address here, because I think that there are companies out there that are podcast companies and specifically hosting companies that have gone along with this model of it. And we did a whole episode on this about the emails and the privacy function of that, and it's just not serving you to be accessible as a host. And I can tell you, we've gotten great business partners In fact, we've got this really fabulous partner we're looking at doing an expansion of our advertising business with, and that came because that email was exposed and out there, and that makes a huge difference. So you can get some really great opportunities from sponsors, from other things, but you do have to sift through all this predatory junk, right?

Right. I mean, look, it's a necessary evil of having a podcast or doing business. If you are a podcaster in business or podcasting in service to your business, I mean, it always shocks me that more businesses today that have website, for example, don't have a phone number on their website, nothing published there. And actually some issues with having your website comply with international rules or even domestic rules in the United States about having a contact phone number available and having your business address listed and things like that. You are supposed to do. Too many people don't. But it always surprised me. It's like, don't you want to be found by more of your ideal listeners? Don't you want to be found by prospects? And yeah, you're always going to get I mean, I think today I even got— for full transparency, I got a phone call this morning to our business line and I could have screened it and let it go on to voicemail. The caller ID made me wonder, gee, is that a customer or a prospect or is it a predator? I didn't know. And I decided to answer it because I happened to be available in that moment. And it was somebody, Tracy, calling for you. That was pretty good at her script and made it sound like she was calling you back. But I also know you really wouldn't give someone that sales phone number in our business if you really wanted them to call you back. And so you can get, by the way, folks, a Google Voice number, which we've had for years. That works well. Or we're now switching over to Zoom and we probably should do more on that in another episode because Zoom's expanding.

And that's what I want to stop you right there, Tom, but that's That's what I'm saying to you here. If you're really bothered by all of these podcast predators, like sending you all these junk mail and all this other stuff, then go out, get a Google Voice and a Gmail for your podcast and use the heavy filters there that are spam filters. They have them.

Yeah.

Use them and use that to your advantage. And then you can make it so that the phone never rings. You just review the, the transcripts of them. Now sometimes they're completely illegible, but The point is, is you can just review it and say, is this real? Is this not? It'll come across really quickly whether that's real or not. Is this a listener? Is this a really great sponsorship offer? Is this something that I should take a look at? You'll be able to screen through it really quickly.

And both Google Voice and Zoom's VoIP service do the transcripts of those, so you can— you get an email or can look them up in other places. I actually, when I have the time, which is not very often, I will admit, and we get one of those phone calls and I am 99% sure this person has never talked to you before, Tracy, I kind of have a little fun with it because I'm also in sales and I try not to be someone who uses sneaky tactics like that. I just— not who I am and who I want to be. But when someone does, I enjoy kind of quizzing them and sort of cutting right through everything and getting them to admit, oh yeah, I've never talked with Tracy before. I've sent her some emails. Oh, so she's replied to your email and wanted you to go. No, she didn't reply to my email, but I want to make sure she got me. Oh, no, I'll make sure she got your email. And if she wants to talk with you, she'll reach out, you know, type of thing. So anyway, it was very—

well, if anyone— if they knew me, they'd know that a phone call is a disastrous way to get my attention. Right. They knew me. Right, right.

Actually, somebody else who I was talking to who was a customer legitimately communicating with you and then was reaching out to me actually also today. Said they've been communicating with you through LinkedIn. To me, that is very believable because I know you are very active daily on LinkedIn. So that's a different situation.

So more— less now because of all these DMs that I receive. So I have to say that LinkedIn used to do a much better job of screening profiles and making it harder for you to scrape the information from there, and they're not doing a good job now. And because of that, I get, like I said, about 10 DMs a day from podcast producers, podcast promoters— like, those are the titles that they tend to use. And so what I do is I just systematically unfriend them and get rid of them, and so block them. And so if they've gotten through somehow my filter of that— but usually they don't even get through that because I'll block them from the beginning. And so when they do though, these DMs are part of why I no longer like LinkedIn and I no longer use it in the same way that I used to. So this is what I wanna remind you is that these strategies are not sustainable, right? They're going to not stop working, but we need to contribute to making sure that they're not sustainable. So if we block people, we report them, we get rid of them, we stop letting them do this. Then we are helping ourselves filter them out. Because then if it's— they're adopting this shotgun approach where they're just like, I don't care, I'm just going to get as many emails scraped off of Listen Notes as possible, and then I'm going to send out mass amounts of email whether they're relevant to their podcast or not. And the relevance part is what can harm you the most, and that's what we want to be careful about. It seems like when you're early into your podcasting journey and business, that you're more susceptible to these people who offer you listens and downloads, people who offer you reviews, people who offer you special videos. Like, I get the video ones all the time of like being able to do all these teaser videos and all these videos for your podcast. I'm getting a lot of AI ones now, probably because of my LinkedIn profile, but I'm getting a lot of those too. And some of them are extremely harmful to your show because they're gonna tell you a tactic that doesn't work. So you pay for something, you get what they say, you get a bunch of downloads and listens, but it then, it harms your ability to get sponsors later. And that's what I want people to understand here, Tom, that getting false downloads, getting false reviews can actually do significant harm to the long-term value of your show.

I agree. There is right now at the time we're recording this, and I know we don't always want to ground these episodes in time because most of our subjects are evergreen, and this is evergreen to an extent, but I'm gonna ground this one in time for our listeners. We're recording this in mid-July of 2023, and right now there is no shortcut, no magic bullet. To get you more real listeners. Now, there are shortcuts to get you downloads, but they're not worth anything because no one's actually listening to it. There are server farms in India and other places that will do it, but it does you a disservice, quite honestly, at the end of the day. And it's similar to the places where you can buy YouTube views and/or YouTube subscribers. Now, depending on your purpose on YouTube, there may be a reason why you want to jumpstart it and get a certain number of plays or subscribers to meet a threshold to unlock something on YouTube. But it's still not going to be real viewers, right? So there is no shortcut. You need to provide good value in your podcast, make yourself accessible to your listeners for them to engage with you, ask questions. Don't make it hard. Just part of what you're saying is don't hide your email or an email for the show. Just like in business, I don't think you should hide your business. I think you should have a phone number and it separates us from all the other hosting companies because none of them have a phone number on their website except Poditise. Just understand there's no shortcut. Now I'll tell you, we at Poditise continue to seek very real, tangible, measurable, and valuable ways to get your show more exposure to get you found, heard, seen. And we have some things we're working on that are different and they're not ready to talk about today, but we're always working on those things. But until then, there's gonna be an awful lot of predators seeking you. But I have to say, Tracy, even though there are a lot of predators and I get emails every day with offers for one thing or another for the podcast or for the business, and I usually read the subject line, read the preview text, and very quickly decide, nope, if it's an email, and most of them I think I get are through email, I will just move on. But occasionally, and like I had one today that offered a truly free webinar about something that interested me for our business that's in 2 weeks, and I signed up for that free webinar. I figured that's worth a little of my time, what they were offering, and I'm gonna do it. I'm interested. They had enough value they provided in that email that it made sense to me. And the tough part is you get so many of 'em, right? Oftentimes, probably the good ones we don't spend time on.

Here's the other thing that I really want you to understand. So not only can some of these things harm, like, look, podcast listeners are really smart. Longtime podcast listeners, the binge listeners that I know a lot about, they're really smart. And when they see hundreds of reviews and they know how difficult it is to review a podcast. They know it's fake. And especially when they just go and see a couple of the reviews and they go, oh, they all said like, great show, like junk like that. And that's what you typically get. They know then that there's something not right about this show and they won't even give it a chance. They're smart. Then when you see a, a bunch of things like stuff with downloads, it's gonna harm you later when your calculations happen. Because if you had a boost of downloads at some moment in time when you got a bunch of subscribers, and then they don't continually download your show, you don't have that ongoing and you don't have the growth factor. Sponsors know the difference. And so then you're gonna see this dip and they're gonna go, what happened to your show? They're gonna wanna know if you reveal that. And then the red flag would be as a sponsor if you won't reveal it because you see this thing going on in your statistics, right? Because you can't show it. But here's another one. We've seen a very high-end producer who produces a package that's $25,000, and they offer a guaranteed number of downloads initially on your first 20 episodes or something like that. And what we found, we actually have proof of this, that they falsified the statistics. They actually took screenshots from our hosting platform and presented it to their client with different numbers in it. That's how scammy at the high end it is, because they know they can't achieve their guarantee. Anyone who promises you a guarantee is the number one scam alert you should pay attention to. Guaranteed number of something, guaranteed results.

Yep. Nobody can guarantee results. I don't care what they tell you. It is— they are out of integrity if they are saying they can guarantee results until something new comes up and I've tested it myself and feel confident sharing it with all of you. And that's the only way that's going to happen.

And that's one of the things that we believe in here. It's like, it's not a guaranteed result unless we can do it 98% of the time. I'm going to say there's always 2%, like Tom and I always— we live in the world of product failure and there's always 2% awful. So like, that just happens, right? But anything less than that is not a repeatable, guaranteeable service. It just isn't.

I agree. I was really shocked. And honestly, this particular situation with this high-end producer that charges a very high ticket price— I mean, any of you that worked with us, you know, I mean, we're not the cheapest service in town. Our customers want to pay to save time and accelerate their growth in podcasting and hopefully marketing and growing their business. But we're not anywhere near the most expensive. I mean, we're talking, you know, $25,000-$30,000 program to set up, launch your show and get you, yeah, a certain number of episodes, 12 to 20 down the road. And they do guarantee— we've come to learn they guaranteeing their people to get in the New and Noteworthy on Apple and they guaranteeing them certain listenership. Impetus for this episode was when I first saw, and it was accidental. I got copied on an email that I shouldn't have, and that person attached a screenshot of analytics that is from our own platform. And that's how I knew that they were completely fake because I could go look up the real ones and they were absolutely defrauding their customer and telling them they've got listens that they did not have. I mean, it was like 6 times higher than what it really was.

Yeah. So the big scam alerts for me are when they make guarantees When they control your access to Apple or to your statistics at your hosting level, anything where they're controlling that and not letting you have direct access, that's another scam alert for me. And you're going to get screwed over in the process.

That happens so often. I see new prospects all the time who have a show they've launched and they're looking to— for growth. They're looking to get more out of it. And, you know, I asked them, well, what's your listenership now? Well, I don't know. Why don't you know? I don't have access to that. Well, why don't you? Well, they won't let me. I mean, if I'm paying anybody to support me in podcasting, I sure as hell better have access to my own analytics for my own show. And if they're not giving them to you where you can see them, if they're giving you a PDF or a screenshot, personally, I can't trust that. I've just unfortunately seen too many people Photoshopping that sort of stuff. You need to log into where it actually is. Is to see the numbers.

Yep. You need it to be believable and you need it to be sustainable and something that's gonna happen beyond them. If they can't do their service for you and then it lives beyond them, then it's a scam. Then it's not real, it's false. And that's also another area that we have talked about. And then the last one that I just wanna mention, the overall side of these things is, is that when you are looking at any of these opportunities that they're offering you, these offers are, go beyond and check their references. Check the sites that they say they have, because a lot of times we found podcast producers who had shows on their website that they claimed to be producing, and they never produced them. They did something free for them, and they never produced them. And when we reached out to the host to say, hey, did you know you were on so-and-so's website as a reference? And they would be like, Wait, that— my show's never been produced by them. They made me one free video as a test and I didn't like it. And they're using you as credibility. So that's also really dangerous. If you don't give permission for your testimonial or your show art or whatever it is to be utilized on somebody else's site as a part of their portfolio of companies, then that's not right. And you need to be really careful about that as well. But on top of that, what I also see happening a lot of times is that when you do go and check, when you ask for references, they don't materialize. And if you did go and check them, what you'd see was the same thing. Everyone's music was exactly the same. Every voiceover artist was her voice. It was exactly the same on every single show. So they were spending high premium dollars and they were getting a cookie-cutter solution that was making their show seem just like everybody else's show out there. That's a huge problem.

I thought was really silly because I felt like actually, yeah, that high-end producer used her own voice as a voiceover artist for the intro of every show. And I don't think all of her people knew that, but I was like, it's really not the best voice and how silly. You're charging 5 figures for a real high-ticket price, you can afford a $50 or $100, heck, $200 voiceover artist to record something for— it just seemed like a silly thing to—

or $50 for original music.

I know, it's ridiculous.

Yeah, that's a real harm to your show also, is if your show seems like it was plug and play and comes out cookie cutter like everybody else's. It's already hard enough to stand out in this digital noisy world, and now you're doing something that's harming you. That's my big complaint about the AI tools. And for those of you who have not checked out our AI lab or known about it, we have some information on our website. You can go to poditise.com/ai-lab and check it out.

I think it might be AI-podcast-lab, actually.

I think Tracy Okay, make a forwarding URL that's AI-lab. Just make sure— anyway, but if you go there and check out, this is some of the things that we're exploring and talking about. Sometimes we find a great tool that seems like a time saver, but then we sound like everybody else, right? And we look like everybody else, and that diminishes the value and the time and money we're spending. And that's what we don't wanna have happen to you. And so be really cautious with these podcast predators. That's our message to you today. Screen them through really carefully. Some of them are really attractive sounding. They offer free things and you think, what harm can that do? And the next thing you know, you're like being held hostage to the process and the producers.

Now say one more thing, Tracy, and provide a little more value to our listeners today. That's not just doom and gloom warning, watch out for predators, which is something that I think is valuable. And we provided some good value on that for our listeners today, but To go back to something you were saying earlier about reviews and fake reviews, I wanna share a little success story and an example of what it takes to get real reviews that are meaningful and good. Longtime podcast that we've been producing for several years, had a check-in with them in December 2022, and they only had 32 reviews on Apple. And they're like, we get a lot more plays every month. We should have more reviews. And they thought maybe not having more reviews was holding them back a little bit. And I think when you have a brand new show and you have a couple hundred reviews and the show's just been out a couple weeks, I think, well, maybe there's where your radar should be up and have a healthy dose of skepticism that how could you have that many reviews so quickly? That's probably not real. But after a couple years, 32 reviews, I advise this customer, here's what I recommend you do. And is that communicate with your own listeners, reach out to them. They had something of value they could provide, like a digital copy of their book they had put out recently that did a review challenge. And they asked their listeners, hey, if you really do like the show and you're subscribed and you'd be willing to go to Apple and leave a review, please screenshot it, share it on social media, and then email that to us and show us you did it. With your name, email, phone number. So they were getting their contact information and now they were adding people to the list. They were letting them know, hey, we're going to update you unless you don't want to be, let us know. But now, 6 months later, Tracy, they've got 220-some-odd reviews from doing that challenge, reaching out, communicating with their audience, letting them know the good reason why they would appreciate it if they could give an audience and if they give a review. And if they did, they gave them a reward that had some more value for them. That's the kind of work it takes and the kind of time it takes to get reviews.

Right. And the reward to that— and that's a whole nother topic that we're actually addressing in an upcoming month. But the reality is that that is more valuable later than it is at the beginning. And that's something that you also need to remember is that reviews in the beginning can be red flags when you have too many of them. It's not as valuable as it actually is after you had your show established in a while. Because what that client was able to do was show conversion on their audience in addition to providing greater value and getting more reviews for their show. So they were able to get a lot more value for it by putting it as a program later than doing it at the beginning. That's another thing that some of these predators don't understand, is they don't understand the order in which you should do things. They think all podcasters want downloads and all podcasters want reviews and all podcasters want videos and teasers and all that and social media stuff. That's what they think they all want. But the reality is, is you also have to do that in the proper order when you have enough content for it, when you have the listeners for it, when you can really maximize the benefit from it. And that's what's not happening in this scope of things. They just going after the hot topic that everyone feels is You know, that missing piece.

All right. Well, I think that hopefully some advice that's going to help all you podcasters out there. Watch out for those predators. If something seems too good to be true, it might very well be. So take a little time just to vet it and make sure before you fall prey to them. All right. Well, thanks so much for listening, everybody. You can see the blog post for this episode, poditise.com. And when you're into a blog, there's a search function. You can search on any topic in podcasting. And find some of our— how many episodes of content do we have out there on this podcast, Tracy?

On this one?

Over 200. Yeah, Future Brand, over 200. So there's a lot of good topics. We may have covered something that would provide you some good support. So go to palletize.com and check it out.

Thanks everyone for paying attention to our livestream. We appreciate you. As always, you can check us out on YouTube and all the other places that we are streaming live, which are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Yeah. I can't remember all this place. So which— pick your favorite platform. We're there.

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