The Three Tragic Reasons Your Listeners Can't Reach Out To You

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard along with my co host and partner Tom Hazard. And today this is one of Tom's pet peeves. Like, we are going to talk about something that bugs the heck out of him. It kind of bugs me too, but in a business intention rant kind of way. So I'm going to try to stay away from that as best as possible. But we are going to go over the three tragic reason your listeners can't reach out to you. This is about you getting connected to your subscribers, to your listeners and making it easy for them to reach out to you. And I'm really disappointed, Tom, that the industry makes this so hard for people.

I am too, Tracy, I really am. And I'll tell you, I geek out on this, I get fired up about it. But here's the real reason why, Tracy. We've been podcasters for actually a decade now. And when we started our first podcast, we wanted to make sure our audience could reach out to us. And I think most independent podcasters, and honestly I don't understand what podcaster is, independent or not, would not want to make sure your audience can communicate with you in some way.

It might be in different areas, right. Like you might want to be reached out in email. Maybe you want them to follow you on Instagram. It might be where you want them to follow you and connect with you. Is different if you're a celebrity versus an independent business person. Right. Or an entrepreneur. So. But that doesn't mean you don't want them to connect with you. Why are you putting your voice out there, your message out there, if you don't want Connection.

And disheartening thing that I see literally every day because I meet with six to ten podcasters every day and I usually am reviewing their show in some way. And we're titling this the three tragic reasons your listeners can't reach out to you. And there are three big ones, but there's really like five or six that I find all the time that even experienced podcasters, yes. A lot of times, rookie or newer Podcasters also don't even know. They're not aware that they're being held back. They're committing these unforced errors and are making it hard for their listeners to connect with them and find them. And those are things we're going to talk about today. There are three core ones. I might throw in a tidbit of a fourth or fifth here. We'll see how it goes.

Well, let me start with saying like, this is what we want you to understand. It's like people are listening to your podcast on a listening app. Right. That's the only way that they find you. Unless you're doing all the work on the other side. Right. And if you're promoting yourself on social media somewhere, if you're promoting yourself in an email newsletter, chances are those people are already connected to you. Right. So this is for you to connect with people who don't know you yet and more specifically the subscribers of your podcast or someone who may have just like tapped into an episode and is checking it out and hasn't made the decision yet to subscribe. Right. So this is where we're talking about. So this it's executed or where you're seeing it happen. The mistakes are happening somewhere else, but where we're seeing it happening is it's visible in the player apps.

Yes, for sure. The player apps are right. The biggest culprits I think that are holding people back. But there's also your hosting platform and I know, Tracy, this is one of your pet peeves too. What's your the number one issue you have with podcast listings? Each of our shows that people probably don't even know has happened to their show that's holding them back.

So it's the email address, right?

Yes.

So. And we've done a whole episode on this. Apple claimed that they were trying to help your privacy concerns and spam email issues by hiding the email address for your show. I don't know about you, but I have a special email address for my show because I want to make sure people can connect with me and if that is being blocked, then I'm not going to have anybody reach out to me in any kind of meaningful way without having to do a lot of work to find me. If they can't click through that, it's one of the biggest problems I have.

I agree with that 100%. I wish the public and you can decide, hey, it's a public facing email address and there's this one you're going to put out there. I wish the apps would display the official email address. It also there is. You have the ability to have your official email address be a part of your show listing in the RSS feed. This gets a little technical and I'm not going to go down a deep technical rabbit hole today. But a lot of the. A few. But three or four of the podcast hosting companies out there have made it as a default that your email address for your show is hidden from your RSS feed and you should check if you've got especially you have a special email just for your show. It's meant to be public facing. Make sure that you have that email in your RSS feed and there is a way for you to make it public. At Potatoes, we believe you should have that public facing email address so people can reach out to you. I just don't understand why any podcaster would not want to have somebody reach out to their official podcast email.

Exactly. I mean this is the way that your community interacts with you. Look, we got an email through our official feature brand. We got an email right into that. We got a message right into that through that email address on podcasters united.org which is the home of feed your brand. Somebody who reached out to us and said, hey Tom, you were wrong last week in your episode recording. It has changed at Apple and now the episode art is appearing. So you got your wish and that was fantastic. That's the kind of feedback we want. Somebody who disagreed with us or somebody who lets us know that things have changed and we're not up on it. That's amazing. And we wouldn't have known that until we tripped on it or accidentally or somebody else. But a listener knows, right?

And look, I have no problem being wrong. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. And Apple podcast app was not using the episode art in their app for a very long time. Even talked with some of the executives in Apple at. In podcasting and they said, yeah, yeah, we know it's not there. No. And then sometime in recent weeks or months that must have changed. And I'm thrilled. I'm happy to be wrong.

Right. But this is the thing. Most podcasters are not listeners. I'm going to say this again. Most of you are not listeners. You do not listen to your own podcast or other podcasts. It's less than 10% that I come across in the binge factor of the interviews that I've done. And I've done well over 300 interviews, less than 10% of those ever listeners. So you're not checking out how the app works. And you're not understanding some of these things that Tom and I are going over with you today. You're not seeing it, you're not experiencing it like a listener, and you're not a listener who wants to respond and then can't find the email address. So it is my biggest pet peeve, as Tom mentioned before, that that email address that those hosting companies and Apple has decided that for their own selfish reasons, they want to make the default that it's not seen. I think it's fine if some people want that. I think you're making a mistake as a podcaster if you choose to hide it. If you have privacy concerns, don't give out your real email address. Give out one that's for the show. Like, there's a way around that. And then it still gets to you, your team or whoever, and you check it. This is what we want. We want our listeners to communicate with us. We want them to know that they reached out to us so we can communicate back with them and say, gosh, you're right, that makes a loyal listener.

Yeah. And I'm thrilled to interact with our listeners and have that conversation. So. But I agree. Email address number one reason. And look, yes, it is your show. Any of you listening that you have your own show, it's your choice. Just make sure you're making that choice. And this choice wasn't just made for you. Okay?

But at the same time, you can't sit there and complain that you don't have listener interaction if you're not doing these things, like, stop complaining about it because it's your fault. You have to fix these things and it's your host's fault. So don't let them do this to you. Don't let them steal your connection.

All right, so that's a great segue into the second tragic reason. And for this, I'm going to show you the Apple Podcast app here. And what I've gone is to the new and noteworthy section, okay? And I'm going to pick on a few really big produced shows, because why not? These shows are have huge budgets and they're bringing their show out to the entire podcast ecosystem and they have big production teams and there's really no excuse for them to be getting this wrong. What I'm about to share with you. So I'm going to take a few different shows here. Let's start with the Daily Show Ears edition. Which fan of the Daily show, if you've seen the news at all, Jon Stewart came Back one day a week and Wonderful. And the Daily show has a podcast. When you click on the Daily show podcast in Apple Podcasts, guess what happens here. Oh, hold on. I gotta do one thing before I realize I'm about to show you something that is not gonna quite work. So bear with me one sec. What I'm gonna show you is that when you click and when you go get into that show. Okay, and bear with me one second. So just getting this ready. When you go into that show, in you go into an episode. Okay, all right. Now I got it. Sorry about that. Bear with me. When we get go click into the Daily show here. And we're going to go into an episode and there is this link, especially an Apple podcast app called Episode Webpage. Not every listening app has it or they call it different things. You click on that link and then where it's going to take you is actually to their webpage. But guess what? This webpage here of the Daily show is Omni fm. That's the hosting platform for this podcast.

Daily show should be pissed because they have their whole website, they have a whole interaction section there.

And they should know better. Really. They absolutely should know better that it's going to take you there. I mean, I'm pretty sure the Daily show and Company Central has their own website.

Oh, they do. The Daily show has a whole interaction section for fans and like, it's a whole place for it.

And that's where you want them to go. Whoever is in control of the hosting at the Daily show is completely unaware that Omni FM is hijacking their traffic. When somebody clicks on that link, it's not going to the Daily Show.com or.

Comedy Central.com so let's be really clear. Not every host hijacks your webpage at potatoes. We do not allow it. We actually prevented it from happening. So if you don't put an episode page, if you don't put the link to a blog, the link to a page that you want it to go to, it will default to your show page. And so what Omni has done is replaced it with their show page.

Right. And what I want to show you here also, I'm going through Apple Podcast desktop app. This is their new noteworthy section. So these are what Apple considers new and noteworthy shows. There's only like, how many shows are here? Four by. It's only like 20 or 25. 25 shows. Here it. Back in the day, when we started our first podcast, there used to be a couple thousand shows because there's always A lot of shows launching, you could see where you ended up in the whole list of new and not worthy. You can't do that anymore. Anyway, they have some new and noteworthy ones. So I want to show you here one by Audible called you'd Mama's Kitchen. This is produced. It says it's an Audible original. Okay. And so they have an episode that published today. And by the way, this is a show that is the one of the ones that the Obamas are a part of. And I'm going to come back to this show to illustrate the third tragic reason your listeners can't find you. So this one's a twofer. But anyway, when you go and click episode webpage, look what happens. You end up on Acast, the page for this show on Acast, which is another their podcast host.

So, yeah, what I want to say to everyone here is it's not just that AAST is committing a crime against a person who's paying them for this service, right, Omni, same thing. You're paying them to host your show. You're paying for this. And then this is happening. What is happening is you're annoying your listener, your subscriber, and your listener is getting completely annoyed by this because they're getting the exact same thing they already had on the app.

That's my biggest frustration, too, Tracy.

Yeah, forget it. Like, you know, I'm not even going to work that hard to go find you now.

You're so right, Tracy. You know, I'm a listener. I read this description like, oh, that's interesting. Oh, episode webpage. There's more information. What can I learn there? And I go click. And I'm expecting to get more, not the same, but I just end up getting the same. Actually, this is just even pretty much the same as what Apple podcast app is doing. Showing you the show and then all the episodes. Why did you send me here? Now I'm annoyed, right?

So make sure your podcast host. Here's the lesson. Feed your brand listeners. Make sure. And by the way, if you're listening to this as a podcast, you got to go watch the video. You got to see what I'm showing you, because I'm actually showing you two different windows and I'm showing you Apple podcasts and a web browser showing you what happens when you go on these links. You need to see it or the blog post. Podcasters united.org check it out. But you got to make sure your host is configured so that even if you don't create, and you should, if you've listened to this show for any length of time. You know, we are advocates of having a unique episode landing page, a post for every episode. But even if you do not create that, you can make the link that populates in every episode in the apps. Always go to your podcast website. Even if you don't have a whole lot of supplemental information from them, you're not providing a whole lot more. Any of that traffic from your episodes in any listening app should always go back to your own website.

It could go to a contact page, it could go to an about page. It could go somewhere where it's like, hey, thank you for listening and here's all the ways to reach me. It could go to a link tree. If you don't really even have a website, there are so many ways to make sure that your listeners can actually get to you, find you.

Yes, absolutely.

So what's next? What is this twofer that you're going to give us here? I want the twofer.

All right, here's the twofer. All right, I'm coming back here to this audible original. This show's called you'd Mama's Kitchen. Higher Ground. Not really sure. Looks like Higher Ground is a production company. And what Higher Ground is doing in this case, it may be the production company that is causing the problem.

Higher Ground is the Obama's production company, Tom.

It's their production company. Okay, great. So they're getting the credit for being the authors of the show, which isn't really accurate. Notice on this cover art it says hosted by Michelle Norris. So I understand with highly produced shows, paid produced shows, there may be arrangements of whose producer, who's host, who owns it, who gets credit. I get. There are complexities. But this is still an important lesson. If I know Michelle Norris and I didn't know the show Mama's Kitchen and I hadn't wasn't really sure what's Obama's production company? What is it called? I don't remember, but I know the host. I'm going to go search in Apple podcasts app on that host's name. And this host, Michelle Norris, is a ghost when it comes to the podcast listening apps because her name is not in this author field here in the listening app, nor is it in the description of the episode. And I didn't see it anywhere.

It is in the description of the show, but not in the episode.

Oh, not in the episode. And the thing is, you've got to understand, these search bars in the podcast listening apps are not the best search bars. They're not the best search algorithms or softwares out there. And so unlike Google, which if you type something in a little bit wrong, it's going to say, did you mean to type in this? They. They don't do that. And it really is meant to search for an author's name through this author field in purple here. So if you're replacing that with a production company name, it's probably not even in the best interest of the podcast. It depends on who's more recognizable. Oh, I want to have that podcast hosted by Jon Stewart or by somebody else famous or in this case, Michelle Norris. So.

So you have a couple options in this case, though, if you're network constrained. And I want to give you those two choices here. If that's you, you can have your mama's kitchen with Michelle Norris or you can have Higher ground and Michelle Norris listed as co authors because you're allowed to have more than one author. Tom and I, if you go to feed your brand, you're going to see that Tom and I are both separate authors because people search on Tom and they search on me.

I want to. Here's a good example of that. And you've got. And although there's three people in this one, so it's kind of truncated, but I did expand this and I found this show is hosted by three different people and they're in all three people's entire names are in the author field. That is the best practice right there to make sure everyone is in there.

So what happens is if I didn't do that, if I didn't put Tracy Hazard in my author field of my shows and I have many shows, then when, if I'm interviewed on someone else's show, that's going to show up before my own show shows up. You being a guest and them titling you and giving you credit for that is going to make it so that their show shows up before yours does. That's a tragedy.

And we've talked about this before, but it bears mentioning just briefly. I mean, you can see here on feed your brand, our show, we have both Tracy Hazard and Tom Hazard. Now we have the same last name in the beginning. We didn't do that in our first show. I think it said Tom and Tracy Hazard. So when people search for Tom Hazard, nothing came up. I was.

It was Tom and would have showed up.

Yeah, maybe if you turn Tom, Tom Ampersand and if you search for Tracy Hazard, that's great. But I had no searchability because my last name was not right next to my first Name See this happen with co hosts all the time, especially when they're related. Actually, you know what, what's the podcast that has Travis and Jason Kelsey in it? What's that show called?

It's called New Heights.

Aha. Look at this mistake they're making. New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce. If you're searching on Travis Kelce, which let's face it, because he's with Taylor sw, I think more people are searching on Travis Kelce than they are Jason Kelce. But I. Jason, if you're listening, I hate to tell you this. Somebody searches on your name, it's not going to come up as quickly now. Maybe eventually it will come up and that would be probably. Well, because he's in the description as Jason Kelsey from the Philadelphia Eagles. But this is not. It should be. New Heights with Jason Kelsey and Travis Kelce from a search ability, a discoverability perspective. I'm sure the marketing people are cursing me right now, are not liking that. But hey, let's see.

But it doesn't have to look that way on your cover art. You can do it. Tom and Tracy, Jason and Travis. Right. You don't need to do that on.

The COVID Hey, good kudos to New Heights. It's. This is going well, let me say. Wait a sec. Let's see. Is this their website New Heights? Hoo Be. I'm not sure what the site is. It doesn't look like a hosting platform. Looks like something specific to their show, I guess, but I don't know. It's at least it's not going to a hosting platform.

Look, at least they have all their social links have a great way to connect with each other, like with their audience. Right. So you can find them. That is fantastic. At least it's something. Even if it's not a full on website. They're not a business. Not like that. So.

Well, they are selling some merch and that's there too. So yeah, and access to their YouTube stuff and all sorts of other things. So that's great. So anyway, you don't realize then there's actually a lot more of these and I'm not going to go into a lot of greater detail here. I really just want to illustrate the point here that there are some tragic things that hold you back.

I do think you want to hit that the website address is very often wrong and it's a combination of. Also a bad hosting company that is doing things not in your favor. They want to send them back to Libsyn. They want to send them back to podbean, they want to send them back to themselves. And if you don't go in to replace your website address for your show, it will populate with your hosting platform and you do not want that to happen. But here's also something. When you switch hosting companies, very often they replace that as well. And so they hijack it right at that moment in time. So every episode web description, episode link, every website description, they replace it with their own as an automatic thing when you re import into the auto imports.

So you're absolutely right, Tracy, and let me sort of put a little more clarity on that if I can. That episode webpage link that I showed you in Apple Podcasts, it's there for every episode. That link is in the RSS feed for your show. And when you move your show from one platform to another, most of them, like we do at Pod Ties, import your RSS feed from the old platform. All those links, like if your show is imported from podbean, we did this recently with a show, then every one of those episode web page links goes to a podbean web page. And it's still going to be that way on the new platform unless you change it. So podties, obviously we're hyper aware of this because we see this all the time and we would go in and remove all those episode webpage links, recommend that you actually either just use one page on your website if that's what you need to do initially, or if you have a page on your website for every episode you replace them. It unfortunately takes a little time to do it because most people just don't know that that was happening till it's too late. They've already imported and moved to another platform.

Yeah. So you may find you have like your very first host and you have all their episode links. So you may find a mixed bag if you've moved post hosting companies. And so this is also something that we wanted you to be aware of as well. But if they can't find your website and they can't find any more information on the website but what's already on the player app, they're just gonna go like this is a rookie or they don't care to connect with me is what the listener is going to receive as a message. That's what I would, I would say from a big show like the Daily Show. I'd be like, they don't want to hear from their audience. And that would make me feel unlikely to want to keep listening.

Yeah, and for me too, the issue I always think about is, all right, how hard do I want to work to dig for the information I was looking for and to get to what I was hoping to get to? You put up too many challenges for me. Okay, I'm on to the next thing.

Yeah.

Or another show or whatever it might be.

So now I'm very sure, Tom, that some of our hosts out there or some of the hosts listening here are going to go. But I put all that in my episode description. I've got links to my website, and I've got all that in my episode description. And that's great that you do that. But know that not every listening app displays those links as clickable or also.

Not just as not being clickable, but you really have to expand and scroll down through the whole description to get to them. And on a lot of phone apps, that's not obvious and not the easiest thing to do. But guess what is a little more obvious is that episode webpage link. So they're probably going to click that before they even click more or to expand that description to even see if there's some other links.

Yeah. So just keep that in mind that you think you're doing stuff, but the system and the way that this is displayed and the listening app itself may be working against you. So that's why we call these tragic, because this is a simple thing to fix.

Well, it's tragic because most people are unaware. They don't even know.

And you might have gone hundreds of episodes and it's still happening to you, or you're using a very expensive producer who is not. Who is not doing what they should be doing.

Tracy, that brings up another real potential pitfall. And tragic thing is you hire a production company and you think that they're acting in your best interest, but they're not always. A lot of times they're putting their own links or sending people to their. Their site rather than your own.

Well, I don't think it's just nefarious. Like, they're just stealing that and other things like that. I think often that you hire someone who's fabulous in video, but they really. They say, oh, yeah, I'll produce your podcast, too. But they don't understand it. They're not up on what's going on. They're not an expert in it. And because they have not aligned themselves with a hosting company that's of value, that hosting company that's doing these things to you, they've actually created that by putting you on that hosting platform. The other place we see it a lot is radio stations. Radio stations will do everything in their power to make sure that all they get is the radio station. So if you expected to get personal value and grow your business from that, it's never going to happen.

Yeah. And the other thing that I do see also one of the things that producers do, intentional or not, and maybe it's innocent, but a lot of producers will syndicate your show to the listening apps for you, the newbie podcaster, and then your show listings are under their account and you leave them and you don't realize it and you don't have control. And it's very hard maintain your audience where you go. I mean, this causes problems all the time. I actually just encountered another podcast that has again, two listings of its show on Apple because they didn't know any better and they don't have control. And it's becoming very hard to get control, even to find where that other show was hosted, to be able to fix it. So you make sure you have control of your own stuff is really, it's your show and you own it or be clear about your arrangements. If you have a producer, you're working with a network, do they own it? Do you own it? Who's in control? And one important thing, if you can't log in and look at your own analytics, you probably don't have control.

That's right.

Just a couple little tips there.

Please, everyone. Like, all of these things could have been prevented if you acted like a listener, a secret shopper. Right? Go secret shop your stuff. Right? Go act like a listener and listen to your show. Interact with it. Click all the buttons, try all the features. Look, I was just in Spotify the other day. They've got a new preview feature that wasn't there two weeks ago when I checked it. So, like, and it flashes up and says, try the new preview. So it's not fantastic, but it's there. Something new is always happening in these apps. You must check regularly.

Agreed. All right, that's some great advice, Tracy. Why don't we leave it there? We really appreciate you listening to feed your brand. Don't forget, you can find the blog post where the videos are and links to anything we talked about today on the blog post@podcasters united.org that is the new home for feed your brand.

Thanks everyone, for listening. We'll be back next week with another topic right here on feature.

Brian heard something valuable today, but didn't get a chance to write it down. No worries, We've got you covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities welcome. While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social at United Wepod so you can get feed your brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting.