Video Search Optimization: Why Your Podcast SEO Isn't Cutting It For YouTube

This is Feed you'd Brand with hosts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazzard.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd Brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with Tracy Hazzard, my co host and better half. And today we're going to talk about how podcast SEO is not YouTube video search optimization. They're two very different things. And, you know, I know a lot of our podcasters, they want to be everywhere, and they should be everywhere. Podcast and video are distributed. They want to be found everywhere. They want to be optimized everywhere. But it's not cookie cutter. The same things don't work in all different distribution channels.

Well, so I think there's a fundamental basics we got to start with. We for a really long time have been saying, well, YouTube is owned by Google.

It's true, it is.

But that does not mean that they work the same way. And I think that's something that we really have to understand on a fundamental basis. They actually work very differently. Their drivers are completely different. And because of that, this is after, I'm going to say, 18 months of intensive testing on our own and watching clients do things, sometimes successfully and many, many times not with YouTube specifically. We're seeing a definitive difference between the two platforms that you can no longer, and this is what our message is to you today. You can no longer pretend that what you doing for podcasting is ever going to work on YouTube. Just be conscious of it. You can make your decision of, I'm going to be YouTube first or I'm going to be podcast first. But if you only want to do one thing, you've got to make that choice.

I agree with that. You do have to make that choice. If you were going to say, all right, I'm going to use one title and one description that's going to work everywhere. You got to decide which one you're optimizing for, because it's not going to work as well as it could doing the same thing everywhere.

But I also think it's a fundamental content choice, what topic you're going to choose to do if you have a, an SEO plan that you're working in, a search engine optimization plan, whether it's for your website, whether it's for podcasting, or whether it's for YouTube. Like, two of those three things do match. Podcast and blog post, website match. So you can do two out of three, but you can't do three. Two out of three ain't bad, right? It's your choice. It depends on how much time and energy you want to put into it, but it cannot be done with all three things. Matching it just doesn't work. We tried every which way to make that work and we can't really.

All this means is you need to do things a little differently for YouTube than you do in the other places. And you can do that. But if either lazy or wanting to be more efficient and not having to deal with doing something different for YouTube to optimize it, or do it for YouTube first and don't want to do something different for your podcast and your website to be the best they can be, I mean, that's your choice, right? As a podcaster, it is your choice.

But I think that the choice really has to come at the beginning level of you saying to yourself, am I going to be a video first podcaster or am I going to be an audio first podcaster. Makes a very, very big difference in what you choose and how you choose to record. Those two things go hand in hand, obviously are recording video. You might record video for podcasting too. Its purpose is not to be YouTube first. And that's the difference there. You can be video first everywhere. It doesn't matter that you're choosing video as a media type. But you cannot be YouTube first and podcast first at the same time. Not without doing two things.

I agree with that. The other thing that I hear a lot from podcasters is, oh, well, yeah, absolutely, I want to be on YouTube because it's the number two search engine now. Okay, it technically is the number two search engine, but there's a little perspective I want to make sure all our listeners understand. First of all, it is not anywhere as powerful or significant as Google search is. It is a far, far, far distant second, a digit percentage of all Internet searches, not a two digit percentage. So people are still looking to meet their needs through Google first. But also more importantly, when you're comparing podcasts to YouTube, I'm sort of holding up my two hands here in the video. For those of you that are listening to the podcast, the reality is you're talking about YouTube, which is one channel, one app destination over here versus podcast. That's dozens of different apps. So collectively, all those different apps together, you need to be really considering that it's not just Apple versus YouTube or Spotify versus YouTube, it's collectively all listening apps. And I will tell you, with all of our many, many podcasters that we support, whether it's for production or just hosting, by far the majority of the shows have a larger podcast listening audience than they do a YouTube viewing audience. There are Some exceptions, but they're few and far between. And this is not to be down on YouTube. I am pro YouTube. I put all my stuff on YouTube. Right. We do that for our shows. But just be aware, whatever decision you make for yourself to be YouTube first or podcast first, make sure you fully understand all the context and the potential ramifications of that decision so you can make an informed decision.

Right. And that's what we're here to talk about today. We're sort of here to talk about how you make this choice and if this choice is right for you. Now, what Tom was saying about the search engine optimization of both distribution of being on the podcast app, but the way the search works is what matters most for us to understand at a fundamental level the way YouTube video search works and the way podcast search and Google search or blog search, if you want to think of it like that, whatever that is, those all go together in a big bucket. So they're actually all the same. So when you're talking about taking that big market that is Google search, it includes your podcast search because it works the same way. In fact, it works even more basic. So, like, there's lots, lots of things and ways you can game the system and play with things and do things to make Google search work better. And they happen to work even better when you go over to podcasts, because podcasts searches like search one on one, 1.0, it's like really basic. And so, you know, if you've ever heard the term like Boolean search or something like that, it's like you type in the words and it's going to give you the results. Like it's that basic where at least Google's doing some interpretation of what you're actually looking for. And so it's making a relevance, a relevance method. And so that's what everything is based on. So SEO, when we use that term for podcasting and for blogging, all of that is based on a relevance model, meaning I'm asking for something, and it is the search engine's job to give me what I'm asking for, even if I'm not 100% sure I know what I'm asking for. It's to give me the most relevant thing to add to what I really want. Right. If that's its job. I always used to say this way back when is that if Google gave us 0, gave us null results, or if Apple gave us null results. So when you ask for something, it's like when we were in 3D printing, like it was such an early stage of 3D printing, sometimes these search engines didn't know who had the answer or even what the term defined as. That's how cutting edge we were. And so it would have to decide what results it's going to give. So it says, well, it's around 3D printing and these guys are the, are the experts in it. So I'm going to give them some result that's over there. And at least they were sending them in the right direction. Because if it gave zero results, if it was empty every time, no one would ever use the search engine. So if Apple didn't give up any podcasts in that search topic, then no one would go to Apple anymore. They think Apple didn't have any podcasts or didn't have enough podcasts. So its job is to serve something up that's as closely relevant to what it thinks you're asking for.

Now YouTube is an entirely different animal, isn't it Tracy? It works in a different way.

Yeah. YouTube is. If you think about keyword search or focus on text based, what you're asking for is what you get, right? That's what we were talking about over on the search engine optimization. The opposite of that is going on where it's being, it's video specific search behavior. So in other words, if the results that it's going to give you don't give YouTube more of what it wants, it won't give it to you. So direct keyword matching is not its model. It's something you can engage with. That's what it's looking for. So it wants to give you a result that will get you to watch it and spend a lot of time watching it because then they make more money off of ads that it will send you into things that you will like comment, engage with and send you into the next thing that it thinks you want because it wants to keep you on platform, right? It does not care to give you what you're really asking for. It's not its purpose. It's going to give you the closest thing you're asking for that it can make the most money from. That's its model.

And isn't it also doing it differently because it relies heavily on tags from a technical perspective, but tags play into it in a big way.

So I mean it's pretty complex. It's, it's. I mean there's Nothing basic about YouTube, right? Like, I mean we talk about podcast search is very basic, but YouTube is not. It's got like visuals matter, right? How engaging is that visual, how likely are you to click on it because of the visual. Like they have measurements for everything. So it's really looking at that, at that video specific ranking, if you want to think of it that way, that video specific performance and not looking at how valuable is that channel or how unless it's making them a lot of money, right? Like that's it, that's how they make their decision. It's not how close to the results you want. Are you going to get more of what you're looking for in that location? Should I send you to this channel? Because they're a Deep expert in 3D printing as we were just talking about. No, they're going to say this is the video I can make the most money off of.3D printing. Here's the next most valuable 3D printing one. And where can I get you to take a dive in what YouTube is going to make the most money from.

That you're they believe most likely to be interested in. But the way they decide that it's not necessarily a direct search response result.

That's right. It's like I typed this in, I'm looking for this. So think about it from this perspective. They have you so mapped over in YouTube they understand your user behavior. So it's your behavior over there that matters more. But I have a different behavior as a individual consumer than I do in my business. My job is to research all kinds of random things all the time, right? If I did that, I'd probably be perceived by their user behavior metrics as schizophrenic. Like I don't think there's any other way to look at it, right? I'm like all over the place. I don't know what I want. I've got multiple personalities, right? Because on one day I'm, I'm a health and wellness guru and the next day I'm a finance geek. And so like, you know, I just got it all over the place because of how I search over there for that. Which is why I do not do that in my own profile. Just so you all know that, like I just don't do it. It would, I never search for my phone because that would mess me up, right? It would mess up the things that I'm actually personally interested in. So I do it in an incognito window. But that's my own way of doing it. And I highly recommend because it will be an absolute self fulfilling prophecy. If you do your keyword research in your own profile, it will mess you up. You will not get good results. You will not understand what you're doing. It will not give you what you are really looking for, which is something you're not doing today. Right. You need results of what I'm not doing so that I can get the results I want. And it can't come when it's already got you. It thinks it understands you already. And that's whether you're using something with AI, you're using something that's mapped you. You're following your user behavior in any way, shape or form.

Okay, I want to raise a big red flag here and say, whoa, hey, hold on. Everybody out there listening and watching. You got to realize what Tracy just said there. That's incredibly important. It's really critical. You're trying to do objective research on keyword phrases, terms, whatever that you hope are going to produce the results you want them to, to get your show, your episode found by more people. You can't do that from your own normal browser and your own profiles, things that you've done, because your own personal behaviors and biases and interests and all that are going to skew the results. You've got to actually do this research in an anonymized way through incognito, windows and whatever else that probably are a number of other techniques too, you've got to do in order to get results that are not going to be skewed. That's. I bet you anything, 98% of everybody listening hasn't thought of that. And when they do research, they're getting results that are. How do we say that have an inherent bias in them.

Well, so here's a really good example. I hear a lot of people using AI, right? So they go to ChatGPT or they go to Gemini and they type in and they say, hey, help me get some keywords. So I did that today. I said I wanted it to give me, give me some YouTube specific keyword research tools that would be helpful to podcasters. So for our coaching call today. So I asked it for that and you know what it gave me tomorrow? It gave me these four things. YouTube search, autocomplete, suggest. Okay. Which I'll show you what that is. People also ask and related searches on Google, Google Trends with the YouTube search filter, on which I will also show you shortly. And then the fourth thing, third party keyword tools. Example tubebuddy, potatoes, website analytics.

What it served that up because you are potatizing. You use it probably more. Right.

I did that from within Gemini in our Google workspace, which is potatoes.

And it knows about us there more heavily, probably than elsewhere. Okay, fine.

It's sucking up to me.

Yeah.

Right. So this is what I mean by it's heavily skewed by the fact that many, many times I teach our own Gemini to point to our own tools and products first.

Well, that makes sense. Obviously we want people to see our resources first. But we're in our bubble, Right?

Right. We're in our bubble. And that's where it can go wrong. Not that our it is a useful tool. I'm not going to get dominoes. For sure, it is a useful tool. That's why we built it into our portal. So it is there for you. But the reality is, is that if it serves me up those kinds of things, you can think about how many things it's not giving you. So in an effort to have an incognito, I have a very separated account that has no reference to the term potatoes or Podcasters United. So it has nothing in there. But I solely use it as its own separate account with an incognito window when I log into it. And I have one for Gemini and one for ChatGPT. And I only use the free version of it because that's what most people are using. And so I want to get the results that most people, people see, not the results, the refined results that I could see. And very often I will go there, type it in, and then I will go to my environment and type it in and see what the answers are. And you are, I am shocked so often at how like generic the answers are over out there and how very specific and helpful they can be in my own environment, but how much stuff they two misses together. So what I usually do is take the incognito one, take the one from my environment, put them together, and then ask a question like what ones haven't I covered before? What keywords haven't I covered before? Or how can I cover these keywords that came from the generic environment in a way that would be more powerful and useful to the productized audience. So you gotta ask the questions in a specific way, but it's very helpful to do that. But video is really important to do that because the user behavior does so much, that YouTube behavior that you, you take does so much to skew the answers that it will give you and the results that you will get that it will completely be an invalid guide. And so I'm a big proponent, absolute big proponent. And we've tested a bunch of them of outside tools, third party tools, TubeBuddy, is the one that Fran always recommend. Fran Acero, who is one of our experts here at Podcasters United, always recommends Tubebuddy. But there are other video tools. Almost every one of them does a much better job than you could do on your own because of the skew in the results and because when you try to use it in an incognito window, it just gives you such generic results because it's. It doesn't know anything about you yet. So it doesn't know. It's. It's trying to figure you out. And so it's kind of like it's testing you as it gives you results to see what you'll click on and what you'll do. So it's almost like. It's like it knows that you're testing that you know that you're being tested in the process of it. So it gives you bad results. So I'm going to share my screen real quick.

All right, so those of you listening to the podcast, you may want to note this time and maybe go check out the video when you have a chance@podcastreviewnet.org. okay.

Yeah. So when you're in. There we go.

So what are we looking at here? We're looking at a Google search now. Okay.

This is basic Google search Now. I typed in podcast social media planning. That's my keywords. I just did it because it's long tail enough to give me some good results here. It gives me. Because podcast is in the title, it definitely gives me podcasts up at the top. That's pretty nice, right? And it gives me social media marketing podcasts. So this is really good for you. You should check this out in an incognito window on your note on your own keywords. And then these are the ones. If you were in social media marketing. I'm not, but if I was, these are the nine. I might want to compare. I might want to use this, my competitive research. So then you're going to get the sponsored one. So you can really check out and see who's paying. Now, most of these are big, so I don't see anyone in the podcasting space paying for anything here. So but Riverside is showing up and they're paying for that. So they're seeing it as a keyword that they should pay for. It makes you decide, do you want to be paying for that keyword? Do you want to be paying to put something up? Almost always Reddit will show because Google's favoring real humans and they think that there are real humans on Reddit. Then it'll show you videos. Yours might be in a different order. This is the Incognito window. So it's kind of going in a logical order and giving you everything. Nine times out of ten I will not even see a video in my feed because it knows I won't click on it. So this is what I mean by you're going to get skewed results if you do it. But it's going to give you the videos so you're going to definitely want to check them out. Click View all and go to that and see what it's going to show you. And then you'll go down here and look. Apple Podcasts is giving you a podcast. Co host is giving you something. And look, here's Podcasters united. We're showing up on the first page of Google how to create an astoundingly simple podcast. Social Media Planner. Right, that's what this is.

So this would be what I would sort of qualify this as an objective result, not skewed based on our personal behaviors or frequent searches because of how you did it in Incognito. Would you agree?

Right? Yeah, exactly. And when I'm going through this, what you want to do is really look for, okay, this one like Meet Edgar. That's a really good social media tool we use to schedule out our social. It's got a nine useful tips. It's got a how to promote a podcast on social media. While that's really good, I may want to go and see what their advice is and do a spin off style episode and blog on our site for that. Or we have a good relationship with Meet Edgar. We're referral partners. Maybe I just want to have re share their article like write a summary of it and send people to their article. That could happen with any partners that you have. I do that with our Rasa newsletter all the time. They have a great blog and I just usually write a summary about why I think people should read their article and I put that on the website so you can also tie the two things together. This is also something else to consider. Look, this one is podcast social media calendar on co host podcasting.com and it's a downloadable. Okay, well ours isn't. Maybe I should do a variation on the blog and do a downloadable too. So these are things that are going to give you ideas about how to plan your topics and what to do with them. This is a tool that I use all the time and then I really go down to also the bottom where people also Search for podcast social media planning template. That would be a logical title to use to make a download. Best Podcast Social Media planning Podcast Social media planning ideas. This is what people are searching for. These are great ones that I should follow up and maybe do. Every year we do the same episode on social media planning. So this is giving me the idea of what should our next episode title be. And so this is really good for this. So this is one way to look at it. And that's what we look at there. If I go to YouTube though, actually I'm going to go to Google Trends first, because I think that there's something here that you haven't considered. So I typed in those same search terms here that did so well on Google and I made it under the Google Trends. You can go into a section where you can put what type you want. I want a web search and image search, a news search, Google shopping or a YouTube search. And look. Hmm. Your search doesn't have enough data to show here. This is what I'm telling all of you out there. This is when I said at the very beginning the words that are succeeding for you to get your website found on the first page of Google or to get your podcast shown as one of the top podcasts in that category is not working on YouTube. And here's the perfect example of it.

That's shocking. I mean, really, those of you listening to the podcast, go check the video out here because the visual here is quite shocking in that your search doesn't have enough data to show here. I mean, it shows you that it really is very different on YouTube and it's a whole different animal in terms of search.

I don't know why that's not showing, but anyway, it should be showing. Ah, here we go. So, yeah, so you'll get some. That'll. They'll start to show you trends over time and whatever. But you have to really, I'm. I'm telling you in order to get it to work in YouTube search, the stuff you have to type into the. The variations on it is almost agonizing to try to come to a solution. Which is why I say if you're gonna do YouTube first, don't even bother. Instead pop over to TubeBuddy and use their keyword planning tool like. And it's way too complicated. I am not gonna show it to anyone here. But you've got search ranking, tracking, you've got alerts that you can put in. You can do it right within the video as you're in search, installing it. And get it. And so you can take your podcast video that you already have and created and published it out on podcast and published it on the blog and then take it to YouTube and retitle it and come up with a new title that will work on YouTube. Use something like this tool. There's Video IO or Video Video, I don't know that something like that that's called. I forget what it's called.

Yeah, but tubebuddy, I mean honestly for YouTube it's the gold standard and I don't think you to spend a lot of whole time, a whole lot of time looking at other things.

The thing about TubeBuddy is it's like I use the legend version which is like 19 bucks a month. I pay for a yearly and get a really deep discount. But it's worth paying the extra because you can use all the tools and every little piece of it works while you're in YouTube doing things. It does not work here in my incognito window. That's why I can't demo it to you because I can't associate it up with my site for you. But then remember that, that it did suggest the Potitize client portal. And if you go to the website that tab in your analytics you go to analytics, you go to the websites tab. As long as your website is registered in with your account here and in with your, with your show. Right. You'll be able to see it here. You can see your backlinks, you can see your organic keywords, you can see your time. This is just a month in a snapshot. But you can go down here and see where you're ranking on the first page of Google best budget podcast microphone. We're in number three. I don't actually see social media on the list that one but it's. It was like number eight or nine anyway. So it's probably just a little farther down on this list. You can export a document with all the organic keywords. So you can get this list and then go look at it and do a comparison and try to find matching words or similar words or what phrases you should be using on YouTube. You can use this tool because these are obviously Your top ranking 1 in the podcasting and search engine world. So these are the tools that like I want you to get used to. But I just have come to this place where trying to do it in an organic way is too, too time consuming. Doing it in a video specific way or doing it in a channel specific way using tools like tubebuddy and we'll of course have the link to TubeBuddies. You can go to podcasters united.org tubebuddy or poditize.com forward/tubebuddy and we'll still get you there. So if you don't know what it is, just go there and you can go there and just learn how to use the tools. Now here's some things that I really found is that their tutorials are fantastic over there. They have videos, of course, and so you're able to like come at, but watch the alerts when they do not turn your alerts off. When you log in and you look at it, they have like, here's the latest tip of the day or whatever like that. I've turned on some things that just like killed it out. Like did amazing things for the channel because they had this little tip. It was a two minute video and the next thing you know I was getting more traffic. So do not skip them. They are the cutting edge tools that maybe only will work for 30 days before YouTube figures out that people are gaming the system. But they work and so you should follow their rules.

But Tracy, let's not sugarcoat it. I mean, I think anybody who considers themselves a podcaster first and is taking advantage of the increased exposure YouTube gives you, which is wonderful. That's why we do it too. And as wonderful as TubeBuddy is, and it is a great tool. I agree. And our customers tout it as a fantastic tool and they got increases in their video views after using TubeBuddy. All this is true, but it's going to take work. I don't want you to think that, hey, TubeBuddy is going to do it all for you. I mean, this is active participation. You've got to put the time in and to understand what it is you're doing and then to do it right and use the tool to optimize. So, I mean, I just don't want people to think, oh, it's so easy sign for TubeBuddy and it's going to do it all for you. Not exactly, but it's going to give you that roadmap for what you need to do. But you've still got to do the work to go down that road, right?

So if you're a big enough company or you're big enough, have a big enough staff, here's what I've come to. I am no longer letting my social media team manage YouTube. The people who are running my social and writing my copy, we keep those all separated. So the one that's determining the search engine optimized keywords and all of that is different from the one who promotes on social media and now is different from the one who optimizes on YouTube.

So what have you done? We put an actual employee in place whose sole responsibility is YouTube. Is that what you're saying?

I'm trying some new things. So we haven't actually. It's like it's a little bit different than that where we're having somebody who both creates clips and optimizes. So we're doing a little bit more advanced YouTube ideas. That's because I want to test going to monetization over on YouTube as its own model. So we're just doing a little bit different here. But yes, essentially it's three. And so what we've discovered is that if I play the social media game, I damage my ranking. Absolutely will damage my ranking. And, and we know this, Tom, because how many social media influencers decide to be podcasters and fail like within 60 days?

Well, they give up really quickly because they're not seeing the same level of engagement as they do in their social channel. The thing they don't realize is whatever social channel they have all that huge number of followers on and get all these likes and shares and things when they post something, those same people are not necessarily podcast listeners or YouTube viewers. They are social media users and followers and they like what's going on on social media. They're not necessarily going to listen to your recommendation, call to action to leave that social media platform and go over and start watching YouTube videos, or go and now start listening to podcasts and subscribing. Now there is. Some are, of course, I'm not saying they're entirely separate audiences, but I would say they. I mean, yes, we've seen it time and again. Someone has 500,000 Instagram followers and they publicize the episode there. They get a modest little increase in listenership on that episode, but not necessarily a big one. Now, of course, there are many, many other factors that play in that. Not just putting it on social. But did the guest actually promote it, say something good about it?

Okay, that's like a totally other podcast that you're going down the road. So like, let's not go there. Okay?

But I want people to understand there's many things involved though, in that. But yes, fundamentally totally different optimization.

It's an engagement basis. It's a authority building. Like it's a different model of it. So we handle it totally differently. But it's hand after the fact because we know that Our business growth depends on people finding us on Google, people finding us on AI. Those two things matter more. And that means that a search engine optimization model based on focus keywords in our niche and topics that are absolutely relevant to all of you listeners out there right now. The stuff we do live on, our coaching calls where we're really helping our clients and we're helping our future clients, this makes a difference to our business. This has a direct impact to our revenue stream. So that's where we start first. That's the decision that we made. Then secondarily we do share tips and clips and engagement and guests and all the things that we do, we share out on social because we want to be social, right? We want to be engaging. We want to make sure people know we're here for them. But that's its point. Its point isn't to make money on social media point. Its point is to be alive, be posting, be there when they need us on social media. That's its point. And now we're looking at YouTube as its own separate thing and saying the YouTube audience is completely isolated. They're very separated in the way that their search works, the way everything else works. I have to have a different strategy for them now. Now Fran and many other YouTuber experts will tell you you need a whole video recording strategy for that and I am going to break that this year. That is what I'm going to say. I'm going to say we don't need a separate strategy. We just need to have to learn how to chop up what we have or reframe what we have by using these third party tools and understanding the mindset and behavior based search optimization that video search optimization. But we can make it work without recording something completely new. I mean look, how many times have they done this like thing where they're like oh, do the like funny little thumbnail clips with Tom making faces and pointing at things and they're gone already. Like nobody wants anyone who sees those goes like, oh, they're using one of those like stop following the stupid trend thing. Do what you know to be best. But understand that video users are have a different behavior model and the algorithm works different there. So you do have to play the game.

You know that's interesting Tracy. As I think back there have been these. I will to the nice way to say it is different trends in how to create thumbnails for YouTube videos or doing other sorts of things in YouTube and I almost want to say they're fads because they really don't have the long term shelf life is maybe a good way to put it as other things do, like SEO and blog search for podcasts. I mean, it's been working for more than a decade and it's why our business exists and it continues to provide value year after year for the podcasters that are doing it. You can't say the same thing about different strategies in YouTube. They tend to come and go pretty quick, don't they?

Well, it's the same thing about like think direct marketing and like LinkedIn chat. Right? Direct messaging and LinkedIn chat. Now everybody has a bot that does it. And because of that, we all now ignore every message that comes through, even if they're coming from real humans. We now just, it destroyed our messaging. So it comes to a point, by the time you are hearing that you should be doing this thumbnail trad someone selling it and making money off the sale of it before it's gone. But it's not gonna work for you. By that time you get to it, you're not on the cutting edge because you don't have a million followers, because you're not on that edge of being able to test something, see, it was working, do it. By the time they tell you what they're doing, it's over.

And it's really exhausting to me mentally to have to try to keep up with that.

But here's the difference, Tom. You and I both know this because I just did this. It's the funniest thing. So we haven't purged shows from our archive in a really long time.

Oh, on our platform. Oh yeah. You told me this yesterday. This is actually eye opening.

We're going to do a whole show on this. But the patterns of failure, they absolutely. I started like making notes and then doing an analysis trend of the ones that failed, the ones that quit their show, basically. And these are people who abandoned their feed, right? Like they didn't just move it. They like didn't make it cheap. Like they, you know, we're going to a free platform. No, they quit. They just were like, forget it. I made all these episodes and I'm done. Right? Like I don't know.

And by abandon your show, we mean truly abandon it. Given up any rights and ownership to it. So go, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I analyzed all the trends of like what was going on there. This is when I come to you, when you hear the episode that we're going to air about this, you're going to go like, like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that that's true. Like, I'm. And I'm gonna give you one tip here so you guys can hear it. But, like, if your name is Sarah, you are more likely to abandon your show, like, statistically, way more likely to abandon your show than any other person.

And so there's gonna be a whole lot of these little, I would say, traits, qualities, or observations that we found from doing this for ten years, supporting podcasters. And it's almost like you wonder why traffic backs up when there's an accident on the other side of the freeway that's divided and, hey, my side's clear sailing. Why am I slowing down? No, this is like, you're not going to be able to help yourself, but slow down and look at this, and you're like, what? And you're all going to learn some different things that some may apply to your show. And maybe not all, but, oh, my gosh, it was I right.

But what this tells us about what we should be doing on our end is the extreme value. And this is why I have come around about TubeBuddy and all of these video and all these other tools that they have out there, because they are seeing this pattern that you are not. There is no way for you to do this in isolation. We can see a pattern of what was working and what wasn't in podcasting. And now our system and process is unparalleled in terms of its success. We see people who leave our platform and come back, and they have lost so much value, it's not even funny in a short, short period of time. That's how much residual value. All the things that we've been built in and done over time, that's what's going on with TubeBuddy and some of these other tools. And that's why I cannot. I cannot recommend them enough. And that's why I said that I. We're adopting a new strategy where I'm getting someone who's an absolute pet expert in that tool to help us develop a video strategy separate. A YouTube strategy separate from the podcast strategy. But I made the choice here, and this is where I really want you to hear it. I made the choice to not be YouTube first because I feel very strongly after looking at how YouTube's search engine is working, that it would harm my business more than it would help it.

If you went YouTube first. Now, I think it's fair to say every other podcaster business owner out there needs to make their own choice, do their own analysis, and decide whether it makes sense that they're going to be podcast first, YouTube first, or try to be all things to all people, you know.

And look, if you're a celebrity or an entertainer, you should not listen to what I just said. You should do the opposite. You should be YouTube first.

Right. But if you're not a celebrity and you're trying to rise above the crowd in this noisy digital world, our experience would tell you, go podcast first.

Right. So this was one of the reasons that this kicked into my reign. Our son in law, Jonathan, is an amazing video expert and he has supported many podcasters over the years and he has just done a tremendous job of growing their YouTube channel. But he said to me that they had some strategy that was given to them by a marketing team.

Marketing firm.

Yeah, a marketing firm. Yeah. And he was evaluating it and he said, do I need to follow this? Is this really what's best for the business? And they said, oh, no, no, we want to rank. We want to be popular on YouTube. Should we? Is that going to drive what you want?

Is that going to achieve the business outcome that you're looking for? Is maybe a different way to think about it. That's how he was, I think quite astutely for him, being a video expert and, you know, it's in his best interest if he were to let everyone believe, spend more money on me and what I do and you're going to get to the promised land. He's actually wasn't doing that. He was looking at it from a perspective of is the outcome this business is trying to achieve, because he's been working with one company as a consultant for years and understands their business model. And he's like, I don't think this is going to achieve the outcome you want it to. It's almost like the Inigo Montoya thing, you know, I do not think it means what you think it means.

That's right. So anyway, but the point is, is that here's somebody in the video world who should be like, oh yeah, let's spend more money on video. He's saying, I don't think this is. You'll quit this, this, right? You'll stop this. It's the same thing like those what we were saying before about the social media influencers coming into podcasting with these unrealistic expectations of how it works. So he abandoned some of their. He said, I don't have to follow all this advice he got, you know, from the person he's direct, directly in contact with. Followed his own, and it's working. So, like, they're they are getting the results that they want, just not through the method of following the YouTube model.

Wow. Eye opening. All right, well, hey, I can't wait to work on titling that future episode where we reveal and dish on all the trends that we've seen in shows that did not make it.

Well, we already used the title, like, how to Fail podcasting again.

No, this is something. No, this has to be a little more.

Well, then I'm going to challenge you to title one for a change, because I'm tired of titling them and, you know, maybe you could come up with one. But. Yeah, I've got 10 things.

Wow.

Like, it's gotta be like 10 things I hate about you. Like that it needs to have a play like that. Yeah. So that'll be upcoming. It is. I think it'll probably be the beginning of August at the latest by the time we get into it. I'm gonna try to put it in sooner, but I don't think I can. And. But we'll be looking forward to seeing you back here on that. So I know this. We went long on this, but I think it was just really. It's. When we compare and contrast, it's really hard to be consistent, precise, especially when.

We'Re opinionated, I think.

Yeah. Just a little bit.

Yeah.

But you know what? Here, I hope you know, I set out the goal for this year is to tell you like it is. Right. To have that straight talk to you, to be the hard truth. And I don't think we'd be where we are in business if we didn't do that behind the scenes a lot to ourselves. So I appreciate all of you who follow us out there. Come back next week for us to say it again. But I don't want to sell you something you're not going to be able to succeed at. I just don't.

Or to give you unrealistic expectations just to make you want to do what would be maybe the most profitable or profitable or the, you know, path of least resistance for us or anything. I mean, it's just not who we are. We're. We're pretty straight shooters, so.

But I'm excited about some of the things we've got coming up to share with everybody come this fall. We've got some super cool new programs. I'm also sure we're gonna upset some people along the way because we're changing things and when we make changes, everybody gets a little bit up in arms. But I'm okay. I can deal with change, so. And I can take the flack. I have pretty thick skin, so we'll deal.

Nobody likes change, huh? Isn't that shocking?

I actually love it.

You know, to me, it's refreshing. It's an opportunity for, you know, it's an opportunity, I guess, the way I look at it. And that's really what we're all about, helping you continue making make progress, to meet your goals with your podcast. So come back and we'll keep doing that for you.

All right, thanks, everyone, for listening. This is Tom and Tracy on feed.

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