Last week was Podcast Movement 2019 in Orlando–and I. had. a. blast.
- LOADS of awesome people
- new podcast companies/tech
- plenty of learning
- potentially game-changing ideas
And goofy podcast nerds 😉
Here are my takeaways from Podcast Movement 2019.
Note: This is a transcript of the episode with timestamps! 🙂
1. It is easier to impact people from a podcast.
2:08
Guy raz a former NPR you know celebrity in my opinion because I used to listen to NPR three of the top 20 podcasts are from guy rise involved Guy Raz how impressive is that for one thing, he talked a lot about audio and how it impacts people how it like makes a difference in people. One thing it has that text does not have is super easy to detect “nuance.”
2:35
I can tell you from my voice if I’m tired, like I just sound tired right now don’t I?
2:40
Or when I’m super excited about online impact! I honest to goodness think this is going to be an incredible thing. You can see that in my voice. You can hear that nuance that shares my emotions so to speak, right? You can do this and writing but it is a lot harder, a lot harder. This is a good thing video has going for it as well.
3:00
On my way back from podcast movement in the car, I had an eight hour drive. I was listening to The Ballad of Billy balls from crime town. It is a true crime podcast. It impacted me. I was emotional in the car, listen to this podcast. It’s a fantastic story. I was almost had to pull over the side of the road to cry a little bit like, it’s such an incredible story. And it’s told with such nuance, and it just conveys emotion in such a way that I would never have gotten from a book. If that story or a book, I never would have gotten the same emotional reaction, or at least it would have been a lot harder for the author. It’s easier to impact people with a podcast.
2. Companies are pouring money into podcasting.
3:46
I will not forget walking into the expo hall at podcast moon but there’s a lot of people going around. It’s a fun conference environment. It’s loud. It’s noisy. I see some friends over there. I see these companies starting to like set up their booths or whatnot and then BOOM.
4:01
I look up and there’s like a 30 foot tall Spotify, almost like a pavilion. It’s crazy. There’s like ivy all over it. They had a like free espresso bar with a barista right there. They had some couches pulled up with a carpet. It said Spotify for podcasters. People talking, they just had baskets, sitting out with T shirts, just like take as many as you want. Just take them. You don’t have to like come talk to us in our reps here at the podcast booth, Spotify.
4:31
I don’t know how much money it costs, but they put a lot of money into this booth for the conference. And right across the way it was Google. Right across the way was IHeartRadio and all of these companies coming in here are spending a lot of money on podcasting.
4:47
What does that tell you? What does that tell you about the medium and where they think podcasting is going?
Super side note here…I’m whispering to get some emotion across. Did you know the Spotify acquired gimlet media last year is one of the bigger podcast production companies. Did you know that they actually acquired Anchor.fm as well? It was the largest acquisition for podcasting in the history of podcasting. What are they going to do with it? I don’t know. I asked the reps and the reps would not tell me. I was like, What is Spotify doing for podcasting? This is super exciting, but no one knows. And the reps told me, we don’t know either. They keep everything a secret from us.
5:26
I found that very interesting.
3. All of these companies at podcast movement are just doing incredible things.
All of these like recording technology like Zencastr and SquadCast, and all these advertising companies that make it super easy. It’s kind of like an AdSense or a mediavine. It makes it easy to insert ads in your podcast without you actually doing it like the company’s the technology does it? It’s going crazy. All the editing tools like Hindenburg and like–I don’t know. I love Hindenberg…
6:02
What I’m saying is, it’s never been easier to produce a podcast. That’s a good thing. And a bad thing.
6:09
This happened with blogging as well, once it became super, super, super easy to start a blog, more and more companies and more and more people started blogging. More and more people are starting podcasts now because it’s easier than ever before. But what does that mean? It means the space is becoming more crowded, it’s more difficult to stand out. It’s more difficult to grow your downloads, and it’s going to be way more difficult. a year from now, two years from now, the time might be now to start a podcast. Actually, the time to start a podcast was 10 years ago, but the second best time is now.
4. Linking to your podcast.
6:49
On your show notes from your website. Where do you link to you link to iTunes IE Apple podcast. Now you link to Google Play. Maybe that’s what mine was. I linked to stitcher, Spotify, Overcast…
7:04
You don’t want to do that anymore. You want to link to two places in two places only Google podcast, not Google Play. You should not be linking to Google Play right now. You should be linking to Google podcasts. And you should be linking to Apple podcasts.
7:18
Why? a whole host of reasons that you can read up on pod news. net, I will provide a link in the show notes to this episode. It’s actually from a guy named James Cleveland, who’s actually coming on the podcast, my own podcast in a week or two to talk about this very thing. I will save that information for that podcast. But you should be linking to Google podcast and you should be linking to Apple podcasts. And there’s some very compelling reasons that will be I guess, shared on that episode. There you go.
5. Podcasts work well with word of mouth marketing, which is becoming more important.
8:15
I’m going to say that again, podcast. So a podcast grow is mainly through word of mouth marketing, you just don’t really acquire a lot of new podcasts on any given day, like you might a new blog. podcasts work well with word of mouth marketing, and word of mouth marketing is becoming more important than ever.
8:37
We can’t trust Facebook. We can’t trust Google to recommend this stuff anymore. Because we’re hit with a bunch of ads. We’re hit with a ton of blogs.
8:45
It’s becoming even more important to rely on what our friends tell us is good, right our friends and family word of mouth marketing is becoming more and more important. And podcasts work really well with word of mouth marketing.
9:00
It might be easier to grow podcasts and it is grow a blog in the future. I’m not saying right now, I’m not saying that it might be in the future word of mouth is becoming more important. podcasts work with word of mouth.
6. You should start a podcast. But you can start small.
9:19
A lot of people see me saying this you should start a podcast everybody started podcast. Everybody listened to the Do You Even Blog podcast should start a blog…
9:29
Yes, I truly believe that actually, I do believe all of you should start. But the good news is you don’t have to learn editing. You don’t have to learn a digital audio workstation. You don’t have to learn anything other than this talking in front of some microphone, ie your phone. You can use anchor to start and start today.
9:48
Yes, you’re going to stink at it. But you think at blogging when you first started. Whenever you launched your first product. I’m sure it wasn’t that great. You had to make minor improvements yet to get better. It’s the same thing with podcastring, and you can start small. But do start, start small.
10:04
But start.
10:05
I think everyone should be at least experimenting with this for several months, and just seeing what happens at this point seriously. Like if you have a blog, start a podcast, do it. Don’t do it for free. Don’t spend any money. Don’t buy any equipment. Don’t use any editing software whatsoever. Have fun with it.
10:22
Make something interesting for your audience for six months, share it with them, and see what happens. That’s all I asked.
10:28
Maybe nothing happens. And then you can quit. But I think everybody should experiment with starting a podcast, even if you just start small start.
6. Launching a podcast (how many episodes and when?).
10:42
It used to be “Oh, I’m going to try and get in iTunes new and noteworthy!”
10:45
Well, those days are gone. For several reasons. One, iTunes is gone. Second news and new and noteworthy is–you can’t you can’t crack that cookie. I’m sorry. Maybe if you’re in Gimlet media and you’re launching a new show to millions of people, maybe you could crack that most of you this in this podcast cannot.
11:03
I’m really sorry, you might get super lucky. And that’s great. Good for you.
11:07
A proper way to launch these days is to launch with Google in mind. Why Google starting to index actual podcast episodes.
11:15
They started this a week ago, from the time of this recording today. Last week, Google started showing podcast episodes indexed and search results, like you can literally click play in Google search results. Hmm, interesting. So what do we do for launching? It means that’s ready. You have a website for your podcast or if you’re a blogger, you already have one good for you. By the way,.
11:37
You create your first episode like the introductory episode, your podcast, episode zero. I like to call it just three to five minutes saying who you are, what your podcast is about. It’s very important because a lot of people go back and start with episode one.
11:51
And this is the episode you want them to see people that are new to your podcast. You want them to listen to this episode.
11:57
So make it good, make it count by the way…
12:00
Launch that. You upload to Apple podcasts or you apply to Apple podcast, excuse me, you hit go. And then you wait a month.
12:08
Why?
12:08
Let it be indexed, you can put it on your website at that point in time. Like you can make a separate podcast category, maybe put podcast under menu. You can also apply to Spotify. After you get accepted.
12:21
You give yourself a month to kind of get it going without actually launching without telling your audience yet. And then you launch then you have 123 episodes that you launch on launch date, after a month where Google now has you indexed. And hopefully you’ll be connected to all of your other apps, like tunein like Spotify, like Google podcast, etc. By that point.
12:47
If you don’t do that you risk anybody who has an iPhone, which by the way, is not a lot in the United States. It’s only like 30 40%.
12:55
Globally? It’s like 70% of smartphone users have Android devices.
13:00
You might actually risk not being able to reach those people.
13:04
You want to be on Google podcast at this day in time and 2019 and beyond. You need to be on Google podcasts. You need to make that happen. Launch with an episode zero, wait a month, get your website setup, get that ready to go get on Google podcast, let them index that single episode, and then boom, lunch, then you can go.
7. Where you learn at conferences in general.
13:27
You can go two sessions, I went to one and a half sessions at podcast movement, and it was great. I really enjoyed them, actually. But I also learn from talking to people, you learn from talking to people. It’s not just networking, trying to find more guest posts, trying to find more sponsors for your blog, trying to connect with brands trying to get your selfie taken with Pat Flynn.
13:48
It’s not all about that sort of networking. You can also learn stuff from other people. Naturally, you will start talking about their business what they do, you can ask questions about that.
13:57
“Oh, wait, you’re launching your first product. What tools are you using for that? oh, I never heard of that software before. What are you doing for this? What are you doing for that?”
14:04
It’s okay to ask questions. And in fact, it’s really, really good networking form…You will probably learn more from asking people questions and just engaging in networking at these bigger events than the actual sessions, especially if you have the virtual replays.
Boom. #podcast.
So–when does your podcast launch? 😉
Drop me a comment and let me know what you think!
