Podcast Growth Beyond Consistency: Create Stories People Remember

What if the podcast advice you hear all the time,

post consistently, feed the algorithm, follow best

practices, isn't the only way to grow? Today we're looking at why

unforgettable stories and great content can matter more than

doing what everyone else does. Plus, I'll share a few practical

things to check before a surprise renewal, a questionable

RSS feed clone, or a delayed show launch catches you off

guard. Hit it, ladies. The School of Podcasting with Dave

Jackson. Podcasting since 2005. I'm your award-winning Hall of

Fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson, thanking you so much

for tuning in. If you're new to the show, this is why I help you

plan, launch, and grow your podcast. My website, courtesy of

podpage.com, is schoolofpodcasting.com, and you

can use the coupon code listener when you sign up for either a

monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription. Again, that school

of podcasting.com, and I went and looked. I haven't talked

about kind of this subject since October 2016, back on episode

535, where I also played a commercial for my Cats record

that was a little weird, which kind of ties into today's topic,

and that is, you know, there are best practices. Last week we

talked with Brian Coddington from Libsyn, and it's definitely

true. Your title and your thumbnail have a lot to do with

the algorithm, the algorithm, and being found, but in the end,

having amazing content is also really good. And there was a guy

on Think Media that got interviewed called Doctor

Plants, and here is a clip from that, and I went, "Oh, we're

talking about somebody who isn't zigging; they're zagging."

For me, I believe that YouTube is just a storytelling contest.

The people telling the best stories are the people getting

the most views.

And then he said this later, in terms of what is the most

overrated advice about YouTube?

Oh my God! Posting consistently. I post three videos a year on

random dates, not specific times, not because oh it's a

holiday weekend. I post the video whenever it's done and

it's to the best of its ability. I only post three videos a year,

and they average 67 or whatever million views. And it's not

consistency. Might build you a more loyal audience. You might

develop a deeper connection with your fans. You might be able to

sell more products. But if you're talking purely about

getting as many views as possible, you can post one video

a year.

And one more clip talking about is YouTube saturated? Are there

too many YouTubers?

YouTube said that 20 million videos are uploaded

every single day. Do you think it's too late to start YouTube,

or can you still get in the game?

I think there has never been less competition. I

think AI has made everyone's content exceptionally average.

It's the reason why, when you go into YouTube, you're like, "Why

does everything look the same?" Right? Being 10% better than

everyone else is a 10 times view multiplier. It is not too late.

Find what everyone else is doing and find a way just to do it 10%

better. If you're improving a little thing on every single

video you do, it would be impossible to lose. All right.

So first things first, Dave. He said you don't

have to be consistent, and you say consistency is really

important. You become part of someone's routine. Yep, and that

is absolutely true. Based on feedback that I have received

myself, where people say, "Dave, you're with me every Monday on

the way to the feed store," and I know there are certain shows I

listen to on certain days of the week. They are part of my

routine, and so when you take a couple weeks off because you

decided to do seasons for whatever reason. You know now.

Granted, if you're going to keep your sanity, that's a good

reason. But you're giving someone else a chance to get at

your audience, and it's helpful. But none of anything you do in

podcasting is mandatory, and so Dan Carlin does hardcore

history, and he has always been the poster boy for well, it

depends. Dan is in the Podcaster Hall of Fame. He puts out

episodes when they're ready, which is one every two or three

months, and when they come out, they're basically a small audio

book. They're three, four hours long. So here are best

practices. Oh, and then there's Dan. So keep in mind if you want

to do something, and in your gut you go, I think this would be

the west, the best way to do it. But there's something in your

head that says, yeah, but that's not the way every. Else is doing

that might be a really good thing. Then you are zagging when

everyone else is zigging, and then I've said it before. I'm

not anti AI, but I see people that are trying to be seen as a

thought leader using the thoughts from ChatGPT, and like

he said, AI is making a lot of things average now. Not bad, not

oh my god! You got to watch it though. And when you want to

break out, you have to be better than the competition. You have

to be relevant. You have to resonate, and just turning on

two microphones and shooting the shinola with your friends is

probably not amazing content. Doesn't mean it's bad, but isn't

something that's going to inspire someone to go tell a

friend. And the very first thing he said: the people that tell

stories on YouTube are going to be the people that get the most

views. And I have been singing and telling, and just it's it's

all about storytelling. Those, if you read any book on

storytelling, and of course my favorite, and I can save you a

lot of time, is Storyworthy by Matthew Dix. Almost every other

book I've read about storytelling simply says stories

are good. Stories have been around since the caveman. You

should use stories. Yeah, duh. But Matthew's book actually

tells you how to take your content and cut out all the

non-essential part. He also mentions how stories usually,

well, not usually, always have a transformation. And one of his

examples is Jurassic Park is not about dinosaurs. And you're

like, what? Then why did they spend all that money on, you

know, the AI, CGI, whatever dinosaurs, and he goes. The

first scene of Jurassic Park has a couple arguing about children

and how they're expensive and they're smelly and they're

stinky and you know et cetera, et cetera. And at the end, that

same person is risking his life to do what? Save the children.

And I was like, hmm. So ramp up on your storytelling, and the

biggest thing I can tell you about storytelling is figuring

out where to tell the story. So very often we have way too much

background information when we just need to figure out where

does the transformation start, and then back up the smallest

amount you need to get the background you need to then

understand the transformation.

So I saw this and I was like, "Oh wow, this sounds

so crazy!" And in the end, it's kind of not. It's just the

direct opposite side of feeding the algorithm is to feed the

emotional side, and both are great. Remember, a great

content, YouTube or podcasting, because of course YouTube is not

a podcast. No RSS, no podcast. Get off my lawn, and you got to

remember, an episode is made up of content and delivery, and you

could have amazing content, but if you deliver it in a very

boring way, that sounds kind of bad. That's not going to work.

But if you have amazing delivery and you're talking about paint

drying, I was just watching the NFL, and I love the guy that

does the voiceover because he always goes Burger King, Burger

King. He's got the delivery, but he's saying Burger King, you

rule. Okay, you do know you're talking about Burger King. Jeez,

he's got the delivery, but the content, you know. Okay, you

rule. So it's content and delivery makes an amazing piece

of content. And if we look back at YouTube, the algorithm is

kind of the delivery. Yes, we're delivering it on YouTube, but

it's kind of dictated by the algorithm. And then Doctor

Plants is all about the content. Then you have to market it, and

that's where social media, newsletters, appearing on other

podcasts, you know, going to where your audience is making

friends with them and telling them about your show. Those are

all the different ways that you can promote. And right now, when

I just said those again, appearing on other shows, using

social media, a newsletter, going to where your audience is,

making friends and telling them about your show. Which of those

are you doing? And if the answer is a little bit of social media,

and yet you're not happy with your growth, maybe you do more.

It's just an idea. Who knows? Maybe your target audience is at

Burger King, and I'm not getting a dime, so I got to quit saying

that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kevin, I must do an episode about how to

get off of Spotify if you're on. But I have said over and over

and over, I'll put a link in the show notes along with the link

to the full Doctor Plants interview, I'll put those in the

show notes. You can go to schoolbookpodcasting.com/ 1061.

But I was I have often said just how you know Spotify is just not

a good partner, and we're all like, let's give everything to

YouTube and Spotify, and I'm like, hold on a second here, and

so I was listening to the Buzzcast. You can find that at

Buzzcast.buzzprout.com, and let's just say this is an

example of how Dave is not the only one that thinks Spotify

could improve. This is Kevin, one of the co-founders of

Buzzsprout,

helping out with a support case this week, so I had

to look at customers. I wasn't actually in their account. They

sent me screenshots of their account, and right under the

settings where you're setting up your Spotify for Podcasters

account, so they can get metrics and they can publish video and

they can do all that stuff. Screens that we have to push

them to to enable video. Like you have to go in here, you have

to turn this on. You have to get this thing so that we can

authenticate you, so that we can start pushing your video. They

are they've got banners that just say like basically, why are

you hosting with somebody else? Host with us for free. Yeah,

dude, that is so like not a good partner. But then we get on the

phone with them. They're nice people. They're easy to talk to.

They're happy to work with us. We want to just support

podcasts. We want to do all this stuff, but why? Why? Oh, it's

such an abusive relationship. I'm fine. Like I'm confident in

our product. People leave all the time. Try Spotify. Then it's

a. It's just a lot of work on the podcaster. It's a lot of

work for our support team because they come back and

they're like, "Oh yeah, I had a problem. I didn't get the

support I wanted, or they don't have a good mobile app for me to

check my stats, or you know, when I ran into an issue, I

could never get resolution for it. Like I'm confident in our

product. What annoys me is like, is this is just it's not it's

not something like a good partner should be doing, and

it's not even something they take seriously. Like they don't

even take the hosting side of their business seriously. It's

just a way for them to like pick off podcasters that start to

have some level of success to move them into your ad program,

which you don't even have to be hosting with them to participate

in their ad program. Every time we have conversations with

Apple, Apple is always like, "We want to help support you. We

want to be a good partner to you, and you you guys be nice to

us. And like, how can we strengthen our relationship?"

And we do get that from the Spotify team in person. But then

I log into their UI, and it's like the opposite of that.

Whoever's like writing these things in their app are not the

same people who kind of understand podcasting and how it

works and how we can all make each other better and stronger

and help ultimately support the creators who none of this exists

without them. And so, stop trying to get them to go to your

junky podcast hosting platform and then go through all the pain

of having to switch back when it doesn't perform. That is one

of my favorite shows. I love Jordan and Albin and

Kevin and everyone over there at Buzzsprout. Also, if you are a

fan of Rob Walsh and Elsie Escobar, when they worked at a

different company, they used to put out the mean and median

stats for their company, and since they moved to a different

company, that hasn't been happening. That's now happening

again. So if you want to see where you stack up, and of

course you can see that from Buzzsprout by going to

Buzzsprout.com/stats. But one thing I want to talk about now

is helping you avoid a headache. And I've worked obviously at the

School of Podcasting. I've worked at Libsyn. I now work at

PodPage. And one of the things that I run into is people get

mad at the company when we renew your monthly subscription, and

that's kind of like going to Netflix and going, "Hey, why did

you charge me again? It's a monthly subscription, and if

it's a yearly subscription, when you sign up at any of the

companies again, it says pretty clearly, 'Hey, we're going to

charge you again in a year, and I can say after being on both

sides of this that I've been with companies that send out

notifications like, "Hey, we're going to charge you," and people

like, "Why do you keep reminding that you're going to charge me?

Just charge me." So it's it's a no win situation. But I wanted

to bring this. Now because it's November as I record this, and

so all those Black Friday deals that you got last year, and some

of them were for a year, are they're right on the edge of

renewing, and so you might want to log into your checking

account that you use for your podcast because you know you use

a separate account for your podcast, right? I just did an

episode about this on the show Your Podcast Consultant. Again,

links to that School of podcasting.com/ 1061 because I

know every year there was at least one that all of a sudden

you look at your account. You're like, wait, what's this $94 for?

And you're like, oh, oh, I totally forgot I bought that

last year. And then you think about it, you go, I'm not even

using that. And now you're in the world of trying to get a

refund, and they don't always give you one because it's in

their terms that you didn't read when you signed up, so I'm just

saying you might want to put this on the to-do list. Go check

your checking account and look for things that you're not using

because Black Friday is coming up, and you probably got sucked

into something last year. And I'm trying to help you avoid

that headache. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All

right, this didn't come via technically email or

voicemail, which you can go to schoolwithpodcasting.com/voicemail.

This was from Nancy May, who's a member of the School of

Podcasting and does family tree food stories, and she was kind

of worried about this story about how people can take an RSS

feed and then put it into Spreaker, which is a yet again

another free media host that has advertising. And so what people

are doing is taking very very popular shows and they're

putting it into Spreaker and earn money from this. Now that

money doesn't go to the actual host because you know you kind

of stole their RSS feed, and then you make the money, and so

does iHeart, which is the people that own Spreaker. Now James

Kridland over at PodNews.net has pointed this out to them, and

there's a lot, a lot of shows that are have been cloned, shall

we say, and it just doesn't seem like they're in a giant hurry to

remove these cloned shows that are earning money for who again?

Oh, that's right, iHeart. And who are they not making money

for? Oh, that's right, the original host, which is bad. And

so hopefully they will change this. I don't know anybody

anymore over at Spreaker. I knew the whole team when they were

before they were purchased by iHeart. The reason I bring this

up is I'm not here to say leave Spreaker. Just realize, number

one, unless your show is really, really popular where people are

searching for it, you probably don't have to worry about this.

And number two, because of this practice, it's not the best look

for the iHeart slash Spreaker brand. And I listened to a show

called Podcasting 2.0 with Adam Curry and Dave Jones, and they

run the Podcast Index, which is a database, kind of an

alternative, independent version than Apple. And they were

talking about how when all this AI slop was coming out and all

these fake shows, and now all these kind of cloned shows are

showing up. They're trying to clean up the database because it

gets expensive to have all these horrible shows in your database.

Now they're very anti censorship, but on the other

hand, there are you know things like this that are just wrong.

And so when they were looking for well, how can we flag this

stuff? What's a red flag? One of the red flags was well, is it on

Spreaker? Now we're not saying all shows on Spreaker are bad,

although I will say this: my own personal observation. Every time

I hear a new show, and it starts off with not one, not two, but

three pre-roll ads. I will go. Hold on a second. This is

horrible. And I will go over, and I can see where they are

hosted on Spreaker. So that just seems to be like they're not

really focused on serving the audience. They're serving on

making the point 003 cents per ad, or whatever it is, and so it

may be something where you want to keep your eye on it because,

in the event the Spreaker brand really gets kind of linked to

not great podcasts, if you're on Spreaker, you might want to

think. About that, or just again, I'm not saying you should

leave. I'm just saying their brand is taking a hit, and they

don't seem really inspired to remove the things that are

somewhat of a black eye. And if you're worried about this, if

you're using a decent host, that is, I don't know. They just do

hosting because they want to be a good host, and they understand

that a media host is the heart and soul. It is the basement

that everything else is built on. Your RSS feed. They should

be able to lock your feed. It's usually just a switch, and so

you could go to their support and say, "Hey, I'd like to lock

my feed." And if they go, "What do you mean lock your feed?"

It's time to find a new host. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to

thank everyone over at PotIndie.com. That was this

weekend. I had a great time with Dr. Brad Miller and Cliff

Ravenscraft and Daniel J. Lewis. We had people from Ohio, that

would be me, Kentucky and Wisconsin, all driving to

Indianapolis, Indiana.

It was a great time, and again, that was online as well. My

guess would be if you go to podindy.com, you'll be able to

buy the recordings, because I know I had never really heard

Cliff Ravenscraft speak live. I've listened to his show,

podcast Answer Man. We've known each other for 20 years, and

Cliff really got me thinking in some of his sessions. And I was

like, you know what? I should have been taking better notes.

And so I will be talking more about that in the future. But

for all my new friends that I met over in Indianapolis, it was

great meeting you, and thank you so much for a great time. Now,

if you need help with your podcast, because look, look at

the calendar. If you want a show ready in January 2027, you need

to work on it now, and that's not a marketing thing. What

happens is Apple typically takes the last two years. The last two

years. Well, that'd be fun. The last two weeks of the year off.

That means you've got to have your show ready to submit to

Apple by the first week of December, and that's playing it

kind of loose. You really need to get it ready to get in there.

That way, come January, when you say, "Oh, here's where my show

is," and of course, the easiest way to do that is to point them

to your PodPage account. That's a great way to do it. But the

bottom line is, if you want to be in Apple and Spotify and all

these other places, you should really be doing that now. Don't

wait till January because everybody else who listened to

what I just said and followed my steps will be everywhere in

January, and you'll be still trying to figure out how to plug

in your microphone. Well, that's the kind of stuff we help you

with at the School of Podcasting. Again, use the

coupon code listener, and you'll get access to the courses, the

community, the amazing community, and of course,

coaching with me. Check it out, schoolofpodcasting.com, and sign

up for either a monthly, quarterly, or yearly

subscription. Until next week, I'm Dave Jackson. I help

podcasters. It's just what I do, and I can't wait to see what

we're gonna do together. And class is dismissed. Hey! In the

immortal words of Stephanie Schaefer, how rude! I forgot to

thank the one and only Mark Lawley. I got to hang out with

him as well as Krista, his wife, who do the practical prepping

show. And Mark, thank you for dinner.

Yeah.