Strike Up Your Podcast: Lessons from Duck Pin Bowling

I am in a loud building flashing back like it's 1970 and I'm five years old because I'm looking at.

Is that what I think it is?

Yep, it's an ashtray.

I'm flashing back because I'm in a bowling alley and all sorts of weirdness is going on because it's not a normal bowling alley.

What is it and what does this have to do with podcasting?

A lot.

There's a lot of lessons and some tips to give you the courage to press record and an AI prompt to reinvent your interviews.

Hit it, ladies.

The school of Podcasting with Dave Jackson.

Podcasting since 2005.

I am your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson.

Thanking you so much for tuning in.

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My website is school of podcasting.com use the coupon code listener.

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And of course that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

And so yeah, I ended up doing what's called duck pin bowling.

And the first weird thing about it was the ashtray.

I was like, wait, what?

And the, the balls coming back did not.

There was no automatic where like, you know, it sucks the ball out.

And that whole.

It was very like, I don't know, 1956.

But I was in Indianapolis this weekend speaking at Pod Indy, had a great time.

It was what they call an intimate affair.

And so we had a great time.

And at the end of it, I don't know, a half a mile from where we held the event, there was duck pin bowling.

And so being that I'd never gone duck pin bowling, they said, hey, you should stick around and go.

And so I did.

And first of all, let's get the obvious out of the way.

And that is what the heck is duck pin bowling?

And the balls in duck pin bowling are about 5 inches in diameter.

They weigh about 4 pounds.

And the actual pins, the duck pins, are shorter and lighter than your typical ten pin kind of bowling, what I will call normal bowling, which makes them more challenging to knock down.

And as they're set up in the same kind of triangle, because they're smaller, it's, it looks the same, but there's more space between the pins.

And basically, in the normal way you bowl, you get two tries to knock them down as this is harder.

As you find out, you get three.

Everything else is pretty much the same.

And so I'm doing something for the first time.

That's one of the reasons I stuck around.

I'm like, I've never heard of duck pin bowling.

I get a chance to go duck pin bowling with Dr.

Brad Miller, Jen from Bourbon Barrel podcasting, Larry Roberts, the Red Hat guy, Chris Kamitsos from podfest.

I mean, a whole bunch of people, and it was fun, but there was a couple things I was like, oh, this is so podcasting.

So first thing, when you think about it, I don't know why, but people seem to refrain from about asking for feedback.

I'm like, hey, have you polled your audience?

And we're going to be talking about polls and audiences over the next couple weeks here.

Hey, this is future Dave jumping in.

I'll tell you about a survey tool from PodPage towards the end of this episode.

It's so cool.

Back to the show.

But I'm really into them.

I think they're.

I'm a teacher.

As a teacher, we all want feedback so we can make the course better.

And when you think about it, when you are bowling, whether it's duck pin or normal, you get instant feedback.

And podcasting offers insights through audience engagement and metrics, which help you refine your approach.

So there was one thing that was kind of funny.

We think we got it.

Like, we kind of walk in, and the first thing I notice is no bowling shoes.

I'm like, wait, no bowling shoes?

Like, nope.

And I see the ball smaller, and people are throwing it and they knock down pins.

I'm like, oh, I got this.

All right.

Everything's just smaller.

And you get three attempts.

Got it.

No big deal.

And I get up, and I'm not a great bowler.

Like, if I were to bowl, like, back in the day, it was somewhere between 130 points to maybe a little over 200.

I usually had.

If I bowled three or four games, I'd have one good one, one bad, and two that were meh.

And so I'm like, all right, I got this.

It looks easy, right?

It really looks easy.

And so I get up there and I'm kind of like, okay, this is going to be weird because I'm, you know, you slide that last step to the pins.

You slide.

And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to slide in my shoes here.

And I'm figuring out.

And I got the ball.

And it's weird because I don't.

You don't Put your fingers in the hole, because there are no holes.

It's like throwing a really heavy, slightly oversized softball.

And so I get up, I take my four steps, I let my arm throw, and I think the first time I might have hit some pins.

But I'm here to tell you, if somebody were to bet on this, I'd go, just bet on me hitting pin number 10.

The way over.

The one.

Way over there on the right hand side.

That last one.

Yep.

Nope.

None of the other ones.

Let's leave the other nine pins.

Just that one.

I'm gonna hit that one.

And I bowl left handed because I'm weird like that.

And I just kept pitching it way, way right.

And it was not as easy as it looked.

And so if you think about this podcasting, well, you just talk into a microphone, maybe call up some of your friends, talk for three hours, and they give you hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yeah, that's.

That's not the way it works.

And if you think about it, I had no hurdles in front of me.

I had 10 pins, nothing blocking them.

Zero.

All I had to do was throw the ball in a way that it did not go into the gutters.

And there was nothing.

It wasn't like the lane was slanted to where they would roll into the gutters.

The lane was flat.

It was just me being able to control my arm and let go of the ball with the right velocity.

And I'm used to spinning the ball like I normally kind of spin it, and it hoops on in there.

Yeah.

I'm here to tell you there was a lot going on and not a lot of pins going down, but that was instant feedback.

And so after throwing, you know, a few frames of stuff, I'm like, okay, this isn't working.

And so that was about a third of the game.

I think at that point I'm like, this is not working.

And I was just literally constantly just.

You'd watch me get up there and throw.

I'm lining up on the left hand side of the lane, and it would end up on the right hand side of the lane, if not in the gutter.

And so you start a podcast and you're like, okay, I started off, I had, you know, whatever, 17 downloads, and then the next one, it was this.

And it's just not going the right way.

That happens.

But you're getting feedback and hopefully.

Right.

If we were smart back in the day when I would bowl, usually you got a couple practice.

You had a couple of practice before the game started.

I don't think we did this.

We might have had one or two, but then we started.

But there wasn't a lot of practice.

So that would be the first lesson.

Maybe practice a little more before starting the game.

So maybe you should get some feedback.

Cause I got feedback the minute I threw that first one.

I was like, oh, this is weird without sliding.

This is weird without shoes.

This is weird without putting my fingers in the holes and one ball, like somebody taking a bite out of it, you'd throw it in that thing, go all sorts of weird ways.

So you are getting feedback.

And so after about three or four, whatever you call it, frames, I was like, all right, I'm really used to sliding.

So I took my shoes off.

I luckily had one of those old person kind of shoes where you just slipping in that.

Those are really what I call my traveling shoes.

Because I usually when you travel, you have to take, you know, untie your shoes and get on a plane, all that.

I drove this time, but I still had my.

My traveling shoes on and got up and slid and it kind of helped.

And then about three frames later, I'm like, yep, it's not the sliding thing.

Now, what was interesting, just like in podcasting, everybody has different approaches.

Chris Komitzos had the taking out some childhood issues kind of vibe when he threw the ball, and that it was about 900 miles an hour.

And you were kind of thinking that if he hit pins, they would shatter into a million pieces.

That was kind of fun.

Larry Roberts, Red Hat Media was kind of like me trying to bowl like you bowl, except this ball is so small and I can't get it to go where I want it to go.

So it didn't make any sense for me to try Chris's approach because it, it.

I, you know, I tried a little bit of that, tried a bit of Larry, but in the end, it was up to me to control the ball so that it goes where it needs to be to hit the pins.

And your content is the same way.

I know my actions resonated when pins fell down.

And with you and podcasting, you might resonate by numbers going up in downloads, by emails and comments coming in, maybe by reviews showing up in Apple.

Whatever it is, there are ways to tell if the show is going okay.

But in the end, it really came down to mastering the basics.

Just like in duck pin bowling, where the fundamentals of aiming and technique are crucial, podcasting requires a pretty solid grasp of content creation and delivery.

I talked about this in my talk at Pod Indy.

One of them I Actually spoke four times.

And it is.

You have content that's great.

You need great content.

I listened to the book Earn it, and they brought up an example.

They said, your content should have three things.

Think of your head, think of your heart, and think of your feet, because it should be stimulating to the brain.

It should be smart content.

It should be content that touches your heart.

How do you want your audience to feel?

And then can you create that kind of content?

You're like, dave got it.

Got the heart and the head.

Like, great.

Can you do that on this particular schedule?

In other words, can you keep doing this?

Can you endure the process of creating content?

And you have a target, right?

With podcasting, you have your target audience.

And I use the analogy of making dinner.

If you held a dinner and made pizza, and you're like, well, everybody loves pizza until everybody shows up, and they're like, is that gluten free?

Like, oh, ooh, didn't know that.

Okay.

And somebody else goes, yeah, I'm vegan.

I can't do pepperoni.

Like, ooh, didn't think of that.

But.

And there's part of you that goes, wait, if I make a pizza just for people that like meat and don't have gluten issues, I'm cutting out some of my audience.

It's not about having an audience for everyone, because that doesn't work.

It's about having the right people, the right people listening that you are trying to connect with.

So keep that in mind.

But the one thing you need in podcasting is adaptability.

At the event, we had an interesting situation where we had this beautiful room set up with chairs, and we had a projector.

And I'm not sure when Brad picked the site.

He might have actually visited it in the evening because it had a giant skylight in the ceiling, and the one wall was nothing but windows.

Well, when you're trying to show slides, it's kind of somewhat important that the room is somewhat dark, and this room was not.

And so myself and Craig Van Slyke from AI Goes to College, we had to adapt.

And that's actually a really good thing, because I'm thinking about this now that I actually want to start making my presentations without slides, get the stories together, make it in an entertaining fashion, present any kind of facts in a way that doesn't, you know, step towards death by PowerPoint, and then add the slides to enhance the presentation.

I already have.

But you have to be adaptable.

I say it all the time.

Your podcast is a recipe.

It's not a Statue.

And so the challenge of switching from regular bowling to duck pin bowling, it mirrors the need to adapt in podcasting, whether it's trying new formats, new techniques, and you kind of tweak it until you start to see some things change.

The other thing that, again, we kind of saw is it seemed simple.

It really did.

If you think about it, I mentioned it before, there's nothing between you and the pins, like, besides, I don't know, 30ft, something like that.

If it's that and the pins and bowling is creating great content.

But the reality is, is often much more complex.

You have to know your why, you have to know your who, specifically, who is your who, and then your what is where.

The why and who overlap.

And success involves more than just one main action.

It's about refining your craft and embracing all those aspects of the process.

Because you could have great content, but if you had horrible delivery, and you said, this is how I'm going to tell you how to make a million dollars, that would be awful.

You need content.

You need delivery.

Does your artwork grab people?

Does your title grab people?

Does the title of the show grab people?

There are a lot of moving parts here.

And so one thing I didn't do, I mean, I scanned a little while I was walking into the place was I didn't compare myself to others.

Now, Larry and I were sometimes close in score, and the last half a game, Chris was just killing us.

But I really didn't look at my competition, because if you look at bowling, if you look at tennis, if you look at golf, even though you play with other people, it's really you.

It's just you.

And it was up to me to keep my arm straight, which I failed miserably at.

It was just me that had to figure out what speed of the ball I wanted to throw, where, how far I wanted to throw it out.

It was all me.

I was the only person that could affect my game.

And it's kind of the same thing with your podcast.

It's you creating the content.

And you can edit, hopefully, or you cannot edit.

I heard an episode this week where they were talking about how they don't edit, and it sounded like they were on respirators.

And I was like, maybe you need to edit.

I don't know.

Should you edit?

I think you should.

Couldn't believe it, but that's the way it is.

It's up to you.

It's your brand.

Don't obsess over that.

To where you never release anything, but it is up to you.

And in the end, here's the beauty of it is you have to love the process of making content.

You just have to.

And in this case, the fun and the camaraderie with my friends and bowling, that is similar to the passion you have to have with podcasting.

I didn't care what my score was.

I was trying to do the best I could, but in the end, I didn't get anywhere near what I would normally bowl.

And it was kind of funny because at first we're like, hey, this is new, this is different.

Woo.

Okay.

All right.

Hey, you hit something.

Good for you.

You know, Larry actually got a spare.

I couldn't believe it.

We all went nuts because nobody had gotten a spare yet.

And we were enthused and inspired.

It was, like, great, awesome.

But in the end, after, if you think about it, if you're bowling and you get three tries in a game, you get 30 attempts to, you know, hit some pins.

And, yeah, I never got a spare.

I often.

The one time I hit no pins, I had three attempts to hit pins and I hit a goose egg.

Nothing, Zero, nada.

And so what?

I do this again.

It was kind of funny because at one point I looked at Larry and we're.

Again, we're all changing our formats.

We're trying different aspects of this.

Maybe faster, slower.

I know at one point I moved to the right, and that actually kind of worked.

I think I got seven that time.

You try different things.

But I looked at Larry and he looked at me and goes, why is this so hard?

And I thought about it and I was like, well, I think a lot of it is for me, I have.

I usually kind of spin my hand when I have my fingers in a ball, which I didn't.

And so I was used to spinning my hand.

In the process of spinning my hand, I just threw it almost out of the lane.

But I was having a great time doing horrible at bowling.

And so when you first start off, it's new.

I've never done this.

We've all been talking our whole life, so it looks easy.

You're like, yeah, I think I can talk.

You just got to talk into this microphone in a way that makes you sound either entertaining or educational or inspirational.

Something there.

Rights, content and delivery.

And when you first start out and you don't get the results, you think you have to love the craft.

I love.

Like, here I was just like, I wonder if I have sound effects for bowling.

Let's paint that picture in there.

Let's do this.

Let's do that how am I going to explain that?

And then I was like, as I was driving back home, I was like, you know, I could do like a cold open, which you just heard kind of explaining.

And how could I do this in the theater of the mind, where I slowly mention, I'm looking at an ashtray, I'm in a loud room, and then expand back to, I am in a bowling alley.

Is that going to trigger the theater of the mind?

And maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

But I'm trying different things.

And when things work, I do more of those, and when they don't, I try not to do those anymore.

And one of the things Craig said from again, AI goes to college, because I would do a half hour, then Craig would do a half hour, then I would do a half hour, and Craig would do a half hour.

I was talking about monetizing your podcast, and Craig would come up and explain some AI tools to help make that easier.

And it was very nice of him.

Craig's a member of the school of podcasting, so is Dr.

Brad Miller.

And Craig said, if you don't want to do this alone, there's a really easy solution for that, and that is join the school of podcasting.

Which was very nice of him to say.

We do have group coaching every Friday.

We do lunch with Dave.

We have group coaching on a Saturday, and then we have group coaching on a Wednesday.

And of course, you can always schedule unlimited coaching with me.

And when you say, what do you mean by unlimited?

I mean, there are no limits to the amount of coaching you can have from me.

And that's kind of like if somebody said, well, do you want to go duck pin bowling again?

If they said, well, I would answer, well, is Brad and Debbie and Jen and John and Larry and Chris going to be there?

Absolutely, because that made it worth it.

I now have a memory being in Indianapolis bowling with primarily Larry and Chris, and that, to me, has value.

And when you start a podcast, I have that kind of running little joke that you're either going to start a podcast when you do this, and you're going to either end up with a story about the time you started a podcast, or you're going to end up with a really good podcast.

And if you've already tried a podcast once and it wasn't for you, then maybe you weren't talking about the right thing, and maybe you didn't have the right mentality for that.

Maybe you were really focused on the wrong thing.

It's all about figuring out who your Audience is, what do they want?

Give it to them.

Ask them to share.

And there are many other ways to grow your show.

But as I was driving back, I was like, wow, that was really frustrating.

Why was it frustrating?

Because I did something I've never done before.

And can you think of anything you ever did, from tying your shoes to riding a bike to shooting a basketball, that.

It was amazing the first time you did it.

Yeah, me neither.

So keep that in mind.

And in fact, we're going to switch gears here, and I'm going to talk to John, who was at Potindy, and he had 30 episodes and had not released any of them.

So let's switch gears.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I will be talking about an AI prompt.

That was amazing.

This does.

This podcast has chapters, so if you want to skip.

But I want to talk to John, because John had, like, 30 different episodes.

And I want to share this with you because you might think like, John thinks there's nothing wrong with the way you think, but sometimes we make things a little harder than we think they are.

And so he was explaining how he's just not really a computer person.

And I go, that's fine.

And I was telling him about, I had a student that was kind of in the same boat that didn't really have any skills when it came to file management.

And I said, I just walked somebody through that.

He goes, do you have a course on that?

I go, no, but I could make one in about 10 minutes.

I go, it's really not that hard.

I said, have you ever played with filing cabinets?

He's like, oh, yeah, my whole life.

I'm like, well, it's the same thing.

It's just with a mouse, it's really not that hard.

And then we were talking about, you know, mixing audio and things like that.

Have you ever been in the car and your jam comes on?

You grab the knob and you turn it up and you're like, yes, my jam.

And then the phone rings.

So you turn down the radio so you can hear the phone.

Well, then you know how to mix music.

Have you ever attached a photo on Facebook or in an email or whatever?

Well, then you can upload an MP3 file to your media host, whoever that is.

Captivate, Buzzsprout, Libsyn, Blueberry, RSS.com There are a billion of them.

I do have courses on those.

Then you can do this.

Sometimes I think we make it harder in our head.

And I explain to him, I'm like, I can help you through the whole thing.

And he said, well, I don't even understand.

Like, my friend says, I need file management.

I go, I can teach you that.

I taught in the corporate world for many, many moons.

I've been doing this so long.

I used to teach people how to use their fax machine.

I taught people how to send email because they didn't know what it was.

But one of the things I taught over and over and over, because if you don't have it, you're going to waste a lot of your life, is file management.

He said, do you have a course right now we could take?

I said, no, but I can make you a video in about 10 minutes and walk you through that.

I said, or if you want, you just sign up and then schedule some time and we can go over it.

It's really that easy.

And so I know a lot of us think, I can't do this, but think about it.

I'll go back to what I mentioned before.

There was a time when tying your shoes was difficult.

There was a time when riding a bike was difficult.

There was a time when programming the VCR was difficult.

There was a time when moving a mouse.

I remember the first time I moved a mouse.

I was like, I can't control this thing.

And yet I said it in a few episodes ago, everything is hard until it's not.

And if you're looking for a place to have somebody go, whoa, just.

Just move a little bit to the left.

Oh, a little more to the right.

There you go.

Now click.

Or whatever it is.

That's what I do at the school of podcasting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was very cool to watch Craig from AI goes to college.

Find him@aigostocollege.com present on these tools.

And so the one prompt I was like, you have got to be kidding me.

And here's the thing.

Craig kind of has the same philosophy about AI as I do, and that is it shouldn't be used to create the content, but you can use it to polish the content, because otherwise you're going to end up sounding silly.

If you have it, write a script.

And you're like, today we're going to take a deep dive and delve into duck pin bowling.

Well, I don't talk like that.

And so you want it to come from you.

And so Craig was saying there are times when he will.

If he writes a script, he'll throw it in and use AI, whether it's chat, GPT or Claude, to critique and say, what is this missing?

How can this be more clear?

How can it Be more succinct.

And it will give him suggestions.

And so it is an assistant to you to help you do this.

And there's a voice version that you can turn on and talk to this thing like it's a person.

Larry Roberts was there and opened up his phone and did that.

And I was like, wait, what?

And it's.

If you've ever seen those science fiction movies where they're, you know, hell's not here, Dave, that kind of thing, it's a little freaky, actually.

It's not a little freaky.

It's a lot freaky.

And so I'm going to try this now.

I'm going to pull this.

I watched Larry do this.

So if you think this is cool, you should see what Larry does.

But I'm going to hit a button on my phone.

I've loaded Chat GPT and I'm going to click on this button for speakers.

And I'm now going to turn on my microphone.

I believe I'm hitting the button.

There we go.

Hey, Chat, are you there?

I am indeed.

How can I help you today?

Well, I'm doing an episode about how bowling and podcasting have similar traits.

What do you think of that idea?

That's a creative and fun idea.

Both bowling and podcasting require a good amount of skill and technique, whether it's perfecting your throw or your podcasting style.

There's also the need for consistency.

In bowling, you aim for that strike every time, while in podcasting, you strive to produce engaging content consistently.

Plus, both have their unique communities and can be social activities.

It sounds like a great way to draw parallels and entertain your listeners.

Hey, thanks so much for chiming in.

You're welcome.

If you need more ideas or help with anything else, just let me know.

And so that's kind of freaky, right?

And again, be careful not to have that create the content.

Now, he said that.

And I'm going to tell you about a prompt where it's going to help you create the content.

However, that's not the final step.

Again, use it to polish to inspire you.

And so I saw craig from aigostocollege.com do this.

And since Brad Miller was there from cancer and comedy and the founder of Pod Indy.com, he went to the chat GPT prompt and said, hey, my podcast.

One of Craig's podcast is Live well and Flourish.

He's like, I'm doing an interview of Dr.

Brad Miller for the show Live well and Flourish.

I would like to come up with questions that haven't been asked of Brad Miller before, and if you could, some of these are going to be used for YouTube shorts.

If you could bold those, that would be great.

Now, that's not an exact quote, but I just tried this myself and said, I'm interviewing, you know, I'm an entrepreneur and I'm interviewing Dave Jackson, but I don't want to have questions that have been asked over and over and over.

Can you give me some new ones?

And some of this is going to be used again for YouTube shorts.

Put those in bold.

And it did.

And I was like, oh, now, were all of them home runs?

Nope.

But it was amazing because the ones I remember when I first looked at this, I was like, hey, some of these are like, really easy.

And I've definitely answered these before.

Well, those were the ones for YouTube shorts.

And so there's a great book again called the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

And one of those habits is start with the end in mind.

And so if you're a YouTuber and you're going to be doing shorts, you might ask questions that would maybe be a super simple question.

You're like, normally we wouldn't ask this person, but I'm going to ask this because the question would be great.

Not so much clickbait, but it's going to be something that people are going to want to click on to see what is the answer to that.

And so you might have some questions in there.

If you're doing video that you go, you know what, this is going to make a great short.

And so you ask those questions, as always, it's your show, you can do what you want.

Keep in mind, you don't have to do video, but if you want to, absolutely, you should be on YouTube.

But this spit out a bunch.

And I don't know that I would use all of them, but there were some of them.

And this is where I always go, great ideas are typically not fresh out of the box.

Right?

You don't go, I think I'm going to try this.

And then it's just brilliant.

It's usually somebody going, hey, what about this?

And you go, hmm, not bad, but what if we did this?

And so this is where you could use AI to somewhat throw out some ideas and then you polish their work.

And you could say, hey, I'm not really think this one's on target.

I don't think this one's on target.

I do like this.

And you just brainstorm.

And I was like, that's pretty cool.

Because as a creative person, it helped me Come up with a couple different ways to describe today's episode.

And I was like, that's interesting.

And it's something I've never done before and I'm sure in the future I'll be better at it.

The other thing I thought we could talk about today is I already heard this, that podcasting is oversaturated.

And I get that.

When I hear somebody say, I want to start a true crime show, there's a part of me that goes, ugh, really?

Okay, because maybe that's your passion.

I hear a lot about true crime, but I can't say that it's over saturated.

Because if you look at books as I record this, it's November and in a couple months it's going to be January.

And I don't know who it is, but there'll be probably two or three or 400 different books about how to lose weight.

It'll sound something like this.

Don't change a thing about yourself.

Don't exercise, don't change the way you eat, and you can lose weight.

Which of course is a bold faced lie.

But there will be people selling books that say that.

Why do they sell books that say that?

Because people buy it because they think it's true.

But then they find it.

They go, oh, it's a lie, just like it was last year.

But there are people writing books right now on diet and exercise and losing weight as they do every January.

So with that said, yes, there are plenty of books.

I have many of them in my bookcase in the living room about losing weight.

And yet there will be new ones in January because not everybody is going to write a book this year.

And not everybody.

You know, as much as 2025 might be the year that you launch Your first podcast, 2025 is going to be somebody that goes, man, I've been doing this 20 years.

I'm out, I'm done.

I'm going to go enjoy my grandkids or whatever it is not me.

But there might be somebody else that says that.

So keep that in mind.

If you think something is, well, there's too many, it's too busy, it's too crowded, things like that.

If you don't quit, other people will.

If you don't believe me, go over to Podcasts About Podcasting dot com.

That's a giant list I kind of have assembled of all the podcasts about podcasting.

And the bottom third of that pages here are shows that used to be about podcasting.

And they have since just said, well, I'm moving On to something else.

So if that's something else, that is kind of stopping you from starting a podcast, maybe it shouldn't.

And the other one is, why are you waiting till January?

That's when everybody is going to start learning how to podcast.

If you start now, you could be launching in January.

It's just something to think about.

And speaking of things to think about, here's a little more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hey, this just happened as I was recording this.

My buddy Brendan over at POD Page, where I am now the head of podcasting, we are releasing audience surveys.

And this is so cool.

There are 28 questions, plus five custom ones.

If you want to make up your own questions that you can put on a survey.

Now, I would not recommend sending out a survey with 33 questions on it, but you be you.

But what we did is Edison Research, which has been researching podcasting since the very early days back when Tom Webster worked there.

And they still continue to do research and surveys on podcasting.

But Tom is now part of Sounds Profitable, and he has that great book that I always talk about.

The audience is listening, and he really gets into audience survey there.

In fact, we have a link to the book in POD page.

And if you really want to get your head around a survey, it's a great book.

And what we've done with Tom's permission, is taking those questions and put them into POD page.

So all you have to do is go in and turn on and off the ones you want to be on your survey and turn it on, say, okay, let people start answering this.

But wait, there's more.

You could name it something like 2024 audience survey.

And it'll probably make a link like, you know, your website dot com, 2024 audience-survey-whatever.

Well, that's too hard to remember.

So pod page, if you just go to.

When you set this up, your website.com survey, and it will go to whatever survey is active, making it very easy.

So next year, when you have your 2025 survey and 2026 survey, you can just tell people go to survey.

Which is great, because in your back catalog, if somebody's listening to an old episode and they go to slash survey, it'll go to today's survey.

So I'll have a video in the show notes where you can see this.

It's amazing.

And so we talked about today getting feedback from the pins.

Well, you can get feedback from your audience.

And I know, I know you're like, but, Dave, what if nobody signs up?

We have Built in incentives.

You can go in and say, when somebody signs this up, send them this email that says, thank you so much for taking part of our survey.

And if you want to send them a link to something, whatever you have, swag from fourth wall or whatever, if you want to give them something, you could do it there.

Completely customizable message and you can point them to whatever you want.

Or if you want to give them a PDF, you can do that.

It's all built into it.

Now, this is beta.

Like, this is rolling out as you're listening to this today.

Today's the first day.

So for some reason you're doing something and you're like, hey, this looks a little weird or something.

Let us know and we will make sure to squash out any bugs.

We've been playing with it for a little bit, but hey, it's software.

You never know.

So how do you make your show better?

Well, by listening to your audience.

And I know, I know you're saying, dave, even if we offer incentives, I'm really worried that nobody's going to fill this out.

And if you do that and that happens, I know it's painful, but can you not take that as a positive of, hey, I wanted to know if I had an engaged audience and I just got my answer.

Now, that's not the answer we wanted and I know that hurts.

I'm not going to pretend it doesn't.

But at least now you can go in and try to find out where your audience is.

We talk about this a lot at the school of podcasting.

Find out where your audience is, go look at comments in different places and find out what they are looking for.

And maybe that's the next survey you put out.

And there, look, if you want something super customized, you can do that with Google forms.

I'll put a link to a couple different places.

There's a new one I just heard about and I was like, that's pretty cool.

Especially because I know some people are like, I'm not putting my stuff in Google.

It's called tally, I believe is how you pronounce it.

T A, L, L, Y.

So but again, why create something from scratch when you have something built in based on questions from people who have been measuring podcasts for 20 years?

I love it.

You know me, I'm ecstatic.

I'm all about getting feedback.

And so I'm happy that this is launching today, November 11, 2024.

And since I'm on the topic of Pod page, if you're on WordPress, just know that Wordfence, which is a company I have to use for the one website I have still WordPress.

And if you're wondering, Dave, why do you have a website on WordPress?

Well, while I recommend Pod Page and have been for four years now, I still have clients that use WordPress.

And so there's a website called Wordfence, which I have to use because people try to hack my site.

And they came out and they explained how there are 207 vulnerable plugins in WordPress.

So just there's that.

Oh, and by the way, the next day after that report came out, yeah, I got a thing from wordfence saying that my bill was going up.

So if you need more reasons to try pod page, there's 207.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I got so much I could share from this past weekend.

I'll be sprinkling that in as we go forward.

And of course, you can always follow the show at school of podcasting.com follow, pick whatever app you want there and never miss another episode.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

I'm Dave Jackson.

I help podcasters.

It's what I do.

And I can't wait to see what we do together until next week.

Take care.

God bless.

Class is dismissed.

If you like what you hear, then don't tell somebody.

If you like what you hear in this place in Indianapolis.

I was spoken.

I was spoken.

Yes, I was spoken.

Is this how we're going to start?

It's only okay.

All right.

With Dr.

Brad Miller and Jen from Verbal Bear Burbal.

Verbal Barrel.

Really?

Right.

Like, okay.

This is just going to be one of those shows.

Lots of bloopers coming your way.

We do every Friday we get together for lunch with Dave.

We have group coaching a couple time a month.

A couple time a month.

A couple time a month.

Yep.