How Long Should Your Podcast Be? (and where to find the answer)

Last week we talked about measuring the success of your podcast outside of downloads. And today we'll talk about some stats that you should be looking at that can help you figure out is your show resonating or not.And I'm going to talk about some tools I used to make that episode that really saved me some time. Along with an update from the school of podcasting. Hit it, ladies. The school of podcasting with Dave Jackson. Podcasting since 2005.I am your award award winning hall of fame podcast coach Dave Jackson. Thanking you so much for tuning in. If you are new to the show, so glad you're here.This is where we talk about how to plan your podcast, how to launch it, how to grow it, how to monetize it. The website is schoolofpodcasting.com I'll be telling you a little more about that later along with podpage.com.If you need a website that looks great and you don't want to learn how to code, check out podpage.com and today we're gonna start off with a little bit of this. Yeah, normally I do not recommend that you talk about how the show is made because your audience really doesn't care. They don't care.They don't want to know in many cases. But this is a podcast about podcasting. And so I thought I would just share something because I thought I had set a record.The last episode was called how do you measure your success without using the word downloads, basically. And I thought that was the longest episode I'd ever done. It was an hour and 12 minutes.And that was mainly because I asked you to chime in and boy, did you. Which was great. But it turns out way back on episode 651, I did an hour and 15 minutes. That was one of those, what is your favorite podcast and why?And I do that every year. And every year I like that episode and you don't.I go in if I ever look at my completion percentages and we're going to talk about that today, I can see where people tune out about halfway through. And so I need to do that. My longest episodes, one of them was, I call it episode 1000B.And this is right after Todd Cochran had passed away and I found a presentation that he had done and I don't think it had been released. And so I put that out. That was an hour and 17 minutes. But it was Todd Cochran and who's going to edit Todd? You don't do that.And my longest one was an hour and 38 minutes. And that's where I did a brain dump of all things interviews. I'll have links to these if you got time to kill.But I really thought, oh, boy, this was really, really long. And it turns out I had done longer. Now, normally my show is somewhere around 40 minutes.And the question always comes up, hey, how long should my podcast be? And the correct answer is as long as it needs to be and not a minute more.So what I did with last week's episode when I got about 55 minutes worth of answers is, I have a rule. If you submit an answer, I'm playing it, but I will edit out some of the stuff.And so that show was as long as it needed to be without eliminating anyone. Now, we, I did skip one, and we'll play that in just a second.And that is something where, as I look back, I don't think I'm going to change that rule.But I could have done something like a, you know, NPR style kind of thing and just said, hey, some people said, you know, growing their email list and then played clips from each person and I could have made that much shorter. Now that would have taken a whole lot more time and questions of the month. Chew up a Sunday like nobody's business. And.But so that's why I didn't do it that way. But looking back, I could have and probably made it a little closer. Now I've also noticed that. And if you ask Dave, why do you aim for 40 minutes?Because in the early days of the school of podcasting, back in the day, everybody thought you had to do a 20 minute podcast because the average commute in America was 20 minutes. So we all went, ooh, we got to do a 20 minute podcast. And I did a 20 minute podcast.And when I met, I was lucky enough to meet some of my audience at an event and they said, can you please make it longer? And so I've always kind of aimed for 40. And really all I really do is I come up with a topic and I talk about it.And then I hit stop and look up and go, oh, cool, it was 40 minutes.Like, I know I said I was going to talk about trolls this week, and I keep finding more really great information about trolls and critics and feedback and being afraid to get feedback and things like that. That I'm going to put those all in a stew and let them simmer, simmer down just a bit, and I'll be talking about that.So how long does your show need to be? I think another thing that we're Going to talk a little bit about today. How long can you hold their attention?And if you think I don't know, there's a way to find out. And you can go into podcasts with an S podcastconnect.apple.com that is your Apple dashboard.Now if you let your media host submit your show to Apple Podcast, you have to do the podcast Hokey Pokey, which is where you, you email Apple, you go into that dashboard and you email support and go, hey, this podcast. So step one would be go get the link to your podcast in Apple.Step two, go to podcastconnect.apple.com, click on the contact support and say, hey, this show right here. Paste the link that you copied in. Step one is my show.I would like it in my dashboard that you just logged into to which they will give you a bunch of galbity gook to put into like your copyright field which proves you own the show. And then they'll move the show and the kind of the same thing for it's creators.Spotify.com that's their dashboard.And all that to say, you can say how far people listen. And that is to me, the statistics.Now, before you go jumping off a bridge or climbing on the roof, realize that somebody may have listened to 20 minutes of your show on the way to the dentist. They get to the dentist 10 minutes through and never go back to finish. Now you could say, well then I guess it wasn't that, you know, engaging.But in some cases people just move on. But it is a way that you can see and you can see trends and things like that. A really quick tangent.For whatever reason, right now for me, I can't see my latest episode stats in Apple podcast. I'm going to reach out to them. I've done this in the past and we kind of go back and forth and back and forth and it's not really fixing the problem.But Apple has great support. But right now I think the latest stuff I can see is from like 2018 and I'm like, hey, where's all my stats? But that can be very, very handy.I do know you need to have something like 10 individual listeners of an episode that are all different. So that's not you hitting play 10 times to get any kind of data.I know it's always disappointing when you go into there and it's like, nope, not enough data yet. But keep promoting, keep putting out content, it will show up.So that's one thing in terms of how long can my show be well, it can be as long as you want. I just proved that I could do this show is probably going to be one of the shortest we'll see. But that's one thing.How long can you hold their attention? And you can find out by looking at those.Now realize that's only going to show you people that listen in Apple podcasts and people that listen in Spotify. You can also get that information if you're doing YouTube videos. But be very careful going into that because it's brutal.They people click away from a video many, many times, much in a much shorter time than they do on audio. In when I did a quick test, the best completion percentage I had on a on the Same content on YouTube was 37%.The worst completion percent on the audio was 73%. So that's a great stat, but it can really be kind of a. An ego kicker. Yeah, yeah, yeah.And as much as I talk about how much I hate Spotify, they do have some stats that can show you some very interesting information. For whatever reason, I don't do well in Spotify, not compared to Apple, but.And that is how many times your show was shown or your episode was shown in someone's dashboard. And then that's impressions or something like that. And then how many people clicked on it.And then the average completion percentage, which again we just talked about, but that one about showing how many times it was shown. This is under discovery in their analytics. So there's impressions, that's how many times it was seen. How many plays did you get out of that?And then the average completion percentage. So what does that play mean? That play is a way in. And again, I'm kind of generalizing here. It could be your artwork and it could be your title.Those are kind of cool little tests to see, hey, how is my title working?And maybe I should quit naming my show episode 16, Dave Jackson and maybe make that a benefit like how to grow your podcast in six easy steps or something like that. So those are some stats. As much as I hate to see especially brand new podcasters get upset with their stats, that's one that you can kind of go, hmm.You can also add Google Analytics to your website so you can see what are the most popular, you know, posts on your website. And this doesn't matter if you're using WordPress or Squarespace or whoever or PodPage, you can put Google Analytics now it's free.And Google Analytics. The good news is they will tell you what your audience had for breakfast last week on a full Moon, which sometimes you're like, I don't need that.And yes, that is true. And that's why I use Fathom stats now, they're 15 bucks a month.But I love the fact that I can go into my dashboard and easily see what was the most popular page. I can see in some cases where the traffic came from. But that's another thing.You can see what was working because you might be able to see what where. Hey, here again. The title of the episode really didn't explain the benefit.Or didn't, you know, make people want to click it because they got to click you before they hear or see you. The School of Podcasting. The School of Podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't you hate it when the only person to blame for something is yourself?And this was me. My buddy Josh Liston asked me a bit.He was like, can anybody submit an answer to the question of the month, or does it have to be a member of the School of Podcasting? And I'm like, well, heck no, anybody can submit. And so he turned right around and attached his answer to my email.Now my inbox can be a bit of a disaster. And the voice in my head said, dave, you better put that with the other answers or you'll forget. And that's exactly what I did.Because I thought, oh, I need to download this. And then I need to go to schoolofpodcasting.com? And and upload the answer. And I didn't.And so consequently, Josh didn't make it into last week's episode, but he's making it into this one. So this again is answering the question, how do you measure the success of your podcast but not downloads?

G' day SOP family. Josh Liston here from the sake this podcast over at sake this.com our show is a comedy variety show all about the wonderful country of Japan.And Dave Jackson himself actually helped us in the early development of the show.We zoomed, we laughed a lot, and I'm absolutely certain that the first half a dozen ish episodes of the show wouldn't be anywhere near as funny without Dave's input.

Oh, thank you, Josh. I appreciate that.

So I'll jump in with two measures of success that I'm looking for with Sake this. And I haven't really felt this way about another podcast in the past. I've done lots of them, but these are pretty clear to me.Even though the show is less than 12 months old, the first one is how many travel enthusiasts, Japanophiles and Australian stand up comedians Are we meeting through the show or that might want to be part of the show? And the second measure is unsolicited feedback, both in person and in the DMs. Are people listening to the show? Are they laughing along with the show?Are they finding it interesting? Or the type of facts they might want to share at a dinner party? I think that's how Dave might have put it in the past about sake this.Are people doing that and are they letting us know? So thank you, Dave. Thanks for sharing your platform with us in episodes like this. To everyone else out there, happy podcasting.

There is nothing better than unsolicited feedback. That's the best. That's the best way to start a day. So that's your homework, everyone.As you listen to this, whatever, not this show, but the next show, when somebody delivers value to you, go out to their website, should be their website.com, whatever it is, slash contact, and if it's not, lovingly and politely smack them in the head. Come on, slash contact should be the link there and let them know that you enjoyed the show. Why?Because half the people said we love it when we get feedback. It puts gas in our tank. And if you want to keep your favorite shows going, put some gas in the tank even better, throw them a shekel or two.So, Josh, thank you so much for sharing that.And the whole purpose of that show was again, to kind of keep you going because sometimes when the downloads aren't doing what they're supposed to do, we get kind of dejected. And there are some really great shows that for whatever reason are just not taking off. And what happens then is this is almost.To me, I'm worried about this being a death sentence. You then start video, which is so much more work, hoping that you can do clips. And from what I hear, clips are a way to promote your show.I'm not sure how much of that is going to come back to the audio version, but it is a way to grow a YouTube channel.But if you don't do that and you don't see the access and you're now being crushed by the weight of doing an audio podcast and a video podcast that instead of saying, well, I'm not doing video anymore, I'm going to cut down the whole thing, that's one of my biggest worries.But Josh is a great guy and as he mentioned, if he can get people to mention to him that, hey, I heard about you on your podcast because he's a stand up comedian now and that's a Great way.I remember in the early days of podcasting, Jay Moore and Greg Fitzsimmons both were playing smaller theaters, started a podcast, and two or three years later, they were both playing bigger theaters and people were shouting out kind of catchphrases, much like you do at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. Hey, play Freebird, right? You're.They're shouting some sort of catchphrase from the podcast, and they were playing bigger venues, thus making more money. So the. And I was, I coached Josh. I'm like, be sure to mention your podcast somewhere at the end. Hey, for more information, check out this.Because the standup can feed the podcast and the podcast can then point back at the standup and they both can kind of feed off each other. I'm going to share a little more behind the episode right after this. The school of podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.So here again, because this is a podcast about podcasting and Border. I wish these people had an affiliate program, but they don't. But here's one of the things.When I do a question of the month, some people are very clear. Some people are super basic, Some people have a lot of room noise, some people have all sorts of stuff. And so again, it takes lots of work.Well, I wanted to share some of the tools I use, and it helps make everyone sound a little more uniform. It's from a company called Accentize. And if we take just a quick second. Can we take a tangent? Yeah, let's take a tangent. So

lovely.Here comes another 10 second tangent from Dave.

Brilliant.

Such absolute rubbish.

All right, since this is a little behind the scenes kind of episode, I just mentioned the company Accentize.And while I'm not a huge proponent of social media, I mean, it's a way to promote, but does what it does. But I'm definitely going to tag Accentize on this episode because those people know people that make good audio and might be making podcasts.So anytime you mention a company in your show, be sure to tag them on social and go, hey, I'm talking about you in a positive way. Ugh. Finally, back to the show. I get all these audio files with different tones and such, and it can be quite the struggle, shall we say?I don't want to say hassle, that sounds negative, but there are a couple plugins I use. One is in this one, they always have kind of a somewhat affordable and a somewhat expensive version is called DX Revive.And what this does is it removes background noise. It removes noise. It somewhat helps level things out, but it Primarily is a noise removal, and it just clears things up.And there, you know, for example, there's a preset for restore phone. So if you have someone. This is on the pro version. We'll talk about pricing here in a second. But there's a restore phone.So if you had somebody that called in on the phone and they're like, dave, I'm so happy to be on the show. Thanks for having me. You can do a decent job. Because I had somebody do that. And I was like, what. Why.Why are you using the phone if you can always avoid, you know, dialing a phone to get into a call? Yeah, that you. You definitely want to do that. So this particular plugin goes for 99 bucks. If you go for the. Just the regular version. I went for the.For the pro version. Yeah, the original version just DX Revive is 99 bucks. The DX Revive Pro is $300. Now, I edit podcasts.If you are looking for an editor, reach out to me. Schoolofpodcasting.com contact.I just do audio at this point, and I have one client that consistently sends me fairly bad audio because they're brain science, they're brain surgeons, and making good audio is not their thing. That's why they hired me. And so this plugin paid for itself by giving me back my evenings. Basically, it does.When you run these plugins, it does slow down exporting your file, but it saves a lot of just hassle. And so the other one I use is called Dialogue Enhance. And this is the one that really comes in handy for the question of the month.And what it basically does is it has a loudness boost, it has a spectral correction. And what that means is if you're a little too sibilant, shall we say, it will kind of back those off.If you're too bassy, it will kind of back those off. It can remove reduction. It's a pretty slick little tool in terms of making things sound somewhat uniform. The kind of regular version is 69 bucks.And again, I went for the Super Jumbo Deluxe version, which is $173.60. It's a very strange price, but it's. Again, it saves me a huge amount of time.And now if I was not editing other people's stuff, I wouldn't buy this because I don't make horrible audio. That's something to keep in mind, but those are two things. Then. Wait, there's more.If you are having problems with your audio levels, there is a free version from Accentize, and I use this and it's kind of pretty cool. It's called DX level eliminate manual dialogue leveling with automatic lufs control. And this is pretty cool.You basically just drag it up to minus 16 lufs and you're done, basically. Now, if you have slightly louder breathing than say, normal, it might also then think that's a voice and boost it up.But it's free, that's the good news. And these all work with Hindenburg and Audacity and things of that nature.So if you want to check out the free one that kind of levels things out, that comes in handy as well. So that's some of the tools I use and especially those get used when I do a question of the month. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Hey, I wanted to also update you, if you remember, probably a few months ago we said we were doing an experiment and we were going to create a free version of the school of Podcasting. And we were both myself and Brennan from PodPage were somewhat apprehensive about it, but we're like, no, let's try it. And we did.And yeah, it didn't really work. The problem with free versions of stuff is if you throw too much stuff in it, well then why do I need to upgrade?And if you don't throw or if the stuff you throw in there isn't that good, well then why would I upgrade? Because the free stuff stinks. So it's a very delicate dance and we tried it.Now, we did do the cohort, the I cannot say that word, the cohort class, and we got actually much more leads from that than we did. And that was just six weeks over months of a free version. So you'll probably hear more kind of one off classes that are live that you can attend.And so just wanted to update on that. I'm in the process of removing any kind of messaging about having a free version.If you are a free member, we're not kicking you out, but just realize you have, and we've pointed this out, a rather restricted view of the school of podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something else I've been working on is, well, this is now live. A new day is dawning.You get out of your bed, grab your coffee and head towards your computer. Open up your inbox. And PR agencies that can't even spell podcast have flooded your inbox. Written by AI and I've just had enough.I've been helping people understand technology for over 30 years. And I was like, I gotta do something. And so I created how to pitch a podcast, a website to teach People, you guessed it. How to pitch a podcast.And hopefully if we can help one person stop spraying and praying spam everywhere, then maybe I've left this world a little better than I found it. Come on over, share your story, pick up some tips. It's all there. Pitch a podcast date. How to pitch a podcast.And the thing that was weird about that, I submitted that show to Apple, got the link, put it into my pod page, and everything was great. And then I told a few people, and they're like, we can't find it in Apple. And somehow, I guess I did not put in my schedule.So in this case, it's weekly. And it had reverted that show back to a draft, so it is now back in Apple. And something else that's new for me. I couldn't believe it.I mean, I couldn't believe it. I had been podcasting for 19 years. I run the school of podcasting.And a student of mine, Kim Newlove from the Pharmacist Voice podcast, said, hey, Dave, do you know you have a typo in your podcast? And I said, well, which one? I have a number of podcasts. And she said, oh, no, the school of podcasting. And I go, really?Is it, like in a title or a, you know, show description? The episode description. Where's it at? And she said, no, no, it's in the title of your show. And I thought, no, come on.I mean, sure, I had updated the tagline, but the typo, I mean, that's ridiculous. And I went over and there it was, School of Podcasting. Plan, launch, grow, and montize. I left an E out of monetize.Thankfully, I had a friend like Kim Newlove. You can't fix what you don't know is broken.I mean, don't you hate it when you've gone through most of the day, only discover things like, I don't know, your zippers down, you have a stain on your shirt, toilet paper stuck to your shoe, or my favorites, you have broccoli stuck in your teeth. And then just think, why didn't somebody tell me? And that's what we do here at Fix My Podcast.We make shows that are kind of, meh, Better and good shows great. You can't fix something until you know about it. And that's where I come in. I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters.So come on over and improve your show@fixmypodcast.com if you need help with your podcast, you know where to find me. Schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code listener when you sign up for either a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription.And that does come with a 30 day money back guarantee. So thanks so much for tuning in. If you liked this, feel free to share it with a friend. And until next week, take care. God bless. Class is dismissed.If you like the show, please share it with a friend. If you like the show, pretty, pretty please share it with a friend right now. But he's making it into this.

Yeah.