Want More Downloads? Ditch Social Media for Newsletters!

When you know what's working, you can do more of that.

And this past really year, so far, January and February, I've been looking at my stats on my website in things like Apple podcasts and Spotify as well as my media host to figure out what's working and what's not.

And the goal of this show is to get you to my website and sign up as a member of the school of podcasting.

Now, this isn't going to be a giant pitch, but just that's what I'm talking about.

That's the only thing I can talk about.

And I have been really amazed to find out two things that I go, well, that needs to change because I did an audience survey.

Still doing it.

Schoolofpodcasting.com survey25.

I'd love to get your input.

And so far I'm finding out that the place where a lot of my audience is hanging out is LinkedIn.

And you know, the place that I spend the least amount in.

Yeah, LinkedIn.

Then I looked at what's driving traffic to my website.

Is it Twitter?

Is it Facebook, is it Instagram?

Maybe it's Blue Sky.

Well, I'll tell you in a minute and if you guessed any of those, you're wrong.

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.

If you are new to the show, this is why I help you plan, this is why I help you launch, I help you grow your podcast.

We're talking about growth today.

If you want to monetize, we can do that as well.

The website schoolofpodcasting.com going through some changes over there right now.

We might talk about that.

But if you go over there like, hey, you move some stuff around.

Yeah, I did.

SchoolOfPodcasting.com use the coupon code listener.

That's L A S T E N E R when you sign up for either a monthly or yearly subscription and that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

I didn't realize this.

We're going to do a bit of it and this is based on audience feedback.

As much as I teach all the time, like the audience doesn't care.

Like when you do the behind the scenes stuff, they usually don't care.

But this is a podcast about podcasting and so I don't know if you realized it or not, but when I just said and I didn't do this on purpose, this is one of the things I was trying to explain.

I just do this stuff.

I don't think about it, I just do it.

But when I said, yeah, I've been changing stuff on the front page of the School of Podcasting, there's a part of you that goes, wait, what'd he do?

I got to, like, I need to see what's different.

And you'll see that as we go along.

What's going to happen is the front page of the School of Podcasting.

And this is always really weird, right?

It's going to be more about me and why you should, like, why I am trustworthy to be worked with.

And then it will have a link to the School of Podcasting sales page.

I was like, oh.

Because really, it was a sales page saying, you should buy stuff from me.

And then I would send you to the other sales page where it would go, seriously, you should buy stuff from me.

And so sometimes you need to establish your authority.

And I am doing that because I'm working with a coach.

Yep, I am working with a coach.

Now why am I working with a coach?

Because you don't see stuff.

I say this all the time.

I beg people, go get an opinion about your show that's not from your mom because you're trying to chop down a tree with an axe.

That is dull.

And I, for the life of me, cannot figure out, well, I know why.

Because people don't want to hear that they can do things better.

I must be weird.

It's my teaching background.

If you didn't know that I have a teaching degree.

Been teaching people about technology going back to the days of email.

Yes.

I have a bachelor's degree in education specializing in technical education from the University of Akron.

And I love.

It sounds weird.

I love negative feedback because it gives me a chance to do something better, and I want to do things better.

Hence, I started off this year going, okay, let's see what's working and what's not.

So first things first.

Dave, how do you do that?

Because I just throw stuff out into the ether, and then I kind of go, oh, look, downloads.

And then I do the same thing next week, and nothing.

Okay, so what I've been doing, and I've talked about this in the past, there are many analytics programs out there, and most of them will tell you what your audience did last week on Tuesday when it was raining, kind of stuff, like, insane detail.

I don't need that.

I just need to know, where did these people, like, how did they get to my website so I can do more of that that's really all I need.

Do I need to know that they're in Indonesia?

Not really.

I don't really care.

I take all people at the school of podcasting.

And so, yes, there's Google Analytics and it's free.

And by all means, nothing wrong with Google Analytics for me.

I just hate going into Google Analytics, clicking on, that's the show I want.

Go that thing under.

Under production, and then that in the thing, and then do the hokey Pokey and there's the stats I want.

That's what it's all about.

And I went, okay, frustration level, not off the chart, but just like, ugh, I don't need all this stuff.

So I started using Fathom stats.

I think it's $15 a month, probably less if I bought a year.

And it gives me exactly what I want.

And I talked way back on episode, he said, stopping the recording so I can go find it.

Episode 896, which you can find@schoolofpodcasting.com 896.

There will be links to that.

In the show notes, we talked about utms, which stands for Urchin Tracking Module.

Yeah, can you smell the nerdness from here?

But basically it lets you figure out.

You basically say, hey, go to schoolofpodcasting.com?

equals show notes.

And so when I go into my stats, I can see, oh, this came from show notes.

And I just looked at 2024.

And it's funny because we all think.

And I'm going to say things that people are like, wait, hold on.

Because again, you have to realize, why are you doing what you're doing?

What's the expectation?

You know, what do you want people to do when you get to wherever you're sending them to?

And so I looked at my stats to see how much was from Twitter, because towards the end of the year, I started using them fancy utms to send traffic to my website.

So every time I went to Twitter and said, hey, look, you know, here's the thing.

We talked about the thing on the thing.

Click here for more information.

And then on Facebook, I occasionally do that.

I would do it on LinkedIn, even though I'm not over there very much, but will be in the future.

And I looked at how much traffic that bought, and the answer was, pretty much, yeah, like a whole lot of nothing.

And the words of my buddy Gary Arndt from the Everything Everywhere Daily show, when he was on the show, Gary gets a million downloads a month.

Now he does a Daily Show.

But you know what you Divide a million by 30.

That's a lot of downloads still.

And Gary, because he is a one man band.

Wait, what?

You can get a million downloads without a team of 18?

It's possible.

And Gary's a great guy, shares everything he does.

Super transparent.

And he came on the show and said, I couldn't do social media anymore because, you know, it takes really good content to get a million downloads in a month.

And I am writing everything.

He basically writes a term paper every night and then records it.

He's insane.

He's crazy, but he's, you know, the proof's in the pudding.

And he said, so I quit doing my social media.

Like, he just quit it cold turkey.

Holy cow, Gary, didn't you feel withdrawal?

What happened to your podcast?

Surely the, the numbers would have just slumped into nothing.

And the answer was, yeah, nothing.

Nothing happened to his downloads.

And so if the goal was to build your audience via social media, I always use the phrase trickle, as in just a drip, A drip here, drip there.

Right?

Look, it's trickle, right?

And now that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but we're using, you know, we're painting with peanut butter.

The social media tool is not meant to grow things maybe.

And what I think the best use of social media, and I'm not great at this, I'm look, you know, physician, heal thyself, is to be social.

You know, search for a term and chime in on the conversation and have a link in your bio to, you know, your website where people can subscribe easily if you want to grow your show.

And so I started doing research, I looked at my stats.

Let's go back to that.

Looked at my stats, and I'll get to the number one thing that drove traffic to my website, but the one that really, the number two, hands down, like, I didn't even see any social stuff.

The number two that I was like, huh, I need to do more of that was I do a newsletter.

And I'll be talking over the next couple weeks about kind of the business I'm running here.

And I realize that you might be going, dave, I'm just talking about Batman in the Basement.

But I think we all want a bigger audience.

I don't know anybody like, no, I've got 38 downloads.

No, I don't want 100.

Because, you know, it's kind of a weird, you know, we all have egos, right?

I got one.

And so when, when I was in a band back in the day, you know, we knew we were never Moving to Nashville to be, you know, major.

But we wanted to be the best rock and blues band in Akron, Ohio.

And we achieved that goal because we put in the time and we did.

We did things to stand out.

We engaged our audience.

Like, we worked harder on break than we did on stage sometimes.

And.

But we, you know, just because you're not going to do this for your job doesn't mean you don't want an audience.

Doesn't mean you want to be proud of your work.

And sometimes that validation comes in the form of downloads or even just emails to people.

So I looked at my stats and was like, wow, I have substack, which you can find@podcastingobservations.com Notice.

Easy to remember URL.

It's not.

Yeah.

Schoolofpodcasting.com Observations.

Try and spell this.

Okay?

- pound sign equals no podcastingobservations.com now there are those that could say, dave, you're not reinforcing your brand.

In fact, you're bringing in a whole new one.

Okay, fine.

Go to schoolofpodcasting.com newsletter.

There you go.

I also have a Sendfox account and we'll talk about email tools in a second.

But my favorite thing.

Have you ever worked with somebody and they make you say things out loud and you go, oh, yeah, that's dumb.

And my coach said, so I, because I gave him access to everything, had, you know, like, metaphorically pull my pants down so this guy could come in and take a decent look and go, oh, here's some things that you're missing.

Because he said, why did you hire us?

And I go, because I have low hanging fruit that I can't see.

And so I gave him access to my course program so he could look at the money and he could look at my newsletters and see what I'm doing.

And he said, so if I understand this right, you have 4,000 people, which is weird because I think that's a lot of people.

And then you hear other people go, yes, we have, you know, 40 million people on our email list.

I'm like, okay, so.

But it's still.

There are a lot of people that said, dave, I want more stuff from you.

And you know what I did?

I gave them a PDF and ran away.

Like, hey, here's the thing you wanted.

Thanks so much.

You'll see, you know, I'm over here maybe kind of, if you want to kind of school a podcasting, right?

And so my coach is like, so let me get this straight.

So you have 4,000 people on an email list, and most of them have only received one email from you.

And I go, well, when you say it out loud like that, and that doesn't mean I'm going to turn into this spamming, you know, oh, I'm just going to, you know, but nonetheless.

So when I looked at my stats and I saw, wait, the number two way I'm driving traffic to my website, where people can follow the show easily, where people can join the school of podcasting, where people can, like, review and all the fun stuff that I want you to do.

It's all there on my website, thanks to my good buddy the newsletter, and I'm not using it.

So I thought to myself, self, is this true?

Like, should I have known this by any means?

And so I went out to the Internet, have you heard of this thing?

You can do like research and stuff on it.

And it said, because I'm like, really?

Because everybody, like every Facebook group, every Reddit group, like, hey, what's the best social media that I should be using for my, you know, growing my show?

And I always go, the one you're using and start with one.

That was my answer.

And my answer is going to be, I don't know, get a newsletter going.

But email marketing offers a significantly higher return on investment.

And for all, if you want to sound like a Smarty pants, it's ROI.

Return on investment averaging $36 up to $45 for every $1 spent.

There you go.

So if you're spending $15 on ConvertKit and you grow a list, remember, you don't monetize a podcast, you don't monetize a newsletter, you monetize an audience.

But nonetheless, if you compare that to social media's lower return on investment, and again, all the cool kids call it ROI.

Additionally, email achieves a conversion rate of 17.63%, far surpassing social media's 9.21%.

And so you're going to get more clicks.

And I think part of that is usually, again, newsletters are people saying, I want more from you.

And yes, if people follow you on social, they are saying, I want more from you.

But when you say a newsletter, it's like, no, no, I want to hear from you.

And a newsletter is something.

When you open a newsletter, you are there to read it or at least skim it.

We're on social media.

What is up with my voice today?

Nobody likes a Charlie in the box.

When you're on social media, you kind of just scroll and you're looking for anything.

To maybe catch your eye and then maybe if something catches your eye, if you're being social with it, right, it's like, oh, here's a report to.

Hey, can we take a tangent?

Let's take a tangent.

This is a good one.

Honest, this is, this will be short.

So lovely.

Here comes another 10 second tangent from Dave.

Brilliant.

Such absolute rubbish.

So you're on social media and you're saying, hey, podcaster, have you filled out James Kridland's podcast report card?

Or Jeremy Ends has opened up the podcast marketing report, one of my favorites by the way, and you can fill that out and it's kind of a, hey, here's what's working, here's what's not working.

Again, we all get kind of transparent on that if you, if you really want it to be good and let people know what's going on.

So those are the things I might put on social.

And yes, links will be in the show notes.

Ugh, finally back to the show.

But if I'm on social and I'm looking around and I see, hey, click here to listen to our four part series on sex trafficking.

I may not do that right now.

I'm just scrolling to see if there's anything quick that I might want to look at later that I might want to click on and add to that Watch later playlist on YouTube that we never go back and watch later.

So social.

I'm not poo pooing social.

I'm just saying I don't think it's the tool.

And look, I'm just saying from my point of view, you might be absolutely crushing it.

I mean, Troy Heinrich was on the show from the Blacklist Exposed and he is now good friends with the producer of the Blacklist Exposed, has been involved with the show, is on a dvd.

His, his name was mentioned in the show.

How did he start that?

With a tweet.

Yeah, so I'm not here to say abandon all social media.

I'm just saying from what I'm reading, you get more juice from squeezing a newsletter than you do actually, you know, social media.

The other thing is email allows a podcast to segment audiences and deliver highly personalized messages.

So think about this.

And I don't do this, but I might in the future.

I could make an email list on something like Kit now if you like Kit the car from the 80s K I T T for easy reference, a kit if you prefer.

It's a email tool.

Used to be convertKit, but I could have a podcast newsletter and then have people say Well, I just want to know about gear.

It's a segment of the podcast newsletter.

Other people might want to go, I just want to know about growth strategies.

Bingo.

Okay.

Another person I want to know about whatever.

Right.

So you could segment those so that when you send them to people they've already like, oh, this is from Dave.

And I told him, I only want to know about gear.

And look, the title of the episode or the title of the newsletter says, this one's about the new Rode Wireless micro thing.

Right.

That targeted approach increases engagement and conversions, which is harder to achieve on social media platforms due to the algorithmic limitations.

Make sense?

Sure.

The other thing, got to keep in mind, this is why we want people to follow the show.

It's kind of a like, hey, will you wear my bracelet?

You know what I mean?

It's kind of.

Remember back in junior high, you know, do you like me Circle?

Yes or no.

And when somebody actually follows the show, it's kind of a little baby level of commitment.

You know, we're going together.

I remember that.

In junior high, I was going with Sandy Goldsmith.

Yeah, we were going together.

So when you follow the show, it's kind of a.

A little baby commitment.

I'm taking actions to say, I like your stuff.

I'm going to follow the show.

And so when somebody signs up for your newsletter, and I'm going to give you my email.

So not only do I get something from you, but you get something from me.

Ooh, wow.

Second base.

All right.

Ownership control.

Look, we've all heard about people getting deep platformed on Spotify.

You've been kicked off.

Look, I played, you know, my cousin's band, and my show got kicked off.

Yeah, because they don't want you playing music on Spotify.

They just don't.

And especially if it's illegal music.

Stop doing that.

No, it doesn't matter that you're not making money.

No, it doesn't matter that you only get 10 downloads.

No, it doesn't matter.

You can't play unlicensed music in your show anywhere.

Spotify is a little more stringent on that, but that'll get you kicked off.

Don't do that.

But ownership and control.

And, you know, you said booger on YouTube and they kicked you out.

And now you're on Rumble.

And yes, you can say booger, but there's nobody on Rumble except other people that all.

All they do is talk about boogers.

And who wants to do that?

Then there's a.

It's a preferred marketing medium.

A majority of consumers 66% prefer receiving marketing messages via email rather than social media.

So when they sign up for an email, they kind of know you're going to ask for something.

Now you don't want to just ask.

Gary Vee has a book.

I think it's jab, jab, jab, jab.

I forget how many jabs there's are a bunch of jabs and then a right hook, meaning give, give, give, give, give, give, ask.

And so this preference aligns with the use of email for whether it's business shopping, because who doesn't love to shop?

Making it more effective for driving sales.

And sometimes the sale we want is just follow the show.

And if you think about it, to me, when we talk about calls to action, calls to actions, it's so hard to do at the end.

To do one, you could do multiple calls to action.

You know, one here, 10 minutes later, another one, you know, hey, go and see the guest@guest website.com and then you do one at the end.

But it's hard to do just one at the end.

And so maybe the one at the end should be.

Here is a free gift that you can get by joining my newsletter.

And then in the newsletter now you can ask them, and they're one click away from following your show.

You also get better engagement metrics.

And so when you look at social.

Yeah, you can kind of like, Twitter has some stats.

I'm not gonna say they don't have any stats, but they're just better because you get things like open rates, which of course, open rates you should be okay at because you're used to writing really good episode titles.

Think about that, though.

People that go, oh, look, episode 16 is out, and they've titled it episode 16.

Would you ever title a newsletter episode 16?

No.

So don't do that for your podcast.

Give them something to click on.

And they say, although click rates 2.9% compared to social media.

Right.

So 15 to 25% higher open rates and click through rates 2.9%.

So what does that mean?

That means let's go.

Let's.

Let's think happy.

25%.

Open the email 2.9%.

Oh, wait a minute.

What is that?

Hold on.

Yeah, that's that magic 3% number I'm always talking about.

3% of your audience will take action.

I say that all the time.

So they, you know, 25% will open it.

3% of the 25 will actually click on something.

And I realize that's depressing because we want a hundred percent of a hundred percent.

But it is what it is.

But if you look at social media's organic view, that is a 2.4% open rate, meaning they actually, I guess, look at your stuff.

And the click through rate of 1.36%.

Now, these metrics demonstrate email's superior ability to engage audiences.

And yet we're all just hammering social.

The other thing is, and this is where I kind of, when I read this, and I will have all my citations.

I've been looking at this for a while, but the ease of building a list and I'm like, easy there, kids.

When you start saying it's easy to build an email list, it is easy to set up a form and go, here, give me your email list or give me your email.

I don't know that I would say it's easy.

It's easier maybe than growing other things, but easy, you know, when, when there are tools like Kit and Mailerlite that allow you to have thousands of people for free.

And there are people like, well, I should buy it now.

And I'm like, well, unless there's a feature that you want that you need to pay for like 10,000 people is a lot of people like.

And I know again you're gonna have the big guru that says, I have 4 trillion million zillion people on my email list.

Okay, and how long did it take you to grow that?

So keep that in mind.

It's easier than growing a social media following.

Okay.

For example, they say experiments show that email opt in pages convert visitors at higher rates compared to social media.

And then it's easy to measure the results.

We just kind of talked about that open rates, click through rates, things like that.

It's easy to see is this working or not.

So some other things, as I did more research, email has 3.7 to 4.2 billion active users globally, surpassing, surpassing social media platforms like Facebook, which I know my grandma uses.

I guess it'd be my grandma uses Facebook.

Yeah, that's why the kids are on the TikTok, by the way.

Nobody wants to be like, we don't.

I had this happened to me in real life, my step kids, when I had them like, they didn't want to be on Facebook because grandma could see.

I remember grandma got mad because one of my stepdaughters was on a boat in a bikini and she was like, oh, put some clothes on.

Nobody wants that.

So they're on the talk face and the chat book and all that.

They don't want to be on Facebook.

Facebook has 2.9 billion monthly active users.

We got 4.2 billion active users on email.

All right, Dave, enough with the stats.

What do I say in my email?

Well, we'll talk about that right after this.

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

Hey, this is future Dave popping in here.

As I'm editing this, I do want to point out Google is the number one, which I kind of take that as a given.

I'm talking about things that I do to drive traffic.

When I'm talking about the top things, these are things that I do.

Actions that take my time.

Google is just a benefit.

All right, so I watched so many webinars and such on email, did a lot of work on this one.

And I realized the question that you are going to ask or you're probably screaming your dashboard right now, Dave.

Well, what do I talk about?

To which I want to point at you and go, wait, you're a podcaster, right?

And you go, yeah.

So you make content, right?

Yeah.

Well, okay, so it's not as hard as you think, but the first thing I would say is focus on creating content that is easy for you to produce, whether that's long form written content.

Maybe it's interview transcripts.

I'm not sure I'm signing up for a transcript.

But, hey, back in the day, Phil Donahue, you could say you could send, I think, an envelope or something to get a transcript of these early TV shows like Oprah and Phil Donahue and all those guys.

I remember Phil Donahue, you could send off for transcripts.

And I'm like, okay, you know, screenshots.

But I find that people love the behind the scenes stuff.

We'll talk.

I have a little behind the scenes stuff coming up a little later in the show.

But also you should kind of like be out there in your community, whether that's, you know, if you're Kim New Love in Perry's burg, who's doing a local show, like, she's actually out in the community when we say community, but that could be Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, wherever your audience is, that's a great source of content.

My buddy Mark Lawley, member of the school of podcasting as is Kim, has like 8 gazillion people now in his Facebook group.

It's crazy, but it's a great source of content.

So it's not as hard as you think.

And then aim to provide value.

To which I want to go, duh.

Don't deliver.

No, whatever you do, don't deliver value.

I always love these tips and be genuine in your approach.

Yes.

So one of the things I want to point out here, rather than being overly salesy, they say include a clear call to action.

So now that you got them on your newsletter list doesn't mean they open it up and like, click here, click here, click here, click click, click, clickety click, click.

No, like, you know, what do you want them to do in this episode?

Maybe.

And you can have more than one call to action, but just, you know, don't just be bye, bye, bye.

No.

Make the newsletter feel like it's coming directly from you as a person, not a generic company newsletter that was written by, I don't know, ChatGPT.

Now, if you're going to use ChatGPT and I do for some newsletters, it's handy.

And you ready for my really extremely hard prompt that I use for jet, I will go, hey, I'm writing a newsletter for podcasters.

Here's what I have so far.

Maybe it's the first blurb and then I will go make this better.

And it usually does.

But make sure it doesn't take you out of your podcast or out of your newsletter like you want it to come from you.

And so I get a little, you know, weird around AI when, when I'm just talking to you.

I just want it, you and me.

I don't really need somebody going, Dave, you forgot, you know, to say, well, you know, so that's up to you again, if that is what it is, is needed for you to make a newsletter where you feel comfortable because you'll write something out and then have it, tweak it.

That's the way I go.

I would not recommend having AI just make a newsletter, even though you can say, look, I'm Dave Jackson and blah, blah, blah.

And here's five blogs I've previously written.

That's just me.

I'm like, I like me to be me, not a robot, but that's just me.

But I do like it as an assistant.

But they say keep designing and formatting simple.

Don't overcomplicate it with excess HTML or AI generated images.

Yeah, simple.

The more you add to your newsletter, the more likely it is it's not going to get opened or blocked.

In some cases they say consider including looking things like the like personal antidotes.

Yes, I'm a walking antidote.

And what they mean by that is share the behind the scenes stuff, the stories.

Now, I know AI can write stories and it'll do all sorts of stuff, but they want more information from you.

So when you share going back to Kim Newlove from the Perrysburg, Ohio podcast.

She had a shot of her on a motorcycle where she was like, I've been riding a motorcycle for 20 years.

I just found out about a guy whose name I can't remember.

And this will be a blooper.

I should know because I actually, here's the thing.

I'm gonna leave this in.

Paul Gowder, right, Is a guy that has a newsletter.

He's actually, if you want to learn about newsletters and I've got more resources, we'll talk about Paul at the end.

But I found Paul via Jeff C.

So ready for this.

This is like the.

In music, there's a circle of fifths.

This is because of Jeff C.

And see, by the way, S I E H links in the show notes.

Great guy.

And I've been on his show talking about making money with your podcast links in the show notes.

And Jeff recommended had Paul Gowder pulled him out of the crowd at podfest, pulled him on and I was like, hey, Paul Gowder, look at this guy.

And Paul does a thing about powwows.

Because I'm going to guess that a portion of Paul Gowder is Native American, as is me.

I am part Cherokee and part Creek.

I'm also part Irish.

So that's how you end up with like a 16 year old kid with jet black hair and freckles.

But when Kim says, hey, I've been riding a motorcycle for 20 years, then maybe other people like, oh cool, maybe they'll have a motorcycle club in Perrysburg, Ohio, and they'll invite her and then she'll grow her audience.

And what was Kim doing?

She was just sharing a little behind the scenes.

That's what people.

It's weird because you know that I know that you know that I know that you're just you and I'm just me.

But for other people, like, oh, that's the host of the school of podcasting.

And I'm like, yeah, so.

But they like that stuff.

They want to connect.

They.

They opted into your newsletter.

And so always encourage replies.

There's nothing that pisses me off more than when I click on reply and I see that the email that it came from says noreplyu.com and I'm like, are you kidding me?

Like, this is the tool.

Oh, wait a minute, hold on.

We've got to do one of these.

And now it's time for a power rant.

Yeah.

So, okay, this is the tool that you've said.

I'm going to reach out and build my community with.

And Your email is noreplyu.com like wait, I'm trying to you.

You asked for my opinion.

I hit reply.

And your answer is no.

Come on, give me a break.

Yes.

That means that when you send out an email, whatever email you're using as the reply to email is going to get about five or six that says I'm out of the office right now.

Oh, all right.

Maybe like make a note of that person and email them in two weeks and go, hey, how was your vacation?

I saw you were out.

What's up?

Again, be personal.

They also say start with a consistent cadence.

Boy, here's why you don't use AI.

I would never use the word cadence in a million.

I don't even know what it is.

Sounds like somebody's niece.

Oh, I was out with Trevor and Cadence, my niece and nephew.

What they say?

Oh, I see.

Cadence is schedule.

See, I would say schedule.

Have a consistent schedule.

Not cadence.

Cadence.

What?

So AI, Even if it's just every two weeks, then you can increase your frequency over time.

Again, write a newsletter.

Start that timer.

Mine is usually about a half hour to 40 minutes, depending on how robust I'm feeling when I sit down at the typewriter.

They say the key is to focus on providing value.

Duh.

In a way that feels natural and authentic to you.

Because that way you can be consistent.

Share the best advice or feedback you've given to someone.

Highlight interesting things happening in your community.

Provide behind the scenes look at your business or personal life.

I already said that.

It's a great.

The other thing, I think I mentioned this, but if not, it's worth saying that you own your list and nobody can do anything about that.

And what I love about it is it's really easy.

If you want to leave, you can.

In fact, I about once a quarter I will download my email list subscribers just in the event that you know, my email list subscribing, you know, tool is in whatever Los Angeles.

And you know, it caught on fire.

My heart goes out to those people, but you get what I mean.

You always kind of want to have a backup.

And so when we talk about tools, this is the fun thing again.

I've been using a coach and I am on Sendfox now.

Sendfox has a lifetime deal.

You pay them $59 once and it's yours forever.

Is there a catch?

Yeah, a little baby one.

If you want your email delivered maybe a little quicker, I think it's 10 bucks a month.

But you know, when you compare that to mailchimp and some other ones.

But realize Mailerlite, you get thousands of people for free.

Kit.

I'm on their website right now.

10,000, 10,000 people for free.

And if you're looking for like, well, Dave, which one's the best?

Well, here's the funny thing.

So I go to my coach.

I told you, he's like, hey, you got all these people on your email list.

And I'm like, yeah, if you sign up for my daily tips, if you go to schoolofpodcasting.com daily, that's Sendfox.

And I'm like, man, it sounds like most of your customers use Kit.

So again, we have the whole of Johnny Johnson jumped off the bridge.

Would you jump off the bridge?

And everybody I know when I work with people at PodPage, by far the most popular one is Kit.

It's a cool service.

They have this referral thing, much like substack.

Heard great things about Kit.

All the cool kids are using Kit.

Maybe I need to move to Kit.

And so I asked him, I go, should I join Kit?

And he was like, well, for what you're doing, again, I'm not doing any a B split testing right now.

I'm just sending a thing and I'm just sending an email.

Nothing crazy.

Not doing any segmentation, which you might be able to do convert or sendfox's interface is a little old in the tooth, but again, it works.

It's fine.

And I was getting ready to copy and paste like a hundred daily tip messages from one platform to the other.

And you know how I say it doesn't matter if you're on I don't know Libsyn, Blueberry, buzzsprout, Captivate, and you move from one to the other.

You're not going to get more downloads unless their stats are a little different than wherever you move from.

Because it's not the platform, it's the content.

And he politely looked at me and said, yeah, it's not really the platform, it's the content.

So now as I look at it and I see the power of newsletters, I might slowly move to ConvertKit because again, they got a free plan.

But it's not like, oh, you must use this because in the same way I talked in a previous episodes links in the show notes about there is no one best podcast hosting company, whether it's Transistor, Libsyn, Blueberry, Captivate, Buzzsprout, whoever, because it depends on your show and what you need.

And so you may not need.

There's Another one, Constant contact.

I hear that one a lot, but that's for like super duper power user thing.

You may not need that.

So you can sign up for free and it doesn't cost you anything.

And so here is my the thing I think it's funny about this is the the content that is driving traffic to my website is basically me saying what's on my mind.

And this is probably four to five paragraphs, if that so.

And sometimes I get very.

I want to pontificate.

There's a fun word.

And I will do that.

Like my last newsletter was turned into last week's episode about Saturday Night Live.

And I just made my point.

Like, hey, make the podcast you want.

It's about content delivery.

Don't be afraid to be weird.

Take advantage of the opportunity.

Nobody's tuning in to watch your zoom meeting.

I love that line.

I wonder what is going to happen next.

That's something that people like in content.

I talked about Tom Green, you know, and then I remind, which I will remind you as I record this right now.

If you're listening to this on Monday, February 24th, which is the day this comes out at 7pm There is podcaster Happy hour and we are having Mike Dell from Blubrry who's showing off their AI tools.

Why?

Because you can buy them separately now.

So they have AI planning tools, all sorts of stuff.

And to be honest with you, I'm not that versed with all of their tools.

And so it's kind of selfish.

I want to know what they're doing over there.

And I've known Mike Dell forever.

And so then I have a section in my newsletter that is like, hey, here's my latest content.

Now what I do with this is I put a link to the title because I have a title for my newsletter that makes you want to click it.

So my case, why SNL's 50th is a gold mine of podcasting wisdom.

I have a link to the episode, but I also have a link to follow the show because that's what we want them to do.

And if you're using PodPage, if you just go to YourWebsite.com follow Bingo Built In.

Gotta love it.

Now, if you're like, oh, I'm on WordPress, then you go over to Daniel J.

Lewis, I'll put a link to this, the social subscribe and follow.

And if you want to see this in action, go to schoolofpodcasting.com subscribe and you got pretty subscribe buttons.

And so I've got links to all the episodes I've done in the past week.

And I put in, for example, I put a link to Jeff C's show creators new creator News Live.

He does that.

He and Colin and I have a link to his YouTube.

Can you really profit from your podcast?

That was me.

I also appeared on the podcasting 101 and 2.0.

That was the name of the episode.

Then I have a section called Stuff that Caught my Eye.

And so it caught my eye that and if you signed up for the newsletter, you would have known this back in January, that Captivate, which is one of my favorite media hosts, you can join right now in February as I record that.

And no payments till april go to supportthishow.com captivate.

I talked about profit first, which is a little behind the scenes of this kind of stuff storytelling thing I found.

And the fact that I was frustrated with Elementor, which is a WordPress tool which I have since eliminated.

That's it.

That's my newsletter.

And I've had people say that they like my newsletter because they can read it in like four minutes.

It's basically my thoughts.

Here's what I've been up to.

Here's some things I thought were cool.

And here we go.

And then at the bottom, of course, the call to action.

Hey, if you use this link, you will save 20%.

Kind of like if you use the coupon code listener.

And that way I can track that.

It doesn't have to be crazy.

You can, even if you wanted to set up most of them, have a way that you stick your RSS feed from your media host.

And when you publish an episode, it will publish your show notes as an email.

Now that is better than nothing.

And you have to write your show notes now in a way that realize this is going to be for a newsletter, not just for an app that people are watching on, but you might want to consider adding a newsletter.

Because when I looked at what's working and what's not, what is driving traffic to my website is a newsletter.

And I said that's the number two.

What was the number one?

Find a newsletter about your topic, whatever it is.

So maybe let's go back to Kim Newlove, right?

She likes motorcycles.

Maybe there's a newsletter all about motorcycles.

And her podcast, we'll make one up, is about motorcycles.

Because Kim's got the bug.

She's on her second podcast.

She's going to start a third one about motorcycles, probably, maybe, who knows?

You never know.

But let's just Say she has a motorcycle podcast and there's a motorcycle newsletter.

Advertise in that motorcycle newsletter about your podcast about motorcycles.

Make sense?

Sure.

So there is a very popular newsletter about podcasting, and most of the podcasters read it.

It's called Pod News.

Find it@podnews.net I mentioned the report card that James is doing, and that sent a really nice amount of traffic to my website.

Now I had a coupon code that people could use to save off so I could track.

Remember, we want to track what's working.

And unfortunately, I didn't get any purchases from that, which I then went, wait a minute, am I going to go blame James?

No.

James sent me traffic.

That's what he promised.

That's when I was like, better go look at the front page.

And when we first started this show, I explained how I'm making changes to the front page.

Find out what's working.

Okay, I don't have enough traffic, so I bought some.

Still not getting as many sales as I want.

Better go fix the front page.

See how that works.

So you might find a newsletter about your subject.

If I'm Glenn the geek over at Horse Radio Network, maybe there's a newsletter about horsies.

And I'm going to advertise in that.

That's what drove for me.

And realize, you know, if you go, oh, wait, I do a show about crochet, I'm going to go advertise in POD News.

That doesn't make any sense.

Find a podcast about your subject.

Don't do what I do.

Look at the concept.

Find a podcast about your topic and then advertise there if you want to.

And then just to do another callback, use one of them there UTM kind of links and I'll make a video.

It's only 4:00.

As I record this, this goes out tonight at midnight.

And I'll try to make a video to show you how I use Fathom to make a UTM link that you can then use.

And if you're using Google Analytics, they work in Google Analytics as well.

But that's enough for now.

On newsletters, my point is you should maybe get one and try playing with one.

And again, maybe write your newsletter in a Google Doc first, set that timer and then pick your schedule.

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

The school of podcasting.

All right, I just realized something as I.

I use Captivate for my media host and I was like, oh, this is where I'll put the question of the month.

And I looked at the date and I'm like, oh, this episode is supposed to be question of the month week.

And you know what?

I'm excited about this topic.

I don't know about you, but I seem a little more perky.

This episode I'm having a lot of fun.

Hope you're enjoying this.

And so we'll do the answers from question of the month.

Feel free to still go to schoolofpodcasting.com?

because you just heard the March question of the month.

But I did want to add just a quick mention.

These will be in the show notes.

If you're looking for ideas on content, check out I just mentioned him, Doug Grouter.

He has templates and things you can buy for like five bucks a month.

And then Liz Wilcox who I met at ecamm creator camp because another cool person that Jeff cuz turn me on to.

I will have a link to her stuff and then I'll have a link to how to make a great Lead magnet, a video from Data Driven Marketing co.

I have a couple out there on how to build a lead magnet because you do want to give them something.

Just saying, hey, join my, you know, newsletter because it's fun.

Probably isn't going to get anybody to sign up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to pull back the curtain a little bit.

This is based on some feedback I got from a member of the school of podcasting.

He's like, we like to get into your head on how you shape your content.

And so I've talked a little bit about profit first.

That's a thing I'm doing right now that inspired me to get a coach.

And I have an interview with Steve Stewart and Steve is going to explain profit first.

And it's not hard to understand, but it is math.

It's a lot of math.

And Steve Stewart is never boring, but it is math.

And I was like, this needs story.

If I'm going to make this more entertaining, it needs stories.

And one of the things that always admired me in different places I've worked is when the manager did the same job I did.

I remember I worked one place doing tech support and the manager we had to do, we had to work a night shift one week out of the month and the manager did that and he's.

And I'm like, dude, why like you've been here forever.

Why are you working one to nine?

And he's like, because I'm never going to ask you guys to do something I wouldn't do.

And so that kind of came back into my head and I was like, huh, okay, if I'm going to tell people about this profit first method for your business, that's again, math.

And then I found a friend of mine who made a million dollars a year and went bankrupt.

And I went, ooh, that's a story.

And then I thought, if I go through this, which I am doing now, there will be lessons learned because I'll be going through everyone say it with me.

I smell the learning curve.

And so, yeah, I'm finding some things.

Also found a hack, which is kind of cool.

And so rather than just give.

And again, not that the interview was bad with Steve, I was like, how can I make this better?

And I was like, we need some stories with this and we need to explain to people because again, with my degree in education, specializing in adult education and technical education, adults want to know why.

Why should I do this?

It sounds like work.

So if I can go, here's the benefit.

There's the benefit.

So when you hear this episode and it may be out, I'm not sure when, because I'm going through the process of setting up the profit first system.

And so when I'm through that process of profit first and I get everything set up so I know the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Because right now, I got the beginning down, I got the middle.

I don't have the end yet.

And that's just something that will be here when it gets here.

Because the fun thing, the best time to contact an accountant about, hey, let's do something together.

Yeah.

Is right before tax season.

So that will be over when it's over and when it's done, it's done.

And then you got to wait on this thing called, oh, that's right, the government.

And they're known for being speedy.

Then I will release that episode.

But that's what's going on.

And along the way, in my along with any topic you would like me to talk about, I'm always open to that.

Schoolofpodcasting.com contact now, today, if you're still here.

This is the wrong time to do this, but I'm going to do this at the end.

I'll probably do it in a future episode, too.

I want to test something because, again, I like to talk about things from firsthand.

We're at the end of the show right now, but don't tune out.

Hold on.

Chill, chill.

Don't know.

Get your hand off that button.

I want to try something.

Because we've all heard that leaving ratings and reviews helps you get found.

To which I always go.

No, it doesn't, per Apple.

So this is from them.

They say ratings and reviews and shares also help indicate a podcast newness, popularity and quality.

They are not factored into the logarithm that determines the rankings for top shows and top episodes, so it doesn't shoot you up the rankings.

In other words, they may not help people find a podcast on their own, however they say.

But they might influence whether people will listen or follow.

Because if my show has however many reviews and another show has four, well, then maybe, you know, you will listen to this.

So if you've never left a review, preferably positive, go over to schoolofpodcasting.com/apple, and that will forward you over to my show in Apple, where I currently have an average rating of 4.7 Yay.

And 331 reviews.

Now remember, I've been doing this for 20 years, so if you're like, how did he get 331 reviews?

I didn't quite quit.

But if you feel so moved, I want to see if suddenly I get a bunch of reviews if it helps me.

Because really, 300.

Like, I would have listened, you know, if it was 340 reviews.

But you know, 331.

I'm gonna listen to this other show, but if you feel so moved, I've never really asked for reviews.

And my God, you know what, we're at the end of the show.

So I'll put a link in the show notes for you.

It'll take you right to the apple thing, if you're on an apple thing to leave a review or if you're using good pods, sure, leave me a review over there.

Wherever you're listening.

If there's a way to review or rate to review, let's see what it does.

So I appreciate it if you have negative reviews, well, then I really want to hear from you.

Schoolofpodcasting.com contact in fact, we might even get on Zoom.

Not so I can yell at you again.

I'm weird.

I love negative feedback because it gives me an opportunity to grow.

Hence, I'm not a marketer.

Although I know a lot about marketing.

I am a teacher and I want to learn.

So thank you so much for tuning in.

Until next week.

Take care.

God bless.

Class is dismissed.

If you like what you hear, then go tell someone.