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This is grow the show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. And in this quick episode, I am going to share with you what I have learned about the difference between a podcast audience on YouTube and a podcast audience on an audio feed, which is you, because this episode is only available via audio. So you and the people who are on YouTube. Right? And this is going to be valuable for you if you are podcaster who is currently in both places, or if you are considering having your show in both places, right? Making your podcast available on YouTube as well as the other platforms, which, first of all, I've said this in other episodes, you don't have to do that, despite what everybody is telling you, even though everyone and their mom is like, you gotta get on YouTube. You gotta get on YouTube. You don't have to. There's pros and cons. But if you do, or if you are, I'm gonna share with you what you need to understand about how these audiences are different. And the first thing that you need to understand is that they are different. It is two separate audiences. I've had the pleasure of getting to know several producers behind massive podcasts who pull back the curtain and are super generous giving me the behind the scenes of what it's like to work on these massive shows that have the audience size that we all want. And I'm almost always surprised at a couple things. Number one, how it's different than I expect, but also how it's also the same. It's like, kind of funny. Maybe we'll go into that in a different episode. But the point that I wanted to share with you quickly today, that it's important to understand and that I particularly am learning right now, is that, first of all, there's virtually no overlap between the people who consume your podcasts on YouTube and the people who consume your audio feed on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or another listening app. Now, before I got into YouTube at all and before I got into this, I figured it would be the same, right? I thought it was one audience. But what I'm learning is that the Venn diagram does not overlap nearly as much as you think. So lesson number one is that if you have your show on YouTube, your audio feed does not know about it and they probably don't consume it. Likewise, if your show is on YouTube, those people don't listen on the audio feed and they probably don't even know about it. And even if they do know about it, it's very rare that they overlap. So, number one, you want to treat these audiences differently in the messages that you share and make sure that if you're in both places, you're sharing things in both places. But the second distinction to share was the one that was the bigger surprise for me. And I didn't really get this until I really got to understand how YouTube works, specifically the YouTube algorithm. And so here's the big thing that you need to know. Your audio feed is mostly going to be people who already know who you are. And that is because as an audio podcaster, you have to be your own algorithm. There is no audio algorithm that is going to bring you new listenership when you publish episodes by itself, like there is on YouTube or on Instagram or on TikTok or other platforms where you post something and the algorithm takes it away and shows it to people. That doesn't exist with audio yet. Spotify is making an attempt, and I will let you know when they have something that's worth noting. They're getting close. But for now, there is no audio algorithm. So you have to be the algorithm by you going out and telling people that your show exists, either manually or by being a guest on other podcasts, which is what I talk about all the time, that's you becoming your algorithm, picking the shows that you go on and getting featured on those shows. Or you need to become your algorithm by going to other platforms and taking advantage of those algorithms. So at this moment in time, the three ways to grow a podcast that I have seen be the most successful are social media algorithm growth, YouTube algorithm growth, and podcast pitching growth. Picking one of those three things, or all of them, if you're really going after it. But anyway, for your podcast feed, you have to be your algorithm. And so what that means is somebody that's tuning into your podcast feedback for the first time usually has discovered you elsewhere. They've heard you on another podcast. Maybe they read your book, maybe they saw a YouTube video, maybe they saw you on social media. Maybe they saw you at a conference, maybe they met you at a conference. Whatever it is, they met you first somehow. And then they went and found and listened to your podcast almost every single time. So while you still want to speak to your listeners in your audio episodes as if it is their first episode. So every single episode of this show, I say this is the show that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland, because if I'm doing my job right, every episode is somebody's first episode. They need a little bit of context. You don't need as much context as you need on YouTube. And that is because no matter what the size of your YouTube channel is, on average, 80% of the people who view your YouTube videos are people who have never heard of you. It is new people now. That is why YouTube is so good at growth, because it shows your videos to so many people who haven't heard you before. It makes sense. How do you grow? You get people who haven't heard of you to hear of you. Right? Audio podcasting is bad at growth because it doesn't show it to people who have never heard from you before. You have to go find those people, make them hear of you, and get them to tune into the show. Here's why this is important to understand my YouTube journey so far as a podcaster has been. Stage one, I was not on YouTube. I was audio only. And I was like, F YouTube, I don't want to be a video podcaster. Stage two, I was like, okay, this is a thing. I need to understand this. A lot of the people that I serve are on YouTube. Whatever. Let me learn how to do this. Then I got excited about it, and then I started making my episodes for YouTube. I started making grow the show episodes as one and the same. There was nothing different between what I put on YouTube and what I put on the audio feedback. Now, in order to make the videos work on YouTube, I had to make some changes. I had to have more of an intro. I had to hook people even harder in the beginning, and I had to more often add more context as to who I am and what I have achieved. My name is Kevin Shpidlin. I've helped more than 400 podcasters grow and monetize. My business has done over $3 million. Like all those things, I have to say that on YouTube. So people immediately are like, oh, okay, I guess I'll listen to this guy. Whereas on the audio feed, people kind of got. People reached out and said, hey, can you stop telling us how much money you've made? I've heard it a million times. So I was like, okay, this is interesting. This is a little bit different. But either way, I said, whatever. I'm a YouTube podcaster now. I'm just going to make my podcast episodes for YouTube and put the audio on audio. But what I've learned through diving deeper into this is that you are a different listener. You've already heard of me somewhere. The YouTube viewer is a different viewer. They haven't heard of me. They also don't have as much context, not only about me, but about the things that I talk about so what's great about these audio episodes is that I can refer to things like the podcast ladder and targeted podcast pitching and targeted daily engagement. These are things that I've talked about in the past, and there's a good chance you've heard me say these things before on YouTube. 80% of the people who see all my videos have never heard me say any of these things before. So you have to explain them all right then and there. You have to speak more simply. You have to add more context, which again can get annoying on the audio feed. We'll get back to the show in one second, but real quick, I am sharing everything I'm learning about how to use a podcast to grow a business here on the audio feed, and you are more than welcome to continue using this show as a resource in your podcast and business growth journey. But it can be hard to sift through all of these episodes to find that one piece of knowledge you need in order to achieve a breakthrough with your show. If you'd rather have a roadmap, expert guidance, and several tools to help you achieve growth even faster, then I invite you to join us in the Grow the Show Academy. The Academy is my online community where I've gathered all the tools, templates and training that you need to take your podcast to the next level. You'll gain access to strategies that are working today, along with live coaching from me, a community of podcasters who have joined forces to grow together all of my AI chatbots and tools that power the production and promotion of my show, and regular community events like masterclasses and Expert Q&As. So if you're ready to take our relationship to the next level, work with me directly and speed up your podcast's growth and monetization. Join us in the Grow the Show Academy. You can join month to month and cancel anytime. To get more details and hop in, you can go to growtheshowacademy.com or just click the link in the Show Notes. I'll see you on the inside. All right, back to the show. So the main nugget that I'm here to share with you today is you need to understand that YouTube is more of a get new people platform. Audio is more of a serve the people who already know of you platform. Because the downside of your YouTube videos being shown 80% to people who haven't heard of you before and don't follow you is that your followers, your subscribers, quote unquote on YouTube don't see your videos as much as you think, whereas Your audio people, it's more of the same people over and over again. So what I'm doing now, and I learned this from Jay Klaus, he did an awesome masterclass about podcasting, like a YouTuber. And one of the things I took away from that masterclass, they make every single podcast episode for the audio feedback. But some of their episodes, they have the ingredients that would make it a good YouTube video. So they give it the YouTube treatment, quote, unquote. So not every episode of Jay Klaus show is on the YouTube feed. It's only the ones where the guest had a great setup and the topic is something that would work for 80% of people who have never heard of Jay before. Whereas things where you really need to know who Jay is, he puts just on the audio feed. Because at this point in time, it doesn't make sense for him to incur the expense of making it a YouTube video. Because I'll tell you right now, it is way more expensive in both time and money to make video versions of your episodes. There's another creator that I follow really, really closely who has a massive audience. You've definitely heard his name. I'm not going to mention his name because some people don't like him and so they discount anything that I say after saying his name. He's a big time creator. Recently he has returned to creating audio only podcast episodes. This is someone who has a massive YouTube channel and a massive podcast. And he was also doing the thing where it was, I make a YouTube video and I throw the audio up in my feed. And what they have discovered, because again, I have kind of a backdoor to this team, is that their podcast stopped growing when they stopped making audio only episodes. So that creator is now doing it separately. They make their audio only episodes, which are way quicker. And if it's a solo episode like this, I make these in literally 15, 20 minutes. Way, way, way easier to crank something out that's super valuable, it's punchier, it doesn't require as much expense in order to make it good. And because you know that the people who hear it are people who have more context about you, you have more leeway to digress and be imperfect. Whereas the YouTube videos take way more time, way more energy, way more money to make. So the topics that make sense for YouTube videos, they make them as YouTube videos. So what does all this mean for you? Well, the number one thing to understand is that if you are a podcaster who's on YouTube or considering going on YouTube, you want to think of your YouTube channel more as a growth play, an expensive growth play, but one where if you do it, if you get it going, it can work really, really, really well. But it's going to be a separate thing. It is a separate channel. It is a separate audience. So if you're having trouble growing one audience, it's going to be even harder to grow two audiences at the same time. So essentially my advice to you is if you are on YouTube, basically, either decide are you making episodes for YouTube? Are you going all in on this? If so, you need to consider that the people who see these videos are going to be colder people. They're going to be people who don't know you. And that's going to affect the topics that you talk about. As an example, I've never talked about launching a podcast on this feed, but I'm going to be making YouTube videos about launching a podcast because that will do well with people who don't know me and haven't launched a podcast yet. But that wouldn't make sense because most of the people who listen to this show have already launched, right? So just remember the 8020 rule. 80% of the people that see your YouTube videos are going to be people who have never heard of you before. All you need to do is understand that and potentially change the way you're approaching this. And if you're somebody who's making audio episodes and throwing them on YouTube and YouTube's not growing, just understand that's why it's because when you make episodes that are meant for an audio feed, where people generally know who you are, if you just throw that into a place where people have no idea who you are, it's just not going to perform as well because they don't have the same amount of context. So this was a quick one. I am still in the throes of learning how to really make YouTube work for a podcast. I've got some new and exciting stuff to share that I'm going to be debuting in January. So there's going to be new training in the Grow the Show academy, specifically about how to podcast on YouTube this coming January. Sharing what I've learned, both doing it myself and from several other experts. But I just wanted to share this with you now so that you can have this 8020 rule in your head and you can use it to help you make decisions on what content that you make and also just to understand how these different platforms work and interplay with each other. That is going to do it. For this episode of Grow the Show, I have two things for you before I let you go. Number one, real quick, if you've ever gotten any value from the show, please, if you haven't yet, leave us a five star review. I get a notification every single time reviews come through and they almost always make my day. So please, please, I would love to hear from you. It really, really helps us. And then the second thing is, if you are a podcaster who needs help with production, if you are struggling with all the time it takes to make these things and you haven't yet, definitely set up a conversation with Podcast Boutique. They are the team that I've been working with for five, six years. They are my most trusted production agency and recently they added an incredible service that you're going to want to hear about. They call it Record and Forget. I've been using it for months. It is amazing. You just record your episode and send it to them. They do the content editing for you. They create titles, show notes, they can make it into an amazing YouTube video clips, and of course high value production. So the content editing piece is the thing that I know people have been asking for for a long time. It is unbelievably good. All I do is record. I send it off to them. They handle the rest. And by the way, they are also closely in lockstep with me. So anytime I discover something that is working to grow and monetize a podcast, I immediately share it with them. We work to implement it with my show and then they implement it with the other shows that they work on. So if you're spending time yourself doing any of the editing or post production, or if your current post production team isn't cutting it, maybe they're an internal team that doesn't know what they're doing or they're an external team that's either too expensive or does not keep their promises, which is very common. Check out Podcast Boutique. You can go to podcastboutique.com let them know that I sent you. One thing though. It is Podcast Boutique, not the Podcast Boutique. So if you Google Podcast Boutique, watch out because it is not the Podcast Boutique. It is Podcast Boutique. Boutique. Com. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.
