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If you're an audio podcaster who has heard me and other online experts tell you you should be on YouTube lately, but you haven't yet, you might be feeling like you're losing the race. I've gotten several panicked emails from listeners of this show, including previous clients of the Grow the Show accelerator. Basically asking Kev, did I completely waste my time? Am I now years behind everyone who's on YouTube? One listener wrote in to say that she has 36 audio episodes ready to go, but she's frozen because. Because she feels like YouTube is the future, but she doesn't have the bandwidth for video production and she's wondering if she should just quit altogether. There's a good chance that you felt some of this fear as well. Am I completely wasting my time putting out an audio podcast? Well, what if I told you that you are not behind at all? What if I told you that audio podcasters actually have a massive advantage on YouTube that nobody's talking about? In fact, I believe that the people who should be panicking aren't the audio podcasters. It's the people starting fresh on YouTube now, who have no experience at all, who have to compete with you. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kev Michael. I am your podcast growth coach. And over the past year I've helped several dozen audio only podcasters start getting real traction on YouTube. And here is what I have discovered. The ones who've been doing audio for the longest grow the fastest on YouTube. That's because they already had the one thing that takes most YouTubers years to develop. So today on the show, I'm going to reveal exactly what that advantage is. Why audio podcasters are actually perfectly positioned to dominate on YouTube. And if you are one of those audio podcasters who says, I can't go all in on YouTube right now, I. I'm going to share the 10 minute strategy that you can use to start leveraging that advantage and YouTube today, even if you don't make a single video. Let's do it. Okay, so I grant you, over the past few months I have almost exclusively been talking about YouTube here on this podcast feed. And lots of people have written in and said, kev, if I'm not doing YouTube, should I stop listening to your podcast? Are you done talking about podcasts that aren't on YouTube? And the answer is no. This is Grow the Show. It is here to help you grow your podcast and your audio podcast counts. At this micro moment, I'm talking a lot about YouTube. Because I personally am deep in the throes of learning how it works. And honestly, I'm excited about it because so far it has been the most fun way to grow a podcast in my experience. And I've grown more than 500 of them. So I totally understand if you don't currently have plans on jumping into YouTube and you're like, well, what the heck? Does this still apply to me? Am I wasting my time on audio? And in fact, I, I had a previous client reach out to me and ask, have I wasted my time over the past few years developing this audio only show? Now that you're saying that YouTube is the way to go, should I stop? And that question made me laugh because I was like, no, you should absolutely not stop. What I'm trying to tell all of you is that what I have discovered right now is that YouTube is becoming the fastest way to grow a podcast audience. But that does not mean that you should stop doing your podcast if you're not on YouTube. So that's like if you were riding a train to go somewhere and you discovered while on that train that airplanes exist. So you got off the train and you were like, oh no, well that's way faster than what I'm doing. And you got off the train and stopped moving altogether. No, we still use trains. In some cases they are slower and don't make sense anymore, but in other cases they totally make sense. We still use them. So for most of you, I'm going to continue to try to nudge you to consider giving YouTube a try because it is so much faster than, than growing an audio only show. But that said, if you want to be audio only, if you don't want to be video at all, that's totally fine. You just have to understand that if you want your audience to grow, it's going to be a little bit harder and it's going to take a little bit longer for a number of reasons. So if that is you and you're like, I'm audio only, I'm sticking to audio only, I'm not doing video, then you have four ways to grow your podcast. And if you're not doing one of these four ways, then, then your show is not going to grow. Way number one is you become really good at social media and you become a social media person like Shortform or Twitter or LinkedIn or something like that, and you get really good at social media, which by the way, that's gonna be video for the most part as well. So you get good at short form video, and then you build an audience there, and you get that audience to move over to listen to your podcast. That's strategy number one. Strategy number two is you get you and or your show mentioned on other podcast RSS feeds, which usually means you become a guest on other shows, and you get people who are listening to those shows to go listen to your podcast. This is something that I recommended heavily for years, but the problem is it's much harder to do that nowadays because AI has ruined the ability to send a cold email pitch, because every podcaster's inbox is absolutely inundated with AI written pitches. And so they're so overwhelmed with pitches that they have completely tuned them out. So if you want to do that, what you need to do is you have to befriend the hosts and producers of other podcasts on social media, become their friend, start DMing with them, and then get them to invite you on their show. It's a lot of work. And what's also true is that it is totally possible for you to become a guest on that podcast. And if you don't nail the CTA to get people to go listen to your podcast immediately, people won't and you lose the opportunity. So there's a lot of risk in using podcast guesting as your strategy right now, and it's not working as well as it once did. The next way is that you literally send cold emails or cold DMs to tons of people every single day. I recently caught up with a Grow the Show Accelerator alum who shared with me that he's actually been helping people launch podcasts for the past couple of years, which is awesome. And his strategy is when he helps somebody launch a show, they do a massive cold email campaign where they email a thousand people a day that, hey, you should check out this podcast. You might not be interested in that, but that's option number three. Option number four is if you're a business owner and you run paid ads to a sales funnel, then as a part of the opt in email drip for that sales funnel, you mention your podcast a bunch and you get people to consume episodes as they're getting emails from you day after day because they are now on your email list. Those are the four ways become good at social media and transfer your audience. Do a podcast guest tour and transfer that audience to your feed. Cold email or cold DM hundreds of people a day, or run paid ads to a sales funnel, and as a part of that, funnel people to your podcast. Those are the four main ways that I'm seeing right now that aren't YouTube. So if you're like, I don't have time to do YouTube, then you better have time to do those other things or else your show is not going to grow. And if you're like, well, I don't have time to do YouTube or any of those things, then that means that your show is not going to grow. It's just a reality. Those things have to get done. That's like if you were a business owner and you said, yeah, I just don't have time to market. It's like, okay, well then you've got to stop being a business owner because nobody's going to buy your stuff, nobody's going to listen to your podcast, unless you take the effort to make it so that people find out about it. So if you're one of those audio podcasters who's like, Nope, not doing YouTube, can't do it. Listen to me now because I have a couple of points that might help you change your mind. Number one, you can still claim some territory on YouTube right now without making any videos. And that's using YouTube's podcast feature. So believe it or not, YouTube actually also works as an RSS feed catcher. So if you go into YouTube and you create a YouTube channel and you go into YouTube Studio and within YouTube Studio, you click the create button, a podcast button appears, and when you do that, you can link your RSS feed. Now, after you add your RSS feed, what it will do is it will import all of your audio episodes. Once it does that, whenever you publish new episodes of your podcast, YouTube will automatically pull them in. It will pull in the audio, it will, it will add a static image to it and those episodes will exist on YouTube. But here's the key. YouTube treats those videos differently. So it's not going to show those audio only episodes on your main channel under videos, which is a good thing. That means it's not gonna screw up your metrics. Because if you publish a bunch of audio only podcast episodes as videos with a static image and you publish them as regular videos, it can sometimes mess up your metrics and your standing in the algorithm. Now, now, now, don't panic. If you're somebody who has done that before, you, you can actually, once you link your podcast, you can go in and retroactively make those videos that you uploaded to YouTube podcast videos, quote unquote. So YouTube understands. Oh, these are audio only podcast videos that are on YouTube. Okay, cool. I'm not going to count these when I'm Looking at how this channel's videos perform now, what this does is it's going to list your podcast as an official podcast on YouTube and in YouTube Music. And this is important and valuable because podcast listeners, by and large are transitioning to YouTube. A recent study by Edison shows that YouTube is now the number one podcast consumption app in the country. In the United States, it has surpassed Spotify and surpassed Apple podcasts. So more than a third of people who consume podcasts, when they want a new podcast, they go to YouTube first. So if you are audio only, I think this trend is only going to continue. And so at the very least, it's a good idea to link your show up there so it can show up. Now. This isn't going to grow your show like crazy, and you might not even notice anything at all, but it's going to be that baby step that gets you a little bit closer to taking advantage of YouTube. Once you take that baby step, you might be then like, okay, my show's on YouTube, maybe. I am willing to try out this YouTube thing. And if that's you, and if you're willing to consider that for a second, I want you to know two things. Number one, you do not have to go all in on YouTube from the very beginning. And in fact, some of the biggest podcasts on YouTube still to this day do not make video versions of every episode. I recently caught an episode of Jay Clouse's Creator Science, and he interviewed Colin and Samir. Colin and Samir have a podcast called the Colin and Samir show, and their YouTube channel has several million subscribers. And, and they told Jay in that episode, we actually still don't make video versions of every single episode because some stuff just works better as audio. And what's also true is that your audio audience and your video audience are going to be different. It is not the same group of people. Case in point, this episode that you're hearing now is only available on the audio feed. This episode is not available on YouTube. And in fact, if you look at my YouTube channel right now, I actually haven't been posting as many YouTube videos to my own channel recently because I'm in such a heavy course build out right now. All of my video production energy is going to the new videos of the Grow the Show accelerator at the time of this recording. I am currently producing week seven of 12. So for the past seven weeks, I've been cranking out several videos every single week of course material, teaching other podcasters how to grow on YouTube. It's kind of ironic but it's just a test. But guess what? My YouTube channel has grown by a thousand subscribers in the last month. My most recent videos have gotten more views than the ones previously. And the clients inside the Grow the Show accelerator are growing. So what's actually cool is that I'm learning lessons through them, growing their shows, and then I'm passing those lessons onto you here. It's pretty cool. I feel like I'm learning faster than anybody because right now I'm literally working on about 30 YouTube podcasts every single day. I'm growing 30 YouTube podcasts. And I'm just learning so much and sharing it with you here. Okay, so the number one thing you need to understand is that you do not have to go all in on YouTube. You don't have to flip a switch and make it so that as of today, every, every single episode that you publish is video. You can, but you don't have to. You can just do one or two at a time. And here's another thing that's amazing that you might not understand. YouTube doesn't require a publishing cadence for success. You do not have to publish once a week. And in fact, sometimes it's better to publish less often so that you can put more energy into each video. There is literally no bonus to publishing more frequently. Sometimes it's a detriment because you're spreading yourself across more videos in a given month and so each video gets less of your attention and so it's less good audio. On the other hand, you do want to try to be as consistent as you possibly can. Now, over the past couple weeks, I've been a little inconsistent on this audio feed because again, I am doing some really heavy lifting with this new Grow the Show Accelerator course material. So it's not the end of the world if you are inconsistent on your audio feed. But it is a really good idea to stay at least weekly. But because audio listeners are much more routine, once you get on an audio listener's grocery shelf of shows that they listen to on a regular basis, you really wanna try to not get knocked off the grocery shelf. Cause it's hard to get back on. With YouTube, that is not the case. YouTube, you're just working with the algorithm to show you to the right people. So it really doesn't matter at all how often you publish. If you're thinking about becoming a video podcaster and taking advantage of the airplane, as it were, and this much easier and much more fun audience growth, you don't have to do it all at once. You can Take baby steps and just try a couple videos at a time. Now, if you're somebody who's deciding to apply to the Grow the Show Accelerator and you and I talk about this, I'm going to tell you that if you do the accelerator, you should make a video every single week so that we can maximize your time in the program. You can get tons of direct feedback from me on what you're doing, where I can correct your form, tell you what you're doing well, tell you what needs to change. So if you do join the Grow the Show Accelerator, I'm going to tell you you need to publish videos every single week because you're in the Grow the Show Accelerator. But if not, and you want to take it slower, by all means you can do that. The last thing that I need you to understand, if you are an audio podcaster who is afraid of going on YouTube or you're feeling like, what the heck, I've wasted all this time. Here's the thing, you actually have not wasted any time. You have been training this whole time in a medium that's harder. It's almost like you've been training at altitude. And what that means is sometimes people who are training for endurance activities will train at altitude 5,000ft in the air, but because it's much more difficult to do stuff up there because there's so much less oxygen in the air. So they train up there and then they come back down to sea level and it's way easier to do whatever it is that they're training for. So they intentionally make it harder to do the thing while they're training. And then when it's time to actually do the thing, it feels way easier because they were training at altitude. Being an audio podcaster is like training in altitude because YouTube has an algorithm where audio does not. YouTube has SEO, audios is not as straightforward and easy to use. YouTube has paid ads if you want to, and YouTube has unbelievably powerful data, which audio podcasting does not. So it is so much easier to grow on YouTube. That said, I've noticed something interesting lately about those who are trying to launch and grow a podcast on YouTube. They are struggling. There are a few exceptions of people who I've helped to launch a podcast and they've gotten over a hundred thousand subscribers within a couple of months on YouTube. What's more common is that people who are jumping straight into YouTube from the very beginning are actually having a really tough time because they're having to develop a bunch of skills all at once. Whereas you have been podcasting for a while now and so you've developed skills like consistency, like introductions, like understanding your audience and just creating long form content. So what I'm finding is that the podcasters who have been audio podcasting for so long, who are jumping into YouTube, are getting success faster because they jump in and they're like, wait a minute. This is so much easier than I thought it would be. This is so much less complicated than I thought it would be. I thought I would need a fancy studio. What do you know? I don't need a fancy studio. I thought I would need tons of expensive editing. What do you know? I don't need tons of expensive editing. All I need to do is turn on a camera while I record my episodes and understand a little bit of difference in, in how it's packaged and how it's edited, publish it on YouTube and get to know the YouTube algorithm. And what they experience is that finally all they have to do is worry about making content and their audience grows. Unlike on audio, where you do have to make your content, you have to stay more consistent week after week than you do on YouTube. And on top of that, you have to pick between either becoming a social media person and then transferring an audience, which is much easier said than done. Doing a huge podcast guesting tour, which is harder than ever and takes a lot of time, cold emailing thousands of people a day, which nobody wants to do, or spending thousands of dollars a month on a sales funnel and transferring those people over. Do you want to do those things? No. Wouldn't you rather be able to just focus on creating content and publish it and it gets shown to the right people? That's what YouTube is. So my hope is that after hearing this, you understand that even if you are afraid of YouTube, even if you feel like you don't have time for YouTube, it's. It's going to be easier than you think. Yes, it will be challenging to build some new skills like thumbnails, understanding titles better, reading the data. Yes, that is the case. But I guarantee that the time and energy it's going to take you to do that is far less than the time and energy it's going to take you to grow your audio podcast to the size that you want just in audio. Like I said, if you don't have time right now to go fully into YouTube, that's okay. Keep doing your audio thing. Stay on the train. It might be a little painful to be on the train now that you know that the airplane exists, but you can Set a plan and you can ease your way into it for when you do have time. And maybe start looking at 20, 26 and start allocating some time and budget to jump into YouTube. Because if you like podcasting, this is where it's going. It's not going to go further away from video. It's only going to go more and more to video. I don't believe that audio listenership is going to disappear, and it is actually not dying. It's just not growing. So audio listenership isn't going down, but it's not going up. Video viewership, and particularly podcast viewership on YouTube is exploding right now. So now is the time to do it. You can still take advantage of it now, even without going all in on a video production cadence. Yes, it is going to take a little bit of getting used to, but I promise, once you're used to it, you, you're gonna be like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I waited so long to do this. All right, that's gonna do it for this episode. The last thing I'll leave you with is this. If you are an audio only podcaster and you are definitely not doing YouTube, you might find that the episodes of this podcast talk a lot about YouTube. That's going to be the case because YouTube is going to be a reality of podcasters for a long time, and that's just how it is. That said, I still am going to be helping podcasters who are audio only, and there's a lot of stuff that we're gonna need to cover on this feed. Like, how do you get your YouTube audience to transfer to the audio feed? Because like we said before, they're two separate audiences that have different buying patterns. So you're going to want to stay tuned for stuff like that. And the dark horse in all this is that Spotify has been investing tons into podcasting and into video. So all the lessons that you're learning on YouTube are going to apply on Spotify, and Spotify is going to try to compete, and that's going to be good for us. So there's going to be stuff on this feed about Spotify in the near future and whether or not you're doing a video, you're on Spotify. So that's gonna be useful to you. All right, that's gonna do it for this one. I will see you next week. If you're a podcaster trying to grow on YouTube and you're still spending hours editing or you're working with a team that just cleans up the audio and calls it a day. You need to check out Podcast Boutique. They've been my go to production team for over five years and now they've built something that's tailor made for YouTube. First podcasters. It's called record and forget and it's exactly what it sounds like. You record your episode, send them the raw files, and they take it from there. High quality audio and video editing, titles, thumbnails, description, show notes, uploads, clips, everything. But here's what makes them different. They don't just polish the content. They help you script your content, cut the fluff out, shorten your episodes and increase viewer retention. They helped you script your content, trim the fat, shorten your episodes and increase viewer retention, which is the number one factor in YouTube growth right now. And because they're in lockstep with me, anytime I uncover a tactic that helps podcasts grow and monetize, especially on YouTube, they implement it for their other clients too. So if you're still diying post production or you're not seeing results from your current team, go to podcastboutique.com and tell them that I sent you. All right, I'll see you next time.