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School of Podcasting: Expert Tips for Launching and Growing Your Podcast
Behind the Scenes at Podfest: Lessons, Laughs, and Cold Coffee
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Podfest 2026 is over and I spent a lot of time talking to people in the hallways and at dinners and it was a great time. And I did see some things that I was like, you're probably wasting your time doing that. So I'm going to share some things that I learned, some things that I saw, and I'm going to give you an update on the how to pitch a podcast show. Because what I did last week, because I was kind of in a hurry and yeah, it did not work at all. 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're new to the show, this is where I help you plan, launch and grow your podcast. The website is schoolofpodcasting.com the hotel in Florida was absolutely freezing. That's another thing I'm going to talk about today because you might be thinking, why are these things so expensive? And there is a reason for that. But the first thing I want to talk about is it was interesting hearing people talk about strategies and things you can do to grow your audience. And one I heard that, I was like, well, yeah, that might get you a few more downloads, but when we really start obsessing over these kind of tiny details, I go, there are other things, like, I don't know, making your content remarkable that might be a better use of your time. And I'll give you an example. I was talking with some people and they mentioned that they were playing with their release time. And so what I mean by this is, let's say you release like this show is released basically Monday at midnight or Sunday at midnight, which makes it Monday morning. And I might want to release it at, instead of Monday at midnight, Monday at 8:00am and then somebody said, well, if you're at 8:01, you would come after somebody who released at 8:00'. Clock. And then somebody said, ooh, well, what if somebody else releases it 8 hours, 1 second? Then you could release at 8:02, because it is kind of a last in, first out kind of thing. And I just thought, I think you're missing something here. And yes, you want to stay consistent with your release schedule. But I would highly doubt that there is someone on the west coast waiting for this show to show up in their, you know, favorite app at 9pm, which is what it would do because they're three hours behind me. One of the magical things of podcasting is its time shifted capability. Case in point, I don't normally listen to the Joe Rogan experience, but right now I'm hunting down especially Ben Affleck seems to be sharing a lot about how the movie industry works. And he's kind of giving us the behind the scenes stuff. And so as I record this, it's January 25th and the interview was from January 16th. I didn't even know about it. It's not that I'm not a Joe Rogan fan. I admire everything he's done. I just, to me, every time I listen to a Joe Rogan show, I go, this would have been great had it been cut down to about an hour and a half. There's always a lot of fluff in there, but it's celebrities and it's Joe and he can get away with that. And so that's, you know, 10 days old almost. And so when we start to focus on minutes, do I dare even say seconds of release time? That's not why people tune in. They don't tune in because you release at 2:31pm on Tuesday. Most of the stuff I listen to is time shifted. So that is a survey of one. There's one show I listen to on Friday because they release on Friday. And I have a routine I do on Friday where I go grocery shopping. And that's like my grocery shopping thing. I always say if you release on a consistent basis, you can be part of their routine. So that was one that I was like, adjusting your release time by a minute or two is probably not going to move the needle a whole lot. The other thing I ran into, and I'm kind of glad this wasn't a lot, but I did run into a couple people that were looking for AI tools to do it all, like, everything. They wanted you to have AI come up with the idea. They wanted AI to write a script. I think they were going to read the script, so it wasn't everything. And then AI would publish it and edit it and do your laundry and wash the car and walk your dog. Oh, and there was one other thing. They wanted to do it for free. And the thing when it comes to free, I have seen many companies go out of business because it turns out that not charging for your product or service is a really bad business model. And so I get it. Look, I like free stuff, but I don't know that I want to build my media empire on something free. I saw somebody that was complaining because, hey, here's the thing. For all those people, since we're kind of talking about AI when Somebody says, I wish insert company here added more AI that AI can stand for always increase, because that's what going to happen to your prices. AI is not cheap to run. It's just not. And so Canva added AI and I think their prices went up. Now, Buzzsprout gives you the ability to kind of ala carte it. So when you add these AI tools, your price goes up. And I've seen other ones. And so when you want AI to do it, you can do it, but it's not going to be free. So keep that in mind. AI stands for always increase when it comes to your price. And so it might be better to learn how to do it. I don't know, the old fashioned way. Keep the money in your pocket. I do like it when companies allow you to add it for an additional fee like Captivate. Their AI tool is really cheap. It's like $5 for X amount of time or whatever it is. Buzzsprout has some of their tools, Bluberry has some of their tools where if you want the AI, you can pay for it that way, if you don't want the AI, you're not paying for stuff you don't learn. But like I said, if you want AI to do everything for you and to do it for free, that's just not going to happen. The other thing, speaking of kind of AI that I didn't hear as much was video, video, video, video, video, video, video, video, video, video. I didn't hear that as much. I heard about video, but it wasn't the, you have to do this. In fact, most people, when they talked about AI, I think we've all come to the conclusion you kind of don't want it creating your stuff, but you wouldn't mind it polishing it, which is kind of how I use it when I do use it. So keep that in mind. But I didn't hear kind of when I was at podcast movement. I think it was evolutions. It was just. They just made it sound like if you're not doing video, you're. You're just. You're an idiot. Basically. It was a lot of peer pressure. Like the. The first one's free, man. You know, everybody's doing it. So that was kind of new. And speaking of that, I did hear somebody bring up Steve Goldstein's fluid idea. And I did an episode a while back on Steve on how I disagreed with him. And I actually emailed Steve. I've known Steve for a very long time. And I said, dude, help me. I don't I don't get where you're coming from, because he was saying. And I. So this is kind of an interpretation. But the way I heard it was podcasting is fluid. And a podcast can be anything. A podcast can be a book, podcast can be a movie, a podcast can be a whatever. And that's where I was like, that's where the curmudgeon in me said, no RSS feed, no podcast. So if we change one word there. I totally agree with Steve. It's not that podcasting is fluent, it's that content is fluid. So you can write a book and turn it into a podcast, you can turn it into a bunch of tweets to put out, you can turn it into a movie, you can turn it into whatever you want. So content is fluid. I get that. And for the record, that's not new. That's been around for a very long time. The other thing I thought I would bring up here is the. There was one thing that caught my eye that I was like, huh? And it's episonic AI. And what this does is. And this is why, as much as I just said I don't want things to create things for me, it was intriguing enough. I think that's the right word here, is that it caught my eye. And what it does is you give it three episodes that you've done and then their AI, like partner or whatever you would call it, their character is named Lorelei. And it's not officially launched yet. Right. When I see this right now, it looks like you can sign up for free. So there's kind of a beta test. But here's the thing. I put in. He put in three episodes. And what it does is that I'm sure it transcribes these. And then it came up with your target audience. And mine, I think was Maggie. And she was cute. And if I wanted to, I could ask Maggie, would you like an episode about such and such? Because the AI had figured out your target audience and then it had a built in database of like 1600 potential guests. And you could say, hey, I'm thinking about doing this show. And it would kind of hone the topic and then it would say, would you like me to go find a guest? Then it would go find a guest based on the topic you had selected, or vice versa. You could look up a guest and it would say, oh, based on your target audience. You should talk about this. And this is the one thing that most people that pitch podcasts don't do is it ties the guest to Your audience. And I told him, when he showed me the first thing, I'm like, okay, you got a guy on first using a baseball kind of metaphor. And he showed me something else. I'm like, all right, you got guys on first and second. And it's not all about guests. You could use this just to organize your ideas. And when I look at the pricing on the website, there is a free version, but you have some. Ooh, they have charter member pricing. Join the first 500 podcasters to believe in episonic. Lock in that pro price $49 forever. There are 487. So 13 people have signed up. The pro plan is 49. Well, normally it's $79. It's $49 for the first 500 people. So it's. I haven't used it yet. I've only seen a demo, but it had me intrigued. That's the best way that I was like, okay, because I've seen software and I've worked in software. The software always looks amazing in the demo. I want to take it and use, like, real life stuff. And so that was the one thing at the show that I thought was pretty cool. The one thing I thought that was really missing from the show was hardware vendors. No shure microphones, No B and H. They were at podcast movement. But I'm here to tell you folks, you're missing out on that. Now, you might say, well, that's because the booths are too expensive. And I would agree with that. It's a lot of money. By the time you get a booth and you have somebody there to man the booth, and you ship the booth back and forth, you're going to sneeze away 10 grand. And when your product is, I don't know, $29, it's hard to sell enough of those to get your money back. But I was talking with Nick, who's the CEO of podfest, and we're talking about pricing, and told him. I thanked him. The hall of Fame, which we'll talk about here in a second. But the hall of Fame went off really well this year. Nothing against previous years, but every year we're kind of like, we need to add a little more polish to this. And it was really well done. And they had this large LED screen behind the speakers that was $10,000 to rent. And then this is the part that's just insane. When you get into hotels, they have union people, and it cost $8,000 to plug it in. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. And then he said, we're talking about coffee. And if I remember right, I thought he said a gallon of coffee was $135, but then you have to, of course, tack on a 20% gratuity and then another 6% on top of all of that for taxes. And he said, I'm not making this up. He said I could put a credit card at a Starbucks and just tell everybody, hey, if you need a cup of coffee, just go to Starbucks and put it on my card. Because a cup of coffee, you know, on the current pricing was about $14 a cup. And I just was like, wow. And so I start to realize why tickets for the hall of Fame are what they are. I start to realize how much tickets are to get into this, because it's, there's just. I remember when I was the head of podcasting at the New Media Expo and we had a panel with four people and there were only three chairs. And so I called the head of the New Media Expo, I said, hey, we need a chair over in this room. And he said, can't the moderator just stand up? And I'm like, no. He said, okay, you sure you need this chair? And I go, yeah. And because a union person had to pick up a chair and carry it, who knows how far. It cost us $300. So if you ever think these things are too expensive, I honestly don't believe it's the organizers that are jacking up the price. They're just trying to cover their butt. And the hotels, the hospitality industry is going to price themselves out of business because eventually there are already less events because it's hard to cover the cost. There used to be DC Pod Fest and there was the indie podcast by Joe Bardo. And it's hard to do these even on a budget, to the point where we almost need to have a BYOH kind of event. Let's just find a big room somewhere. And then everybody, bring your own hotel, bring your own food. That way you don't have to pay $26 for a cheeseburger. I don't know how to fix that with the hotels, but that's what's going on. If you've ever wondered why things were so expensive, the one magic thing about PodFest and really any event that you go to is the networking. And I know one night it was myself, Daniel J. Lewis, Rob Walsh, Rob Greenlee and James Cridlin and Mark Johansson. And just to hear it was kind of almost an OG table, right? A bunch of old gray haired white dudes. And it was just great to, you know, Remember old stories from back in the day and talk about what's happening now. Speaking of that, I need to say thank you to James Gridland, excuse me, hall of Fame podcaster James Cridlin, because he bought us dinner and it was very nice of him. Podnews.net I love the. I listen to his daily show and I also really, really like his weekly show that he does with Sam Ceci. So thanks to James for that. And we have a running gag about is a podcast a PDF or not? And in the specs, it still says it's a PDF. I know that's weird and I know nobody does it, but here's the funny thing. If I say a podcast, no RSS feed, you know, it's audio or video delivered via an rss. I will have somebody, I'm not making this up. Somebody will email me and they go, you didn't say PDF. And I'm like, okay, so now that I've said PDF, James loves to go, nobody's using a PDF. So that was fun. It was great. And had a just a good time meeting people. It was kind of wild because the hall of Fame does a quick kind of rehearsal. And I'm sitting there and me and Gordon Firemark and Rob Walch, and we're just hanging out at this table and this guy sits down and the voice of Dave Ramsey came out of his head. Cause it was Dave Ramsey. And I was so tempted to go to Dave and say, hey, as of December 23rd, after man, 15 years of fighting it, I'm officially, you know, debt free. Because that's Dave's thing. People call him up on the phone, they scream, I'm debt free. Yeah. And I wasn't gonna scream at Dave, but in the end, I didn't do anything. And I was kind of upset that I didn't say any. Anything. And during my induction speech of Mark Asquith from Captivate, there was a line, because Captivate really did turn the business model of podcast hosting on its head. And I had a line in there that said, that's not an opinion, it's just facts. And I was like, that is such a Dave Ramsey line. So I did my almost horrible Dave Ramsey imitation. And two, with Dave Ramsey sitting, I don't know, 15ft from me during the actual ceremony. So that was fun to do. And if you want to have, if you want a fun exercise, take something that, you know, 20 years of and then do a two minute speech about it. I had to really focus on every single word I said because I was going to stick to my two minute limit. It turns out podcasters don't understand how to tell time. Nobody else did. But I stuck to my 2 minute limit to induct Mark. I'll put a link to that out in the show Notes. But the one thing as the hall of Fame is great to attend because of the stories, but I looked at it and I knew many of them. Like I know Arielle Nissenblatt and I love the fact that she interrupted her acceptance speech with an ad read. I thought that was creative and very cool. But Ariel is someone who. She has the Earbuds newsletter and her whole thing. I thought about this because there was Ariel. I know James Kridlin, I know Paul Culligan. You know, I knew many of the people. I know Dan Miller. And all of them had one thing in common. They served their audience. Even if it's Paul Culligan. Paul Culligan is, I used to laugh and call him Podcast Consultant to the Stars because he had people that you knew, Suzanne Somers and all these other people. But what I love about it is Paul would go up to the mountain and work with these giant numbers because he was dealing with celebrities and he would run experiments and try things, or he would figure out what was working and then come down to the mountain and tell us all, like, oh, you ought to try this. And when I do this, this is what happens. So that was kind of cool. James Kridlin especially travels all over the world for POD News and lets us know what's going on. Dan Miller, 48 days to the work youk Love had a show about business and he was just this wise sage that would share his experience in the business world and what worked. And if you look at all the different people there, it was amazing. And I was like, that's kind of the one thing that they have in common. There are people there that really helped get advertising into podcasting. There was the lawyer from the EFF that saved podcasting. Most people don't realize podcasting almost went away because we had a patent troll who we beat. And then they did an appeal and then we beat the appeal and then they eventually ended up at the Supreme Court. So thanks to the eff, the Electronic Frontier foundation, and Julie Samuels was there to be inducted. So that was kind of cool. But again, these are people that are solving problems. They are getting knowledge and bringing it back to their audience. They are serving their audience. And it was great to hear all those stories. And another great hall of Famer, Tom Webster, brought up that, you know, we have a history now. We've been doing this over 20 years. And it's kind of interesting now to see the seeds that were planted that have now sprouted up. And it was different in a way that we honored Dan Miller because he died a couple years ago. That's why Dave Ramsey was there. Dave Ramsey was one of his best friends. We honored Todd Cochran, who died last year. And it was very strange for me on Saturday night when my buddy Neil wasn't there as the dj, his friend filled in, which was nice, but it was just weird to turn the corner and not see my buddy Neil behind the. Whatever those are. The turntable. It's not a turntable. The thing you wick a wicka wicka on, that was different, but it was fun all around. The only thing that was weird is I went to Florida to get warm and froze my tuchus off because the hotel apparently does not have an off button on the air conditioning, which is kind of weird. So I was complaining it was cold until I stepped off the plane in Ohio, where it was 13 degrees. So, yeah, you know, be careful what you wish for. And for all my friends across the pond, that's minus 10 something Celsius. So, yeah, it was cold. In just a second, I'm going to play a clip because I made what I thought was a good point. It got picked up on another podcast, and while they didn't agree with me, they also didn't say I was wrong. And that's about the price of ads. We'll be talking about that in a second and I'll update you about the horrendous week I had trying to get a podcast off the ground right after this. Have you been thinking about taking a turn in the podcast Hot Seat? Well, here's what Stephanie Graham from the Nosy AF show had to say about her time in the podcast Hot Seat.
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Hey, Dave, you know, I'm currently editing one of my episodes and I just want to tell you that me listening on the hot seat, that was super helpful because even just in this conversation, I'm interviewing this other artist. This is such a good exercise in that way of being like, is this really necessary? So we'll see. But just want to share that, you know, I'm thinking about some of the lessons learned from our hot seat.
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So what is the podcast Hot Seat? You pick an episode for me to listen to, I check out your website, you tell me what the goals are for your show, and I tell you what you're doing right and if there's anything there that needs a little polish. Now, the hot seat also comes with a free month at the school of podcasting, which includes unlimited coaching. For more information, go to podcast hot seat.com Want to know more about what I think when it comes to podcasting? Check out my newsletter@podcastingobservations.com that's podcastingobservations.com links in the show notes. So I listen to a lot of podcasts about podcasting. And when it comes to keeping up with what's going on in the ad space, I listen to Sounds profitable. But I also listened to a show called the Media Roundtable with Dan Granger. I really like Dan Granger. Dan Granger is a guy who comes out and this is a guy that sells ads that said, look, we should have a cap at 10%. Don't go. Cause radio is 30%. And when I was watching Hallmark movies over the Christmas break there, some of their shows were 32% advertising. Which, of course, if you give them $7 a month, those will go away. But I wrote a article, if you hear me talk about podcasting observation. That's my newsletter. And I simply. And I'll summarize this. There were banner ads that used to make lots of money on websites because not everybody had a website until everybody did. And then supply and demand kicked in and banner ads went down the toilet. You know, if you have Google adsense on your website, you're not getting paid a lot for those. And I said it was because of supply and demand. And now we've got cpm, you know, price per thousand downloads, advertising programmatic. And it used to be you can make decent money with that because not everybody had a podcast until they did. And now everybody has the ability to put programmatic ads in and then insert our good friends over at inception Point AI, the new villain of podcasting. And they will take any amount of money because they're making 3,000 episodes of AI Slop every week. And so when you have people that will take peanuts, then why should they pay you decent amount of money for the relationship you've built? And I just said, I think that CPM ads, if it plays out the same way banner ads did. If I was making a living with programmatic ads, I would be nervous right now based on the history of banner ads on websites. And so here they are commenting on this, and I thought it was interesting that they kind of disagreed, but they didn't say I was wrong.
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So I think what's fascinating is that the Premise of Dave Jackson's article here is at the end of ads and podcasting, will podcasters be stuck punching the monkey from podcasting observations on January 2 is his comparison to banner ads. And none of you even honored that comparison. Like, is. Is he just completely off base there?
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Notice that's a yes or no question.
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Is it just. It's a different channel. Like, what do you, what do you even think of his comparison to it being, like, the collapse of banner ads? It's a powerful metaphor. It's. It's. It's exaggerated, to put it.
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To put it.
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Yeah, but sensationalist. I mean, I do think. I do think the general point about sort of, you know, podcasting becoming more like radio is a point that we've been making for a long time.
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And so, again, I'm a big fan of Dan Granger and what he stands for. I just, I'm here to let you know this is my way. This. I. Why am I putting this in a podcast? So I can say, I told you so. Basically, when I said, hey, we should. I don't know, price fixing is illegal, but I think we should stand up and go, yeah, we're not going to take less than this for programmatic ads because again, studies have shown we have more trust with our audience. We have a better engaged audience, and that's worth paying for. But I thought it was interesting and I got giddy, giddy. I tell you, when I heard somebody say my name in their podcast and the fact that they had read my newsletter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, where am I gonna be February 4th online? I'll be doing a presentation, podcasting power. Grow your small business with your voice. Then February 17th through the 20th in Nashville, Tennessee. I'll be speaking at the NRB 2026 International Christian Media Convention. For more information, go to schoolofpodcasting.com where to have me speak, go to schoolofpodcasting dot com contact. So I talked about this new show I might launch if I get enough input from you. And by you, I mean, yeah, you listening right now. And the idea is when you get a bad pitch from an agency or somebody who just who has obviously not done their homework or the opposite, really did their homework, and holy cow, this is a great pitch. Then I needed you to. And I still need you to go over to pitchapodcast.com and you'll see there where you can share your story. But I said I would like these in audio format. I had many people, like, forward me stuff. I'm like, I needed an Audio format. And that may be enough. The fact that I wanted an audio feedback or in an audio format, that may be enough to kill this idea because it's an audience participation show and it would be more impactful, I feel, if we heard it from you, not me reading your email. And so that was one thing that I'm like, hmm, that might be a thing. So I tried to make that as easy as possible, but I was using a form that had a ton of fields in it, and every time you add a field, so if it goes from just first name and email to first name, last name and email, that itself, you're increasing the number of items by 33% because you added one can actually inhibit how many people use this. And I had a ton. Now I even said at the top, most of these are not needed. The idea being that the more you added, the more I could feature you on the site. But unfortunately, I think that led to a lot of people seeing it and going, yeah, I'm not filling that out. And so now if you go to pitchapodcast.com story, it will take you to a Google form I made where it simply asks for your name, the name of the show, your website, and from there you can either click and upload your story, or I have a link in the form where you can click and record it via voicemail. And I'm hoping that will make it considerably easier and we'll actually start getting some pitches. Because I thought about this. If it's something that I don't get enough to make it its own show. We were talking about this on the Ask the Podcast Coach show that I do every Saturday. Maybe this will be just a segment and I will have a link in the show notes where you can click and fill this out. Maybe it's. Maybe I'm not going to get enough to do a show. I like starting new shows. I've done this 30 sometimes now because I like to remember what it's like to be a new podcaster and to go, oh, wow, I got 18 downloads. And so that's the other reason I do that. And it's an experiment for me to play with. So if you want to contribute and you're probably thinking, dave, this is boring. It's just somebody gave me a bad pitch. Yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for. And the worse it is, the better, because then it'll be entertaining. I had somebody once pitch a submarine captain to me for this show because we talk so much about submarines and being a captain. Things like this on the School of Podcasting show. So go over to pitchapodcast.com and you'll see a button there. Or if you just want to go to pitchapodcast.com story and share your story and get featured if this show actually launches. But I'm not going to launch it unless I get 20 replies. The school of Podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you're listening to this and you attended podfest, let me tell you about the most important thing you can do right now is take all those business cards you got. And for the record, when you give me a big, giant business card, that's like, I don't know the size of my head. What you're really doing when you hand that to me is you're kind of saying, here, throw this away later, because that's what we're doing. But I took all the business cards and, you know, I have some that I was like, oh, I really want to follow up with this person and. And do that. That's one of those things, at least for me. It's a survey of one that when I go, I'll do this later, I don't. And you're going to miss out on some of the magic of attending a live event when you actually don't follow up with people. So if you've been thinking about it, put it on your calendar, make it happen. Add it to your Google tasks or whatever you're using, and make sure that happens. And since we're talking about conferences, January 30th and the 31st in Austin, Texas, which I'm hoping is going to be warm, I will be attending the Novel Marketing Conference. This is the one put on by my buddy, Thomas Umstadt Jr. And I'm going there because I'm an author, but I'm also going there because authors need websites, and it's just something I. That's a space to me. I think authors are very similar to podcasters, where we make content, we edit it, we get feedback, we make it public. Same thing as the movie industry. We make our art, we edit it, we get some feedback, and then we make it public. And so I'm looking forward to this. To me, Thomas is just a wealth of knowledge, and much like somebody like Daniel J. Lewis, if Daniel J. Lewis puts out a product, I know it's going to be good. Pat Flynn's products are good, you know, and so I wanted to support Thomas and I wanted to get out of Ohio and go to Austin, Texas. So. And if I get time, who knows, maybe I'll go visit Stevie Ray Vaughan's grave. That would be very, very cool. That would be a bucket list item. But if your bucket list item is to start a podcast or to get it growing or going in the right direction, then simply go out to schoolofpodcasting.com join use the coupon code listnr when you sign up for either a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription. I'm Dave Jackson. I've been podcasting for over 20 years helping podcasters get where they need to go. And I would love to see what we could do together because, you know, I help podcasters. It's. It's what I do. And until next week, take care. God bless. Stay warm. 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. I just realized I forgot to thank Jeff Grief from the selling podcast as an S E L L apostrophe N. Thanks for dinner, deeply appreciate it and look forward to working with you in the future. Yeah.