← School of Podcasting: Expert Tips for Launching and Growing Your Podcast
School of Podcasting: Expert Tips for Launching and Growing Your Podcast
School of Podcasting's Big News with Podpage
00:41:04
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's Dave. And throughout this episode, I tell you that this is episode number 1028. And guess what? It's not. It's episode number 1029. So thanks to the joy of dynamic content insertion, I can tell you that all the show notes are available@schoolofpodcasting.com 1029 and you can just ignore the rest.
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B
I'm gonna leave that there.
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A
Well, some big news this week, and that is the School of Podcasting has been acquired by PodPage. Hooray. Thank you, James Kridlin from podnews.net but I was thinking about, how am I going to talk about this? Because does this really give you any value? And I could just hear the listener
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B
thinking, oh, great, another episode where Dave talks about Dave. Ugh, Seriously, it's like, enough about me. What do you think about me?
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A
And so I was like, what can we learn from this? And I was like, how did I get from a guy that was just divorced, just went through bankruptcy, living in his brother's house, to building a company that eventually got acquired? And then I saw it, there was a kind of a theme that ran through the whole thing. And if I hadn't done it, none of this would have happened. So, yes, we're going to walk down memory lane a little bit, but we've got some lessons to learn along the way. Hit it, ladies. The School of Podcasting with Dave Jackson. Podcasting since 2005. I'm your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson. Thanking you so much for tuning in. If you are new to the show, welcome aboard. This is where we help you plan, we help you launch, we help you grow. Hey, if you want to monetize, we can even help you with that. The website. Yep. Hasn't changed. We'll get in. There's really not much that's changed, but there are a couple of things, and I'm excited about it. And that website, of course, tell your friends schoolofpodcasting.com welcome to because of My
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B
Podcast, where we spotlight the results people are achieving because of their podcast.
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A
So, yeah, my. Because of my podcast, my podcast got purchased along with my business. But we're going to go back, way back here. And basically it boils down to the thing that I saw. This wouldn't have happened unless this happened. Oh, and this wouldn't happen, except, well, this happened and this happened, etc. And I was like, well, how did each of those things happen? And if you're an introvert, you're going to hate the answer. But it comes down to relationships. And I realize for some people, hearing that word just makes you want to go. But I often say one of the biggest benefits of a podcast is people you have no business talking to will come on your show. And so I thought about it. When I first started off in podcasting, like the early days, 2005, I connected with a guy named Marcus Couch. Why? Because we both love hard rock music, and Marcus was a guy that I believe I really connected at the very first podcast event. Back then, it was, I believe, the podcast portable media outlet, something like that. But at that event, I met Marcus Couch. I met Paul Culligan. I remember Paul walking in with a bag of a box of books saying, you know, if we got a big enough audience, I think we could actually make some money at this podcast thing. And people wanted to throw us out. And I probably. I'm a little hazy on that because it's a while, but I think I met Rob Walsh there. If he was there, that's probably. I've known Rob forever and. But Marcus. So there's. There's. I'm growing my network. Marcus put in a good word for me at Pod show, which later would rebrand Amivio, which enabled me to work for and with the one and only inventor of podcasting, Adam Curry. Hello, everybody.
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B
My name's Adam Curry. This is the morning announcements. Enjoy it in the morning.
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A
And so back then, this show was actually called the School of Podcasting's Morning Announcements. And that's where you learn the lesson, don't get cute with your name, because we were calling it the morning Announcements. And then you had to explain, because you get it. It's the school of podcasting. Yeah. So if you have to explain your name, you've picked a bad one. And so I was able to get on Pod show, the first podcasting network, which later became Mevio. Got my first advertising spot from McDonald's. Got to get to know Callie Lewis, who is now Luria Petrucci, Keith and the girl Michael Butler, and as I said, Marcus Couch. But meanwhile, things like Podcast Pickle. Back in the day, this was one of the first podcast directories, along with a thing called Podcast Alley. This is all before Apple and maybe itunes had come along, but the owner of Podcast Pickle was a guy named Gary Leland. And then later, I don't know whose idea it was, we did a show still around. Hasn't had an episode out in forever called Today in Podcasting. And who was it? People I'd already met. Paul Culligan, Kennedy, Gary Leland and Rob Walsh. We did that for a while. And then I took my podcast and I interviewed people like Rob from Libsyn. I got to know the owner of Spreaker, who has now launched Pod SEO. We talked about that in last week's episode links in the show notes. And I got to know the head of Bluberry, a phenomenal guy named Todd Cochran. I miss him a lot. And I met these guys at events, and they would come on my show. And again, I've said this before, when you do a solo show, you grow your influence, because right now, I'm just talking to you. And when you do an interview show, you grow your network. But the thing that really kind of blew me away in the early days is there were, like, there was, you know, Marcus had the Hard rock show, and C.C. chapman had a, you know, pop show and this and that, and I had the podcast show. And then some guy named Cliff Ravenscraft came along, and I was like, how dare you? You know, but really, that's kind of what I was thinking. But then I listened to Cliff Sho and another guy named Daniel J. Lewis and Ray Ortega and David Hooper, and all these guys were talking about podcasting, and I was like, but, but that's my thing. But they each had their own spin. And so after I thought, how dare you? It turns out these guys were the guys I was hanging out at events, and we would completely nerd out around podcasting. And so again, in 2013, I was approached by the one and only Ray Ortega as Google Hangouts on air. Yes. Welcome to the History Channel. It had just rolled out, and he thought it would be cool if we took these really nerdy podcasting conversations between myself, Ray and Daniel and do them in public. Call it the Podcasters Roundtable, because he really wanted to play with this live thing, and he was getting into video, and I got a lot of new subscribers from that show. How did it work? Networking and not treating your, quote, competition like your competition. I love those guys. I wish we could get that show to come back. So that was 2013 and 2014. Then this is total humble brag theater. Rick Calvert was running the New Media Expo, previously known as the Blog World and New Media Expo. And he called people like Libs and Spreaker and Blueberry, and he said, who should I get to fill this empty spot previously filled by my buddy Cliff Ravenscraft? And they needed a new head of podcasting to pick speakers and things for this event. This was a huge event at the time, and all three of those companies, Libs and Spreaker and Blueberry said the same thing. What do you think about Dave Jackson? Why? Because I'd had them on on my show and because they listen to my show relationships and producing good content. And the cool thing about that was I got to interview all of the speakers and I got to hire Pat Flynn as the keynote if we jump up to 2016. I lost my job as a software trainer and I called my now ex wife and I said, hey, I want to take the school of podcasting and do it as a full time gig and then I could be on your health benefits and hey, you make a boatload of money. You've been doing nurs nursing for 20 years. And she said, which may be one of the reasons she's my ex wife. So I wanted to get a job in podcasting. So I looked at my relationships and I called my friend Rob Walsh. I said, buddy, this could get awkward. I got good news and bad news. And he said, oh, I'll take bad news for 100, Alex. And I said, I just lost my job. And he goes, oh, wow, what's the good news? And I said, I'm available to work for you. And so I went to work for Libsyn. If we jump ahead four years, it's 2020. I'm working at Libsyn. And according to Brennan Mulligan, the CEO and founder of PodPage, he reached out to Daniel J. Lewis and Ray Ortega. Why? Because he wanted to make a product and he needed to know what people wanted. He built podpage the same way I recommend you build a podcast, find out what people want and give it to them. And both of my buddies, Daniel and Ray, said, look, if you really want to understand what podcasters want, the person you want to talk to is Dave Jackson. So in 2020, I got hired as a podcast consultant by Brendan Mulligan to talk about this new idea he said, called PodPage. And the very first thing I said when I met him was this. But from, from what I've seen from your product, my first question is, do you have an affiliate program? And so it's been love at first sight ever since I first saw PodPage. And for four years I was telling everybody about PodPage. I was one of his top affiliates. I was slightly getting in trouble at Libsyn because at that point they owned a web hosting company called Pear Networks. And instead of driving people to Pear Networks, I would drive people to PodPage. And when they asked why, I simply said, it's better. And that was kind of it. There's this thing called integrity. And I always say every podcaster starts with two things, no audience and integrity. And the goal is to get an audience without losing your integrity. And nothing against pear networks, but PodPage is made for podcasters and it was just better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so four years goes by. I'm one of the top affiliates. I asked him, can I buy the domain tripod page and learn POD Page? And I would give him an idea. In some cases, like, that's great. And he would somehow wave this magic wand and it would just appear and it really got to this point. Here's another clip from that first meeting that we had. What doesn't it do, I guess, at this point? And so we would text back and forth, kind of keep in touch. And then one day Brendan sent me a video via text.
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B
Hey, hope you're well. I'm here in Maryland on a farm. It's very nice and peaceful. So we've known each other now for four years and I feel like, you know, I've always really appreciated everything you've done contribution wise for PodPage externally. I think that we've talked about this for a second before, but I'm curious to see if you'd want to have a conversation about essentially coming over and working on podpage full time. And when I say full time, I mean, you know, your Libsyn full time kind of commitment.
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A
And then he rolled out a position that sounded like it was tailor made
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B
for me, basically community focused. And so that would mean doing the support. And it's kind of stuff you're already doing, which is why I feel like you'd be such a good fit. Like, you know, I'm already asking if you'd be interested in like, right, doing our demo videos for us and you know, stuff like that. Like I just doing that, doing like a podcast about websites. And so I know you're doing a lot of the stuff sort of with the angle of driving affiliate sales. So I'm curious to see if you would just be interested in doing it to drive POD Page growth. And so, and so one of the
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A
things he said really caught my attention because when I was working at Libsyn, I wasn't really allowed to mention the school of podcasting a whole lot. And Brendan said this, you've really valued
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B
the flexibility in being able to keep pushing forward with School of Podcasting. There'd be no conflict there. We could talk about ways we could integrate it in a way to be able to drive customers to School of Podcasting.
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A
Yeah, which really caught my eye. And so I've been. It's hard to believe I've been at PodPage for two years now. And that has led to this.
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B
We announced yesterday that PodPage has acquired the School of Podcasting. We are incredibly excited to sort of partner with Dave on this next leg of the School of Podcasting journey.
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A
At the end of 2025, we were doing kind of our yearly wrap up. And Brennan, it's kind of funny, said, you know, it seems like everybody knows you, but again, relationships. And I'm also here to say, no, not everybody knows me, but why isn't the School of Podcasting bigger? And I said, well, I make part time income from a part time job. I work seven to midnight, a couple nights a week, and a little bit on the weekends, and I make, you know, part time money. And I think that made him go, hmm. And so it's a great marriage in the fact that PodPage is still an amazing product. And I know you're gonna say it's because you work there, but I've now proven I've loved this product really since it was love at first sight. And the one thing that people leave PodPage, like, what's the big reason? What's the one thing? And it's very simple. It has nothing to do with PodPage. It's just they quit podcasting probably because of one of those really selfish things called babies, the arch nemesis of podcasters. But that's our biggest. We do an exit survey and it's like, yeah, I'm not podcasting anymore. So we're hoping that the school of Podcasting can help some of these people keep podcasting. And so again, relationships. And if you're an introvert, you gotta just pull yourself out. I've told this story before. When I was 16, I was fired from my first job because I was too shy. And a teacher of mine said, act the way you want to be and you will be the way you act. And I am still deep, deep, deep, deep down, still a little shy, but not as introverted as I was. And I'm just here to tell you, how do you get better at it? You just have to do it. I remember once I was at an event and I went there looking to find people that needed podcasts. And I went to. I was speaking at this event and I went to a dinner that was all speakers. Well, hello. Every one of those people needed a podcast. And yet there I was. I couldn't have been any further away from the group. And I just kind of mentally kind of grabbed myself and was like, hey look, you idiot, the opportunity is right here in front of you for about the next 20 minutes. And I just kind of mentally put my finger under my collar and just said, come on, you get over there. And I just, instead of thinking, oh, all these people, I picked one person. It was a blonde female. And no, not that kind of thought here. I just was like, look, she's close, go talk to her. And I just went over and I'm like, what brings you to the show? Kind of thing and got the conversation going. And the more you do that, the better you get at it. And nobody has punched me in the face yet. Now if you want the nitty gritty of the actual deal and what does it mean for members of the school of podcasting? And what does it mean to you if you're not a member of the school of podcasting? We're going to talk about that right after this. Have you ever been driving along and your favorite song comes on and you're like, yeah, and you crank up the radio and then the phone rings and so you turn down the radio, not all the way down because you still want to hear your jam, but enough to where you can answer the phone. Well, guess what? Haha. You know how to mix audio and if you've ever attached a photo to an email, you know how to upload an MP3 file to your media host. And if you've ever deleted text in a word file, then you know how to do it basically in Audacity. It's not that there's no learning curve. There's a little one and I'll be right there next to you to help you flatten that learning curve. I'm just telling you it's not as scary as you think. Go to schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code listnr when you sign up for either a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription and you can join worry free with a 30 day money back guarantee. Just go to schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code listnr. It's time to go back to school. If you host a podcast, your website should work as hard as you on your episodes. At PodPage, we automatically create a beautiful professional site for your show, complete with episode pages, transcripts, audio players, SEO optimization, and building tools to grow your audience. No design work, no plugins, no ongoing maintenance. In less than a minute, you can see exactly what your podcast would look like on PodPage. Go to podpage.com preview and generate your Free preview site right now. See your show the way it should look@podpage.com slash preview. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did a town hall and I have a link to that out@schoolofpodcasting.com 1028. But School of Podcasting member, and I love her to death. Her show is called Nosy AF and she's very, very curious, which makes her a great podcaster. And she asked, all right, so what did Brendan buy?
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B
PodPage bought everything. Bought the IP and the name and all that stuff. And when I presented Dave with options, I said, there's a couple different options. And all of them had a here's what we'll buy the IP for, and then here's a Rev share of going forward. The question about equity, I mean, we get this as a different Q and A startup. Equity tends to be. It seems like it's going to be a great idea, and very few times does it end up being a good idea because of just the way equity waterfalls work. And I don't ever intend to sell the company, so the equity would never turn into anything. So instead of thinking about equity, I presented David the option of actual rev share. And the rev share is very much is tied to. Specifically tied to the school of podcasting, because I didn't want decisions made with PodPage or expenses with PodPage or anything muddying this work. And so we've actually, we're accounting for the school podcasting revenue and expenses totally separately. And then we're. We have a profit share at the end of the year and we will both be making the decisions on the expenses. So it's kind of like a company running within a company that won't be touched by any of the expenses outside the company it doesn't have. Dave's salary isn't actually part of the expenses for the school podcasting. And so the goal is the more we can grow the school podcasting, like Dave just continues to generate revenue or profit off of it. And after looking at spending time doing like, the analysis of the school podcasting is like financial books. I think it'll end up, the entity itself will be more profitable because a lot of the expenses can just get absorbed into PodPage. The point is that it was important to me that, like, as the school podcasting grew, his compensation for it still grew. And I think it would actually end up being better than if it was independent.
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A
And that's one of the things I get. I am now being guided by someone who's had multiple business and they've done well, but People have asked, well, what if it doesn't go well? And we actually have a lot of things in our paperwork that talk about that. And then Brendan on the roundtable mentioned this.
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B
I have bought businesses before where, like a year in, it didn't go as well as I was hoping. As the new owner, I was like, oh, this business isn't. Isn't growing like I thought it would when I added more resources, or the person who started it and I have are misaligned. And then there's this whole thing. Well, like, I put all this money into it. I can't just give it back to the person. But I also don't really want to run it. Should I shut it down? Should I try to sell? It's like, it's a little bit of a mess. So Dave and I actually started with that conversation and, you know, assuming that nothing in the world goes crazy, even with AI and everything that's happening, basically what we said is the goal of this merger is that school Podcasting can help PodPage and PodPage can help school podcasting grow. And so it was kind of like, I forget, I think we said, we'll do a check in after one year and two years. And it was like, if after a couple years school podcasting hasn't grown, nothing's really different there. It hasn't really helped podpage, like, if a strategy doesn't work, as long as there's some sort of balance on investment made and revenue, which there should be, we can just unwind it. Because the goal here wasn't to, like, take something of Dave's and then make it. It was just to, like, I want to put a lot of time and effort into it. And so this was the structure that we came up with.
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A
And what about ask the podcast coach, your podcast consultant, and all the other podcasts that Dave does?
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B
Dave is a kind of a tricky person when it comes to both hiring and doing a deal like this because he has so many podcasts and they're all kind of related. When I first hired Dave for Pod Page, a lot of people ask me, well, was there anything in his employment agreement about the school podcasting? Because what if he does an episode on the school podcasting about a competitor or WordPress or. And if. When I've joined larger corporations before, usually when you join a big corporation, they basically say, you can't. You have to stop doing all this other stuff because you work here now.
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A
And one of the things I loved when I first joined PodPage is I explained to Brennan that I Do group coaching at noon. That's why it's called Lunch with Dave. And I said, hey, can I expand that from 30 minutes to an hour? And he's like, sure. And we both trust each other because he knows that for every hour that I might be, even though technically it's my lunch hour, there are plenty of times I'm answering podpage tickets at 10:30 at night, because I always check before I go to bed. So there's a lot of trust there. And that really helped the deal go fairly smooth once we got through the awkwardness of explaining. What exactly are you buying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what is going to change at the school of podcasting?
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B
One question I always ask Dave is like, you're. You're a one. You're one man.
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A
How are you going to.
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B
Like, when I think of school podcasting, I think, like, tons of courses. How do you handle doing all that? Have you ever thought about having other people do instruction? Because I see just as, like, a person outside of this sort of educational world. I was like, so all these people running courses and all this, like, everyone's trying to, like, launch their own set of courses, generally about different stuff. Like, have you ever thought about inviting other people to publish on the school podcasting their own course? And we're going to start experimenting with that by having more than just Dave teaching, because Dave might go on. He does some great deep dives into software, but it might be even better to have the people who created the software do the deep dives into their software in a way that obviously would be promotional because they're promoting their own thing, but hopefully educational. That's a balance that we want to strike. And then also just people who are, you know, like, there's certain people who are the best podcast lawyers. So when you think about what you should know, podcast, as far as a podcast are about, like, how to set up, you know, your entity or anything you're going to do around law. Instead of Dave and I trying to, like, figure that out, let's have the people come on who know it the best. And yes, if a great podcast lawyer is teaching you about what you need to do and then you need help, you're probably going to reach out to the podcast lawyer. So it's hopefully going to be good for. For them, but the education will be good for the community, and so that's something we're going to try.
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A
So what's the overall vision for the school of podcasting?
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B
My vision is for school podcasting as, like, the person who came today and said, hey, let's. Let's make this bigger is relatively simple. It's just. It should be where anyone who wants to learn anything about podcasting signs up. There's not really a lot of nuance to it. Like, if you're a pretty big podcaster and you're trying to. And you've got a good audience now you're trying to figure out monetization, it should be super valuable to you because you can log in and you can read all kinds of stuff about monetization. You can take courses, you can take courses from experts. You can. You can connect with other people at your level.
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A
And so when I heard that vision, I was like, that's my vision.
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B
If you're just thinking about podcasting for the first time, and you woke up thinking, I think I want to do this podcast. Come in as a free user, get some basic information about if this is something you want to do, and then if you're serious, you sign up and your hand is held through the process of launching a podcast in those first steps. So the more people who can come in with their expertise, I think the better. And so we've got to figure out the right way to both make sure that the education quality is consistent and also, you know, give. Give enough a framework for people to teach. But I think that it'll be. It'll be really cool to have a more centralized knowledge base for sort of all podcaster education. The thing about PodPage over the last six years is I go to these conferences and I see Dave's old company, Libsyn, when he used to work for Libsyn. There are all these hosts that are all friends with each other, but at the end of the day, they're. They're all competing for the same customer. And so, yes, everyone's friends, but at the same time, yeah, I mean, Libsyn would love a Buzzsprout customer to come over. A Buzzsprout would love a Captivate customer to come over. Well, PodPage has always been like, no one else really does websites, not really at these conferences. It's just I. And I work with everyone. So I've got this Switzerland approach of being like, yeah, I'm friends with everyone, and I think school podcasting should be as neutral. It's just a neutral platform for podcasters to come, and hopefully we can serve as many people as possible.
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A
And I love that attitude because I've always been Switzerland. Even when I worked for Libsyn, I was friends with people at Captivate and Buzzsprout and Blueberry, and Brendan has come up with some pricing perks.
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B
This is going to be a little bumpy because I'm still working on the way to do this, so it's easy. But my end goal for this will be if you were paid a paid member of PodPage and you are a paid member of School of Podcasting, you will get an automatic discount on your school podcasting membership. And if you go to our blog and read about it, and we have it in our support center, like how the discount, depending on what tier you're on, what your discount's gonna be. Obviously, like, people who Pay more for PodPage should get a bigger discount on school podcasting, but it's gonna be automatically applied so there's no coupon. So no one who's like, just hasn't heard about this misses out. When the school podcasting goes to bill you, whenever the regular billing period is or when you go to sign up, it will do an automatic check to podpage and say, is this email address a paying member of PodPage? If it is, then it'll automatically apply a coupon so you don't have to do anything. And if you've been a long standing member of cool podcasting, you've just been paying, you just get billed, you should, starting soon see your bill just automatically reduced if you are a paying member of PodPage. So that's how it's going to work. We're still making sure that it's consistent the way that the invoices are created and stuff. We're still making sure that everything is done at the right time. If you're paying for both, we really appreciate you supporting both services. And so we want to make sure to give a discount. So the next time you get a bill after, now that it's public, check if there's a discount. If there's not, obviously just write Dave, we can make the adjustment and more, more importantly, figure out where the bug is.
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A
And so now that the School of Podcasting is going to be part of my day job, this is how Brendan sees it.
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B
So I said to Dave, I was like, I'm kind of thinking you're probably 80, 20 as far as the time you're spending on PodPage and School of Podcasting right now in your working time. So 80% of your time is on PodPage 20. I was like, by the end of the year, I would like to flip that. And so you're spending 20% of your time on PodPage and 80% on School of Podcasting. That's my goal. And the way that I want to do that is try to figure out any of the areas of PodPage that are taking more time than they should and try to help with that.
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A
And so for current members of the school of podcasting, they're like, has anything changed? And the answer is no. We added a free tier. Now the free tier gets access to a couple courses, one that is before you start the road to podcast success. And of course, there's a free podpage course and then you get access to some of the community called general podcasting. But there are also things like the SOP episodes. There is a special ask the team section. There are event replays. So if you can't come to the events, there's replays, there are questions about courses, there's an AI community, an analytics community, a monetization community. So all those, you get the general one. But if you want all of the community, then you would become a paid. And then likewise there is coaching that I always talk about on this show that you get access to me. And so that is part of the paid plan. So it's really kind of gears for people that want to come in and chime in with the community, get their feet wet, get into podcasting. I was looking today, there's some things on my YouTube channel. So it's things I've already said for free in public. I'm going to add those to the free course. And that's for me, one of the things that I'm kind of excited about. I've never really done the freemium. And freemium is a different model because if you don't have valuable things in the free, well, then why would they upgrade? Because this stuff isn't very good. And then likewise, if you add too much stuff to the free, well, then why do I need to upgrade? Because everything I need is on the free section. So it's a little different than the 14 day trial on PodPage, because on that particular trial you get access to everything, but it's for a limited time. Now, if we flip that around, you can be a free member for as long as you want, but you're not going to have access to everything. So that's how that works. And again, if you're a current member, I keep saying nothing changes. But the one thing that's going to change is I'm now going to have more time to make more videos and grow the community and bring in some experts. So things are going to change, but in terms of access to the content as A paid member, you get access to everything.
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B
We're just funneling everyone into joining the school podcasting as a free member. And if they want the additional time with Dave, all the coaching, all the courses they can, they can go over. But if they just want sort of a place to ask some questions in a chat, just like they're doing in Facebook, we have that in the school podcasting.
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A
So there is one big change.
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B
One thing we did as part of this, I don't know if anyone noticed, was we moved to school podcasting.com from a 10 year old WordPress installation over to PodPage, and then we added some cool functionality so we would have. This would have never happened if we didn't do this deal. But the first thing that we did was we needed to get the content over. So in PodPage, we built an entire WordPress migration tool, which now we can offer to other podcasters who want to come to PodPage from WordPress. That's just a tool that like, we needed to build for this and now we get to offer it to a bunch of other podcasters. So that's really cool.
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A
And the beauty of having a different set of eyes look at your stuff is you find things like this.
- [32:03]
B
Anyone who wanted to read about any of Dave's courses, there was nowhere online that you could actually look in details about them. You had to join the school of podcasting on Heartbeat to look to see the description of the courses, which is a horrible way of discovering the content. And for some reason, all of the platforms, Heartbeat and Circle and all that, they just, they don't have publicly available pages, which means Google can't access them, which means if you're searching for a course on podcasting, Dave's courses would never, ever, ever, ever, ever show up because they're not public.
- [32:30]
A
And the beauty of having a Brendan Mulligan on your team is he then just comes up with a solution.
- [32:35]
B
When we moved it over to podpage, what's cool is now I built an integration with Heartbeat, which is the platform that it runs on. And so now if you go to schoolpodcasting.com courses, you see the whole course catalog, you get to read about it, you can see all the lessons. Google gets to see that, but, but we can share that link with other people.
- [32:52]
A
But now you get to go and
- [32:53]
B
you get to see all the courses, which is cool. And that we're adding an events page. So all the events that we're putting inside the school podcasting will be publicly. You can see the list now. You can't join all of them, but you can see what's going on. And then I'm working with the Heartbeat team now on a reverse integration where anytime someone school podcasting episode is published to PodPage, we'll actually also publish it into a channel within the school podcasting Heartbeat again. That will be a feature that anyone can use as a Heartbeat community. So it's been cool because one of PodPages biggest, I'd say, constraints or limitations has been podcasters grow beyond just podcasting and they have their own community and it's on Circle or Heartbeat or Mighty Networks. And by working with Dave internally on this, we're able to sort of be like, okay, let's build these features for school podcasting that then get everyone on PodPage can enjoy. So that's those. There's things we're going to release in the next couple months.
- [33:44]
A
So I'm very excited to have additional resources and now additional time to work on the school of podcasting. And this is what we see for the future.
- [33:52]
B
This is the start. And you know, I don't think we mentioned it, but there's no change to pricing and the goal will be, you know, by the end of the year. I think I saved, I sent Dave a little bit of an overwhelming list, but I was like, okay, I looked at your courses, but what if we did this and the framework was you've got a bunch of courses, but what if we thought of this as like, if you were to build an actual physical school to educate podcasters and they were to go through a curriculum, what would that curriculum look like and what would the different cohorts be? And I think it ended up being like 60 courses. And it's a little much, but the courses are very targeted. So the courses are intended sort of the way that we had we started designing it was these courses would be like mini courses. They would be able to be consumable in like a 30 minute chunk or an hour long chunk. So it's not like a long course, which means at your lunch break or whenever, if you just want to sit down, be like, I just need to be schooled on affiliate marketing for my podcast. Cool. Go and take the course. You're done, right? Cause you like, look at all these course platforms and the completion rate's really low. Well, the completion rate's low because these courses are really long. And so instead of having like a everything about podcast monetization course, maybe we just need five or six courses with specific things to learn. So the hope is by the end of the year. We have a really, really awesome curriculum that spans the whole podcast lifestyle that has very short, very actionable pieces of advice for each different thing. And so we're hoping, like, the actual. The recorded courses end up being really, really special by the end of the year. Obviously not today. Right. Where's this beginning of a journey? And then we'll be rolling out, like, the event schedule, like a more regular, like Dave said, more events that we can do on a monthly basis. You'll have more access to Dave, more access to just getting information at, like, live events and webinars. We want to add a lot to it. We're not going to change the pricing, but we want to make the what you're paying for a lot more valuable if we can. And then obviously, more access to Dave.
- [35:46]
A
And I believe that answers the most common questions that we got. During the town hall, I did have somebody ask, are you going to retire? Are you not going to teach podcasting anymore? And I want to play a clip from a documentary called the Messengers, a podcast documentary. And this is me. And this is how they closed the movie. My grandma lived to be 95. She was born in 1899. And the one day she said that and I was on the account, she goes, well, honey, I was born in 1899. I'm like, Whoa, grandma, you're older than dirt. And in her age, she saw things go from horse and buggy to the space shuttle. So I want to be that guy that looks back and when we're consuming podcasts in our head through the chip or whatever is going on at the time and go, yeah, I remember when there was no itunes and when there was no Google and kind of be able to hopefully help people eliminate some of the headaches and things like that. I'll still be doing that. My wife asked me, when are you going to stop podcasting? I said, the day you bury me. And I'll have a link to everything out@schoolofpodcasting.com 1028. So if you want to preview what your site would look like on PodPage, I'll have a link to that. I'll have a link to join the school of podcasting. And thanks to everyone who sent out the well wishes. I deeply appreciate it. We do have some work to do to kind of clean up some old stuff as we make room for the new stuff. So for all of you that are like, I'm going to suggest me as an expert, that's fine. But that may not be coming for a bit. But we'll see. There's a lot of it that we're like, well, let's try this and let's try that. So I'm excited that, like I said, I started after filing bankruptcy and divorce in 2004, lived in my brother's basement in 2005 to now be doing the School of Podcasting and of course, podpage as my day job. I couldn't be happier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [37:39]
B
Ooh, now that's a good question. Question.
- [37:43]
A
Oh, we're going into the deep end of the pool. Where do you think podcasting is going? Or you might view it as what do you feel the future of podcasting is? Are you optimistic about the future or are you kind of going? And if so, why? In both cases, I would love to hear it. I need your answer by April 24, 2026. Simply go to schoolofpodcasting.com? and don't forget to tell us a little bit about your show and your website address. Again, I need that by April 24, 2026. Want more podcasting tips? Join the 1700 people who read my newsletter. And at podcastingobservations.com that's podcastingobservations.com. We started off talking about relationships and I just thought I would throw this in here. My favorite tool, It's a whopping $15 a month, which is cheap for this kind of product, is a CRM. Now that stands for, you know, Customer Relation Manager. But and a lot of these really get into sales funnels and things like this. And this has that feature. But I really like it as a way to a set reminders to reach out and, you know, just touch base with someone as well as I can put notes in there. It's really cool. It's really. That's what I use it for is hey, I, you know, need to follow up with someone about such and such or whatever. And this is the actual name of the tool, Less Annoying CRM. I'll put a link to it because there is an affiliate program. But I'm here to tell you I use this one because I love it. I've used it for years. It works with Zapier. So if you wanted to, like in my case, when somebody signs up, it automatically adds them to my Less Annoying CRM. So it's a great tool and it's a great way to keep up with your relationships. I'm here to tell you, yes, it's great to have technology and great content and that all is definitely still part of the deal. But relationships that I planted came back and bloomed years later. So thank you so much for listening. If you want to join the school of podcasting, go out to schoolofpodcasting.com start. You'll see the options there. You might have to click change to see the different options if you're looking for the free version, but you might as well just start with the paid because there is a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're worried about that, you don't have to be worried. I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters. It's what I do. Been doing it for over 20 years and until next week, take care. God bless. Class is dismissed. If you like the show, please share it with a friend.
- [40:48]
B
If you like the.
- [40:55]
A
And then one day over these, over those.