← The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
E606 - Stop Trying to be the Best Podcast - Be Someone's Favourite Podcast
00:30:40
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Okay, we're rolling. Welcome back to the how to Podcast series. It's Dave with you. Hope you're doing well. We're gonna talk about how you can make your podcast somebody's favorite podcast. And you're looking at the title. You're like, Dave, you spelled favorite wrong. No, outside of the U.S. that's how we spell favorite. So there is a U in there. It's on purpose. Just so you know, we're gonna put the U in favorite today. How to stop trying to be the best podcast and instead be somebody's favorite podcast here on the how to Podcast series. I'm glad you're here. Here we go. So a quick shout out to Derek, who is part of our podcaster meetup over@meetup.com for the how to Podcast series. We get together and talk podcasting. Derek is probably out on a walk right now listening to this. So, Derek, hi. Walk safe. Look both ways before you cross the street. And thank you for pressing play. Derek. Glad to be with you on your walk. I spend some great time talking to podcasters, and one of the things that I'm finding, though, is in the plethora here, I'm coming over the words to plethora of podcasts about podcasting. There are podcasts that actually focus in on being the most popular podcast. Be a top 100 podcast and be this and be that and blah, blah, blah. And I just, I wonder, I wonder who the target audience is for these shows. Because you can have a small podcast with a very tiny audience about a super narrow topic, and you'll never be a top 100 podcast ever. Like, never. It's not even going to be in the cards. You might have an audience of 20 people tops, who are interested in your topic, but are they. They're super interested in your topic. Like, you are the voice of that community, even if it's small. And you'll never be one of those big, fancy top 100, top 1% podcast globally. I don't like that stat, by the way. And people just hyper fixate on being the top podcast in their field. Now, is it, is it a good thing to be wanting your show to be popular? Well, of course, the more people who listen to your show, the better. Right? That's kind of why we're doing this. We wouldn't record an episode and not want anyone to listen. So. But this whole fixating of it, you're going to be the best. Be the top, be the best. Be this. I'm like, really? That's a small portion of the podcast community that is hyper fixated on the top spots. Those top spots generally in general terms belong to famous people with a big team and a ton of money behind them, a big budget. And they were famous elsewhere before they came to podcasting. You and me, no, no, this show right here, the how to podcast series. I'm not on any podcasts about podcasting lists which is fun. A bunch of other dead shows are and a bunch of other inner circle. I'm finding there's an inner circle of podcasting. Little side note here that people who like each other stick together and it's kind of like a click where people, they don't let people in and they could be threatened by some newbie showing up talking about what they talk about. I'm not any on any of those top 10 lists for top 10 podcasts about podcasting. Isn't that funny? 606 episodes plus 365 episodes this year in a row. A meetup group, a community around podcasting. And no, I'm not on any list. I'm not a top 100 podcast nor is that any of my focus because I really don't care about being a top 100 podcast. That's not my goal. My goal is you. I just want to connect with you and help you with your show. That's how I know I'm a success and I'm not obsessing over this top podcast ranking stuff. I find that exhausting and you're going to have to maintain that ranking if you want to stay there. So no, I think we should aim to become a podcasters go to favorite that they rave about and talk to others about in in their real life. In a sea of like 3 million podcast feeds, broad appeal fizzles. But niche again to my US fronts, niche loyalty from 100 super fans turns into real true organic growth for your podcast. It helps with referrals, it helps with guest swaps and it helps to outpace those chart chop topping podcasts and the people chasing the top charts. You simply doing your thing and showing up can outwork those big shows. Keep in mind those big shows that you're competing with, that host, they don't edit their own show, that host, they don't find their own guests. That that show, that's just a voice talent. As the host of the podcast, they have a team that makes them look good. You make yourself look good as an independent podcaster. So keep that in mind. You're doing every job that that team has. You're doing it all and that podcast host, they're just doing their part. They're not doing the whole thing where you do it all. Keep that in mind. Podcasters know the grind, the endless episodes, the algorithm whims, and the listener drop off after one. At one try. We draw from years of creation and creating great content. The real edge comes from strategies that make your show instantly magnetic to and help overwhelmed hosts seeking that next aha episode. I think one of the things that makes our podcast unique is when we forge our own signature podcast voice, our signature. You know that thing you sign, we used to do on checks or at the bank or at the lawyer's office, on your permission slips for your kids to take the day off school or go to that event. You sign. You sign report cards, you sign things, right? Your signature, that's you. That's a representation of you on a document. What's the signature of your podcast? What's the representation of you in your podcast? How do your. How do you identify and how do people equate you with your show? Your mic time is your brand. You showing up on the microphone and doing your podcast, that's you. That's who you are. That's what people think of you. That's how they think of you. We need to infuse every intro, every segue between this segment and that segment, every outro, every piece of content with unmissable personality. We need to think in a conversational tone, with warmth and with your own unique spin. We need to come up with a way to make our values shine through, and that could be through our consistency, where we share failures like that episode that I totally messed up on and that interview that failed and what I learned from it. By building trust over time, we share our story, and listeners spot the fakes so easily. When I listen to podcasts about podcasting, I can tell you who's just recycling old content and who's being creative and new. It's one thing to be in podcasting forever, but you haven't grown. You still tell the exact same story. When you go on this podcast and that podcast, it's like you just repeat the same talking points. You have only one gear, and you just keep recycling the old stuff. You just keep playing the hits, and after a while, it's like, does this person learn anything new? It's very interesting to listen and to go, I wonder. I wonder what this person has learned recently. It's that whole, what have you done for me lately? But what have you learned for me lately as a listener? That's What I'm one of questioning. Forging that signature podcast voice comes over time. So if you're starting your show, you're brand new to this, give yourself some grace. It's going to take a little while for you to figure out your own unique podcasting voice. If you listen to some early shows, early episodes of your favorite podcast, go back to the beginning if you can, if it's still available, and listen to the podcaster trying to find their voice over time, they will. So don't Compare your episode one to somebody's episode 606. That's not a fair comparison. Compare your episode one to my episode one. That's a little bit of a more fair comparison. But even that is not completely fair for you, for me, because again, we all approach podcasting from different backgrounds, different skill sets, different experiences, and it takes a while. But to forge that signature podcast voice comes from time on the mic time, creating content time working through feedback and simply but in the chair, making this thing happen. If you don't pour yourself into your show, it's going to take longer to get your podcasting voice figured out. So the longer you can podcast and the more frequently you can do it, the quicker you're going to see results. So go ahead, start forging that signature podcast voice. We can also do some stuff that will help us to dominate the podcast discovery platforms. This will really help us as well to be somebody's favorite podcast. They got to know about you. You can't just quietly build in the background and hope that the world finds you. I remember my kids were young and they were looking for jobs. I would tell them, you got to go out and talk to people. You can't sit here in the house and expect somebody to ring the doorbell or knock on the door and say, we want to hire you. They don't know who you are and they don't know what you have to offer. When you're sitting in the basement playing Minecraft, you got to go out and meet people and you got to talk to people. People need to find out who you are. And that's basically what social media is. Now, I am not a huge social media guy. I actually have one podcast that I do that has zero social media at all. Nothing. Not nothing. It doesn't have any social media, and yet it still works. So I'm not a huge proponent that you have to be all in on social media. It's a good idea to have some way for your audience to connect with you. So I have social media, but I also have My meetup group. I get more engagement through my meetup group with real humans, having real conversations and building community there than I ever get on Instagram stories. So do I want a bunch of passive views on social media or active engagement through a community like my meetup? And I prefer that for me, but you can leverage things like activities X, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram. YouTube is a social platform basically. Now it's wherever you think your listeners are and where they gather and be there. Notice I didn't say Facebook because for me, I've totally deleted all my Facebook contacts instead and just kept my family really and super close friends. Other than that, no send me a Facebook request. I'm probably not even going to see it because I'm never there. Mostly my family sharing photos of kids and holidays and stuff. That's all I use that for. We need to do something though, to help us to find our audience and to engage relentlessly. We need to be there and, and be helpful and be a source of community support. Whatever your, whatever your podcast is about, if you have a dad podcast like I have dad Space, then being in dad communities makes sense, right? Being in a podcast community about podcasting, I'm talking to other people who have podcasts. It's not really dads. So finding the community that makes sense for your podcast is more important than just being a part of any generic podcasting community. Unless it's the meetup, you actually get podcast support from real people who care about you. So keep that in mind. But we need to find some place to be where we can then connect with others. Being somebody's favorite podcast also comes from leveraging other people's audiences through promo swaps. Where you promote somebody else's podcast, they promote your show, or having collaborations with other podcasters where you go on their podcast, for example, they come on yours, you shout out each other's show, you drop their episode in your feed and your episode in their feed.
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There's a lot of different things you
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can do to share audiences. This works well if you have a shared audience and both you and the other podcaster are not super paranoid that we're going to lose our audience to your show. If I highlight you on my show, I don't have that feeling for this podcast. You'll hear me bring on a lot of podcasts about podcasting as hosts coming on as guest co hosts on the show. I'm not super nervous. If you love them more than this show, then have at it. Go to them wherever you feel most comfortable. But if you're not super paranoid about losing your audience, then collaborating with somebody in your space who has a show like yours might be a great opportunity. So that's another way you the best way to find other listeners for your show is to be where listeners are. They're not on Instagram, they're not on Facebook, they're not on X. They those platforms are different. They're not a podcast first platform. So define podcast first listeners and viewers be where the listeners already are. They're listening to other shows and connect with those shows. So you can use things like podmatch and a bunch of other places where you can connect with other podcasters as guests, hosts, collaborators. It's a great thing to do. You can repurpose your episode clips on social if that works for you. Finding that YouTube is more of an engagement play than Instagram for this show and that just comes from over time and figuring out what works. Drive traffic back to your podcast in whatever you do so that people know that there's longer form content that's valuable. And even if people only follow your shorts or your posts on social, give them value anyway, don't just do new episode this Tuesday. There's nothing of value in that. Give them something from the episode that makes them curious and is still a fully fleshed out idea that has value in a short form version, that's fine, that's still content. It's not a typical podcast, but it's still content of value. And if you keep serving value over time, you're going to win them over. You might convert somebody from a social media person, an engagement to a podcast engagement and that's a different, that's a big change to get to have somebody go from a 60 second clip of you to a 45 minute interaction with you. That's going to take time. So don't just post your posts and hope for the best. Build your audience, build your community. Get to the point where people are saying, oh my gosh, you gotta listen to this podcast. Work on that and lock in your consistency. But don't let yourself get burnt out. It might seem ironic for me to say don't burn yourself out by being consistent. Where I'm doing 365 episodes this year, every day, every day, all year, a new episode. So it's like Dave, oh my gosh, I'm batching. I've recorded seven episodes today. It's just a day of recording. And I have this in my calendar. I've got a few more of these coming up. Where it's just gonna blow through. Record, record, record, record. Because I. I am building up my inventory of finished episodes to give me the opportunity to focus on other things as well, while still creating this great content, while still putting out and having connection points with you. That's the one I'm doing. So lock in your consistency, but don't burn yourself out. Weekly drops, signal reliability, a regular cadence, a regular, predictable schedule for your episodes. Doesn't matter what time of day, doesn't matter what day of the week. That's all just noise. You pick the date and time that works for you and your schedule and your audience will adjust. Because it's appointment listening. Unless you're going live, it's appointment listening. People will listen when they want to, not when you release your episode. So don't get all hung up on that, because people in Facebook groups are very distracting and they're going to give you a lot of bad advice. Just post when it works for you, and everyone else will adjust their life around you. But if you show up on a regular basis, you'll become somebody's favorite, and that's your responsibility. Definitely make your podcast predictable. Predictable in how it's released and when. And maybe you can theme up your months, for example, as well. This is great because you could do, like a little again. That's why I have the word series and how to podcast series. It gives me the opportunity to focus on a series of episodes around a given topic and then go back to just regular episodes that have really no connection with the next episode. It gives me a lot of opportunity to think about how you can group your episodes together and do like a little miniseries. It could be really helpful for you. And I think the other big thing about being. Being somebody's favorite podcast is people love to connect with people who are raw, real, and invite feedback. People love to know kind of how the podcast is made. They love to feel like they're part of the inner circle of your show. So being vulnerable is a great thing. It might feel weird, but being vulnerable actually helps you win in podcasting when you admit, for example, that this week's guests completely ghosted me. So here's my backup plan for today's episode. Let's go down this path. It helps people to go, wow, this is a real person. And crap happens to them, too, just like me. And it makes people lean in and go, hmm, okay, yeah, so I can identify with this person. Think about how you build your show. And don't hide the wrinkles, don't hide the Things that make you look unprofessional. And don't worry about that top 100 slot. Worry about the people who listen to your show. Worry about great content, worry about improving. That's what you should worry about. Because all those things make you better. Think of this. When a player doesn't perform to the standards of the team in a game or whatever, what does the coach do? Think of football, think of basketball. What does the coach do to the player who doesn't meet expectations? Makes them run laps, which might seem like a punishment. But what's happening when that player goes to run those laps or do push ups or whatever, what are they doing? They're improving. They're building up their stamina. They're building up their. Their muscles, their strength. They're building up their. Their ability. That punishment, it might seem like punishment, but that punishment is designed to make them better. Right? A football coach is not going to punish the player by asking them to go out and eat ice cream. That's not a. That'd be a great punishment. The coach is asking them to go do something like run laps, drop, and do push ups. These are things that are designed to make you stronger. So when we talk about how we get stronger, it comes back to our work ethic. It goes back to what we put into our show, what we put into our content creation and how we show up. All of these things work together to make our show better. So think about how can you make your show better? How can you be somebody's favorite podcast? Not the best, not the top 100, none of that stuff, but somebody's favorite show. Because if you're my favorite, I'm going to tell people. I'm going to tell people because I can't not tell them. I just love your show so much. I'm going to tell everybody that I talk to. And if you can multiply your listeners into favorites, there's the secret sauce for growth for your show because they're talking about you and you're not even there. Turn your audience into favorite listeners instead of chasing after some random chart of being the best of whatever, because anybody can knock you off that chart. But a favorite listener is hard to lose, so focus on them. Need any help? Reach out. Love to help you. Thanks for listening. Catch you tomorrow. Thank you so much for listening to
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the entirety of the episode, including this part. You know what?
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A lot of people leave right now,
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so we'll let them leave. Give them a second to go. Okay, now it's just you and me. We have our Meetups that we do for the how to Podcast series. We do them during the week and we also do them on Saturdays. So twice a week you have the opportunity to meet other podcasters just like you. Some people have just started. Some people haven't even released an episode yet. Some have been doing it forever. And we get together and talk podcasting. We want to help you in community to continue with your show, to start your show, to grow your show. So come and meet listeners of this show in one space on meetup.com again through howtopodcast ca. You'll see the links. It's completely free to join. Come whenever you have an opportunity to come. There's no commitment. You don't have to sign any waivers. You can just come join us. Come join the conversation.
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We'd love to have you there because
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the only thing that's going to make these meetups better is you being there. So I'm hoping you will say yes and you'll say, dave, I'm tired of podcasting by myself. I wish there was people I could connect with that are fellow podcasters and share my frustrations with guests who ghost me. And my editing software is crapping out on me and I'm just having this hard time. I'm just having a hard time coming up with podcasts, episodes and titles and all the things. And social media. Wouldn't it be great to get in a room with other podcasters and share best practices and learn? Three of our four Saturdays every month are themed to have a topic, but that last Saturday of every month, it's open. Question and answer. Ask anything. Come meet a podcaster. Come enjoy the podcasting community throughout a podcast. Ca come to our meetups. Can't wait to see you there.
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You're still here. Awesome. Good. All right. This is bonus stuff at the end of the episode only for you because most people are gone. When is it time? The question came in, when is it time to think about outsourcing my editing and getting some podcast support? When do I know it's time to do that? Well, this could be right from the very beginning, when you first start episode one. Could be when you're further down the path. I love the idea of a podcaster editing their own content because you're gonna learn a lot more about your show and about you and you on the mic and some of your vocal things where you trip over yourself and how you can improve, outsourcing it right away and not knowing how to edit. I know a lot of people aren't techie but not knowing how to edit, I think makes it take longer for you to catch on to some of these things. But I get. If you don't know how to edit and you have no idea, then hiring somebody is a good thing. On top of this show and the other podcasts I host, I have the Podcast Editing and Support show at podcast editing and support.com and it's a podcast where I try to help podcasters find editors and help editors to find podcasters so we can support podcasters in their journey. And I would say when you can afford to invest in your show and when it gets to the point where, where you're taking time away from family or work or holidays, sleep, and you're investing it in your podcast and it's wearing you down, think about, put it into this context. If you make a hundred dollars an hour doing whatever you do, okay, whatever your job is, real estate agent, I don't know, but you make 100 bucks an hour. So every hour, you know, you make good cash. It's good. But let's say it takes you an hour to cut your lawn, which means you didn't make a hundred dollars that hour. And you're like, ah, if I could just give away cutting my grass, I could make a hundred dollars because I'm not spent wasting time. Air quotes. Wasting time cutting my grass. So I could pay my neighbor kid 20 bucks to cut my grass. So, yeah, it cost me $20. But in that same time frame where I would be cutting the grass, I go back to my job, back to what I do, and I make a hundred bucks. Twenty for them, 80 for me. That just makes sense. If you could spend more time with your clients, if you could spend more time promoting your book, if you could spend more time up on stage connecting with an audience, if you could spend more time coaching and not have to do the editing for your show, and you would make more by doing what you do instead of spending time behind a computer screen editing your podcast, doesn't that just make sense? Doesn't it just make sense that you could. Yeah, it's going to cost you something, but the difference is substantial. So I'm encouraging you to stop cutting your grass. I'm encouraging you to stop editing your show when you could be doing something else that's way more important. Way more important. It happens everywhere. So if you're at the point where you're saying no to income because you have the responsibility to edit your show and you're not enjoying it, it's not giving you value, you're not saving any money really by doing it, then maybe it's time to offload that to somebody. I'm always looking to help podcasters, so you can always reach out to me. Happy to help. But when it when it comes to the point where you you're losing business and you're losing money because of your show and the editing portion, it's time to offload that. And I'm happy to help. That would be my my quick answer to that question. That's when you know it's time to to offload that recording and editing time. Happy to help. Let me know if you need it. How to Podcast CA Talk soon.