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The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
E615 - Podcasters, How To Use Spotify Clips To Promote Your Podcast Episode - Length, Size, Audio Rules for Podcasters
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Okay, we're rolling. Hey, welcome back to the how to Podcast series. Dave, with you, I'm gonna unveil something to you that you might not be doing for your podcast. And it's specific to one platform. I get it. You don't have to be hosted there to do what I'm gonna be talking about today. But I think you're missing an opportunity to. To play in traffic. Now, playing in traffic is probably not a great idea, not a great metaphor. Example Dave there. But I think if you want to get your podcast to grow and you haven't tried this, then maybe you should. So we're going to walk through how you can create little short Spotify clips for each episode of your show. Again, you don't have to be on Spotify as a hosting site to do this. Claim your show on Spotify. You do need to see what's going on on Spotify, even when you're hosted somewhere else. Claim your show or be hosted on Spotify, whatever you choose. But you should have clips for each of your episodes. I'm playing with it right now. So if you go to the how to Podcast series on Spotify, if you're a listener on Spotify, where I am, that's episode. Let's see here. Episode 572, 571, 570, 568. Right now at the time of recording, have clips and you can see them. And when you. When you click on the episode to listen to one of my episodes of the how to Podcast series on Spotify, in the top left corner, you'll see this little window and there's a video kind of playing there. That's it. That's the clip I'm talking about. I'm creating them in Canva. I'm recording my audio track with a music bed in Audacity, uploading that track to Canva. Using stock video footage from Canva, I'm creating these clips. They're like a minute long, and there's a bonus that we'll talk about at the end, but what you can also do with these clips. So it's working. And I'm encouraging you to do more than just post your podcast. Let it go live on Spotify again, whether you host there or not, letting it go live and just walking away. There's one more step, and it's not a rule. It's a guideline. It's a suggestion. But if you want to grow your show specifically on Spotify, then I'm encouraging you to listen to the end of this episode and Then go check out what I'm doing on Spotify and click on any of those episodes in the top five 70s around there and you'll see exactly what I'm doing. And I'm starting to go back and do this for my other episodes and my other podcast. So this is just a suggestion and if you want it, you're like, Dave, I need to see this in real life, then great. You and I can get together on Zoom Screen Share. I'll walk you through step by step by step and help you to do this yourself. Glad you're here. It's time for Spotify clips. It's time to see if this will help your show grow. And I'm glad you're here. So let's go through some of the information from Spotify about what it takes to do a Spotify clip and their guidance, their suggestions on how to do this properly. I'll have all this information in the show notes. As always, you know we do things and I would love for you to go check it out. This is going to be kind of a teaching episode and I know this is an audio podcast and you are listening to me talk about a lot of visual things, but again we can always do a zoom call screen share, share a coffee virtually and, and go through this together and happy to do that. Anytime on my website is my calendar. Just throw in the comment section when you, you set up a time with me that you want to talk about this and I'll be ready to go. Ready to help you to go through this. Always there. How to podcast. Ca. Happy to talk. So what are Spotify clips again if you're not a Spotify user as a listener and a viewer now, because there's a lot of video stuff going on in Spotify, they have music videos. Did you know that? Yeah, MTV's dead. Spotify has music videos. Interesting, right? So Spotify is really pushing into video in video podcast, in music videos and on and on and on. And Spotify clips is a video component even for your audio only podcast where podcasters can create short little video snippets from episodes to boost discovery on Spotify. This is only going to help you on Spotify. It's not going to help you help you on Apple. But they appear in the Spotify app on users home feeds, search and personalized recommendations driving more plays to full episodes. So we're always trying to get people to come to our episodes, come to our podcast and when I hear people push back on me right here and go, yeah, but I don't like Spotify or I'm not on Spotify, I'm not hosted on Spotify. These are all excuses. Okay? If you want to grow your show, Spotify is a. Is a very popular app. Whether you like it or not, Spotify is a popular app. People are there. So if you really want to grow your show, putting up a wall saying, I will not be on Spotify, you're just limiting your audience. So if you're not a Spotify person, you never will be a Spotify person. As a creator, you don't support Spotify. This is probably not the episode for you. Happy to have you leave. Thank you for being here. I love you guys listening to the show. But for people who want to grow their show and they're not too worried about what Spotify does, then I think using clips might be a great idea to promote your show. So some key requirements to consider at the time of recording, this could change. But at this point, when I'm recording this episode, here's what they're giving us for some basic parameters about these video clips, these Spotify clips that we have within every single episode, you can have your own clip unique to that episode. Your clips attach to a specific episode and it must meet strict specs to publish successfully. So I've already practiced, I've already tried this and I played with a little bit and this is what I've come up with. The length, 15 to 90 seconds. But it has to be a minimum of 15 seconds. Nothing less than 15, nothing more than 90. That's what qualifies as a clip within Spotify. For the episode dimensions and ratio, the minimum dimensions are 768 by 10 by 1024 and that's your pixels. It has to be vertical 9 by 16 format. All these things make sense in Canva. So just so you know. And again, if you have questions, we can do this together. Is recommended for mobile feeds. So think of your phone as you hold your phone up the regular way you would talk on the phone, if you still talk on phones. That's what it wants to be. Not horizontal, but vertical. Right. So that's kind of the picture of how the dimensions look. The video format file format has to be an MP4 or an MOV file. That's how you do this. The mint. The file size maximum is 1 gigabyte. No problem. For that you're making a short video. The audio must include an audio track. It can't be an like just a video with no audio. No silent clips are allowed. And it has to be encoded at 128 kilobytes for quality and stereo is preferred. That's their settings. Okay, again, if you're like, I have no idea what you just said. HowToPodcast CA Calendar links right there. Let's go. And then content rules. It must follow Spotify's clip content policy. No violations like spam, hate speech or misleading info or the clips will get removed. So there you go. Keep it to the standards. How do you create and upload these clips? So again, like I mentioned at the beginning, I'm recording an audio track. Me talking to the audience about that specific episode. I'm keeping it to 55 seconds in length. That's my. That's kind of what I've set in my Audacity. I have a music bed which is really quiet behind my voice. And I set that track to be 55, 58 seconds long. So I. I can see when I'm recording, when I'm getting to the end. It's a visual cue for me as I record the little audio track. Here's where I need to end. And I end on the beat. That's what I do. Again, happy to show you exactly what I'm doing on Audacity with a screen share zoom meeting, you and I, anytime you want. Happy, happy, happy to do that. So that's what I'm doing. Recording the audio track with a music bed. I'm just talking about the episode. Hey, in episode 615, we talked about making Spotify clips and why you should use them in your. In your podcast. We walk through and break down the reasons why and all the mechanics behind it. If you're interested, please press play and check out this episode. Thanks for being here. Let's go. And I do something like that. Basically just a short off the cuff commentary about the episode. Specific to the episode. That's one thing to keep in mind. So I'm creating it in Audacity, the audio track. I then export it as an MP3, upload it to K Canva as an audio track. I then create a template, which I'm happy to share my template with you if that helps you. And it basically looks like a phone. And I just bring in video footage, stock video footage from Canva that goes with the topic. So whatever that is, Stats, analytics, talking on the mic, whatever I grab, I go and just do a search, find a video that matches with what I'm saying. So it's not really me, it could be me, but I'm just using video footage from Canva. I drop the audio track into Canva and then I make sure it all lines up, export it, upload it to Spotify and I'm done. And again you're like, wait a minute, what? Howtopodcast CI Just go there. It's way easier to do this together than to try to explain it visually. So there you go. That's kind of what I'm doing. I would encourage you when you do this in Canva, I can do this as well. I can add in my logo for my podcast. I can put in my website address, episode number, the title of the episode overlaid over top of the video. So that's what I'm doing. I would encourage you to do that too. Don't just put up something without any branding on it. And when you upload the video clip to the episode, you then have a little short, little window where you can put a little bit of text which will show up on the screen as well. Leave it. You don't have to put that in, but I would suggest you do that and play with that. Put out a little short description about what this clip is about and then the limits, unlimited clips per episode. But focus on one to three high impact hooks, some quotes, something from the episode Spotify promotes via the algorithm based on engagement. So this is a tool that Spotify has created. This is a tool that Spotify is encouraging us to use. And if you use a tool that the platform creates and wants you to use, doesn't it make sense that they would promote people who use the tool? That makes sense. Some best practices to consider vertical. First, remember, it doesn't look like your phone captions are essential. Make sure you have something on there where there's some words on the screen. Hook it fast. Quality check. Make sure that you're doing exactly what what they want. It's not too loud. Make sure that you level off your audio. Don't blow people's heads earbuds out of their head. And it's a promotional boost for your show. Definitely worth looking at. So again, this is for every single episode of your show, whether you're hosted on Spotify or not. Claim your show on Spotify. Go in here to the episode level. You'll see a spot where it says upload clip. And that's it. You go right into it. Again, happy to help you through the screen share. We can walk through this together. What is the bonus to this? That same clip that you've built for Canva in Canva for Spotify. That same clip, you can then take that clip and Put it on Tick Tock, you can put it on Instagram, you can put it on YouTube. As a short. I put here's a T here. I'm just going to pull up my phone while we're chatting here. I posted one of my clips on Spotify and then I put it over on how to podcast on YouTube, my YouTube channel. Again, I don't do a ton of clips. I do more full episodes on on there. One clip has been up there for 35 minutes. One of the ones I created for for Spotify. It already has 142 views. One of them has seven views, one has 40. So just by putting them on there on YouTube, I'm taking my hard work that I'm doing for Spotify and I'm creating something for YouTube at the same time. So that work is being spread out into multiple places because not everybody's on every, on every platform. They're not going to always see it where you post it. So be everywhere. So again, the same clip goes on to TikTok, same clip goes on to Instagram, and that same clip goes on to YouTube in addition to Spotify. Four places. Bam. One clip. 55 seconds. It just brings people to the episode and makes people want to click, play and give them a little taste of what it is. Think of these as little mini trailers specific to the episode, not your podcast as a whole. A trailer for your podcast lives at the top of the feed on the player app and it lives there all the time telling people about your show, of which I just upload. I just updated my trailer for this show. If you haven't listened to it in a while, go back. It's new. You can change that anytime. By the way, that trailer episode. Yeah. Think of these clips on Spotify as little mini trailers for that episode to get somebody to go, will I like this? Will this be interesting? Make sure when you record that little clip of you talking or pulling a clip from the episode, if you're going to use some of those other tools that do this for you, stay within the confines of the time and put these into each of your episodes. And then take the same work you've done for Spotify, repurpose it elsewhere. Spotify clips, a great idea for podcasters. You want to grow. You want more people to come to your show. The app has created the tool. When they create the tool, they want people to use the tool. Otherwise they wouldn't have created the tool in the first place. They will reward you somehow some way for using their tool because you're using something they built natively. You're using the app the way the app was intended to be used. So I all I can say because I don't work at Spotify, is that when you use a tool that people that the app creates and you use it the way they intended it to be used, I can see them somehow promoting your content. How they do that, when they'll do that, I can't answer that question. But logically, it makes sense that a tool created by the app, used by its creators on the app, should get the attention of the app. So there you go. If you have any questions, howtopodcast ca and again, go to those episodes, 570, 569, 568 around there and you'll see exactly on Spotify. You'll only see it on Spotify. You'll see what I'm doing with my videos. And if you want to, you can go over YouTube. If you're not a Spotify person, Go look at my shorts. Go over to that sounds funny. Look at my shorts. Go look at my shorts on YouTube and also you can see it on TikTok and Instagram. Love for you to come, follow the show, be a part of our community. Thanks for pressing play. Appreciate you. Spotify shorts, have you started? And as Bart Simpson would say, eat my shorts. Well, create your shorts first. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for listening to the entirety of the episode, including this part. You know what? A lot of people leave right now, 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. We'd love to have you there because 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 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. You're still here. Great. Okay. Question came in. Dave, what do you do with negative comments, like on YouTube or wherever when you post an episode? I'm nervous about people saying bad things about my content, about me or my guest. What do I do? So I had an episode of Living the Next Chapter. One of my guests came on, talked about his journey through alcoholism and mental health, and he had a pretty dark past. And that episode did great. When it was released, we got a great, great response from the audience. And then over time, because it happened years ago, it just kind of got quiet. So what I do is I just go in and change the date of the episode, bring it up to the most recent episodes, always the day before, not today or tomorrow, but yesterday's date, just bringing it up, just, just alter the date. And I do that for a period of time and then I push it back down to where it came from. And by doing that, I was able to take this episode with this great content about mental health and alcoholism, bring it up to the top. And it went from 200 listens to 2000 listens over a period of time simply by playing with the date. But I got feedback from listeners saying that my guest, their name is also the name of somebody else in the UK who's pretty popular or well known. And people thought it was an episode about that person, not the person that I had on my show. And they were mocking me. They were mocking my guest, and they were kind of complaining that it was kind of like a bait and switch. They thought they were getting this other more famous person than the guests that I had on my show, but they both had the same name. It's my guest, real name. They weren't stealing the other person's name, they weren't trying to steal their identity. And there was nothing behind our episode that was meant to trick anybody. That's the name of the guest. They're not going to change their name. And they wrote a book and they did the thing. So people were complaining that we were trying to fool them, but we're not. My name's Dave Campbell. I've had that name since I was born. I'm not gonna go change my name because there's a Dave Campbell singer somewhere or another Dave Campbell podcaster. I'm Dave Campbell. That's my name. I'm not. I have a driver's license that says Dave Campbell. That's who I am. So this guest, we had some really nasty comments about people thinking that we were, we were doing this on purpose. So I just went through and deleted these things. I had somebody say to me, why do you have music at the beginning of your podcast? You're no NPR podcast. I'm like, thankfully I'm not an NPR podcast. No, no, I have music at the beginning of my show because I've always had music at the beginning of my show. Just a tiny bit. But they were complaining that I was trying to be like npr. Some people are just strange. Some people just have no concept that their words out loud sound pretty dumb. So I just deleted it Again. You might get some interesting comments from people. Go into every episode with a good heart, good intent. You're not, you're not trying to fool anybody. You're not telling people you're going to talk about A and then you talk about B and people get upset because you trick them. Don't do that. Just be a real, honest, human, genuine person. Do your best with what you have, where you are, where you all of that stuff. And don't worry about people who don't get you because they're not your audience and you don't need to worry about them. Just move on. It might hurt when you read some of these comments. A lot of these people, again, are ill informed or not very smart at times with their comments. And some people don't realize that there's an actual human being on this side of the mic and they think that the computer screen is a protection between them and you. They wouldn't say these things to you in real life, to your face. They probably would just walk away. The biggest thing to keep in mind, if somebody doesn't like your content, most likely they're just going to quietly exit, unfollow your show, just move on. And those types of feedback and analytics you're probably not going to see easily. So don't worry about it. Create great content. Build an audience. Put your best into every episode. Try your best. Do what you can with what you have, where you are and leave the haters out. Don't worry about them, they'll just go away. Thanks for listening.