Is Audio on YouTube Worth It? Here’s My Take

Drownh2o asks, Should I put my audio podcast on YouTube?

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So should you put your audio podcast on YouTube and say it with me?

It's the beginning of every podcast answer.

And that is, of course, it depends.

So the first thing is, what are you currently doing on YouTube?

And if your answer is nothing, I don't have anything on YouTube, then your answer is, yeah, you probably should now.

Why?

Well, number one, it's free.

Number two, takes about, I don't know, five minutes.

All you need is your RSS feed.

And then the third one is the almighty YouTube algorithm.

And what that means is they have a thing, it's a recommendation engine.

And the beauty of it is if you get noticed by it, it can make you more popular on YouTube than you are now.

The bad news about it is that thing can take you and lift you up and then smash you to pieces.

You know, YouTube giveth and YouTube taketh away.

But it's better than nothing.

And what I hear a lot is, oh, I have an audio podcast.

I'm going to start this YouTube channel with an audio podcast to grow the audio podcast to which I then go, what are you going to do then?

To grow the YouTube channel, which is supposed to grow your audio channel.

And it's again, better than nothing.

YouTube is the second largest search engine and in the number one search engine, you know, Google, a lot of those results are from YouTube.

So it is a way to be found.

That's the good news.

The somewhat not so great news is when you go into YouTube stats and YouTube stats are amazing because they can show you exactly where people came from, how many people are subscribed, how many people are following you.

And the best one is how far are people listening.

And that particular YouTube stat is soul crushing.

It really is.

It's.

Why?

Why is that, Dave?

Because people go to YouTube to watch things.

And depending on the audience, most people, when they click on a video and they get your static image, are going to go, oh, this isn't what I thought it was.

And they will leave.

Now there are people that will just go, oh, never mind, and just put your phone or their phone in their pocket and just listen to your show.

But that is not the majority.

But you just got somebody to listen to your podcast who wasn't before.

So you are growing your audience in a way that didn't cost you any money.

It cost you about five minutes.

And your chances of being found are now better than they were before.

Now, if you have an actual YouTube channel with actual videos, should you do this?

Not on your current channel.

Don't mix videos with what we will just call static videos.

Some people call them fake videos, but that sounds kind of judgmental, don't you think?

But I would start a second channel so that when somebody goes, oh, I love this channel, and they click on the next thing and they're like, oh, that last one was video.

This one's just static.

Keep them separate and that way you can really see the stats on this channel that is just static and get the idea of how well is this working.

And again, you just set it up once.

That's it.

So if you're not doing anything on YouTube, take the 5, 10 minutes and take your RSS feed added into YouTube and then you can go in if you want to and make a playlist based on that RSS feed and check the box that says it's a podcast.

And in the land of YouTube, that's all you have to do is check a box.

Now, in this thing I call, I don't know, reality, that's not a podcast.

You're a YouTuber.

There's a lot of arguments about this and let's not waste our time on that.

But technically that's not a podcast, it's a YouTube podcast.

We talked about that before.

But if you're not doing anything and you got five minutes, it's not gonna hurt you.

I would definitely do that.

Now, if you need help setting any of this up, or if you go, dave, I haven't even started my podcast, then go over to schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code Listener.

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I'm Dave Jackson, I help podcasters and I can't wait to see what we do together.