2013: Top 13 Things that “Really” Build a Podcast Audience

0:02 Welcome to My Digital Life Show with Rob Greenley for June second, twenty thirteen. I'm Rob Greenley, and thank you for downloading or just clicking play to listen to this show from my website at Rob Greenley dot com from all over the world, and I welcome all of our listeners from every part of the globe listening to this show. I know it's a new show, so we're probably not reaching that many people around the world quite yet, but I'm definitely going to keep you in mind people listening outside of the United States. This is episode three. This is kind of a new project for me. It's spent a lot of time since I've had my own show. I've been doing podcasts for other people for a long time and on other people shows. This is my entry back into doing my own show. I used to do the show called web Talk Radio, and I ended production of that back in two thousand and six, so this is a newer adventure for me, even though I've been around podcasting for a long time. Like I said, I certainly appreciate you downloading this. It takes a lot of dedication and commitment to get access to a show like this, and like I said, I really appreciate it. In this show, I'm going to cover just a couple of topics. I try and keep the show relatively short, but the topics this week i'm going to cover are the top thirteen things that really build a podcast audience. The Electric Frontier Foundation has launched a legal defense fund to raise fifty

1:32 thousand plus dollars to fight a podcast patent troll out there that seems to be causing a lot of angst amongst the podcaster community. And I also wanted to mention too, I'm not going to cover just podcasting topics on this show forever. I'm going to try and vary it up a little bit, but my passion in my life does center around podcasting, so you're going to see a lot of that type of discussion on this program. I can be reached at Rob at Rob Greenley dot com and that's the last name is spell g r e E N L e E. I certainly want to hear from you and get your feedback on this program, and I can also be reached on Twitter at Rob Greenley. The show is now on iTunes and it's in the Windows Phone podcast area. I've added it to Stitcher and I'm going to get it on the in Tune platform. I'm working our way through it. And for those of you that don't know, I actually manage the podcasts for Windows Phone and Zoom at Microsoft so and been around podcasting since.

2:38 Actually I started doing a broadcast radio show back in nineteen ninety nine and took it out as a podcast in two thousand and four. So this is a little bit of a different format for me, being a solo show. I never really thought that I would do a solo show like this, So I'm definitely going to get other people involved in the show, do some conversations with others that can bring some expertise that I may not have, and some perspectives that will add some variability to this program to add more value to you. I also want to let you know I co host the New Media Show every Saturday mornings at nine am Pacific Standard time and noon Eastern Time with Todd Cochran, who is the CEO of Raw Voice, Blueberry power Press plug in for word Press, and you can catch that show live. It's actually live video streamed on YouTube. You stream and live stream, and this is the url to go watch that show every Saturday it's Live dot Geeknewcentral dot Com. I have a fun time doing that show. I just got done doing that show just this past Saturday. We had a great guest on from StreamingMedia dot Com, mister Dan Rayburn, who's executive vice president that manages all of the Streaming Media West and East trade shows. Dan and I go way back to the early days of streaming. I didn't mention this on the show today with him, but we did a show called the Streaming Media Show. So I did a very early streaming show with Dan and actually

4:10 hosted on my servers. You know, back in the early days of my own show, I had I had two data centers with co located servers that I streamed other people shows as well as my own show. Back then, I really felt like I had to do that because I had real servers as well as I had Windows Media servers. Because most of my listening my audience was listening to my show in two places on broadcast radio. I was on about fifteen radio stations and then also off of streaming from the Windows Media Player. I just I got most of my online listeners via streaming, which was really interesting. And it seems like we're kind of coming around back to that again, let's dive into the core topics that I wanted to cover on the show today, and most of what I'm going to do here, there's going to be probably at component to this off of my blog, and this one is certainly one of those.

5:05 In it was a pretty popular article that I wrote on the blog fairly recently. It wasn't something that I have just written here in the last few weeks or anything like that, but it has some really solid points that can help any podcaster that may be listening to the show. And I'm pretty sure that most of this audience for this program are probably podcasters and new media creators. What are the top thirteen things that really build a podcast audience? I made this list just from a really high level perspective just to kind of give some some really high level tips to podcasters or new media creators to help build an audience. And it's a very difficult thing right now, and I think that what we all have to do is kind of back up and going back to the fundamentals. You know, I played basketball for many years and one of the big things that I learned from playing a high level of competitive sports was that at the foundation of any outstanding player or competitor at any level, whether it's business or sports, is that you have to have your fundamentals down, your basics covered first.

6:10 And I think that is oftentimes lost in the aggressive pursuit of trying to build an audience for a podcast, is that you get kind of caught up in the hype of what the next shiny thing is, and oftentimes podcasters will neglect the boring fundamentals that need to be exercised on a regular basis to keep your foundation built to build your success. And I think that these thirteen things are pretty much time tested. I did most of these things on a consistent basis with my own radio show and have seen these things work with many other content providers over many years of doing this, and I've been managing podcast catalogs for my god now it's it's been probably over eight years now, so I've been able to build a career around podcasting. That's that's rather unique and rare out there, and I totally realize that and I really appreciate it. So let me run down the list of the thirteen things, And like I said, this can be found on my blog as well. Number one is great audio and video quality. And maybe this is just you know, this is the number one thing that's top of the list because it is something that we all need to strive for and get better at. And I know, even with this show, I did my last recording with a kind of like a handheld digital recorder.

7:40 I was not happy with the way that sounds, though it sounded very crisp and and but you know, you spend a couple hundred dollars on a portable handheld recorder and there's some trade offs for that, right, So I've gone back to using my more expensive recording system here that's in my my office, and that's the same pretty much the same system that I use to do all my guesting on other people's podcasts. And as you probably can tell, between the recording of episode two and the recording of episode three, you're probably noticing a pretty significant difference in the audio quality because I am using pretty expensive broadcast quality radio microphone right now. The sure, the SM seven B MIC. That's a fairly popular mic in podcasting.

8:30 But great audio and video quality is extremely important, I think to build and sustain an audience. And number two is that the content needs to be informative or comedy, or it's got to have some aspect that's fun. So it depends on what your genre is. It just needs to be compelling that oftentimes comes from a certain amount of passion, knowledge and personality. But what I really hope to do in this show is an example of that is offered great value as far as the topics, the value of the information that shared, just based on the years and years of experience that I have in this space and can help others to be successful too. And I'm also going to use this show as an example as well. And there's things that I certainly am working on to improve on and take this show and do all the things from this thirteen list as well, and oftentimes it takes time to do that. Number three is and from my perspective, running an aggregator network, compelling and interesting cover art or album art, depending on how you want to describe it is probably it belongs, probably even higher than number three, but it is so important because it is the first thing that your audience sees before they decide whether or not they want to subscribe or even just check out an episode. And then the other aspect of that too, is I've noticed over the years when I've refreshed the at it's not that you have

10:01 to dramatically change your cover arts. If you just do a refresh of it, maybe it's one thing to think about it is that it's a progression of improvement. And that's how I would look at your album art. I've seen shows that had questionable album art do okay, you know, and have medium success, but when they went to a next level of quality in their their cover art, I've seen a significant increase in their their audience and engagement and the perception of their program jumped up dramatically. And now, granted, cover art is a very subjective thing, so I would just recommend that you you plan for and be thinking about ways that you can improve your album art cover art on an ongoing basis, and then as you get those ideas just on a periodic basis, just do a refresh, you know, And it's it's worth the investment. It's also worth getting somebody that's that's really a professional graphic artist to actually do that. And I was going to get a link to some resources you as a podcaster can tap into to maybe take advantage of that. Number four is being very clear in the name and the series descriptions of your show. I would say that the cover art and your name and description of your show are the three most important things that you need to make sure are covered. The fifth one on the list is have your show made available on as many aggregator platforms as you can. And that's what I was alluding to earlier, is that I'm on this path of getting this show

11:32 out to all of the distribution platforms that are out there, and there's a lot of them out there that people just neglect to get into, and one of them is a network called tune In. I would say that getting your podcasts into tune in dot com should be a high priority because as you look into the future, especially if you're doing audio podcasting, getting your show into platforms that are heading towards the CAR, I think are very important, and so as you think about your online syndication strategy, those are things to consider. Right is where are the trends moving towards? And I would say that the trends are moving towards easier user experiences for consuming audio content that comes off of the Web and the Internet. In the CAR itself now granted, a lot of people, and most people are probably going to be listening to their audio content through their phones into their car stereo systems or their car Bluetooth kind of scenarios, but be thinking about the next generation distribution platforms, and Stitcher certainly lives in that world as well. There's other companies that are coming that haven't been announced yet that will also be living in that world as well. And who knows, we could see a service like Pandora or Spotify or any of these other music networks wind up adding audio podcasts to their collection of content. So us as content providers and podcasters need to really start thinking about those next generation platforms. You may even consider, depending on what your

13:02 show is going and approaching a radio station and taking your show on broadcast. It may make sense for some of you guys to consider doing that and looking at ways that you might be able to do that in your local market. So I would definitely consider that. Moving on the next one, number six, major parts of your show need to include audience engagement and contribution. And as you'll hear in this show a little bit later on in the program, I'm going to have I'm going to talk about people's comments. About my first couple of shows and actually play an audio clip. So get your audience engaged.

13:42 And I definitely want to reach out to people listening to this and feel free to reach out to me. I can be reached at Rob at Rob Greenley dot com, I can be reached in Twitter, I can be reached in a lot of different places. Feel free to contribute your thought. And like I said, I'm going to be getting guests on the show and would love to get it maybe like an MP three from you that can be played on this show. So if you wanted to ask a question and I can talk about that, I know a fair amount of shows do this. We'd love to create that conversation with you and to talk about these topics at a much deeper level because I think that other people listening to those questions could benefitment from those topics as well. So anyway, audience engagement in contribution can really help make this show more valuable to you.

14:31 So the next one here is meet your audience in the real world and do that as much as you can. There's a variety of ways you can do that, but going to conferences, going to different events, you can have meetups, you can have get your audience together. I mean, if you're on a trip somewhere, put it out there in your show that you're going to be in such and such city. Set up a time to go to a bar or a restaurant or somewhere like that, and invite people to come join you and meet you. It's just a great way to get a deeper engagement with your audience. And I know a lot of podcasters, at least the big celebrity podcasters, are doing that a lot by doing live shows, like they'll they'll go in and they'll get a venue in a city and they'll they'll actually record their podcast in front of a live audience. And that's a terrific way to meet your audience in the real world.

15:18 And you're seeing big name celebrity podcasters do this very successfully, and it's growing their show and their audience and their connection with their audience, and that's very powerful. And there actually a lot of them are making big money from that because they're selling tickets to actually get in. So the next one here is I'm guests on other people's podcasts and radio shows and TV shows. If you're a topic expert, get out there and put yourself out there, build relationships with journalists, become a resource to those journalists and those radio show hosts and those TV show hosts to help them create content, and thus you're reaching that audience that can maybe come over and consume your show as well. So I think those are very important things to think about too. And also create some written words, activity in your blog or join other forums topic discussion areas in your genre and your topic area. And I think it's very very important to building connection with new members that could be potentially listening to your show. And number ten is being very consistent with the production and fairly consistent with the duration. Now, granted this show is going to vary, probably pretty wildly on the duration. Part is I'm already at twenty minutes now and I'm not even through all my topics here yet, So anyway, i tend to be a little long winded, but I'm going to keep it value packed though if I can so

16:50 making your show on a regular basis, publishing it on the same day, and being fairly consistent in the length, though that can vary a lot. That's one of the big things about podcasting that make it fantastic is that you don't have to conform to any you like show clock that kind of thing that is kind of in the radio world. Number eleven is join a network of other podcasters that can aggregate audiences. That can thus if you have ambitions to monetize your show, to get advertisers in your show. So I think it's a good strategy. I think it's working for a lot of podcasters to do that. And I think that's a big uber trend that we're seeing around podcasting, is the rolling up and the aggregation of audiences in genres. It's easier for that network to approach big advertisers to pay content providers to produce content in this area. So I think it has a lot of benefits. Number twelve is work really hard to be known locally in your community as an expert and doing a show, and it's probably getting more difficult now because media online media is so popular now there's so many people doing it. Getting out there and putting yourself out there locally is a way to stand out too, because not everybody does that, and try and gain some local media attention for what you're doing and as an expert.

18:15 And that kind of goes back to getting on radio and TV shows, it's a similar kind of concept. And then number thirteen is post your episodes to Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and use popular keywords to describe your programs in your blog or on your website, depending on how you want to call it. It's really key. I think it's a little old school, but I think Twitter and Facebook are going to become increasingly more important to getting content like podcasts out discoverable. So that's my top thirteen lists. If you have some other ideas that have been successful, please send them to me and I will mention them on the next show of successful strategies that you've seen that have worked to build an audience. I don't have all the answers. I know that the community that could potentially be listening to this show has tried a lot of different things, and I definitely want to want to share that it's all for the betterment of podcast communities that we all share and share our strategies because not all of us are competing with each other. So anyway, I'm going to move on to the next topic, and that's the battle of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to go after a US patent holder for podcasting and their fundraising effort that they just had just over the last couple of days, where they've raised over fifty thousand dollars from over nine hundred supporters to fight this podcast patent troll.

19:47 And it's kind of a derogatory term. I don't necessarily like the term troll because I think it has a much more negative connotation than probably is really warranted here. Any company that owns a past and is certainly within their legal rights the patent. The US Patent Office issues patents through very stringent kind of consideration. Though I think this podcasting patent from personal audio it can be very harmful to a medium like this, and so I support the effort to challenge the podcast patent and I contributed some funds myself here over the last couple of days to help support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and their effort to challenge this podcast pattern. And there's been others like the Berkman Center the Cyber Law Clinic have also joined with them in the effort to challenge this. It has the potential to damage a upstart medium like podcasting, and I'm not sure that there's really a benefit to this company doing this other than to basically get some money.

21:00 They are not a participant in this community at any level. They haven't created any technology that they are really defending here. They just came up with the idea of a very broad concept of this back in nineteen ninety six, and then more recently in twenty twelve, they had an amendment that was added to the patent that was approved that covers kind of the podcasting process. So they're in the middle of going after or sending out letters and to contentb writers, I mean big content writers like CBS and NBC and mister Adam Carolla and the Discovery Network with the house Stuff works folks. And I've heard that there's other people that have gotten letters too. I don't believe that any of these have gone to court yet, so we shall see. But anyway, I just wanted to give kind of a general thought and I'll put some links to this. I hope that it gets successfully challenged. We shall see, though, So anyway, I also submit a prior art suggestion, though it may appear to be a little bit out of left field. It is difficult to find a prior art prior to nineteen ninety six for this, because frankly, nothing of this really existed a whole lot back then. Though there are some prior art that I've seen.

22:18 There is a website that I will link to that is asking for prior art to contest this patent, and there appears to be quite a bit of stuff in there, and I did contribute. Like I said, a comment in there about the File Transfer Protocol FTP might be a good prior art example against this patent because the FTP protocol is very similar to podcasting in how it technically works. At least that's my opinion. It may not pass the muster of any kind of legal challenge, but I put it out there anyway to kind of give a different perspective that the FTP protocol was established back in nineteen eighty five, so it's been around a very long time, but it basically does the same thing. It's the basics are ordered files being either manually or automatically transferred over the Internet between computer devices with storage capability. So that could be media files, it could be you know, text files, It could be a lot of a lot of different types of files. But that is the case with podcasting as well, so it is kind of a you know, ordered file is could be you know the episodes of a show, right, So anyway, I also put a link to that resource too, and I will add that to my blog post at Rob Greenley dot com. So let's uh, let's kind of move towards the last part of the show.

23:48 I have a few comments on last week's episode that came in the last week's show was is podcasting the same as radio? Was the question? And if you haven't listened to the episode, go back and check it out. I did hear a podcast that commented on my comments, so I always like to have that. We're a podcast that comments on the topics of another podcast, and we'll do that as much as I can. I really encourage podcasters to comment about my thoughts here and I will play those comments back. And let's uh, let's do that. The show is uh speaking of that, and this podcast is hosted by Robert Kimi, and let's let's listen.

24:35 Last week about is podcasting radio? Basically? Is it? Is it? Internet radio? And the guy I can't remember his name, I feel terrible, but he's the uh. He's like the podcast guy from Microsoft. He gets all the podcasts into Zoom. He finds out about him, he talks to podcasters. He gets them all into the Zoom Store, so people who have Microsoft you know, Windows phone and all that, they can easily subscribe to these podcasts. And he's a pretty cool guy. And I'll put his I'll put a link to his blog in his podcast in the show notes. I just can't remember his name right now, but you know, his answer was, no, it's not And he even said things like, you know, this is a podcast. Do whatever you want. You don't have to do the traditional thing of you know, having a little jingle when you come back in or have it. You know, it's not like that.

25:22 You don't have to have that. You don't have to have those stupid format things like you play a little music and then suddenly you're listening to blah blah blah. Well people know what they're listening to because they loaded it into their freaking device. And that's what podcasts. When podcasts came out, that's what it was about, bucking the system, doing something different, getting breaking away from traditional radio. That's what it was. I mean, if anybody says different, I want to punch them in the news, because it was about doing your own thing. What we did as podcasters, all of us you included. You know, we we do things that are still kind of radio. We try to do it at least we put in music, like like we all have music at the beginning of our shows because hey, that's the way you do it, that's the way it was. I don't have it on this one. You know what, I'm gonna have to start listening to the beginning of the show because I didn't notice that.

26:14 No, there will be nothing. There'll be nothing just because you're going to buck the system in within the system. No, it's just I don't have I'm not going to put it in unless I have something good, Like I'm not going to go out and get pod safe music to put in there. What I would like to do is get Brian Page to do it, but I can't. You know, I'm not made of money. So I mean, he's a professional. He requires payment in order to write bring us a custom song. And yeah, and I think that if don't do it just you know, like, don't do it just because you have to, you know what I mean. You don't feel like you have to, Like you said right now, you don't. You don't have the money to do it. But I don't think for this one because you do this for free. This is this is you don't get paid to. Not only that, this one is my personal This is just this is like a personal thing. It's me talking to someone else and never once have I ever called you up on boxer or whatever, and suddenly music plays and then we can have a conversation.

27:06 I want to say thank you to Robert and his co host for the nice comments about my thoughts on his podcasting the same as radio. Those guys went into a little bit more detail later in their program about this topic, but I just wanted to play a snippet from the show. They can play snippets from my show if they choose to too. I want this to be a very open scenario for all of us to exchange information with our audiences on what other people's thoughts are and this is an example of that. So we also had a few other text comments that were posted to the Rob Greenley dot com blog. And Michael Wolfe, who is in the middle of doing what is called the podcast project. He's a local guy in the Seattle area here who wrote an article for Forbes covering the podcast space.

27:58 He has his own podcast it's called Next Market and it's at next market dot co and you can follow He's talk with some of the leading minds in podcasting today. I've actually was on his show once as well, but he's talked to some very really, really smart people in this space. I would highly recommend that you go check out his show. But he posted in comments, Rob, glad you were doing this, and he said he really enjoyed the post on Google Plus and liked that I'm using this podcast to give my thoughts keep them coming. Well, thank you, Michael. I appreciate it, and I'm actually going to have lunch with him next next week and we're going to talk podcasting in greater detail. I also got a comment from JD. Sutter, who says, Rob, I enjoyed the topic, looking forward to hearing what you share in upcoming shows. As for the topic of the episode, I shared a lot of my feelings on this in my own blog. Radio and podcasting have many similarities but are very different. I had also explored somewhere thoughts on my own blog a while back and that you might find fascinating.

29:04 His blog is at www dot Jdsutter dot me. He has a comment about podcasting as an apparatus for communication, and he Els said, I really enjoyed the New Media show and keep up all the great work and thanks for all you're doing for the world of podcasting. Well, thank you JD for the nice words and comments. That's all I got for this week. I'm Rob Greenley. I'm the podcast guy on Windows Phone at Microsoft. Thanks again for listening to my thoughts here. Next week, I'm planning to get some other voices into this program to talk about the topic that I'm going to focus on next week, and it's the globalization of podcasting and what it means for podcasting's future. There's been a few others in the podcasting space that I've covered a little bit of this topic.

29:50 I want to dive into it at a deeper level. And I do have a blog post coming on this topic that will come out next week right along with the the new episode. It probably come out before the episode comes out. Like I said earlier in the show, I want to hear your thoughts on this topic and other topics that you think are important and let me know on Twitter at at Rob Greenley or in the comments area of Rob Greenley dot com. If you're a podcaster and you want to get your podcast on Windows phone or in the Zoom software which is still available at zoom dot net. Then shoot me an email to Podcasts at Microsoft dot com. I can also be found on Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or just email me to Rob at Rob Greenley dot com. So take care and like I said, thank you very much for listening and hope to have you back listening next week on my Digital life. Take care of the bod.