Podcasting Made Simple
Podcasting Made Simple is the premier podcast about podcasting! We’re here to help podcast guests and podcast hosts reach more listeners and grow their income so they can change more lives! Join Alex Sanfilippo and other podcasting industry experts as they share how you can level up on either side of the mic! (Show notes and resources: https://PodMatch.com/episodes)
Podcasting Made Simple
Reaching More Podcast Listeners | Tom Webster
The most common question asked by podcast guests and podcast hosts is this: “How do I get more podcast listeners?” Most experts suggest advertising your podcast episodes or paying an agency to help get more eyes on your content, but that's not the best approach. In this episode, Tom Webster shares 5 things you can do today that will cause your podcast and episodes to gain more traction. Get ready to become a better podcast host or guest that's aligned to reach more listeners!
MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/303
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the State of Podcasting
02:15 Understanding the Pulse of Podcasting
03:39 The Quest for More Listeners
06:01 The Importance of Knowing Your Audience
10:41 Defining Your Podcast Avatar
13:34 Knowing Who You're Not For
17:27 Creating a Unique Podcast
20:45 The Necessity of Editing
25:26 Building a Recommendable Podcast
Takeaways
The most common question in podcasting is how to get more listeners.
Understanding your audience is crucial for podcast growth.
Defining a specific avatar helps tailor content effectively.
Knowing who your podcast is not for can clarify your target audience.
Creating unique content is essential to stand out in the podcasting space.
Editing is necessary to enhance the quality of your podcast.
A podcast should be viewed as entertainment, not just a marketing channel.
Engagement with listeners can provide valuable insights for improvement.
Building a recommendable podcast involves being where your audience is.
Creating a safe space for listeners fosters loyalty and engagement.
MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/303
📊 This month's Independent Podcasters Report is now available! To see podcasting industry insights that matter for indie podcast hosts and podcast guests, please visit https://PodMatch.com/Report!
You're listening to Podcasting Made Simple. Hey everyone, Alex Sanfilippo here. Super excited to be back with you for the State of Podcasting, which we do every quarter. And I'm really excited with my guest today. I'm excited that I have Tom Webster joining me, who is one of the partners of Sounds Profitable. And I'll share more about that in a moment, but real quick, Tom, today we're gonna do something a little bit different with the State of Podcasting, but first and foremost, welcome. So glad you're here. Thanks, yeah. And you know, I'm glad you're gonna do something different, because I think that's part of... keeping the podcast fresh, right? So you never know. You got to try, you got to iterate. For sure. And you know, I was thinking back to some previous state of podcasting conversations I've had with other experts in the industry. And we've covered things like AI before it came out, cryptocurrency before, like when Value for Value was coming into play, video podcasting before YouTube, right? And although you could still go back and listen those and they're still somewhat evergreen, what we're going talk about today is like, probably the most evergreen topic in podcasting. Now, real quick, you're like, Alex, I wanted to hear like the data, the research, right? I'm going to give you a resource. It's actually Tom's resource. If you go to soundsprofitable.com forward slash research, there's all kinds of things. It's always getting updated. It'll be evergreen because they're always doing new things. And it is some of the best reporting I've ever seen in podcasting. So Tom, first and foremost, thank you for that. I really appreciate what you guys make available to us as indie podcasters. Yeah, I mean, that's our mission. I mean, you know, we are serving as the trade organization for the industry and We're certainly funded and supported by various networks and companies in the space. my heart, as it always has been, is also with the Indies. So anything that we are going to produce, it may have a variety of sponsors on it, but we provide it for free. We don't ask people to sign up for anything. Our goal is to grow the space and to enable careers. Yeah. And I respect that you've been the forefront of that for as long as podcasting seems to have been around. So thank you for that. And I was actually shocked when I went to... soundsprofit.com slash report. I like went in there, I clicked, it just gave me the PDF. I was like, you don't want my email address or anything. Like, again, really appreciate you looking out for many of us that are in this audience today, like myself included. Anyway, I move into today's conversation for sake of time. We're going a little bit deeper than just the research. We're gonna get into what I consider to the pulse of podcasting. Now, if you're a podcast host, this is gonna be directly for you. If you're a guest, this is gonna help inform you on the shows that you should really be pursuing and how to determine if it's gonna be a right show for you. So I encourage you. Make sure you're not like, this sounds like it's just for podcast hosts. No, this is equally for you as well. And when I talk about the pulse, I noticed, Tom, there's three main questions I've gotten over the years, and I've not been in podcasting nearly as long as you have. First one, I'll go in order from third to first. The third most common thing I hear is how do I improve my podcasting workflow or production process? Which I actually like that question. The second one is how do I monetize my podcast? But number one is how do I get more listeners? And when I say number one is in its own category, I mean, it's like, 10X these other two, right? Cause they're like, well, if I get more listeners, I can monetize. If I get more listeners, then I can focus on making my show better, right? And that's kind of always been the mentality of it. So today what we're gonna dive into is that question and really getting into how to answer it. And Tom, this will be from your book, which I highly, highly recommend. Like, I mean, I have the book right here with me and it is like my most underlined and page folded book I've ever read and it's called The Audience Is Listening. a little guide to building a big podcast. And if you go to audienceslisteningbook.com, you can grab a copy. And I seriously urge anyone checking this out to please, please grab a copy because it will be a game changer for you. So I want to get into the opening question here and turn this over to you, Tom. I'm going to do a lot less talking for the rest of this, but how do I get more listeners is the opening question. Can you just kind of talk about why this central question is like the focus of the book? Yeah. And I'm going to go with the deeper unspoken question here. It is the most common question you hear. It's the most common question I hear. How do I get more listeners? And a lot of times the answers people give are going to be tactical marketing things, You know, feed drops, Facebook ads, social media, all this other stuff, right? That's kind of tactical marketing things. But there's a question underlying the, how do I get more listeners question? And it's usually asked by people whose podcasts have stopped growing. They've stopped growing. Or they have slowed down, right? Nobody asks that if their podcast is growing like gangbusters. The better question is why did my podcast stop growing? When you can answer why did my podcast stop growing? Then you're ready to tackle the full ramifications of how do I get more listeners? And where I wrote the book from and the standpoint that I take is that there's really two things you can master as a podcaster. One thing you can master is your craft, the tools of your craft, the workflow, editing, all of the audio engineering and sound quality and all of that stuff. That's half of it. The other half is knowledge of your audience. And this is not where I see podcasters going in terms of what they want to master and where they want to spend their time. It's the hard work. And I wrote the book to try to make it more accessible for people. But, you know, ultimately, if you're trying to grow your podcast, you're trying to figure out why it stopped growing. The first question you need to figure out for yourself is who am I for? Who am I for? You what I respect about you, Alex, you're very clear with me even before this podcast started and in this podcast, you're very clear to me that, I am for not just podcasters, but I'm also for guests on podcasts, right? So you have that in the back of your mind the whole time you're talking. And, you know, what I would encourage people to do is to get as specific as you can. It's to think about an individual human, somebody you know, maybe, you know, this is the podcast for. Jennifer who is in accounting at this and you know, has two kids and she like get as specific as you can because if you make that show That's the start and if you're not making that show if you're not if you're making a show that well think everyone would like this or I think it's for men 25 to 54 people don't have anything in common at those levels Not really so that you get very specific about who you're for and that's how you begin your journey I think this is such a good point because I think that many of us like you said that it's like a two-sided coin We focus very much on our own craft And there's many people in podcasting, they've got it polished, they've got it buttoned up. So they're like, why am I not getting more listeners, right? But what we miss is like, yes, we have our knowledge of ourselves and what we do, but not of our listeners. And there's something you wrote in the book that I actually wrote down here. It was like the first thing I highlighted, underlined, ripped out the book and put on my wall basically. And it says, if you don't understand the human on the other end of the screen or speaker, you will never succeed. You might get like little movements and stuff, but you're never going to fully succeed. And that's what I really want to dive in here today. So I'm just going to kind of go point by point on a few things that I think really stood out. The first of which is actually talking to your listeners. And the reason I want to start with this is because I think so many of us were like, okay, Alex, great. How do I get more knowledge of my audience? And I think it sounds simple once I read it, but we don't think about talking to our listeners very much. Can you speak to this point a little bit and how we can kind of successfully do this? Yeah. You know, the one thing I really wanted to not do in the book was go too far off the deep end in terms of, you know, structured quantitative research, cause that's not something most podcasters are going to be able to afford or Or maybe make the time for, because so many podcasters, it's a hobby or it's something they do after hours or it's a second gig, right? So I wanted to make sure that what was in the book was actionable. And it does start with talking to people and it's incredibly easy to talk to people. mean, if you have an audience of some kind already, it's the easiest thing in the world to reach out to them in the podcast itself and say, Hey, I'd to make this show better. you email me? If you're asking me how to grow your show, you're probably not going to get inundated beyond your ability to respond. So you go ahead and ask for the, ask for the order there, ask for emails. I tend not to try to engage in things substantive on social media because character limits and performative behavior and things like that. try to keep it private and you know, one-on-one is a great way to go. But the real key here is, is to ask better questions. Because if you ask questions like, what do you think of my podcast? What do you like about it? You're going to, you it's, good. I like it. It's funny. It's interesting. Well, what do you really like about it? I don't know. I just, you know, it's funny. It's, interesting. Like you're not going to get, you know, specifics that are really going to help you. So the questions you need to ask are not focused on you. They're focused on them. You need to figure out who they are when they're at home. And that's a quote that I love from Ulysses by James Joyce in a, in a former life. I, I was a I taught rhetoric and composition at Penn State for a while. was an English major. And so I had to read Ulysses. It took a whole semester. And there's a great quote in there from Molly Bloom, one of the characters, as her husband Leopold is talking about somebody and she goes, who's he when he's at home? And the answer to that is not, he's an accountant. know. No, it's something deeper than that. And when you begin to understand that, then you can begin to get more specific in your delivery of the podcast. You begin to have a better filter for. is this person going to find this interesting or not? So those are the kinds of questions. And I have some, I think, great examples in the book, and I'm happy to share them here as well. But you you tell me. I think that we'll get into just a few of those. again, I do encourage people to grab the book because it's a great practice you send people to. And we just won't have time to get into that today with continuing along here. But real quick, like you mentioned some of the questions not to ask. I totally agree. By the way, if you ask me those questions, Tom, about your podcast, like the way that you said not to ask them, I'm a bit of a people pleaser by nature and it's not comfortable for me to tell you something uncomfortable. So if you're like, do you like the show? And we're like, yep. Anything we can do better? Nope. Please don't ask me again. Right. But what's way we can reposition some of those questions, just really high level and then we'll kind of move on here. But I am curious to hear what you would say, how we could really ask a better question. I will give you a great one. And it's one simple question. I call it the eulogy question and it's this, and you can, you know, you can go as far down this road as you want, but if you were to say to somebody, you know, I'm thinking about ending the podcast. I'm thinking about not doing it anymore. If I, if I did that, what would you miss? What would you miss that you would have to look for somewhere else? Right. And that is going to generate a more specific response then, what do you like? Right. They're going to have to dig a little bit deeper. They're not going to go, I'll miss the interesting and funny. They're probably going to name a feature or a segment that you do or a particular point of view. There's something that sparks with your existing listeners. And if you, this sounds awful. If you threaten to take it away, They'll get a lot more specific about that. And by the way, the answer to that question might be nothing. And you need to know that too, because that's a warning sign. That question right there, that's worth the cost of entry. So thank you. We could end right now, Tom, and it would be worthwhile. So I love that. think it just gives a level of insight that someone's going to provide to you that you otherwise wouldn't get. So I love that. I want to move on to the second idea here I want to get into, which is knowing your avatar. And you kind of already hint about getting really specific with this a little bit. I find that many podcasters I talk to when they describe their avatar, can tell there hasn't been a whole lot of talking to your listeners to describe this. Can you just share some best practices around really learning to know your avatar and really designing and crafting who that is? Yeah. And this is, again, this is, think, an audience-centric practice and not a content-centric practice. And the key to this, you know, there's a TEDx talk by a guy named Simon Sinek that everyone in quotes called, start with your why and all that. And I don't think that's a particularly applicable quote for people in the entertainment medium, because I think for most people, what's your why is I would like a large audience and I would like to make some money or I would like to, right? That's sorry, that's bulk. You can edit that out. Thanks for the clap. That was a real pro move. That was a pro move right there, right? I'm going to leave it all in though. It's going to make people laugh. So we're keeping it. Like your why doesn't matter. It's the why of the audience. And here's the key to that. The why that you need to know. is the why a group of people, not everybody, but why a segment of people would or would not listen to your show. Why do they listen to your show? And there's no one reason. There's not, I'm not saying there's millions, but there are different groups of people that share a different why. I want to just because that's a little fuzzy for people, I'm going to give you a really clear example of that. and, I think I touch on this in the book. If I were to do a podcast about, you know, my little pony, okay, there's three whys. in there, three segments of humans that would be interested in that. And they have completely different whys, right? One would be nine-year-old girls. Nine-year-old girls want to play with My Little Pony, and they have various reasons for doing that. That's their why. The second are collectors, right? You know, people who look like the guy who runs the comic shop and the Simpsons, wanting to collect every little My Little Pony for monetary reasons. And then there's a third, and that is there's a group, there's actually two groups, one called the Bronies and one called the Pegasisters, their female counterparts. who celebrate the values of My Little Pony in a non-ironic way. And I would submit they probably are more engaged with the mythology of My Little Pony than the other two. And they have very different whys for why they would engage in a show about My Little Pony. So you have to get more specific than my show is for people who are interested in toys, right? Are they collectors? Are they people who play with them? Or are they people who celebrate the value? Are they people who are engaged with the media properties that spawn from them, whatever. But different segments have different whys. And the more specific you can get on a segment on a human and their why, then the more you've always got that in the back of your mind to pay that off. Right. And that's, that's the level of specificity and detail that I think you need. Something else you bring up here that I think is really important. I you to touch on is the importance of also knowing who you are not for within this. Can you just for a second riff on that? yeah. And the biggest example of this, the great outlier edge case in all of podcasting is Joe Rogan. And the thing is, is that, you know, you will find. literally millions of podcast listeners who say, I would never listen to Joe Rogan. But part of that is that there are literally millions of podcast listeners for whom Joe Rogan gives them what nobody else will, gives them a voice of some kind, right? They are underserved by other channels and Joe does not pander to them. He commits to them at the expense of everyone else who's not part of that segment. And as a result, he gets about 12. 13 million listeners a month because he super serves that audience. knows who he is not for. Right. And that I'm not condoning exactly what Joe Rogan does, but you know, I do admire his taking a, know, having very clear sense of who he is not for and not caring about that. Not because he's super serving who he's for. And I'll close here by as a hotelier named Ian Schrager, who has a number of, he started a number of boutique hotels all over the world and they spark a reaction. they are not, you you don't walk in thinking you're at a courtyard by Marriott. They will spark a reaction one way or another. And he's very famous for saying, I don't care if 90 % of the world hates me, if 10 % love me. And if nobody loves your podcast, that's something that you need to work on. That's a good point. That's some deep work right there for sure. You know, an example of this with Podmatch and Podcasting Made Simple, the brands that I run, we look at our avatar as a podcast host or guest. that is willing to financially invest in themselves for a better podcasting future. And that's where we draw the line the same. When somebody reached out and they're like, this is so stupid that you all are trying to charge for this, right? Like when we hear those things, we don't get offended or mad. We just say, we know in our heads that it's just not the person we serve. It's kind of like a attract and repel type of thing. But we know the people that are saying, yeah, I'm willing to invest. They love what we do because we definitely over provide value, right? That's very, very important to us is we over deliver on the value that we provide. But we want to know, are you serious enough to put put a few dollars in this little jar right here to show me that you're willing to take the next step with me. So to your point there, we've drawn that line. I'm not saying I'm doing everything right, but it's just a practical example of what I think this looks like in many ways. Yeah, and I'll give you an answer that I often, besides my, I'm starting my 20th year in the podcast industry, but for 30 years I've been a media researcher and I've worked on audience development for Howard Stern, for Elvis Theron, for All Things Considered. have a lot of... big shows and audiences is what I work on under my belt. And often when I talk to people about some of the things that they do to make a better show, even at the highest levels, people will say to me, well, you no one's going to do that. No one's going to take the time to do that. No one's going to invest that much or whatever. And my answer to them is generally you're right. Only the best podcasters do. And then you figure out where you want to be. Right. And, and you know, like you don't deserve, you don't have a right to an audience, but if you want one, There's a way to it, but you got to do that work. Yeah, it's really good. Last thing I want to talk about on this, this avatar section, we'll move on here, is just your podcast guest. think it's a really great practice to ask your host, even before you're going on the show, who is your avatar? Who is it that you're speaking to? You're going to learn a lot about the show, the listener, how you should show up, but you might also learn that, hey, this host doesn't really have this dialed in yet. And maybe if they're early in their stage, fine, get on there and help them with that, right? By the way that you present yourself and show up, it might become the most successful episode they've ever had. And they might be like, wait, there's something there, right? That Tom spoke that no one else has ever done before. So I encourage you, don't say, okay, that's the host job. You as the guest, you should be informed of this and know this as well. Cause I find that that goes a really long way. And Tom, next thing I want to talk about here is making your podcast unique. I find that a lot of us want to have an audience, but we can't really offer them anything unique or specific that there aren't other podcasts that are already doing it. Even our same vertical or niche. Can you talk about this point on how we can figure out how to make our podcast a bit more unique so it really stands out? Yeah. Here's a way to think about your podcast that I think not everybody thinks about. And that is this. think a lot of people think about their podcast as another marketing channel. It is another marketing channel. is another place for me to put my marketing efforts. I'm also doing white papers. I'm also doing social media. I'm also doing all these things, right? You know, people don't rush home from work and sit in front of the TV at eight o'clock for a marketing channel. A podcast is an entertainment. A podcast is an entertainment. And if you don't think of your podcast as an entertainment beyond whatever topic you're doing, beyond whatever, you know, audience you're serving, then your podcast is no different, right? Then it's just simply an extremely inefficient way to transmit information. I'd rather just read it. You know, my, my warning sign for podcast is always if, if I, know, if people are always telling me, I listened to your podcast on 1.7 or 1.9. I'm like, well, then I have a lousy podcast because you don't watch your favorite shows that way. You know, you really need to think about that. So there's a great quote from, there's this fantastic musical by Steven Sondheim called Sunday in the Park with George. And it's about the artist, George Surratt, who painted with little dots, it's pointillism. So instead of just like painting a park, he would put a million dots on a, and drove everybody crazy with it. And, know, at the end of it, he, would look like a lovely picture of the park, like another talented artist might do. But the quote that I love is, love from it is anything you do, let it come from you. And then it will be new. And that's, that's the kind of secret sauce of it is the marriage of the, why your audience is listening to you and the why you want to serve them is actually going to create something unique. It is going to create a unique marriage, a unique intersection that, that, that secret sauce that you can lean into and create an entertainment from. And, know, the example I'll give here. And it really comes from knowing your audience is, you know, a podcast I listen to a lot is an ostensibly a sports podcast, the Ryan Russo show. And at the end of every episode, which is normally a sports interview, he sits down with his younger producer. Like he has a, like a gen Z producer and a millennial producer in there as well. And he's a little older and they do this thing called life advice where he essentially is like the big brother. Many people didn't have, or like the uncle they never got to talk to. And he talks to these like 20 to 30 year old men, mostly. about how to deal with their landlord and stuff like that. It's like stuff that they're not getting from somewhere else. And it's wildly entertaining. It's got nothing to do with sports. And it's what makes his show different than any other sports show because he's figured out his audience. my audience are young men who are out of the nest, out of college, and they're all lost a little bit. What else do they have in common besides sports? Well, let me speak to that a little too. And again, it's all from the knowledge of your audience. It's so helpful, like so useful thing about that because I think many of us were like, okay, I have a sports podcast. How do I do it different? You figure out who your audience is, what they want. Like that, that back and forth that like advice from a previous generation to the upcoming generation is a really cool twist on it. I really respect the fact that he was able to kind of figure out that angle. That's really cool. The next thing I want to talk about here is the one that might scare some people off. So everyone buckle up, hold on here. I'm editing your podcast and I wrote this down. I want to read it real quick here because I don't want to mess it up. It's on page 131. of your book and it says, if you want to grow an audience and you're not editing your podcast, you're making a big mistake. I totally agree with this. I'm going to give one quick example and turn it over to you, Tom. The most common thing I hear on a brand new podcast is this. I'll just do the introduction of every single one of their episodes. They might have 10, they might have 15. This is it. Long pause. Okay. We're recording. You ready? Yeah, you ready? Okay. Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. And that's in there. And I'm like, man, if you could just remove that weird 10 seconds, we'd already be doing so much better, right? Can you just talk to the importance of editing and why it matters? There's three levels of editing, Alex. Level zero is I don't do any. And the people who don't do any often may not make the time for it and they'll rationalize it by saying, I want to keep it authentic. Well, authentic to me is expressing my ideas in the clearest way possible so that they are adapted and value is created from them. And if I didn't do that live, then it's not authentic for me to let that sit out there. So authentic is what you call authentic, right? That's level zero. I don't do any level one is what I call hygiene editing. And that is you go through and you remove those things. You remove mistakes, you remove somebody coughing or saying, wait, can we do that again? Or back earlier in this podcast when I clapped, but you're not going to remove it. That's great. You know, like that's, that's I think what a lot of people think. Here's the next level of editing. The next level of editing is listening back to your show carefully. and asking yourself is the order that things tumbled out in live the best order for this information to be presented? Did something come up later in that interview that would have served the interview better if the audience knew it earlier in the interview? What is the next question the audience is going to ask after every piece of information in your podcast? And if the next thing they hear was the next question they were going to ask, that's brilliant. And that's the real top tier of editing and that's editing for a narrative arc. You know, here's the thing, if you're a guest, this is where you can actually determine once again, if a podcast is gonna be good for you to be on. I always am a big proponent, before I go on a podcast, I wanna listen to it. Before I have a guest on, I listen to them on other podcasts. I just think it's a good practice to kind of hear what you're getting into. Listen for this. So join into a podcast and if you're like two minutes in, you're like, man, this seems very advanced for this far, right? Is it advancing the plot, as you say in the book, Tom? Like, is it actually kind of moving the narrative forward? And so if you're a guest, Listen for that and also show up and do that. So like not just listen for if you're like, I'm going to be on the show show up in that way saying, okay, can I help advance this? And another thing you talk about was making judgment calls. And I think as a guest, I do this a lot. A host will ask me a question that I know is going to take the interview in a wrong direction. I will very shortly answer, but kind of nicely redirect in my own response to kind of bring it back on track. And maybe I'm an air quote here. That's a pro move because I've done a lot of interviews, but the reality is I know, cause they've explained me where they want to go with it. And so I want to make sure that I kind of help it go there. We don't jump off on little tangents around the way that are not going to really, like we said, not going to advance the plot or the narrative. And so I think that I don't want to spend too much time editing because a lot of people kind of glaze over on, but that's, those are important points right there. know, here's something I think that's important to both hosts and guests. And I say this as someone who's been a public speaker for over two decades. And you know, I, I do a lot of public speaking into a lot of keynotes. do, you know, not just in podcasting, all over the world and in various industries. And the one. Piece of advice I always give people who walk in, they say, I have these bullet points. I know what bullet points I need to hit. That's fine. If you're going to be explicit about something, script your transitions. Script the glue that goes between them. Don't settle for, and another thing I want to talk about, and the next thing I want to say, those are crap transitions. If you can't write a really great transition that justifies why point B follows point A, then point B should not follow point A. And I think if you have that knowledge in your head as a guest or as a host, then you're always going to follow a narrative arc. And you're not just going to be, got to get my bullet points in there. Why is this bullet point next? Because that's not necessarily how an audience listens. An audience will have a question in their head and they'll hope you answer it next. And that's what the transitions are all about. And that's the thing to really get explicit about when you're structuring a show is what's the glue between your bullet points. Man, you know, this brings up the kind of last thing I want to land with here. And again, state of podcasting here, right? And we're talking about from the pulse perspective of the top question we're getting in podcasting. Tom's heard it for twice as long as I have. He's been in the industry twice as long as I have. And at the end of the day, what we're talking about here is kind of landing here is creating a recommendable podcast, as you call it, is like the recommendability of it, right? Within the book. And I want to turn it over to you kind of like where we land this thing. Like our final thought here is this is how we get more listeners and this is what people want in podcasting on either side of the mic. Can you just talk about this idea of building a podcast is truly recommendable? Yeah, everything that we've talked about so far about making an audience driven show, about making a show that some people love, even at the expense of others, something that's about something specific and something that addresses who the listener is when they're at home. Let's stipulate all of that. But trust me, that's some work. The thing about a podcast, you know, the definition of podcasting has changed a lot, right? You know, now a lot of things are called a podcast that maybe the founding fathers did not imagine when, the first RSS feed was, was transcribed with feather pen. But the key to it to me is to be where your audience is. Right. That's table stakes. I think you can't say wherever you get your podcasts, if you're not there, because some people like get their podcasts in places that you have not yet dreamed of or places that you have ignored anything from sound cloud to YouTube. Right. So be where they are. think live where they are. is the next thing. Don't just treat every one of these channels if you're really going to be there as another Coke machine that sells your Coke. You've got to hang out there a little bit. And then the final thing is to love where they are. And to me, that is craft. If you're going to go to YouTube, right? And you just put your podcast as it is up on YouTube, you're not going to succeed that way, right? You need to create something that is native to that medium. even if that's not your podcast, but it's a thing that is a thing unto itself that pays off immediately. That's not a trailer. It's not a tease. It's a thing that works on YouTube. And if people like that, maybe they'll want a deeper engagement with you. Maybe they'll look for your longer show or something like that. But you've got to be where the audience is. You've got to live where they are and you've got to love where they are. Don't expect to pull them somewhere else. You know, when I think of these three things, I go back to your book and something that kind of you tied all together with is it's creating a safe space for listeners. And when I read that in the book, I was like, man, like, if you really love it, right, you go through those three things, you end up that, like, I love it. Like that's a safe space. Like where there's love, there's usually safety involved in it. And I couldn't get this old meme out of my head. And it's been in podcasting as long as I have. I don't know who made it, but it is a girl probably in her late teen years sitting with headphones on, holding a phone, sitting next to a cardboard wall that has three people on it laughing and she's sitting there laughing and she's like listening to my podcast like I'm sitting with my best friends. And the reality is if you can create that experience, can make people feel like they're involved, they can feel loved, they can feel heard. Man, that's a podcast that someone's gonna recommend. Like they're actually going to want to share that because they feel like they're part of the actual narrative. They're part of the process of it. And so I love that you're able to kind of tie it all together like that. Tom, I'm turn back over to you if you have any quick final thought, word of wisdom you want to end us with today before we close out. Yeah, just on that point you just brought up as a point, deeply care about deeply. Best example of this in the world to me is car talk. If I explained car talk to you as it's a show about people calling in with problems with their cars and two mechanics help them fix them. That sounds terrible, right? But what it is, is it's a safe space for smart people who feel frustrated about this thing that they don't actually know anything about to be stupid and not get laughed at. And believe me, that's gold. That's what car talk does. Smart people who never learned how to fix a car, but don't want to be made to feel stupid, calling into a safe place with warm, intelligent, friendly people, made to feel like they're not stupid, having their problem solved by people who laugh with them and not laugh at them. Now you put that into a show description, I don't know that it works, but it sure works, right? And that's what it's all about. I love it. Tom, thank you again for this book. The audience is listening. Absolutely love this. Again, the best read I've ever done in podcasting. So thank you for that. And thank you for your contribution in podcasting and for being with us today. I really appreciate your time. Thanks Alex. For more episodes, please visit podmatch.com forward slash episodes. Thank you so much for listening.
