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
The Smart Way to Stay Ahead in Podcasting | Seth Silvers
The podcasting industry is changing fast; what worked just one year ago won't cut it today! Thankfully, there's a smart approach you can take to stay ahead. In this episode, Seth Silvers and Alex Sanfilippo explain how to position for future success as a podcast host or podcast guest. From platform updates to new audience behaviors, they reveal what hosts and guests can expect in the future. Get ready for a look at where podcasting is headed and how to make sure you don't get left behind!
MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/329
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
02:23 State of Podcasting: Current Trends and Data
06:15 The Competitive Landscape of Podcasting
11:30 The Role of Video in Podcasting
15:13 Improving Show Quality and Guest Preparation
19:24 Understanding Podcast Analytics
23:13 Retention Strategies and Listener Engagement
27:56 Final Thoughts on Audience Connection
Takeaways
The podcasting industry is becoming more competitive and maturing.
Only 400,000 out of 4 million podcasts are considered active.
YouTube is gaining traction in the podcasting space with significant viewership.
Podcasters need to improve show quality and be unique in their premise.
Analytics should focus on listener behavior and audience growth, not just downloads.
Shorter intros can lead to better listener retention.
Guests should invest in quality gear for better audio and video.
Hosts should control their own audio quality and set expectations for guests.
Understanding your audience is crucial for podcast growth.
Building rapport between hosts and guests enhances listener connection.
MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/329
You're listening to Podcasting Made Simple. Seth Silvers, welcome to Podcasting Made Simple. Thank you. Really happy to be here. I know we've talked about this the last couple quarters, so I'm really happy that we could align our schedules and make this happen. Yeah, man, really excited to have you here. And for everyone listening, watching, Seth Silvers has been a friend of mine for, I don't know how many, it's been years now and I kind of, the dates get blurry after a while, but one fun fact, me and Seth shared a stage together. It's the only time I've ever.
done like a co-talk, Seth, is that the right terminology for it? I don't know what to call it. I think we all know what you mean. Okay, cool. All right. So basically we had a co-talk and I also remind me where it was. It was Dallas, Denver, Vegas. Do you know where it was? I that one was in Denver. In Denver. Yeah. Okay. And there's a point for me saying this. We had a great time. I found out we prep differently for our talk. I think we did a really good job, but we were in a room that was also like a trade show room going on and it was unbelievably loud, but we had speakers facing us so could hear ourselves.
with like a half a second delay. So you're like talking and half a second later is coming back to you. Seth, I was told we did a good job, but man, that was- It was, I think we did a good job, but it was not the best stage experience. Right. I you were gonna say that we share a birthday, cause we also share a birthday. So you were like, Seth and I shared a stage and I was like, yeah, yeah, we did that too. We also share a I think that's more fun for everyone else, but yes, we also share a birthday. So anyway, Seth and I have a ton in common as you can all now tell, podcasting and birthdays.
What more is there? Seth, again, thanks for being here. Thanks for being in my corner all the time, man. I'm really excited to dive into this today. Seth runs a company called Story On, and he does full production for amazing businesses, has some incredible clients. And because of this and Seth's experience, he really understands the data and future strategy of how to position a podcast, I think, better than anyone I've ever met. So Seth is my go-to. And I'm like, I don't know. I'm like, hold on a minute, Seth, what do I do here? Like, what do I say, right?
So he's always been my behind the scenes go-to guy for this stuff. And he's also at the forefront on the production side. And we're gonna make sure this conversation is valuable for both podcast hosts and guests as well. Because there's definitely something that you can bring to the table and understand about podcasting from an analytical standpoint that will serve the podcast you go on, but also help make sure that you're getting on the right shows that are really going to benefit you and ultimately the listener. So Seth, you ready to dive into this stuff, man? Absolutely.
Cool. I want you to start us off then, man. Give us an idea of kind of like the state of podcasting your mind. Cause we've seen a lot of changes in recent years. So where do you kind of think we're at and where are we heading? Yeah. I mean, obviously there's so many different directions that this could go, but just like some like high level numbers, kind of like interesting things that we've seen happen in the last couple months or like weeks. One is a really good annual report is with the podcast host.com, which is a good friend Colin. And he does an awesome job with that website over there. And he's been.
writing about podcasting for I think over a decade from the highlands of Scotland. But anyway, they do such a good job with this report. And so they just released a report and they said, you always hear this number a little bit differently, but they said there are currently 4,396,000 podcasts out there today. Typically you hear that number anywhere between like 2.9 million and over 5 million. The interesting thing here, I won't just focus on the numbers, but like what this means,
is only 2.7 million of those are on Apple podcasts, which people might be like, what in the world? Why is that? The main reason behind that is Spotify. So when people launch a show on Spotify, it does not automatically go to Apple podcasts. It's possible for those shows just to live on Spotify. And they've made it really, really easy for people to launch a show that only lives on Spotify. So the interesting thing is like, that means around, like I'm doing numbers off the top of my head.
but that's like around one and a half million shows that are only on Spotify, which I think is super, super interesting. And then when we break down that further, if that sounds like, oh, there's a ton of shows, only 400,000 of those are what's considered active and top 1 % amongst active shows, which Alex, you do such a good job of pulling this data together. Top 1 % of active shows do around 4,700 downloads within like a, I think that's within a seven day period.
So I always think it's good to like kind of just benchmark like what those numbers are, because there's a lot of podcasters and for like, if people are guests and they're, you know, you're looking for a show to be on people like we're a top 1 % podcast. Are they comparing themselves to the 4 million podcasts? Most of which are dead or are they a top 1 % amongst active podcasts? Like that's like a really interesting data point, I think to like look at. So I think that is really interesting. And the other thing I kind of want to mention at the top is YouTube is kind of making some
interesting noise in the podcasting space because they released a blog a couple of days ago saying that in the month of January, they had 1 billion active viewers of podcast content on YouTube, which is very interesting. a few things, reasons why that's interesting, kind of causing some noise is like a YouTube view counts, I think after one second, one or two seconds, it counts as a view. And on podcasting it's 60 seconds. So there's a lot of conversation of like,
Yes, that is significant. YouTube is significant. We'll probably talk about that more, but also there, it still leads to like, there's conversations of like what content is considered a podcast. Most news channels now are publishing all their content to YouTube and just calling it podcasts. like anybody that's watching anything on CNN is probably technically watching a podcast, even though they're just watching like Anderson Cooper. So I think there's just some interesting, like big things that are going on in podcasting right now. Spotify and YouTube are
kind of at the forefront of a lot of those conversations. And I think that all really matters for podcast hosts and how they're creating and podcast guests and how they're approaching getting on shows. It's good to hear that data. I think for everyone listening and watching, like it sounds like a lot, but really just kind of think about that, right? Like active versus inactive, the platforms now that we need to be looking at. And by the way, that report, you can easily just type in the podcasthost.com and look, you'll see their report pretty easily. So can find it. And as you said, Colin's a friend of both of ours and he has a phenomenal job.
And I want to dive now deeper into what you're seeing from the podcast level. So that's kind of like industry level. And then we'll kind of get real granular with some stuff, but just like now, what are you seeing like this working for shows? And again, I want us to keep guests in mind, guests listen to this, like, cause you want to say like, I approaching shows that are following where we're seeing this thing go or am I kind of heading in the wrong direction? So Steph, you don't want to us an idea now at the show level what we're looking at. Yeah. think the main overarching thing is it's just getting more competitive.
And that's just the reality of like the maturing market of podcasting. I think for a while, the podcast industry has kind of felt fairly like stagnant. And I think that's beginning to shift and the industry is beginning to mature. I use the example often of if we rewinded 10 years and went and looked at MrBeasts and like, let's say Marques Brownlee and Casey Neistat. Like if we look back at their videos from 10 years ago, we would probably be like, if we looked at those today, we'd be like, man, these videos kind of suck.
Maybe not Casey Neistat, because he's always been like one of the best producers in the world. But if we judged content from 10 years ago with today's standards, we would think that content was bad. Even though in that time 10 years ago, that content was great. It was some of the best on the platform. So I think it's really interesting to like look at that to where there's a lot of shows that haven't made any changes in the last three years. They haven't made any changes in the last like five years or they're basing
their current podcast strategy off of a show from like five years ago or 10 years ago or something like that. So I think that just doesn't work anymore. And as the market gets more competitive, it's getting easier for people to edit content faster. It's getting cheaper for people to be able to do like high quality video podcasts and different things like that. You have these like interview shows at the top of the game with it's like Steven Bartlett and know, Chris Williamson and some of these shows.
where they're spending so much time preparing for these interviews and they're hiring huge production teams. And Stephen Bartlett has different, like matching studios in multiple cities around the world. Not everybody can do that, but it is getting easier to produce a like high quality, what looks like a high quality interview, which just leads me to really believe that like we just have to get better at podcasting. And so I think for podcast hosts,
Simply having an interview show just isn't enough anymore. I think we really have to get creative with like how are we formatting the shows? Are we getting creative with like the segments? And I think the big piece with that is you really have to be unique on the premise of your show. And I'll share kind of a story with one of our clients. They had somebody that came in and wanted to interview them on the show. So they asked me and I, we talked back and forth about it and we looked at this, this person's platform and they had had huge guests on their show.
like some of the biggest names in the world in podcasting on their show, but I could not figure out what their show is about. There wasn't like a unique premise behind it. And so I actually said no. And even though they were getting like millions of views on Tik Tok and Instagram and like their reels were getting a lot of social attention, but I was like, I don't think this fits with your strategy. And so I actually talked with the host. I ended up taking them out to dinner and he was like, Hey, can you give me any feedback? And so we sat down and talked and I kind of told him, I was like, I don't know who to recommend your show to.
And so then we started talking about the show and surprise, surprise, he was getting a lot of social clips, but he was having a really, really hard time translating those into like long form subscribers on a podcast platform. So he couldn't really get the social audience to actually engage on the podcast platform. And a lot of it was because there wasn't a unifying premise. It was kind of just around like the conversations this person wanted to have, and they were spending money on it. So it looked really good, but they were lacking that like,
So I think with podcasts, it's more important than ever. And this gets into like podcast algorithms and how that will affect things. All of this leads towards, we just need to have better shows, which means we need to put more work into them. Yeah, that's really good. You know, something you just said there, I don't know who to recommend your show to. If you're a podcast guest and you get invited to be on a show or you pitch to be on a show, go look at the show. And if you don't know which of your friends or family members you could potentially recommend it to,
maybe it's not the right show to go on. If you're like, don't have any clue who this is for, right? And even if you are using Podmatch, like they kind of describe that, but I don't mean to look at that. I mean, actually look at the show, like you don't have any information about it and just say, is there something here, right? Like, could I somehow articulate what this is for? A great example, Seth, I just looked up a podcast. I want to see if there was any podcast for plumbers specifically. I got a quote from a plumber who's going to come out here and say, oh, there's a plumber podcast. Turns out there are. You want to who that show's for? Shows for plumbers who want to like.
build their business bigger, right? Like it's very easy to know that, but some shows are not that easy to see, right? So I think that's a really good point, man. I want to get into some more stuff here that we kind of talked about. Did you have anything else to share on that side of things before I- No, that's great. Okay, cool. First thing that you talked about is a video. You mentioned a couple of times, mentioned YouTube. Do you think that it's time for podcast hosts to incorporate video or do you still not necessarily see that as a requirement? Yeah.
It's a good question. It's definitely not a requirement. So, I mean, I'll say that from the get go. Like you do not have to have video to have a podcast. And actually the, I will say like as a case study, one of the bigger shows that we have worked with over the last year, which is Alex Hermosys, he was struggling to grow his show. And we actually switched his format to an audio first audio only format. And his show started to grow because it was like native to for his podcasting audience.
So we've tried out a bunch of different like content formats and different things. So that's an interesting use case that showed us there is still a world where you have a audio only show and it works. The caveat here is if you're like a highly produced, like narrative based show, or it's really designed to be an audio experience, I don't think you should be worrying about video. You should connect your RSS feed with YouTube so that like it's in there for like searchability.
but it's probably just like the audio version of your podcast is on YouTube. But I don't think that you should worry about video if you're like an audio kind of like focused narrative based podcast. So this is like a lot of like true crimes or like really heavily produced stuff like masters of scale or business wars or different things like that are heavily segmented. If you're an interview based show where there's not a ton of extra lift, then I don't see any downside to putting your
podcast on YouTube and also the video version on Spotify. I see only upside. However, I do want to like acknowledge that YouTube and podcasting are different games. And so I think your expectations need to match that. Like in the same way that if I'm a multi-sport athlete in high school, there's definitely benefits from that. Like I'm going to learn different disciplines from playing different multiple things at once, but I might not get to be as good at basketball as if
all I was doing was playing basketball all the time. So if I'm playing like basketball with half my time and football with half my time, somebody's probably going to send me like a study of how multi-sport athletes are actually better at one sport. So we have sports podcasters in our, in our group here, Seth, you're for sure going to get that article. Yeah, I'd to see it. But the point is like, if you want to like really thrive on YouTube, you need to have like a YouTube first strategy. You need to like really be designing it around YouTube. And that's a little bit different of a strategy than is going to be
primarily like focused on winning on podcasting. So I think yes, you should be putting your videos on YouTube. And I think on Spotify, there's some nuances there, but I also think your expectations have to match it just by putting your video on YouTube. That is not going to cause your YouTube channel to blow up. You're not going to be the next Diary of a CEO. But if you're YouTube focused on like, if you're putting time into it and you're
Alex Sanfilippo (14:19.542)
split testing, multiple thumbnails, and you're looking at your retention charts every day and all of these things, then you're probably gonna succeed on YouTube. But for the most podcasters and also like people that are guests, think ask the hosts if you can have permission to post that interview on your own YouTube channel. Like there's not really a downside right now to putting your podcast content on YouTube and also video content on Spotify.
Well said, man. I'm thinking now about this idea of improving your show, right? Whether that is just audio or audio video, whichever side someone decides to focus on, right? And I do think we're going to stay centered around this idea of podcasting, right? Not a YouTube channel, which again is something different. You can have your podcast on YouTube, but it doesn't make you a YouTuber. Still a podcaster first and foremost, right? This idea of improving the show, something that I did recently, this will speak to the guesting side of podcasting, is I started saying no to more people who are going to be on my show.
And it's not because they didn't have a great message, but what I was finding is that they were using just their built-in with their laptop. So built-in microphone, built-in camera, and a lot of them were using virtual backgrounds and they talk with their hands and their hands disappear, right? They have one finger instead of five like they had a minute ago. And because I am focused on both now audio and video, I want it to be, again, I'm not trying to be a YouTube channel, but I do want that if someone's going to watch it, it to still be good to watch and not like what?
what is that thing that keeps on glowing? Oh, it's their water bottle that comes in focus and leaves out of focus, right? Like, and it's disappearing into the virtual background and showing up. And so one way I've improved the show is I now require that my guests have a external microphone, preferably a dynamic microphone, so it's not picking up their neighbor's dog or someone mowing the lawn outside, right? And then also not using virtual backgrounds. And I don't need them to have like a full on studio setup. Like being in your living room is perfectly fine. Obviously move your laundry out of the way or something like that. But do you think that as an interview based host,
is that the right track and should guests also really start considering some of their own gear? So if you're guesting on shows, then 1000 % buy your own gear. I think it is definitely worth it. that I get comments every day on my setup and people are like, wow, you looking sound so good. And I always joke, it's like, you do know, like I do this for a living and they're like, oh yeah, I guess that makes sense. It's like talking to a basketball player, wow, you're really good at shooting threes. It's like, I'm a professional basketball player now.
So I always laugh at that, but I think if you're going to be on shows, like my setup is less than $2,000, which some might say is really expensive. You can go a lot more than that, but I think that it's worth spending a few hundred dollars to start. If you're willing to spend like between a thousand, $1,500, you can get a really good camera. You can get a really good mic. And that is going to really go far for you as a guest, especially if you're talking with the hosts and getting permission to reuse that content.
on your YouTube, on your socials, where you're actually taking that and cutting clips out of it and stuff. On the host side, very similar. Like we tell people, like, if you're not willing to buy a external microphone, then I do not think you should be podcasting. know there's a lot of people there to say you can podcast on your phone. Yes, you can. But I also think like, if I'm not willing to like invest $99 or $63 into a microphone, then there's probably other areas where I'm not willing to commit that are going to impact the show. I will say that
If you're a host, I think what you're doing is great with kind of like asking your guests that I would more worry about what you can control. And I think that listeners have a higher standard for the host than the guest. think like when we're listening to a podcast, we think about it we're like, okay, well, this is Alex's show. like Alex, you can control your own quality. So your quality should be like top-notch. If you have somebody that's a really good guest and their quality is subpar, I think I'm to have more grace for that.
because I know Alex is still bringing, he's initially valuing bringing somebody on the show that is excellent content wise. And then he is controlling what he can control, which is his own quality. So I think it's great to make recommendations, to make asks, like with our clients, like we often send the guests like recommendations of like, okay, cool. Like go buy this microphone. Like, you know, here's some options if you don't have anything. And I think that that's really good to do. And I think we're going to start to see more guests.
doing that and getting their own gear. Seth, your setup is amazing. Thank you. You said you hear that every day. Just in case you hadn't heard it yet today. It's what I do. I wanted to make sure you heard it today. It really is. My gear, by the way, I use USB stuff that plugs straight in my laptop because I'm not much of a tech guy, which everyone kind of laughs at. But I think this, microphone was about $200. Sure, MV7 and I use a Logitech 4K that I think was like $150. Like I'm not much in as far as an investment's concerned.
you can get by with some of this type of gear. And so I love the point you brought there, man. You're right. Listeners have more grace for the guest because if the story's worthwhile, then it's okay. I want to get into the data side of things, which for a moment will cut guests out, but guest, I want to circle back to kind of your role you play in the data and the analytics. What are you seeing as the most important factors to track right now? And I don't want to get too deep in this because
even my eye, I might fall asleep. it'll come back to my, to me and you'll see me asleep on my desk. So, but at a high level, like what is it that we should really be focused on as podcasters? Then we'll kind of talk about how the guests can actually influence and impact that as well. Yeah, I think there's a few things right now in the industry. Like there's a lot of people that are kind of like saying that downloads don't really matter. And I do think it's worth saying like downloads are kind of an, it's incomplete, like it's incomplete data. Like it could mean different things on different platforms. But I do think that looking at downloads,
does, it's really important. Like it's one of the best indicators of our people sharing. it's, people are not going to be sharing your show and downloads not go up. So I think that is something, but I think it's important to look at it in a set timeframe. So like we've started looking with our shows, like locking, kind of like locking data on a spreadsheet after seven days. And so this requires manual work to kind of like go in a little bit. Some platforms will give you the first seven days and that's great. We go in and look at it on different platforms, but
you want to compare within a specific timeframe, how your episodes are doing, because some episodes will pick up over time, which is great. And that shows that episode was good, but it's really hard to know, within the first week, how did this episode do? So I think that's one important thing is look at how your episodes are performing from a downloads perspective within the first seven days. And then the other thing is going to be actually looking at your listeners, like the number of humans that are listening. So for us, like we're going in,
And at least weekly we're initially documenting new, the, many listeners in Spotify and how many listeners in Apple podcasts. So we want to know like how, how big is the group of people that are listening? Because sometimes you might have power users that are listening to everything you do. And then you might have somebody else that's only listening to one episode, but ultimately we all want to see that that group of people is growing. So I think those are some things consumption rate is another one that we'd look at pretty frequently, but I think that's like,
the point of analytics, could talk about analytics all day. The point of analytics is to identify how your audience is behaving and then to figure out, they behaving in a way that is good? If so, keep doing that. Are they behaving in a way that is not as good? If so, stop doing that and change. So we could talk about specific numbers, but I think really looking at how is your content performing compared to your other episodes in a set period of time. And then just looking at is my
audience itself actually growing, that number is more important than downloads. Downloads are important, but your actual audience size and like listeners, I would say is more important. Man, that's good. Listen, everyone who is watching, listening this and you're like, wow, I want to hear more that from Seth. I'm just going to give a call to action here. If you go to businesspodcastroadmap.com, this is where Seth shares all this free stuff. So there, it's not like things for sale. He's going to dive deeper in this type of stuff. I have heard Seth give talks.
strictly on analytics at conferences. So I know he's gonna have this stuff to share on an ongoing basis, which thank you for that, Seth. Some of the most impactful stuff I've ever heard in podcasts, and where I'm like taking notes and everyone is like taking pictures of every single slide, even though there's only like three words on some of them, like, what did you need a picture of that? But anyway, so again, that's businesspodcastroadmap.com. If you're like, man, I wanna hear more of this, go check that out. Obviously finish this conversation first, but Seth, thank you for that free resource for us, man. I really appreciate it.
I want to kind of go in some rapid fire stuff before we end here. And again, that last part, I think is so important, the analytics, the data, like downloads are one thing, because it auto downloads for a lot of people listeners is who's actually like going through listening to it and that consumption. The consumption side is that I think we can kind of dive into this whole thing deeper and do some rapid fire stuff. Some people quit really quick, really fast, right? And my podcast is a great example of that. My show had people leaving in like the first 10 seconds. And I was like, why are people leaving? My podcast is about podcasting and podcasters.
and their guests don't happen to have a lot of time to listen to podcasts. I cut my intro down to three seconds from like 25 or 30 seconds. And what do know? People stayed because it got straight into the meat instead of like the same thing they're used to hearing. Like I listen, you know, I have a podcast. I get it, Alex, right? Just get to it. They were leaving and that kind of stopped it. Shorter intros and outros. What do you think of that, Seth? Is that something that people should consider or is that not really a factor when it comes to consumption? I think it's definitely a factor. I don't think there's one.
one size fits all. think every show should kind of be looking at it. And inside of Apple and inside of Spotify, you can see kind of like second by second your retention and what percentage of people are staying. And so I do think, like, I think you should know what your target retention is 30 seconds into your podcast. Like you should know a benchmark. Maybe it's 80 % for you. Maybe you're like, I want 80 % of my listeners to still be listening 30 seconds in. So then once you like have that baseline, then you can kind of know
man, this episode dropped down to 65. And then you go listen to the episode and then you're like, huh, what'd I do differently? I think the consumption rate is definitely important. think the intro, the intros play a role in that. It's good to just get into the meat. And then I think also it's the packaging. I think a lot of people don't package their episodes correctly. And so like if you titled this conversation, a conversation with Seth Silver's, then you'd probably get like zero views on it or downloads.
wherever it is. Like it probably wouldn't give them attraction partially because I'm not that well known. And then also because when people clicked onto it, if you start talking about the state of podcasting, even if I was well known, let's say I was a celebrity, then people click on it and it's like, wait, they're talking about the state of podcasting. So it's like, you're not fulfilling on the promise. So I think you need to like affirm your packaging in the first 30 seconds of an episode so that people know in their mind, like, okay, I clicked on an episode to listen to this.
And I have confirmation that this is actually what the episode is about. And that's good. And this leads me to a thought I want to share on the guesting side of things. Guests, you've all heard this question. Hey, Seth, welcome. Tell the listeners about yourself. And that's such a hard question. immediately closed his eyes and shook his head. It's such a hard question to answer. And I will acknowledge that. That is not easy for a guest to answer. But it's in the best interest of this idea of retention that you don't go into your full history and you don't go into your credentials.
you answer that as short as you possibly can so that the host can go back and be like, okay, today we're talking about the state of podcasting versus having to wait six minutes to hear your whole backstory to get into that, right? You can kind of do that during the conversation, the interview. And that brings up another question that I have, Seth, have you seen shows, and I know at the high level we definitely have, but you've seen like shows put more of a focus on the idea of having it be narrative driven, even if it is just some sort of.
business interview, let's say, but still something that can kind of coherently grab a listener and kind of want them to go through the whole thing. Like, are you seeing people get better at this or is that an important factor that you found? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah. So yes and no. No, in the sense that like, I don't see a ton of shows that are trying to pull off like a narrative style of a podcast with like multiple segments and voiceovers. Like I think people generally are like, that's a lot of work and I don't have time for that.
Yes. In sense that the shows that are succeeding in that are growing right now are shows that are looking at their content and they're being more specific about what they want out of it and kind of building that into a narrative. So an example is we were just talking with a client yesterday and they have kind of like eight frameworks to success, to like business success. They're very, very experienced in business. So we were talking to them about like,
Let's say you have Alex Sanfilippo on your show. I don't want to hear about all of Alex's business story. I want to hear about Alex like lasering in on like what of those two, what two of the eight frameworks is like Alex pretty proficient in and can he speak really deeply to? And then you build the packaging of the episode around that. And so that means people are going to miss out on a lot of Alex's story, but they're not there for Alex's story. Actually, they're there to learn about how important culture is.
building a company. And Alex can speak to that. So I do think that shows that are succeeding and that are growing are focusing interviews and focusing content to where each episode solves one problem and goes way deeper into one or two things as opposed to being widely covering a ton of things. And that's gold. I think that's a huge takeaway right there. I'm going to share one more thing. I'm to ask for your final thought as well, Seth. Great.
Something that I've been thinking about throughout this conversation is just this idea of the importance of listenership. You've mentioned listener behavior and the whole time that's been in my head of like, really matters is the listener at end of the day. I'm gonna want your final thought that as well, Seth. So start preparing yourself because I didn't tell you in advance. So, but for me, when I think about that, it's about establishing that connection. If you're the guest, the way you establish a connection with the listener is by building some sort of rapport with the host. Use the host name, reference the show title.
If the host uses a pet name for the listeners, use that terminology as well. I've gotten better at this and I'm not trying to say like I'm getting it all right, but as I've learned to do this, I hear from our listeners saying, wow, I really appreciate how you showed up. they reach out and they're like, man, I just really respect the fact that like it felt like you all were friends. Like I felt connected. And then the day guests and hosts, that's the goal, right? To build that connection with listeners and the way that we treat each other in the room with them just kind of hearing it.
is gonna tell us, are these people connected or not, right? And if you're the guest, you kind of have the ability to go even further by connecting with the host, which makes the listener feel welcome as well. And so I've just been thinking about that most of this conversation, but Seth, do have any final thoughts for us today before we end? Yeah, I think I like what you just said. And I think it's really important to, if you're a guest, to know who your audience is on the show you're going in. So ask the host questions. And if you're a host that in your show isn't growing, then the most common thing that we see is that
the host just isn't narrow enough with their audience. They're trying to speak to too many people. So I think it really is all about knowing the audience, but Alex has been great. Thank you so much for having me on. Seth, thank you again, man. I really appreciate you. Absolutely. For more episodes, please visit podmatch.com forward slash episodes. Thank you so much for listening.
