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Begging your listeners to tell others about your
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podcast will only get you so far.
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Getting more people to do it starts by understanding what people love about
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your podcast and why they keep listening.
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Today's episode is brought to you by the Advancing Podcasting
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community at advancingpodcasting.xyz.
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Because why would I do anything normal?
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It's a special community just for listeners and readers of
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Podcast Pontifications and it's populated by like-minded working
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podcasters just like you who also want to make podcasting better.
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You're already listening to the show.
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So why not extend the conversation and your influence
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on the future of podcasting?
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Join us today at advancingpodcasting.xyz.
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Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.
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Think about the things you recommend to people - like TV shows.
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I'll go first.
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Mine is Ted Lasso.
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I recommend that to everybody all the time.
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How about books?
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I highly recommend The Three-Body Problem by Liu Chixin.
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I'll put a link to that in the show notes.
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And for podcasts, I'll go with My Dad Wrote a Porno.
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I recommend that quite a lot to people.
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Now, of course, these aren't the only properties I'm aware of.
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I watch a fair amount of television programming, and I subscribe to,
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I think, every streaming service.
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I read almost every single day, or at least in the evenings.
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And yeah, I listen to a whole lot of podcasts.
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Now, also, I only watch/read/listen to things that I find genuinely interesting.
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However, if I'm being honest, it's only a few that I'll proselytize for.
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Only a very few have hit that "recommendability" level that Tom
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Webster spoke of at Podcast Movement '21 last week, and forms the basis of this
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week's Podcast Pontifications episodes.
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Here's what Tom said on his final-ish slide about recommendability.
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There was a bullet point, and the first one was to increase the recommendability
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of your show, you must know who you are for and why they are there because you
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can't give your listeners the unexpected, if you don't know what they expect.
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There's a lot to unpack there, and that's what we're going to
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unpack today on the episode.
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So let's just take it in stages.
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"Know who you are for."
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Not who you are, and not who your audience is in two separate groups.
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These two things go together.
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It's the Venn diagram of the overlapping between who you are and
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what your audience is there for.
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Now, there's a very good chance you listen to Podcast
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Pontifications because of, well, me.
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But that in and of itself is not enough, and here's proof.
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There is a very good chance that you have never listened to a single episode of The
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Bangkok Podcast, which I was the co-host of for seventy episodes a few years back.
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Even though Bangkok is one of the top destinations in the world, you
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probably didn't listen to that show.
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It's also unlikely that you've listened to the audiobook as podcast that I
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wrote and produced a decade ago on the topic of writing awesome book blurbs.
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It's good.
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People need to know this, but you probably haven't listened to it.
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Look, I know you know who I am, and now you know those exist, but
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neither of them are likely for you.
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You know they're out there, but they're not for you, so that's
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why you don't listen to them.
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And that's okay.
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Let's break down the next part, which is "why they are there."
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So yes, people are there for you.
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Your listeners are there for you, but as I just established, that's not enough.
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It's not enough.
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And yes, of course, they are there for your content, the content you
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make, and you put blood, sweat, and tears into all the time.
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You're here because you enjoy the fact that I'm talking about things that only
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are interesting to podcasters like you.
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But honestly, I don't know your motivations much beyond that.
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What I do know, I actually just infer.
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I infer from looking at consumption data on the episodes themselves, like
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at Apple Podcasts and Spotify and Google Podcasts provide that for us.
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And yes, I actually do look at those reports.
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And frankly, not as much as I should, obviously.
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So maybe, speaking to that, maybe a breakdown at some point of how to read
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those and what you can infer from them might be a good thing to talk about.
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I'll stick a pin in that and come back to it later.
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I also infer a lot of information about why people are here because
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I'm looking at information from the Advancing Podcasting community.
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Sometimes some people will give me direct feedback on Twitter.
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I can look at the shows of the people who support me on BuyMeACoffee.com/EvoTerra
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and make some inferences.
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But honestly, I need more than that.
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You need more than that if that's all you know as well.
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Going back to Tom Webster who inspired these sessions I'm doing today.
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Now, Tom knows how to understand what consumers want.
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It's his profession.
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But it's not my profession.
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And it probably isn't your profession.
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So Tom has gifted us, the podcasting community, a way to learn more about what
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it is and why our audience is there, less about them, more about why they're there.
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He's gifted us that in the form of a survey that we can easily
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implement and ask our listeners.
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Again, it goes well beyond demographics, gets down to the motivation
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of why your listeners listen.
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I have a link to that survey in the episode details/notes, and I'm
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going to implement it on my own.
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I don't know that I'll get it done today, but I will try.
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I will let you know as soon as you can go, give me lots of information about you.
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But let's move on to the long bit at the end, when it says, "You can't
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give your listeners the unexpected, if you don't know what they expect."
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I'm already running short on time, so I've decided to shove
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all that into one big chunk.
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To me, this is summed up in a theme I've learned across the thirty-some-odd
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years I've been in business, and that is surprise and delight your customer.
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Not surprise or delight.
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Surprise and delight.
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Not all surprises are good.
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In fact, some surprises are downright bad.
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If we're lucky, when we surprise someone they're tolerated, but
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it's very hard to make a surprise that really delights the customers.
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And it's really hard just to delight the customer when you're
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not surprising them on occasion.
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That's why you're at this plateau with your podcast growth.
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You've reached consistency.
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Good for you, your audience loves what you do, and they're going to stick around.
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That will retain your audience.
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But very few people in your audience are going to be
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excited because of consistency.
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And it's an even smaller set that think consistency is something worth sharing.
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So putting that whole thing together once again - let me just read Tom's words.
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I'm getting it mixed up.
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"Know who you are for and why they are there.
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You can't give your listeners the unexpected, if you don't
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know what they expect."
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That's what you're going for.
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Now tomorrow, we're going to get to the second part of his recommendedability
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suggestions, and that was ensuring your show is easy to recommend.
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Chances are, there are some improvements you can make on making
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your show more recommendable.
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We're going to dig into those tomorrow.
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If you got value out of what I'm talking about so far on this episode, and
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everything else that I do for you here on Podcast Pontifications four days a
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week, please return some of that value by going to BuyMeACoffee.com/evoterra.
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I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.
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Cheers!
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Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra.
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He's on a mission to make podcasting better.
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Links to everything mentioned in today's episode are in the notes
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section of your podcast listening app.
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A written-to-be-read article based on today's episode is available at
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podcastpontifications.com where you'll also find a video version and a corrected
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transcript, both created by Allie Press.
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Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media.
