Have you ever hit the podcast charts? Or wondered how they work in the first place? Our guest today, Jeff Umbro, is here to answer all your podcast charting questions. He breaks down exactly what the podcast charts are, how they work, and whether or not we should put much thought into them.

He also shares how to leverage your chart placement and strategic podcast marketing tactics by defining the five tiers of audience development. If one of your goals is to top the podcast charts, you will have a plan to put in place by the end of this episode.

⭐️ Resources Mentioned:

• Muck Rack
• Cision
• Meltwater
• Follow me on Instagram @podcastingforeducators 

🔗 Connect with Jeff: 

• Check out his website
• Listen to his podcast, Podcast Perspectives
• Follow him on Instagram @poglomeratepods

🎤 Recommended Podcasting Resources:

• Hosting: Captivate.fm (Get a free 7-day trial!)
• Transcription: Otter.ai
• Project Management: ClickUp
• Private Podcasting: Hello Audio
• Podcast Playlist Toolkit - use code PODCAST to grab it for $17!
• Launch Your Podcast: Free Podcast Launch Guide & Podcasting for Educators Prep School
• Level Up Your Podcast: Podcast Like You Mean It
• Leverage Podcast Guesting: Guesting for Educators Mini-Course

Show Notes: https://podcastingforeducators.com/episode140

Some links mentioned are affiliate links. This helps to support this podcast at no additional cost to you. 

Topics in this episode: tips for podcasters, educational strategies, marketing tips for TPT sellers, online educator tips

Sara Whittaker 0:00

Hey there and welcome back to another episode of podcasting for educators. Have you ever hit the podcast charts? Or maybe you've wondered exactly how the podcast charts work in the first place? Our guest today, Jeff Umbro is going to answer all of your questions. If one of your goals is to top the podcast charts, you will have a plan to put in place by the end of this episode. Jeff Umbro is the founder and CEO of the pod glommer. It the award winning company which produces distributes and monetize his podcasts. They work with more than 70 podcasts and more than 30 million monthly podcast downloads. The pod glamorous clients have topped the podcast charts and have received features on every major podcast distribution app and national coverage in print, digital radio and television. Today, Jeff breaks down exactly what the podcast charts are, how they work, and whether or not we should put much thought into them. He also shares about some strategic podcast marketing tactics by defining the five tiers of audience development. There's so much great information in this episode, Jeff is a wealth of knowledge. So let's go ahead and get started. Your Podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business. But how do you manage it all bring in new listeners, and convert those listeners into customers. That's what this show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whittaker, classroom teacher turn podcast manager, and I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. Hey, Jeff, welcome to podcasting for educators. Thanks so much for being here.

Jeff 1:39

Hey, Sara, thank you for having me. I'm really excited. Yeah,

Sara Whittaker 1:42

we've been talking a little bit before jumping on and I finally had to push record because we were getting into some good stuff. We're gonna cover a bunch of a bunch of different great things today. But what I'd love to start with is talking about the podcast charts. I think there's a lot of kind of mystery out there, people don't quite understand how they work. There's some not accurate information floating around in the online space. So could we start there? Can you kind of talk us through how exactly the podcast charts work and why it even matters? Like why this metric matters? Yeah, happy

Jeff 2:21

to. So to start, I'll just define who is publishing these charts, and kind of like which ones most people pay attention to. So the big ones are apple, podcasts, Spotify, and then chargable has their own version of this, which is very unique. And in a lot of ways, my favorite. There is also a bunch of other ranking systems like pod track, or Edison Research that will put out, you know, like top podcasts or top podcast networks by scale or volume, and, and those have their own nuances too. And I'm sure I'm leaving out 100 right now. So just to get it out of the way, a lot of the trackers like pod track or Edison Research are actually pulling information only from certain networks or shows that have opted into sharing those metrics. So while they are robust, they don't necessarily reflect the entire ecosystem. Charts, as most people discuss them are very likely in relation to the podcast apps such as Apple, Spotify, etc. Pocket Casts has their version of charts. castbox does. A lot of these are pulling information from like the bespoke systems that people are using on the apps themselves. And a lot of them are actually just pulling the apple podcast charts and using that. I actually haven't looked recently, but historically castbox was just replicating the apple podcast charts. Oh, interesting. Yeah, cuz a lot of people are a lot of the apps are actually and again, this is maybe dated information. But at one point, a lot of the apps were actually using Apple podcast directories as like their point of truth for actually getting all of these RSS feeds onto their platform. So the big one that most people will pay attention to is Apple, which has top charts based on all shows based on the premium subscription feeds, and then based on channels as well. And then also based on specific genres. So these genres are categorized based on like the Apple metadata tags, which if you Google Apple categories, Apple podcasts categories, you can find that, but it's technology, society and culture arts, and they have subcategories, like parenting or education or something like that. But these charts a lot of people think are tracking total audience of a show. They're more tracking, like what's trending in a particular moment in time or the hotness of like a particular show. So as I understand it, an apple is always been a little bit opaque with this, like they haven't published exactly how they come up with these numbers, but a lot of people have been able to figure this out. through a lot of trial and error, Apple podcast charts are measuring the number of net new listeners, subscribers and followers within a certain window of time, they also are taking some version of like the number of new downloads, but that's a much, much tinier fraction of what they're weighing into that that equation. So for example, if you launch a brand new show in like the education space today, and you get 10,000, net new, unique IP addresses that will download an episode of that show, or follow it or subscribe or share this on social or whatever, you are probably going to rank very high within that category. And frankly, within like the entire ecosystem, it really does not take very much to get to the top of those charts, especially if you're looking at category specific and a lot of these categories are going to be more or less competitive than others based on like, how popular they are. But for Apple, specifically, you are really competing against the number of net new listeners, subscribers, followers, etc, as opposed to the total number of downloads. So x net new show can very easily rank with like the Joe well, not the Joe Rogan's, but can very easily rank for like now their level. It could very easy and also not on Apple, but it can very easy. Yeah, it can very easily rank with some of the top shows as long as you're bringing in like a new user base, which is actually really funny because a lot of organizations that we work with at the PUC Lammert will have, like a big email newsletter, or a website that gets a lot of traffic or big social platforms, in sometimes all it takes is that they share the show out on these platforms in kind of a concerted manner in order to drive all of that traffic within that window of time in order to hit those chart rankings. We're getting very wonky here. So I'll take it all.

Sara Whittaker 6:53

Yeah, no, you're making total sense. And this is this is aligned with what I see. Like usually when we launch, a client will always see them chart in that launch period, because that's when they're doing that like really big initial push. Like sometimes we'll put out a trailer for somebody before their official launch date, and just their trailers out, but they're hitting those charts because people are going ahead and following or subscribing and you hit just such an important point. I hear people all the time, say like, it's the downloads or it's the reviews that you get. But really those, those two things do not factor into charting, the downloads

Jeff 7:31

are very helpful, just in terms of like kind of finding out where you might fall in, in tandem with like the other shows that are out there. And the reviews are great as like social proof that people are listening. But you are correct. As far as I'm aware, they do not impact the chart rankings whatsoever. Spotify is funny, it's kind of like the second largest chart, and they are meant they have their own like very wonky algorithm to measure based on listenership subscriptions followers. But as far as I'm aware, one of the biggest factors that go into the chart rankings on Spotify is actually the number of people who are searching for your show on the

Sara Whittaker 8:16

app. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Jeff 8:18

So they actually over indexed on people who go in and like type in the name of the show in the search bar, because they are showing that like, that's being talked about elsewhere. Sure. Yeah.

Sara Whittaker 8:30

I mean, I guess that makes sense. I've never heard that before. That's so interesting. Yeah,

Jeff 8:34

that one's a surprising one. I don't actually know if I'm even supposed to share somebody at Spotify have mentioned that to me years ago. You're gonna

Sara Whittaker 8:41

have podcasters over there for the next like, hour just searching? Yeah.

Jeff 8:46

Well, it's five. I've actually thought about that a lot. Because there's a there was a thing years ago with pardon my take, which is a Barstool Sports Show, where they used to tell all of their listeners to unsubscribe to the show, and then re subscribe, which, in lieu of this new iOS 17 update is even funnier to me. Because now it's like if you dive into the and I don't want to go down too far of a rabbit hole. But apparently, historically, if somebody unsubscribed and re subscribe to a show, or got like a new iPhone or something, and like, opened up Apple podcasts, it would actually go back and redownload every episode of the show that they had not listened to in between those two windows of time. So I think it was actually triggering just like a very substantial amount of new downloads. Oh my gosh, but no, I think there's a lot of like, really weird, quirky things that are happening there. But in terms of why people should care about these charts, my honest answer is that that you shouldn't, but I'm

Sara Whittaker 9:46

glad that you say that because that's kind of always been my take like yeah, it's super cool to see that you've had the charts but because I'm sorry to interrupt but to like backtrack a little bit because you you meant And you know that it's that window of time that people are searching for your show or or an influx of people are following or subscribing to you? How because the charts do like in a given day change, do they change? Several times? Right? Yeah, it

depends on the app, they're all a little bit unique in terms of how they update it. I believe in this one, I actually am a tiny bit unsure of I believe the apple updates hourly. And there's some apps. It's funny too, because if you go to chart Apple's website, which also takes the apple data is every like, it's two or three times a day. I'm sure it has something to do with like, cost of compute or something. But But I believe Apple updates their charts hourly. Okay.

Yeah. Which is just interesting to me, because, you know, you see people who put, like, in their bio, top 10, on the charts in whatever category. And I always wonder, like, are you charting consistently in that category was it one time, you know, so that, I mean, to me, it is a little bit of a vanity metric

100% in there are like a lot of really good ways to use that to your advantage. So when I say that, like, you shouldn't care about that, like, it doesn't, I guess what I mean by that is that it doesn't actually mean that you're getting tons of downloads or listeners or anything like that, it is very much a vanity metric. And it's very cool to be able to like put in your press release, or social bio or something, top cooking podcast. But it doesn't actually, like when you get right below the surface, it doesn't mean anything, I actually have a friend who has a cooking podcast that hit number one, like three years ago, because of one of these big concerted efforts. And to this day, this person still uses that and like all of their press releases, and bios and everything and, and you know, there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, this is a metric that will allow you to kind of leapfrog into the next thing, and you know, book a bigger guest, because you're able to show that you have social validation of like a high charter or anything or pitch a cool media opportunity or something like that. But it doesn't have any impact on your downloads with the one caveat that if you are like a top 10 show on Apple podcasts, or Spotify, or, or any, like big platform, you very likely are more visible as a show. So it does snowball a little bit. Because you've been able to hit that like really high placement on those charts, you're gonna be seen and get more impressions from other people who are looking at those charts, who may then go and test out your show. But you know, that's a lot of ifs.

Yeah, totally. Well, I think you brought up some great points about how you like when you do hit the charts, there are ways that you can leverage that long term through things like the press releases, and your bio, put it on your website, all kinds of things, which I think is really smart. Can I ask you a follow up? Question,

please?

What do you have a take on? Like, when you're thinking about how these charts are grouped by categories? Do you have a take on whether or not somebody should list like their primary category as a main category or subcategory?

It very much depends on what kind of show you're publishing. So funny that you asked me this. Because in a prior life, I was a book publicist, and people used to ask this question about the Amazon charts all the time. It's way easier to chart as like a podiatry book or something as opposed to like a true crime book. So if you want to game the system, and like, take the most obscure subcategory, you can find them become like, you know, a number one chart topping podcast in that way, then like, yes, that's a great thing to do. And you should look into that. And at the same time, it's also like, not really fair how it works, because if you have like, society and culture show, you're competing as half of NPR, whereas if you have like a, there's a category for pets, like I can't imagine that there are tons of those being published every day. So it really I guess my answer to your question is, it depends on what your goals are. Like, if you want to rank much higher in a smaller category, like do that. But it goes back to like, why you want to rank and like what you think that's going to achieve for you.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Like don't, don't tie yourself up and oh, if I'm not on the charts, then like, my podcast isn't successful. There's not that direct correlation. I think a lot of times, especially in the like online business, entrepreneurial space, people who launch business podcasts, like it's maybe not the best decision to put yourself in that main business category, because there's gonna be a lot of competition.

Well, and there's also the idea that you can change categories whenever you want. So you can launch is like a personal news category or something and like you can then change it later to business or society and culture, or something that's a little bit more competitive and If I do that, actually all the time, but some of our shows like just because over time a show changes. So it might actually, at some point be a better fit for a different category. Yeah,

great advice. And you win. If you do decide that you want to kind of experiment with categories, you just change that inside of your host. Right?

Yeah. We host most of our shows on megaphone. So that's where we do it. But every hosting platform has that capacity. Yeah. I'm sorry. has that capability? Yeah.

Okay, awesome. So that I feel like that clears a lot of stuff up about the podcast charts, in general, how they work, why they might matter, not so much, maybe, maybe now you can kind of breathe a sigh of relief that you don't have to put so much emphasis on the charts, I

will say in pod glomer. Its press releases and for like, shows where it's applicable. We do say chart topping podcast. Yeah. And like, I'll use that forever. But it's the same deal where it's like, you get a review in a blog somewhere, you can call it critically acclaimed, savvy people are gonna see right through that. It doesn't make it less true. But you just want to look at the lens in which you're trying to place it.

Yeah. Oh, 100%. I have in my bio in multiple places I have that I work with clients who have chart topping podcasts? Because they do and they did at some point. And I mean, use that to your advantage for sure. 100%. Okay, so let's jump into you talk about these five tiers of audience development, and how that can kind of lead to unlocking an apple feature. So can you talk us through that?

Yeah. 100%. So, at the PUC lahmar, we've kind of developed this idea of like a five tier audience development solution. There's no one size fits all approach, every campaign that we run is a little bit unique. This is just a framework in which it makes it easier for us to understand what we're trying to do. So those five tiers are publicity, marketing, cross promotion, pitching the podcasting apps, and paid acquisition. So we're often working with clients that have big budgets, you don't have to do any or all of the things that I'm about to say these are all just ideas. And you can do free versions of all of these things. So just keep that in mind. Take everything with a grain of salt. But publicity is the idea of organically getting yourself your show your topic featured in online outlets or elsewhere. So we will craft a press kit, which will include what we call a synopsis document. So essentially, it's the who, what, where, why, and when of the show. It'll include all of those fun accolades, like critically acclaimed and chart topping in a big picture of the podcast. And don't get too clever with it. This is literally a document to show people like the information that they will need if they're going to cover the show. So make sure you say like, is this free? Where is this available? When do you publish episodes? What is the show about? Who are you? And why should people pay attention to you saying these things. So getting too clever is always the enemy of doing this stuff? Well, so we'll draft sometimes like a fake q&a, a list of talking points, synopsis documents, pitch documents. So with the end goal of getting the show or talent featured in reviews, features, interviews, lists of shows surrounding certain topics, etc. And then we will build what we call a media pipeline, which is a big fancy spreadsheet. So we will literally go in and create a list of like all of the podcasts that are really similar to what we're producing all of the outlets that might be interested in writing about that podcast. So there's the podcast media, there's the education media, there's the media relevant to the specific type of content that you're talking about. So if it's a cooking show, then you can have cooking media, local media, relevant to the hosts of the show, podcast media subreddits, newsletters that cover cooking, or food or recipes or arts and entertainment. And we really like make robust documents, you don't have to, some of you may have existing relationships. Some of you may not, you know, it's 2024 is not very hard to find an email address if you need to. If you do have the budget, we use a system called MK RAC am UC Krack. It's a publicity database. So if we pop if we type in someone's name, it'll give us their contact info. There's also session and meltwater. These can be expensive. I think we pay about $5,000 a year for my crack. So keep that in mind. There are cheaper versions, they might not be as good. Or you can just go on somebody's Twitter bio and half the time you'll see an email address. But you

want to like be hard to find sometimes those email addresses. They

can be very hard to find, but I'm willing To bet that you can find 40 to 50% of them guaranteed on people's websites or Twitter BIOS or whatever, not perfect, but if you need a low cost solution, it works. And you want to then take like the pitch documents in the synopsis and send them to the people on this list. And you want to think really hard about like, what the recipient is going to experience when you send them this, you know, if I have a cooking podcast that interviews famous chefs or something, then there may be somebody eat or curbed or something like that, who might be interested in covering the launch of the show, because of what these like big celebrities are saying on the show, or whatever the conceit of the podcast is, or that kind of thing. But if I'm just saying like, Hey, I have this cool thing, you guys want to listen to it, like most people are gonna ignore that everybody's busy, they all have stuff going on. So you want to really think about their experience. There's a million I won't go into like the nitty gritty, but there's a million different philosophies on like, how you should pitch people in what kind of pitch letters you should write? And should it be 50 words or 500 words? Or should you link to certain things or send embargoed audio? And, and all of that's available online? If you want to check it out? Just Google like how do I pitch XY or z. So that's the publicity bucket. And to be very blunt, like, unless you're getting featured in like the New York Times, or something, most of these PR hits are not going to drive a ton of traffic back to your podcast. But what they will do is allow you to put in that press release or email to Apple or whatever, whoever you're pitching, and say like, Hey, I was just featured in Gawker, or sorry, that one doesn't exist anymore. But like, Hey, I was just featured in Forbes or something. And it just adds a little bit more legitimacy. And it will drive downloads, if it's like the right fit. second bucket is marketing, which I know is a big term, the way that we consider that is your owned and operated media. So social media, Website, Email, newsletter, live events, apps, etc. There's the idea of just like taking the existing audience that you have, and like driving them towards this new property that you're launching. And maybe you have other audio properties, too, that should be considered as well. So putting in your newsletter, that you're launching this thing and trying to incentivize people to go and check it out. You can use stuff like charitable or pod sites to track attribution on these things. So you can actually see how many people are clicking and downloading the show. There's a lot of layers to like, how you might want to consider doing that. But it's the same idea. It's like you want to think about what your audience is going to experience when you send this stuff out. Maybe you have like friends or colleagues or professional acquaintances that have newsletters or big social followings or something and you can like work out a way for them to feature your show, through bartering or something like that. There's a lot of different avenues that you can take here. cross promotion, there are three big buckets for cross promos one is guesting on another show, two is running audio promos for one show on another. And three is ad of a feed drop where you publish an episode of a podcast on another podcast. Again, it all really depends on like, what the alignment is between those shows, to really determine like what's going to be effective. We have internal static agglomerate, where it's like anything above point 1% conversion rate is good. Charitable has internal benchmarks based on genre that you can look up their public that has numbers that are very different charitable has benchmarks will include cross promo data from like pre roll, mid roll, post roll feed drops, guest opportunities, etc, all combined, so they don't break it out into one. So those numbers are usually a little bit inflated in my mind. But like I've seen conversion rates as high as like 19% and as low as like point 00 0%. So in the way that like charitable works is like prefix and pixel tracking, which I would love to get into. But I'm sure that it would be a little too boring for your audience right now. But you can Google that and find out if you're interested. But the idea is essentially like the easiest way to find listeners of your podcast is going to be by finding people who are already listening to podcasts. And however you can get in front of them. You should do that fourth bucket I'll start with just paid acquisition. So if you have money to spend to promote the show, you can buy ads within podcasting apps, on other podcasts for audios, promos, social media, display ads, email newsletters, and then there's a whole slew of other apps that have like growth opportunities like pod roll or intro cast or mo pod or something, in my opinion, and I have some data to back this up buying ads within podcasting apps, so castbox player, FM, podcasts, Republic, podcast addict Pocket Casts, overcast etc. Several of these are self serve and you can find out from just Googling some of them you should just email them a contact page at the website, you can pay for placement within the app to grow the show. And traditionally, you'll get like a lot of scale from doing this. Not necessarily always a lot of retention. That's gonna it's gonna be my question. Yeah, it totally depends on like, honestly, what show you're promoting, this show is gonna have a much more niche audience than This American Life. Right. So like, it truly depends on a million variables. But ways in which you can look to improving the conversion rates on this is by reviewing like, what you're promoting via the art, the context, the title, the topic, like what episodes you've recently published, the timing of when you're doing this, you know, maybe doing a cooking show promo in November is going to perform a lot better than July. So there's a lot of factors there. Audio is usually less good at scale, but a lot better at like a retentive audience. But again, all of this is really going to depend on how you're like kind of presenting the show and what kind of promo you're doing. The fifth bucket is what I call it retailer merchandising, but it's essentially pitching the podcasting apps. I call it merchandising, because if you work in a bookstore, or any retail outlet, merchandising is what they call it when you like display something on the front table. So if you go into Barnes and Noble, or any random bookstore, you'll see like they have a whole window display of like the new releases. That's what all of these podcasting apps are doing. So Apple Spotify Pocket Casts, castbox Tune in Deezer, geo sovereign, Amazon music, Sirius XM, many, many others. They all have some version of like a featured section of their app, explore, discover featured, you can and should. If you're trying to pitch these apps, download the apps, they're all free, and like, see and experience what they're serving to people, and determine if there's anywhere that your show would be a particular fit. So if you have a fantasy baseball podcast, and it's April, and Apple is doing a collection on fantasy baseball podcasts, then you can send an email to Apple support, or whomever they actually have a self serve submission platform that

you can. There's like a form that you can fill out for Apple, right? Yeah, yep,

that's exactly right. And if you have a great show with good art, and good titling, and metadata, and the audio is great, then they will consider featuring the show in these collections or in their carousel or new and noteworthy or something like that. The same thing applies for Spotify for Pocket Casts. And for most of the apps, I'm not naive, I know that like I do this every day and have like more relationships within the industry than most. But this is all publicly available if you Google enough, and you can make these connections and, and I can tell you that this community of people in podcasting, they love to help out others and and be of assistance and everything. But the one message that I do, you know want to say is, I often will get people who send me notes like with kind of an expectation of me helping them and like not doing like any of the legwork or anything like that, in you should not do that when it comes to pitching a show to like one of these podcast apps or something like that. You should present them with what your ask is why you're asking why you are the best fit for the result of that ask. So if you're pitching that fantasy baseball podcast, like have a nice little package that says, I'm the coach of my high school baseball team, I've been watching this sport for 30 years, we have guests from all the minor league teams around in the area, where they talk about, like the status of what they think is gonna happen with the Red Sox is here. It's kind of a terrible pitch. But you get the idea.

Yeah, you want to prove why you should be featured. And

yeah, what your credentials are like, hand them like artwork and audio. And don't make them ask for it. Make it easy for them. Yeah, exactly. So in a nutshell, that's the five tiers of audience development. And in terms of unlocking like an apple features, specifically, you should just do your research and like look at the app and see what kind of stuff they're featuring, often they're doing these things like annually, they will always have an Earth Day collection, they will always have a Black History Month collection, they will always have National Park Week, they will always have some kind of sports section for the Super Bowl for the baseball playoffs for whatever. So you can kind of get a sense of like what they're going to anticipate and you can like make it easy for them and say, you know, hey, I'm a female podcast host and I know you're going to do a Women's History Month collection, like would you consider my podcast? Because they're already doing this work. So if you can make it easier for them to do it better than like, it's probably going to be pretty effective.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. So you really have To be kind of thinking long term here thinking ahead before you're putting your pitch in. So Are most of these podcasts that are in these featured sections? Are they there because they have pitch themselves or because Apple or whoever is finding them and putting them in there? Or is it a mix, it's

a mix, I'd say it probably skews a little bit more towards like shows that have been pitched. Not necessarily by the individuals behind the shows. But a lot of these shows are part of like networks or publishers, or that kind of thing. Apple will find on its own certain shows and surface some based on what they think is going to be really appealing for their audience. But I'd say like, it is kind of a guest. But I'd say like 70 to 80% of the shows that are featured on Apple are probably pitched. Apple also unveiled their like premium subscription option A few years ago. So you can actually put like bonus content or add free content behind a paywall on the platform. And they have been known to over index on shows that are using that feature. Oh, that makes sense. So it's, I don't know, it's kind of fun, though. It's like a little bit of a maze to navigate, we did a show called missing pages last year. And we were able to not only get a big feature on Apple, which was based off of just like years of us like building relationships there. But also, Apple books did a big feature on the show, because it was kind of content that aligned with both. So that was very cool. And like that was an idea that I had that I pitched to them. And so like they like it when you get creative. Yeah,

you gotta get up think outside of the box with your pitches. So when you've had when you've had shows be featured. Do you see a influx of new followers do downloads like you see that ripple effect?

Without a doubt? Yes. How big of an effect there is, is going to entirely depend on what the feature is. The quality of the show the artwork, the title? Are they giving you a carousel position? Is it the first carousel? Or is it the fifth? Are you getting like the first new and noteworthy or top trailers? Or is it a collection that you're like the 10th show in or something, you will see a spike no matter what but like, if you're a show that has 10 downloads, you're going to notice it a lot more than if you're a show that has 10,000. So I have seen these features reflect like 10s of 1000s of new listeners to a show. I've seen these features reflect like dozens of new listeners to a show.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like with all of this, you have to just kind of be willing to experiment and see what pays off and what doesn't, because everybody's show is so unique and your audiences are unique to you. Can I ask a couple follow ups about some of those things that you went over?

Please do?

I'm wondering when you do because I I totally agree with you about in terms of expanding your podcast audience like getting in front of other people who are already listening to podcasts? Is such a smart way to do it and a low investment, often way to do it. Do you have an opinion on like, if you're going to do a cross promo with another podcast or you, you get together and you say I'm going to promo your show on my podcast and vice versa? Do you find it more effective? Like if somebody is just going to do kind of a shout out of another show? Do you find it more effective to share about the podcast as a whole or talk about a specific episode?

There's two ways to answer that. The most effective way to cross promote a show if you're doing an audio swap is going to be generally speaking will be a mid roll promotion, there is evidence to show that a pre and mid roll combo will actually be the most effective. But like there's a lot of nuance to all of that. It depends on like how people are tracking those impressions, which is going to really just differ based on the hosting platform. And the tracking solution that people are using. Host red is a much better listening experience and converts much better than a producer red spot. When it comes to promoting a specific episode versus a show as a whole. I think it depends on what kind of show you're promoting. When we have done that historically, we have had a lot of success when we're doing episode specific promotions. And and I even was listening to how I built this the other day. And they did a really clever thing where they actually had listeners call in to talk about their favorite episode. Yeah,

I've seen people do that. That's what I've seen a lot more. I've heard a lot more people recently calling out specific episodes, which is why I asked because I thought it was kind of cool and interesting. And it is kind of nice that they're pointing you to like a very specific topic to listen to. Yeah. So

I like to think of it from a data point of view and from a like content editorial point of view. And from a data point of view, it is is definitely more effective to do a very specific curated mention of an episode, as long as it actually is good and fits the bill. And on the editorial side, it is a much larger lift to do that. And the difference in conversion rate does not necessarily equate to the amount of time that you're going to put into that.

Yeah, that makes sense. For paid acquisition, because I've never, I've never really experienced with or experimented with paying the different apps to, to have ads for your podcast is there like a general ballpark of what people typically spend in like, let's say a week, when they do something like that? Yeah,

it's so it's less about a point of time in which you spend it, you can do it like, if you're doing like a pay per click ad on Facebook, or Instagram or something, you can say like 10 bucks a day, or 50 bucks a day, or whatever it is, many of the promotions that I would recommend that people do either in app or audio, it's generally like you're paying an invoice. So you kind of know, like, you're going to spend X dollars for this campaign as a whole. And it's a project fee as opposed to like a daily spend. So it really breaks down to like what your goals are. Very loosely, what I would usually mentioned to a client is that a good conversion rate is below $10. A very good conversion rate is below $7. And a great conversion rate is below $3. And that is conversion rate being cost per subscriber. So you can do the math on that, like, if you're running a really amazing campaign and you spend $1,000, you'll get like 300 and change new subscribers. There's a lot of variables that go into like the churn of listenership, and like when you're doing this, and how effective it is, and what copier using an art and that kind of thing. But generally, those are kind of the numbers that I would look at. And I usually would recommend that a client starts at around $10,000. If they're going to do this, I've had clients spend north of $500,000. But it really goes back to like, what means Do you have what are your goals? How does that align? You know, if somebody has $1,000 to spend on the podcast, I might suggest that they put that towards like updating their cover art or like buying a better microphone or something. And that might be a lot more effective than buying a paid ad.

Yeah, great point. Yeah, improve those little things that will actually keep your current listeners around and have them hopefully recommend you to other people, too. Yep. Awesome. Well, I feel like we've covered a lot. Is there anything that you hoped that we touched on that we haven't? Know?

I mean, I love talking about this stuff, I can keep going for days. And it gets me in trouble. I still am happy to come back and talk about anything if you ever want to. But yeah, for sure. I'd love to have you back on? Yeah. But in general, I don't know these things change so frequently, like every day, there's something new out there. So it's really about just paying attention and staying abreast of like what's happening in the podcast world, listening to this show, going to read the newsletters, like pod news or hot pod. And the people in this industry are very good at sharing this information. And if you just do some Googling and like know where to look, then you're probably going to be able to access most or all of like what you're looking for

here. So right things are changing so frequently. And I always say like, there's just all the different apps are different, like nothing is truly consistent among listening apps, podcasts hosts all of that. So you do have to kind of stay up to date on things. Well, Jeff, where can people find you online after listening today?

Yeah, I'm at Jeff Umbro, je FF un BRL on, I think all the apps, LinkedIn, Twitter, I'm on Instagram, but I don't really use it. And then pod glamour.com pod jello M er a te. I don't know when you're publishing this, but like we're a couple of weeks away at this moment from launching a new website. And that website will include a bunch of resources for people who are looking to learn about all of this stuff. And then I'll get in trouble if I don't mention this. But I also have a podcast, of course, called podcast perspectives, where I interview executives in the podcast industry about, like, what the future holds, and what kinds of things we should be paying attention to. And you can find that on all the different apps, including YouTube, so check it out if you're interested. Perfect.

Thank you so much. And we'll link all of those things. In the show notes. I'm glad you mentioned your podcast. I always forget to do that. Even though I tell all of our clients like when you guests on other podcasts, make sure they make sure that you say that at the end, but sometimes we forget so thank you so much. for being here, Jeff.

Yeah. Thanks again for having me.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. To keep this conversation going connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support and launching, managing or growing your podcast, check out my online course the podcasting for educators prep school at podcasting for educators.com/prep school. I'll see you here next time.