Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Okay.
Speaker 1 00:00:05 As podcasters, we have a burning desire to create something unique. Something that separates us from the other 2 million shows available to listeners side note, it might not really be 2 million shows. Pod news recently reported that it might be along the lines of 888,000. Still. That's a lot. What if I told you that the unique fingerprint on your show, isn't always the content or the sound design? No, there are more ingredients than just that, like your favorite home cooked meal preparation of the ingredients can add a flare that makes it yours. It's yours uniquely aside from getting hungry. What does this have to do with today's guest? Not only does Evo Terra host of podcast, pontifications Dawn of the title 40th podcast ever published. He's a master chef at preparing shows. I've invited him to share the rare secret ingredients to encourage us to cook up some of the tastiest podcast episodes we can produce. You're listening to the audience, podcast, your home to stories and lessons for podcasters, looking to take their show to the next level. For people just getting started with podcasting to brands and celebrities monetizing their audio experience. The audience podcast has it all. Never missed another show by subscribing at castles.com/subscribe that's cast dose.com.
Speaker 0 00:01:16 Subscribe.
Speaker 1 00:01:19 Welcome back to the audience podcast as always your host Matt today joined by special guest Evo, Terra, Evo. Welcome to the program. Thanks Matt. Appreciate you having me on, I am going to put all the cards out there. I have only recently come across. You I'd say that within the last 60 to 75 days, you could probably check your email stats on when you saw Matt at <inaudible> dot com subscribe to your email list, but I've just been consuming every word, every audio bite that you have put out. There's a Jack Nicholson GIF of him smiling, nodding his head up and down that gets passed around the world. That's me every time I'm like, yeah, this guy knows exactly what I'm thinking. And you put out a recent email titled the subject was willed the race for podcasting's profit drive our dystopia. And I want to dive into some of that stuff today, but real quick for folks who don't know who you are, who are you and what do you do?
Speaker 0 00:02:13 Yeah. So my name again is you said is Evo Tara. I have been podcasting like since the beginning of podcasting time I had the 40th podcast ever. So that goes back a long, long, long ways. Uh, I wrote podcasting for dummies and have been involved in the space for a very long time. These days I do run a boutique podcast consultancy here in Phoenix, Arizona called simpler media. But what I'm most known for nowadays is podcast. Pontifications the show's last website slash newsletter that I do four days a week, every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, that talks about the future of podcasting and ask questions that every working podcast or should be asking themselves, like the raise towards this, just open your future, which I couldn't sleep one night because it just kept in my head here at West.
Speaker 1 00:02:57 Yeah, we'll add that link to the show notes. So if you also want to lose some sleep, definitely check out this article and we're going to expand upon it today, but I'm interested in the cobbler's house here. The, uh, or the cobbler shoes, it's the painter's house. That's never painted as the cobbler's shoes that are never going to live somewhere. One of the things that's fascinating and I really appreciate, and what you do is you and correct me if I'm wrong, you live stream the prerecording of your show filled with all the errors, the ums and AHS, and you're clearing your throat and you're getting this going and you record. And then I watch it. And then an hour later, it's in my inbox. Can you just give us that brief overview of, of that approach and, and what that means for you as a creator?
Speaker 0 00:03:37 Yeah, so I don't recommend it first and foremost, this is, this is not the wisest way to do things, but when I started doing podcast pontifications gosh, I think I just, today was episode 419 that I released. And, uh, so it's, it's been a long time when I first started doing it. You know, it's not my first foray into podcasting. Obviously I started as simply a live video show because I was trying to talk to people in the business space who might be thinking about podcasting, but certainly aren't consuming podcasts to learn about podcasting and that's how the whole thing began. But then that morphed into some more things. I got them more future thinking about it, you know, which is really where my head kind of goes to most of these days. And so I started doing some just regular monologue shows and they were just boring.
Speaker 0 00:04:23 They just weren't good. So I get turned on if you will, or I turn on perhaps as a, as a less sexual way to say that, uh, when I am on stage, when people are watching what I do. And so having a little video camera in front of me, whether one person or three people, and that's usually never more than that, one of the people are watching me live when I do this at seven o'clock in the morning. That really makes me better as opposed to just staring into the ether, if you will, or staring at a beige wall and trying to do it once again. So yeah, so I do that and then I would love to get to an hour, but it's really, I'm closer about three hours later is when it actually shows up everywhere because I take the finalized video and that's just the, you know, you've watched the show.
Speaker 0 00:05:01 So you know, that I rant and ramble and just kind of get my throat clear for a minute or two. And then I do the show itself. And then I, I cut just the show part out. And that's what becomes the podcast episode, a little bit of editing, but I also give it over to my production assistant. She's my, my audio, my video producer as well. And she makes the video look nice and neat. And then I spend the next two hours basically rewriting every single word that I said during the podcast into that newsletter, that email that gets sent out. And that article that goes on my webpage. That's what takes most of the time, because while all the things I said out loud were good, when they were said out loud, they don't read that well, you know, we speak differently than we write. And I'm a writer. And I it's important for me that my words read as smartly as I wanted them to say. And while I do make a full transcript available, it's just not as good as the written word, if you want to consume it that way. So that's why I do what I do. It's takes about three and a half to four hours, every single to put out one 10 minute episode, but it's a lot.
Speaker 1 00:06:00 Yeah. And you know, we talk on this particular show a lot about, because we get these questions all the time, uh, here at Casos, there are new people, of course, because of 2020, COVID lots of people getting into the podcast space and everyone from the beginner to the person who has, has a a hundred episodes out there, how do I make my show better? My show is just me. It's just me talking into a microphone. How do I make it better? And there's all kinds of arguments of, well, we could do music tracks. We could transition through different thought processes. You can cut in different sound bites from other shows or something I would argue. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts like this live stream into produced recording. That's a twist of your own. Like, this is my own show. Like it's still me largely talking. There's no transition sounds. But this creation, this creative process is what makes my show unique. It doesn't always have to be about the audio track that you ship.
Speaker 0 00:06:54 Yeah. And I think that's an astute realization that most podcasters don't have. We think podcasting equals the MP3 file that I sent out via my RSS feed. And how many downloads did I get yesterday? Which is never, it's not the way things work, right? We are creatures with multiple sensory inputs. Sometimes it's, we need to read. Sometimes we need to watch, and sometimes we need to listen and a lot of people want to dip in and out of all, three of those things. So I figure, look, it's not really taking me any more time to do this because the video that you see is the video that goes out again with maybe five or 10 minutes of extra stuff, cut from it. I'm not spending hours in the studio. It's just me talking for seven to 10 minutes long. So I don't have to worry about jump cuts and all of the other things that make compelling video, compelling video.
Speaker 0 00:07:48 And honestly the least compelling aspect of my show podcast pontifications is the video. Cause it just my talking head like this, you know, you've seen it. It's fun to watch it live sometimes, but I get a lot more people that read my words than ever watch my videos. So when I talk to people who say, Oh, I think I'm going to use video to really expand my podcast. I always remind them like, well, keep in mind though, that video lies to you. You know, you can see what your YouTube view numbers are, but that's means somebody watched one minute of your content. There's a rule I have called the EVOS, uh, 90 10 rule of online video. And that is that 90% of your audience will have abandoned watching the show before 10% of the show has been sent down to them. And that's held up every single time that I've looked. If you're making really compelling video with lots of action sequence and various things like that, that's a whole new ball game, but it was just two people talking and maybe you've got a one or a two camera setup, maybe even a three camera setup. And there's really nothing. The video does within a couple of head nods here and there. You're going to lose your audience. That's not what people tune into videos for. We want to watch we'll watch the next Marvel. We don't watch anything else. Yeah. Good
Speaker 1 00:08:56 Luck doing that with your Sony a 6,000 in a road microphone. One of the things that you mentioned recently, I don't know if it wasn't and it wasn't from directly from this email. Oh no. It was the, it was the email you sent out where you said most people listen or excuse me, most people read what I'm putting out then listen. And so if you're somebody listened to the audience podcast right now, one of the biggest questions that I get all the time here is how do I grow my audience again? It's not just about shipping the podcast file up to your Castro's account. Maybe sometimes you write some words, maybe you do a blog post with it, and you actually have the data in one of your more recent articles is yeah, more people are reading my stuff, then they are listening to it. But like you said, you're a writer at heart and then podcasting came second. Is that
Speaker 0 00:09:44 True? They actually no other round, but very close. So my first real writing gig where I was paid to write was writing podcasting for dummies. So I kind of had to know about podcasting to do that, but that came in like a year after that. And I, I had some radio experience, but, um, yeah, I was really trained how to be a writer by the, by the lovely people at Wiley's publishing. So yeah, that, that was kind of surprising to me. And now, and here's the other weird thing, Matt, that your audience should appreciate this. My podcast is only of interest to podcasters. That's it? There is some general other information for content creators and marketers, but let's face it. It's called podcast. Pontifications it is about podcasting through and through. So my audience is almost a hundred percent podcasters yet, yet more people read my words than listen to my words, which makes zero sense. Or maybe it does. Maybe it's just the reality that we're a multi-sensory creatures, as I mentioned previously, and we want things consumable in lots of different ways. So, so why not? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:10:47 Uh, dissecting the dystopian future. One thing, the question that popped into mind, and I'm just curious on your thoughts on this. Obviously I don't trust other content creators who say they don't consume other content. Do you consume other content? And if so, what is it without it? I don't really have a question here, but as somebody who respects the craft so much, I'm curious of your answer. I mean, most notably there are people like who really in the media, like a, like a Gary Vaynerchuk, we might know him from business and podcasting. I mean, that dude's schedule is probably what, you know, doesn't allow him to consume other kinds. He's got no time, but I see so many other people on YouTube on podcasts who like, yeah, I don't, I don't watch any content. Well, where do you drive inspiration from? Where does it come from? Just curious
Speaker 0 00:11:31 Thoughts. I've heard that from other people. So when I got into podcast originally, it was a, I was talking to authors primarily. And the amazing number of people who say, Oh, I, I don't read other people's work because I don't want it to influence my way of writing. Like have you not known that that's not how humanity works? We always build on everything. There's no such thing as an original. You mean there's really not. We just do the things we do that to bring forward with it. So I've always thought that was silly. That makes zero sense to me. If you are a superstar and you're famous for being, I don't know, Gary Vaynerchuk, that you probably get away with that, but you're not Gary Vaynerchuk. Whoever's listening to this right now. And so you need to understand what other people are listening to a long time ago.
Speaker 0 00:12:15 When I first got into some digital work back in the, the turn of the century, which sounds like it was a long time ago and it was, I had a guy working with me and he brought up one point in time. And he said that, you know, let's not forget that most people are on other people's websites a whole lot more than they're on ours. And so we need to know what the experience is like this was before we even knew what user experience was or now customer experience, right? We need to understand what that CX is at other places. And I think podcasters need to understand what sort of listener experience maybe LX people are having on other shows, because the reality is we're being judged by that. Person's understanding of everything else they listen to. And that's not just podcasting, that's audio books, that's professional content. They're getting from other places that's watching television. That's how we're being judged. So if we don't understand what else is going on in our sphere and outside of our sphere, we're just not paying attention and we're not going to delight hourly.
Speaker 1 00:13:12 Let's get into this dystopian future. There are a few bullet points I want to, I want to pull out first, uh, of how you introduce this model. Now, largely everyone listening to this podcast episode is a $20 a month podcast hosting customer here at Casos. And, and, and even if you're not at castles, chances are, that's what you're doing. Our friends over at pod news have a visual graph of the, of the flow of where people go from one podcast hosts to another. An anchor is like this massive, huge blob of paint of all these people going to this free platform. And I have some thoughts behind that, but what we're getting at here is maybe in this article illustrating, well, there'll be podcasting will just largely be free. And then ad supported, which had me thinking like, okay, maybe like this YouTube model, right?
Speaker 1 00:14:03 Where it's you upload your content and ads just play. And we all just sit back and like, where's the next button? Where's the skip button, this ad. And then there's like the people who are true, like RSS fans, even though your recent email today, you didn't like RSS so much, but the people who are like, I just want a true RSS, you know, 20 bucks a month. And I don't want any ads touching this is this because that ads is just, what's going to consume this technology like big industry is going to come in and just say, ads, YouTube. They're doing it. Let's do it here too. So it's funny, you know,
Speaker 0 00:14:37 So podcasting predates YouTube just for the quick history lesson there. And I remember the early days when YouTube was getting started, many of us were lamenting the fact that we decided to use this distributed model. YouTube can get away with doing a whole lot because there are YouTube and they, for all points and purposes bought everybody else or crushed them out of competition. There's a handful of stragglers hanging on Vimeo and some other specialty services, but it's all YouTube. That's never happening with podcasting, right? That the genie's out of the bottle for too long. I do not think, I mean, I suppose Spotify could come along and buy everyone Casto is included, you know, and then one big thing, but I'm not so sure that's really the way that things are going to go down. But I also think that advertising and podcasting, there's just, there's just a big miss right now.
Speaker 0 00:15:20 It's very difficult to run ads at scale. My, my background is running digital advertising agencies. That's what I've done before podcasting and then parallel to podcasting for a decade or so. So I understand what it takes and what businesses are looking for out of podcasting. And it's just way too much of a problem, right? We've we've been able to sell ads into podcasting since I think I started running my first ads in 2006. So it's a, it's a long, long time, but it's never really grown to the scale. It needs to grow. What predicated that article was the announcement that another hosting company was buying a big podcast sales platform. And we're gonna merge those two together for the first time offering. The idea is offering programmatic easy drop ads into the show. Like the people that, you know, pod corn have been promising to do.
Speaker 0 00:16:07 And like red circle does. So where I went, that was, Oh my goodness, what if everyone does this? What if every podcast hosting company winds up buying some ad platform, they don't get it together. And then what if the CFO does the analysis and says, Hey, we make more money per podcast. If they run ads, then we do from that $20 a month fan plan. So let's get rid of the $20 a month plan. Let's get everybody over here, hosting for free with us. We can sell more ads, but they have to run. Ads is the whole deal. So yeah, I think there's still an untapped market, you know, 20, 21 should be the year we hit a billion dollars of ad revenue. Some people say we've already hit it, but I think it's, it's deals like this that caused that to happen. And then it's the, well now what does that mean? You know, what's the, what's the next step? What's the, what are the unintended consequences? And I love unintended consequences. So what's that when you do to the industry played out to it's, you know, logical, absurd.
Speaker 1 00:17:00 Yeah. Who loves a good conspiracy who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory, especially around podcasting, one of the, as a creator. So I've been podcasting personally podcasting for eight years. I've been on YouTube, roughly the same, primarily focused on a little piece of software called WordPress. And that's sort of my claim to fame in this space. And I always feel like the YouTube model and the ad model, the creator, the small creator always loses. It's the small creator that always loses. Right. And in these deals with Spotify and anchor, like one day you wake up and you're a fitness podcast and all of a sudden Pringles is your, you know, is the advertiser on your podcast? And you're like, yeah, what is that doing here? Like not only my losing, I'm only getting five pennies for that Pringles ad. Is there any way for, and maybe this is where you're going into the business class podcast, we have members only podcasting where anyone can name any price and they get a private RSS feed, which I know the other, the other counter to that is, Oh, private RSS feed. It's not open well, yeah, but it's, it's paid and people have access to it. First thoughts on the small creators, how does small creators sort of rally up that they get value?
Speaker 0 00:18:07 That's going to be, uh, always a challenge, right? Cause oftentimes get ignored. If not outright shafted, they certainly get ignored and they just don't have the same opportunities available to them. And it makes sense. Right. I mean, I understand that from just a supply and demand perspective, it makes it, I get why it's happened. It's is it unfair? Yeah. But you know, who said life was fair? That's not really the way things are supposed to be. Like I said, in the article, I think most of the independence, most of the small people will be happy to take the ads. And I'm pretty sure that there will be some sort of a brand safety model, much like the Google ad words program, which you can put on your website. And you can say, I don't want ads from these particular categories. So now things still slip through.
Speaker 0 00:18:47 I think that will be somewhat accepting of that. But the other good news with that is right now, the small podcasters are really left out of the equation. They don't really have a chance to play because unless you're with a red circle or someone that's using a pod corn or one of the other sites out there that, that does do this, you don't really get a chance to make much money at all. So at least in my new crazy world, you know, if everything is monetized bubble, at least your content will be in the consideration for that $25 CPM. You only might make a dollar a month of profit, but you know, that's because you don't have that many downloads. So that's life
Speaker 1 00:19:22 To go both ways. And you're obviously much more experienced at this than I am, but I've heard that even podcasts with whatever a thousand downloads a month could still perform really well if they went to a, like a direct ad sales model where, Hey, they find a brand that is perfectly aligned with this niche podcast to get that hyper-focus audience. But I guess that's the challenge is it's not, there's a network that algorithm that's going to do that for you. You got to knock on somebody's door.
Speaker 0 00:19:50 That is all the hard work in a way back in the radio and back in radio. But way back in the early days of podcasting, there was a show called grape radio and it was a wine podcast. And I think don't quote me on the numbers, but I think it had like 300 listeners that was it. They were getting $5,000 a month for sponsorship because those 300 listeners are the owners of all the wineries in America. So five grand has to advertise to them for an entire month and to get your message heard for them, you know, at least four times a month, it's worth five grand. You know, one say it was probably offer that. So yeah, it's completely dependent on what it is that you're actually doing. But if you just go for the, the mass marketing appeal, you know, crappy ads, we're all exposed to every day on websites. You know, those are going to come into podcasting and they're going to be 15, $20 CPMs if we're lucky.
Speaker 1 00:20:36 Yeah. I know this topic has been beaten up pretty much, but the acquisition of the Joe Rogan streaming rights or however that's defined legally, right? They didn't buy the show. They the rights did they buy the rights as it's streaming rights, whatever. I mean, at the end of the day, it's still a clear win. Whether of not whether or not you agree with the content of the show and if you're a fan or not of Joe Rogan, do you see it as a win for the Hey? So the solo creator, somebody who starts from nothing and then sells their show for a hundred million bucks or whatever the number was like, is it still a win for creators that way?
Speaker 0 00:21:11 I think that would be a win for creators. I mean, I'm not so sure that Joe Rogan did what you said. I mean, Joe Rogan just didn't come from nowhere, fear factor and UFC forever. You know, it's great to be a celebrity, right. But there are other people that we could talk about who have similar experiences who were kind of self-made in podcasting, I'll use Jordan harbinger as an example of someone, right. And he didn't get picked up by Spotify, but I know Jordan is doing quite well building up the show that he's done. So yes, solo creators can absolutely do it. And they're not just, you know, basic interview style stuff, right? There's a huge amount of going on right now with solo creation in the fiction podcasting space with what Lauren Shippen has been doing and others who are really elevating that craft that to me is what's most compelling about podcasting is the ability for someone who doesn't really have an outlet for whatever it is they want to do. There's just no other option for them. Radio's not right. Prince not right. TV's not right. Even a web series. Isn't right. YouTube videos. Aren't right. How can they grab hold of this thing called podcasting and turn it into something that people love? And if enough people flock to it and say, yeah, that's really compelling and amazing. Then they've got to go and concern business pretty quickly on their hands, which is a pretty interesting space.
Speaker 1 00:22:22 Let's mash up one of your other pontifications, uh, clubhouse in social audio. I'm not a huge fan. And maybe it's because I'm an old school and not as old school as you in the podcasting world, but I like content that is evergreen. That can be archived. That can be searched. I don't want my stuff to disappear into the ether, including a clubhouse stage or room, whatever they call it. And like things like Instagram stories, not a huge fan of wasting my time, designing a cool sticker. And then just having it vaporize in 24 hours. Like if I'm going to put that effort in, I want it to live on a site that I can repurpose. What are your thoughts around social audio in that impact of, of podcasting?
Speaker 0 00:23:02 Yeah. We're, we're seeing every single platform I heard the other day that LinkedIn is coming out with a clubhouse clone. So, okay. It's clearly a thing. I think it's something that we need to pay attention to, uh, up until about two weeks ago, I was doing a lot on, on clubhouse specifically. I kind of backed off because I just kind of felt like I wasn't doing any me time. And so what can go, Oh, that new thing, bye. So I killed that. Uh, I'll probably get back to it eventually, but that and Twitter spaces is growing. Now. We might have soon, uh, fireside by Mark Cuban is coming on. There, there are all of these things that are, you know, just keep coming out of the woodwork and like you, well, let me just say this way, social audio is not going to replace podcasting.
Speaker 0 00:23:42 This is simply not the majority of people who like listening to podcasts, especially those that like listening to long form content or multi episode things they can go back to again and again, the on demand style of podcasting is here to stay and we're not, that's not threatening it. However it is now a new medium, it threatens radio. I think, I think it also threatens the supply of new podcasters coming in. I mean, you saw what happened a couple of years ago, I guess more like five years ago when anchor came on the stage and suddenly here's an extremely easy way to get stuff available on the internet. Boom, anchor blew up and you could listen to most of the anchor shows and it sure sounded like there was an easy way to get a podcast on the internet. This is even easier. You don't have to do anything other than simply fire up your application and start talking. So I think a lot of people who were attracted to podcasting because I thought they were going to have the next radio show and wound up, they did not are going to go to a clubhouse, a Twitter spaces or whatever the next thing is. And that's where the wind up doing their show. And that's okay. They're going to try and reinvent radio, which, which is fine, which I think just leaves more room for the podcasters to, uh, to play in 20.
Speaker 1 00:24:48 Like I think about like humanity and like broadcasting audio, and you think back a hundred years or whatever, the F I don't have a history book in front of me, but whenever the first radio tower was made and like, man looked up at that and they were like, ah, in order to broadcasting that big tower and then whatever, a few decades after that, the ham radios and that got even smaller and then radio stations and then podcasting, and you keep losing all the need for equipment and centralization as years goes on and then plot and then clubhouse and social audio. Now you need no microphones. In fact, microphones don't even work with it. Can you just pick up your phone and start talking? It's like, I mean, what's next? Like you just think in the words, just magically broadcast onto Twitter. I don't know what's next
Speaker 0 00:25:27 Is that neural hat that Elon Musk is making that digs into just pull your thoughts right out of it. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:25:32 Why not? We'll see that. Raise your hand and be the first in line for that, for that bad boy. When the creator goes to monetize. Well, actually let's take a step back a podcasting, a 2.0, the RSS feed you rallied or ranted around that today. I didn't get a chance to read the whole thing, but I saw it come through and I think it was, did somebody say you were, I saw it on Twitter, like, Oh, just more Evo rants. What was that?
Speaker 0 00:25:58 Pretty much. Yeah. I've ranted about the RSS feed for a decade now. So
Speaker 1 00:26:03 What around that technology do you think can be enhanced or should be enhanced? I think I know podcasting 2.0 now there's like artwork. That'll change with chapters shipping transcripts. Is there anything else in there that you think would make it a premium get?
Speaker 0 00:26:18 Well, I'm very happy to see that the podcast index.org is, has taken off in the podcast and two-point initiative is actually being adopted now by, by a lot of hosting providers, right. Being it's quite common now. And if, if, if it dies after just getting finally a transcript tag on there it's, to me, that's, that's a much better thing, but still we're limited. We've I've, we've been limited with RSS feed for the longest time, right? RSS feed came out of blogging that's it came from de Weiner figured out the 2.0 thing to stick the enclosure tag on us. We could have audio files attached to it, but with the exception of maybe, you know, Apple slash iTunes, putting some new tags for us in there so that we can now have seasons and episode numbers, it's been a relatively static thing. And speaking of a static thing, it's a flat file.
Speaker 0 00:27:01 It's a flat file that is generated with texts. It's very good at what it does, getting my show listed on the 27 different directories that meaningful, right? And then they can disseminate that, but we've asked RSS to do so much more. We're building websites based off of an RSS feed. And that's just not enough information. There's not enough info. One person makes a podcast. That's fine. If you're me and you made a podcast, but I'm making podcasts for a little company called SAP right now, the list of credits will last five minutes at the end of an episode, right? There's no way to stick that in the author tag, right there just, it's just not designed for it to me. I see RSS feeds the way I feel about 83 tags, another technology that we borrowed from somewhere else it's designed for music. What's the name of my album album.
Speaker 0 00:27:47 That makes zero sense, but we have to deal with it. So I don't, I've predicted the death of RSS for the longest time. And so far, it hasn't really happened. Uh, but you know, with, with new tools like Jason and other API direct integrations, I think there's a lot more that we can do with it. I don't know that the, I think that the spirit of the RSS will live along forever and it'll probably be RSS for the longest time. But at some point in time, I think we need to be willing to recognize that there's more, we can do that. And we can just extend things on our own without requiring, you know, a big body of people to get together and declare a brand new namespace. If we do it a little it a little differently. So I like what RSS gives us freedom, open web, all of that, but it's not the only way we can get there.
Speaker 1 00:28:28 Yeah. I mean, we here at castles, we're always talking about, you know, we're just sort of sitting back and we have plans for maybe like a castle specific app, if you're a castles customer or something like that, where these things can be pulled in. But again, we were at the same boat. Like we, we, we like RSS for what it does and, and for the freedoms and for the flexibilities. And we certainly don't want to take that away from our creators and just lock them into, you know, we don't want to do a Spotify where it's just like, you have to have our app in order to do this, but I get it. Like I also get, man, if we had our own app, we could deliver transcripts as, as the, as a Texas scroll area, as the audio is playing the Texas scrolling and you can swipe your chapters a whole heck of a lot easier, but then you're stuck in this app. So it's not an easy as not easy.
Speaker 0 00:29:12 No, it's not, but luckily it's not an either or situation. Right. Cause we don't have to be with the luminary slash Spotify model, but we're also, don't have to be stuck with just one way to distribute things. I think we can be flexible
Speaker 1 00:29:21 As we sort of wrap up here, uh, really drilling down into a tactic of yours, very interested to learn with Apple's sort of switching to the, uh, no longer subscribe to my podcast, but follow my podcast. What are your, what's your favorite way to, and maybe this could go from the way that you coach clients to your favorite methods for call actions, for people to do something in a podcast, get on a newsletter, buy a premium membership, buy a product. Do you have a way that maybe you massage your own clients to make those types of requests, not just follow me on, on iTunes or leave me a review? Is there anything else we can do?
Speaker 0 00:29:59 Yeah. Yeah. And that's always a trick, right? And that's one of the limiting factors of podcasting is the, the call to action is said are really, but I can't shout out to the world. I mean, I guess I could with my woman in the cylinder over there whose name rhymes with <inaudible>, she didn't know. Dang. She did. She just turned on. I guess I could. You know, but those don't work very well as, as part of the episode for today. Yeah. It's it is so hard to get some sort of people to do some sort of call to action, you know, cause there's a call to action that you say out loud and there's a call to action. You put inside of your in-app episode details, which I refuse to call, show notes. That's always hard. The one thing I try to get across to my clients is don't do too much.
Speaker 0 00:30:42 If you try and do too many things, you're going to lose people. Right? So generally speaking, I tell my clients to do one single call to action. What is it you want them to do? Do you want them to sign up for a newsletter? Do you want to say click this link? Do you want whatever the message is that you want to do? That's your primary call to action that you do? Just, just figure and make sure you understand what it is. Don't say things like, you know, below you'll find these details below what, below my feet, as I'm standing on the backside of my phone, I have to think through doing dishes right now. Right? What does this mean? Right. That's that's really the bit, that's really a big problem, right? So it's pick a call to action and repeat that call to action.
Speaker 0 00:31:21 Because as you just said, Matt, people are doing the dishes right now. So I'm going to forget, I know I've got sudsy hand or syndrome, right? And even though theoretically, this iPhone is supposed to be waterproof. I'm not putting of the hands on my iPhone. So we got to do the thing that old brand that advertisers told us to do for the last hundred years. And that's repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. So we actually get it. So I tell them to do that. And the second thing I do, I learned from a friend of mine who runs the sleep with me podcast. So drew said he never underestimate the power of asking your guests. You're asking you to be asking your audience, to tell a friend about your show, do it for a year and see what happens. Just repeated every single time to see what happens. And that's been a pretty good way to grow a podcast. Do all my clients do it? No, but I give, I give them the advice and then it's up to them. Horse water drink syndrome, right there
Speaker 1 00:32:12 Sort final question here. I had interviewed a couple of producers, podcast producers over the last couple of weeks, asking them as someone who helps other clients or your own clients make shows. Is there a particular genre of podcasts that you're just like, Oh, not another one of these. Is it something like true crime interview? Like, is there a genre? You're just like, Oh, I'll do it. But I don't
Speaker 0 00:32:35 One another one on the web. I think we need one more entrepreneur interviewing entrepreneurs shows need more of those. And by that I'm being, I'm being very sarcastic. Interesting enough. True crime is dropping. Ah, is it? I didn't see that. But some of the things I've seen it, I think we're kind of done with the bad news. So now it's becoming more of the true crime that there's not a dead body involved or they still, still want lose. Don't want bad people, but we don't want them killing other people because we've had enough, you know, 600,000 people, you know, million people. Right. So that's, that's a bad thing. So yeah, but no, personally I really despise doing the entrepreneur interviewing entrepreneurs, you know, it's, you know, crush it next version, fake it till you make it all those sorts of platitudes, which mean nothing that don't really say anything new. It's the same entrepreneur asking the same questions over and over and over again, kind of boring kind of still about, Hey, I also can't deny the fact that there's a huge audience for it. Man. Never underestimate the people's desire for easy answers that they've heard a million times. That's why self-help books keep selling
Speaker 1 00:33:33 Evo Terra podcast. pontifications.com. If you're listening and you're saying I got to work on my podcast website. I, I, why have my website not working checkout egos? You just recently redid this website, right? I think I saw in an email came out fantastic. If you're looking for a great site to model don't don't don't, don't just copy paste it, but just look at it, you know, look at the hero images, look at how, uh, Eva was put the call to actions for subscribing to the different platforms. Uh, social proof reviews, quotes. It's fantastic. It's very well done. Uh, podcast pontifications.com, Eva, where else can folks find you to say thanks.
Speaker 0 00:34:06 Most of these days, I hang out on Twitter. I'm at Evo Terra on the Twitter letters. Uh, but that's, that's it, there are podcasts, modifications, and Twitter. I'll be around,
Speaker 1 00:34:14 Definitely check out his live stream and sort of that behind the scenes, look at how he's producing his podcast. Uh, he'll go from three hours to one hour. By the time we get this episode out, it's the audience podcast, castles.com/audience. And don't forget to register for our free podcast Academy academy.casos.com that's Academy, castles.com. Thanks.
