Attention vs. Connection

It's a nice day outside, and I'm walking up to

hole number four on a thing my brother and I call the Jackson

Open. My brother golfs every week. I golf once a year at you

guessed it, the Jackson Open, and I've been doing what are

called worm burners all day long. Now I'm blaming the gear,

of course, because I'm using my father's golf clubs, which are

probably two inches too short. And my brother says to me, "Hey,

it looks like you're trying to kill the ball. And I'm like,

"Well, it's whatever, 300 yards, etc. etc. And he goes instead of

trying to kill it, just try to make good contact with the ball.

And I'm like, okay. So I walk up to the tee. Now there are people

on the green on this hole. It's a little shorter, and normally I

would wait, but I'm awful, and I basically hit a ball and it

rolls 90 yards, and I'm like, "Well, there's no way I'm going

to hit these guys, and so I get up there and I think to myself,

"Just try to make a good connection, and wait till you

hear what happened.

Podcasting

sense 2005. I am your award-winning Hall of Fame

podcast coach, Dave Jackson. Thanking you so much for tuning

in. If you're new to the show, this is where I help you plan,

launch, and grow your show. The website, courtesy of

PodPage.com, is SchoolOfPodcasting.com. And so I

walk up to the T. I relax. Maybe not think about it so much, and

I connect with the ball, and it's not a worm burner. In fact,

it's going way, way, way, and I look up, and there are people on

the green. So both my brother and I scream four, and the guy

looks up as my ball hits him in the calf and rolls towards the

hole. So not only did I hit somebody, I kind of used him as

a bank shot, and it almost went in the hole. To which he then

went over and kicked it away. Later, in the same Jackson Open,

I would hit a duck, and so I was very inconsistent, but I quit

trying to kill the ball. And so, what we're going to talk about

today to grow your show, we're all talking. I got to grow the

show. Got to get more downloads. Got to get a bigger reach. Got

to get this. Got to get that. Is actually focusing on not so much

getting a massive amount of people to listen to your show,

but to actually get the right people listening to your show,

because I've been recently been doing webinars, and we're going

through the different ways you can grow your show, and as I

talk with different people, I am noticing that we're not doing

the little things. We're all trying to hit not just a home

run. We want to hit a grand slam. We want to flick that

switch and get 10,000 downloads. And I totally understand that,

except that doesn't exist unless you got a really really big

budget, and even then, it doesn't always work. After all,

feel free to tell me who the winner of American Idol season

six was. They got in front of a million people, but did they

really connect? You see, growth doesn't come from a big swing.

You know, more effort, more reach, more platforms. It comes

from a solid contact with the right people, and you can't know

what's a solid contact until you measure it. So we're going to

talk about that today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I keep hearing how the number of downloads you

need per episode to get a sponsor from quote one of the

big sponsors because of course you can always have a

partnership with a small company, but it went from 5000

to 10,000 to 20,000 per episode, and I heard one episode that the

guy actually said 50,000 downloads an episode.

What what what?

And so the quote you know the the big big big

sponsors. That's probably out of reach. But if you wanted to do a

membership show, and I I truly believe we're going to see more

people doing this. Think about this. What if you just went to

your audience and said, "Look, it cost me whatever 30 bucks a

month to do this show. I'm looking for one of you to give

me 30 bucks a month, and I will mention whatever you want me to

mention. You would then break even. I think somebody in your

show, in your audience, might take pity on you, or whatever.

But here's the thing: anybody that's going to give you any

money is going to be somebody that's connected. And what

you're looking for are let's just say 500 people that are the

right fit listeners who trust you. Those people are what

you're looking for because downloads, those people don't

join a membership. The connected people do. So we're looking for

connected people, and so I love to study podcasting. I study

SEO. I study YouTube, but I also study authors, and I study

musicians. Why? Because we are all in the same business:

entertaining people with our art. Man, in one channel that I

watch on YouTube is Mary Spender, so she's a musician,

not a podcaster. But I wanted to bring this up because this isn't

a podcast industry kind of issue. We all kind of have this

same problem across every creative field, whether you're a

podcaster, a YouTuber, an author, a musician-we're all

facing this.

How are you actually supposed to build that

relationship anymore? Because that's the part that worries me.

Instagram barely shows people your posts. Facebook has become

increasingly difficult to reach people on organically. TikTok

can be extraordinary one week and disappear the next.

Advertising becomes more expensive each year. We've spent

years treating streaming numbers as though they measure fandom,

but perhaps they often measure familiarity instead. Millions of

streams doesn't necessarily become hundreds of people

willing to leave the house on a Wednesday evening. Maybe we've

become incredibly good at measuring attention, but

forgotten how to measure connection. And if connection is

ultimately what sells tickets? Perhaps that's where the real

work begins.

I'm here to tell you that hit me square in the

chest when I heard her say, "Maybe we've become incredibly

good at measuring attention, but forgotten how to measure

connection. I was like, "Oh, I'm so using that in my podcast,

because she said, if connection is ultimately what sells

tickets, or Patreon, or Supercast, or books, or

consulting, or whatever it is we're selling, that's where the

real work begins. It's not about getting a ton of listeners; it's

a ton of getting the right listeners. And what I love about

Mary, especially her channel, she does a lot of experimenting

and comes back and explains what works and what didn't. Like last

year, she went on tour and came back, and she had lost money

going on tour.

So there we go, 12,000 pounds-a substantial loss. What

happened?

And so here's another great line that she's

like with this wisdom, right? Because we can have knowledge,

but wisdom is when you act on the knowledge you have.

Taking away from all of this, not to chase the biggest

room, to chase the right room, not to impress the most people,

to matter to the people who choose to be there. I'm putting

these ideas to the test myself. I'm booking my own shows again.

Some UK dates are already on sale, and I'm genuinely excited

to be back out there.

And so she tried something. It didn't work. And

you, as you just heard, she says, "I'm booking myself this

time. I'm taking the lessons I learned by trying new things,

and now I'm doing it this way. And now I'm really happy to be

out there. You learn from your mistakes. You put new things in

to try something different, and it probably restores your fun.

We are not gonna do this if it's not fun. That's just the bottom

line. And Mary is like, okay, I tried that, lost a bunch of

money, came home tired and broke. Don't want to do that

again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. So she was talking streams. We talked

downloads. You know, she was talking tickets. We might talk

membership, and the last couple weeks at the School of

Podcasting, we've really been focused on growth, just just

brainstorming, and I'm going to talk about a couple things here.

And the idea is not to do all of these; the idea is to do one and

test it. And so, this is a few examples. For example, we know

guesting on other podcasts can help. Why? Because there's less

friction. Because that audience already knows what a podcast is.

They know how to listen, and in theory, you're going on

somebody's show that shares an audience. With you, and so it

could be as simple as saying, "Hey, you should check out Big

Podcast Playbook with my buddy David Hooper. Go check out Pod

Mastery with Neil Veglio. He's a great guy. I've reached out to

him. We might do something in the future. It could be as

simple as a shout out. It could be a 32nd promo swap. There's

all sorts of ways to do it, but you gotta quit reading about it

and do it. That's just two. And again, are any of these a not a

home run, a grand slam? No, but they're singles. You build an

audience one person at a time. Keep that in mind, and so just

some other ones here: speaking engagements or workshops. Here's

Are you writing a blog on your website? Are you looking at

the SEO of your content? And we can always find an excuse to not

do something. Well, SEO is dead because of AI. Nope, and radio's

not dead because of podcasting. You know, writing articles for

other publications. Have you checked into that? Especially if

it's one that your audience already reads. That are you

looking at partnerships? Maybe not just as a sponsor, but hey,

can you help me promote this? And of course, word of mouth

powers about 70% of podcast growth, and yet we're all like,

"Huh? What do you mean? That's where you slowly and

specifically and concisely ask your audience to share this with

a friend. Are you doing that? There are local community

operations. I used to do it, and it didn't cost me anything

because I was bored, I used to go to the library, and in some

cases, when there were bookstores, bookstores, and I

would take my-I did a show about weight loss-and I would put my

business card on whatever age I was. So I remember, let's say I

was-I don't know, 48. I would go into a bookstore, find a book

that I really thought my audience would read, and on page

48, I would put a business card there that had my website

address, explained what it was, and was kind of like bonus

content for them. Didn't cost me anything, and I didn't get

kicked out because I never got caught. Now, is that going to

give you 10,000 downloads? No, but how much time did it take? I

have found out. I'll talk about this a little later. That

sharing on social, I've always kind of like, hey, it's a

trickle. You know what? If you put a hose into a pool,

eventually it's gonna fill it up. And just because it's not a

fire hose, you go, I'm not doing that. I'm waiting for the fire

hose. No, you want to grow your audience. We'll get to that in a

bit. But you've got to do something. We can't just talk

about it. You got to do it. But Dave, I don't want to waste my

time. So how do I know what to do? I'll explain that in just a

second.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So how do you know what room to be in? Well,

let me introduce you to the concept of click trackers. I use

one called Switchy.io. I have an affiliate link in my in the show

notes, which will take you to AppSumo where you can buy it

once for I believe it's 29 or $39 a month, and then every link

you put out, you track it, and you're like, "Oh, Dave, that

sounds like a lot of extra work it takes. I just did it, 41

seconds, 41 seconds. Now you're like, "Oh, that's for one link,

but then I got it. Let's say I do X, and then I do blue sky and

then I do threads and then I do LinkedIn and then I do that's 41

seconds times seven, yeah, it's still less than an hour. It's

it's minutes now. If I said that and I said by the way you're

gonna get 36 clicks to your site now, depending on obviously your

social things like that. But if somebody said, "Hey, would you

spend five minutes to get 36 people to at least look at your

episode? I would. There's not a lot of work involved with that.

I did not break a sweat copying and pasting. The goal here is to

connect, and what do you do on social media? Well, most of us

just go new episode out, new episode out. Maybe we ought to

try to connect with people on LinkedIn so that when we say

there's a new episode out, somebody will actually click on

it. But you've got to try, and I have seen number one, I found

out that there's got to be some sort of bot on Blue Sky because

I can post on Blue Sky and within a minute get five clicks

on that thing. But the the number one thing that drove most

more traffic to my episodes, you guessed it, it doesn't have an

algorithm. My email list, double digits. Everything else was

single digits, but it was 77512, and within a week it was 36

clicks. Now that's not going to grow. That's not the 10,000

download switch. But if I could get 36 clicks a week, and then

multiply that by four. That's 144 people that might actually

listen to the show, might actually follow the show, might

actually tell a friend. And it cost me less than five minutes a

week because you can schedule these things, and that's just me

posting once about an episode. So again, it's not the 10,000

downloads, but how do you grow an audience one person at a

time? And so, just to explain what a click tracker is, so the

last click I just put in was. Let me edit this so I can read

it. Can you imagine me telling you to do this? Oh, it's simple.

If you want to listen to the last episode of Ask the Podcast

Coach, just go to askthepodcastcoach.com/embedding-live-streams-two-reinforce-your-brand.

It's just that easy. That's why Pod Page makes short links

automatically based on your episode number. So you could

also go to askthepodcastcoach.com/ 593, and

if you're on an elite plan, you can see how many times that was

used. But you don't want to just look at clicks. You want to see

are people listening to the episode, and if they're going to

your website, it should should show up as either a Chrome play,

a website play, Firefox, something like that. So don't

just get hung up on clicks. Are people actually doing that? And

if not, then we start to look at the title. Maybe we look at are

we doing artwork for each episode? That might get people

to click. And so, for me, the important twist again: a click

is still just attention. The same thing that that Mary warned

us about. The real question is: after the click? Did that

traffic actually turn into an email subscriber, a membership

sign up, and a new follower? You can track this stuff, and yes,

it takes time to track. But when you figure out what works, you

can go. You know what? I'm never posting to LinkedIn again. Like

I was really surprised. I because I'm I because I have

gray hair. I'm on Twitter slash X, and I don't get a lot of

traction over there. I stream live there.

I stream live to LinkedIn, and in some cases, that's not where

I'm getting the most stuff. And this is what you need to learn

because what's the point of doing something that's not

working when it's working over at some other place? Then you

can say, "Look, there's only so much time in the day. Well,

let's quit doing the things that don't move the needle as much,

and we came up with a list of like 30. That's just like I

don't know five or eight. And again, the idea here is not to

do them all. Start off with one or two, so you can look and

measure and see what's happening, so that you can

Do I need to keep doing this? But realize if you're

like, well, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna waste my time on anything.

You have to waste some time because even if you talk to

somebody, they say, oh, I advertised on such and such

website and I got a ton of downloads. Okay, great, that

worked for them. That you, they might not have the same audience

as you. You're gonna have to waste some time. You're gonna

have to waste some money in some cases if you're gonna advertise.

I know I've advertised on Pocket Casts. I love that app. It's an

amazing app. But man, for me, it didn't work. And remember, when

you're doing advertising, there's three things involved

the actual ad that you put up, the landing page

that was there because I've seen people do that. They'll send

people to a landing page. You're like, "Where's the play button?

There's all sorts of things involved, and also the actual

ad. Like a few I've advertised on Buzzsprout ads. Well, I could

blame Buzzsprout, or here's a novel idea. Maybe my ad was just

awful. Maybe the landing page I sent them to was just awful. How

do I know you track the link you put into the ad? It's yes. It

takes 42 seconds. Pick one, do one, try it, measure it, make

changes, and go forth with wisdom.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But Dave, I'm just starting out. I don't have

an audience. How can I connect with people I don't have yet?

Well, again, this is where you can find people that you might

partner with in the future, and if they're on YouTube,

hallelujah, because you get a lot more comments on YouTube

than you do on an audio podcast. So go over. You can go into

their videos, find their. Most viewed video, and then look at

the comments, and that's a place to start. You can go into Amazon

and search for your topic. Go to the books, and I always say

don't look at the five star reviews and don't look at the

one star reviews because they're typically not helpful. It's like

best book ever or this book sucked. That's not helpful.

That's not constructive, but when they say I would have given

you a five star, but you didn't say this, so I'm giving you

four. That's more feedback. Now, can I get that information from

AI? You probably could, but here's the question again: I

could spend 30 minutes developing some sort of bot to

go do it, or here's a novel idea: you could just go do it,

and I realize things like that are kind of mundane, and those

are the things that AI is designed for. And so, if you

have the skill to do it, but I just I keep hearing people

spending hours and hours, and I'm doing this myself, learning

AI, but just realize that sometimes you spend a lot more

time learning the product that's going to save you 10 minutes.

Like I think it would have been easier just to do the 10

minutes. The other thing, and of course I'm going to say this: if

you really want to grow your audience and you want to again

be the right audience, how do you know if you're attracting

the right audience? You got to ask them, and I realize it is

disheartening. I have been there when you do a survey, and you

get almost nobody filling it out. Keep asking, keep asking,

and when you're done with that, keep asking and explain it to

them how they are going to benefit by filling out your

survey. I'm doing this show for you. If you could let me know

what you'd like to hear, I will give it to you. It's just like

you're in the kitchen. Hey, what do you want? I got pasta. I got

meatloaf. I got salads. What do you want? Anybody want shrimp?

Let me know. I'll make it for you. So explain that, and then

keep asking. This isn't something that you can just ask

once. Hey, if you got two minutes, I'd really like if you

would fill out this survey. If you have a tool that does

dynamic, this is where it's great to put it at the beginning

and put it at the end, and put a link in your show notes. And

this is where again short links come in really handy because you

can see that's really weird. We had 12 people click on the link,

and only six of them did the survey. Well, maybe you have too

many questions, and people went, "I'm not filling that out. How

do you know? You got to track it because when you track it, you

can see what works and what doesn't. And then once you've

come to a a really solid conclusion that that doesn't

work for my audience because it might work for somebody else's,

you can quit doing it, and you don't have to worry about. I

feel like I should be doing more. Well, you know I don't

have to do this anymore because your audience doesn't appreciate

that they don't want that, but it takes time, it takes effort,

and so many times we're just going to sit back and wait, and

we want to swing for the fences and get a grand slam and put

some points on the board. When you got to realize, if you quit

trying to hit a golf ball with all of your might, and instead

focus on just connecting with the ball. You might end up with

a much better shot.

All

right, I'll give you one more. One of my favorite

people in podcasting is Steve Stewart. He's the guy behind the

Podcast Editors Academy, SteveStewart.me. How did I learn

about Steve Stewart in the early days of podcasting? There

weren't that many, and it seemed like every time I would tune

into a show, they'd be like, oh, and we got a comment from some

guy named Steve, and then they would play it, and he'd go like,

hey, this is Steve Stewart, and then I would tune into another

podcast about podcasting, and I would hear, oh, we actually got

a comment from some guy named Steve, and I they would hit

play, and I would hear, hey, this is Steve Stewart, like

everywhere I turned, you could not escape Steve. Now, how much

did Steve pay to be featured on those shows? Zero, not a thing.

The audience or the host actually said, "Hey, if you got

any comments, I'd love to hear it. And Steve went, "Okay. Now

that's not a 10,000 download switch, but it got him in front,

and he also brought value. I should point that as well. His

comments actually, I went, huh? And so Neil Velio from

Podmastery, the full tagline: podcasting insights and advice

for the indie creators with the Podmaster. He has in quotation

marks. No, I'm sorry. Not just Podmaster, the Podmaster, and I

heard Neil on Pod News Weekly Review, and I was like, "That's

a good point. And then next week, it was almost like, and

now it's time for Neil. He was consistently leaving just

insights and comments to where I was like, "Who is this Neil guy?

And I kind of bumped into him. I, you know, I'd see his artwork

and stuff, and I went over and listened, and I was like, you

know what? I like this guy because he's kind of like me-a

little snarky, a little tired of hearing people say, you know, I

make, I can make a seven-figure podcast. Okay, but how much do

you get to take home? That seven figures is revenue. How much of

that is profit? That drives me nuts, and I think at times, I

don't know if Neil does, but if you think Dave, you you sound

just a shade frustrated. I am a little. There are times when I I

run into people who are desperate to grow their show,

and I go okay, go post on social and track it, and they don't.

And I go go leave a voicemail on, and they don't. And I go

well, you could write better show notes, and they don't. And

we're all waiting for that 10,000 foot switch. And I've

been saying this since about I don't know 2007. After I looked

for it for a few years, there isn't one. You grow your

audience, one listener, one audience member at a time, and

there are things like I'm going to podcast movement next week.

I'm going to meet a bunch of people, and I'm going to say

school of podcasting, and I'm going to maybe hand out a few

business cards. I'm looking again not to meet a bazillion

people. I'm looking for people that I can connect with. It's

about the right audience, and our ego really wants that number

to go up. And I totally get that. I'm right there with you.

I am still reeling from the days when this show had more

downloads before the whole Applemageddon thing happened,

and all of a sudden your numbers went down. In fact, I just heard

James Cridlin from Pod News say there's a big, you know, podcast

tracking thing, and they said across the board numbers are

down a smidge, and so you have to ask yourself, why am I doing

this? Am I still having fun? How am I going to measure my

success? Well, one of the ways you can measure again is through

a link tracker, and so I'll have links to Switchy, and the other

one I used that I found was free. Don't get me going on

free, but you can try it for free. Is Short.io super simple,

and I'm here to tell you it takes 40 seconds to do, along

with everybody that I mentioned.

But I'm I'm just here to say, yes, we want that big audience,

but we need to measure connection, and that's almost

like a spreadsheet I want to make. How many emails did I get

from people that I didn't ask for that said that was a really

good episode? That's a cool way to measure. Am I making a

connection? How many shoutouts did I get out on social? That's

another thing. If you mention a company, are you tagging them on

social? And if you go no, I'm gonna lose my mind, so you got

to do it. Hope, hope is not a strategy. It's not. Well, I I'm

gonna put out a new episode. I sure hope it does well. Track

that stuff. Find out what works. And just like Mary, her second

tour is gonna be much more profitable than her first one

because she's using, she's acting on the knowledge that she

got, and wisdom is knowledge acted upon. And with that, I

will say thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you got

something out of this. Quit swinging for the fences. Start

trying to build direct connection, and if you need

help, you know where to find me. schoolofpodcasting.com. Been

doing this for over 20 years, and I absolutely love helping

podcasters. And you can sign up for either a monthly, quarterly,

or yearly subscription. Use the coupon code Listener, and that

comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. And until next week,

take care. God bless. Class is dismissed.

Yeah.