Building Relationships with Your Audience: The Long-Term Approach to Podcast Success

This is an unedited transcript from Catmagic

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:

Hey. This is future Dave, and I forgot to mention there is no live show November 5th, so no episode next week. Wanna say thanks to podcastbranding.co, and based on his true story, podcast.com, for understanding. I'll be speaking at podindi .com. So if you need more Jim and Dave, check out Jim at the average guy dot tv, and check out one of my other shows by going to power of podcasting .com. Here's the show. Ask the Podcast Coach for October 28, 2020 3. Let's get ready to podcast.

Dave Jackson [00:00:39]:

There it is. It's that music that means it is Saturday morning. It is time for ask the podcast coach where you get your podcast questions answered live. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com and joining me right over there. You know him. You love him. Don't be fooled by cheap imitations. Jim Colson from the average guy dot TV.

Dave Jackson [00:01:00]:

Jim, how's it going, buddy?

Jim Collison [00:01:02]:

Greetings, Dave. Happy Saturday morning to you. We we dressed alike again. We're both gray. Not sure what just maybe The weather's changing in the US or the Midwest. Winter is on its way. Maybe we're both feeling a little gray. Could be Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:01:15]:

It got down to Freezing last week. They're like, oh, there's a freeze warning, and I'm like, oh, surely, you you jest. And they're like I woke up, asked the woman in the tube, and she's like, It's 32 degrees. I I was like, which is kinda depressing, but, you know what? It'll warm you up. That's it. You get a nice cupping pot of Java going, and there we go. And you are set to go, and, of course, That's, piping hot cup of java is brought to you by our buddy, Mark, over at podcastbrandingdot Co, you said going back to the 1st slide in the video. Thank you.

Dave Jackson [00:01:52]:

Because Mark I still don't have the right page. Yeah. It is. Podcast Branding .co. The beautiful thing about Mark is, number 1, he's a podcaster, so that whole, like, oh, it's like a radio show. Yeah. He's got that, and he's an award winning graphic artist. And he does something that I don't think everybody else does is he will sit down with you 1 on 1.

Dave Jackson [00:02:12]:

He'll go look at your website. He'll listen to your podcast. He kinda make sure everything is in alignment because you're going for maximum impact, and that could be on your show's artwork. It could be on your whole website. It could be on a PDF or a lead magnet. Whatever it is, if you wanna look good, you gotta go see Mark. And then the beauty is is when everything's in alignment, It just works better. So go over to podcast branding.c0 and tell Mark that, hey.

Dave Jackson [00:02:39]:

Dave and Jim are saying very nice things about you. Can you please make me look better? Because you gotta remember, they see you before they hear you. So check-in my podcast branding dotco.

Jim Collison [00:03:02]:

And, of course, a big thanks to our good friend, Dan Lefebvre, over there based on a true story based on a true story podcast .com. This week, show 281, he's doing Jobs. Do you ever see Jobs? Do you ever watch Jobs? Have you watched much on

Dave Jackson [00:03:14]:

Steve Jobs? There's about 3 different

Jim Collison [00:03:16]:

Steve Jobs. Yeah. There was

Dave Jackson [00:03:17]:

one with Ashton Kutcher played him.

Jim Collison [00:03:20]:

Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Interesting guy. So Jobs, the Pacific, and Tombstone are covered this week. Check it out now if you need something to listen to, and who doesn't based on a true story podcast .com.

Jim Collison [00:03:31]:

Thanks, Dan, for your sponsorship.

Dave Jackson [00:03:34]:

Would think I wonder if, like, if, like, during commercials for anything on Steve Jobs if there would be, like, a turtleneck company. That would be something.

Jim Collison [00:03:45]:

Didn't he always wear black?

Dave Jackson [00:03:46]:

It was always black.

Jim Collison [00:03:47]:

Wasn't it a black turtleneck Gonna jump.

Dave Jackson [00:03:49]:

And then he'd always have that 1, he was kinda like Columbo. Man, that's that's a dated reference. That that is my new hobby is realizing I say things, and a big chunk of the audience has no idea what I'm talking about. Columbo was a very old TV show back in the Seventies when I was a little I I used to watch Columbo at my grandpa's house, like, with the whole family, so but Columbo would always go, one more thing, and then he'd solve the mystery, and and Steve Jobs was always had, oh, one more thing, and then he'd pull out an iPad, and Everybody's mind would be blown. So that's always fun.

Jim Collison [00:04:28]:

Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:04:28]:

That's true. There was a study that came out, and I was like, well, that's interesting. The Ads Results Media, better known as ARM, has completed a 14 month study of podcast ads, and perform let's see. 14 month study of how podcast ads perform based on the number of ads in a commercial break. The analysis takes into account over 80,000,000 in ad spend and compared performance among different buckets of ad counts in an ad break. Jim, how many ads is too many ads for you? Like, they're gonna go, well, we'll get to this great thing that you wanna hear right now, but first, we're gonna talk about this. Like, how many

Jim Collison [00:05:08]:

Do we do we have a duration? Do we have durations in there for, like, per per hour?

Dave Jackson [00:05:12]:

Or It doesn't. It just says there's I didn't read the whole study. I'm getting this, like, cliff notes version from, sounds profitable, but how many ads before people, like, really start losing their minds?

Jim Collison [00:05:24]:

For for me, personally, may in an hour, I'm gonna say maybe 3. Like, that's probably what what I tolerate.

Dave Jackson [00:05:30]:

Yeah. Since they're finding show, podcast ads performed best when there were only 2 ads and a break. Again, it doesn't say how long the show is. Scoring 12% better, Now they don't say what they scored. It was just 12% better than breaks with 3 or 4 ads while they found no significant difference between breaks with three in 4 ads once breaks reached 5 ads. And I'm like, who do you think you are? Radio? Like, there are times I mean, it takes me 7 minutes for my little egg cooker thingy to cook an egg, and there are times when I will walk in, Ask the woman in the tube to play a radio station. She will play it. Ads are starting.

Dave Jackson [00:06:10]:

I cook my egg, and as I'm walking out of the kitchen, They finally go back to their program. It's like it's ridiculous. Between breaks with 3 4 ads, once breaks reach 5 ads, performance dropped to 46% worse then breaks, with 2 ads. I I just to me, it's kind of interesting that I I just I just wanna I, you know, I'm an old curmudgeon guy. I'm like, there are other ways to make money with your podcast than than ads, and it just seems like everybody, a, will make a show that's just like every other show. I ran into that a lot this week, you know, the interesting show where we interview interesting people with interesting stories, and I'm like, and what's the goal? Well, we wanna get advertising. I'm like, Okay. Not saying you can't, but then I heard this clip.

Dave Jackson [00:06:59]:

We first, I guess, if we're going to, to play this, we I I think this fits if I do this. Right? Ladies and gentlemen, it is the Podfather, Adam Curry. So we'll we'll usher in the the Podfather here. And this is what he said. And I was like, maybe. Podcasting is not all about making money and a career, And it's it's just not. First of all, you cannot serve 2 masters. You know, either you're making a great product And people and you can monetize that, or you're just out for money, and you're gonna make a product to to to reverse into it.

Dave Jackson [00:07:37]:

This is no different than blogging. This and blogging became microblogging, became social networking, and 99% of all people just will not make Any money on social media or blogging or you know? And then we went down to the lowest common denominator, which was banner ads And clickbait and stuff, and and that brought down the CPM to, you know, pennies. And this is where, podcast advertising is headed now that we have DAI, and it's just because there's there's unlimited inventory, so there's no scarcity. So it just you have this you you name it. How much do you want is not a problem. It's just going to go it's a it's a race to the bottom. So and I I I thought that was interesting because I was PodPage redesigned their Their menu system. So I am up to 52 videos now.

Dave Jackson [00:08:35]:

I think I have about 4 more to make, and it'll be done, but I was going through how to put Google Ads on your your website. Right? And it's not hard. Right? Copy paste. You gotta get the right code and blah blah blah. So as always, Brendon makes it easy. It's it's the Google interface. You're like, you have to find this thing. And so I'm I'm sitting there explaining, and it's it's, you know, a mild hassle, but okay.

Dave Jackson [00:09:00]:

But I'm like, Google I'm like, I I remember when Google Ads were the rage. Everybody had Google Ads on their website, And I went over, and I I asked uncle Google, like, what's the average rate of a Google Ad? You wanna guess, Jim? No. Yeah. Speaking of race to the bottom, it said anywhere from 20¢ per 1,000 impressions up to $2. That's brutal.

Jim Collison [00:09:26]:

And I

Dave Jackson [00:09:26]:

was like Yeah. 20¢ per 1,000, you know, web visits, and I was like, That's brutal. Like, I'm like, I'm not putting that. No. I'm not it's just like so I thought it was interesting, and I I think because I'm not sure, but I just I'm always under the impression that everybody wants to make money with their podcast. And I think it's always, like, well, it would be nice, but I'm not sure how many people, like, that is, like, if I don't make money in 2 years, I'm quitting, because I have plenty of shows I do that, like, if I make I don't even care if anybody listens with some of my shows. It's just It's just me getting out my art, man. I just gotta be creative.

Dave Jackson [00:10:09]:

You know? So, Like, with with Home gadget geeks, I know you've you've added some affiliate stuff and things like that. Like, on a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is I must make money and one is I don't Care, like, where do you fall in?

Jim Collison [00:10:25]:

0. Yeah. I don't like, on that show, I mean, it's you you gotta I mean, when you think about Making money. If if that's your sole source of income, you have to make money. You have to make different choices, Right at that point, if you're gonna decide to do that as a small business or as a business or whatever, you've gotta make different choices. I can afford to. You know? Last night, or Thursday night was a live show scheduled, guest canceled due to COVID, which has come crazy. Like, I I you know, we keep thinking this thing is over, but people People are still getting COVID, or it was just I had to wash my hair.

Jim Collison [00:10:59]:

Right. One of those 2, like, one of those kinds of excuses. So, you know, if if I'm making money, If I'm if that show is my income, I'm finding a guest pretty quick, and I'm putting something together to make sure that Thursday night show works. If it's just if I'm just kinda doing it for fun, a hobby, whatever we call it, then, then I'm not. And so what did I choose? I took the night off. I took my wife out on a date. We went out to dinner and, you know, you you kinda just like, okay. Well, this is kinda cool.

Jim Collison [00:11:29]:

I let the audience know, hey. You know, no live show tonight. Most of them I mean, most people. Like, even in this show, Dave, we do tens of people live and Hundreds of people recorded. So the live part, you know, I wanna see if we could've done it in a different time. So I I think the motivation of like, I can afford to say Home gadget Geeks is a hobby, because I have a I have a sugar daddy at Gallup where I work. They're paying the bills. Right.

Jim Collison [00:11:57]:

But if that's my only source of income, and, yeah, you I think you can make a podcast work financially in a way to That it's a business, and it doesn't have to I don't know what what did Adam I felt like Adam was saying if you do that, you sell out, and I don't I just don't I don't think that's true. I think there's great ways to make money on a podcast, and what yeah. Here's a good example. Dave Groff He he's a he listens to the show, so he'll he'll probably be smiling right now as he over at Cigar Authority. He runs 7 ads a segment. They do a 2 hour show. Like, he breaks all the rules. 2 hours, 7 ads every segment they they go that that that they, you know, that they have for their, and they're taking breaks all the time.

Jim Collison [00:12:43]:

The ads aren't for the listeners. The ads are for the advertisers Because they all wanna be on that show. They don't wanna be left out. So he's kinda reversed to that where it's like, you know, I'm gonna play these ads. Probably most people don't listen to him. Although, there's some funny ads in there that people can recite and sing along with. And when he takes one out, people get Disgruntled. Right? They're like, hey.

Jim Collison [00:13:09]:

Where'd that ad go? I'm used to listening to it. So the ads have become in his case, the ads have become a Part of the show. And and, listen, Dave probably makes more money podcasting than anybody. I mean, those ads are those ads are are, You know, they do pretty well for him. So, you know, that's 15 ads a 2 hour show, maybe more.

Dave Jackson [00:13:29]:

Yeah. And

Jim Collison [00:13:29]:

Maybe more. Right? And

Dave Jackson [00:13:31]:

there's there's a guy that's using it to promote his business, which is the best use of that.

Jim Collison [00:13:36]:

And and

Dave Jackson [00:13:36]:

the other thing, another report, I I didn't read the report, but I heard about it that most podcast sponsors, yes, they want ROI on their their ad spend, but most of them are doing it for branding. We just wanna keep our brand in front of people, and that's that's that's the best kind of sponsor. If you have some if it's mom and pops selling their homemade blue jeans, and they're like, how many downloads do you get, and how many clicks? Like, that is the worst sponsor. You want somebody that's like, here's a couple grand. Just Say our brand and this and point people at the website. That's the the best ever. And when we got some go ahead.

Jim Collison [00:14:12]:

Hold on before before we move on to that. But, like like, in in in, in Dave's case, Dave Buffalo, he He has prerecorded ads that he just runs right after 1 right after the other. I think it'd be a mistake for him to try to host read those ads every week. I mean, What a monotonous kind of, like, 7 ads in a row, coast read. Even with a lot of discipline, You wouldn't get the you don't get the the power, the punch of a host read ad. I think host read ads are best 1 at a time. Yeah. Right? And meaning you do wanna and then move on.

Jim Collison [00:14:49]:

And you made me come back 15 minutes later to another, another host red ad, but I think that would be too much if they were all the same. I mean, his ads vary in tone and inflection and in music and And in and even in accent. Right? So that

Dave Jackson [00:15:05]:

you know? Isn't that monotonous then to the audience to hear the same prerecorded ad?

Jim Collison [00:15:10]:

No. Some of them wait for them. Like, they you it's it's this effect. Like, they've got this ad for Jose Dominguez that's got this jingle that I even started singing. One time, I was walking up the stairs singing the singing the tune. Right? And Sarah is like, I hope you're listening to Cigar Authority, aren't you? And I'm like, yeah. There's that that tie it's such a ridiculous commercial. Right? I mean, it is and he he kinda works creating these really ridiculous commercials that people will listen to.

Jim Collison [00:15:42]:

Right? And and even in in one of his ads, he's got this This phrase where he just goes, I don't know. And I I use that all the time. You know? It's somewhat, Oh god. I don't know. You know? So I quote him. So it's these quotable things, these memorable things. He's figured out how to do it in that way. And If I listen.

Jim Collison [00:16:04]:

If I try to do that on home gadget geeks, I don't know if it would work. It's not the same kind of audience. It's not the same kind of expectation. That's how he started doing it, and he's gotten better as he went along. Ed Ed tells me some in the early days. It was a little cringeworthy in the early days of doing it, and you get better at some of those Kinds of things. But he still makes crazy ads today that they play, and you're kinda like, Dave, what are you doing? But it's so memorable. Right? It's so memorable.

Jim Collison [00:16:31]:

It becomes a part of the show.

Dave Jackson [00:16:33]:

Have you ever seen the the local guy on TV? Like, it's Crazy Al's, you know, whatever, carpet barn or whatever it is. Like, I don't care about making money. I just wanna sell carpet. And you're like, oh, that's but you remember him because he's Crazy out down at the, you know, carpet barn or whatever.

Jim Collison [00:16:51]:

Well, that style of advertising, how do we how do we reference it? We go Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Imagine the 1st person who did that Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Right? When people were listening to it, like, this is ridiculous. We all say that. We have to turn it down, you know, if we listen to it. We turn it down. We all think it's ridiculous, but, man, that Stuff sticks in your head and and and and goes along with people. And so I think, you know, Dave just made the assumption.

Jim Collison [00:17:22]:

Dave Groffel made the assumption. He was just gonna do ads in his podcast from the very beginning, and and he doesn't I mean, The money he makes from the show, I don't know. Not certainly, probably not as much as what he makes on the advertising side of things. He does have a retail outlet, and he has a product that he sells, and that's a great way to do it. Most of us don't really have a product. Right? I think Most podcasters are just selling their voice. If you're just selling your voice, besides, You know, guys like Rogen who were already famous before he was coming into this.

Dave Jackson [00:17:56]:

It's a tough gig.

Jim Collison [00:17:58]:

Yeah. It's work. You gotta get famous. You gotta make yourself famous.

Dave Jackson [00:18:01]:

And then Tim is saying and he meant shows, not shoes. He goes, I I do my shows because it's fun, and I occasionally get to hang out with you guys. So there is that. And then, Daniel brings up a good point. We're talking about ads and stuff, and he goes, yeah. Plus, there's, you know, a 1000 people who don't wanna have who do not have ad blockers. Right? So just ad block, and and, poor twit on Overcast, which is one of the probably top 5 podcast apps. His show just wouldn't play because people were using ad blockers.

Dave Jackson [00:18:33]:

Was there some sort it was a network, I guess, that I don't know. But, anyway, something to do with ads, and it it stopped them from, getting their app. And, of course, Overcast gets all the heat, and it's like, we didn't do it. It's, you know, some ad blocking system blocked him. So

Jim Collison [00:18:49]:

Well, Leo is trying to figure out how to, Like, he's trying to figure out in a race to the bottom with ads, and he in in a space by the way, if you're selling if you're buying or no. If you're doing ads in 2024, I think it's gonna get even worse. Like, for for Ross Brand's 100 predictions for 2024, my prediction is It's it's gonna be I mean, it's just gonna be it's gonna be really tough. It's gonna be a tough year. So Leo is trying to do that subscription Model, right, where he does $7 you get access to. That's a lot trickier than we think, you know, doing doing all that to figure out, k. You get an ad free version, and you're gonna get the ad version, and how is this gonna work, and he's trying to insert things in. I mean, he's had a Pretty sophisticated post production process for a while in the way he produces those shows, and they're messing around with ads on that thing to try and figure out how to get him in and how to get him out and some of that.

Jim Collison [00:19:43]:

It's I don't I would not wanna be a producer over there at Twitch.

Dave Jackson [00:19:47]:

Leo is the guy that I'm like, If anybody has the nerdy audience that is not gonna, like, scream and run away from crypto, Like, that dude should be playing with the whole streaming crypto thing because I think that's an audience that would do that, and that's direct payment. And then I just every time I He's been asked about it, and he kinda poo poos. I'm like, oh, dude. You're you at least test it. You know what I mean? The z man has a question. He's like, alright. So Is there a balance and or limit to the ad space per episode? What would what would or should it be, or is it a depends thing? It is a depends thing. It depends on your your length of show.

Dave Jackson [00:20:24]:

But the thing that I always say, and this is not, I repeat, underlined, in bold, circled, This is not a benchmark. Radio is 30%. So if you're over 30%, I am going to vomit when I listen to your show. I'm gonna be really upset if it is 30%. To me, like, I don't know, I'm, like, 1 and a half hour, maybe 2, and part of it too, here's the depends. How good are you at reading ads? You know what I mean? It's like Jordan Harbinger, I don't know what that guy is doing, but I don't mind his ads. I think he usually works in a story, and then there's the Marc Maron method where he'll just be talking to Jim, and all of a sudden he'll be like, MeUndies is the thing that blah blah blah. And you're like, wait.

Dave Jackson [00:21:09]:

He just went into an ad. About the time you go, is he just I can't believe he just did that. He's done. It's like he just throws it in there, and then he goes on. Jason Bryan from Matt Talk online says I always put 2 post roll ads. It doesn't impact the actual show, so that's the standard. I run 2 to start, mostly 2 32nd spots, dynamically ad inserted if you ever wondered what the DAI stands for. Then I have 1 section or 2.

Dave Jackson [00:21:36]:

I plugged 2, 3rd I think it's, 2:30 seconds, in shows, 45 minutes or more. So it's there you can see 45 minutes. It's got a few in, and I know I think part of it too is just talking to your audience because Todd for Geek News Central, he said, I do 2 ads. He goes, I tried 3 once, and my audience was like, what the heck? Like, what's the deal? And I I found there was 1 study that said it's not the minutes. Like, you if you had a 2 minute segment, right, and you had 2 1 minute ads, and then the next week, you put 4 32nd ads. So it's still 2 minutes. It's just a different thing. The 4 32nd ad, has a more adverse reaction because people are like, well, surely Dave is coming back after this ad.

Dave Jackson [00:22:25]:

Nope. Here's another ad. Oh, shoot. Okay. I bet he's coming. Nope. Sorry, psych. You know? So, Jason says my, my 5 minute show, 1 32nd to start, just one, and the same, 2 post rolls because post rolls are, you know, pretty much who's gonna listen to those are already gone.

Dave Jackson [00:22:42]:

And then Todd the Gator Has a comment. He says, we make our own ads and reinforce where to reach us, how to send us a question, and our website. So my question to that, Jim, is that an ad? They're used yeah. They're used

Jim Collison [00:22:59]:

probably. Probably.

Dave Jackson [00:23:00]:

Yeah. They're used as a transition to another segment of the show. That's kinda cool. I used to do that with my, with my music show. And in between each segment, you just hear this whoosh, musicianscooler.com, whoosh, and and then it'd be another segment, and then whoosh, music. I was just trying to beat my brand into their head. I I might bring that back. I was like, alright.

Dave Jackson [00:23:21]:

I do it now. I have the stupid well, not stupid. I don't wanna offend the ladies, but the whole, my my original jingle for, from Music Radio Creative was, you know, the lady singing The School of Podcasting with Dave Jackson, and then at the end of that, they went, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I cut out the yeah, yeah, yeah, and I now use it as a transition, and I always wonder if that's really annoying by the time you've heard it, like No.

Jim Collison [00:23:45]:

I think it makes a good I think it makes a good transition. That's probably an area well, I don't make those kinds of podcasts, But that's kinda, I think, an area for people who have multisegment podcasts, different topics. Having a musical, You know, jingle to separate those ideas. I think it's a nice you know, you don't want it to be a long song, but I think it's a nice transition for people Mentally to go, okay. I'm shifting gears. Right? That segment's done. I'm shifting gears with this. I I don't think that's a bad thing to do.

Jim Collison [00:24:17]:

I never. I listen to it a lot, and I never get sick of it. You know? It's it's it's yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:24:21]:

Yeah. That's it. That's, like, 2 seconds too. Yeah. And I think it's I think I like transitions, especially if you're doing kind of a a segmented show. I think we've all heard the Casey Kasem, You can't go into a a dog dedication and then go into an uptempo tune. You know? So if you are talking about 1 topic and you it's kind of a You know, it's a bit of a right turn to to go into this other topic. You know, 3 seconds of music just lets people go, alright.

Dave Jackson [00:24:49]:

Give my brain a break, and go that route.

Jim Collison [00:24:52]:

But you I think you need to use it consistently. Yeah. Like, that's one of those consistent things that if you're gonna do it once, Do it consistently across the show, and then do it consistently weak or what however, whatever your frequency is. Do it consistently in your shows because that's So that could be annoying. If it was just every once in a while, he'd be like, why is Dave throwing those in there? That's kinda weird. Right?

Dave Jackson [00:25:16]:

Todd says, hey. Sorry. I jumped into the conversation without contact. Absolutely no need for it. No. That was a good comment, actually, because it made me think, Hey. Is that an ad? Then

Jim Collison [00:25:25]:

We're a context free show.

Dave Jackson [00:25:27]:

Yeah. No. That was, like I said, it made me think, I should do that more. So and it's good because, you know, anytime you want somebody to remember anything, you gotta repeat it. So, like, I hardly ever say if you wanna jump into the show, just go to ask the podcast coach.com/question. I did have it was interesting because, SP said he tried to jump in and ended up at some old dead link, and I'm like, so he might have been doing because we used to have ask the podcast coach.com/join, but / join now points at / question, which jumps into our, you know, thing. So I'm not sure what's going on there, but if you ever wanna jump into the video instead of just asking questions in the chat, we are happy to have you. And that's every week, so, you know, if you're listening to an old show and you're like, oh, I wonder what the link is this week, it's ask the podcast coach.com/question.

Dave Jackson [00:26:20]:

And, Jim, you know what the link's gonna be next week?

Jim Collison [00:26:24]:

Ask the podcast coach.com.

Dave Jackson [00:26:26]:

That is it. There we go. Speaking of repeating things, so that's That's something to think about.

Jim Collison [00:26:32]:

We should've said it one more time, though. You said it once, and then I said it, and you should've come back with, you're right. It is Ask the Podcast Coach.com soft question.

Dave Jackson [00:26:40]:

And, of course, if you're listening to this later and it's not live, then it's just ask the podcast coach.com/ask, and you can leave us a voice mail message, and, we will play that on the show, much like it.

Jim Collison [00:26:52]:

Did you did you ever look at getting atpc.com? Did you

Dave Jackson [00:26:56]:

ever Did you have a word

Jim Collison [00:26:58]:

for that?

Dave Jackson [00:26:59]:

Domain. No. I

Jim Collison [00:27:01]:

I I'm not sure. It's 4 it's a four letter domain. I think all of those are actually gone. Yeah. I'm surprised. Just go out there.

Dave Jackson [00:27:09]:

It is odd because, you know, we're Americans, and we don't like long phrases. And, You know? So any

Jim Collison [00:27:17]:

It's definitely fake.

Dave Jackson [00:27:18]:

Is it? Okay. Well, somebody who's got some sort of weird program or whatever. Yeah. Let's see. Okay. So we have a a question. He said hitting the Marker button, if I can remember how to click the there we go. The read button.

Dave Jackson [00:27:35]:

There we go. Beautiful. So, this came from Reddit, I believe. My podcast focuses on my local area. It's about 1 year old, and we have 50 episodes. Although, I I think it's a good show, we currently only get about a 175 listeners. Now if we divide that by 20, it'd be 5, 13, 8. I'll never do math live.

Dave Jackson [00:27:58]:

It's a that's more than a hallway of people if you are teaching classes of 20, but it's growing. That's good. When guests ask how many people heard the interview. I'm embarrassed, and I sometimes talk about the poor analytics of the podcast industry. My question is how should I answer this question without having guests feel like they wasted their time? And so This, again, is where I think everybody thinks we have huge you know, everybody else has 1,000 and millions of listeners, and I've only got a 175. So, Jim, any thoughts on this? I know I have a couple ways of of explaining it.

Jim Collison [00:28:36]:

Oh, you you

Dave Jackson [00:28:37]:

you So I would go, I would say, so Jim goes, so, yeah, I'll come on your show. Like, how many listeners do you have? And I would say, You know, somewhere around anywhere from a 150 to 200. So, you know, when you come on the show, it's like you're talking to a small theater. Right? Let people feel like, hey. If you got to, you know, get on stage in front of 200 people, would you do it? And they're like, how many there? 200. Oh, that's a pretty big stage. I mean, that's my my high school auditorium, I think, held 300, you know, so that's pretty much the bottom floor, but not the balcony. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:29:12]:

I'll do that all day. So that would be here, again, it's the comparison is the the thief of joy kind of thing that, well, you know, Jordan Harbinger gets 6 figure downloads. Yeah. Well, you're doing a show about, you know, Poughkeepsie or or, you know, beaver mud, Mississippi or something, some hyperlocal show. And the other thing is who is your guest? If your guest really fits the local show, Like, I've had people I've been, like, episode 3. Why? Because they were talking about marketing or something that People needed to start a podcast, and I'm like, well, you've got the audience I'm looking for. And while there's no audience there now, for me, some of my top downloaded shows are the first ones because they've been there, you know, by you know, a decade later, you know, people have gone back and listened to the whole thing. So I don't know.

Dave Jackson [00:30:02]:

Do is what do you think is going on here with, you know, oh, I I've only got a 175.

Jim Collison [00:30:08]:

That doesn't mean those shows are the best. Yeah. You know, they've got their most downloads, but they may not be the best

Dave Jackson [00:30:13]:

That's true.

Jim Collison [00:30:13]:

Right, that you've ever done. Yeah. You know, it it is it's a privilege To be able to have that many people, I think, if it's 5 people. That's 5 more people than you started with in some cases, and those 5 people might Be really, really important. They may become really important to you. I I've said for a couple weeks now that I've been on a journey both with Home the one I do for work. That if I get if I get someone who who wants to talk to me or they've got a question, I've just been, You know, hey. Send me an email with some feedback, and then I send them a note back, say, hey.

Jim Collison [00:30:48]:

Can we chat? And I've done that. I think I did that 4 times this week, And each one of those conversations, Dave, was super meaningful. Now the the, you know, the in the case of 1 of the one of my home gadget geeks Listeners pinged me. And immediately after that, he's from Northern Europe. So we we did a call, did a Zoom call my morning, his afternoon. We chatted for in fact, I need to call him back. I I feel like I didn't chat with him long enough, but And immediately, he he, he jumped on the Patreon team as soon as we were done. Not once did we ever talk about that.

Jim Collison [00:31:25]:

I never asked, Hey. You know, I didn't do the hard sell at the end of the call. Do you think you could, you know, if you're finding value in this Zoom call that we just did, right, Could you you know? No. I it was the furthest, to be honest, the furthest thing from my mind. It actually has a little you know, it first, you're kinda like, oh, I hope you didn't think I did that for for a Patreon subscription. Right? I I'm I'm genuinely interested in that, in in in my audience. So, you know, that's the long play game, and I think that's easier to do when your audience is smaller, And I just think it means a lot to take a few minutes, a half an hour, 45 minutes, whatever, give them a call, have a conversation, ask them questions. I did one of these at work just yesterday.

Jim Collison [00:32:07]:

It was one of the last calls I did of the day, and that customer gave me some really by the way, they were not happy with The organization, you know, our company before the call. So this was a, hey, let me explain some things to you. Like when we got done, they were super happy. I got some great feedback from him, and it was something I and I made a I made a really good friend in in the in the process of doing this. Right? Yes. That takes 1 person at a time, and some people would say that's not scalable. I think you can't I think you have to do it if you're gonna be in podcasting. You gotta be willing to reach out 1 on 1 to your audience to to figure out what they're saying and what they're doing.

Jim Collison [00:32:46]:

Stop doing no. I shouldn't say this. Do surveys. They're fine. I work for a

Dave Jackson [00:32:51]:

Say that.

Jim Collison [00:32:53]:

The surveys are fine. I almost said, stop doing surveys. They're dumb. Right? No. No. No. They're they're actually really good, But, they're okay. Right? But when you get a note, when you get an email, when you get something from somebody, Ask him if he can just talk to him.

Dave Jackson [00:33:08]:

That's cool. So, obviously, the guy at work was complaining. What did he say that inspired you to go, okay, can we get on Zoom?

Jim Collison [00:33:19]:

Yeah. I got a note who's and and And he'd said, hey. A long time listener, first time email type deal had listened since the early days of home server show for me And just didn't was we said we were talking about I had the host from home service show back on to my show, And he was just making some comments how great it was in those days, and he loves it when the 2 of us are together and some of those kinds of things. And and I just said, hey. I'd love you got 30 minutes. I'd love to just meet you. And he's like, absolutely. Right? And so that's that was just The the the feedback in the email just led me to believe, you know what? Why don't I just give him 30 minutes? I probably should've gone a full hour, and I'm gonna, Like I said, I need to call him back and give him a little bit more time, but that's it was just a it was just some feedback.

Jim Collison [00:34:07]:

But if you get some say you get some Some not so positive feedback on your show. Hey. I don't really like the way you're doing too many ads. Go full circle back.

Dave Jackson [00:34:16]:

Nice to

Jim Collison [00:34:16]:

call back. You do. Say it would have been even better if I wouldn't have said it was a callback. Right? So you could say, Hey. I'd love to I'd love to get some more info from you on this. Tell me about it. Something changes with angry customers or angry listeners or disgruntled people. Something changes when it goes 1 on 1 like this.

Jim Collison [00:34:39]:

It's super hard to be angry with someone when you're face to face. I mean, you can do it, But what I have found most of the time is that just melts into, like, oh my gosh. I get to talk. Oh, now I understand. You have these great conversations, and you win the customer

Dave Jackson [00:34:54]:

Yeah. The, you know, lessons from marriage advice when I used to go to therapy for my marriage, why do people yell? It sounds like a dumb question. It's like, well, because they're upset. No. Because they don't feel heard. And so, like, you didn't hear what I said at the first time. Now I'm gonna say it in this voice. Do you not you know? So and I was like and I remember once the other thing, you talk about doing things in person.

Dave Jackson [00:35:15]:

Some guy complained about a podcast or something like that. I forget what it was, And this is so long ago, we got on Skype. We got on Skype, and I'm like, hey. I really would love to get your input on this, blah blah blah. He's like, oh, I'm a fan. What and I'm like, well, you You said you didn't like this, and you were mad. He's like, well, it was just that one thing. So the whole thing was like, I thought it was, like, this majorly upset guy.

Dave Jackson [00:35:35]:

He's like, no. And so I I just thought that was boring or whatever it but the the fun thing is about that is you've gone the extra mile. Right? It's like they didn't expect that, and it's it's I don't know how to explain it, but they they expected a Band Aid, and you brought a whole ambulance. You know what I mean? It's It's like, wow, I can't believe you got on those, you know. And you're right. That doesn't scale. I love stuff that doesn't scale. I wanna be so busy.

Dave Jackson [00:36:02]:

I'm like, I can't do this anymore, and I add things. Like, I remember when I added unlimited consulting to the school of podcasting, and, like, this could really blow up in my face, and I was, like, well, if I end up with Too much consulting. I will find a member of the school of podcasting who I feel really has a grasp on this stuff, and I will don them my deputy, and they can help, and then I'll watch the recordings of what they did. And I was like, well, let's jump off their bridge when we get to it, and I haven't had a problem with it yet. Yeah. So

Jim Collison [00:36:31]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do it till it doesn't scale. That's the I I think oftentimes we think of these things and you look ahead, and you're like, oh, that's definitely not gonna scale if this goes big. Well, do it till it doesn't scale. Have some have a plan. Like, when it does get to that point, here's what I'm gonna do to it.

Jim Collison [00:36:49]:

You know, we We were in a spot where we had we had, with our customer service, we had really created, the role for just 1 person, And it wasn't at some point we got we ran out of scale. Right. And they replaced it with with them with 6. Now they weren't 6 full time people, but it was, you know, it was 6 part time people were better than the 1 full time, And we had some global coverage and stuff, but we had a plan around it. And so we did it till it didn't scale, and then you're like, okay. We need to make some changes to get this done. But I think if you if you just, ignore it, you're like, oh, no. No.

Jim Collison [00:37:26]:

No. No. That's not gonna work. You may miss out, Dave. I've had some I have some of the best ideas I've ever had Have come from some of those kinds of conversations. I haven't just had one of those yesterday where they said we were talking, I'm like, hey, what if we did this? What would you think about that? And you And in the moment, you can't get that in an email. You're never gonna get that in an email back and forth, that that moment of discovery where they go, oh my gosh. Someone's listening to me, They get a chance to, and I say, look, I don't know if we're ever gonna implement that, but thank you for your feedback because it's super awesome, and it changed my mind on a few things.

Jim Collison [00:38:01]:

You know? So Back

Dave Jackson [00:38:02]:

back in the day when I was a customer service person, one of the things I would do is you you said a great thing. People have a hard time being mad at you in face to face, but if they are, people have a hard time Staying mad. I remember once I was, I participated in this new leadership program they were designing at a college, so I got to be one of the guinea students, right, the guinea pigs, and they gave you a tennis racket and a pillow. And at the count of 3, beat the pillow as hard as you can for as long as you can. And it was a it was real and the 1st day had you think about something that made you really, really upset. So I'm just sitting there, you know, thinking about my dad or whatever it is. Right? We've all got our issues, and I just you just close your eyes, and you just beat this thing, and you could like, you ran out of gas real quick. So one of the things I used to do is if somebody was upset, I would walk in and they'd be like, well, you guys are doing this thing, and I'm like, okay.

Dave Jackson [00:39:00]:

Great. I said, can you like, I wanna hear exactly what you're saying, and I would grab a pen and pencil and stand and I would so you could see me writing down what you're and just the body language is what you're saying is important. So when you get on a Zoom call, you're like, what you're saying is important. I wanna hear this. Is it okay if I record this? I might listen to this later. Anything that just says because, again, it goes back to we all wanna be heard, and so that's, that's some good stuff. And I I've I've told the story here before. I I meant to send an email out to 10 people on my email list that said, hey.

Dave Jackson [00:39:33]:

I'd like to talk to you, and I accidentally sent it to my whole email list. And I had 2 weeks of back to back to back to back to back Zoom meetings, and it was the best mistake I've ever made because, a, it's always kind of, like, Jim, you run to this when you go to your events, and they're like, oh, you're you're Jim Culison. Like, holy cow, Jim Culison. You know? So there was a little bit of that going on, which is always kind of odd on my side of the mic, but I get it. You know. So, yeah, don't don't hesitate. That's why we say if somebody emails you, definitely email them back. Maybe now it should be, hey, thanks so much for listening.

Dave Jackson [00:40:07]:

Can we, like, get on a Zoom call? I'd love to meet you and just know more about you because

Jim Collison [00:40:12]:

I'd love to hear about your experience. This could be and people love to give that kind of feedback And say, hey. You know, we've been doing HomeGadget Geeks for 580 whatever episodes. It's like, hey. I've been doing this a long time, and I'm looking for something new. I just wanna pick your brain on some People love that, like, come in here. Hey. Tell me why why do you listen to it? What do you like best about it? What is it like, that kind of feedback, They're never gonna give you that level of feedback in a survey.

Dave Jackson [00:40:37]:

Right.

Jim Collison [00:40:38]:

You will never get that. Right? You probably when you send it to your home mailing list, You probably got triple or 5 times more responses to do that than you ever would have gotten on a survey. Right. Again, I work for a survey research company. I'm not there's times for surveys. Right? But if you really wanna get meaningful feedback that, get get get on there and and ask some questions. It's it's super it's super fun too. Right.

Dave Jackson [00:41:07]:

And it's

Jim Collison [00:41:07]:

I mean, it's as it's as good for us as it is.

Dave Jackson [00:41:09]:

Well, the beauty of that is you also get body language if you're on Zoom. Right? You can see the facial expression and things like that, and that's where I learned when I would ask them, is there anything I should do that could improve the show? You have to shut up and and let that awkward pause go. And in many cases, they're gonna go, no, no, really. I love the show. Don't change a thing. But if you let it go long enough, they'll come up with something, and then and explain to them, like, look. I got extra skin on. I can take it, that whole 9 yards.

Dave Jackson [00:41:35]:

And, I

Jim Collison [00:41:36]:

always say just make something up. If you don't have an idea, just make something up. Usually, if you if you get them talking, something will come. Right? If you just kinda keep you're just like, oh, well, I mean, okay. I'll give you a second to think about it. I mean, And it can be super small just to, you know, think think through one time you heard something, and you're like, oh, I didn't like that, or, oh, that was a little cringe worthy, or is it, And then you can give them some ideas. Is it the way I say some things? Is it the segments we do? Is it certain guests we have on? Kinda kinda get them thinking because eventually, They'll be like, alright. I don't want this guy to shut up.

Jim Collison [00:42:08]:

I'm just gonna make something up.

Dave Jackson [00:42:11]:

That would be. I I think if you gave them multiple choice, they would probably pick 1. So I would do that last when they can't do anything. So but yeah. Absolutely. Our here's an old friend we haven't heard from in a while. Our buddy, Michael Delaney, buddy, good to hear from you. Oh, hey, Michael.

Dave Jackson [00:42:27]:

Says, how do you guys check if your feed is up and going? Well, number 1, if you subscribe to your own show, that would be part of it. And then the other one, this is a website I use all the time. It's from our good friends at Blueberry, cast feed validator.com. So I could go here, and mine is set up to go to that page. Here we go. So if I say ask the podcast coach Oh, wait. I'm on the wrong page. It's gonna say it's not valid.

Dave Jackson [00:42:54]:

I was on the right one. Here we go. Because you can go over here. Find your feed because if you're like, wait. What is my feed? So ask the podcast coach, and it finds my feed. There it is. And so I could just click here and say validate the feed, and so there's my feed, ask the podcast coach .libson.com. Now, one way to find out if it's live is just to copy that and throw it in a browser, and if something comes up, yep, then you know it's there.

Dave Jackson [00:43:21]:

But if you get a four zero four error, then you'd know. So if I came in here and made this a typo. So if I said ask the podcast co, right, then you get that. So if something comes up on the screen, it's there, but never a bad idea to validate your feed. So we'll see what's going on with ours. We got green checkbox across. It's doing more thinking. The server's good.

Dave Jackson [00:43:42]:

The artwork is probably gonna say it's too big. Nope. That's good. Your bit rate mode is not set to CBR. That's not true. That's interesting. I'll have to check that because I'd, Ask the Podcast coach does have some dynamic stuff in it, and I would be very, very surprised if for some reason because that's through Libsyn. I don't think when Libsyn does dynamic stuff, I don't believe they, You know, we all know that CBR or VBR stands for a very bad rate.

Dave Jackson [00:44:10]:

At least it does in my book. So, yeah, that's how you do it. If it's there, it's there. If you're using a host that you've, you know, you've paid, you know, go in, check your credit card. That's the number one thing at Lipson that I see. People are like, hey. What's interesting is we send, I think it's 3 emails, And the 4th one is, hey. Your your site is closed, and are we do we need to share your screen, Jim?

Jim Collison [00:44:39]:

Well, can we can we do it? Can I nerd out?

Dave Jackson [00:44:40]:

Oh, dude. Holy cow. Yeah.

Jim Collison [00:44:43]:

And now it's time for a power rant.

Dave Jackson [00:44:47]:

If we do this, I think.

Jim Collison [00:44:50]:

No. That was the wrong one. Oh, that

Dave Jackson [00:44:51]:

was the wrong one. See, I'm not even noticing.

Jim Collison [00:44:53]:

That was the wrong one.

Dave Jackson [00:44:54]:

Hey. My power rant is I hit I hate it when I hit the wrong button. That's my power rant.

Jim Collison [00:44:59]:

That's

Dave Jackson [00:44:59]:

There we go.

Jim Collison [00:45:01]:

Oh, we're waiting for this. It's time for Jim to get his nerd on.

Dave Jackson [00:45:10]:

Now in theory, I think I I It's

Jim Collison [00:45:13]:

a little weird there. And we got the echo in there. I just go back to the go

Dave Jackson [00:45:17]:

back to the radio scene. I think I can do this. No. I can't. I thought it could wait. There's that. Don't want that. Oh, Dave, you're so awful at this.

Dave Jackson [00:45:28]:

I want to add here. This. Nope. There we go. There's your screen.

Jim Collison [00:45:35]:

There we go. There we go. Alright. Audio's good? Yeah. It sounds good. Okay. So, a a service that I have, that I've really liked for this kind of and this is more than just is my feed working. This is my site working.

Jim Collison [00:45:50]:

Right? So oftentimes, you know, you kind of think about whether you're self hosted, or you're you're using a host provider, or whatever, you can use a service called Uptime Robot. So all one word, uptime robot.com. I actually interviewed the CEO of this, I don't know, 6 or 7 years ago, it might even longer, when it was just a really, really small company, and they've done some good stuff. They've grown nicely. But here's the idea. You give them your website and say monitor it, and if it ever goes down, they send you an email. They'll say, hey, it's been down, and they kind of keep track of How long it's been down and when it comes back up, they send you an email that says, hey. Your your site is back up, and you can get some you know, if you're If you're working with a host provider that may not be very reliable, you may be able to go back to them and say, hey.

Jim Collison [00:46:34]:

You're not providing the service that you That you promised you'd give me. Ironically, on the website we're seeing right here, GoDaddy, which is is you know, that's a that's a a pretty interesting shared host provider in the way you Yeah. But, you can monitor those. They have they have free plans. So for most podcasters, if you have 1 or 2 sites, you can actually use Uptime Robot for free. Dave, I know you often say, you know, free stuff goes away. In this case, they have a lot of corporate clients That are really kind of paying the bills, and then the free folks around it are, you can take advantage of that. When Effective.

Jim Collison [00:47:11]:

You can see they not only do website monitoring, but if you had a Cron job, that's an automatic job that's running in the background. It's providing something. It's doing something. It's putting something out. You could monitor that as well. Port monitoring at the local level, and then there's some new ones, new new to me, keyword ping monitoring, SSL monitoring, and domain Monitoring. So a a lot of enterprise or a lot of businesses use those. For the podcaster, this website monitoring is worth The the few minutes to sign up, give them your website, and, and let them honor it for you.

Jim Collison [00:47:46]:

They give some ideas if it's up if it stays up. You'll know because in the middle of the night, you don't know if it goes down. You don't know. You don't know it goes down until your audience says, hey. I can't get I can't get this or I can't do that. So if you've got any website that you wanna say, hey. Is this thing still up? Uptime robot, all one word, uptime robot.

Dave Jackson [00:48:05]:

There we go. Rich says, I've used Pingdom for monitoring website uptime, but I'd love a free option. Yeah. Who doesn't love free? That's a beautiful thing. That's interesting.

Jim Collison [00:48:16]:

Yeah. Try this one try this one for free. They've got some it's a premium a freemium model where you can you can purchase more Services. But like I said, for just for just monitoring your website, that's really where they got started, And, and you can get, you know, one site for free pretty easily.

Dave Jackson [00:48:35]:

I'm, here. Let me share my screen. If we go to here, This is the site I use. It's called Fathom Stats. I like it because it's super simple. Like, I can go here. This is we're looking at this. I'm surprised.

Dave Jackson [00:48:50]:

I'm like, don't I have ask the podcast coach on here? And I guess I don't. No. Really interesting. I will have to change that, but, I can see what pages are the most popular, how's my traffic, so most of it's coming from Google and Facebook that's just direct. There's people go, why do you do Reddit stuff? Because I get a whopping 10 people in the last this was last month. So not a ton of traffic from Reddit, but better than a poke in the eye. And then if you do things with campaigns and, UTMs, I, apparently, I got 1, 2 clicks from an episode description, so and then a couple different so it's Fairly simple, but if you wanna get crazy, like here I got some from my newsletter, show notes and email, etcetera, etcetera, and I bring this up because one of the things they do is, you guessed it, they let you know if your website goes down and when it comes back up. So if you are doing something and you're like, hey, what's the deal? The other thing, if I wanted to, which is, I guess, if you have a if you're doing this for a client, Somewhere in here, you can make your your, yeah, like here, podcast consultant.

Dave Jackson [00:50:06]:

Apparently, in here, if I click on this, Yeah. I will share this. I'll grab this whole link. You can get a link, and if somebody you know, you could share it. So If I paste this, that's not the right here we go again with Dave cannot copy and paste on a Mac. I don't know why. It's command c, not not control c. There we go.

Dave Jackson [00:50:29]:

So these are the stats for podcastconsultant.com, which doesn't get a ton of traffic, etcetera, etcetera, but you can make your stats public if you want to. I wanna say it's $9 a month. It's not a not a ton of stuff, but it's, That's just another tool that will let you know if your website has gone down, and I know Anytime my sight goes down, which is not very often, it's, like, for, you know, 45 seconds or something, and I'm like, it's like barely down. By the time it The message gets to me. It's it's up. So, Jeremy

Jim Collison [00:51:07]:

Well, it's it's good to know. I mean, it's good to know that From from that perspective, is your host providing for you, you know, you the uptime you expect?

Dave Jackson [00:51:15]:

Yeah. And then just checking your website every now and then. Like, Michael's like, hey. Like, I should probably check my feed. Right? So Jeremy says, I spent a decent amount of time working on my site this week. It's on DreamHost shared hosting, and I found that my WordPress SuperCache had not been working for quite some time. So this is one of those times where what I always recommend is pretend you're a listener, and go back and, like, send yourself an email. Make sure your contact page is working.

Dave Jackson [00:51:43]:

Make sure, You know, just all the stuff you're asking people to do, go back through the the path of a customer or a listener, and make sure all that stuff works because it's embarrassing when you go, oh, wait. There's a typo in my name? Like, I didn't notice that. So, Yeah. The I I'm very close to thinking about moving my my WordPress site to PodPage. I'm thinking about it. I'm like, because I I have 18 years worth of caca behind the the wall of the school of podcasting.

Jim Collison [00:52:16]:

It's a lot of movies, Dave. It's a lot of movies.

Dave Jackson [00:52:19]:

There's a lot of 3 zero one redirects. Like, this was here, and I'm, like, but every time Like right now on The School of Podcasting, if you go to the episodes page, you will see that, it read it basically duplicates itself. It's I'm using Elementor because I just got a thing last night. Hey. Your Elementor, Premium subscription is coming in November. It's $149 a year. Just letting you know, so, like, get your which is good. You know, that's that's if any time yearly thing you should have, something to let people know, hey.

Dave Jackson [00:52:54]:

We're gonna just charge you a decent amount of money. If you don't want us to do that, then, you know, cancel this now. So Hansel it's it's really the billing department that's sending that out. Like, we don't wanna have to refund your stuff in a month when you forgot that you had this subscription. And so just to give you an idea, I use Elementor, and 2nd line themes, I think, is what I'm using. So, you know, here's my my episodes, and I'm getting this weird thing now where I don't know why it's putting this Weird line of code in the middle of my paragraph, but, like, okay, whatever. So we go down, and if if these weren't in the middle of the paragraph, I'm pretty happy with this page until you get to the You're like, hey. Didn't we just see these episodes? And you're like, oh, Dave, you have that code in there twice, and you're like, no.

Dave Jackson [00:53:38]:

I don't, and I've tried multiple things, and blah, blah, and I'm, like, I think this now is not Elementor. I think this is some sort of thing in WordPress, but for whatever reason, And I go in, and I look at the code, and it's just weird. As I scroll down, I see my, whatever, 9 or 12 episodes, and then they just start repeating. And I'm, like, why is it showing? And my answer is I don't know, and I don't feel like paying somebody right now to Figure it out. I'm like, it's kinda bad on my branding, but I've I've I've had 1 person notice it that said, hey. Do you know your episodes repeat? And I'm like, Yeah. I know. You know? So

Jim Collison [00:54:19]:

One of those one of those problems. Throw up Jason's comment there. He says, Jason Bryan said I had a rogue plug in mess up this week. Maple Grove, the that's our host my host, Maple Grove Partners, found the issue without saying we don't manage WordPress or or blame, you know, you know, the blame game of customer, answer. Maple Grove for the win. Yeah. And, Dave, can you show can you show the I I have the uptime robot stats up just for folks, just to kinda Circle around on that. You get this and this is I'm on their free plane.

Jim Collison [00:54:53]:

You get this app up to 50 monitors, and you can see right here, and it's refreshing every minute, which is kinda cool. You can see, at Maple Grove no downtimes in the last 24 hours, 7 days, or last 30 days. Doesn't mean we don't ever have We have zero downtime. It does happen, and he up he updates stuff and reboots, but I love I love Christian as a host provider because like Jason says, he can be, he can be oh, we'll come back to you, Dave. He can be sorry. I stopped sharing my screen. Didn't know. I was I was thinking in the StreamYard days, it would come back to to this.

Jim Collison [00:55:28]:

He thinks a he thinks a little beyond just hosting. He wants, You know, he's kinda thinking through, like, hey. How do you have the best experience of your site possible? And I wanna make sure you, you know, that that that service is there. And he knows how to troubleshoot anything. So it's it's kinda cool to have that kind of service For your for your website. So, Jason, thanks for sharing.

Dave Jackson [00:55:50]:

I have no, like, oh, I wanna say Christopher, but that's not it. Christian Christian at Maple Grove. I have no qualms with Maple Grove Partners. I I kinda wish I had a little more control over my email address at times.

Jim Collison [00:56:05]:

Yep. And

Dave Jackson [00:56:06]:

I'm I'm thinking of moving it to, like, fast email, or there's some program that I'm, like, just, a, just to because I'm not constantly, but Probably once a quarter, I'm like, hey, Christian. My email's weird, and he'll he usually just increases. I have a huge, like, inbox now, and I'm like, I'd kinda like to get that off his plate. But speaking of subscriptions and stuff, Gary says, I canceled my Evernote for increasing from 80 to $129. I have to check because I use Evernote. I think I have not the free plan, but the one above it or whatever, but that's a bit of a hike. But on the other hand, hey. Let's let's raise the minimum wage.

Dave Jackson [00:56:45]:

It won't have effect on anything. Well, all those Evernote play. It's like, But speaking of that, speaking of Evernote, if you get it in today, the question of the month is if you're listening to a podcast. Jim, this is a good question for you. Let me put a marker for that. So you're listening to a podcast. Right? Somebody's interviewing something. They're saying whatever it is.

Dave Jackson [00:57:07]:

Something comes up, and you're like, oh, I wanna mention this on the podcast. How do you Remember, capture, whatever you wanna call it. How do you get that information into your podcast 6 days from now. Like, what do you do to remember that?

Jim Collison [00:57:25]:

Oh, that's a good question.

Dave Jackson [00:57:27]:

Because I have a couple, and none of them are great.

Jim Collison [00:57:32]:

You know, I generally just I I've got, yeah, this is gonna sound like I do everything with tech Except those kinds of things. I just I have I have a notepad that I just keep in mind.

Dave Jackson [00:57:42]:

There you go.

Jim Collison [00:57:43]:

Yeah. And I write I write it down. Like, that's just one of those things I've never completed I've never completely moved to digital or notes, and it's just it's never really worked for me for whatever reason. I just I've tried Try a different way of capturing things and organizing things. It just never really worked very well. So, still, if I'm if I won't remember something, I I write it down.

Dave Jackson [00:58:05]:

I remember back in the day when Palm Pilots first came out, and I had I had a Palm Pilots, and a friend of mine looked at me. He's like, hey, man. Paper doesn't crash. And I'm like, oh, you know what? You got a good point.

Jim Collison [00:58:16]:

It is true.

Dave Jackson [00:58:17]:

Dan Daniel has come to my rescue. He says, hey. Cash feed validator is wrong. I checked the latest Ask the Podcast Coach episode manually, and it's constant bit rate. It is 48 k instead of 44 1 and not variable bit rate, but maybe it's because the encoder Lev, is not sure, but yeah. So I'll have to let Todd know. Mike, I don't know what you're using to check variable bit rate, but it's not accurate. Then Dan, I love my my audiences coming and troubleshooting my website.

Dave Jackson [00:58:45]:

Dan says my the thing on, The School of Podcasting goes doesn't look like code. It looks like 2 lines of text lapping, so maybe it's a which is a a div is a HTML tag, so maybe something's not correct there. So thanks for that feedback, Dan. And then speaking of Evernote, it's a stampede. Daniel has also canceled his Evernote, $49 a year to $129. They try to get me to stay at, I think, 69 a year, but it's not worth that to me anymore. I'm moving to Apple Notes. My problem is I have everything.

Dave Jackson [00:59:18]:

Now I can move to Notion, but Notion is one of those things like it slices, it dices, and even juliennes. And I'm like, I I just needed to slice. I don't need dicing or juliennes, and I'm like, I could yeah. So thanks, but but no thanks on that. But, Yeah. So paper and pencil is is Jim's official that is a good answer. It works as long as you don't lose the the paper and pencil, then you're.

Jim Collison [00:59:42]:

Yeah. For the for the most part, it works. I mean, nothing's perfect. Nothing is perfect in that. And it it is to be fair, it is a combination of those things, but it's mostly Like, during a show, I'm taking I take physical notes on a piece of paper. It's just I've I could type them in, and I've quite I've even got quiet Keyboards for that so I can be typing it. I just find when I'm multitasking, I write faster than I would type When I'm trying to listen and write at the same time. And the typing just it's it's just a mess by the time I'm done and Things don't go right now.

Jim Collison [01:00:16]:

Oh, oops. Oh, that you know? So if if I I have found oftentimes just grabbing a piece of paper is Easiest way, and then maybe that gets transferred to something else eventually to you know, an email gets sent or it gets on my calendar. I'll be honest. I use a calendar like it to do off sometimes. If I need to remember something or do something, I'll just schedule it on my calendar to make sure I don't miss That one.

Dave Jackson [01:00:40]:

Yeah. This has me thinking now. I have to if I'm moving from Evernote, I'm not sure where I would would move to, but, somebody who who might have the answer to that would be, of course, maybe one of my awesome supporters. If you'd like to be an awesome supporter, it's super easy. Just go to ask the podcast coach.com slash awesome, and, you can become that. And for the record, there are people this week. We had a Northeast Ohio Podcasters meetup with the 1 and only Glenn the Geek. And if you're an awesome supporter, you got a copy of that.

Dave Jackson [01:01:14]:

So when I talk about bonus content. And we asked him about selling his podcast on how he went through that, so that's some bonus content that you're not getting here on the show. Also, the show is brought to you by, The School of Podcasting where we have courses, coaching, and community, and I mentioned earlier, unlimited 1 on 1 coaching. And, that's not true. That's an old slide. The supporter of the week of the I should be, yeah, of the week is the one and only, Ed Sullivan. So if you need an editor, go check him out over at sonic cupcake.com. And as I was putting together this slide, I was like, I just love the name Sonic Cupcake.

Dave Jackson [01:01:51]:

I don't know why. Mhmm. I just do. It's like it makes

Jim Collison [01:01:54]:

Just cupcakes. They're delicious.

Dave Jackson [01:01:55]:

That's why. It makes me hungry, and, yeah. So, Ed, thank you so much for your support. Ask the Podcast Coach runs on PodPage and, now with its new fun interface, and, it does some really cool stuff as I as I had to dig through every single feature of PodPage. I think one of my favorites, they have and episode signature. So if you want something added to the bottom of your episode on every, you know, episode on your website, not in the apps, Check out the episode signature. And if you need more Jim Collison, and who doesn't, check him out over at, check out Home Gadget Geeks over at the average guy dot tv. Or Speaking of PodPage, go to home gadget geeks.com.

Dave Jackson [01:02:36]:

That runs on PodPage as well. And we're on our journey to 40 awesome supporters. It's time. If you've been thinking about it, now's the time. Go over to ask the podcast coach.com/awesome, and you can be an awesome supporter today. And remember, when you sign up, We give you a big to do and a big there will be horns. There will be loud music and dancing, when you become an awesome supporter. So thanks so much for that, and now I'm always like, did I miss anything? Oh, here we go.

Dave Jackson [01:03:05]:

Dan has, I thought I forgot about this one. I migrated from Evernote to OneNote many years ago and have since moved from OneNote to Obsidian? Obsidian. Obsidian. Now I've heard that name, and that's one of those things where I've never heard of it. But the few times I've heard it, the people that know about it Go, oh my god. I love Confluence. Like, I

Jim Collison [01:03:30]:

think that's an Atlassian product, I think. So they're a big open source, and it's A lot of tech companies use those products to keep track of all their stuff, all their notes and such.

Dave Jackson [01:03:42]:

Yeah. But, man, I used to teach classes on OneNote many, many years ago and, because that used to be free.

Jim Collison [01:03:52]:

I think it's a I think it's Wiki based too, I think. I could be wrong. I could be thinking about it.

Dave Jackson [01:03:56]:

Some cool stuff with OneNote. That's the reason I like Evernote is, like, I have a contact in my Google contacts. First name ever, last name note, and so if If something comes up and I'm, like, oh, I wanna put this, I wanna save this for later, I can forward it to Evernote, and It goes into a notebook. So the ease it does integrate with everything, but I see that's one of those where is how valuable is it because I'm like, I I think about that sometimes. Anytime we get into transitioning, you have to think about, okay, How how much time does it take to just migrate all that stuff? And then you have to tack on learning curve, and how many extra steps? We were talking about, yesterday, I was doing consulting for Lipson, and I was explaining how You can set up your default. So if you publish every Tuesday at 4 AM, you can go in and say the default is every Tuesday at 4 AM, And, oh, by the way, set this to that and set the category to this, and it was funny because I said, now go go back to the dashboard and click on new episode, I said, and scroll to the bottom. And the guy's like, oh, that is so cool. He's like, I know it's, like, 3 clicks.

Dave Jackson [01:05:09]:

He's like, but the fact that I don't have to make 3 clicks, he goes, I don't know why, but that's just cool. And so it is sometimes it's just the little things when you're doing if it's something you do every day, if you can eliminate 3 clicks, I know, first world problems, but, there are just times when you're like, I'm so glad. I like, what was I doing this? Oh, when I'm making these pod page videos, I upload them. I was using Loom in this case because I don't care if it gets shared because that's one of my free courses, but I would upload it. I'd go to edit, Click on settings, click on upload thumbnail, click on save, go to the back, click on add a link, and then I had a text expander where I would type in hashtag TPP, and it would put in the the link to tripod page. I'd so all these little things, but when I was doing those manually, It was like, but I had a bunch of, TextExpander stuff that made it super easy. So, sometimes those little things can just stop you from losing your mind. Dan says Confluence is boy, we're learning else

Jim Collison [01:06:13]:

At last.

Dave Jackson [01:06:14]:

Atlassian. Atlassian. Awesome. Wiki based, yes. Not free, but I already pay for it for work. Obsidian is open source text based. Basically, for me, it's just using tools I'm already paying for, and that is always a fun, I I I think I've talked about that before. There are times when well, the the stuff now that I'm uploading the, the new video is on.

Dave Jackson [01:06:35]:

I forget the name of the program, but I bought, like, a lifetime access to it, like, 3 years ago, and I'm looking through all these different video platforms, and I'm like, Oh, wait. I have 1. So that's one of those where I saw somebody yesterday, and as I was doing research for the show that somebody was thinking about moving to a different media host. And I said, what are you hoping the new media host does that the current one doesn't? Because you might wanna make sure that what you have, you know, you might actually already have it. Like, I had a guy this week, that wanted me to cancel his subscription. It was a Glow customer, so Glow is Lipson's Patreon alternative, and he's like, I don't wanna have to load iTunes to listen to this thing because he wanted to listen on the web. Well, it's a private podcast. It's like you you here's The joy of it is you can listen to it on whatever app you want.

Dave Jackson [01:07:31]:

And so he's like, I don't wanna have to listen to, you know, on on Apple. And I said, well, if you and he was really kind of grumpy, and he's like, I really just want to be canceled. I'm like, okay. So I canceled this account. I'm like, just for the record, you know, just if you, you know, you could have copied and pasted this per my last instructions into Google Podcasts and listened on your website, at which point he was like, okay. So how do I turn this back on? So, you know, there are options sometimes that you have that, You know, it's like, oh, I didn't realize I had this option already. So make sure you know what you got, and, there you go. I Dan is throwing out more options.

Dave Jackson [01:08:12]:

I thought about this. I I used to have a class on Trello for the school of podcasting. Trello is is kinda Evernote, but much more visual. And so Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:08:22]:

Kind of project management tool.

Dave Jackson [01:08:24]:

Yeah. It is. Yeah. You're kinda painting with peanut butter with that one, but it I've seen people do a lot of really cool stuff. I've seen people use it for feedback where people can vote. Like, here's an idea, then you have your audience vote on it and things like that, but, most of my stuff is, like, Keeping receipts for travel. I do that a lot as well.

Jim Collison [01:08:43]:

Right. Right. Yeah. It it took me 55 years, that's how old I am, to to figure out, I'm not good at any of those, like keeping track of things and and making big, You know, big charts of things and all all of, you know, the the stuff, lots of notes, an organization. That's not my I I don't like doing any of those kinds of things. I am a in the moment. You'll you won't find a more in the moment, Firefighting, every day is different, serving customers than me. And and realizing that for years, Dave, I tried to be that project manager guy, that project you know, keep track of stuff, and I was terrible at it.

Jim Collison [01:09:29]:

I was I would get into all of these, and this is maybe why I'm still using paper for these kinds of things, is because I'm just not I just don't like doing it. I get bored by it really fast. Now there's some people who are just great at that. My favorite thing to do is just partner with those people who are great at those kinds of things, and then Oftentimes, they don't like being the front person. They don't like being upfront. They don't like being the one dealing with the customer or what having those conversations. Conversations wear them out sometimes. So I found great, you know, great success in Not trying to be that project.

Jim Collison [01:10:06]:

Again, all these tools are out there. I think sometimes as you think about your podcast, You you spend some time and a little bit of a strength based philosophy here, but think through, you know, like, what am I really good at with this, and how do I do more of that? And then if you're finding you're getting frustrated, Dave, in your case, say, like, your your website's not working and stuff, stop trying to code it yourself and just get like you did with Mark. Like, you try to make your own graphics, but I do too. We're not very good at that. Like, let the pro do it. Right? Let the Go out, like, buy that stuff and and focus the time on doing what you do best. I did during the pandemic, you know, I was doing 5 or 6 podcasts a week, and I never got tired of it because it was we were busy. There were things to be said and things to do.

Jim Collison [01:10:57]:

There are folks who looked at me and said, you are nuts. Like, how how could you that's a lot of work, and I'm like, yeah, but it's what I'm best at. So I think in this, As we think through all these different tools, some of you may be thinking, oh, I so desperately wanna do that, but I'm terrible at it. Embrace it, my friends. Embrace it for what it is, and get some folks, you know, who can who can help you with that or do it for you or do it as part of the team and figure out how you can add value to the what they're doing

Dave Jackson [01:11:28]:

Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:11:29]:

In in I

Dave Jackson [01:11:30]:

picked up a client this week. I don't do a lot of editing, and it's not my favorite thing, but he's like, I don't need people to he goes, I just needed to, like, make it sound a little better, slap on my music, throw an ad in the middle. I'm like, well, I can do that for you. He's like, really? And I'm like, yeah. I'm like, how often do you publish and this and that? And like I said, realize I travel from time time. So there may be times when you have to get episodes ready, so he's making an informed decision. And after 2 episodes, he's like, I should've done this so long ago. He goes, because I like podcasting again.

Dave Jackson [01:11:58]:

So take the things that drive you nuts. And, you know, if you got the budget, farm them out. Chris has an interesting question. I have a client that went on a break, and there's 1 thing I asked you a couple weeks ago, Jim. I'm like, because you occasionally like you said, the guest didn't show up, you take a break. Jim is taking, like, a 1 week break. What's the longest break you've ever taken? Do you know?

Jim Collison [01:12:20]:

6 weeks.

Dave Jackson [01:12:21]:

And but you you did your numbers get affected at all? Oh, for sure.

Jim Collison [01:12:26]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Not and not drastically, and they come back. Right? So, like but yeah. Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:12:33]:

There's a little joy when you stop. At work, this was at work where I took the 6 week break. You can I mean, you can see a definite drop, and then it it's slowly been coming back, and that's okay? Yeah. I Like, it's

Dave Jackson [01:12:44]:

I brought back the the Akron podcast, and, again, local show that I I've never really put all my efforts into, but I think I was up to, like, maybe 50 downloads an episode, you know, hyperlocal. I quit for months, And I was like, you know what? What I'm doing is I'm I'm finding stories, having chat gpt summarize them, and so I don't have to do that, and it's making it much easier. And, again, as always, super double checking to make sure it's not making up facts, but it was it was months, and I went from 50 downloads. So I put out my new episode, 7, and I was like, ow, that that that hurts. But, but like you said, I checked the last one. We're up to 22, and I'm like, okay. So people are like, oh, it's it's back. Okay.

Dave Jackson [01:13:29]:

So but Chris has a different one. He goes, I had a client that went on a break from their podcast for a few months. Not a great idea. You know, what are you gonna do? And he goes, and stop their lips and payments. Podcast is still up. Send me an email with either the name of the show or their login or something because their show's not closed. Because if your show is closed, the the longest it would go would be till the end of the month. Like, if you cancel it, it'll be like, okay.

Dave Jackson [01:13:57]:

Like, today is 28th. November 1st, your your file should not work, so something You got some 'splaining to do there, Lucy. There's something that's not right there.

Jim Collison [01:14:08]:

Or it's still being charged on a credit Card that They're not looking. Getting automatic Yeah. Off or or some of those. Yeah. It's it's coming it's probably coming from somewhere.

Dave Jackson [01:14:17]:

Or I've seen this, and it's it's rare, but it happens. People, like, I will go in and click their files, and, like, nope, they're dead in Lipson. You're you're closed. And then you go to their thing in Spotify, and they work. And you go, well, I don't know what Spotify is using for a source. It's not Libsyn, but Spotify is looking at something different. So, that's well, I clicked the wrong button, and I'm going

Jim Collison [01:14:41]:

Hi, Dave. Hi, Dave.

Dave Jackson [01:14:43]:

Let's do the undo. Sure. Undo hide overlay. There's Chris is back, and now I'm back. And those are the things those are the things Dave edits out in post. So Excellent. So I will let me check that into that. And then, SP had a great Point here, he goes, what I wanna know is I'm looking for that magic 10,000 downloads per episode in 30 days in my media host provider.

Dave Jackson [01:15:11]:

Well, SP. That leads us to our next question here, which is this person said in Reddit, and I was kind of like, really? But, you know, we're not here to judge. He says, I'm looking to learn which are the unsaturated podcast genres, which you'd like to listen to. I'm thinking of starting my new audio podcast, and I'm looking to understand which podcast topics and genres are least saturated now and that we need more of. I can tell you one that is really popular, and that, of course, is true crime. Do we need another true crime podcast? I think my answer to that is, but that's just me. I don't listen to now If I love true crime, I might be going, oh, yes. Please bring more.

Dave Jackson [01:15:56]:

Any idea on top of my mind is an immersive scripted Friction Friction. Yes. That's a whole different kind of pop. Scripted Friction. Yes. Immersive scripted Fiction podcast, wow wow, podcast, but I'm looking for a second opinion. Thanks for your advice or help. So here's the I I have an idea.

Dave Jackson [01:16:17]:

I wanna do an immersive scripted fiction podcast. Well, then do an immersive scripted fiction podcast. I think if we try to pick, like, something based on I mean, it's there are tons of genres out there. I think if you go to Pacific, I wanna say dashcontentorpacificcontent.com. I know they've done that before, and, like, comedy and business, I think, are the most crowded. I know anytime I see somebody do a real estate podcast, I'm like, There are a lot of real estate podcasts, which makes sense. You could do a hyperlocal one. Hey.

Dave Jackson [01:16:53]:

If you're buying a a house in the Akron area, come see Dave, you know, you know, Dave Jackson Realty, something like that. So I see a lot of those, and I see a lot of golf podcasts because it's hard to rank for the word golf when there are already 478,000 podcasts, you know, that are the golf podcast or, you know, I think my favorite is still Thinking Outside the Box. I think there are 26 shows named Thinking Outside the Box, so I get where they're going. On one hand, I applaud you for having a bit of a plan, but there's part of me that goes because originally when I saw that, I thought they were looking to monetize. Like, what's the I I always love when people go, what's the topic I can talk about that requires the least amount of work that pays the most. I'm like, yeah, don't start that podcast. That's not the reason to get into it, but I just to me go ahead.

Jim Collison [01:17:48]:

You think about what Elon Musk has done with space. Right? And 15 years ago, recovering, you know, oh, recovering booster rockets at NASA would say too expensive. Can't To explain no. Yeah. It's just it's just not gonna we don't have the budget. It's not gonna work. And Elon Musk comes along and says, I'm gonna make this work. And throws a whole bunch of money at it, right, and commits to it, and we we land rockets now, which is which is right.

Jim Collison [01:18:18]:

We bring these boosters back. I think sometimes, you know, we we think you know, what if Burger King would have never It's McDonald's has got this wrapped up. It's it's just there's too many you know, wings are really popular right now. I I can't There's a it seems like there's a new wings restaurant opening up all the time. In fact, new restaurants open up all the time. I don't think you can go I think you gotta try, and you're gonna fail. Many of them do fail. Right? They get out there and they fail.

Jim Collison [01:18:51]:

To the to the rocket, you know, to the space thing. There's a couple other companies that are trying to do things that aren't working really well. They're putting a ton of money into it, and it's not working. I think you've got to like anything, if you wanna do it, you gotta get out there, you gotta take a risk, And try it. Right? Yeah. You may you may flush the money down in the process. You may you may fail in that, But you won't know for sure. Questions like this say to me, tell me what's a guaranteed winner because I don't really wanna try and fail.

Jim Collison [01:19:27]:

And sorry, guys. It's that that's just part of the deal. You've just gotta get out there. I I think Oftentimes, what's holding me back on some podcast is the the fear of failing. And so I go with the safe, Then Safe is okay, but, you know, taking a big risk and trying something new or trying something different or trying a different form. Well, look. Rob Greenlee on his new podcast put music a little

Dave Jackson [01:19:52]:

music in the

Jim Collison [01:19:53]:

bed behind. Right? He thought, well, give this a try. Oh my gosh. The audience feedback was blistering. Now and he he said, I guess I won't make that mistake again. Was it a mistake, Rob? Like, you got feedback from an audience, an already established audience that is used to a certain kind of podcast Flavor. And you had a few people who gave you some pretty hard feedback on it, but what about A new audience segment that may want a music bed going on in the background. Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:20:25]:

What if we just wiped out all those old curmudgeons who just wanna complain about everything around podcasting. And what if we got them out and you actually attracted some new people who liked that, who would have a new voice that maybe Have some new opinions. Right? So in him just saying, well, never do that again, well, maybe that's quitting a little too early. Like, You know? Who are we trying to who are we trying to attract to that thing? I don't know. Did you listen to did you listen to that

Dave Jackson [01:20:54]:

episode at all? The minute I hear a Show, and it's you know, we just got some music in the background. Now I would do this to do a segment. Like, if I was doing an ad, I'd be like, hey. Jim Collison, home gadget geeks.com. You're loving me? Hey. It's like you're at home you know, I can see that for an ad, but if this just keeps going, Here's the problem. I'm a musician, and so when I hear that, I'm going, I bet that's in that's in e. C, d, g, e, c, d, g.

Dave Jackson [01:21:21]:

Okay. So that and I just said, hey. Consider the source. I'm a musician. That's gonna drive me nuts. So and I think Doctor even was like, yeah. Some people find it distracting, but you're right. Some people might like, you know because I know there's a lot of YouTube people that throw little music on it.

Dave Jackson [01:21:37]:

It's like beep beep beep, Happy funny music, and they're bouncing around and that whole 9 yards. So

Jim Collison [01:21:42]:

Yeah. Well, you just have to be careful with your audience making decisions. Like, who am I trying to reach with this? And if you let your your existing audience who is used to one style dictate what you do next And you listen to their advice. This is where I recommend not listening to their advice. So if you're trying something new and you're getting feedback from an existing audience, Maybe don't listen to it because if you're trying to reach new people, you've gotta do new things. And so, You know, in in Rob's case, I'd have been like, oh, I don't I didn't I'm not a musician. I'm not you. I listen to it, and I was like, Well, this is kinda this is kinda interesting.

Jim Collison [01:22:21]:

Like, what could we do with this? Right? So

Dave Jackson [01:22:23]:

One of the hardest questions is, what are you gonna do to be different than the other 50 podcasts that are already talking about, you know, the Denver Broncos or whatever. Okay. We're gonna play music under ours. Does that make it hugely different? No, but it makes a difference, and some people might like that because they're on the treadmill or whatever. You know? So, you know, and try it.

Jim Collison [01:22:45]:

There was a there was a radio show here in Omaha that did that for a lot of years. Z 90 2 here in Omaha. 92. Alright. Doesn't that just sound cool? They, Todd and Tyler in the morning. Todd and

Dave Jackson [01:22:57]:

Tyler. Oh, yeah. You know? It it

Jim Collison [01:23:00]:

They went They went syndicated with music playing in the background, and they it was all talk. No. They they completely stopped playing music in the morning show except behind their voices. And it was just very faint. You could just kind of hear it, like just barely hear it, and they got really popular and kind of went syndicated. Right. It can work. It can work.

Jim Collison [01:23:24]:

What's it just depends. Are you gonna are you gonna survive the negative feedback from your Your already existing audience of folks who you know they're not gonna like it. They listened to you when there was no music behind it. You're gonna need to you're you're gonna need to do that.

Dave Jackson [01:23:40]:

Leave, and let the new people that like it come in. You just gotta be able to weather the storm. So

Jim Collison [01:23:45]:

Listen. When McDonald's tried special sauce, which what the what is special sauce? Right? But it was new, And they put it on the Big Mac. How many people said, why are you putting this special sauce on a hamburger? That's something my dad would have said, by the way, and he never would have bought that hamburger. It's delicious.

Dave Jackson [01:24:03]:

Ketchup and mustard and pickle. That's it. No special sauce for me. Yeah. Exactly. So Todd and who? What was it? Todd and Taylor in the morning?

Jim Collison [01:24:15]:

Todd and Taylor. Tyler.

Dave Jackson [01:24:16]:

Face. Yeah. Here we go, everybody. Come on. Alright. Woo hoo. Alright. So very fun.

Dave Jackson [01:24:22]:

Well, you mentioned, businesses closing. According to our good friends at Google, almost 20% of businesses fail within the 1st year. A whopping 18.4% of businesses fail in less than 12 months of being open. 1 in 5 businesses is predicted to fail within their 1st 18 months. Following the trend line, this business failure statistic rises to 36 or 30.6 after 2 years. So not everything. You know, you drive by, and you go, wait. That used to be a Wendy's, or that used to be, you know, whatever.

Dave Jackson [01:24:52]:

And how does a Wendy's fail? Like, they've got tons of advertisement. They've got everybody knows what you're gonna get, and, You know, at least in my case, there's there's 1 in our town. The closest one to me, I do not use because the inmates are running the asylum, and it's the insight is gross. You're lucky if you just bad service. I'll just leave it at that. So

Jim Collison [01:25:15]:

Are you talking about a Waffle House?

Dave Jackson [01:25:16]:

Yeah. No. Just kidding.

Jim Collison [01:25:18]:

Just kidding. No. Just kidding. Just kidding.

Dave Jackson [01:25:20]:

Here's a, here's a good answer. SP coming up with a great bumper sticker. The least crowded genre is the one that hasn't been invented yet. Be creative and serve the listeners. If I Get an if, oh, crap. What's the name of the sticker mule? Sticker mule has another sale on T shirts. I'm gonna get one that's like hashtag serve first because That's really what it's about. So, it

Jim Collison [01:25:47]:

Well, what's that that quote from, Wall Street movies. I forget which one. He says you can be first, you can be oh, I don't know what this

Dave Jackson [01:25:56]:

shit is. Or first. No?

Jim Collison [01:25:58]:

Best or cheat, something like that, and he's like, I'm not a cheater, and it's just easier to be first. So he was it was it was, you know, one of those, I think, There is a lot to being first into something. Now it doesn't mean there's there's been lots of businesses that were first that didn't end up being the market leader in those things, but but it certainly is it it gives you an advantage going in and and going first. Listen. There's more failures than our success. That's just the way it goes. And and I'm I'm gonna talk to myself on this one. You gotta be okay with failing every once in a while, trying something and failing and scrapping it and saying, well now

Dave Jackson [01:26:39]:

Well, Daniel says, I remember when Pod News added music in the background. It was during a time that Apple Podcast categories were all messed up, and I thought James did it to emphasize the urgency, and now you're absolutely used to it. Yeah. I totally forgot. They didn't used to have to have money, but talking about failing, last week, if you didn't listen, Jim had had a heart out, and I was like, you know, I'll just do, like, the last 20 minutes by myself. And I remember thinking, wait. The last time you tried to do a show by yourself, you told yourself, Don't ever do that again. And what was interesting about it is if you're gonna do a solo show with a chat room, First of all, kudos to the chat room who who kept throwing me stuff.

Dave Jackson [01:27:18]:

But I listened back to that, and I don't think I took a breath. I was really, apparently, uncomfortable with dead air. And if you listen to Jim Rome as he's trying to figure out what to say next, you hear this, and you and you have to be okay with that. You'd be like, alright. Baltimore is doing the thing and quarterback and blah blah blah, 1,000,000 of dollars. Okay. Taylor Swift, football. Meanwhile, over here and I I just I was like, did I breathe? It was like, okay.

Dave Jackson [01:27:50]:

Gary said this, and then the thing in there to say to him is, alright. Tom said this, and I was just like, holy cow. So

Jim Collison [01:27:56]:

Think your voice your the tone of your voice went up.

Dave Jackson [01:27:59]:

Yeah. It was

Jim Collison [01:28:00]:

Like, when you and I are talking, it's pretty normal, but when you went alone, like, I remember, like, the Tone just picked up a lot.

Dave Jackson [01:28:07]:

And I was kind of like, alright. If I ever try that again, which I probably will, somewhere along the line, I'm like, ah, let's give this a shot. I will I will have to remember, like, breathe, little you know?

Jim Collison [01:28:19]:

And and let let the silence be okay Out there. You know? Just just it doesn't matter. You can by the way, you can go in and edit that in the in the post show. So it doesn't matter. Live, People, I think, are a lot more forgiving with live silences than they would be listening to it. So you can go in and either programically take it out or take it out yourself. Just see it on the waveform and cut it. Right? One one of the things I love about,

Dave Jackson [01:28:45]:

Audacity?

Jim Collison [01:28:47]:

No Afonic as they've got that. Oh, that's the one I was thinking of. Audacity is easy to see it or any of those. But if you wanna do it in your video, They've got some ability to take those things out, and then they remix the video for you. So it's it's kinda cool, not kinda cool. It's, Dave, it's good recognition. You what you just did, I don't I think a lot of podcasters are afraid to do, which is 1, go back and listen, And then 2, say, yeah. I didn't really nail it.

Jim Collison [01:29:14]:

Yeah. You know? It was it was okay. It was okay. It's it's why I don't like to do solo shows because I I need someone to Fill in my gaps for me. I need some time for someone to bring up new things or whatever, and I'm not good at it either, and but If you practice it, if you do it again, which is I think you said you're gonna do, you'll be better the next time, or you might be worse because you overthink it the 3rd time, And then you right? But you won't know until you try.

Dave Jackson [01:29:41]:

I don't know that I would do 90 minutes solo. That would be That's insane with a live audience. Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:29:48]:

I'd just rather get a root canal. I'm gonna go to the dentist and have them give me a root canal. No novocaine. I just yeah. That's not that would not be my favorite. It's still not my favorite. I get a little anxious thinking about doing it, doing it well.

Dave Jackson [01:30:02]:

And and Todd says here as we start to wrap up, It was an info explosion, and he goes, actually, I didn't really mind it. Yeah. Actually, Todd sent me a thing after. He was like, man, there's a lot of knowledge in those last 20 minutes. I was just like, And moving on, next, you'd have this or that. And yeah.

Jim Collison [01:30:16]:

You got the guy you got the guy who distracts you out of the way. You know?

Dave Jackson [01:30:20]:

No. And luckily, I had a lot of questions set to to answer, and they were throwing me stuff too. So, Yeah. The in fact, you nailed it, Jim. There are 3 ways to make a living in this business. Be first, be smarter or cheap. And then there's what's the other one? Cheat. Yes.

Dave Jackson [01:30:36]:

Don't do it. Cheat. Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:30:37]:

Not cheap, but cheap. And he says, I'm not a cheater. It's it's just easier to be

Dave Jackson [01:30:41]:

first. Well but then there's the other saying, Oh, it can be good. It can be fast, or it could be cheap. That's where I thought you were going with it. Have you ever heard I mean, you can only pick 1, and that is very true, that it can be you know, when you're gonna do something.

Jim Collison [01:30:55]:

Well, isn't it 2 or 3? Isn't it good good, fast, or cheap, and, in and

Dave Jackson [01:31:01]:

you can only

Jim Collison [01:31:01]:

pick 2?

Dave Jackson [01:31:02]:

Yeah. Because that's it. Yeah. Because it could be good and fast, but it's not gonna be cheap. It could be cheap and fast, but it's not gonna be good. Yeah. That's it. Yes.

Dave Jackson [01:31:10]:

Thank you for that. So

Jim Collison [01:31:11]:

And then the other saying is you can no quotes or just slaughter them as you're setting them.

Dave Jackson [01:31:16]:

Which is what we specialize here at Ask the Podcast Coach. So, man, that went quick. Stay warm where if you're on, And, I know it's getting chilly here in the US. It's really odd when you hear the mic. Oh, yeah. I was on the beach today, and it's in February. Like, oh, wow. Okay.

Dave Jackson [01:31:32]:

That's it's warm on that side of the planet. So, Jim, what is coming up on the average guy dot TV?

Jim Collison [01:31:38]:

It took a week off.

Dave Jackson [01:31:39]:

That's right.

Jim Collison [01:31:39]:

And so I always encourage I encourage to do this. I encourage my listeners to catch up the weeks I do that. I just say, hey. Look. We're we're not doing a live show. Go catch up on the ones you missed. And they always say thank you. So taking a week off, not a bad thing.

Jim Collison [01:31:53]:

Try it sometime. You might like it.

Dave Jackson [01:31:54]:

Yeah. On the school of podcasting, I have a bunch of interviews in the can, and that's when it dawned on me that this is the last episode of the month. And so I have the question of the month, which was, again, we we asked Jim, like, what do you what do you use to capture stuff? And if you want A little promotion for your show, and you answer that in the next 3 hours. So if you get that to me by, say, 3 o'clock Saturday, October 28th, that's when I'll start working on that. Actually, I'll work on the show tomorrow, but that's where I start harvesting the answers. School of podcasting.com/ Question. Now if you have a question for this show, just go to ask the podcast coach.com/ask, and, because you're like, Dave, you guys are live at, like, 4 in the morning my time. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [01:32:38]:

I get that. So you can always send them in, and we'll be happy to answer that. And, if you want a big shout out, the easiest way to do that, Become an awesome supporter at ask the podcast coach.com/awesome, and, it helps support the show. And don't forget to You have you heard about this? If I say like, what is it? Like, subscribe, like, and if you say smash the bell, According to Bandrew, something in the video is gonna go wacky, and the like, the the button vibrates or something. It's yeah. That's what he said.

Jim Collison [01:33:10]:

They're They're

Dave Jackson [01:33:10]:

gonna start animating the button. So smash the bell, like the bell, whatever it is, you know, like, subscribe.

Jim Collison [01:33:16]:

Like, subscribe. Smash the Smash that bell.

Dave Jackson [01:33:18]:

It. So We'll see you next week. Have a good weekend.