Discoverability Dilemma: Navigating the Challenges of Getting Your Podcast Noticed

Marc Ronick  0:00  
You do all this work, you follow all of the steps you think you're supposed to follow. And then it's kind of up to the algorithm Gods whether or not it gets out there to the masses. So that's one reason why it frustrates me so much. Welcome to podcast, Ph. D. My name is Marc Ronick. And I'm here with my co host, Larry Roberts. Good morning, Larry. I guess Good morning for us anyway, right?

Larry Roberts  0:28  
Yeah. Good morning for us. Here we are. I don't even know what day it is man as a full time podcaster. I think days just tend to flow together. Yeah,

Marc Ronick  0:35  
especially when we're working with so many different podcasters and too many dates and launch dates and publish dates. And yeah, I lose track very quickly. And you know, speaking of launch dates, so we are as we like to teach other podcasters, we are doing some batch recordings, as we kick off our first season of podcast, Ph. D. And one of the conversations that I brought up to you actually last night that we haven't really had yet together, I want to do it here, I want to talk about construction, I want to talk about this idea of possibly making this podcast for this discussion sake only available on one platform, the rule of thumb has always been for the years that we've been doing this, the rule of thumb has been get your podcast on as many platforms as possible for discoverability. We feel like if you're on all the different platforms, then you can cater to all the different devices and apps that people are using to consume your podcast. At the same time, Larry, there's also this messaging around not giving our audiences too many choices. Because when we give them too much to choose from, then they tend to not take action on any of those. So first, I'm curious just so far, what I'm talking about what your thoughts are. And before we get into all the different tools, whether they're apps or microphones, we're going to share some of our thoughts around what you need, what you may not need. But first, I want to dig in with you. And I want us to see if we can make a decision right now as to what do we want to do? Our audience already knows, because here we are. But we haven't decided yet. So what are your thoughts first around some of the stuff that I'm talking about. And then let's talk about whether or not we'd go exclusively on one platform,

Larry Roberts  2:24  
I think you nailed it with the D word discoverability that escapes so many new podcasters. Because we don't take that into consideration. We don't take into consideration the fact that the only way we're gonna get listeners and subscribers is for people to discover our show. And there's so many different ways to go through that, there's really only three things that will make our show more or less discoverable. It's either luck, which most of us don't have, it's time, which most of us hopefully have a lot of, or it's money, because you can invest in the show, you can invest in advertising, you can get it out there in front of eyes and ears, one of those three things has to come into play. And with the thought of jumping on multiple platforms and hoping that someone finds us there, we tend to try to be everything to everybody. And if we look back at our show descriptions, because we always talk about when we're writing a description for the show that we want to identify our unique listening proposition, we want to identify our audience. So we want to be in a niche, we want to be one thing to one particular type of individual when it comes to discoverability. And it comes to having our podcast in one place or another. Could it possibly be said that we're spreading ourselves too thin. And we're going through too many exercises, trying to talk to too many people. And we once again, ended up talking to none. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. And especially with the evolution of podcasting, podcasting, in the traditional sense is audio only driven by an RSS feed. But with advanced technology with smaller phones and more portable devices and higher speed internet wireless, that sort of thing. We've got this functionality available to us now that provides the content in whatever format we prefer to consume it really at any given time of the day. So where can we put our show? Or how can we put our show out there on a platform that has the most tools and the most opportunity to up our discoverability without us trying to post as Gary Vee likes to say 40 pieces of content a day every day. And it's like trying to post 40 episodes of your podcast every week, every time you release. So that's kind of where I'm coming from there with it, especially now I'm really starting to lean closer towards finding one platform and being exclusive on that platform.

Marc Ronick  4:40  
Yeah, I there's something appealing about that to me. And I think some of it has to do with taking that leap and testing it and seeing if it's to our advantage or not because that's also an area that I don't think a lot of podcasters do enough of is testing and experimenting again, it's back to what we were talking about in a previous episode around perfection. They just want to make sure they're Doing it quote unquote, right? Yeah. And it could actually end up hurting them in the long run. So I gravitate to doing it simply as an experiment. And for some of these reasons that you've described, and I had shared with you, the question then leads to where we're doing video and audio, at least that's what we decided when we went into this that said, YouTube could be the one place that we decide to go right, especially where YouTube is now officially getting in the game of podcasting youtube.com/podcast, for anybody, at least as of now in the United States that will actually take you to a working page on YouTube. So do we do this exclusively on YouTube? Or do we say maybe YouTube and pick one of the big audio platforms like Apple or Spotify? Yeah, I

Larry Roberts  5:49  
think as far as an audio perspective, you need to be somewhere on audio. But I'm also of the mindset that right now, especially as we're recording this podcast, videos, where we're at YouTube is coming to the forefront of the game, as you mentioned, they now have their podcast landing page, YouTube is so much more robust when it comes to discoverability than our traditional RSS feed driven podcast players, you don't have as much opportunity on Apple podcast to leverage SEO, you don't have as much opportunity to leverage SEO on Spotify and Google podcasts. And as we trickle down to some of the smaller apps, and the smaller players, our opportunities become less and less. But it's been proven on YouTube, at least, that if you follow this step, you're going to get this result. And many times on the audio only platforms, you can follow this step and still not get the results that you're after having an IT background, I kind of go with the proven methodologies approach myself. That's what I like, I like to know that if I follow through on specific operating procedures and follow standards, there's going to be certain results that I can expect from that.

Marc Ronick  6:59  
Yeah. And that's a whole other conversation, because I have that same feeling, particularly for platforms like social media like Instagram, where you do all this work, you follow all of the steps you think you're supposed to follow. And then it's kind of up to the algorithm Gods whether or not it gets out there to the masses. So that's one reason why it frustrates me so much. So you're going with the idea of just YouTube and then just an audio platform. And that's it, is that correct?

Larry Roberts  7:28  
I mean, it doesn't hurt to be on maybe apple and Spotify. I mean, they're your biggest players, you're gonna get 98% of all your traffic is going to come from one of the two. Granted, there's some podcast apps out there that you're going to get some traction on as well. I don't want to start dropping any names because I don't want to leave anybody off the list or offend anybody or promote someone that's not sponsoring the show. Hint, hint, wink, wink. But we can talk about that later. But it's not going to hurt to be on Apple and Spotify. I'm just saying that I wouldn't pour a ton of my personal resources into promoting those platforms necessarily. Yeah.

Marc Ronick  7:59  
Okay. So I'm feeling like we're gonna go down that road, we are going to try to make this exclusive ish. And the way we'll do that is, yeah, we will make it available on the other platforms. But we're really going to only focus on it for our audience, we're going to send them either to Apple or Spotify. This way. We've got iPhone users and Android users all having that ability to get that audio content. And then we'll focus on really the one and only place to put your video content right now, YouTube and yes, there are other places, but YouTube really is the place that I think we should be have all the options. So yeah, I'm with

Larry Roberts  8:35  
you. But then that leads us back down to that path you mentioned earlier to do we now take this video content because video, social media platforms, that's where it's at. So do we now take our content and promote on Tik Tok? Do we promote our content on Instagram? Do we promote our content on Snapchat? Where do we go? Do we do shorts are they shorts are by default, that's probably going to be one of our options there for this particular show, since it's going to live on YouTube. But going back to any of the social media marketers that you listen to, or any of the big names that are out there. They're all talking about content across the board. But if you go to a podcast conference, or you go to a podcast meetup and one of the city's local cities hear you hear people complain all the time, they just don't have time to do it. So are they sacrificing their opportunities to grow an audience because they just don't have the time to be everywhere?

Marc Ronick  9:23  
This is actually a great question, Larry. And it's making my mind go in tons of different directions. When it comes to our actual podcast. I'm liking the idea of that exclusive approach. And I think when it comes to promoting it, I think that's where we, for lack of a better term, spread our wings, we want to be out on a bunch of different platforms. We want to understand and focus on the ones maybe that our audiences are using the most and maybe put more of an emphasis on those but ultimately, I think it's important for podcasters since it's a digital medium, it's an internet medium I think that we want to be on the different social platforms, the popular ones, to distribute small pieces of content to direct people to the big show, which is right here where we are.

Larry Roberts  10:11  
And again, though, it comes down to the discoverability, and the time as independent podcasters. And we kind of alluded this in our first episode, the vast majority of listeners of this show are going to be independent podcasters. And it can be so frustrating to me, what are the percentages of people that start podcast and pod fate? It's massive. Yeah, I think out of the 2.4 million podcasts that are out there now. And I'm just kind of picking that number. It's gonna vary depending on what platform you go to get your stats, but roughly 2.4 or so podcasts, I was talking to somebody yesterday, and only about 59,000 of those are active, if you 9000 out of 2.4 million. Yeah. So what's one of the main reasons that people fade from the podcast? Because they're trying to be everywhere and everything to everybody. And they ended up not getting any traction whatsoever, right out of the gate? Yeah,

Marc Ronick  10:58  
because they're frustrated, and they give up, they don't feel like anybody is listening, because well, they're probably right, because, again, there being too many things, and in too many places at once, it just gets lost. So yeah, focus your efforts when you can on the main places, and what my intention for us, Larry is to pick one or two social media platforms to promote, and then take that same content that we're using and distribute it to those other platforms, I just may not put as much time and effort into those other places until they prove me wrong, right? Until they say, Yeah, my audience is here to do want more content from there, then I'll nurture it a lot more at that point? Well,

Larry Roberts  11:39  
there's tons of tools that can help with that process as well, especially if you just want to have a footprint on a particular platform and not necessarily put a ton of energy, you can always leverage scheduling tools and scheduling platforms to push your content out there and not have to do too much extra work to get it out in front of that audience. Absolutely. Okay. So this conversation ended up going a direction, at least a little bit deeper than we had anticipated. And I think that's fine. A lot of times, you'll have a plan for an episode as well. And you'll have a conversation that kind of takes it in a different direction. But at the same time, I think there was value in what we had to say today. So hopefully, it got our audience to thinking a bit. What we're going to do in the next episode is bring you that tools discussion. So we will talk about some of the entry level tools to some of the more intermediate tools, and then we'll wrap it up with a look at some of the more advanced prototype tools that you have at your disposal as well. So, Marc, thank you for joining me. And thank you for letting me join you for this episode of podcast PhD. And for everybody out there listening, if you would do his favorite reach down there, hit that subscribe button or the Follow button or the plus symbol, whatever it may be on the platform that you're listening on. That kind of leads back to our discussion, only a couple of platforms to choose from there. That's right. So go ahead and do us a favor, hit that subscribe button. We'd love to bring you this content each and every week. So until then, thank you so very much for joining us. I'm Larry Roberts and my co host is Marc Ronick. Thank you. We'll see you next week.