There you are grinding away, chopping up your podcast into all those little clips

that you're just desperate to have go viral on the TikToks

and the Instagram reels. You're getting a few views, maybe even

the odd great content comment, and they're coming from

people you've never met. All good stuff, right? But then

you check your actual podcast stats and

nothing, nothing has changed since the last time you

looked. Maybe a couple here and there, but overall

your downloads are fairly stagnant and you're putting out all this great

viral content. What gives? Have you been

sold a lie by a bunch of LinkedIn

podcast gurus who think that having a big Follow

account means they know the first thing about building a real

podcast audience? Spoiler alert. Yes,

but it's a bit more complicated than that. And we'll get into it in this

episode.

First off, let's kill something of a sacred cow. The whole

thing with so called podcast experts telling you to get

onto video to have any chance of having any success with

your podcast. They're talking bull. The data

is clear when it comes to actual dedicated

listening. Apple podcasts and Spotify are

still where that game is played. The whole YouTube is number one

line comes from flimsy survey data that

serves YouTube. And it's not where your ideal listeners are

actually spending the most of their time. So why bother with video at

all? Well, look, I think you've been thinking about

all of this all wrong, as has everybody else.

And it comes down to this simple thing. You need to understand the difference

between discovery and attribution. Think of

it this way. You wouldn't walk out of a movie trailer and

expect that to count as a full cinema ticket sale

for the distributor, would you? Course not. The

trailer's job is to get you interested enough to buy a ticket

for the full event later on. And that's pretty much

what your social media clips are for. They're not the destination,

they're the advertising billboard. Recent studies have shown

that while direct traffic is pretty pathetic from these

clips, some of the new podcast discovery is happening

because of them. They see your face on TikTok, they hear

your point of view on reels, and then a seed is planted.

They don't click the link then, because who does that?

What they do is they open Spotify during their commute later

on, and they think, hmm, what was that show

again? How many of them are doing this? We don't know.

And this is where the gray area comes in. And it

raises an issue that I've Known all of my career in

radio and in podcasting. It's called recall.

And what it means is this. When people are asked

how they discovered a podcast, few are going to remember the time

that they were told about it at a boring networking event or

by one of their friends sending them a link via WhatsApp.

So when the survey person asks them about their first touch point

with shows, they'll get a little bit awkward and shuffle

and say, hmm, I think I saw it on

social media. The same thing's always been happening with

radio surveys. What radio station do you listen to?

Cue memory of one radio station brand they've heard of.

I listen to Radio 1. Even though they're 62,

I see this play out with my own clients. They'll get a new client, sign

up for a high ticket offer, and when they ask the person

how that person found them, what do you think? They

say, I've been listening to your podcast for a while now.

There it is. No. I clicked your link in

bio on Instagram. No, you're real made

me buy. No. Oh, I saw you on

TikTok and thought you were funny. Here's what happened.

They discovered them somehow, listened to a few

episodes, and then when they were ready to spend money,

the podcaster was the only person they trusted.

The podcast did the selling, not the social media post.

So if you want to stop wasting your time creating all these clips,

you need to change your approach. The job of your

clip isn't to get a click, it's to be

memorable. You're not playing for clicks here. You're

playing for Mindspace. You're playing for attention.

You're playing for cutting through the noise.

So here's how you're going to go about it from now on.

First, stop making those boring talking head videos.

Nobody cares. Your clip needs to do one thing,

be interesting in its own right.

Add the captions, add the B roll and make it pop. Its

only job is to stop the scroll and make them remember

your name. And the only way they're going to do that is by

seeing you showing up continuously. And the only way they're

going to do that is by you posting these things with

a view to holding engagement, not sending them off to another

place. The second thing you're gonna have to change is your call to action. You

got it all wrong. Stop saying link in bio. Start

saying search for Insert your podcast name

here on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tell them exactly what to do in the app where they're actually

gonna end up listening to podcasts Third,

be consistent. You need to become a familiar face

so when someone's seen you pop up with a couple of smart takes during

the week, you're not going to be a stranger anymore. You're now an

authority. The bottom line here is you need to stop

correlating what you're doing on Instagram and TikTok with what's

happening in your podcast hosting stats. Focus on making

your content so good that they can't help but but

remember you when they're ready to listen for real. Because

that is how you build a real audience, not a collection of

vanity metrics on TikTok. So that's it

for this one. If you're tired of getting advice from so called podcasting

experts who have never actually built anything meaningful in their

entire lives, you know what to do. The insights I share with my

community are even better than this and you can sign up for

it over at Podmastery Co. Now

get back to your podcast, get those clips

and post them for the reason they should be posted

and we'll get you one level closer to pod mastery.