Welcome to Podcasting Tech, a podcast that equips busy

entrepreneurs engaged in podcasting with proven and cost effective

solutions for achieving a professional sound and appearance. I'm

Matthew Passi, your host and a fifteen year veteran in the podcasting

space. We'll help you cut through the noise and offer guidance on software and

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podcast platform, and join us on this exciting journey to unlock the full

potential of your podcast. Taking out

to Denver, Colorado, we are chatting with Lindsay McMahon. She's the cohost and

CEO of the All Ears English and All Ears English

podcast. Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Yes. Thank you, Matthew. Thank

you for having me here. Glad to be here. So let me

start by asking, how did you kinda start your podcast journey? What

led you into wanting to do a podcast that helps

teach English communication around the world? Yeah. Well, it was 2013.

It was very early days for podcasting when I started. Out there. Yes.

More than ten years ago now. I had been teaching English around the world. I

had lived in Japan. I had lived in South America. I had lived in New

York City, just teaching to adults, to global professionals who

wanted to improve their career opportunities and live abroad. And

so I thought we needed a tool like this. I saw that classroom

learning doesn't always work, especially the way it was being done around the world,

and I thought that we could use technology. At the same time, podcasting was starting

to become popular kind of on the fringes

still, but I could see it was it was going somewhere. So the two kinda

came together, and that's when we launched in 2013.

Very cool. I'm curious. What is it that is being done in the

classroom that you saw and you were like, there's a better

way? Yeah. Well, you know, when I got hired to work in

Japan, I worked for a conversation language school, and those types

of schools cropped up due to the, practices that

were happening in schools that students had been going through. Essentially, in

Japan, you memorize the way you learn to read is by

memorizing kanji. Right? You memorize 2,500

kanji characters. So what I think was happening, and maybe still is, I'm

not sure, I hope it's gotten better by now, is a memorization.

Right? And I don't think languages are meant to be memorized. The reason

you learn a language is for human connection. That's our entire philosophy at

All Our English. And so it's taken in isolation. It's taken,

like, doing math problems or memorizing Kanji

characters. And there's not a lot of speaking in the classroom. There's not a lot

of listening. It's mostly writing and reading. So students aren't

ready. When they get to the, you know, business level, they're just not ready to

perform in English and connect. So how did you look

to improve upon that through the podcast? Yeah. What we did, our format is

is still kind of different from what you see. There there's a lot of new

podcasts lately that are great that have cropped up. But at the time, when we

launched, we were one of the only, double hosted

shows. So we always have two hosts. So that's what we do. That's one thing

that's very important because students wanna learn conversational skills,

and you're not gonna learn back and forth conversation, unfortunately, with one

host as well. And so we give them we let them

see two hosts coming back and forth with each other, the chemistry,

the connection. How do I comment on what someone said? How do I tell a

story? How do I interrupt politely, but in a realistic

way? We give them a % real English, which is what they're looking for.

We don't edit our show very much, to be honest. Why

do you think that it has taken off from

there? So you you started doing this in 2013. You have this

background in teaching English around the globe. I imagine your co

host also, you have a similar background teaching English to to folks all around the

world. What was it that when you were starting to do

your podcast that you thought maybe this will help? Maybe this

will, you know, help us find some success or more importantly,

this is gonna help our audience find success. What were some of those tactics

and, you know, things you put in place early on? Okay. So in terms of

tactics, one of the good early decisions we made was the

color of our cover art. Couple things. The cover art is huge. When you first

launch, that's all people have to go on, is what your podcast looks

like. We decided to go with a bright color, and it's still we still use

a bright yellow, and that's always helped us stand out. It's a very simple

thing. If everyone starts using yellow, then no one will stand out anymore,

but, you know, it pops right on the screen.

And we definitely got the word out. As soon as we launched, we announced it

to our networks. We we weren't shy about saying, hey. We're launching a

podcast. You know, sometimes people are a little shy about their work when they launch.

They'll let me publish 10 episodes, and then I'll let people know about it if

people like it. No. You just go go for it from the beginning. Friends and

family. Right? They can share it with someone else. And we know that, you know,

in terms of how you get more downloads, especially in

Apple Podcast. You wanna get more followers, more people to follow your show, and this

leads to more downloads. And the more you get in a short period of

time, the more that will lead to. So it becomes like a positive

snowball effect. We also put ourselves on the cover,

and and this is not very revolutionary now, but at that time it was, especially

in my industry. So at that time, not a lot of ESL

teachers or EFL podcasts were actually putting their

faces on the cover. It was much more of a trying

to stay professional, staying behind the

scenes. We actually didn't have this

whole vibe of professionalism. We had more of a fun

vibe to what we were doing. And so I guess the lesson for your

listeners here is look at what people are doing in your industry and try

to do something a little bit different. You know, what can you do? What is

the standard of what people are doing and what might your audience want

that could be slightly different, a different format, different way of presenting the cover

art, a different yeah. Just a different way of conceiving of the

show. I wonder why folks in your industry weren't putting themselves on the

cover. I mean, for for those listening who who are wondering why is that so

important, you know, for many people when they see actual faces,

actual people on the cover, it makes the content more relatable, more

personal, it makes them want to more engage with them. So, you

know, understandably, putting you and your co host on the cover, you're real people now,

someone who, you know, probably garners more interest than just

the nameless, faceless, you know, podcast cover art.

But I'm curious why you think others in your space weren't doing that, if that

was a conscious choice or, like you said, just, revolutionary at the

time. Yeah. I don't know. I think podcasting kinda came up from the

tech world. Right? It was kind of a techie thing in the beginning.

Maybe it was people that were just more comfortable with their voices, which

is fine. It's their own style, their own personality.

I think maybe people didn't seem see it as being as

performative as we saw it as we see it now, as we saw it.

Maybe they thought, I'm teaching English. I don't need to be a character.

You know what I mean? I don't need to be a personality. And we see

it as more we're personal we are our true personalities for the most part on

the show. We share things from our lives, but I think a lot of

teachers separate maybe their personal lives from

the teaching, at least in the classroom. So maybe that was the thinking.

I don't know. I mean, it's not that everyone was not doing that, but

the majority weren't. And so I think that's a big way that we stood

out. Alright. And, love the the

use of yellow. Previous guest, Harry Duran, also on here talking about his show and

the use of yellow and how he made that stand out now. That was a

a big part of his brand. So certainly advice we've seen before, although,

like you said, if everybody goes yellow, though, it won't be as, impactful.

So don't just go yellow, but, you know, right, try to stand

out is really the key. So looking at the All Ears English podcast, you are

up to, it looks like, almost 2,300 episodes. Am I am

I looking at that correct? Correct. Yeah. That's totally correct. I mean, we do five

episodes a a week, and we've never missed an episode.

We've been going since 2013. So if you do the math on that, we we

bumped up from four to five just about a year ago. So

How did you how do you keep that pacing,

that stamina? Are you just recording every single day, or

are you doing, you know, like, blocks of recording? Right? Recording a week or two

weeks at a clip? Yeah. No. We definitely don't record every day. It's not

easy. And you do have to you know, when you hire your team or when

you recruit your cohost, however you wanna set up your your podcasting

team, you need to make it clear that this is how we do it. So

our team, my team, they know that we publish five days a week. It's

nonnegotiable. It's not if we feel like it. It's not if we're

inspired. There is a system that makes sure we get that done five

days a week. And the way we do that is we do chunk

and block off recording times each week. So I have, first

of all, I have I've just had one person leave the team. So

currently, we have four of us. There sorry. Three of

us who are on three different podcasts. It's ideal to have four or

five for for three podcasts so you have extra people,

extra combinations. However, we've got three for three

podcasts at this point, so we will be actually looking to hire a couple of

new cohosts to join the team this spring, just kind of a side point.

However, yeah, we set up a system where I record twice a week

with one cohost. We do about two and a half hours on a Wednesday

morning, and then Thursday afternoon, I record two and a half hours with a second

cohost. And that other cohost records two and a half hours

with the fourth cohost on a sec a separate

date. So that creates enough content for to keep us about a week

or two ahead. When people need to go on vacation,

we we record in advance, and we have a

system. Our editor gets the files. Our VA

puts the files in, you know, in the host, in megaphone.

Everything is kind of systematized. So the only thing I really do

is record the podcast and the WIFMs and the titles, and

every the team does the rest for the most part.

Gotcha. And I like that, like, round robin system where everybody has a little bit

of a chance to work with everybody else on the show and kinda creates a

little bit of variety. So having done this since 2013, I'm curious,

what are some of the the new tools or the new tactics

that have come along that you think have

changed the game or that you have found to be most

impactful in whether it's, you know, the sustainability

of the show, right, being able to keep it going for as long as you

have, or in the show's success. You talk about

having, you know, almost 2,000,000 followers of your show in

Apple Podcasts and whatnot with, you know, 4,000,000 downloads a

month, nothing to, you know, nothing to shy away from.

What do you think are some of the things that have helped you along the

way, to reach those those levels? Yeah. I mean, so

we do about 4,000,000 downloads a month. And on our other shows,

the other shows are a little smaller. They do between

205 downloads a month, I believe. And

one Oh, so poultry not it's terrible. So

one thing that we've done that we've started doing the last two years, and we

saw I think we saw about 25% growth between

2023 and 2024, not in downloads, by the way. It's

important to note that in verified listeners. And that is the metric that the

industry is is starting to actually look for and look at.

And that's really important because downloads are not a great metric. It's

currently the metric for advertising, and it's it's where the industry is, but we

will move over time over to verified listeners. We've seen that kind of

growth because we do a monthly we call it a

relaunch. So we have three shows. Every month, we choose one

show, and we relaunch it, quote, unquote. Just means we promote it. And what

we do is we use the other shows. Right? So we do

a feed drop on the other

shows to drive to the show being promoted. Feed drops are the

most effective thing we've seen. We don't track them

anymore, but we tracked them for two years on Charitable, and they

work really well, especially if there's a match with the audience. And,

obviously, with us, it's a network around ESL and so different

subcategories of ESL, but it makes sense. So if you have

that kinda match and you do that, it act actually really works well.

Very nice. What would you say were some of the other things that you have

done to help grow the show? Or I I guess, like you

said, it's less about growth and more just about, like, have found success with the

show. Yeah. Well, I mean, dynamic ad insertion has been a huge

surge forward for the entire industry.

We migrated our show to megaphone. We started

dynamically inserting ads and promos, by the way,

promoting we're reminding people to hit follow, which is huge, huge,

huge. Reminding people to check out that other podcast,

right, which is a tool we utilize in our relaunch plan every month.

So dynamic ad insertion is a big deal as well as monetizing the show

with sponsors, which we started doing. We started doing it in 2014,

and then we stopped doing it, and we came back to it in

2021. And so I I think in terms of the

industry at large, dynamically inserting your ads and your promos is

a huge deal. I'm sure because of the the content that

you talk about, you know, you get lots of people who, one,

right, they see your success and they wanna ask you questions, but, two, you probably

have folks who are going through your courses and thinking, well,

now that I'm more comfortable with the language, now I wanna do something.

Is there advice that you give out or there,

you know, common questions that people are asking you about podcasting that you find

yourself answering all the time? Yeah. For sure. So questions about launching

and, you know, what should I do when I launch. One thing that we did

that I I think still works, and we did this when we launched our most

recent recent show, which was business English in 2022,

is launched with a number of episodes already in your queue. Because if you think

about it logically, you're probably a podcast listener. We're you know,

makers of podcasts are also listeners of podcasts. Right? Hopefully.

And you know that when you find a new show and it's just a trailer

or it's just one episode, it's really disappointing. And you're much less likely

to hit follow because you just don't know if you wanna hit follow and add

that show to your your real estate in your in

your queue because you don't know if you really like that show yet. So

what we do is we launch with, you know, six to 10 episodes

already in the queue for them to see if they like the show, and then

we really push, please hit the follow button, hit the follow button to make

sure you don't miss an episode of the show. I wonder

too if, you know, for a while there, people would say you put

three to six episodes in the queue, and that's because it triggers

more downloads and therefore gains the algorithms and convinces people you're

more successful. But I wonder too if when you launch with 10 shows, if it

makes people feel like you've been around longer than you have. It kinda gives

them, like, confidence that this is a show that is

you know, it exists. It is, already

established. It's obviously sustainable. They could do this much content. Do you

you think any of that might play into the psyche as well? For sure. And

you also hone your message. I mean, to be honest, that's my next tip, and

this is why this matters. Frequency of publishing, there's there's a use for it in

the sense of you'll figure out your voice. You're not gonna find your voice on

episode one. Right? We found our our trademark,

and it's more than a trademark. It is a it is a value. It is

the reason we work on this show, and it is connection, not

perfection. And we trademarked the phrase, but we also say it in every

episode. Connection not perfection. And

as it applies to language learning and also broadly life, and it works

because everyone can relate to that. Everyone says, yeah. That feels right. I

want connection. I'm I'm always torturing myself over trying to be

perfect, and we just show them how to do it in language learning.

So it's like a evolutionary thing. If you can find a

a message that you really believe in, but you're not gonna find

it on day one. You're gonna find it on episode 55, right, or episode

a hundred two. So that's why there is something to be said for publishing more

frequently, and you're just getting everything out, figuring out what you

actually believe when it comes to your industry. What is your unique

angle on your industry? You can't find that by sitting and

thinking about it. You have to talk through it. At least that's the way

I to I figure things out is by talking through things.

I I am exactly the same way. Somebody will ask me a question and I'll

be thinking around as I'm talking, I'm solving the the the

problem, like, as I'm speaking. Must be a podcast. Nextion

Not Perfection. You know, well yeah. I Nextion Not Perfection,

I think, is great especially in in, you know, teaching folks language. Right?

It's we communicate with so much more than just our words.

And if you can build up a good connection with somebody, even

if you don't have a perfect grasp of the language, you can communicate what it

is you're trying to say and hopefully work through it and build a relationship and,

you know, build that that that communication, that strength, that connection.

So I think that's I love that phrase and, damn jealous that you

trademarked it. We are chatting with Lindsey McMahon, CEO of All Ears English and the

cohost of the All Ears English podcast. You can learn more about that at

allearsenglish.com and a bunch of other spots which we'll have links

to here in the show notes. Lindsay, before we let you go, we have a

few questions I'd like to ask everybody in the show. Alright. One, since you've been

in the space for so long and you've probably seen a ton of improvement, but

I'm wondering, is there another spot in podcasting that you would like to

see improved, whether it's from the creation,

distribution, even the listening consumption discovery side? Is there one thing where you're

like, god. I wish podcasting did this better. I

think I would like to see and I think there are always,

you know, new software tools cropping up, but around getting

people introduced to each other, I think that's how we met on

PodMatch. Right? So tools where you can I'm not sure if we met maybe we

met on there. I'm not sure. But ways that you can meet other podcasters

yeah. Because guest guest hosting or guesting rather, being a

guest on another show really helps your show grow. That's one of the strategies

that, I didn't mention, but it's really it's an important way that we

grew. So more software and more websites cropping up to

introduce so that people can be introduced to each other that might

add mutual value to each other's shows. I'd like to see more of that.

You can never have enough of that, to be honest.

I couldn't agree more. And by the way, if you're curious about PodMatch, which

is the platform that Lindsay and I were able to connect on, we'll have a

link to it here in the show notes below. Check it out. Alex, who was

a previous guest on the show, just put together a fantastic platform,

continues to improve it all the time and well worth the time and investment

there. You you kind of alluded to it, but my second question is, is there

any particular tech on your wish list, like, something

that's already out there that you you just haven't pulled the trigger on

or something you're like, god, I wish somebody would make this so that I can

do my job better, hardware, software, anything in between?

Well, I don't if any of your listeners, use

do video to go along with their podcast or if they do any

filming on the side, if they sell courses, that kind of thing, I just

bought a teleprompter, and it's called prompter. So I

haven't taken it out of the box yet, but I have a feeling there's a

major that this Elgato? Yeah. Elgato teleprompter. So I'm not

gonna endorse it yet because I haven't used it, but I got a lot of

good recommendations for it. So I am looking forward to using that. There

is a problem that we have where we film a lot of, VSLs,

video sales letters, a lot of intro videos because we sell courses as

part of how we make money in our brand.

And it's really cumbersome having your notes on

a piece of paper that you have to get get up every, you know, five

lines and then tape up a new piece of paper. And it's

just it's just very slow. It's a slow process. So I'm looking

forward to trying this teleprompter. I would also like

some really, I would like more technology around rec recording

like this. We've tried Riverside. We've tried SquadCast. They're all decent programs.

We're on StreamYard right now, but I would just like to have more options.

You know? You can never have too many options, like I said.

That is very, very fair. And, yeah, I I I

got that prompter. I love what it can do. I love its capabilities.

What I'll say to anybody listening who's thinking about it, it works best if

you have the right cameras for it, whether that's a really good DSLR

camera with a lens or Elgato's actual webcam,

right, they have plates that are built to make it work better. I've tried it

with a few others that weren't a % compatible and what I got was a

lot of glare on the screen and and not a great picture, but the the

prompter itself worked great and whether you're using it to

read text on the screen while looking directly into the camera or even just

using it to interview someone where you can see them. You're doing a a an

amazing job with eye contact on the camera, so I'd be curious about your

setup later. But, you know, for a lot of folks like me, my camera's here,

but, like, you're over here, and so it's I look a little shady,

or shifty, so to speak, but, the prompter definitely can help, with

those things. And, you know, we'll throw a link to that here in the show

notes as well. And then, you know, like you said, people who create podcasts are

also big listeners. Any shows on your playlist,

like, you know, when a new episode drops, stop what you're doing, you're gonna

listen to it, or you're never gonna let a new episode get by? Yeah. I

mean, I like, Professor G. I've been listening to that

lately. Scott Galloway publishes some interesting

content. I also listen to, like, science, health, and

nutrition podcast like Zoe. It's called z o e. It's

a, I think, a British host. I listen to

Vox. What is it? Today Explained. Not Vox. It's

Today Explained. Yeah. And I also listen to the, you know, the

journal and the daily. So I'm

a major podcast listener for sure. But right now, I don't have a show that

I'm incredibly passionate about. So I'm on the hunt for a new

one. Very hooked hooked on, for sure. You hear that

podcast? There's another listener, available to be, to be your,

you know, huge fans. That's right. Made some good content here for Lindsay.

Yep. Lindsay McMahon, CEO of All Ears English and the co host of

the All Ears English podcast. Been doing it for over

ten years. Amazing stuff. Keep up the great work, and thank you

for joining us today. Well, thank you, Matthew. It's been great chatting with you today.

I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today on Podcasting

Tech. There are links to all the hardware and software that help

power our guest content and podcasting tech available in the show

notes and on our website at podcastingtech.com. You

can also subscribe to the show on your favorite platform, connect with us on social

media, and even leave a rating and review while you're there. Thanks, and we'll

see you next time on Podcasting Tech.