Brett Johnson: This is a Note To Future Me.
Hi, this is Brett Johnson, your host and the owner of Circle270Media Podcast Consultants.
How do people find your podcast and apps?
Should you put your guests name in your episode title?
Do podcast apps, use your podcast description to help people find new shows?
Which apps search what information you provide in your RSS feed.
In a three week experiment, Mark Steadman from podcast STUDIO ORIGIN, cataloged what
every big podcast app indexes, and how to help listeners find your podcast.
This full article is available on podnews.net.
I have a link to that article in the podcast show notes.
I would advise that you read the article prior to this interview, but you can listen to
the article, listen to the interview and then read the article afterwards.
Either way, you're going to get some great information from Mark about his experiment,
his research project, as it were, about how podcasts apps help people find new podcast
episodes.
New podcasts to listen to, or how they don't.
Mark works with best selling authors, entrepreneurs, artists and celebrities.
His work has been highlighted by the BBC and he presented the Comedy Award at the
Inaugural British Podcast Awards in 2017.
He founded the podcast hosting company, Podiant in 2016.
Coding every line, writing every blog post, and in the beginning replying to every support
email himself. He's helped individuals, organizations and commercial radio stations
launch their audio presences online and has been consistently producing podcasts since
2008. He sold his hosting business in the spring of 2021 and now spends his time
exclusively helping podcasters get results on their own terms.
I'm sure him selling his business has helped him open up some time to do interviews about
this article, so I was very happy when I contacted him that he sent an email back saying,
great, let's talk, get on my calendar, and here we got it done.
This interview really solidified what his research and his experiment did prove and
didn't prove in regards to what podcast apps do for podcasters.
I think the one takeaway that you will realize after reading the article and listening to
this episode is, that the findability piece is all on our shoulders.
We cannot rely on podcast apps.
We cannot rely on social media.
We have to do the work ourselves.
It really does come down to understanding how different mediums search and index, and
give those that are searching that information.
This is a really good article to read about that, and this interview highlights a lot of
great stuff from the article.
I hope you enjoy. I hope you learn a little bit.
I know I did.
I think everything from this article and this interview you can take and start producing
even better podcast's for search your next episode.
Mark, first I want to thank you and James Cridland, editor of Podnews and a radio
futurist, for doing some heavy lifting with your research on podcast app search.
The article you wrote for Podnews is concise and full of great information.
So much so I wanted to contact you to see if you might be willing to be a guest on my
podcast to give some highlights of what you and James discovered and what we as
podcasters should do, starting with our next episode.
Mark, thanks for taking some time to be with me today.
Mark Steadman: It's a real pleasure. Thank you.
Brett Johnson: What stirred your interest in doing this podcast app search experiment?
Mark Steadman: It all started when I was listening to an episode of The Feed, the Libsyn podcast, and
they were talking about the things that appear in search for, I can't remember what it
was. It was a user submitted question, I think for Libsyn, and it was about their content
not appearing when people searched and about descriptions and things like that, and Rob
started talking about the various things that Apple Podcasts indexed.
I realized I hadn't really thought about it.
There were a couple of things that I sort of vaguely think I knew.
With anything that's self taught, there's always going to be gaps in your knowledge.
There's always going to be stuff. It doesn't matter if you could tell yourself as being
any kind of podcast, quote unquote, guru, there's always going to be stuff that you don't
know. I'm certainly not touting myself as a guru, but, I work with other podcasters and
try and help them. I started to think actually, I don't know definitively what Apple
Podcast is indexing.
I've got this information from Robert Libsyn but, okay well that's one directory.
I know we've got all of these apps that are powered by the Apple Podcasts directory and
fewer and fewer now as we see more things like the Podcast Index and Spotify, and other
apps maintain their own indexes, but it started me thinking, presumably different apps
have different rules for what's going to be indexed.
So I thought, well, yeah, this would be a really interesting thing to look at and
actually do a bit of a [INAUDIBLE] and do some research and find out, are all apps
indexing information the same?
What data is being pulled in from our feed, and how is it being utilized?
How is it being exposed and such?
Brett Johnson: There's a ton of talk about what to include and what not include, tons of it.
To me, it always seemed as though it might be more of a this is a best practice you never
know when they might start looking at this piece, just include it.
We'll put the field in there, just do it sort of stuff.
Mark Steadman: Definitely.
Brett Johnson: In your experiment, you use the top 14 podcast apps.
When I saw you include Google Podcast, I thought that might be the wild card on the list,
quite frankly. From what you saw it wasn't.
About half, including Google Podcasts, of the podcast app seem to search numerous channel
level tags. That is the podcast RSS feed as the whole.
Did you have some pre experiment thoughts about certain podcast players?
Mark Steadman: I thought Google would be more.
I thought it would be better at search.
It's that simple.
There's quite a few these apps actually I thought would have a better approach to search.
Now, one of the things that we haven't talked about and when I've spoken to people about
this article is, we haven't really touched much on the way search engines work in these
apps. Now, we used made up words, specifically so that we wouldn't have clashes with
other things, and we wouldn't end up - we could be really definitive about worrying about
things like pluralization and potentially being confused with other languages and stuff
like that. I deliberately just kind of mashed the keys and tried to use often alphabet,
tried to use letters from the alphabet that would kind of look like words.
But, a conversation with a couple of people sort of led me down to thinking about one of
the issues we do have in search is, things like pluralization, things like alternative
spellings. For example, if I think about my, one of the shows that I think I mentioned in
the article, which is a show about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you search
hitchhiker, you get one type of result.
If you search hitchhikers without an apostrophe, you get another type of result.
If you search hitchhiker's with the apostrophe, you get a different set of results.
That's a problem.
As a former, in a past life as a former sort of Web engineer, I know what that problem
is. But I think I was surprised at the number of apps that were addressing that problem,
which is almost none.
Brett Johnson: Yeah, it is interesting, it's almost just get the product out there to do.
As you mentioned too in the article, were those apps really developed as discoverable,
findable types of play?
They do what they do really well.
They play podcasts, but were they really built to do that?
Maybe we're asking a bit too much of them?
Mark Steadman: Yeah, absolutely.
That's why I was a little bit surprised.
I had a lovely chat with J.J.at GoodPods, because I think there is, with GoodPods
specifically, a real opportunity there.
I think it is much more a discovery engine than it is a player.
I think I would really like to see search play a better role in that.
Now, for anyone who builds these apps and works in this space, I know what a hard problem
it is, especially given episode level surge, which I'm sure we'll talk about, and sort of
how little provision there is for episode wide search.
I know why that is, because if you think this potentially four million podcasts in the
Podcast Index, now think about the number of episodes each one of those has.
You've got to maintain that database yourself in a searchable way that's mental.
I get the problem.
I think I keep giving very long answers to your questions and I'm not entirely sure if
I'm actually answering them.
Brett Johnson: You're good. No, you're going in exactly the right direction.
What I'm thinking too is, it seems though, we're addressing that findability.
I just want to kick that discoverability word off of our lexicon.
Findability, it seems that lots of apps are building themselves around the findability,
but they're not great players.
Mark Steadman: Mm-hmm.
Brett Johnson: We don't have this middle ground, I just want a really good player that I can at least
find some podcasts that are similar to what I'm playing right now.
That doesn't even really exist, honestly.
Mark Steadman: No, I think to be honest, what I want to say is, and I'm not in charge of GoodPods and I'm
not about to tell them what to do, but if I take an app like GoodPods, or if we imagine
Discover Pods has a proper mobile app.
I want my podcast player to be one thing, and I want my discovery engine to be another
thing. I want the two to be separate, but be able to communicate so that I can hit the
plus button and maybe I'll get taken out to, sorry the plus button in Overcast where I'm
comfortable listening. I've got things set up the way I want, but then I want to go and
find new podcasts and I think, okay, I'm going to go off to GoodPods, or I'm going to go
off to Podchaser or somewhere else, and use the player that, just a preview.
Just to get a little sense of, here's what people are listen to, I want to hear this give
it a shot. Then I want to just hit that button to say, okay, take me back to Overcast.
I'm ready to subscribe.
Let me subscribe to it in Overcast.
I don't think, I personally think that's the way to do it, is that we keep them
separate, but people wouldn't be able to own as much of the stack as possible, and that's
understandable.
Brett Johnson: That makes sense too, and you describing that scenario is that would be an easy lift.
You have two companies that do something very well.
Why not? Not necessarily merge, but at least work with each other.
Mark Steadman: Just talk to each other.
Brett Johnson: Just talk to each other.
Mark Steadman: Very, very simply, it's code that's already baked into the operating system.
It's very easy to pass information to, from one place to another to say now bring in this
resource and show it on screen.
That's, very simple.
Brett Johnson: First you cover in the article the channel level tags, which again telling the audience
are tags in the podcast RSS feed that relate to the podcast as a whole.
That includes the podcast title, the description, podcast, person, iTunes author, iTunes
subtitle and the iTunes owner and keywords.
I'll let you read the article, as I mentioned before the podcast, about how each of those
play into search.
But, what I wanted to ask you, is to talk more about the person tag.
That info about who contributes to a podcast, and that's not being used by any search
engine you surveyed. You made a comment in the article, that this isn't to suggest the
tag has no value.
Far from it. Just because the names are being surfaced in search results doesn't mean
it's not a great way to link podcasts together.
I'd love to see it influence results for guest-based podcasts.
Still, early days. Talk a little bit more about that, linking podcasts together.
What your thought process was there.
Mark Steadman: Back in, I want to say 2013, I started working on a little project that very naively
I thought would be really fun, is could I create an RSS feed or a playlist of podcast
episodes across any number of podcasts that featured a particular person I like.
Back then I was ten years younger.
I was gullible.
I was whatever age I was, and it was Kevin Smith.
I want to know if Kevin Smith pops up as a guest in a not Kevin Smith podcast, it would be
cool if I could just automatically subscribe to that.
The way I did that, was very naively at the time, was just trying to search through the
Apple back then, as it was called, the iTunes database, and try and find stuff that way
and very quickly hit up against the problem of scale with something like that.
The idea stood, and what I think we're seeing with the likes of Podchaser and to a
degree, the Podcast Taxonomy project is this idea of being able to link information
together now, so we really can go from, you enjoyed this guest on a show, so you've been
subscribed to this particular podcast.
Every week they have a new guest, this guest you really dug on this episode.
You want to know where else can I hear them?
Where else are they cropping up?
To be able to go and follow them because they're listed as a creator in Podchaser is
amazing. A way of being able to do that in the Oodcast Index as well, to uniquely
identify a person, because obviously you can have several John Smiths.
But to be able to know the John Smith you're talking about is this person, and to be able
then to find all the episodes of any podcast that that person has appeared in, to me, as
possibly as a data nerd and an avid podcast listener, that's gold.
There's so much fun you can have with that.
Not just guests of course.
If you loved the music that was on an episode, and you want to know what else that
musician has scored, the sound engineer or whatever, and Podchaser are trying to map out
that information and make it accessible.
One of the things they hit up against a few years ago, was that, we podcasters are a
thirsty bunch. If we find that there is a potential to game the system, to hack the
system, to promote something, we'll do it.
We'll game a system if we can.
They saw that.
The people were just saying, every episode had this X number of guests who were not on the
episode, but were big draws, because there was no vetting.
You could put that information into your RSS feed Podchaser would suck it up and believe
it. It didn't take them very long for them to be like, okay, yeah, maybe not then.
There are ways that we need to police it, and figure out ways that maybe the information
starts at that RSS level, but then we have a way to be able to vet it or to say, if that
information is false, to be able to give it a thumbs down in some kind of system.
Be that Podchaser or the Podcast Index or whatever.
When you've got that sort of taxonomy, when you've got that corpus of data, that you can
then start to navigate around based on people, I think that's phenomenal.
That's what excites me about things like the podcast person tag.
Brett Johnson: I know exactly where you're going with that.
I love audio drama, and the audio drama world, the actors, the performers, even though
there are a lot of them, there are many that are used over and over, because they're
great at it. And I've always wanted to, when I pick someone, I want to see what other
podcasts they've been a part of.
Have acted in, just to hear their different roles, because the good ones, if you listen
well enough, you can kind of go, oh, I know who that is.
They put on a different accent and you want to go, oh my gosh, she is really expanded in
this versus what I listen to.
I don't know if that exists. I was thinking the IMDB was supposed to try to do something
like that, but I agree.
If something can come up with that and whether it's maybe by genre, by category or
something, that's even better because then it fine tunes the John Smiths of the world.
You know that John Smith is a business entrepreneur, that's the category you want to
follow versus John Smith musician sort of thing.
[CROSSTALK] That would be exciting.
That would be exciting.
You're right.
Mark Steadman: That's what Podchaser is trying to do.
No one is yet completely disabused me of this notion, but I do have the sense that
Podchaser is used more by podcasters than it is by listeners.
I feel like that's where it is at the moment because it is aiming to essentially be the
IMDB for podcasters.
Brett Johnson: Right.
Mark Steadman: Or for podcasting.
And it's great, I've got no shame at all.
The team are great and they're doing a great job and they really care about the space.
They've been doing this for a while now, and yet they are a great team and I've enjoyed
working with them.
I think I still feel like, it's mostly the podcaster's that are using this information.
I want to be able to see, like you were talking about, you listen to that audio drama,
you're into this stuff and you go, oh, wow, who was that?
Or you hear the name in the credits.
And you know instantly, if you want to find out more about that person and other
podcasts that they're in, you know straight away that you go to Podchaser and you put
their name in the system.
Or we standardize linking to people's Podchaser creator profile, and we make that a thing
that we do in show notes.
The more that we can do that, the more we open it up to listeners, I think then we create
something that is immensely valuable.
Brett Johnson: Right. The findability scale cranks up versus seeing on a Twitter feed of that artist or
that personality, oh, hey, I'm on this podcast now, and you just accidentally saw the
Twitter feed as one resource.
Maybe that's what Podchaser should do and does well.
If it's just for us, it's just for us.
That's great. Build it and make it bigger and bigger and bigger.
You know, it's got to start somewhere.
Mark Steadman: Yeah, definitely.
Brett Johnson: Next, you cover the item level tags, which the tags that relate to each episode in a
podcast and those being the title description, the content, the subtitle and the author.
I was surprised by what you found, that the Podcast Index, along with Pocket Casts and
Overcast, not servicing episode level titles in search.
That was interesting.
Mark Steadman: Yeah, I think the problem here is largely one of scale, because there is just so much data
to index and it takes so much time to index all of that information.
Especially something like the Podcast Index, which is now the, I'd say possibly the second
definitive directory of podcasts and could well be the definitive in time.
They're a ragtag bunch of misfits.
They're a small operation and they're an independent operation and they're funded by
people like us who care about this and want it to continue, but that funding can only
stretch so far and there are massive storage implications when you start to blow up the
size of the database, 100 times plus over, because now you're storing information about
each individual episode.
Again, if we just imagine four million podcasts, each one of those has seven episodes.
We know that many podcasts have many more.
That already just becomes a huge job.
There's all sorts of other number crunching issues with it.
I sort of wrote the article without being sympathetic to that because, you know,
ultimately to the podcaster and to the person searching that doesn't [INAUDIBLE] in the
world that's not our problem.
But it is a problem that is worth addressing.
It's not a simple one to solve.
I think if we can find ways to make that easier then great.
That might just mean more of us throwing more money and helping Dave and the team at the
Podcast Index make this stuff happen.
Brett Johnson: Right. Well, and I think they want the feedback, too, because-.
Mark Steadman: Yeah-
Brett Johnson: I was looking at a few podcasts that I work with, and found it had multiple listings in
the index-.
Mark Steadman: Mm-hmm-
Brett Johnson: Whether on purpose, by accident or whatever, and contacted them, they took them out.
Mark Steadman: Yeah.
Brett Johnson: They verified that I was the one that should have the only feed of that podcast, and
there were two or three others there. Basically it's a network situation that that feed
is fed into other networks and allowing it and it was there.
I think if we as podcasters take a little time, go to the Podcast Index and take a look
at what you have there in that library, that might help clean it up a little bit too.
Help them do their job, because they were totally responsive.
Within a day I got an email back saying, hey, thank you for the heads up.
We'll clean that up, get it out there.
I think they appreciated that.
Mark Steadman: Yeah, definitely.
Brett Johnson: If nothing else for the total numbers.
Yeah.
Mark Steadman: To be clear, the Podcast Index are one of the companies that are surfacing stuff with the
title, but I think it's very few that are doing anything other than that.
Brett Johnson: Yeah, and that's not to poke them in the eye at all.
Mark Steadman: No, no, no.
Brett Johnson: You're right. It is. I agree.
I think they're going to become the de facto when it comes down to it.
They're setting their selves up to be when Apple decides to, we're done with you guys.
We're now making money and we don't have to do this with you anymore.
Thanks for the ride, but, we're done.
Exactly. You also found that potentially, if the content, the episode show notes is
present, aggregators ingest this information instead of the description.
To me, and I want your thought too, do you think that makes episode show notes a bit more
of a priority when publishing an episode?
Mark Steadman: First off, I'll acknowledge James really help me out with this one and clarified, because
I get mixed up on this sometimes as well in terms of I always just default to content
encoded.
Which is a tag in your RSS feed for each episode that allows you to have rich show notes.
It has its roots in blogging and it's used a lot in WordPress things as well.
A feed item in a blog post listed in your RSS feed can have as much html as you want, and
it's expected to be in there.
Whereas the description tag, we're all a little bit fuzzy about whether we want html in
there, and so not all of the apps agree about what is allowed in there or not.
I haven't gone back and read the spec to figure out what is the correct answer.
It doesn't really matter because none of us can agree, and none of the apps can agree in
directories. I think, good rich show notes should always be in your episode,
in your RSS feed, regardless of the search ability aspect of it, because it makes your
podcast better. It's that simple.
Even if it's just a chronological list of the things you talked about and links to those
things, which is what a lot of podcasts do.
You maybe have a quick description of what was in the episode of maybe a guest that's in
there. If you're talking about books or articles or TED talks or videos or whatever, just
list them and link them in chronological order.
If you're doing that in your show notes, then you're doing your listener a great
service. I think you should do that regardless of whether it makes the stuff more
searchable or not.
Brett Johnson: Right. I always look at it, too, if you're going to create something, how many times can
you use it?
Mark Steadman: Oh, yeah.
Brett Johnson: If you're creating great episode show notes, why not turn that into the blog that has the
player to it? You've done two things with it.
It doesn't matter if that replicates.
It's two different mediums.
You're letting people read it versus listening people [CROSSTALK] would sometimes rather
read it.
Mark Steadman: To me, being an old school RSS guy and an old school blog guy, they are the same thing.
They're not different things. All a podcast feed is, it's a blog feed with one extra line
of code in it effectively that says here's an MP3 file.
It's still a blog post that has a date, a title and a URL.
The URL is not your MP3.
The URL is the Web page for that episode, and the Web page for that episode should have
your episode title, and the player and those show notes.
It should always come from the same place.
At the moment I'm in between a couple of different systems for one of my podcasts and I'm
having to copy and paste show notes from one system to another.
You should never have to do that.
You should always be able to just put them in one place, and then they go out to your
feed and on your website as well.
If you're having to copy and paste notes between different platforms, then it's worth
looking about your hosting provider or your CNS and find out whether you can make your
life a little bit simpler.
In reality, it's all the same thing.
Brett Johnson: Right, exactly. I've always been an advocate of building your castle on your own property
in your podcast website.
Even if it's as simple as activating a, getting a Google My Business page and activating
that page with feeds, it's something.
It's kind of your own.
Most hosts now have the opportunity to create a podcast page, at least through the
hosting platform. So at least do that to control a little bit for the search aspect and
such too. What would you suggest podcast producers consider and do with your experiment
findings?
Mark Steadman: That's a really interesting question.
I don't know.
I feel like I would like to see more done on the creator, on the podcast app side.
I kind of felt like this with, for a time a few months ago, Apple Podcasts wasn't showing
show notes properly.
It wasn't showing links properly, and it was making them a garbled mess.
People were talking about and advocating, okay, you should format your show notes in this
way. I sort of sat there and kind of bit my lip, or bit my tongue.
I don't think that's the right approach.
We shouldn't, we as the podcaster, shouldn't be changing the way we're doing things when
we're doing them correctly.
It is incumbent on the apps to read our information that we are providing in the correct
format. They need to read that.
If we're providing in the correct format, it is incumbent on them.
If that temporarily means that some people aren't getting the experience that they
should, that is on the app developer, that is not on you as a podcaster.
If the experience is diminished in your show notes in one app, that is the one app's
fault, and you shouldn't be changing your methodology to appease that one app.
Doesn't matter how big it is because it's on the app.
That's my particular viewpoint.
I think this is the case right now.
It's not that we need to do anything different, because we are providing really good
information. Let's say we're doing the really nice episode title with the name of the
guest. We've got a nice short description of the episode.
Then we've got our full show notes and they've got links and rich information, and we've
got a transcript, let's say.
We're filling in all the person tags, we're doing all of these things.
We're donating all of this information to these systems, to these apps.
It's their job to present that to us.
I think the best thing we can do is just try not to game that system.
Is try not to get into the habit of, hacking things or keyword stuffing and all these
different ideas.
Trying to avoid appeasing one app.
I talked about things like the iTunes keyword tag, which is now deprecated and has been
for some time. There's a couple of apps that surfaced this summer.
I spoke to one of the marketing guy for one of the apps last week, and I won't call him
out by name because it wouldn't be fair.
He was, kind of proud that their app was one of the two that was indexing this.
And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not the point.
We shouldn't be providing that information anymore, and saying that podcasters can just
put a bunch of keywords into their feed in order for their show to be found on your app.
That ain't helping anyone.
This is really much more for, let's understand where we are as an industry at the moment
from the podcaster side and from the developer side.
I think if there's ways that we can help developers say, listen, there's a few things you
could do here, make our lives a lot easier.
If we can get episode level search into the Podcast Index.
I did misspeak earlier in that I said they are indexing the title because I read the
article when I was just reading back.
If we can get the Podcast Index and a couple of other places to start indexing some of
that episode level data, I think that would really blow the doors off things.
Again, to very slowly and verbosely answer a very simple question.
I think it's on the app developers to try and lift this space now.
Brett Johnson: Right. I think you synopsizing what that article is intended to do will help podcast
producers look at it.
I got the same feelings.
Every one of them does something different.
You cannot cater to everyone, the top 14.
You cannot cater to those 14.
Just do the best practices, do what you're supposed to do, do what your podcast host
platform actually is encouraging you to do.
You're probably going to be okay.
That's just one piece of the puzzle anyway.
This is [CROSSTALK] just podcast player app search.
This is small, again, like we talked about earlier, they were not developed to be a
search engine.
They're a player and we're asking a lot of them.
This leads me to my next question.
I think one major disadvantage most podcasters have is the lack of the knowledge about
SEO.
And what search engines are there to do.
We still banter around those terms, as I mentioned earlier, podcast discoverability.
We've got to get rid of that, get rid of it, and probably should really be focused on
the term of podcast findability.
Based on what your podcast was about.
Coupled with podcasters wanting everyone or everything else to do the work.
We put it out there somebody else should take care of that.
What advice would you give podcasters on best practices when it comes to SEO and their
podcast? Knowing your background, what you've done, what would be some good things,
here's three things you got to check off the list.
You've got to do this to help yourself.
Mark Steadman: Three things. Number one, get a really good website.
Number two, get a really good website.
Number three, say it with me, get a really good website.
Brett Johnson: Yeah.
Mark Steadman: I work with, there's a podcast [INAUDIBLE] for someone.
I absolutely love the show.
I've got no interest in the topic whatsoever.
Couldn't be further from my interest.
But I love editing them. They do such a great job.
They are a dream to work with because, they research the episode really well.
They give me lovely show notes.
They have this great banter.
It's pre-prepared. They know what they're going to talk about.
They're really informed on their topic.
They've got great chemistry.
When they make a mistake they're really good at pointing it out.
I can just edit that out and we end up with this lovely, bubbly, bright, informative,
engaging episode. They don't have a podcast website and it drives me insane every time.
It's something we're working on.
I'm not just sitting there going well, it sucks to be you.
It is something we're working on.
The reason is, I'll just break it down a little bit.
It's not just about having a place that you can direct people to.
One of the big things is talking about search, going from search.
If you've got a really interesting topic, if you're solving a listener problem, you want
that to be the kind of question, I actually just put out a video on this yesterday.
You want to be able to answer the kind of question that someone might Google, and to be
able to phrase it in a way that meets a particular need that someone's Googling.
If you have got a website that you own, that allows you to optimize it in the way you
want to, that is linked up with your Google Podcasts account, that sets you up in such a
great way, because then you've made your title really Googleable, really easily findable,
you are helping that person get an answer to that question.
They find your search results, they click on it all.
They might just click the play button and hear the episode straight away in Google
Podcast, or they might click through to your website and they will see the space that you
own. They will see your text, they will see the player.
They will see the subscription links to listen to your podcast.
They will see the link to join your mailing list.
If you need the modal pop up dialog box to say, I've got this mailing list, I've got this
great offer, they can see that.
You're not relying on something like Listen Notes or Player.FM To be indexing your episode
for you and showing it on Google.
This is your opportunity to own the space and it doesn't cost a lot of money.
In order to do this, you can run it on Podpay, you can do a simple WordPress site, but
getting the ability for you to own that space and to be able to optimize.
The last point of this is, tangential to all of this is, each episode that you create is
part of your body of work.
It's not just this is the thing we've put out this week.
We go through the cycle.
We put out out Tweet.
We do our Instagram post.
We put it on Facebook and LinkedIn, and then onto the next one.
That's so often how we think about it because we're stuck in that cycle.
With each episode, you're building a body of work.
If you don't have a website where every episode has its own Web page with the title, the
player and full rich show notes describing the episode and potentially the full
transcript. If you don't have that for each individual episode, then yeah, your stuff is
just going to disappear into the ether.
Having a website, crucially with each episode having its own web page, that preserves
your work in a way that would be so much harder otherwise, because all of that good stuff
that you've written, all of those show notes, that transcript, it's all being gobbled up
by Google and it's loving it and it's eating it up and it's indexing it.
Again, it's going to space you own.
It comes down to having a good website.
Brett Johnson: Right. I de-mythed it in my own mind about what Google is to us in regards to well, think
about how you use Google.
You're asking it a question.
Mark Steadman: Yeah.
Brett Johnson: And you want Google to deliver you the best options it can find.
Therefore, that's the game we play.
Mark Steadman: Be one of those options.
Brett Johnson: Be one of those options. Be the best that you can, knowing again, lots of things are
against you to a certain degree.
Algorithm, how long you've been there, how you rank in regards to an authority figure and
such. But, you're there.
Mark Steadman: Yes.
Brett Johnson: You may be page five, but you're there.
Mark Steadman: Yes.
Brett Johnson: Potentially to grow and then build upon that SEO.
There are a lot of people that are just really good at SEO, find them.
Let them help you out, because there are little tricks to this that you just keep it in
your workflow. It's going to help you in the long run.
I just [CROSSTALK] see that.
It's a little bit of work, but it works.
It works.
Mark Steadman: I think it's also, it's a habit you build up as well, like a muscle that you build up, I
should say. The title is so important and it's something I fall down on a lot.
There are really simple free tools that will help you make your title better.
They will analyze the words in your title and say, you know, actually if you use this
kind of language, if you put a personalized kind of word in here, it makes us connect
with it more. If you use a brand, if you use certain words, caution or stop words, they
make us have emotional reactions when they read this article.
Doesn't necessarily mean we're talking about clickbait here, but we are making the title
as enticing as possible and as compelling as possible, and to set up a bit of tension and
suspense of, oh, I've got to know what, setting up an expectation.
I've got to know what is in this.
You can do that stuff actually quite easily and for free.
If you speak someone like [INAUDIBLE], I think he's one of these people who's a believer.
It's one of the most important things you can do for each episode.
Is get that title absolutely bang on, because that's the most important thing that crops
up in search.
Brett Johnson: Yeah, exactly.
Talk about, more projects or experiments coming up as we finish out the episode?
Mark Steadman: Projects certainly.
I'm having a lot of fun at the moment, trying to make videos and write articles that are
going back to the stuff you and your listeners already know about, but going back from
first principles of podcasting all the way up to a much more advanced stuff.
I'm doing videos every week over at podcode.tv.
There's written articles, podcast episodes as well.
There's the newsletter where I try and disseminate the podcast news through my particular
viewpoint. If you're interested, if I have talked your ear off and you want to hear more
of what I've got to say, podcode.tv is where you can find out some of that.
Brett Johnson: Super, and I'll remind everyone too listening, that I'll have all the connections and the
links and his websites and such in the podcast show notes so you don't have to hear a
litany of what did he say?
How do you write that now? Which always drives me insane, that's a great way to end an
episode. [CROSSTALK] Links are in the show notes we'll go that way.
Thank you for spending this time with me talking about this.
This has been enlightening for me, even me reading your article numerous times and
spending a lot of time on it.
It still gives me some insight on why you did it, and what you thought from the results
as well, too. You come from a different angle.
Definitely more of the tech piece of this and the back end of how everything is built.
I think that's something we need to know.
We need to understand where things come from and why they exist the way they do.
Then we can do better with them.
And that's great. I really appreciate your insight and your time this morning Mark.
Mark Steadman: That was absolutely lovely to talk to you.
Thank you, Brett.
Brett Johnson: My thanks again to Mark for spending a little bit of time with me talking about his
experiment. I hope you got as much out of it as I did.
Again, I encourage you to read the full article if you haven't done so already.
It's worth the 10-15 minutes to read it.
If you're looking for more tailored help on your podcast, then be sure to connect with
our dedicated team of podcast professionals.
We'll help your business create a podcast from planning and launching to editing,
presentation skills, promotion and monetization if it's in the game plan.
Interested in speaking with one of our professionals, we put together a questionnaire to
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The link is in the podcast show notes.