Alban Brooke has been at Buzzsprout for almost ten years and is the head of Marketing. Today we talk about some new features to manage your show in Buzzsprout along with the attitude and expectations to make it in the long game of podcasting.
Connect with Alban Brooke
Check out Buzzcast
Connect with Alban on Twitter @albanbrooke
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Alban Brooke on the Podcasting Long Game
When it comes to a new podcaster and growing your show, Alban starts with, “Congratulations on starting and for starting the one (vs blogging, video, email) that's the hardest to grow. Newsletters, social media, blogs, and videos are all easier to grow by a good bit than podcasts. Podcasts are the hardest of all of them. I've done all of them.
Even for me, working in a podcasting company, it's the hardest. But it has the greatest dividends because, on a blog piece of content where somebody will read it for, like, two and a half minutes of my videos on YouTube, it'll be around 45 seconds of watch time. TikTok, it's maybe 12 seconds of watch time. You get one view or one interaction or one follow there. On podcasting, we've got much smaller download numbers. We have much smaller audience numbers, but what I consistently see in a 45-minute episode is that my average duration if someone starts is around 36 minutes or 38 minutes.”
Growing Your Podcast Through a Deep Connection
Alban continued, “The number one way to grow a podcast is to keep podcasting. It's very easy to get discouraged because you're on a slower journey, and you see, wow, I've done three episodes, and I'm only at 20 downloads per episode. That's probably about above average for the industry. Once you get up into the thirties, at Buzzsprout across 120,000 plus active shows, we think 31 downloads is the median. So you're at the 50th percentile when you hit 31 downloads per episode. And everybody who continues podcasting and growing themselves, learning their craft, getting better content, they all grow because the way that podcasting mostly grows is through word-of-mouth, through an existing audience.
You can do things like advertising podcasting apps. You could use something like Buzzsprout Ads. You can go on other shows. You can do cross-promos. You can work with other content creators who are talking about content that is similar to yours. There are so many ideas of how to do the marketing, but the underlying piece is you gotta stay in this game for a few years if you want to get a real audience. And the more of an existing audience you have, the easier it's to grow because you've hit this critical mass of listeners who will refer your content to their friends.”
Make Sure You're Connecting With the Audience
While I 100% agree if you quit podcasting, your show won't grow. It would be best if you kept going, but you should get constructive feedback from people you trust to know you're going in the right direction.
Podcasting Is Valuable to the Soul
Alban Brooke: “I think creating something is just valuable for your soul. And so if you wanna create in any of these mediums, I highly recommend to do it. And do it in a way that is affordable to you. I hope if it's a podcast on Buzzsprout, you might hope that it's on LipSyn, but we would both just say, just go do something and see if you like it. And then over time, you will grow into new interests and hobbies.”
I think the best thing about podcasting for me has been it helps me articulate my thoughts. You can probably listen to seasons of Buzzcast where we'll talk about similar things and yet, by going through the practice of writing out your thoughts and sketching things and then kind of trying to express it on air, then I go do a guest interview and then I go, oh, you know, the way Dave asked that question helped me articulate something I believed. And it's only by the act of creation that I really understand.
Experimenting in their Show
Alban and the co-hosts of Buzzcast aren't afraid to try new things. They've been adding non-podcast related items to the END of their show so people can connect on life-related topics (like socks), and they recently started using Slick Text to be able to send and receive text messages (which may work well with so many people listening on the phone).
Four Reasons Why Buzzsprout Built an iOs App
- Better notifications
- Easy to update a previously published episode
- Checking stats (great if you're running an ad campaign to check and see how it is doing)
- Easy to share benchmarks
Connect with Alban Brooke
Check out Buzzscast
Connect with Alban on Twitter @albanbrooke
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This is episode 928
