Only 8% of Podcasts Succeed. Here are 3 Ways to Optimize Your Podcast for Success - Teacher: Neal Veglio

92 percent of podcasts fail. But today on our lesson, we're going to talk about how you can start a successful podcast. Today we learn how to optimize your podcast. Why starting with an end goal in mind is critical and why the first seven seconds of your podcast opening is most important. Here we go.

Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast. And today we have a new straight talking teacher in our Useful Content Classroom, Neal Veglio. Neal, how are you today?

I am absolutely ecstatic, especially as you got my name right. You said it. You nailed it straight off the bat, so thank you for that. Appreciate that. Juma.

The truth is I, went on Google translate. I Googled the name and um, let them pronounce it for me. Cause when I went to your LinkedIn and I hit on the pronunciation stuff, you're so smooth. You say it so fast So great. It was great to have you on. I think it's worth mentioning that I found you on LinkedIn and the manner in which I found you is interesting because it's in alignment with your general brand, which is this straight talking person, you were in the comments of another LinkedIn user pointing out why the thing they were saying about podcasting wasn't right, do you often get yourself inside of the comments saying those things?

I am not very good at letting things go, and one of my big problems is if I see someone who is considered to be an educator in the space and they're giving poor education, then I find it really difficult to just sit back and just go. You know what? I'm gonna be polite. 'cause the thing is, I think, and I, I saw somebody else make the point about this is, you know, if you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all.

I don't agree with that 100%. I completely disagree with that because this is not about your dynamic relationship between you and another creator, another social media user. This is about your responsibility as a human being who understands a thing. Making sure that other people who maybe don't understand a thing aren't led down the garden path. By a false profit, which is, to be honest, how I see these people. They are individuals who somehow have managed to build an audience and it's low hanging fruit kind of content and data that they're putting out there. And there are some really clever people who are great marketers who can build that following and build that community. Who actually are giving bad advice. And so, yeah, I really struggle. I mean, some people probably see it as really rude and a bit aggressive, but to be honest, those people aren't my tribe anyway. That's how I, you know, I've made that decision a long time ago that if people don't like me because of the advice I'm giving, even though it's in their own best interest, then I'm fine with that.

You don't have to follow me, but you know, at least if I'm interacting and you see it, then at least you, you can. You know, rest in the knowledge that it's decent quality advice.

Yeah, and I think that's what stood out to me when I saw the comment, I was like, I need to follow this guy immediately because I, myself, I'm a fan of a good disagreement when it's, it's properly done. And I found that if somebody is willing to share the straight knowledge with you based on experience, because you've been inside of podcasting for almost over 20 years now.

And that is your area of mastery. I think, yeah, I can move with this. I can move with this person and find out more from them because clearly they know more than I do. Part of your story is that you were on radio and you were one of the first people in the UK to upload your show to the internet, and this was before there was any social media.

what possessed you to do that, Neal?

Honestly, it was a bit of ego had I had a section of my audience that weren't able to listen to my show. Uh, you know, we, we were actually so UK based. But we're actually more popular with the US audience. And so there was a section of the US that was not able to catch the show live and so they were going to work and they were missing parts of it or you know, they were getting up too late or whatever.

So I decided, well, look, there's a whole section of audience here, and not just America, but like around the world that are in bed or you know, at work at the point that I'm on air doing my thing. So I. Why not because of the website. The radio station website is the first streaming live digital radio station in the world.

The first commercial one at least I was uploading the shows and. Yeah, the audience was just incredible. I was seeing bigger download numbers of the on demand content than we were seeing for the live streams. And you know, I was able to monitor in real time in the radio studio how many listeners we had at any one time.

And it was, it was doubling it sometimes having it this, you know, on on demand this way. So I just thought there's something in this, the fact that you can actually listen at your convenience. And I can actually track where the data is as well. So for example, with the the streams, we knew that they were in America.

We knew that they were in Germany, we knew that they were in the uk, but we couldn't really pinpoint it any more than that. Whereas with uploading it, we're able to get actual IP numbers track down to almost the town level using some advanced behind the scenes stuff. So it just led me to thinking Wow, I've gotta get into this, you know, I've gotta make this a, a thing.

And of course, I then learned about the podcast, which was being experimented on just the whole. The whole setup, the whole premise of I can take this content, which I own and put it out there and syndicate it. This to me, like, no, there was no wall. It was, it was just incredibly exciting.

Yeah. And it seems like you were living in the future because now all the walls have essentially been removed and anyone can start their own, what we would call digital radio station by uploading to these distribution platforms. And that's the thing we're going to focus on today. How do you optimize that process?

How do you make your podcast the best? It can be. And the first thing I have to ask you is that you have said that, and I don't know if this is something that you have observed, maybe you've observed this as well, 92 percent of podcasts fail. Why do podcasts fail?

They put content out for content's sake. You know, I, I see it quite a lot in the corporate world. I do a lot of consultancy work with some of the bigger brands and, you know, smaller brands as well. But, you know, it's, it's incredible to see the attitude that some of the really big brands have. And I, I won't name them because it's, it's a bit of bad blood, but there was one well-known High Street Bank that I was working with for, for a while, a couple of years ago on a consultancy basis.

And their attitude to podcasting was, Well, everyone else has got one. And I just, it, it left me feeling sad because you have all these really creative people, these really talented people that work their behinds off to get this content out there because they understand the fundamental principle of this, which is a podcast, is simply another form of entertainment medium. That's it. It's, you know, it's closer to a blog post than it is to a radio show. But that said, you still need the fundamentals. You wouldn't get a blog post that is badly written, dull, not engaging, doing well. And it's the same with podcasts. So I think what the mistake, most people in this 92%. Fail on is they're not understanding the power and the responsibility that they actually have with this content.

They've got a real opportunity to change lives, to educate, to really make that connection with their ideal audience, but they're only gonna do that. If they think about it, strategize it and approach it in the right way, and just sticking u s b microphone into, into a computer, into your laptop, talking into a microphone, recording that in GarageBand, or you know, audacity, whatever it is you are using, that's, that's literally the process.

That's not what a podcast is. That's a part of the process, and I think the more people can understand, actually, when you are creating this content, it's gotta be very deliberate. There's gotta be an intention behind it. You've gotta have an End goal in mind. Unless you approach those aspects of this, you are always gonna be in that 92% because your own brain is gonna say to you, well, we're not doing this right. You know, we we're We are just really half baking this. And so you are going to lose the momentum. You're gonna lose the energy flow. And I think those that really know what they're doing and throw their all into it, there's just a different energy they carry, which just lifts them. And, and it's not even about download numbers then.

It's just about knowing what you are, you are creating for the world.

would you say that before anyone even thinks about creating a podcast, that they must sit down and think about the purpose and the strategy behind it?

I mean, I'd, I'll put it to you like this. Juma, would you start a business just on the whim of, do you know what, I quite fancy launching a business today. You, you wouldn't, would you? You, you know, you would, you would. Fair enough. You might d i y, your business launch, you might start, you might see how it goes, and then you might scale later on.

You'll bootstrap it, as they call it, but you are still gonna have an idea of where you want to go. You are gonna have an idea of, right, so how much money do I want to invest in this to start with on marketing on my website? On my content, you know, on the social media platform setups. Even at that base level, you are gonna give it thought.

You're not gonna register as a, as a limited company unless you've given some thought to where you're going, how are you gonna make money from this thing? And how you're gonna supply your ideal intended clients.

So, Why would a podcast be any different? It's essentially, it's the same thing. I mean, certainly as there's two different approaches of podcasting anyway. I mean, without delving too much into this, 'cause that's not the point of this, but you've got podcasts that are products themselves. In other words, they're looking for sponsorship advertising or maybe, you know, becoming the product that then gets syndicated and sold. And then you've got podcasts that are actually just a marketing tool behind making you the product. So Juma, you would be the product in, in this case, and, and selling your services and using the podcast as a marketing tool. So to go into this without having at least an idea of what this is gonna look like and sound like, and then your intention and your ideal outcome from it, it's just, it's bmy, but it's what most people do when they start a podcast.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought about it, but you're very right. There's some podcasts. The podcast is the actual. Thing that you're selling and the, and some podcasts that the person or the services or whatever else you share on the podcast. So there's a, massive difference in the way you would approach that if you are actually structuring your podcast.

And I guess some of the mistakes that people make is that they put themselves in a different category, even though they are a different thing. So. And I guess, I guess part of that is that people look at popular and podcasters and they want to emulate them. Have you seen a lot of that going on in the market?

Oh, it's, yeah. I mean, have I, everybody wants to be, I mean, we've got Steven Bartlett diary of a CEO. He is, you know, I mean, he's the number two UK podcast now that's official according to the Edison research they've just released. But for a long time, people have seen him as the number one podcast in the uk and. Everybody wants to now be Stephen Bartlett. So it's that whole thing of sitting down two people in a room, the camera panning between the two of them. If it's the video version, you know, the conversation, if it's the audio version, and you know, just very raw. Not particularly well produced. Not particularly well structured, just a guy firing questions at a guest and everybody is doing that format now.

And even another big podcast kind of started out. With that format. It's called the High Performance Podcast for Jake Humphries. It's a great show, but it's doing the same thing. It's trying to take this approach of this show, did it? This show seems to have had success with it, so therefore, that's now the blueprint.

That's the benchmark for all podcasts that are having guests and. My thing on this is actually you are then immediately making it difficult for yourself. Because what you are doing is you are not only competing with, you know, the, the 375,000 active podcasts around the world that are churning out fresh content, but you are specifically competing with this podcast because you're in the same niche, you're in the same format.

So therefore, If you are doing the same show, people are immediately gonna compare you to that show. So you are on the back foot from the start. Whereas if you strategized it and thought, okay, so what can we do this a little bit different? What can we bring to this, to this genre, to this format that not everybody in the world is doing?

So yeah, in, in short, it is a problem. I think, you know, there's a reason people like I like me exist and that is to sort of say to people, look, I get that you love Stephen Bartlett. I get that you love the diary of a C e O podcast. Enjoy the podcast, but do your own thing.

Yeah, but that's not you.

That's that's not you. That's a great opening chunk of insight that the people can take. Now, let's move into deeper into some of the optimization things that would work for people when they're actually thinking about creating and launching.

Their podcast so you you kind of cover three things in our questions that we talked about before which was optimizing your show just general optimization I'm figuring that is and you'll explain more optimizing your episodes Episode to episode. What does that look like? And then there's optimizing your descriptions, which I am myself am terrible at and I want to know about that part So could you start from the top because since so many people are getting this thing wrong And we want them by the end of our conversation to be able to do it right. Start at where you feel is the most important in terms of optimizing your show.

Oh, I like the way you've gone into that. So that gives me a real opportunity here. And in fact, this, this, I'm gonna demonstrate to you in real time actually how we do this. So what you want is you wanna be focusing everything. On the first seven seconds of your episode, okay? So forget your first episode.

Forget your fifth episode. If you've been going for 300 episodes, I don't care. Irrelevant. Right? Now for episode 301, the most important seven seconds of this show's history is these first seven seconds. You gotta throw everything at it. So, for example, you know, if your show is about, for example, we're talking about podcasting. So we might go in with right now, my name's Juma. Right now I'm talking to Neal, and he's gonna tell us why the first seven seconds of your episode is the most important seven seconds of your show's history. Boom. Done. And that's what we're talking about. So now technically you could take that clip and put that at the beginning of your episode, have you introduce it and say, this week's guest is Neal. Here's why. Then it goes into me saying the first seven seconds, et cetera, et cetera. The reason for that is because every single podcast, app displays your latest episode, unless they've gone out of their way to change the settings in their app and have all the episodes show up in chronological order, no one does that.

Only psychopaths do that because most people wanna go straight in with the latest episode first. That's we're all about. Now, we're all about new. that in mind, obviously the first thing they're gonna hear your new listeners is those first seven seconds. If those first seven seconds are either poor quality zoom audio, you know, glitching, somebody that's not on their proper microphone, maybe they're going through their laptop microphone straight away, you've probably lost about 75 to 90% of your audience. We've got data on this as well. This is not me guessing, this is me giving you the data metrics on this, that most people, if they're not hooked and engaged and don't hear that pleasant quality sounds straight away, they're gone. They're off to another podcast, which serves them better, or at least in their perception will serve them better.

So in terms of optimizing your show, what you wanna think about is a couple of fundamental things. Number one, What are you giving the listener? Simple as that. Forget you as the creator. I don't care if you've got a million followers on LinkedIn or Twitter or 10 followers, you are gonna have the same rules here because of the 1% conversion, which is the reality of this.

Doesn't matter how many followers you got, 1% of your followers if you are lucky. Are ever gonna track through to listening to your podcast or watching it on YouTube. So you are already against it there. So what you wanna do is make sure that your episode, your podcast in general, but certainly your latest episode, going back to the fact that the first seven seconds, the most important factor of your show's life right now. You've gotta make sure the listener knows that by the time they finish listening to this, they're gonna be improved in some way. Whether that's something new that they've learned, whether that's something that's gonna transform them or whether it's something that they're gonna think, okay, well that was really cool and I'm entertained by this person or this topic.

I want to find out more about it. That's it. That's literally the optimization, and you'll do that with structure. Making sure that all of your content follows in a nice fluid fashion, so you haven't got, you know disruptive bits in the middle that could be really brought forward actually, and sort of played earlier to listeners, so they're gonna get something out of it. It could be that you are just making sure that the bits, the topics that you are covering are in a logical order. So you don't wanna sort of like give away the big reveal, if you like, like the most important factor of a topic right at the end, necessarily. If actually it's the first thing they need to consider. So that's something you need to think about is sometimes you might need to move your audio around to a different order from how it was recorded. So yeah, that's what I would say. It's the content, it's the sound quality, and it's the hook. It's that first seven seconds. If you're recording your podcast on Zoom, I would stop that immediately.

That's all I would say to you.

I take what you're saying because I have found too, that when I record my shows or even when I record regular content, sometimes I listen to them and I realize, okay, this is not optimized in terms of how someone would want to listen to this.

And I take a chunk of audio, which is more relevant and move it earlier in the conversation so that people get that. And it actually encourages them to stay all the way to the end. The question I want to ask you is, do you have to optimize in a different way for new listeners versus. Listeners that you have already or people who are already following the podcast.

You are optimizing for new listeners all the time. Your existing listeners are not going to stop listening to you just because you are making it easy for new listeners to enjoy and engage. I would say that. So every single episode that you put out, have your new listeners in mind at the forefront because that's who we are trying to win.

We've, we've won the existing listeners, they're in, they're engaged. They, they love you. They're listen to every episode that you produce, hopefully, or at least most of them. So what we need to do is make sure that we don't do anything that is jarring. When I say that, what I mean is if you are a podcast covering a certain topic, don't suddenly think, well, do you know what?

This week I fancy going off a complete tangent and doing a completely different topic because then you will lose those existing listeners. But other than that, You really wanna be thinking about how can I encourage my brand new listeners, someone that's discovered me for the first time, maybe, maybe they followed me on social media today.

Maybe they saw a Facebook ad, maybe they saw me commenting on someone else's LinkedIn post. And they've tracked through, they've, they've gone down the rabbit hole that is you and your profile, and they've decided to listen. So these are the people that we wanna be making sure that, think about it like this.

Let's simplify this with a, with a visual. An analogy, imagine that you've got a brand new restaurant that's just opened up in town, okay? Nobody knows about it, but somebody's just wandered past and they've gone, oh, that's a new restaurant. I'm quite fancy to look at that. I might pop in. And then you've, all you've done is you've done a really nice, bright facade. It's really clean and neon lighting all the stuff, and it looks great. And then you get in there and you see that they're still using old chairs from the previous establishment. There's dust everywhere, and the food just looks a bit disgusting. They're out, they're gone. So they might have been enticed by the visuals, by the branding, by what it looks like. But when they've actually gone in and they've listened to it, they've watched the content, they're like, nah, this so it's really about making sure that just because you are doing something the way you've always done it, And your current listeners are okay with that. Have a think about what it looks like to new audiences that maybe are not familiar. You know, it's like a restaurant, moms and pops places. As, as you know, I like to call them. You'll put up with a, a, you know, a, a lesser decor if you know the food is great, you are put up with it because you're like, well, they're not all about design. They're not all about the marketing. They just do great food.

So back to that restaurant analogy there, what you're doing is you're taking care of your current estate. Current clientele, you're not thinking about the new people and what the first impressions are. So that is what I would say is always focus on making sure it's the best possible experience for those newbies.

Yeah. And, and so what I'm hearing you say too, is that your hook or your headline has to match the content.

Oh, yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

100%. Yeah, it's, it's a bi, it's a much bigger deal. Some people get, you know, people are all about, you know, we hear authenticity all the time. Authenticness authentic that. But in terms of this, in terms of how your brand marries with your content, there's nothing more paramount. There's nothing more fundamental.

It absolutely has to speak your brand all the way through.

Beautiful, beautiful. All right. So we talked about the show, how to optimize that at the top level. Let's get into the episodes. What are some things that we must look at in order to optimize our episodes?

Remind me to talk about titles, because that's a big part of this. But in terms of the episodes themselves, in terms of optimizing those, I want you to think about just a couple of things here. Number one, is your episode matching with your intention? So, for example, if you've got a guest that talks about, I don't know, let's take a a, a fairly sort of open and broad topic business. If your guest is talking about business strategy or business investing or something that's, you know, within business, but is something that not everybody is necessarily talking about and they're an expert in the field. What you've gotta bear in mind is who is going to want to consume that content? So if you are wanting people that, let's take investing for an example.

You've got somebody that's got a bit of cash in a bank. They're at that point now where they're thinking, you know, I really should start investing my money somewhere because it's just, it's just gathering cobwebs. I'm wealthy. Great, good for me, but I need to be sensible about where I'm gonna start distributing this cash. If you are then gonna create an episode which has a guest talking about this, but then you are not going to make it clear to your intended listener. Through the show notes, through the title, through the way you are presenting the content, that that's exactly who you are trying to serve with this episode. And instead you start going off on a tangent with them and, and you have that first in the episode. You've lost your audience already because they're, they're listening in and they're going, well, hang on a minute. I thought this was about investing. Why are they suddenly talking about their yacht, that they have moed up in Monaco and talking about how they've had trouble with their banks or whatever, and the advice they're giving about making sure that you pick the right bank. No, no. I wanna know about investing. So it's a subtle thing. It's, it's a really fine line. Where you've got a wider content sphere, a wider idea, but your listener doesn't care about that wide. They come in for a very specific reason. They have noticed that your episode is supposedly talking about investing as an entrepreneur, but yet you're talking about wider business, so you Absolutely Absolutely need to get it nailed down that everything that you are talking about in the episode, everything you are putting out there as descriptions for the content is married to what the outcome that the listener is looking for is suggesting.

Right. And that would include your, as you said, your show description your show notes what is the best way, and this is something that I've kind of. Personally, this question is for me now.

It's something that I've kind of struggled with in terms of the show notes and how much information you give inside of that, because I see there's a big variance in how people approach that. Some people give a really kind of short synopsis of what the show is about. And sometimes they would put the their guests in information in there.

Some people it's like a ton of stuff in their show notes and they give a lot of different things. Some of it you may consider extraneous. What have you seen in your experience is the best way to structure like a show notes, a section per episode.

My advice on this is make sure you are not gatekeeping. Too much. So in other words, if the information can lead to a transformation just in the show notes, don't be shy with that because they're gonna wanna listen to the episode anyway. If, if what you are telling them is this is what this will talk you through, this is the information we're gonna give you here. Don't do that whole, we are all guilty of it, you know, in the past where we put the T's down. So in this episode, somebody's gonna tell you exactly how you can make X into Y. And you're like, ah, that's great. I got everyone listening in. Now I can tell you this. Now that doesn't always work. Some people will be like, well, okay, so if, if you're doing that now in the show notes, and I'm not even listening, what's the episode gonna be like?

Am I gonna have to sit through three ads? You know, 10 minutes will waffle. And then you'll finally tell me in the last 10 seconds what this is all about. And I've seen this firsthand that shows that try and do that, they do that slightly clickbait approach. Listeners aren't stupid. They know and they can, they can definitely suss it out.

So don't be afraid to give away more in the show notes. When I'm doing my show notes for my clients, they're presented as blog posts. That's what we are literally doing. We're saying, right, here's what this is about. Here's what you're gonna learn and here's how you need to take the next steps. Because the idea is that the listener is gonna go, wow, okay, that's cool.

But I'm more of an audio learner, or I'm more of a visual learner. So although I've got that there, I kind of want them to talk me through it. I'd like them to explain in real time so they'll listen or watch it anyway. And I think the more you can give, the more chance you've got as well of being indexed in search engines.

I mean, this is a, a very uh, a little known thing. Not the actual landing pages. I wanna be clear about this because a lot of people, they, when they talk about podcast SEO, they go for the low hanging fruit and say, make sure you put in all the stuff in your show notes because they will get you in Google. They won't. But here's how it works, the more you put into your show notes. That tell Google that there's valid content there, even though they're not indexing and ranking the podcast landing page. So I'm, when I'm talking about that, what I'm talking about is Captivate Libsyn Buzz Sprout. The pages that they give you for your episodes, although they're not necessarily gonna rank on page one, or Google what might rank com page one or Google, is if you then feed this content, link it to an actual blog post on your website. That could actually rank on Google. So here's a secret source there for you. A lot of people wouldn't admit this publicly. They'd rather go on their $97 course on Instagram, but here's how it works. The more you put into the podcast app show notes, that then feeds to. An external public facing blog post, the more chance you are helping that public facing blog post that has a bit more exposition, a bit more expansion, a bit more dynamic content on it, the more chance that that will rank. So that's where the SEO part of it comes in, hence the optimization.

Wow. I think that's incredible. I had not even considered that as the show notes as a blog post. I had not even considered that. That's just blowing my mind right now. Which means that anyone who's creating their podcast shouldn't make effort to create pretty robust show notes things that can be shared, not just on the app itself, but linking back to their own native website.

Yeah.

Here's how to think about it. Juma. So you know at the moment everyone's going nuts about YouTube and YouTube shorts, and it's the same idea really. You've got your YouTube, which is your longer form video, so that's like your podcast. You've then got your YouTube shorts, which is your shorter version. It's like your caption. So it's, it's kind of almost like a promo for the main content that is on your YouTube channel. So if you think about your podcast platform, show notes almost being like your YouTube shorts. So here's a tease, here's what's coming up. Here's a nice piece of content that tells you exactly what this is all about. We're not gonna make you wait for the content. Here is the content, here's the main point, right? But if you wanna find out more, Then by all means, go and check out the full blog post. And this is why I suggest to people if they've got a podcast, the bare minimum you wanna be doing is having a podcast website.

If you do, no other marketing whatsoever, if you don't invest in traffic from pod, in podcast apps, Facebook ads, Google Ads, whatever and you know, that's a topic for another day, how you absolutely need to buy your audience to start with if you wanna get any sort of brand lift for your podcast. But even if you don't do that, At a fundamental basic level, at the bare minimum, what you wanna be doing is having a podcast website whereby Google can fall in love with your content.

Because it's Rankable, it's dynamic. You can put your YouTube video in there as well. You can put in artwork. I mean, we've got Mid Journey now doing ai. You can create beautiful AI pieces that can illustrate. So for those that are Maybe you know, audibly impaired, you can create the story through this artwork that they can look at, and it's pretty, and anything you can do that essentially can signal to Google and their brand new e e a T framework, yes, it's all here. I'm taking care of it. Any inquiry you have in the world, this post, this blog post, answers that query. And the more you can do to do that, the more chance you've got of your podcast ranking.

Beautiful. Good stuff. Good stuff. We spoke so much about the show notes. I don't know if optimizing your descriptions is very similar. Is it a similar thing? Cause that's the last thing we have to cover today. 

I am gonna talk you through the, the fundamentals here of, of titling and descriptions. So what you need to worry about here is Apple Podcasts, number one. Regardless of what Spotify's marketing team might want, want you to believe Apple Podcasts still accounts for 70%. It fluctuates, but it's generally 70% of all podcasts listening.

It's got the market covered. So really you want to be making sure that your podcast is optimized for discovery in Apple Podcasts. Here's how their discovery system works. Show title. Show author. Okay. That's the first search. So in other words, let me just break this down and simplify it for you. Any search keywords that you have that describe the content you've created in your episode? Okay. First of all, you need your show to be talking about that. So for example, if your show is about, I don't know, let's talk about, okay. Podcasts. Okay. Podcast videos. Okay. You wanna make sure that if you are doing a podcast about how to optimize podcast videos, optimizing podcast videos should probably be in the title somewhere, or at least something along those lines. Okay? Then your podcast author field needs to also nod towards that expertise. So I'll give you an example from me. My show is called the Pod Master. Okay? Pod and it's got a subtitle helping podcast I, I can't even remember the name and subtitle in my own show. Juma, this is embarrassing, but it's basically the pod master colon helping podcasters achieve success or something like that, or helping you towards pod mastery. So therefore, in my title, I've got Podcasters Podcasting Pod Mastery. So that sort of suggests what the show is about, which tells Apple Podcasts. Oh, okay. This is a show about podcasting. We'll rank it along with those shows. Then in the author field, I've got Neal Lio, the podcast, but I could very easily, if I wanted to, I don't do this podcast for, you know, getting gaming the algorithms, but if I wanted to, I might put podcasting expert or podcast expert, Neal Veglio. That then signals at the show level. What the podcast is about and how it addresses those keywords. Now, next down, episode title, episode author. So if you're gonna be specific, and again, back to the YouTube podcast video kind of thing, you might have an episode that's titled How to Rank Your Podcast Videos on the, you know, number one on YouTube. You've done it, you've told, you've told Apple Podcasts exactly what this show is about, so therefore, anybody searching podcast videos, YouTube. Ranking, anybody searching for those terms, your show is more likely to surface in those initial results. And that's fundamentally the more important thing here with the ranking, not charts, we don't care about chart positions, their vanity metrics, they don't convert to new listeners.

What does convert to new listeners is you showing up in the search for the very topics that they're searching for. And then in the author field, again, you come down to the expertise. So it might be, you know, podcast, video, YouTube expert juma. And that's literally how it works. It's the same for Spotify, and it's the same for a lot of the other podcast apps as well, in terms of the description. Now Apple themselves are notorious liars. I'm gonna say that I can, I can definitely tell you this. They lie about how their algorithms work. Why? Because they don't want you to game them. They don't want you to start nudging things around and getting results that are. Artificially moving your show around in the wider spectrum of podcasts.

So they keep this stuff shrouded in secrecy so that you are just putting out organically titled content. But here's how it works. If your show starts ranking. Because it's showing value as in the content that you are putting out there is matching what's titled and what you're describing. They then start to look at more of your podcast. So for a zero day. So for someone that's just published a brand new podcast, it doesn't have any followers yet. It doesn't have any listeners yet. It's not had many downloads. They're not gonna take into account much more than the show title and the show author field. They might look at the episodes as well, but you are still new, so there's still, you're still finding ground with it, so they're totally gonna ignore your description. You haven't earned that right yet. However, More established shows that have been putting out more episodes. Maybe they're doing more, you know, giving more content out there. Maybe they're putting out an a weekly episode rather than a monthly episode or, you know, sporadic episodes. What Apple podcasts are now gonna do is they're gonna say, oh, okay, we're gonna run the AI tools on this now in the background. So what that's doing is it's transcribing, not publicly, but it's transcribing within their own ecosystem what your show episodes are about. It's then gonna be logging the keywords. So now you are gonna get started to, you are, you are gonna start being found for keywords that you might not even be putting in your titles because it's gonna do that work for you. Also, it's gonna start looking at description. Now you are gonna say to me, well, at what point do you become a podcast where that stuff comes into play? I can't tell you that it shrouded in secrecy, but I can tell you is this, if you continue to put out consistently content, On a week to week to week to week basis, that's well optimized.

It's got good titles, good artwork. That's another important factor, by the way, but that's another topic for another day, you know, and it, it just sounds good and it looks good. Apple Podcasts will reward you by allowing your show to be discovered by more people. It's in their interests to keep more people using their app, and that's how they do it.

Oh, that's, that's amazing. That is good stuff. You answered my question before I asked it, which is, you can only, you can only hope for that type of interaction when you're asking questions about things like these. Neal, you've given a complete view of how to optimize. your podcast. And I don't think we could add anything else without speaking for another hour or two.

So please, if you have any final things to share with the people in terms of optimization or final message or perspective, you can share that with them now.

I would say actually just quickly then going on the As as we are now allowing that space to talk about artwork. Artwork is one of the most fundamental parts of your podcast as well. It's not quite as fundamental as the content, the sound quality. However, bearing in mind, apple Podcasts and Spotify are very visual platform.

Forms, and therefore it's like when you're looking at Netflix or or Prime or whatever streaming service you might use. A lot of us, probably what we'll do is we'll browse through looking for the thing that drags us in and we are seeing those thumbnails, we're seeing that artwork. And usually the reason we'll watch something is because something looks good. And it's the same with podcasts. So my My advice here is when it comes to your artwork, I don't care whether you paid a designer on Fiverr or whether you did it yourself in Canva. Look at your artwork and just have a serious chat with yourself about does this absolutely sell my show to a complete stranger?

Does it make someone want to listen to the podcast? If it's your face on it? Is it a, is it an attractive and presentable version of your face, or is it something you just shot as a selfie and then took the background out and put a purple cover behind it? Which a lot of people do. It's totally valid. But if you are gonna be competing with the big guys on this, then you really need to be putting more thought into what your visuals look like in terms of the branding, and also make sure that your artwork is absolutely on the right dimension, so it's 1400 by 1400. It has to be that, no 1000 by 1000, 2000 by 2000, you can do 3000 by 3000, but it needs to be 1400 by 1400 or 3000 by 3000, 72 D P I and fewer than 500 kilobytes. If you are launching a new podcast or you won't get it accepted by Apple Podcasts. Secondly, You've now got episode artwork. Use it. They've just unveiled it. Definitely get yourself designing new episode artwork, which speaks to the topic of the week. You will definitely get the reward for that. Trust me.

That's a great way to tie up and to finalize and to bring this in for landing. We've been talking about how to optimize your. Podcast with Neal. Neal, this has been really, really excellent for me personally. Me first. I'm getting this before everyone else. And so I think it would be very important for you to share with the people where they can find you online if they need your help.

For sure. My company website is podknowspodcasting.co uk. That's podknows spelled with a K as in pod knows as in God knows where he gets all this podcast information from. That was the idea behind that, or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Neal er, that's n e a l. V E G L I O. I am on the other platforms, but I'm normally living on LinkedIn.

That's where I sort of enjoy spending my time most of the, most of the time. But yeah, I'd love to connect with anybody that, that watches or listens to this and yeah, look forward to getting to know you.

It was so great having you on Neal your two decades of experience has really come to bear. Which I appreciate very much. Thanks for being here and thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the useful content podcast, useful content classroom dismissed and we're clear.

Awesome. 

Good stuff. Good stuff. 

To give you all the, all the stuff, all the nuggets,

You made it sound pretty thick, which was good, which is good. It's good stuff. I like that. I like that.