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What if you could save 12+ hours per week in your business? Being a solopreneur sometimes focuses too much on the “solo” part: doing all the jobs, figuring things out yourself, and spending too much time in your business. But we didn’t start out own solo business to spend all of our time at our desk.
We did it because we want freedom: to travel; to spend time with our family; to watch a movie in the middle of a week day. That’s why Streamlined Solopreneur exists.
Each week, host Joe Casabona talks about how you can build a better business through smarter systems and automated processes. He does this by bringing on expert guests, and sharing his own experience from years as a busy solopreneur parent — so that being a solopreneur feels…less solo.
With every episode, you'll get insights, great stories, and 1-3 actions you can take today to improve your business processes and spend your time the way you want.
Joe Casabona: What’s preventing you from creating content? That’s the question that Alban Brooke and I set out to answer in today’s episode. But it didn’t start that way. See, I thought we’d talk about podcast stats and what creators can do to make money. After all, Alban is the head of marketing over a Buzzsprout, a very popular podcast host. But there is no making money if there is no content. So we get back to basics. And if you are stuck creating content, or not creating content, this is the conversation that you need to hear.
Today’s episode, Episode 269, is brought to you by LearnDash, Nexcess, and WP Wallet. You’ll hear about them later on in the show. And you’ll be able to find all of the show notes over at howibuilt.it/269. But for now, let’s get on to the intro and then the interview.
[00:01:04]
Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.
[00:01:27]
Joe Casabona: All right, I am here with Alban Brooke. He is the head of marketing at Buzzsprout. I’m really excited to talk to Alban. I’ve heard him on multiple podcasts, following him on Twitter. Usually, if I’m quoting stats, they’re from Alban. So, Alban, how are you today? Thanks for being on the show.
Alban Brooke: Joe, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here to talk to the How I Built It crowd. It’s exciting to be here and talk about podcasting.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, I’m really psyched. That’s honest. Whenever I’m saying something like, “75% of podcasts fall victim to pod feed,” I always google your current stats or whatever from what you’re pulling from. Buzzsprout for those who don’t know is a podcast host. And we were talking in the pre-show that you have over 100,000 active podcasts, is that right?
Alban Brooke: I think the current number right now is 116,000 maybe active podcasts, or 114,000. You’ve got some people in there who have kind of drifted away and they’re not podcasting as often now. A few years ago I realized, as an industry, everybody had lots of proprietary data. And for some reason, you know, some lack of desire to share it or maybe nervousness around letting competitors have no things, everyone was kind of keeping it close to the vest.
We kept seeing journalists, though, say numbers, and we were like, “Those don’t seem right at all.” And we’re like, “Whatever.” We just need to start posting our numbers and throwing them out there for everybody. And if anyone finds them valuable, that’ll be great. And if they don’t find them valuable and they think they’re wrong, maybe they’ll correct us and we’ll learn even more about what’s actually happening in podcasting.
Alban Brooke: I mean, podcasts… it’s like kind of the wild west. As we record this, Apple finally just gave us follower numbers, which my follower numbers were very surprising to me because I average around like 6,000 downloads in the first 30 days per episode, but I had like 17,000 followers on Apple podcasts alone. So are followers people who have subscribed and just never download an episode or…?
Alban Brooke: Well, two things. One, 6,000 downloads in the first 30 days of an episode being released, that puts you well into the top 1% of podcasts.
Joe Casabona: Wow. And for you to have about 3x the number of followers on Apple podcasts is that you do downloads, or maybe I guess maybe closer like 5x the amount of downloads in Apple podcasts. That’s about the industry average as well.
Joe Casabona: Okay, cool.
Alban Brooke: When I look at all our shows and then I’ve been sharing this data with other people, we found you get sometimes as many as five people following the show for every one person that downloads it, and actually listens to some of the episode.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Which is really interesting, right? I guess it’s probably the same on YouTube. I’m not watching every YouTube video for every channel I’m subscribed to.
Alban Brooke: It’s definitely the behavior on YouTube. I mean, we have a YouTube channel I think with close to 80,000 subscribers, but we get 4,000 views on a video, we’re excited. So the numbers are even worse over on YouTube or TikTok and many other areas. Podcasting is actually the one where I feel like we have very high success, that if you actually get somebody to subscribe and listen, they’re much more likely to stick around than in other forms of media online.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. Because podcasting, at least at this point, if you follow a show, that’s gonna show up in your feed for the most part. But depending on the app you use, there’s no algorithm showing you podcast episodes. And maybe that’s detrimental in some cases. But for those of us who have followers, it means that they’re going to see our shows when they come out.
Alban Brooke: I really want to maybe present a talk or write article about this. Different platforms have very different characteristics and they’re useful in different times. Like there’s a spectrum all the way from things like TikTok, which right now you can get massive exposure, no matter who you are if there’s great content. But TikTok does not respect the fact that you’re a massive creator very much, or that you’re a small creator. They are really leaning into the content. So the positive of that is, hey, you’re nobody, you can get exposure. The downside is you built a platform on TikTok, and it may all come crumbling down once the algorithm starts liking different things.
Podcasting is on the exact opposite of the world. It’s right there next to your email newsletter and your WordPress site. These are things that you control yourself. Once you get people to subscribe to your newsletter, or subscribe to the podcast, or visit your website, you actually start having a one-to-one relationship. So it’s much harder, the exposure is much lower. But once people start paying attention to you there, well, that relationship is more likely to be ongoing.
And I think YouTube over time has started closer to that WordPress, email newsletter side and has figured out actually the best way for YouTube to grow is to become much more similar to TikTok, which is, let’s just find the best content and only show that.
Joe Casabona: I mean, we were talking in the pre-show about kind of YouTube and… Or maybe that was already when we started recording. I’ve already messed up time in my head now. But you know, I’ve got like 2,300 subscribers on YouTube. You look at some people like MKBHD or like Rhett and Link, they’ve built these big followings, but they have been on YouTube since before the algorithmic change. So they built this following. Now you got to play this game of thumbnails and titles. That in and of itself could be a full-time job.
Alban Brooke: I don’t know if that was an intentional segue. But I, as of yesterday, put up a full-time job for that on YouTube and I posted about it on Twitter that we realize it’s a full-time job to shoot and edit the videos and make great videos. It’s another job to write scripts and to write titles and thumbnails and strategize YouTube. So we literally just posted it. I totally agree with you.
Joe Casabona: That’s so funny. I use like TubeBuddy or whatever to AB test some stuff but it’s definitely not something I put as much time into it if I wanted to be a big YouTube creator. But conversely, I do put a lot of time into my podcast.
So I want to circle back because that was a really good digression. But you mentioned 114,000 active podcasts. You define active or maybe the industry defined active, maybe you can clarify that for me, published an episode in the last 90 days. Is that accurate?
Alban Brooke: Yeah, published in the last 90 days. There’s a few other things we use, like whether or not they’re on a paid plan. Whether or not… I think it may even be less. Maybe episode published in the last 30 days or on a paid plan with plus.
Joe Casabona: Okay.
Alban Brooke: But it’s the signals that you have actually put forth saying like, I am doing this. If you’re paying real money to get your message out to the world, there’s intention behind it. You don’t have people who are paying real money to get their podcast out to the world when the only episode is a guy kind of rambling for few minutes saying like, “Oh, what if I started a podcast?” Like, we don’t want those to count. So it’s just us filtering anything that comes off as low quality. There’s not really episodes there and they’re not active fully like putting up new stuff. That’s clear we need to pull that out of the math.
[00:10:14]
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[00:11:19]
Joe Casabona: So for context, you have paid plans, you also have a free plan that is two hours each month. Is that right?
Alban Brooke: Yeah. The idea there is when we started, we had lots of churches and nonprofits and people who were giving talks that were really timely and they want to be able to get out to the world but they were probably not… It wasn’t super important that content looked around forever.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha.
Alban Brooke: We said, “Well, great. This is an awesome way for us to have a free tier that’s distinguished from a paid tier.” The free is it’s two hours of content a month. And once you hit that limit, you can’t upload more. And eventually those episodes after 90 days cycle off are not live in your feed anymore. That’s the differentiation for us between if you want to be podcasting for real and keep all these episodes around, well, then let’s move you over to a paid account. And then we’ll keep everything forever.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s such a good way to differentiate, I feel. Because like you said, if I’m just some guy talking about a microphone, maybe whatever I’m talking about today isn’t gonna matter in 90 days. But if I’m creating this more timely content, and I want to have the archive, and I want to reference and I want to build this content library, that’s something you should be willing to pay for.
Alban Brooke: And you think of all the people that actually that our plan works out well for, I think sometimes people see it and they’re like, “Well, this would never work for me. This plan isn’t a good idea.” Well, for a lot of school teachers, this is actually perfect because they can do announcements, and they can give short assignments. And it’s a good way for-
Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s super cool.
Alban Brooke: Like, you don’t need more than the last two weeks of content to actually still be up. And it’s just a nice way for people to communicate. So we’ve had people who’ve been on the free plan and never had to upgrade for many years and it works out well for them. It’s also just a good way to figure out if you’re going to use this product.
We all have had the experience of you think you’re gonna start something new and you start buying stuff, and then you don’t do it. And that’s totally fine. And then a year later, though, you realize, “Oh, I signed up for that Mastermind and now I’ve been charged for it for a year.” Or “I got some software and it’s been billing me the whole way. I forgot I set up a Calendly account.” Then you have to go cancel and see if maybe they’d give you a little bit of a refund.
Our hope was start out on a free plan, figure it out. And if it works for you, then, well, let’s talk about how we can make some money too rather than trying to trick people into upgrading and maybe paying us for no value at all.
Joe Casabona: Nice. I like that a lot. And that feels better than a trial. Because it’s essentially with a podcast platform or with maybe like Vimeo or something else, if you’re gonna take two weeks to build something there, now you’re kind of locked in unless you don’t use it. The free trial is basically like, well, I have two weeks to use this or not. If I don’t use them, am not gonna pay for it, I guess.
Alban Brooke: And sometimes, you know, we… I mean we can talk about this just in the context of creators. It’s very easy to see the end result that I want. I want to be a published author. I want to have an online course, I want to have a YouTube channel and a podcast and a blog and email list or whatever it may be. And you go, “I want to get there.”
And then in your research, you start finding kinda sexy stuff that you can buy and use, and you’re like, “Oh, I could get this really cool typewriter to write my book. I can get this beautiful WordPress template to be my website. And I can sign up for a cool podcasting service and buy a microphone.”
And what happens is, as creators, we don’t want to take the leap to do the thing that actually is going to hurt, which is putting ourselves out there, and getting feedback on our work, and really coming to grips with how good we are things in the beginning. Instead, we’d rather kind of play around and test things out.
So I just think there’s a high propensity for people to stumble early on. And I don’t want to be the company that makes money off of that stumbling. I want to be the company that says, “Hey, it’s totally okay that once you get into it, you realize, yeah, podcasting is it for me?” And you know, if you ever decide it is, then come on back.
Joe Casabona: I love that. That’s great, and absolutely, absolutely true. There are some people who just want… I was talking about this in my membership meetup today actually as we record this. One of my members are saying like, “Oh, maybe I should get a really nice camera. I’m thinking about doing this.”
And one of the other members… I’m like an enabler and I love spending people’s money. So I’m like, “Yeah, totally do it.” But one of the other members was like, “You know, maybe just use your iPhone to record videos at first. And if you like that, then…” I was like, “Yeah, do that. That’s a lot better than spending the $1,300 I spent on my camera because I make courses for LinkedIn Learning and I record and I live stream. And this isn’t the first camera I bought. This is like the third camera I bought. And I knew what I wanted.”
Alban Brooke: Yeah. You look around your office, sometimes you just see all of the equipment that was purchased for initiatives that you thought were going to be really good. And what they really were is distractions from the actual work that needed to be done.
So to find out if you’re going to be a YouTube creator, you’ve got to start shooting some videos. Like let’s get to that point as soon as possible. And realize like, Do you like it? Is it what you thought it would be? Are you comfortable putting yourself on camera? Let’s work on that stuff.
The thing that we feel like is important is the camera, the right camera. Well, all that’s doing is just putting like two grand into purchasing equipment that high chance of likelihood will end up on your bookshelf in a few months rather than being your sole income for your YouTube channel.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. First, that reminds me of the How I Met Your Mother episode where Ted started Mosbius Designs. And he was really concerned about the official company pen because he was afraid to make the phone calls. I wrote a blog post, I’ll link this in the show notes, which you will be able to find over at howibuilt.it/269. But I wrote a blog post called Why Gear Matters Least When You’re Starting a Podcast and how to kind of start off simple and find a decent microphone. I think the Blue Snowball is decent enough and it’s like $40 or whatever.
And then get your reps in and record and get comfortable doing it. And then when you’re ready, when you know like, “Oh, this microphone kind of is a little tinny or whatever, maybe my voice sounds like muddy on this one, so I want to do something else,” then you can invest in the gear if you want. You don’t need to.
Alban Brooke: Well, I heard this once. I think it was from a car mechanic who gave me this advice. And I think about it a lot when it comes to buying tools. What you should do—he recommended—was go to Harbor Freight which down here is cheap tools. He’s like and buy every vital but buy the cheapest version. And then when a tool breaks, you have permission to go buy the exact one you want of that tool. Whenever it wears out, go buy the exact one. But don’t do it until then, until it limits you.
And I thought it was such a great rule because you don’t know what you need yet. You think you know what you want. And by letting things break and… You know, use the cheap mic until you realize, “Oh, I actually have an ear now for what a better mic sounds like, and now I know more about my voice and my cadence and what the right vibe mic and settings would be for my voice. Well, that’s great information for you to have now that you’re ready to make this purchase, and you’re going to be in love with the microphone. Rather than having spent 1,800 bucks on a whole setup and realizing, “Oh, this isn’t even what I needed at all.”
Joe Casabona: Right, right. That’s such great advice. I love that. Because then it proves you use it too. If it never breaks then you don’t use it enough, either. And that’s super cool. So awesome.
We’ve set the stage. We’ve already given the listeners some really good advice. Let’s talk about… Well, I guess first, I think a lot of people will say it feels like there’s too many podcasts. 114,000 active sounds like a lot, especially when we’re looking at these are only active podcasts on your platform. I’ve heard stats around maybe there are 2 million active podcasts total. How many podcasts total are there? Like how many inactive podcasts are there?
Alban Brooke: The numbers right now look like… We’re somewhere about… Let me actually pull up this information up for you.
Joe Casabona: Real-time stats.
Alban Brooke: Real-time stats. We’re over to like 2.8 million podcasts that are live right now. So 2.8 million sounds massive. It also sounds massive because since I’ve been in podcasting, we were down at 60,000 total.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Alban Brooke: The world has changed. It’s so funny I hear people say, “There’s too many podcasts. You know, everyone seems to have a podcast?” Well, there’s 2.8 million. That number seems like a big number. But then I flip over and I go well, there’s 38 million YouTube channels. So we’re talking about there’s like 14 YouTube channels for every single podcast, and there’s over 500 million blog posts. So for every podcast, there’s like 250 blogs.
The amount of content on the internet should not deter you from whether or not you should be creating. Sometimes creation is important regardless of whether or not there’s other content. There’s what? 8 billion people in the world. There’s still room for your unique voice in all of these spaces. But podcasting in particular is still pretty young.
The amount of people listening to podcasts and the amount of people that are creating podcasts is still pretty low. And it becomes pretty apparent when… You know, I’ve a friend recently started a podcast on vertical farming. And vertical farming is a rapidly growing industry. And there also were no good shows in the entire space.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Alban Brooke: There were people who were blogging about it, and there were journalists writing about it but there wasn’t anybody who’d realized, Hey, maybe I could bring podcasting and vertical farming together. So there are particular niches that there actually is not a good podcast in that space. But I know that some of your audience are small business owners.
I would really encourage you if you’re running a small business, especially one where you’re trying to get a foothold in the space, go and look. Are your competitors doing a podcast? Is there anybody in your space doing an excellent podcast? Especially if they have kind of your… are they doing what you would do? If not, this is a chance for you to become kind of the voice for your industry and really have some influence and also have an opportunity to connect with a ton of people in your space.
[00:24:03]
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[00:25:01]
Joe Casabona: When people say like, “Oh, there are too many podcasts,” that kind of assumes a static world, right? Like maybe there are too many podcasts about whatever Theranos. There’s like a lot of podcasts about Theranos right now. But vertical farming perfect example of a podcast… Or like the Kenobi. As we record this, Kenobi is not out on Disney Plus yet. Well, there’s an opportunity to create a companion like watch-along podcast. Doesn’t exist yet because there hasn’t been a single episode out yet.
Alban Brooke: I think what people are saying when they say there’s too many podcasts, it’s all the boring people in my life have started podcasts.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Alban Brooke: Actually, you’re thinking of particular people who you do not find that compelling and they seem to be doing a podcast that is a couple other guys and they’re hanging around, and they’re drinking, and they’re kind of making jokes. And it’s a little annoying I think for some of their friends to go, “Why are these people think they’re so special?”
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Alban Brooke: That’s when you start hearing, “There’s too many podcasts.” But nobody is listening to these unique shows. There’s podcasts about specific forms of cancer or groups of people who’ve lost a child to a rare illness coming together to talk about it and grieve together and learn about the illness and what you could expect. Those type of podcast, no one’s looking at those and saying, “Those shouldn’t exist.” They’re really just saying, “I’m annoyed by certain people in my life that seem to be thinking they’re very important.”
Joe Casabona: Right.
Alban Brooke: I always tell people, “Look, before you start the podcast, let’s ask a question. Why are you doing a podcast? And if the answer is I want to be famous, or I want to make a ton of money, or I think I should be a comedian, those are red flags for sure. I would like the result of a massive show that’s really funny. But that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be driven to do the work.
Instead, if you have a podcast where you’re sharing something that’s really important to you that you know there just isn’t a good alternative for this content, there are people who need to hear this message, we’ll that’s an indication that even if their shows in the same area, same subject, bringing your voice might be really important.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. It’s just like teaching right? People are like, “Oh, well, I’m not going to make a course because a course already exists like that.” Yeah, but the person who has that course isn’t teaching the course the way you do and there’s going to be a whole group of people who are going to learn that topic better the way you teach it than the way this other person teaches it.
Alban Brooke: I mean, growing up, we all had a dozen different math teachers. And it’s funny that we grew up in a world where we understand there are vastly different levels of experience with people who teach things. And they teach differently and there’s different learning styles. And yet, if we think we are going to teach something, it’s only valid if we were the very first person ever to think of it and or the expert.
That’s kind of a defense mechanism because we don’t want to be made fun of and we don’t want to be told that we actually got some stuff wrong, or that we could improve. All those things are true. We will get things wrong, we will need to improve, and we’re probably not the premier expert in the world, but you still have a valid point of view to bring to the conversation.
And sometimes we learn best from people who are maybe only a few steps ahead of where we are. That’s one of the things I love about podcasting is that allows novices in a space to enter and say, “I’m going to learn about this. I’m gonna start interviewing people, we’re going to talk about it.” And if you’re the number one AI researcher in the world, your podcast is going to be way over the heads of most people.
Joe Casabona: Right.
Alban Brooke: But if you’re a novice and you’re kind of introducing some of the experts, and you’re saying, “Hey explain that on my level,” well, now there’s a large audience that can engage with that content. So different levels, different experiences, different takes on subjects, different types of entertainment quality, all of those are important to bring together when you’re creating your show.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. We learn best from people who are just a few steps ahead of us. I think that’s so important. It’s really easy when you become an expert to forget what it’s like for the learner. The time that this really landed for me was when I was teaching a bunch of Freshman in an intro to computer course about WordPress. And I explained the concept to them kind of flippantly like, “Oh pages do this, posts do this,” because I’ve been using WordPress for 10 plus years at that point.
And one of my students, God bless her, she raised her hand and she said, “I have no idea what you just said.” And like then it clicked, “Oh, I’m explaining this like they see it as often as I do.” So inviting people on your learning journey with you where you’re learning, and then you’re explaining it, and you’re reinforcing what you’re learning, and people are seeing kind of how things click, that’s really, really valuable.
Alban Brooke: I heard a story once of a crypto conference. And they had like these top-level cryptography experts were there, and someone’s giving an in-depth talk about this really advanced cryptography stuff. And the first question they’re thinking is just gonna be so intense. And the first person raises their hand and goes, “so what’s a block? What’s the blockchain?”
And they’re like, “Oh, we’re up here talking about the cutting edge because that’s what’s interesting to us and that is what we think most people are interested in and want to learn about.” We’re telling you something we just learned. And most of the people in the audience were brand new beginners who just heard the words and thought, “This sounds interesting. So what is blockchain? And why does it work?”
And there’s many, many more people who are in that beginner camp than in the expert camp. And I’ve recently experienced it. One of my friends started a DJ podcast. He’s been a DJ in the area for a long time. I was like, “honestly, I don’t know anything about what you do beyond that you’re picking the music.” And it was funny to him to hear that because he was like, “Oh, I’m talking to other DJs and we’re going really in depth. And I didn’t even think about addressing everybody who their only experience of DJ-ing is they walk up and they say, ‘Hey, why aren’t you playing the latest song that I like?'”
Joe Casabona: Oh, man. I DJ’d for a small amount of time in high school. I was not good at it because I just played music I liked. And the music I liked was like Blink-182. And that’s not good. That’s terrible dance music.
I like what you said. There are many more people in the beginner camp and the expert camp. And like if we look at those as two pools filling with water, the beginner pool fills up a lot faster than the expert pool does, too. So there are way more beginners to something every day than there are people becoming experts every day.
Again, kind of teaching the thing or talking about this thing that you’re really passionate about can help you create good and evergreen content. I have like a framework for how to make money podcasting and sometimes I talk about it, and I’m like, “Gosh, this has been done to death,” and I think for me because I talk about it every day. But for that new person who just got on my mailing list, they’re hearing about this for the first time. And maybe it didn’t occur to them that they could use affiliate links to make money with their podcasts or whatever.
Alban Brooke: We have a Facebook group about podcasting that’s pretty big. What happens a lot is people show up and then they ask the basic questions. “What mic should I get? Where should I host my podcast? Is my podcast doing well?” And you always get a snarky response where somebody says, “That question has been asked before? Why don’t you use the search feature?”
And I’m saying, “Well, I think you’re misunderstanding what the point of a community is. People are here because they want to connect to other people who are doing something.” And inevitably the beginner questions will be asked the most. The people who are saying, “Hey, so I’m already at 100,000 downloads per episode, but I’m trying to take it to the next level and get a deal with like GM motors to be a sponsor, that question will be rare because there’s only, you know, 1,000 podcasts total that have hit that level.
And if we kind of… I don’t know. It just seems like when we’re creating content… I always remind myself and my team, we need to be a little bit more basic than we think because even the stuff that seems boring and done to death probably still needs to be done 50 more times before the expert level stuff is really… everyone thinks been saturated to the same extent.
Joe Casabona: It’s so funny how quickly you can get like that. “I know something” shine, right? Like, you might have just asked this question last week, but now you know the answer to it and you can’t believe other people don’t already know the answer to it. It’s important to remember to stay humble. It’s like the xkcd comic. There’s always going to be somebody who doesn’t know what you know and you have the opportunity to bring them into the fold instead of shame them.
Alban Brooke: Yeah. I think that the other side of that is often what keeps creators back from starting in new spaces… It took me years to start my first podcast, to start writing online to make YouTube videos than to do TikToks. All that content creation felt really weird for me. It felt like because… maybe it’s because I was more judgmental of other people who are doing it that I expected that same level of judgment on me.
So you’re sitting there judging yourself and not forgiving yourself for being a beginner. When you begin something, you should expect that you will be bad in the beginning and you should have to be okay with that. You shouldn’t have an expectation of actually being above average when the amount of experience you have in something is significantly below average, right?
Joe Casabona:
Alban Brooke: I had a colleague once who had just got a promotion, and she was now running a team with five people. And she said, “You know, I’m so nervous that I’m not a good manager.” I’m like, “Well, you probably aren’t.” She was like, “What?” I was like, “Well, you’ve only done it for one day. Of course, you have a ton to learn, but you’re smart and you’re a good learner, and you want to learn, and you’re reading books and stuff. You’re going to get better faster than most people.”
But like to put that burden on yourself day one and say I shouldn’t be an above average leader and manager is just like way too much to handle. And I see that happen in the creator space all the time, where people are like, “Oh, I have good taste so I can tell that my podcast is worse than this American Life. But I do not have abilities to actually make it better yet.” You need to be gracious with yourself to actually learn how to improve things.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah. The theme of the first season of this podcast was it kept coming up a lot. We always see the gold medal Olympian standing on the podium with their gold medal. What we don’t see is the years of sacrifice and work and blood and sweat that it took to get to the gold medal pole, to the podium. The hard part about creating content online is that the blood and the sweat and the sacrifice is done in public. But you just kind of have to own it. I think people really like seeing that because it really humanizes the process.
Alban Brooke: One way I like to describe it is that we develop our taste before we develop our ability. So we are all good at saying, “This meal is bad. It doesn’t taste good.” But could you create something of that caliber? Probably not. I’m able to look at YouTube videos and go, “Gosh, that looks like it was lit incorrectly.” But I don’t know anything about lighting. I can listen to audio and say, “That sounds broken.” But I can’t diagnose it and make it any better.
So that’s the difficult space for a lot of us to inhabit. I know that what I’m doing right now is not top-notch, I am totally incapable of diagnosing and solving the problem. Can I get comfortable enough though to put this out in the world and to be kind to myself and not be so judgmental? For me, that took many years of just stalling and trying to level up.
The sad thing is you don’t level up when you don’t publish and you’re often living in kind of a fantasy land where you think the thing that will hold this podcast episode back is my editing. And if I learned to be better editor…” And it turns out, no, the thing holding it back is you’re not a very good interviewer. So actually the raw audio file here wasn’t very good for my like first interview. I thought that it was the editing that needed to be improved. But now listening back I’m like, “Yeah, I should have been asking better questions, so I should have done more research on the front end.
Joe Casabona: It’s so funny. Just that as a quick side quest, I always thought, “I’m not going to do any research I’m going to learn when the listeners also learned and we could be surprised together essentially.” But being prepared makes for a much better interview. Because ultimately you are trying to tell a story and weave things together. And if you don’t know where you’re going, then you can’t do that.
Alban Brooke: There’s very different thinking is on this. Larry King famously never did any prep for his show. And he was one of these great interviewers.
Joe Casabona: Dang! I didn’t know that.
Alban Brooke: I think he would get like in the limo on the way to the show, he’d have a one page and he’d go, “Oh, I’m going to talk to Jerry Seinfeld and I’m gonna ask about Seinfeld Show.” There’s actually a really funny interview where he interviewed Jerry Seinfeld. He goes, “What was it like when Seinfeld got canceled?” He’s like, “Cancelled?” Did you even prep for this? We had the number one show in the nation and I decided to stop it. Like, what are you doing?” It’s because he was just kind of learning along with us and he didn’t feel bad about it.
The flip side of that maybe would be somebody like Jordan Harbinger who’s a podcaster. He researches the heck out of every guest to the point that he will interview people, he’ll ask very pointed questions and they’ll say, “I don’t really know.” And then he’ll say, “Okay, just pause the recording, but this is in your book. It’s in this passage and here’s the story.” And they go, “Oh, yeah. All right, let’s restart.” And he starts it back and they go, “Oh, yeah, I know what you’re talking about.” And they answer the question.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Alban Brooke: So there’s different ways of doing it. Again, both of those can be podcasts and both can be interesting. I think Joe Rogan is much closer to Larry King. He’s kind of off the cuff exploring along with you. And apparently lots and lots of people enjoy that kind of content.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. But like you said, you’re getting your reps. And that’s kind of what I call it when people are like, “How do I get better?” You got to get your reps in. You got to learn to become a good conversationalist. And Joe Rogan, for all of his druthers and however you feel about him, he’s a good conversationalist. He can move through topics quickly, and then find the one that’s interesting, and then dig in for a while on that. And that’s why millions of people listen to him, because he’s kind of good at teasing that stuff out.
Again, people have asked me, like, “How do you get good at podcasting?” I was in drama club from 2nd grade through 12th grade. So I had the benefit of like messing up in school plays where the stakes were really low. I mean, it feels big for you at the time, but you forget a line and you’re over it like the next week, right?
Or, when I was defending my master’s thesis, I said something incorrect and my advisor corrected me during my defense. And he’s like, “That’s not really how it works.” And I’m like, “Well, you gotta bounce back from that.” And I did. I bounced back with a joke. So like, you know, I kind of had the benefit of learning this stuff along the way.
I want to ask you this, right, the thing to combat because you have access to a lot of new podcasts. The thing that keeps people coming back is probably the content and connecting with people in some way.
Alban Brooke: I think specifically, there’s a lot of shows that are actually doing really well because of the hosts. That doesn’t mean you have to be as funny, a famous comedian and you don’t have to be as insightful or as great of a writer is like, Terry Gross, or as good of an interviewer as she is. You just have to be who you are.
You’ve only ever met a few thousand people in your real life and a lot of them seem to like you. So it’s not too surprising that if you’re putting out just who you are there’s a lot of people who would be interested to hear that on a podcast. And if you’re putting in some work on the front end, which you should be, then you’re not just getting like you off the cuff, you’re getting you distilled, and in a more thoughtful form.
So I think, you know, learn what feels right to you and then just start doing it. And ask for lots and lots and lots of feedback. And as you get all that feedback, you’re going to get better and better and better at creating a great podcast. So I’ll just tell people… I don’t know. Be a little brave and be kind. You’re gonna take some lumps along the way but in a year, you’re gonna look back and be like, “Holy cow, that’s so impressive how much better this show got.”
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Try not to take the feedback personally. It’s really easy for people to be mean if they’re faceless or whatever. One of my early comments I guess I used to say “that’s awesome” a lot after everything. And somebody was like, “The host says, ‘That’s awesome too much.'” And I was like, “Sorry, it’s awesome though.” You know, learn what feels right for you.
I had my friend Carrie Dils on recently, we both make LinkedIn Learning courses, and she needs to write out everything she’s gonna say in her videos verbatim. And she does it in one long script. I do the scripts because it helps me be clear about what I’m teaching, but I don’t read from them verbatim. I can’t do that. That doesn’t work for me. So you’re right.
Again, do a few test episodes, see what feels right. Maybe fully scripted works for you. Maybe bullet points work for you. Very few people I think are good at talking off the cuff really, really well. I know a few people and that’s like a really learned skill. But-
Alban Brooke: Yeah. When we do YouTube, I’m more on the everything written out side. I feel much more comfortable if I’ve taken the time to figure out what I want to say by writing it. And then I can deviate in the moment if maybe a different language sounds better. But I put in a lot of work on the front end to learn what I want to say.
But there’s a girl on our team Jalon, who’s been on a YouTube channel a bunch, who is like… She’s definitely had an anomaly. I don’t know if I’ve met many people like this. Normally, when you turn a camera on people start shying down and their brain slows down and it feels a little bit more difficult for them to talk. Her speeds up and she actually gets even more insightful and thinks of even new things when the cameras turned on. So there are times where we talk through a video idea for a while and I’m like, “We’re kind of getting it.” And then we turn the camera on and one take it’s perfect.
Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s awesome.
Alban Brooke: I’m like, “Holy cow.” We’ve never got anything back good. I’m the exact opposite. If it’s not great before we turn the camera on, I know it’s not going to be great once the camera is pointed at me.
Joe Casabona: That’s so funny. My secret because mine are more off the cuff than not, I plan it out, my secret is I usually record the video twice and mess up a lot the first time. And then I have to scrap that recording. That’s my big secrets.
Alban Brooke: That’s funny.
[00:47:21]
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[00:48:28]
Joe Casabona: Well, we’ve been talking for a while. This has been a really good conversation. It actually went into a direction I didn’t expect it to go based on the pre-show. But I think there’s a lot of really good advice here.
But let’s bring it back to something you said earlier where you need you need to ask, why are you doing a podcast? I think this is something really important for two reasons. First is going to make your show better because you’re going to define the audience. But it’s also going to help you do something that I feel a lot of podcasters, a lot of content creators in general want to do more of which is make money with their content. So can you talk a little bit about finding your reason and then maybe how creators can go about monetizing their content in some way, shape, or form.
Alban Brooke: A few good reasons to start a podcast: You want to generate leads for business. You want to build a community of people around an important message. You want to be recognized industry leader. You actually maybe entering a space as an employee and you want to start building out a network of connections. All good reasons to start a show. To have fun and enjoy yourself, another great reason.
To make a lot of money… I think the most visible podcasts make a lot have money. So it’s easy to imagine that that’s happening. We talked earlier, your show gets 6,000 downloads in the first 30 days of new episode. That’s in the top 1% and it’s well into the top 1%, maybe top half a percent.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Alban Brooke: I think people need to realize that the average podcaster is only getting something like 30 plays per episode in the first week. So how do we make money in a world where you’re only getting 30 people to listen to your show within a week? And the reason that is so much a low is because most people don’t stick with podcasting long enough to build out the audience.
But the truth is things like ads do not work at those numbers. Until you’re starting hitting 5,000 plays per episode, you’re really not going to be making a significant amount of money and definitely not one that will allow you to make it a full-time role. But what you can do is things that you mentioned earlier. You can have affiliate links to products that you talk about, especially if they’re ones that are connected to your podcast topic and expertise. I have an SEO podcast and I’m recommending my favorite SEO tools. Go click the links. That works.
For people who have a small business, the product that you’re selling is your business and the podcast is the marketing for it. So how does my marketing make money? Well, I recommend people to go use my business that pay me. So if you’re a small business owner and you’re thinking like, “I need to get more clients for my law firm,” we’ll start a podcast talking about the legal issues that you see and that you provide services for, people will see you as the expert. And so when they go, “Yeah, I need to learn,” or “I actually need a lawyer for this issue,” they know who to go to.
A lot of ways I think indirect monetization is better than direct. Ads are really, in many ways, the lowest common denominator of how to monetize anything online. It’s what we should go to when we realize, I don’t have a good way to make money off of this but I do have a ton of people paying attention. And podcasts have lots of ways to make money. And we don’t have a ton of people paying attention.
So ads, while sometimes earn the right answer, I think they should be in the toolkit that we’re using. If your podcast is about an area of expertise, it pairs really well with an online course. So let’s say I am going to teach you how to market a SaaS product and that’s why podcasts it’s about. Well, I’ve been doing this now for five years, I’ve taught tons of people on my podcast. Now, I’ll build a course on it.
I even saw a podcast that did a really interesting… I want to say it was like faith-based productivity. So it was a combination of like spirituality and productivity. And for people who are interested in the podcast, they were learning stuff that didn’t have an exact one-to-one correlation with any daily planners. So the podcast host said, “All right, I actually I’m gonna make this for myself based on the principles that we have developed together as a podcast community over time. Would anybody want this?” And before he even launched the planner had like 6,000 orders.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Alban Brooke: Like an incredible amount compared to how hard it is to actually sell books. So when you are creating unique, valuable content, you will inevitably raise opportunities for you to provide unique, valuable services on top of that. So step one really has to always be you have to be creating something that people really want or else they’re never going to part with their money to get more of it.
Joe Casabona: I love that. Are you talking about Mike Schmitz? He does a podcast with David Sparks called Focused.
Alban Brooke: I think so. He also has the website Faith-Based Productivity. And I thought, “What an interesting niche that is!” Because-
Alban Brooke: I think that’s something that if you heard that, yeah, faith-based productivity, if you heard that, you’d be like… If that came out of your friend’s mouth, you’d go, “Dude, that’s weird.”
Joe Casabona: “Sounds stupid.”
Alban Brooke: “Why are you doing that? Instead I think we should be focused on just productivity in general. Why are you trying to bring God into this?” But the power of actually focusing your podcast in your content is that it actually becomes recommendable. And so let me give you an example. I’m just gonna go off as much as I can.
If I’m like, hey, the world of motocross, then somebody who’s interested in Motocross is like, “Oh, that might be a podcast for me.” Well, let’s say women and motocross. Well, now, if you hear of that, it may not be for you but you’re like, Actually, my girlfriend’s really into motocross and nobody else’s. So she should be listened to this podcast.”
There’s people who have podcasts about specific TV shows, but they focus on only a particular audience and how they watch that show. So there’s one that somebody was talking about today called War of the Roses I think that was like a bachelor podcast that was all about watching The Bachelor as if it’s really a sporting event, not as a love, connection thing.
Joe Casabona: It’s awesome.
Alban Brooke: Apparently is supposed to be very funny and good. So I don’t know anything about the bachelor. But if you are, you might want to check this podcast out. And when you do things that are really focused, now it becomes something that you can recommend to a friend and say, “This actually is in your space. It’s talking about politics from the lens that you have to people like you. It’s talking about motocross, but it’s not just to everybody in motocross, it’s actually talking about the women in motocross, they’re never highlighted. And that might be really exciting for you.”
So when you focus, people actually recommend your podcasts to the people in their lives that will want it. And those people will listen, because they’re going, “Ooh, this is unique. This is for me, and this is the stuff that I am personally interested in.”
Joe Casabona: I love that. It’s so great. The example I’ve heard a lot is like underwater basket weaving. It’s like, if I make a podcast, how many people are gonna listen? I’m like, Well, if your addressable audience is 100 people and 80 people are listening, that’s phenomenal. Eighty percent of your addressable audience is listening? That’s great. You might not be the general purpose 11 million people are listening to you every week. But if you’re getting a high percentage of your addressable audience, and that’s amazing. You’re building a really good niche audience.
Alban Brooke: We still have not seem to grasp the change that happens when we use the internet to connect to people. When we have this idea of what will work in my local geographic area? You know, we talk about the radio shows. What radio shows will work?
Let’s just only talk about the sports. You can only ever really talk about the local sports team because you’re in Jacksonville, Florida, the only sports team that there’s enough listeners interested are the Jacksonville Jaguars, maybe the college teams that are right nearby. But beyond that, there’s not enough New York Yankees fans in town to want to hear New York Yankees podcasts. And there definitely are not enough Real Madrid fans to want to have a Real Madrid show on the radio.
Well, these are all people that now think my interests are two out there that anybody cares, will actually no matter what your interest is, there are millions of people like you. And I think millions is a correct answer. Like, whatever you’re interested in, there’s a million people out there. So all you really need to do is just find the flag. I’m really interested in finding out about this thing is there anyone else.
And as long as you just keep waving that flag around long enough, eventually the people who are like you are gonna go, “Oh, I thought I was the only one. I didn’t realize that other people were trying to solve this problem and try to figure this out work interested in it. I’d love to talk to you.
So finding your audience becomes much easier when you are explicit about “Here are the people I’m trying to connect to. Here’s the conversations I want to have. Here are the people I want to interview.” And the more that you do that, the easier it is for people to identify, “Oh, you’re actually creating the content for me.”
Joe Casabona: It’s so funny how you can feel siloed. I come from the WordPress space and the tech space, I’m in the baseball. I don’t know if you did your research, but the Yankees are my team born and raised in New York. And anytime, yes, very nice. I looked around I was like, “Am I wearing my Yankee hat right now?” For those of you who can’t see what I saw, Alban just put on his Yankee hat. That looks like a classic, like old school Yankee hat.
Alban Brooke: I’m just a father so I have to have like the old dad hat.
Joe Casabona: Very nice. Very nice. Every time I bring up sports in the WordPress space, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, the World Series or whatever.” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, sports ball.” If I only listened to that audience, I’d be like, “I’m the only one who likes sports, or “I’m the only one who likes baseball” when I know that’s patently not true.
Alban Brooke: What we’re doing when we create an unique and focused content is the exact opposite of what network television does when they create shows like Two and a Half Men? I think what happens a lot is when you’re trying to create content that needs to appeal to a large market, what you end up doing is like either, you can’t use any inside jokes.
You can’t say anything that’s too offensive, everything kind of has to be obvious. And you end up like watering down, I don’t know, culture until it’s kind of like everybody gets the jokes, everyone understands it. And it just kind of feels dull. But Two and a Half Men for a long time was the number one show in America. And I was like, The show is not good at all.
Joe Casabona: The show is dumb.
Alban Brooke: And consistently, that would happen with other shows that I thought were really boring. It wasn’t just that they were made poorly. I was just like, “I don’t get like anybody enjoys this.” And then what I realized was, when things are targeting everybody, they’re not really made for any specific person. There’s no average person. There is an average of a group of people. And so they’re just saying, “Yeah, everyone kind of isn’t is fine with this show being on.”
What people are really interested in is a show like Mad Men that turns off 90% plus of people they go, “That’s definitely not for me.” But the 10% that is for are like, “Yes, I’ve been looking forward to this.” Or these new Star Wars shows. The Star Wars nerds in the room are like, “Yes, I can’t get enough of these new Star Wars shows.”
Joe Casabona: Yes!
Alban Brooke: And for live sports and everything. The more we get focused, the more intensely, you will connect with your audience. And as an individual creator, the thing you can bring to the table is that fan intensity, that real focus. And you can provide that for all your audience.
What you can’t provide is this mass appeal show because nobody will ever think… because frankly you don’t have the distribution that NBC has, that they can put a show on and everybody kind of has to watch it. You don’t have that lever. Instead, you need to pull the let’s go really focused and really deep lever and the people who are interested in this content, they will find you.
Joe Casabona: They’ll say, “You have to watch this.” Something I forgot to do in the pre-show was ask, Alban, if you would have some time to talk in Build Something More, the members-only part. As soon as we stop recording this, I am going to mention two shows that came out at the same exact time. That one was great, one was terrible and the other one out. So I want to be cognizant of Alban’s time. And if there is a few minutes, we’ll talk about TV shows. But otherwise, this has been such a great conversation, Alban. I really appreciate your time and sharing your expertise with us.
Alban Brooke: Yeah, Joe, I’ve had a blast. I’m thankful you invited me on the podcast.
Joe Casabona: For all of the show… Well, first of all, if people want to find out more about you, where can they find you?
Alban Brooke: Most of our content is on YouTube on the Buzzsprout YouTube channel or the Buzzsprout blog. But if you want to contact me, Twitter @AlbanBrooke is the place to find me. If you have any questions or thoughts or comments, I’d love it if you reached out and we can start a conversation.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. I will link to all of that and everything we talked about in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/269. Alban, thanks so much for your time today.
Alban Brooke: Thanks, Joe.
Alban Brooke: I also want to thank our sponsors: LearnDash, WP Wallet, and Nexcess. I really appreciate their support. So, again, check them out over at howibuilt.it/269. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.