PODCASTING Secrets! w/GUEST:🎙️”Insider Secrets to a Top 100 Podcast”🎙️Host: Courtney Elmer! | Ep. 301

Foreign welcome to do this not that, the podcast for Marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson.

Let's do this not that we are back or do this not that podcast presented by Marigold. And I don't know if I've been so excited about having somebody on that. I am right now. So we have Courtney Elmer. Now.

When I was thinking about starting a podcast about two years ago, I knew zero, like actually zero about a podcast. And I went on and I found this podcast called the Insider Secrets to a top 100 podcast. This is Courtney's podcast. And I went deep.

This thing is one of the most popular podcasts out there about podcasting. And without that podcast, I don't think I would have had the ability to launch mine because I learned so much from it.

Now then I went deep on Courtney's life. I'm like, who is this amazing human being? And then I got inspired for real.

Courtney, unfortunately, at the age of 25, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Okay. That is her horrendous. Two days after her honeymoon, I mean, she thought she was going to lose her actual voice. She overcame that.

And there are days where I'm like, I can't handle this and I'll think about Courtney bike. But no, she. She overcame that. I could do this stupid thing. So I'm inspired by her. I learned from her.

You're going to learn from her about podcasting, about everything. Courtney, welcome to the show.

Jay, thank you for having me. It is an honor and a delight to be here.

So I want to talk quickly what you do for a living. What is pod launch? How did you get into all this?

And then we're gonna break down podcasting for real so everyone feels comfortable starting their own podcast.

Yeah.

So we help business owners and subject matter experts launch a binge worthy top podcast that actually converts listeners to clients and that they can monetize through other traditional forms of monetization as well.

And so one of the things that we notice a lot of times when people wanna launch a podcast is they think it's about the gear, they think it's about the microphone, they think it's about plugging it in and finding time on their calendar to record. And it goes so much deeper than that. And we're gonna break all get into that.

And that's really what we're passionate about doing, is helping people actually succeed in the world of podcasting. Not just getting excited about doing the thing, starting.

And then six episodes in, quitting and realizing, oh, wait, maybe this is harder than I thought. This isn't working for me. I don't know why it works for everybody else. Maybe something's wrong with me. Right?

And going down that rabbit hole, which we can easily spiral into, and actually helping people succeed and have a profitable top podcast.

Okay, so two things. First off, dispel the myth. There's millions of podcasts out there. It's too late to start a podcast. I missed the podcast train.

My business missed the train. There's no point doing it. The world is flooded with them. Is that. Is that not true?

There is more demand for podcasts than there ever has been in the history of podcasting. What people don't realize, they think, oh, podcasting saturated. There's so many podcasts on health, there's so many podcasts on fitness.

There's so many podcasts on business and marketing.

And all the things what they don't realize is that of the 3 million plus or minus podcasts that we have today, based on the latest reports put out by Pod Pros, they run this report every single month. My friend Alex Sanfilippo, shout out to you, Alex. He goes and digs into the data, and he actually pulls the numbers out.

And of those three plus million podcasts, Jay, only a about 30,000 of them are what we in the industry call actively established, which means they're not run by a major, major celebrity. They're not backed by a major network or like this big media backing behind them.

They're independent podcasts who've been around for a year or more and who consistently release at least one episode every week. So that's what we consider actively established. There's only 30,000 of them, which means that.

Which means that over 2.9 million podcasters have stopped podcasting.

This is amazing. You just blew my mind. First of all, I'm very happy I'm in that group. I am now one of the 30,000.

I'm like, as you're rattling off what you have to do to be in the 30,000, like, did I do that? I'm like, yes, I did all those things. So I'm very excited, and I want you to take somebody through. The name of your podcast is interesting.

It's Insider Secrets to a top 100 podcast.

Now, the reason it's interesting is when I launched my podcast, okay, I was trying to get different notable people on it, and we're like, I don't care about your podcast, whatever. And then I noticed if I.

If I was able to get into the charts, which I don't know if everybody understands what that means, all of a sudden you say, well, it's a top whatever. A hundred podcasts in this category.

I was able to get all sorts of cool people to start to come on because I had that, you know, that superlative, that achievement. And when you talk about a top 100 podcasts, people think Joe Rogan or call her daddy or whatever.

Can you talk a little bit about what are the charts, the subcategories, and how it's not impossible to get onto those charts?

Yes. Okay, so first of all, I love this question because this. Just let me nerd out for a second, Jay.

So there are three top ways that people discover podcasts, okay? The first one is word of mouth. It's always been one of the top contenders.

The second one is search, and I say second, but actually search is becoming more popular.

It accounts for over 54% of the way that people find podcasts, whether that's through searching in the app or searching on a platform like Google or Bing or Safari or whatever. And then the charts is the third way that people discover podcasts. Now, charts used to be super popular with the way that people discovered podcasts.

Someone would open up Apple podcasts app, they would go through, you know, kind of like searching for a genre of music. When I'm at the gym, I'm in Spotify and I'm like, okay, I want to listen to, I don't know, hip hop or what's new in this genre this week.

So this was how we categorize podcasts and how people can find those podcasts.

Now, though, as search and as word of mouth recommendations have both really increasingly grown in popularity, charts has become a little bit less popular, but not less important to your point, because it adds a lot of credibility to the show when you are ranking on the charts.

Now, the charts, when you open up Apple podcasts and you look at top shows, they even have a section that says top charts, you can browse these categories of interest. So let's say you want to look at health and fitness podcasts.

So you go and you click health and fitness, and it's going to show you the top 200 shows in that category. What it doesn't show you are the thousands of other podcasts that could be in that category that by looking at the charts, we don't know exist.

So when you can get your show consistently ranking on these charts, not only does it help you increase your discoverability by 13%, because charts make up.

They account for 13% of that, a hundred percent of the way people find podcasts, but it also increases your authority, it increases your credibility, and it helps you tap into the group of listeners out there who are actively searching for a podcast, might actively be searching for a podcast like yours, and also are seeing you ranking in that chart and being like, okay, it's kind of like, think of like the top search on Google, page one of Google. I like to think of top 100 as the page one of Google.

In podcasting, not many of us click past page one of Google because Google's gotten really good at showing us the search results for what we're looking for. And kind of similarly, you can think of the charts that way. Your podcast is ranking in the top 100.

It adds that instant credibility and authority for your show. So it is important for those reasons, the credibility piece and also the discoverability piece.

And so what I've learned, and you tell me if this is not accurate, I thought in order to get listen the top 100, top 200, which really does. It's something you can then shout around on social media. It helps out your business a lot.

I thought it meant you need to have the most downloads, the most people listening. And I was like, how am I going to do that? Might take me five years to get there. But it doesn't seem, the algorithm doesn't seem to do it that way.

They seem to reward you to getting new people, not just a lot of people. Am I wrong?

So there's a couple of things that go into it. You're part right where the top. There are five things that the algorithm looks at to determine ranking potential.

So these are new daily follows to the show. These are downloads, listens, plays. These are ratings and reviews. And what's the fifth one? Oh, my gosh, Jay, I'm blanking on it.

Okay, well, we'll go with those four. We'll go with those four. I might have said it actually in there where it's like, downloads, listens plays, follows, and then ratings and reviews.

And that's why, because the downloads and the listens and plays, I tend to lump those together when I'm teaching because it gets into the weeds to try to explain to people a download's a little bit different than a play or a stream or a listen, you know, but the download is. So here's where we go. So follows. Someone hits that follow button that shows intent to listen.

That's really important because the algorithm wants to see, okay, someone has the intent to listen to this podcast. Now, they hit play, they start streaming it. That shows that they're interested. Those retention rates matter in there.

Are they clicking play and they're dropping off after two seconds, or are they clicking play and they're listening halfway through or three quarters of the way through or all the way to the end? Are they coming back for more?

If they actually click the download button, which is those three little dots next to the episode that says download, well, that shows they're really interested in your podcast.

This shows that, okay, I want to have access to this content even when I'm not able to have a WI fi connection or, you know, I'm flying in a plane 30,000ft above the ground and I want to be able to listen to this show and then ratings and reviews.

Because while they don't necessarily influence the algorithm as much as like downloads and plays and follows, it also shows social proof and it also shows listener engagement.

Because someone who really loves your podcast and they might take the time to leave a review, but someone who's not engaged or who doesn't, they're not going to take the time to write a review. So that's why all of these things carry different weight in the algorithm.

Okay, so with that, downloads are important and listens and plays are important, but the way that those are weighted is over a 24 hour window. Meaning, you know, we've got a client who was like, wait a minute, I get more downloads on my podcast than this other competitor podcast out here.

But ranking, and I'm not what gives? And it's because those downloads and listens have to come in over a certain window of time in order for that to kind of be counted.

The app kind of rolls over every 24 or so hours. But aside from that, or I should say, in addition to that, new daily follows is the biggest indicator or driver of ranking potential.

And so to your point, you are correct in saying that the app wants to see that you are bringing new people to your content and then also keeping them Listening. Because not unlike any other app, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, users of the app, the app wants to keep people on the platform as long as possible.

And this is especially true for an app like Spotify, which is more algorithmically driven than Apple Podcasts, which operates more under an open concept.

So without getting too deep in the weeds there, because I want to confuse people or, you know, some of the things we could argue splitting hairs, you know, a little bit of like a download, a listen, a play, you know, they carry. Think of those as carrying the same weight in the algorithm. And then new daily follows as also being really important, showing that intent to listen.

Does that breakdown help?

Oh, my God. So much so. And it's so valuable for people that are thinking about having a podcast.

And, you know, there may be listeners, they're like, I can't do a podcast. It's too complicated. It's too much of a heavy lift, and I guess there's two sides to it. No, that's not true. It's a lot easier than you think.

But on the flip side, it's a lot harder than you think. And I want to hear your take on this. You know, I'll talk to somebody. They'll be like, I want to start a podcast. I could talk about this.

Whatever I got, it's gonna be amazing content. And they have an idea for, like, probably two months worth of content. Okay. If.

When you're contemplating for your business or for you, yes, I'm gonna do a podcast. Like, what is the thought process to know if you're ready to actually do this?

Yeah, I always. I don't like the term setting realistic expectations, because I think even that is subjective.

But what we can do is we can set accurate expectations for how a podcast can serve you. And especially if you have a business behind the podcast, how your podcast can serve that business.

So one of the things Jay and I listened to your episode with Amy Porterfield recently, where y' all were talking about her podcast rebrand. And if anyone in the marketing space knows Amy, I mean, you're living under a rock if you don't.

But Amy Porterfield, right, She's kind of like the OG when it comes to some of the marketing content around webinars, email list building, and all these things that Amy is known for. She's had her podcast for a really long time.

When she first launched that podcast, it was marketed around a very specific topic designed for a very specific audience. Now she's rebranded and she's going broader, but she's got the Platform, the message, the credibility and the foundation built to be able to do that.

What happens is a lot of people do the opposite when they start their podcast and they're like, well, I just want to try to attract as many people as possible because in their mind, they think the more that I could have the podcast grow the audience, then the audience is going to grow my business, because that's going to convert. And what people don't realize is that the two are mutually exclusive.

Growing in audience through whatever mechanism you're growing an audience, I don't. It doesn't have to be podcasting and sales don't always. One does not always equal the other. They should work together.

One should influence and impact the other, but they don't always work that way. So what happens is people say, okay, I'm going to start a podcast.

They start a podcast, they're afraid of going too narrow, they're afraid of boxing themselves in. And I get it because, you know, in my business, I serve multiple avatars.

So if I were to say my podcast is only for, you know, brand new people who want to launch, or it's only for people who are struggling to grow their podcast, I would feel boxed in.

But instead, what we teach to do is to actually define your niche, define what the topic of your podcast is by the problems that you're here to solve for people. And I promise I'm going to get to the answer here in a second for your specific question.

But by narrowing down the focus of your podcast to solve specific problems for people, particularly if you're a subject matter expert or a business owner, is going to optimize your ability in podcasting to attract the right audience, who's going to be more likely to convert.

Now, there's different mechanisms and things you have to have in place as part of your podcast funnel to actually get them to that point of sale, to get them to that point of conversion. But without this, it's going to be so much harder to grow a podcast.

So for someone who's considering doing this and they're thinking about doing this, and they've seen other people be successful with podcasts, there's a lot of misconceptions in the industry that podcasting is easy. And I'm not here to scare anybody off.

In one sense, it is as easy as buying a microphone, figuring out where to plug it in, figuring out how to hit record, and then publishing that episode once every week and delivering valuable content. On the other side of that, it's a different ball game. And this is where that accurate expectation has to come into play.

It is one thing to record content, it's another thing to know how to attract listeners to that content and keep them listening to that content, because that is how we then grow an audience.

So a lot of people start podcasts and they get the basics down of actually getting in the rhythm of putting content out there, but they're not doing the other half of it, which is this is your wheelhouse, Jay.

Marketing the podcast and actually doing a good job of attracting listeners to that podcast and retaining those listeners, because otherwise you got a leaky bucket, people are falling out, and it's going to be very difficult to grow. So as podcast hosts, and if you're thinking of launching a podcast, by all means, the opportunity is there. You've not missed the boat.

But you are going to have to have expectations around how long it's going to take you to see success from that podcast. And success is subjective. You're going to also have to define what that success looks like for you.

Is it X number of new leads coming in a month from your podcast? When are you counting them as a lead? Is it when they fill out an application? Is it when they book a call? Or is it when they get onto your email list?

Right. And clearly defining these objectives for the show? And then that's what we do with our clients. We reverse engineer that process.

Okay, so you want two new clients a month from your podcast so that your podcast can generate X in revenue in order to get there. Now we can reverse engineer. Here are the targets that we need to hit for your specific podcast to do that.

But you're also going to have to have accurate expectations around developing the skill of getting good at not only creating the content, but attracting people to that content. Because otherwise it's going to be very difficult for the show to grow.

Oh, yeah, it's two pieces to it. It's the content and then promoting the content. And also, you don't have to follow everybody else's playbook. I learned that early on in my podcast.

I started out doing these long form interviews and I'm like, I stink at this point. Okay. I'm just not good at long form interviews. And then I pivoted to these really weird, really short episodes. I don't think we have it right.

I'm losing my mind. I'm on a hamster wheel because we release five episodes a week and four of them are solos. And I've been doing this for over a year and I. It's.

It's it's horrendous. Meanwhile, I just need a therapy session on that before I ask you something else.

I'm afraid if I get rid of any of my episodes because releasing five a week, that I'm going to disrupt the flow of my listeners. I'm going to lose all my listeners. I'm going to lose all my ranking. Am I just. Am I an idiot?

You know, first of all, it's a very valid concern because you have had success with your podcast.

You've been doing this for 19 months at the time that we're recording this, and you've been ranking in the top charts in marketing pretty consistently. I see you there with your bright pink cover art often, like, very often.

And I live in the marketing charts as well, so I'm always looking at the podcasts that are in those charts. So you're doing something right. And it's a valid concern to be like, okay, we've had this success, and I don't want to lose that.

I don't want to backpedal. I don't want to back out of what I've built. So a lot of times what happens is people. People will start with one episode a week.

You jumped off the cliff there. Like, we're going to do five episodes a week. And yet in some part, that probably played a role in accelerating your success.

But here's my recommendation for people, because most people can't start with five episodes a week. For most people just trying to figure out how to do one, they're like, yeah, okay, I gotta dial this process in.

So what I always tell my clients and anyone that listens to my podcast, and Jay, you might have heard me say this on my show before. Adding additional episodes is gonna benefit your existing listeners.

But again, if we don't have the skills of attracting new listeners to the show, it's not gonna actually grow the podcast.

I see.

So in your case, because this is kind of the flip side of that coin, right? This is like, we've already got the episodes. It's stressful. It's a lot. And what I'm hearing you say is that, well, maybe I'd like to.

Little bit of a step back, you know, at least to have a little breathing room in between these episode releases. So with that, what I would want to do is I'd want to look at your numbers.

I'd want to see what exactly are we getting in terms of downloads and things like that right now that are contributing to your ranking, to your chart potential, that kind of stuff.

And then Also, any changes you ever make to your podcast, you want to make sure that you're letting your listeners know what those changes are and why and how it benefits them. So my recommendation is, if you ever want to change anything to your podcast, first we look at the data.

I'd want to also see how many of those listeners that you're getting every week, Jay, are new listeners versus returning listeners. Because that could be a really good indicator. That could tell us a lot about the direction that we could move in terms of the content.

Yeah.

And then if and when you decide to make any changes, simply looping your listeners in and letting them know, hey, here's how we're doing this and why we're doing this to better serve you, and always tying it back to the listener and what's in it for the listener.

I'm going to do all of this. I'm very. I'm so excited to kind of be in your orbit now. And everybody listen, I'm not saying this.

Sometimes people come on, I say, go, follow them, whatever, and I half mean it this time. I genuinely am telling you, you need to go first of all and follow Courtney's podcast Insider Secrets to a top 100 podcast. She has incredible guests.

She also has, like, the best voice of any podcaster on Earth. So there's that. And then you need to learn about Pod Launch. So, Courtney, tell everybody how to get involved with your world.

Where can they follow you? What's going on?

Yeah, the podcast is honestly the best place. I mean, like, you did, Jay. Just deep dive into it. Always warms my heart so much when we get a review from someone.

I got one just a couple of weeks ago, and someone's like, I was looking on for something on Google. I found your podcast, and Now I'm like 30 episodes deep, and I listen to two to three episodes a day, and it's helping me so much.

And that really is what the podcast is geared to do.

If you're thinking of starting a podcast, if you have a podcast right now that's not growing like you expected it to, and you're struggling with it, and you're like, oh, do I need to just quit this thing? But I like podcasting, and I want it to work. The show is for you. I also hang out online, you know, social media. You can find me over there.

But if you really wanted to take your podcast game to the next level, I teach a live workshop once a month. It's totally free. It takes everything that you learn on my podcast to the next step.

Of really understanding what is the foundation that we need to build in order for a show to be successful.

And by successful, I mean in order for it to grow organically without you having to do a whole lot of heavy lifting to market and promote it and to make it profitable for you to actually see an ROI and to have that show yield and ROI for you. So you can go to podlaunchhq.comworkshop and get those details. Come join me for one of those amazing.

I'm doing that today. This has been incredible, Courtney. I cannot wait wait to listen to all your future episodes. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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