March 19, 2024 • 45 mins
Most podcasters waste their time on these tasks that will never lead to growth. Are you?
Producing a regular podcast is one of the most grueling, time-intensive forms of content creation in existence.
But what if 80% of the time you’re currently spending on your show isn’t actually contributing to growth?
In other words, what if you could get the same results while spending drastically less time on your show?
Or, what if you were to redirect that time towards higher leverage activities that actually did move the needle for growth?
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Topics Covered
00:00 Intro
02:13 Breaking Down the Numbers: Data on high-growth show time spends
08:39 What stood out from the categories of growth in the data?
11:19 Where to spend time when you’re first starting your show
19:18 Finding opportunities to improve your show in your daily life
20:48 Where to spend your time once your show has traction
29:00 Time-sucking tasks to ignore or eliminate
40:21 The ultimate amplifier of every hour you spend on your show
42:37 How much time are you spending on your show each week?
⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️
Resources
David Perrell: How I Write Podcast
Chat GPT
Everyone Hates Marketers
Ira Glass
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Check out the Podcast Marketing Trends 2023 Report
Subscribe to the Scrappy Podcasting Newsletter
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jeremy (00:02):
People are always looking for the shortcut. And so
a lot of times it's the personwho actually puts an
unreasonable amount of time intothe thing that is more
successful with it. And I thinkthat this is something that is a
really hard pill to swallow fora lot of us because we wanna do
everything. We wanna be onInstagram and we wanna be on
YouTube and we wanna have apodcast and maybe we wanna have
a newsletter. And we wanna doall of these things really well,
and we can only do so much.
(00:23):
And so it's making this decisionconsciously, where am I going to
put an unreasonable amount oftime into this? Welcome to
Podcast Marketing TrendsExplained. I'm Jeremy Enns from
Podcast Marketing Academy.
Justin (00:36):
And I'm Justin Jackson from transistor.afem. And
together, we're digging into thedata behind the Podcast
Marketing Trends 2023 report tohelp you understand what it
means for you and your show.
Jeremy (00:49):
Our goal is to help you make better informed decisions
about the way you create andmarket your show so you can
spend more time on what actuallymatters for growth and
accelerate your results.
Justin (00:58):
Let's get into it. One thing I hear from podcasters all
the time is just how long ittakes to make a show. And I
never really thought about ituntil a, we started working on
this show together and I, I wasreminded, and then I was looking
at this graph in the report thattalks about the weekly time
(01:22):
investment. And to see itquantified like this is
surprising. It's it's more hoursper week than I would have
guessed, and maybe than I wouldhave admitted.
Jeremy (01:36):
So one of the questions I have actually about this data
as well, and we'll we'll kindabreak down the numbers in a
minute, but I suspect actuallythat these numbers here are
underrepresenting the actualamount of time that goes into it
because I think when I thinkthrough my own process with
basically creating anything, itis optimistic, let's say. And so
I'm like, oh, yeah. I spend, youknow, 5 hours a week on, you
(01:58):
know, doing my my newsletter, mymy podcast or whatever. And
really it's like 15 orsomething. And it's like, where
does all this time come from?
But there's all this like adminand management and maintenance
that is kind of behind thescenes. 5 minutes here, 10
minutes there that you don'treally count. And I suspect that
the numbers here aresignificant, but I think they're
actually probably higher. So,maybe we should dive into these
(02:20):
and break down kinda what we'reseeing. And, just for some
context here, we're again goingby the growth rate, of the show.
So we've broken down the growthrates into 4 categories. There
are the the top tier high growthshows that grew by a 100% or
more a year, so they at leastdoubled their audience size. The
next tier down is 21% to a 100%.So these were the shows that
didn't double in size, butoutperformed the median of all
(02:42):
shows. And then we've got showsthat grew by a little bit but
less than the median, 0 to 20%.
And then the 4th category isshows that actually shrunk on a
downloads per episode basis. Sothese are the 4 categories that
we've broken down the timeinvestment per week into. So,
Justin, Justin, you wanna takeus through the numbers here?
Justin (02:59):
Yeah. So for the highest growth shows, the total amount
of time invested per week was12.1 hours, but 3.9 of that was
marketing and 8.2 wasproduction. Next category down
9. 1 hours and, around 7 hourson production, around 2 hours on
(03:22):
marketing. Next group down thathad 0 to 20% growth.
That's about 10 hours a week,about 6.4 on production, 3.6
hours on marketing. And then thelow growth shows 9.5 hours total
per week and 6.3 hours onproduction, 3.2 on marketing. On
(03:44):
average, every show is spendingabout 10 hours a week.
Jeremy (03:47):
Yeah. So you talked through the product time spent
on production and the time spenton marketing. And the reason I
asked this question is there'sthis old kind of idea that you
should spend just as much timemaking the thing, whether it's
art or a podcast or content,whatever you wanna call it,
however you wanna define it asyou do spend on marketing it.
And so I was curious, you know,a lot of times people will say,
(04:08):
you know, that's a 5050 split,just as much time on marketing
as production. I know that I'veheard some people in the content
marketing space say you shouldbe spending 80% of your time on
marketing.
I think there's some assumptionshere of, like, maybe you have a
product that is complete andfinished and doesn't also
require ongoing, you know,creation. And podcasting as as a
medium is an interesting placehere where for some people,
(04:30):
business owners, podcasting ismarketing for their product or
service. Whereas other people,podcasting is the product and
they need to do marketingoutside of that. So it gets a
little bit fuzzy around thepercentages here, but across all
the shows, the typical showspends 10 hours a week on
average on everything that theydo marketing and production. And
31.5 percent of that was spenton marketing.
(04:51):
So they're spending about athird of their time on
marketing. So 3.2 hours onmarketing and 6.9 hours on
basically everything else,production management,
maintenance. And again, I wouldsay that there is a lot probably
on that maintenance andmanagement side that is not
actually getting counted here.My assumption would be when most
people are giving their numberhere for this kind of, you know,
(05:12):
6.9 hours that they're spendingon production, They are really
thinking about research,interviewing, recording, editing
is is my kind of guess.
Justin (05:19):
Yeah. And I just wanna stop here, pause, and say, if
you are a podcaster and you aremaking a show, let's just
celebrate the fact that this isa considerable investment and
well done. Yes. If you're ifyou're putting in the effort for
this, it just makes me respecteverybody who tries to make a
(05:42):
podcast, because this is not animmaterial amount of time. It's
a lot of time.
It's so well done. If you'relistening to this and you make a
show, my hat is off to youbecause this is not for the
faint of heart. This is real,like, you gotta be in the
trenches making this thing thatyou care about. So that's that's
(06:02):
what really hit me is, wow, Thisis an investment. And Yep.
And people are probablyunderreporting what it actually
takes to make a show.
Jeremy (06:12):
Yeah. And, of course, this is not counting all the
time you spend refreshing yourstats page either. So, we could
add in probably another couplehours a week, in that for for
most podcasters. Yeah. And Ithink that, you know, what's
interesting when I look at thisis if you've created a podcast,
probably most people listening,will look at this and be like,
yeah.
I I am fully aware of the amountof time that this is taking from
my life, and this is one of themost common pain points that I
(06:34):
hear from podcasters. And whatwe wanna do in this episode is
look at some of the ideasaround, you know, where is your
time actually best spent?Because we all have a finite
amount of time that we have toallocate to the podcast. And for
some people that might be 40hours a week or 60 hours a week.
If it's your full time gig andyou go all in on the podcast,
maybe you have, you know, a abig advantage there where you
(06:54):
can spend more time on it.
Maybe if you have a team, youhave more kind of person hours
you can allocate to it. But atsome point we all have some
limit that we're operatingwithin. And so we want to look
at some of the things that maybeare high leverage tasks and uses
of your time where you're gonnaget more out of that and other
tasks where you might think it'ssomething that you should be
doing that might not actually begetting us the best return on
our investment. So, that's kindof what we're going to be diving
(07:16):
into here. But the one thingbefore we move on from this data
is when we look at the reasonsfor pod fade, I think this is
it.
I think people going in have noidea just how much work it
takes, and there's all thesekind of hidden costs associated
with podcasting. And so I thinkyou get into this, you do a few
weeks of it, and you're like,wow. I this is what I've signed
(07:36):
up for. That was not quite whatI was anticipating. And you make
a decision, which is probablyoften the right decision and
say, actually, I don't think Ilove podcasting as much as as
this.
Justin (07:46):
Yeah. And it it brings up other questions that people
should consider. Do I reallywanna do a weekly podcast? Maybe
it should be every 2 weeks.Maybe it should be monthly.
You can use this data to thinkthrough, like, am I ready for
this investment? I wouldencourage people to actually
time track, like, actually getone of those time trackers. And
(08:07):
every time you do something forthe podcast, record it. If you
do that, by the way, reach outto us. I'd love to see a weekly
breakdown, but it's heavy.
And so use this data to informsome of your production
decisions. What kind of show doI wanna have? Do I wanna be
doing this every week? And yeah.I I'm eager to get into this,
because I think there are placeswhere people could be saving
(08:30):
their time, energy, and enjoyingmaking the podcast and still
getting the same results or veryclose results to what they would
get, but using less time.
Jeremy (08:43):
Yeah. Before we get into kind of the 80 20 here of maybe
allocating your time when itcomes to podcasting, is there
anything that stood out to youfrom the different categories of
growth that might be worthexploring a little bit?
Justin (08:55):
I mean, we talk about how important it is to have a
good product.
Jeremy (08:59):
Mhmm.
Justin (09:00):
And the highest growth shows are spending the greatest
proportion of their time onproduction significantly more.
And so they are investing moreof their time in crafting the
product, which, again, your yournumber one referral source is
(09:23):
going to be word-of-mouth almostwith every podcast. And so if
you're making a podcast that'sso good that people are
compelled to share it, thenthat's a pretty good investment
of your time.
Jeremy (09:34):
Yeah. That's the one that stood out to me where the
the highest growth shows, theshows that doubled in size or or
greater, they spent the mosttime overall by 2 more hours a
week from the next best and sothey were the average was 10
hours a week and, the next bestwas also 10 hours a week on the
dot. They were spending 12.1.They also spent the most, on
production and also the most onmarketing, but marketing was
(09:55):
actually pretty in line thenumber of hours per week that
they were spending. And so herewe look at, like, okay, if they
did spend more time marketing alittle bit than the average
show, but they spentsignificantly more time, 8.2
hours a week on productionversus everything else was
basically around 6 and a half.
So they're spending 2 hours aweek more on various production
related tasks. Not that muchmore time on marketing, which to
(10:16):
me, this was actually a littlebit surprising. And so, you
know, obviously I I teach peoplemarketing and part of what we
teach is around building a greatproduct in the first place. But
part of me was thinking my biaswas towards, I bet the highest
growth shows are gonna bespending, more time on marketing
activities. And that just wasn'tthe case.
And so this was both surprisingand also kind of like affirming
in a way. Because the core of myphilosophy as as is yours, as we
(10:38):
talk about on the show here islike all great marketing starts
with a great product. And nomatter how great your marketing
is, if you have a crappyproduct, there's nothing that
can save you.
Justin (10:47):
You know, we've even experienced this ourselves.
There are first 2 or 3 episodes.We actually recorded those twice
each time. We were trying tomake the best possible show we
could with the amount of time wehad. It was painful.
We finished recording, and thenwe're, like, let's record it
again. Essentially doubling theamount of production time, I
(11:10):
think the show was better forit, especially with new shows.
Your first 2, 3 episodes, if youwanna make a good impression,
you need to be putting forwardthe best possible product, and
that might mean investing moretime.
Jeremy (11:24):
So you just made a good segue into this category here of
getting into the 80/20 because abig part of my belief around
this is that this actuallychanges depending on where you
are in your kind of journey as apodcaster that that the highest
impact place to spend your timewhen you're already at, let's
say, 10000 downloads an episodeis very different when you're
releasing your first 10episodes. So somebody in their
(11:45):
first 10 episodes, where wouldyou recommend they allocate the
majority of their time?
Justin (11:50):
Yeah. I was thinking about this before we started
recording because there's somany factors. I was thinking
about this episode I justrecorded for my other podcast,
where we don't release anepisode every week. It's
basically whenever we wannarecord something. I reached out
to 2 people.
Basically, the prep was we wereall debating and arguing on
(12:10):
Twitter, and I just said, let'stake this to the podcast. Sent
them a link, just got into it,recorded it, sent it to an
editor. He sent it back to me. Ipublished it. My guess is that
the total production time forthat podcast, tops, was 3 hours.
But I'm not doing the editing. Ididn't have to do very much prep
(12:31):
because I was already seeped inthe topic. Like, I'd been
marinating in the topic, and myguests had been marinating in
the topic. We also knew eachother. We had rapport.
They had their equipment set up.It was, like, easy. And so so
much of this depends on not justwhere you're at with your show,
(12:51):
but everything else, all theother layers of who you are and
who you are in relation to theaudience and the topic.
Jeremy (13:00):
This is what I think about all the time with people
starting out is, like, a lot ofpeople who are podcasters have
had previous creativeexperience, but I think a lot of
time the people who hit theground running, they have been
doing something that has gottenthem to this moment where they
are just primed to have successimmediately. And part of that is
is building a network andconnections and just
understanding content. Being aconsumer of content and
(13:21):
understanding how to fit intothat ecosystem that you're
creating in, that is a hugelyhugely not even undervalued but
people don't even think aboutthat. But that's a huge kind of
predicator of success. And sofor me, I think a lot of when
you're first starting out, youjust have to be a student of the
platform.
You have to listen to otherpodcasts. You have to just do
the work and get your stuff out.And I think when you're in that
(13:43):
early stage, I usually tellpeople you shouldn't really
spend any time on marketing. AndI can make the counterargument
to that too because the way toget better at marketing is by
trying marketing. But you alsohave to understand that your
skills and your product probablyaren't good enough yet for your
marketing, no matter how good itis to be that effective.
And so a lot of times early on,I'm like, just get the reps in,
(14:04):
just do the work, keep yourexpectations low and like hone
that craft, study what otherpeople are doing, and don't care
too much about the kind ofexternal, you know, download
numbers, followers, all thatkind of stuff.
Justin (14:14):
I mean, also, another factor for both of us would be I
mean, already this year, I Imight have been a guest on at
least 10 podcasts. Sorepetitions, the practice,
figuring out what getsreactions, what gets shared,
what gets responses. These areall skills. The culmination of
(14:37):
all these skills and experiencesis what you bring to the table.
And so if you're brand new, youknow, playing in this space,
you're gonna need to put in morereps than somebody who has a lot
of experience with this kind ofstuff.
Yeah. So now with my other show,I can just invite somebody and
(15:00):
know that they're gonna be agood guest. We can just talk as
experts about the topic withoutmuch outline. I might write
down, like, 3 or 4 bulletsbeforehand. But when I did my
first interview podcast back in2012, I was doing so much
research and, like, all thisoutlining and researching the
(15:22):
guest and, you know, it was alot more work.
But now that I've been in thisindustry, I've been forming
these connections, and it's justa part of, you know, my week is
debating and thinking andtalking about these topics. A
lot easier to just jump intosomething and start going. But
(15:44):
it really depends what stageyou're at, what you want out of
it. And, certainly, if you'rebrand new, it's gonna take you
more time than somebody who'sbeen doing it for a long time.
Jeremy (15:53):
Yeah. We talked previously about the How I Write
podcast on a previous episode,and this was not, a show that
I'm really into right now. I wastalking about it with another
friend who also is aware ofDavid Perrell, and he was also a
big fan of the show, and he wasjust angry. He the this friend,
Andrew, is is not a podcaster.But, he, I was asking him if
he'd listened to it.
He's like, man, I'm just so madlistening to it. Like, how does
(16:14):
David Perrell, like, come out ofthe gates and just immediately
be this good at this show? Like,what is he doing? What does he
have that I don't? And he waskind of, like, mock angry at it.
But, actually, you know, he'shad a podcast that he did for
probably 2 years or 3 yearsbefore this that it's been a
couple years since he publishedit, but he had 2 years and like
over a 100 episodes, somethinglike that of interviewing
experience. And so that was kindof the training camp for this,
(16:35):
like, next project. And this issomething I think about all the
time where, you know, we'redoing this podcast now. I want
it to be successful, whateverthat means. I don't really even
have an idea.
The fact that we're doing it issuccessful for me, but I'm kind
of like, this is a sandbox toget to test out new format, new
skills, and we're gonna learn somuch from doing this. And we
already have and I don't knowwhat we're in, like 9 episodes
or something like that, that nowthe next show that I do, maybe
(16:57):
later this year, next year, 10years, all of these skills are
translatable into the nextthing. And so for me, I think a
lot there's it's almost clearthat there's, like, 2 timelines
emerging here. There's where areyou at with your show in
particular and then where areyou as a creative? Then we could
add on a 3rd, where are you as ahuman?
It probably factors into that aswell. What's going on in your
life right now outside yourcreative work? That plays a huge
(17:18):
role in how much time you can,allocate to the show and you
know, how much kind of justmental and creative attention
and energy you can give to it.So I think that it's it's gonna
be very different for everybodybased on those factors, but I
think one of the things that Iwould say based on let's just
take the kind of creativejourney and the podcast journey.
I think if you're early on inyour creative journey, you wanna
(17:40):
spend a lot of time just gettingyour reps in studying, not
worrying about perfection, liketrying to make a good show, but
not getting too hung up on thatthat you're not hitting publish.
I think on the podcasting trackside of things, maybe you
already have some experience.And I think this is true even if
you have a lot of experience asa creator and even a podcaster.
I think the first number ofepisodes, maybe 10 to 15
(18:01):
episodes depending on what theshow is. It feels to me like
most shows don't really findtheir footing and lock in their
format until you get a number ofepisodes under your belt. In any
show, this is where you wannaspend a lot of time early on is
trying to figure out like trythings out and experiment and
find out like what is the actuallike soul of the show to some
extent And the only way to getthere is to try different things
(18:21):
and see how it works.
And a lot of times, it's somerandom thing that just occurs
and you're like, hey, that thatfelt really good. Like, let's do
more of that and we'll lean intothat in the future. And so I
think early on the podcast sideof things, no matter your level
of experience, it takes sometime and some reps to unlock the
show, what for what it has thepotential to be.
Justin (18:39):
Even this show, we often will relisten to episodes, and
we can hear it. It's like, we'reoverexplaining where our
transitions aren't working, Andwe will send notes to each other
of like, okay. I feel like we'rewe're getting bogged down here,
and we need to try to improve onthat gradually. The other thing
(19:01):
I thought of is you you and Ihad all this practice talking
about this topic justinformally, you know, podcast
movement. We did a few YouTubelives together.
We've had practice justinteracting together. But even
with all that practice, it stilltook us a while to find our
groove once we got in themicrophones together.
Jeremy (19:22):
Mhmm.
Justin (19:22):
And that's why we were willing to rerecord those first
episodes, I think, because itwas like, oh, we just need more
practice. We need more justgetting in the groove, figuring
out what works for us. Yeah. Andthis is one opportunity, whether
it's production or marketing orwhatever, is especially in the
beginning to view all of theopportunities for practice. If
(19:45):
you have a show about politics,one simple way to practice is to
talk about politics around thedinner table, talk about
politics at the coffee shop.
There are places you can startemploying that skill of, can I
discuss this topic in a freeform, free flowing way without
(20:07):
getting too bogged down andmaking it compelling, making it
succinct, all the things thatmatter? You can put in the reps
in all the different places ofyour life. And this is also true
even when you have been doing itfor a while. Obviously, neither
of us are experts on that yet,but these are some of the things
that you wanna be spending yourtime on getting better on being
(20:31):
cognizant, being mindful of. AndI would be investing more time
in the kind of practice thanmaybe, you know, spending tons
of time on Twitter marketing theshow or something.
It's better to put work into theproduct, into the practice, then
there's some places you coulddefinitely waste your time that
don't matter.
Jeremy (20:51):
Yeah. Okay. So I think we've covered the early stage
there quite a bit when you'restill in kind of, like, figuring
out the show, figuring out yourown skills, how you kinda fit
into it. Let's maybe move on tothe show that has traction. And
now they have the same, let'ssay, just 10 hours a week, and
they're looking to now make themost of that.
So a show that we've got aproven concept to some extent,
it's gonna take some time toproduce it, but they've kinda
(21:13):
figured it out and they've gotsome some baseline level of
skills. What are some of thethings that you think are most
valuable, uses of time forsomebody with a proven show?
Justin (21:22):
Yeah. I think once you have something that's working,
something that listeners areresponding to, something they
like, I would switch to moreexperiments. For example, I like
the idea of posting a bunch ofclips from the same episode on
TikTok or Reels or YouTubeshorts and just seeing which
(21:43):
ones get traction and which onesdon't, what gets picked up and
what doesn't. What getsresponses and what doesn't. Or
take your transcript, throw itinto chat tbt, write a series of
blog posts on the same topic.
Which of these gets traction?Which doesn't? What gets shared?
What doesn't? I'd beexperimenting with different
(22:05):
channels that we talked aboutbefore, different places to
promote your show.
I'd be experimenting with ads.This is once you have something
that's working, you're takingthat product that you've made,
and you're saying, how can I getthis into more people's hands?
Like, how can I find newlisteners? It's the time to
start experimenting with thatstuff. So I would increase if
(22:26):
you can or be more mindful of,marketing experimentation.
What what comes to mind for you?
Jeremy (22:33):
We could split this into, like, the must haves and
the nice to haves almost. And Ithink I would still be really
focused on the quality of theshow. I think that's something
that at some point you feel likeyou got a solid show and you may
allocate less time to itactually. And sometimes it's
like, actually, it still couldbe better, and you would still
be better served spending yourtime there. So I think that that
is still something that is isworth not taking your eye off
(22:55):
the ball.
But outside of that, it's Ialmost feel like beating a dead
horse here a little bit, but Ithink integrating yourself into
a community and just being whereyour people are. And one of the
things that I see people gowrong with this a lot is they
wanna create their owncommunity, which there is a
there's value to this andthere's a time and a place for
it. But I think until you're atthe point where you have
thousands of listeners and apretty decent sized following
(23:17):
where it might actually makesense to cordon off a section of
your most dedicated fans, fewhundred people in some kind of,
you know, WhatsApp group or aSlack channel or a Facebook
group or what what have you. Ithink generally, you're better
served just being active in theplace where your people are
already hanging out. And thatactually gives you exposure to
new listeners while also givingyou an opportunity to hone your,
(23:38):
you know, messaging and deliveryat how you talk about the show
on a regular basis with peoplewho are not familiar with you
already.
And so Mhmm. This is what what Iwould really think about is,
like, finding that onecommunity, not trying to be in,
you know, 5 different Facebookgroups, 10 different Facebook
groups, whatever. It's like findone place that you can be in the
center of the action kind of andshow up there regularly. I think
that's one of the highest valuekind of returns on your time
(24:00):
investment that you can have.Again, I think then thinking
about the experimentation aswell, but I think that a lot of
times this just general nicheactivity, let's call it, in your
space is the kinda likefoundation layer where maybe
it's not you're not spendinglike 5 hours a week doing that,
but you're kinda chipping inevery other few minutes a day,
something like that.
Just checking in a couple ofcomments here and there being a
presence in that space. And Ithink we've talked about this in
(24:22):
a previous episode as well.Before people listen to your
podcast, they need so many touchpoints with you. And so I would
just think about, you know, howcan I just on a daily basis, I
don't need to be creatingcontent, but I can be chiming in
on other people's and eventuallythat kind of trickles back to
(24:44):
the show? That would be one ofthe big things that I would
focus on once you have a kind ofproven show that you know when
you tell people about it.
Their kind of eyes light up andthey're like, oh, that sounds
really interesting. Now it'skind of like, okay, well, how
can I just have conversationswith more people? And as you are
starting out, you're still inthat kind of less than a 1000
downloads an episode mayberange. I think that the fastest
way to actually get people intoyour show is 1 to 1 small group
(25:05):
conversations in communities. Ithink it does change a little
bit once you start to get you'rein tens of thousands and you're
looking to scale up to 20,000downloads an episode or 50,000.
You can't have that many one toone conversations anymore, and
so you do need to start lookingat more scalable marketing. But
in my opinion, I don't thinkyou're really ready for the
scalable marketing tactics untilyou get to that point. And
you've actually throughrepetition, through actual
(25:27):
conversations with people or youactually understand how to talk
about your show in a a way thatjust, like, clicks for people
that they're, like, you givethem your pitch and they're,
like, wow. That sounds awesome.
Justin (25:36):
I like this. I like this a lot. There's the you'll also
be building up a library ofepisodes, clips, time stamps,
transcripts that if you are anauthority on a topic or you've
put in the work on a topic, youcan start chiming in in
appropriate ways with thislibrary of content you've
(26:00):
created. Oh, you know what? I'vetalked to that expert before.
Here's a timestamp on this onething we're all discussing here
in this community that might beinteresting. So you're using
your library of podcast episodesas a resource that you can then
share with other people, andthat is a part of this
(26:20):
marketing, part of thediscovering what works, what's
shareable, what's not, and whatpeople respond to. And as people
see you as a resource, anexpert, a linchpin for a
particular community, they'regonna start to seek you out.
They're gonna wanna know I wannahear more from this person on
this topic.
Jeremy (26:41):
Yeah. And I'll give you my my trick for this that I
started doing this maybe a yearor 2 ago, and it has been
something I don't think I'veever actually, told anyone about
this. But what I do when I amcommenting on social media or in
a another community or somethinglike that, a lot of times
there'll be a question that I'mlike, Oh, this is a really great
question. And I don't actuallyhave any content on this yet.
I'll actually use that commentsection to start my first draft
(27:04):
of the blog post or the podcastepisode or whatever it is.
And so I'll actually writesometimes 300 words because I'm
like, I'm gonna put this time inanyway and I'm gonna actually
look really good when I givethis really thorough detailed,
answer in response to thisperson's question. And a lot of
times people are like, woah.This was so helpful because it's
more than what people expectfrom a comment section. But I
(27:25):
know, like, I'm just I'm gonnaput the work in now instead of
putting it in, you know, nextTuesday when I'm writing the
blog post on the topic. And nowI already have my head start.
And so what I do is I I treat itthat way and then I just copy
and paste that into a documentwhere I just keep all my, like,
ideas and I'll it'll I'll kindof title it like, okay. In this
community, this person askedthis question and so now I've
got like, okay. This is aquestion that I could maybe
(27:45):
explore more and already here'smy answer. And the other thing
that happens is a lot of times,the same questions come up again
and again. And so now I've kindagot the swipe file that I can
say, okay.
Here's my thorough answer tothis and I can just change the
details in here and customize itto this person's situation as
well. So, this is another waywhere I think a lot of times we
don't be as helpful as we couldbe on social media when we're
(28:06):
chiming into these conversationsbecause it feels like, man, am I
really going to spend 15 minuteswriting out a comment and an
answer to a question on Twitter?And it's like, well, I was gonna
spend that 15 minutes writingthe blog post, and it's the
same. It's it's all writtencontent. I might as well just do
that now and win a new fan a lotof times in the process.
Justin (28:22):
Yeah. If if people can see the Slack channel that you
and I are in, whenever westumble on a interesting tweet,
an interesting Reddit thread, weare throwing that into the
channel, discussing it, and kindof mining that as a potential
topic for the future.
Jeremy (28:35):
Yeah. So we've talked a little bit about where should we
be spending the time. And to behonest, I think most of the high
value time expenditures outsideof actually networking and
creating the show are they'repretty boring things. There's no
there's no, like, bigbreakthrough here where it's
like, oh, if you just spent 2hours a week doing this, you'd
be wildly successful. I thinkthere's a lot of small
(28:56):
optimizations a lot of timeswhere you're just like making
those investments in being aregular kind of contributor to a
community.
That's the stuff that has thebiggest impact over time. Now, I
think on the flip side, there isa lot more to be gained from
optimizing the things that youare not doing. And so if we look
at this 80 20, we've got thislike, okay, the 20% of things
that gets 80% of the results.What's the other 80% of things
(29:17):
that people are doing that maybethey are working to some extent,
like there is some positivevalue that comes out of it, but
it's not really worth the timeinvestment that goes into it. I
know I've got a a couple thingson my mind, but I'm curious if
anything comes to mind for youwhere people are kind of
spending too much time for theresults that that activity
generates.
Justin (29:35):
I mean, show notes is 1. You can always get better at
making show notes, and I'vefallen into this as well. But
they're not as important aspeople Mhmm. Think they are.
We've talked about this beforeas well, but spreading yourself
too thin across too manyplatforms.
So you're spending an enormousamount of time
Jeremy (29:56):
Yeah.
Justin (29:56):
Especially on social platforms that are designed to
suck you in. Mhmm. So it's like,oh, I'm just gonna go over here
and promote the podcast onTwitter. And then the next thing
you know, you've spent 3 hourswasting your time scrolling and
going to other things, gettingdistracted. I mean, those are 2
big ones for myself.
What's on your list?
Jeremy (30:15):
Yeah. Show notes is the one that I always people obsess
about this, and I think it'sbecause it's a thing you need to
have to some extent. Like, itdoesn't make sense. Like, you go
into your podcast hostingplatform. You're not just gonna
leave the show notes blankentirely.
But my suspicion is that podcastagencies and managers and
producers sell their clients onthe value of SEO optimized show
(30:37):
notes, quote unquote, withoutreally knowing what that means,
not being SEO experts themselvesas a kind of like value added,
like, look at this fancy thingthat you're going to get, which
I get. I've been a serviceprovider and I've run a podcast
agency and clients ask aboutthat kind of stuff. And so
you're like, yeah, we'll do ourbest SEO, optimize your show
notes. But personally, I have noevidence and I've never talked
to an actual SEO expert whosaid, yeah. Going all in on
(31:00):
podcast show notes like that'syou're gonna hit page 1 with
that.
I think if anything, it's gonnabe based on the guest and
probably if they're a famousguest, your show is probably not
ending up on page 1 ahead of allof their own stuff. So I'm a
skeptic in regards to shownotes. And a lot of times, like,
when I work with people, we'llactually do a time tracking
assessment and I'll say, okay,for the next 2 weeks, track all
(31:21):
the time you spend on yourpodcast. And a lot of times you
look at the things like the shownotes, the content repurposing.
These types of things take upthis huge amount of time and
I'll be like, okay.
Our first job here is to juststop doing all of that or take
it down to the absolute bareminimum because maybe we do
wanna bring this stuff back inin a better version in the
future. But right now, likewe've kind of got bigger fish to
fry and these maintenance tasksthat you've kind of taken on and
(31:44):
now have this ongoing costassociated with them. They're
actually detracting from thetime that you could be spending
on updating your show concept insome way or working on the
actual craft of the show that isactually going to have more
positive impact than simplyputting out the show notes. The
test for me is like, go look atyour analytics and that will
tell you everything you need toknow about the value of
investing time into your shownotes.
Justin (32:05):
The other one that just came up in my mind is editing
clips, like producing clips.
Jeremy (32:10):
Mhmm.
Justin (32:11):
I I have spent so much time on this, and there's all
these labor saving tools outthere, like with AI that are
supposed to automaticallygenerate clips for you. And even
those, I find time consuming touse
Jeremy (32:25):
to
Justin (32:25):
find like, to go in and actually clip the right spot to
make sure that they're and thento export them, and It can take
so much time. And for mostshows, it's probably not worth
(32:46):
doing that. It would be betterif you have hired an editor to
say, hey. If you find somethingin here that you think is just a
great 32nd clip, could you just,at that moment while you're
editing it, export that clip forus and then give us a video that
we're gonna upload to YouTube?And then you give us a short
clip that we can share, Andthat's one place you can save
(33:09):
time instead of you going backinto the episode and going,
okay.
I'm gonna find all these clips.And I haven't found an efficient
workflow for generating clipseven with all the crazy tools
that are out there. I I'm surethere's gonna be tons of podcast
clipping people that willcontact me now, but it just
takes time. It takes time, andit can take a lot of time if
(33:30):
you're not careful.
Jeremy (33:31):
Yeah. This is I'm really glad you brought this up. And I
think that this segues into thelast kinda main topic that I
wanted to talk about here on theaspect of where do you allocate
your time. And I was having aconversation with somebody
earlier today about cliprepurposing and AI tools. And
you might get this temporaryadvantage by getting this AI
clip tool that now allows you toget your clips out on all these
(33:52):
different platforms.
But to really take off, part ofwhat's going on here is that you
stand out. And if everybody'susing the same AI software,
nobody's clips are actuallystanding out. And so one of the
things with so much of marketingis that people are always
looking for the shortcut. And soa lot of times, it's the person
who actually puts anunreasonable amount of time into
the thing that is moresuccessful with it. And I think
(34:14):
that this is something that is areally hard pill to swallow for
a lot of us because we wanna doeverything.
And we wanna be on Instagram andwe wanna be on YouTube and we
wanna have a podcast and maybewanna have a newsletter and we
wanna do all of these thingsreally well. And at the end of
the day, it's like we can onlydo so much. And so it's kind of
making this decision consciouslywhere am I going to put an
unreasonable amount of time intothis. And one of the places
(34:35):
where this shows up so regularlyto me is when all the AI writing
tools came out last year, peoplewould sign up for my newsletter
and they would start reading andthey'd be like, man, this is so
good. Did you get AI to do this?
And I was like, the this is aridiculous question. Like, never
in in the the whole history ofhumankind, nobody if you saw
something that was greatwriting, you were like, no
(34:55):
wonder it's great becausethere's an artistic genius
behind it. Obviously, I'mreferring to myself here. And,
now we've got these AI toolscoming out and people
immediately think they can getthis incredible quality emotion
and pacing and ideas and contentwith AI. And this is something
where it's like I'm, you know,I'm not really offended by it,
but I'm like, no.
Of course, I'm not using AI forthis. This is one of the core
(35:17):
parts of my creative businessand practice and like I want to
spend more time than otherpeople think is reasonable on my
writing. And I think that youtalk to most really successful
creators and this is what itboils down to a lot of times.
It's like they love doing thething. They want to spend more
than anybody else is doing onit, time wise, more so than
money, I would say.
And they benefit from thatbecause that kind of experience
(35:39):
compounds over time. Their skillcompounds and they keep showing
up and publishing content inthat space and this is, at the
end of the day, one of the bigsecrets is is not doing that
everywhere but choosing 1 or 2places in your work where you're
like, I'm going to do this andspend more time on this better
than anyone else and I'm gonnaget incredulous looks when
people ask how much time do youspend on this. And you're like,
actually, I spend 40 hours aweek on my podcast. And people
(36:00):
are like, what? And you're like,oh,
Justin (36:01):
yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy (36:02):
I I love doing it, and I'm gonna keep doing it.
Justin (36:05):
I I do think there are high leverage places people can
spend their time that line upwith what you just said. Mhmm.
So for example, for this show,you and Chris find a clip that
you can put at the beginning ofthe show that takes extra time
to find a clip that hooks thelistener.
Jeremy (36:27):
Yeah. What I like about that is it actually really
aligns with this idea ofspending an unreasonable amount
of time in certain key places.And so I think there are
different points within alistener experience that matter
more than others. And so I reada newsletter by Louis Granier
from Everyone Hates Marketerslast week. This is a show that
has over a 1000000 downloadslifetime.
He said he actually spends outof his whole process, he spends
(36:48):
more time coming up with theepisode title and and the cover
art for it than he does on theediting and production and
everything else kinda behind thescenes. And his rationale here
is that the title dictateswhether somebody will click on
this or not. And you hear thesame thing about email subject
lines that dictates none none ofthe email content matters if
somebody doesn't open the email.And so these are the places,
(37:08):
these pivotal points where aperson will either listen to
your show or not. And I thinkabout cover art, show title,
show description to some extent,episode titles, the first minute
of an episode.
These are all decision makingpoints where I would spend much
more time on these places thanthe rest of it. And you hear
YouTubers talk a lot about thiswhere, like, they'll spend a lot
of time producing the video butthey'll spend double or triple
(37:29):
that on the thumbnail and thetitle because they know the
content doesn't matter ifsomebody doesn't click into the
video and it all hinges on that.And so I would think about these
key moments here like where issomebody not yet fully bought
into my episode or they haven'tclicked in on the show yet? This
is where I actually wanna spendmore time. And so kind of to
your point about, you know,putting in some extra time on
the post production, so oureditor, Chris, will make an edit
(37:51):
of the episode.
And then I'll go in and do atleast one more if not two passes
and remove more content toreally tighten it up. And so a
lot of times we cut out 20 or 30minutes. And this is a kind of
laborious process and like forme, it is it's actually really
fun because it's it'semotionally confronting to some
extent cutting out good stuffBut I also know it's compressing
the quality of the episode. AndI often think about it in the
(38:11):
terms of like the value density.Like every couple minutes,
there's something new thatpeople are like, oh wow.
That I never thought about itthat way before. And so this is
one of those behind the scenethings where it's like probably
the full conversation was great,but spending an extra hour
actually removing content makesthe listener experience of that
episode. They were gonna maybeclick play anyways but now
they're like, what? Oh, that wasso good. I'm definitely coming
(38:32):
back for the next episode.
So I think it's finding theseareas in your process whether
it's post production ormarketing, which I would say,
you know, episode titling andthumbnails are a 100% marketing
that are really going to have anoutsized impact on people's
decision whether to clickthrough or keep listening and,
and really spend more time thanother people might do on those.
So as we kind of wrap things uphere, what's your we're talking
(38:54):
about the 80 20 here of timespent on the podcast. So what's
your kind of 80 20 to leavepeople with, the small number of
things that you want them to totake away in terms of where
they're allocating their time?
Justin (39:04):
I mean, the the first thing I think of is in terms of
80 20 in a bigger scale is justbe the kind of person over your
lifetime that is interested inthe topic, that is building
relationships, buildingconnections, joining
communities, that is the true 8020. I spent 80% of my life
thinking about this topic,investing in this topic, and
(39:27):
then when I show up for the 20%that I'm recording, I can do
that with authority andconfidence. That's the real
answer. And then 80 20 willdepend on where you are at in
your podcast journey. I do thinkmost folks could probably be
making their show better Mhmm.
In some way. And that's theactual audio. That's the pacing.
(39:48):
That's shortening up theepisodes like you talked about.
And, also, I mean, if you'relistening to our companion
podcast, the roasts that we do,listen to those.
It's the same things we keeptalking about. Tighten up your
podcast cover art. Tighten upyour episode titles. We just
noticed on threads, TonyMastrorio says he will
unsubscribe from a podcast if hescans through the episode titles
(40:11):
and nothing's compelling.
Jeremy (40:12):
Yeah.
Justin (40:12):
So spend more time on the things that matter that
actually bring people in. So I Iwould kind of say all of those
things, production and thenpackaging are where folks should
be spending more of their time.
Jeremy (40:25):
Yeah. And I would add on to that. To me, the ultimate
accelerator and amplifier ofyour show's kind of potential
and growth is the show concept.And so I think coming up with a
unique combination of topic andformat and the way that you
explore it or present it, thisreally unlocks your potential
for growth. And what it does isit makes everything much easier.
(40:45):
So you can put in the sameamount of effort and you're
gonna get better results or youcan get the same results with
less effort, less money, lesstime, all of these things. And
so I think, you know, like we'vetalked about many times, we've
talked about quality, but Idon't know that we've talked a
lot about like the show concept.And so this the premise that the
show is based on so that whenyou give somebody that one
sentence pitch, you go to your10 of your ideal listeners and,
like, all 10 of them are, like,pulling up their phones and
they're like, wow. Where's thisshow been my whole life? And so
(41:08):
when you get to that point,everything else, you just get
way bigger returns on every houryou spend, every dollar you
spend.
And so I think that's where Iwould say is is really the
biggest impact that you canhave. This is is not something
that's easy and there are not,you know, a surplus of super,
super high quality, really ultracompelling podcast concepts out
there. But I think with wherepodcasting is going, this is
(41:30):
going to be more of a necessity,as a way to stand out.
Justin (41:33):
Mhmm. Yeah. 4 funny guys that get together for beers and
have a funny show is not gonnacut it. Like, if that's if
there's a spectrum, you know,there's a lot of 4 guys on a
couch trying to be funny Mhmm.Shows, and you can imagine going
from there onward.
There's a lot of topics andconcepts that if you put more
(41:56):
work into it and that, oh, wow.No one's really doing it this
way, or no one's really thoughtof it presenting it this way.
And I could put some work intothat, and that's what's gonna
grab listeners because it'sunique. It hasn't been done
before. People have never seenthat happen before.
People have never talked aboutthis topic in this way. I love
that. I love that positioning.And, again, it's hard because
(42:17):
it's kinda fuzzy, but this ishow you should be thinking. You
gotta think like Ira Glass.
Go and listen to a bunch ofinterviews with Ira Glass and,
observe how he thinks aboutmaking a show.
Jeremy (42:30):
Mhmm.
Justin (42:31):
And you gotta learn to emulate some of that. How can I
create a concept that'scompelling, that's not boring,
instead of just falling into thesame tropes that everyone else
is doing?
Jeremy (42:42):
So for everyone listening here, I would love to
hear from you. How much time areyou spending on your show? You
can get at both Justin and I onTwitter and the links are in the
show notes. And, we saw herethat, you know, most people who
submitted the survey werespending on average 10 hours a
week. Are you above that?
Are you below that? And what'sthe kind of breakdown look like
of that? So feel free to reachout to us on Twitter. You can
(43:02):
also reach us on LinkedIn or,leave us a voicemail, which the
link is also in the show notesand let us know there. And,
we'll maybe do a follow-upupdate on where our listeners
are kind of fitting in in thatspectrum and what their
allocation of hours was.
Justin (43:17):
Sounds great.
People are always looking for the shortcut. And so
a lot of times it's the personwho actually puts an
unreasonable amount of time intothe thing that is more
successful with it. And I thinkthat this is something that is a
really hard pill to swallow fora lot of us because we wanna do
everything. We wanna be onInstagram and we wanna be on
YouTube and we wanna have apodcast and maybe we wanna have
a newsletter. And we wanna doall of these things really well,
and we can only do so much.
(00:23):
And so it's making this decisionconsciously, where am I going to
put an unreasonable amount oftime into this? Welcome to
Podcast Marketing TrendsExplained. I'm Jeremy Enns from
Podcast Marketing Academy.
Justin (00:36):
And I'm Justin Jackson from transistor.afem. And
together, we're digging into thedata behind the Podcast
Marketing Trends 2023 report tohelp you understand what it
means for you and your show.
Jeremy (00:49):
Our goal is to help you make better informed decisions
about the way you create andmarket your show so you can
spend more time on what actuallymatters for growth and
accelerate your results.
Justin (00:58):
Let's get into it. One thing I hear from podcasters all
the time is just how long ittakes to make a show. And I
never really thought about ituntil a, we started working on
this show together and I, I wasreminded, and then I was looking
at this graph in the report thattalks about the weekly time
(01:22):
investment. And to see itquantified like this is
surprising. It's it's more hoursper week than I would have
guessed, and maybe than I wouldhave admitted.
Jeremy (01:36):
So one of the questions I have actually about this data
as well, and we'll we'll kindabreak down the numbers in a
minute, but I suspect actuallythat these numbers here are
underrepresenting the actualamount of time that goes into it
because I think when I thinkthrough my own process with
basically creating anything, itis optimistic, let's say. And so
I'm like, oh, yeah. I spend, youknow, 5 hours a week on, you
(01:58):
know, doing my my newsletter, mymy podcast or whatever. And
really it's like 15 orsomething. And it's like, where
does all this time come from?
But there's all this like adminand management and maintenance
that is kind of behind thescenes. 5 minutes here, 10
minutes there that you don'treally count. And I suspect that
the numbers here aresignificant, but I think they're
actually probably higher. So,maybe we should dive into these
(02:20):
and break down kinda what we'reseeing. And, just for some
context here, we're again goingby the growth rate, of the show.
So we've broken down the growthrates into 4 categories. There
are the the top tier high growthshows that grew by a 100% or
more a year, so they at leastdoubled their audience size. The
next tier down is 21% to a 100%.So these were the shows that
didn't double in size, butoutperformed the median of all
(02:42):
shows. And then we've got showsthat grew by a little bit but
less than the median, 0 to 20%.
And then the 4th category isshows that actually shrunk on a
downloads per episode basis. Sothese are the 4 categories that
we've broken down the timeinvestment per week into. So,
Justin, Justin, you wanna takeus through the numbers here?
Justin (02:59):
Yeah. So for the highest growth shows, the total amount
of time invested per week was12.1 hours, but 3.9 of that was
marketing and 8.2 wasproduction. Next category down
9. 1 hours and, around 7 hourson production, around 2 hours on
(03:22):
marketing. Next group down thathad 0 to 20% growth.
That's about 10 hours a week,about 6.4 on production, 3.6
hours on marketing. And then thelow growth shows 9.5 hours total
per week and 6.3 hours onproduction, 3.2 on marketing. On
(03:44):
average, every show is spendingabout 10 hours a week.
Jeremy (03:47):
Yeah. So you talked through the product time spent
on production and the time spenton marketing. And the reason I
asked this question is there'sthis old kind of idea that you
should spend just as much timemaking the thing, whether it's
art or a podcast or content,whatever you wanna call it,
however you wanna define it asyou do spend on marketing it.
And so I was curious, you know,a lot of times people will say,
(04:08):
you know, that's a 5050 split,just as much time on marketing
as production. I know that I'veheard some people in the content
marketing space say you shouldbe spending 80% of your time on
marketing.
I think there's some assumptionshere of, like, maybe you have a
product that is complete andfinished and doesn't also
require ongoing, you know,creation. And podcasting as as a
medium is an interesting placehere where for some people,
(04:30):
business owners, podcasting ismarketing for their product or
service. Whereas other people,podcasting is the product and
they need to do marketingoutside of that. So it gets a
little bit fuzzy around thepercentages here, but across all
the shows, the typical showspends 10 hours a week on
average on everything that theydo marketing and production. And
31.5 percent of that was spenton marketing.
(04:51):
So they're spending about athird of their time on
marketing. So 3.2 hours onmarketing and 6.9 hours on
basically everything else,production management,
maintenance. And again, I wouldsay that there is a lot probably
on that maintenance andmanagement side that is not
actually getting counted here.My assumption would be when most
people are giving their numberhere for this kind of, you know,
(05:12):
6.9 hours that they're spendingon production, They are really
thinking about research,interviewing, recording, editing
is is my kind of guess.
Justin (05:19):
Yeah. And I just wanna stop here, pause, and say, if
you are a podcaster and you aremaking a show, let's just
celebrate the fact that this isa considerable investment and
well done. Yes. If you're ifyou're putting in the effort for
this, it just makes me respecteverybody who tries to make a
(05:42):
podcast, because this is not animmaterial amount of time. It's
a lot of time.
It's so well done. If you'relistening to this and you make a
show, my hat is off to youbecause this is not for the
faint of heart. This is real,like, you gotta be in the
trenches making this thing thatyou care about. So that's that's
(06:02):
what really hit me is, wow, Thisis an investment. And Yep.
And people are probablyunderreporting what it actually
takes to make a show.
Jeremy (06:12):
Yeah. And, of course, this is not counting all the
time you spend refreshing yourstats page either. So, we could
add in probably another couplehours a week, in that for for
most podcasters. Yeah. And Ithink that, you know, what's
interesting when I look at thisis if you've created a podcast,
probably most people listening,will look at this and be like,
yeah.
I I am fully aware of the amountof time that this is taking from
my life, and this is one of themost common pain points that I
(06:34):
hear from podcasters. And whatwe wanna do in this episode is
look at some of the ideasaround, you know, where is your
time actually best spent?Because we all have a finite
amount of time that we have toallocate to the podcast. And for
some people that might be 40hours a week or 60 hours a week.
If it's your full time gig andyou go all in on the podcast,
maybe you have, you know, a abig advantage there where you
(06:54):
can spend more time on it.
Maybe if you have a team, youhave more kind of person hours
you can allocate to it. But atsome point we all have some
limit that we're operatingwithin. And so we want to look
at some of the things that maybeare high leverage tasks and uses
of your time where you're gonnaget more out of that and other
tasks where you might think it'ssomething that you should be
doing that might not actually begetting us the best return on
our investment. So, that's kindof what we're going to be diving
(07:16):
into here. But the one thingbefore we move on from this data
is when we look at the reasonsfor pod fade, I think this is
it.
I think people going in have noidea just how much work it
takes, and there's all thesekind of hidden costs associated
with podcasting. And so I thinkyou get into this, you do a few
weeks of it, and you're like,wow. I this is what I've signed
(07:36):
up for. That was not quite whatI was anticipating. And you make
a decision, which is probablyoften the right decision and
say, actually, I don't think Ilove podcasting as much as as
this.
Justin (07:46):
Yeah. And it it brings up other questions that people
should consider. Do I reallywanna do a weekly podcast? Maybe
it should be every 2 weeks.Maybe it should be monthly.
You can use this data to thinkthrough, like, am I ready for
this investment? I wouldencourage people to actually
time track, like, actually getone of those time trackers. And
(08:07):
every time you do something forthe podcast, record it. If you
do that, by the way, reach outto us. I'd love to see a weekly
breakdown, but it's heavy.
And so use this data to informsome of your production
decisions. What kind of show doI wanna have? Do I wanna be
doing this every week? And yeah.I I'm eager to get into this,
because I think there are placeswhere people could be saving
(08:30):
their time, energy, and enjoyingmaking the podcast and still
getting the same results or veryclose results to what they would
get, but using less time.
Jeremy (08:43):
Yeah. Before we get into kind of the 80 20 here of maybe
allocating your time when itcomes to podcasting, is there
anything that stood out to youfrom the different categories of
growth that might be worthexploring a little bit?
Justin (08:55):
I mean, we talk about how important it is to have a
good product.
Jeremy (08:59):
Mhmm.
Justin (09:00):
And the highest growth shows are spending the greatest
proportion of their time onproduction significantly more.
And so they are investing moreof their time in crafting the
product, which, again, your yournumber one referral source is
(09:23):
going to be word-of-mouth almostwith every podcast. And so if
you're making a podcast that'sso good that people are
compelled to share it, thenthat's a pretty good investment
of your time.
Jeremy (09:34):
Yeah. That's the one that stood out to me where the
the highest growth shows, theshows that doubled in size or or
greater, they spent the mosttime overall by 2 more hours a
week from the next best and sothey were the average was 10
hours a week and, the next bestwas also 10 hours a week on the
dot. They were spending 12.1.They also spent the most, on
production and also the most onmarketing, but marketing was
(09:55):
actually pretty in line thenumber of hours per week that
they were spending. And so herewe look at, like, okay, if they
did spend more time marketing alittle bit than the average
show, but they spentsignificantly more time, 8.2
hours a week on productionversus everything else was
basically around 6 and a half.
So they're spending 2 hours aweek more on various production
related tasks. Not that muchmore time on marketing, which to
(10:16):
me, this was actually a littlebit surprising. And so, you
know, obviously I I teach peoplemarketing and part of what we
teach is around building a greatproduct in the first place. But
part of me was thinking my biaswas towards, I bet the highest
growth shows are gonna bespending, more time on marketing
activities. And that just wasn'tthe case.
And so this was both surprisingand also kind of like affirming
in a way. Because the core of myphilosophy as as is yours, as we
(10:38):
talk about on the show here islike all great marketing starts
with a great product. And nomatter how great your marketing
is, if you have a crappyproduct, there's nothing that
can save you.
Justin (10:47):
You know, we've even experienced this ourselves.
There are first 2 or 3 episodes.We actually recorded those twice
each time. We were trying tomake the best possible show we
could with the amount of time wehad. It was painful.
We finished recording, and thenwe're, like, let's record it
again. Essentially doubling theamount of production time, I
(11:10):
think the show was better forit, especially with new shows.
Your first 2, 3 episodes, if youwanna make a good impression,
you need to be putting forwardthe best possible product, and
that might mean investing moretime.
Jeremy (11:24):
So you just made a good segue into this category here of
getting into the 80/20 because abig part of my belief around
this is that this actuallychanges depending on where you
are in your kind of journey as apodcaster that that the highest
impact place to spend your timewhen you're already at, let's
say, 10000 downloads an episodeis very different when you're
releasing your first 10episodes. So somebody in their
(11:45):
first 10 episodes, where wouldyou recommend they allocate the
majority of their time?
Justin (11:50):
Yeah. I was thinking about this before we started
recording because there's somany factors. I was thinking
about this episode I justrecorded for my other podcast,
where we don't release anepisode every week. It's
basically whenever we wannarecord something. I reached out
to 2 people.
Basically, the prep was we wereall debating and arguing on
(12:10):
Twitter, and I just said, let'stake this to the podcast. Sent
them a link, just got into it,recorded it, sent it to an
editor. He sent it back to me. Ipublished it. My guess is that
the total production time forthat podcast, tops, was 3 hours.
But I'm not doing the editing. Ididn't have to do very much prep
(12:31):
because I was already seeped inthe topic. Like, I'd been
marinating in the topic, and myguests had been marinating in
the topic. We also knew eachother. We had rapport.
They had their equipment set up.It was, like, easy. And so so
much of this depends on not justwhere you're at with your show,
(12:51):
but everything else, all theother layers of who you are and
who you are in relation to theaudience and the topic.
Jeremy (13:00):
This is what I think about all the time with people
starting out is, like, a lot ofpeople who are podcasters have
had previous creativeexperience, but I think a lot of
time the people who hit theground running, they have been
doing something that has gottenthem to this moment where they
are just primed to have successimmediately. And part of that is
is building a network andconnections and just
understanding content. Being aconsumer of content and
(13:21):
understanding how to fit intothat ecosystem that you're
creating in, that is a hugelyhugely not even undervalued but
people don't even think aboutthat. But that's a huge kind of
predicator of success. And sofor me, I think a lot of when
you're first starting out, youjust have to be a student of the
platform.
You have to listen to otherpodcasts. You have to just do
the work and get your stuff out.And I think when you're in that
(13:43):
early stage, I usually tellpeople you shouldn't really
spend any time on marketing. AndI can make the counterargument
to that too because the way toget better at marketing is by
trying marketing. But you alsohave to understand that your
skills and your product probablyaren't good enough yet for your
marketing, no matter how good itis to be that effective.
And so a lot of times early on,I'm like, just get the reps in,
(14:04):
just do the work, keep yourexpectations low and like hone
that craft, study what otherpeople are doing, and don't care
too much about the kind ofexternal, you know, download
numbers, followers, all thatkind of stuff.
Justin (14:14):
I mean, also, another factor for both of us would be I
mean, already this year, I Imight have been a guest on at
least 10 podcasts. Sorepetitions, the practice,
figuring out what getsreactions, what gets shared,
what gets responses. These areall skills. The culmination of
(14:37):
all these skills and experiencesis what you bring to the table.
And so if you're brand new, youknow, playing in this space,
you're gonna need to put in morereps than somebody who has a lot
of experience with this kind ofstuff.
Yeah. So now with my other show,I can just invite somebody and
(15:00):
know that they're gonna be agood guest. We can just talk as
experts about the topic withoutmuch outline. I might write
down, like, 3 or 4 bulletsbeforehand. But when I did my
first interview podcast back in2012, I was doing so much
research and, like, all thisoutlining and researching the
(15:22):
guest and, you know, it was alot more work.
But now that I've been in thisindustry, I've been forming
these connections, and it's justa part of, you know, my week is
debating and thinking andtalking about these topics. A
lot easier to just jump intosomething and start going. But
(15:44):
it really depends what stageyou're at, what you want out of
it. And, certainly, if you'rebrand new, it's gonna take you
more time than somebody who'sbeen doing it for a long time.
Jeremy (15:53):
Yeah. We talked previously about the How I Write
podcast on a previous episode,and this was not, a show that
I'm really into right now. I wastalking about it with another
friend who also is aware ofDavid Perrell, and he was also a
big fan of the show, and he wasjust angry. He the this friend,
Andrew, is is not a podcaster.But, he, I was asking him if
he'd listened to it.
He's like, man, I'm just so madlistening to it. Like, how does
(16:14):
David Perrell, like, come out ofthe gates and just immediately
be this good at this show? Like,what is he doing? What does he
have that I don't? And he waskind of, like, mock angry at it.
But, actually, you know, he'shad a podcast that he did for
probably 2 years or 3 yearsbefore this that it's been a
couple years since he publishedit, but he had 2 years and like
over a 100 episodes, somethinglike that of interviewing
experience. And so that was kindof the training camp for this,
(16:35):
like, next project. And this issomething I think about all the
time where, you know, we'redoing this podcast now. I want
it to be successful, whateverthat means. I don't really even
have an idea.
The fact that we're doing it issuccessful for me, but I'm kind
of like, this is a sandbox toget to test out new format, new
skills, and we're gonna learn somuch from doing this. And we
already have and I don't knowwhat we're in, like 9 episodes
or something like that, that nowthe next show that I do, maybe
(16:57):
later this year, next year, 10years, all of these skills are
translatable into the nextthing. And so for me, I think a
lot there's it's almost clearthat there's, like, 2 timelines
emerging here. There's where areyou at with your show in
particular and then where areyou as a creative? Then we could
add on a 3rd, where are you as ahuman?
It probably factors into that aswell. What's going on in your
life right now outside yourcreative work? That plays a huge
(17:18):
role in how much time you can,allocate to the show and you
know, how much kind of justmental and creative attention
and energy you can give to it.So I think that it's it's gonna
be very different for everybodybased on those factors, but I
think one of the things that Iwould say based on let's just
take the kind of creativejourney and the podcast journey.
I think if you're early on inyour creative journey, you wanna
(17:40):
spend a lot of time just gettingyour reps in studying, not
worrying about perfection, liketrying to make a good show, but
not getting too hung up on thatthat you're not hitting publish.
I think on the podcasting trackside of things, maybe you
already have some experience.And I think this is true even if
you have a lot of experience asa creator and even a podcaster.
I think the first number ofepisodes, maybe 10 to 15
(18:01):
episodes depending on what theshow is. It feels to me like
most shows don't really findtheir footing and lock in their
format until you get a number ofepisodes under your belt. In any
show, this is where you wannaspend a lot of time early on is
trying to figure out like trythings out and experiment and
find out like what is the actuallike soul of the show to some
extent And the only way to getthere is to try different things
(18:21):
and see how it works.
And a lot of times, it's somerandom thing that just occurs
and you're like, hey, that thatfelt really good. Like, let's do
more of that and we'll lean intothat in the future. And so I
think early on the podcast sideof things, no matter your level
of experience, it takes sometime and some reps to unlock the
show, what for what it has thepotential to be.
Justin (18:39):
Even this show, we often will relisten to episodes, and
we can hear it. It's like, we'reoverexplaining where our
transitions aren't working, Andwe will send notes to each other
of like, okay. I feel like we'rewe're getting bogged down here,
and we need to try to improve onthat gradually. The other thing
(19:01):
I thought of is you you and Ihad all this practice talking
about this topic justinformally, you know, podcast
movement. We did a few YouTubelives together.
We've had practice justinteracting together. But even
with all that practice, it stilltook us a while to find our
groove once we got in themicrophones together.
Jeremy (19:22):
Mhmm.
Justin (19:22):
And that's why we were willing to rerecord those first
episodes, I think, because itwas like, oh, we just need more
practice. We need more justgetting in the groove, figuring
out what works for us. Yeah. Andthis is one opportunity, whether
it's production or marketing orwhatever, is especially in the
beginning to view all of theopportunities for practice. If
(19:45):
you have a show about politics,one simple way to practice is to
talk about politics around thedinner table, talk about
politics at the coffee shop.
There are places you can startemploying that skill of, can I
discuss this topic in a freeform, free flowing way without
(20:07):
getting too bogged down andmaking it compelling, making it
succinct, all the things thatmatter? You can put in the reps
in all the different places ofyour life. And this is also true
even when you have been doing itfor a while. Obviously, neither
of us are experts on that yet,but these are some of the things
that you wanna be spending yourtime on getting better on being
(20:31):
cognizant, being mindful of. AndI would be investing more time
in the kind of practice thanmaybe, you know, spending tons
of time on Twitter marketing theshow or something.
It's better to put work into theproduct, into the practice, then
there's some places you coulddefinitely waste your time that
don't matter.
Jeremy (20:51):
Yeah. Okay. So I think we've covered the early stage
there quite a bit when you'restill in kind of, like, figuring
out the show, figuring out yourown skills, how you kinda fit
into it. Let's maybe move on tothe show that has traction. And
now they have the same, let'ssay, just 10 hours a week, and
they're looking to now make themost of that.
So a show that we've got aproven concept to some extent,
it's gonna take some time toproduce it, but they've kinda
(21:13):
figured it out and they've gotsome some baseline level of
skills. What are some of thethings that you think are most
valuable, uses of time forsomebody with a proven show?
Justin (21:22):
Yeah. I think once you have something that's working,
something that listeners areresponding to, something they
like, I would switch to moreexperiments. For example, I like
the idea of posting a bunch ofclips from the same episode on
TikTok or Reels or YouTubeshorts and just seeing which
(21:43):
ones get traction and which onesdon't, what gets picked up and
what doesn't. What getsresponses and what doesn't. Or
take your transcript, throw itinto chat tbt, write a series of
blog posts on the same topic.
Which of these gets traction?Which doesn't? What gets shared?
What doesn't? I'd beexperimenting with different
(22:05):
channels that we talked aboutbefore, different places to
promote your show.
I'd be experimenting with ads.This is once you have something
that's working, you're takingthat product that you've made,
and you're saying, how can I getthis into more people's hands?
Like, how can I find newlisteners? It's the time to
start experimenting with thatstuff. So I would increase if
(22:26):
you can or be more mindful of,marketing experimentation.
What what comes to mind for you?
Jeremy (22:33):
We could split this into, like, the must haves and
the nice to haves almost. And Ithink I would still be really
focused on the quality of theshow. I think that's something
that at some point you feel likeyou got a solid show and you may
allocate less time to itactually. And sometimes it's
like, actually, it still couldbe better, and you would still
be better served spending yourtime there. So I think that that
is still something that is isworth not taking your eye off
(22:55):
the ball.
But outside of that, it's Ialmost feel like beating a dead
horse here a little bit, but Ithink integrating yourself into
a community and just being whereyour people are. And one of the
things that I see people gowrong with this a lot is they
wanna create their owncommunity, which there is a
there's value to this andthere's a time and a place for
it. But I think until you're atthe point where you have
thousands of listeners and apretty decent sized following
(23:17):
where it might actually makesense to cordon off a section of
your most dedicated fans, fewhundred people in some kind of,
you know, WhatsApp group or aSlack channel or a Facebook
group or what what have you. Ithink generally, you're better
served just being active in theplace where your people are
already hanging out. And thatactually gives you exposure to
new listeners while also givingyou an opportunity to hone your,
(23:38):
you know, messaging and deliveryat how you talk about the show
on a regular basis with peoplewho are not familiar with you
already.
And so Mhmm. This is what what Iwould really think about is,
like, finding that onecommunity, not trying to be in,
you know, 5 different Facebookgroups, 10 different Facebook
groups, whatever. It's like findone place that you can be in the
center of the action kind of andshow up there regularly. I think
that's one of the highest valuekind of returns on your time
(24:00):
investment that you can have.Again, I think then thinking
about the experimentation aswell, but I think that a lot of
times this just general nicheactivity, let's call it, in your
space is the kinda likefoundation layer where maybe
it's not you're not spendinglike 5 hours a week doing that,
but you're kinda chipping inevery other few minutes a day,
something like that.
Just checking in a couple ofcomments here and there being a
presence in that space. And Ithink we've talked about this in
(24:22):
a previous episode as well.Before people listen to your
podcast, they need so many touchpoints with you. And so I would
just think about, you know, howcan I just on a daily basis, I
don't need to be creatingcontent, but I can be chiming in
on other people's and eventuallythat kind of trickles back to
(24:44):
the show? That would be one ofthe big things that I would
focus on once you have a kind ofproven show that you know when
you tell people about it.
Their kind of eyes light up andthey're like, oh, that sounds
really interesting. Now it'skind of like, okay, well, how
can I just have conversationswith more people? And as you are
starting out, you're still inthat kind of less than a 1000
downloads an episode mayberange. I think that the fastest
way to actually get people intoyour show is 1 to 1 small group
(25:05):
conversations in communities. Ithink it does change a little
bit once you start to get you'rein tens of thousands and you're
looking to scale up to 20,000downloads an episode or 50,000.
You can't have that many one toone conversations anymore, and
so you do need to start lookingat more scalable marketing. But
in my opinion, I don't thinkyou're really ready for the
scalable marketing tactics untilyou get to that point. And
you've actually throughrepetition, through actual
(25:27):
conversations with people or youactually understand how to talk
about your show in a a way thatjust, like, clicks for people
that they're, like, you givethem your pitch and they're,
like, wow. That sounds awesome.
Justin (25:36):
I like this. I like this a lot. There's the you'll also
be building up a library ofepisodes, clips, time stamps,
transcripts that if you are anauthority on a topic or you've
put in the work on a topic, youcan start chiming in in
appropriate ways with thislibrary of content you've
(26:00):
created. Oh, you know what? I'vetalked to that expert before.
Here's a timestamp on this onething we're all discussing here
in this community that might beinteresting. So you're using
your library of podcast episodesas a resource that you can then
share with other people, andthat is a part of this
(26:20):
marketing, part of thediscovering what works, what's
shareable, what's not, and whatpeople respond to. And as people
see you as a resource, anexpert, a linchpin for a
particular community, they'regonna start to seek you out.
They're gonna wanna know I wannahear more from this person on
this topic.
Jeremy (26:41):
Yeah. And I'll give you my my trick for this that I
started doing this maybe a yearor 2 ago, and it has been
something I don't think I'veever actually, told anyone about
this. But what I do when I amcommenting on social media or in
a another community or somethinglike that, a lot of times
there'll be a question that I'mlike, Oh, this is a really great
question. And I don't actuallyhave any content on this yet.
I'll actually use that commentsection to start my first draft
(27:04):
of the blog post or the podcastepisode or whatever it is.
And so I'll actually writesometimes 300 words because I'm
like, I'm gonna put this time inanyway and I'm gonna actually
look really good when I givethis really thorough detailed,
answer in response to thisperson's question. And a lot of
times people are like, woah.This was so helpful because it's
more than what people expectfrom a comment section. But I
(27:25):
know, like, I'm just I'm gonnaput the work in now instead of
putting it in, you know, nextTuesday when I'm writing the
blog post on the topic. And nowI already have my head start.
And so what I do is I I treat itthat way and then I just copy
and paste that into a documentwhere I just keep all my, like,
ideas and I'll it'll I'll kindof title it like, okay. In this
community, this person askedthis question and so now I've
got like, okay. This is aquestion that I could maybe
(27:45):
explore more and already here'smy answer. And the other thing
that happens is a lot of times,the same questions come up again
and again. And so now I've kindagot the swipe file that I can
say, okay.
Here's my thorough answer tothis and I can just change the
details in here and customize itto this person's situation as
well. So, this is another waywhere I think a lot of times we
don't be as helpful as we couldbe on social media when we're
(28:06):
chiming into these conversationsbecause it feels like, man, am I
really going to spend 15 minuteswriting out a comment and an
answer to a question on Twitter?And it's like, well, I was gonna
spend that 15 minutes writingthe blog post, and it's the
same. It's it's all writtencontent. I might as well just do
that now and win a new fan a lotof times in the process.
Justin (28:22):
Yeah. If if people can see the Slack channel that you
and I are in, whenever westumble on a interesting tweet,
an interesting Reddit thread, weare throwing that into the
channel, discussing it, and kindof mining that as a potential
topic for the future.
Jeremy (28:35):
Yeah. So we've talked a little bit about where should we
be spending the time. And to behonest, I think most of the high
value time expenditures outsideof actually networking and
creating the show are they'repretty boring things. There's no
there's no, like, bigbreakthrough here where it's
like, oh, if you just spent 2hours a week doing this, you'd
be wildly successful. I thinkthere's a lot of small
(28:56):
optimizations a lot of timeswhere you're just like making
those investments in being aregular kind of contributor to a
community.
That's the stuff that has thebiggest impact over time. Now, I
think on the flip side, there isa lot more to be gained from
optimizing the things that youare not doing. And so if we look
at this 80 20, we've got thislike, okay, the 20% of things
that gets 80% of the results.What's the other 80% of things
(29:17):
that people are doing that maybethey are working to some extent,
like there is some positivevalue that comes out of it, but
it's not really worth the timeinvestment that goes into it. I
know I've got a a couple thingson my mind, but I'm curious if
anything comes to mind for youwhere people are kind of
spending too much time for theresults that that activity
generates.
Justin (29:35):
I mean, show notes is 1. You can always get better at
making show notes, and I'vefallen into this as well. But
they're not as important aspeople Mhmm. Think they are.
We've talked about this beforeas well, but spreading yourself
too thin across too manyplatforms.
So you're spending an enormousamount of time
Jeremy (29:56):
Yeah.
Justin (29:56):
Especially on social platforms that are designed to
suck you in. Mhmm. So it's like,oh, I'm just gonna go over here
and promote the podcast onTwitter. And then the next thing
you know, you've spent 3 hourswasting your time scrolling and
going to other things, gettingdistracted. I mean, those are 2
big ones for myself.
What's on your list?
Jeremy (30:15):
Yeah. Show notes is the one that I always people obsess
about this, and I think it'sbecause it's a thing you need to
have to some extent. Like, itdoesn't make sense. Like, you go
into your podcast hostingplatform. You're not just gonna
leave the show notes blankentirely.
But my suspicion is that podcastagencies and managers and
producers sell their clients onthe value of SEO optimized show
(30:37):
notes, quote unquote, withoutreally knowing what that means,
not being SEO experts themselvesas a kind of like value added,
like, look at this fancy thingthat you're going to get, which
I get. I've been a serviceprovider and I've run a podcast
agency and clients ask aboutthat kind of stuff. And so
you're like, yeah, we'll do ourbest SEO, optimize your show
notes. But personally, I have noevidence and I've never talked
to an actual SEO expert whosaid, yeah. Going all in on
(31:00):
podcast show notes like that'syou're gonna hit page 1 with
that.
I think if anything, it's gonnabe based on the guest and
probably if they're a famousguest, your show is probably not
ending up on page 1 ahead of allof their own stuff. So I'm a
skeptic in regards to shownotes. And a lot of times, like,
when I work with people, we'llactually do a time tracking
assessment and I'll say, okay,for the next 2 weeks, track all
(31:21):
the time you spend on yourpodcast. And a lot of times you
look at the things like the shownotes, the content repurposing.
These types of things take upthis huge amount of time and
I'll be like, okay.
Our first job here is to juststop doing all of that or take
it down to the absolute bareminimum because maybe we do
wanna bring this stuff back inin a better version in the
future. But right now, likewe've kind of got bigger fish to
fry and these maintenance tasksthat you've kind of taken on and
(31:44):
now have this ongoing costassociated with them. They're
actually detracting from thetime that you could be spending
on updating your show concept insome way or working on the
actual craft of the show that isactually going to have more
positive impact than simplyputting out the show notes. The
test for me is like, go look atyour analytics and that will
tell you everything you need toknow about the value of
investing time into your shownotes.
Justin (32:05):
The other one that just came up in my mind is editing
clips, like producing clips.
Jeremy (32:10):
Mhmm.
Justin (32:11):
I I have spent so much time on this, and there's all
these labor saving tools outthere, like with AI that are
supposed to automaticallygenerate clips for you. And even
those, I find time consuming touse
Jeremy (32:25):
to
Justin (32:25):
find like, to go in and actually clip the right spot to
make sure that they're and thento export them, and It can take
so much time. And for mostshows, it's probably not worth
(32:46):
doing that. It would be betterif you have hired an editor to
say, hey. If you find somethingin here that you think is just a
great 32nd clip, could you just,at that moment while you're
editing it, export that clip forus and then give us a video that
we're gonna upload to YouTube?And then you give us a short
clip that we can share, Andthat's one place you can save
(33:09):
time instead of you going backinto the episode and going,
okay.
I'm gonna find all these clips.And I haven't found an efficient
workflow for generating clipseven with all the crazy tools
that are out there. I I'm surethere's gonna be tons of podcast
clipping people that willcontact me now, but it just
takes time. It takes time, andit can take a lot of time if
(33:30):
you're not careful.
Jeremy (33:31):
Yeah. This is I'm really glad you brought this up. And I
think that this segues into thelast kinda main topic that I
wanted to talk about here on theaspect of where do you allocate
your time. And I was having aconversation with somebody
earlier today about cliprepurposing and AI tools. And
you might get this temporaryadvantage by getting this AI
clip tool that now allows you toget your clips out on all these
(33:52):
different platforms.
But to really take off, part ofwhat's going on here is that you
stand out. And if everybody'susing the same AI software,
nobody's clips are actuallystanding out. And so one of the
things with so much of marketingis that people are always
looking for the shortcut. And soa lot of times, it's the person
who actually puts anunreasonable amount of time into
the thing that is moresuccessful with it. And I think
(34:14):
that this is something that is areally hard pill to swallow for
a lot of us because we wanna doeverything.
And we wanna be on Instagram andwe wanna be on YouTube and we
wanna have a podcast and maybewanna have a newsletter and we
wanna do all of these thingsreally well. And at the end of
the day, it's like we can onlydo so much. And so it's kind of
making this decision consciouslywhere am I going to put an
unreasonable amount of time intothis. And one of the places
(34:35):
where this shows up so regularlyto me is when all the AI writing
tools came out last year, peoplewould sign up for my newsletter
and they would start reading andthey'd be like, man, this is so
good. Did you get AI to do this?
And I was like, the this is aridiculous question. Like, never
in in the the whole history ofhumankind, nobody if you saw
something that was greatwriting, you were like, no
(34:55):
wonder it's great becausethere's an artistic genius
behind it. Obviously, I'mreferring to myself here. And,
now we've got these AI toolscoming out and people
immediately think they can getthis incredible quality emotion
and pacing and ideas and contentwith AI. And this is something
where it's like I'm, you know,I'm not really offended by it,
but I'm like, no.
Of course, I'm not using AI forthis. This is one of the core
(35:17):
parts of my creative businessand practice and like I want to
spend more time than otherpeople think is reasonable on my
writing. And I think that youtalk to most really successful
creators and this is what itboils down to a lot of times.
It's like they love doing thething. They want to spend more
than anybody else is doing onit, time wise, more so than
money, I would say.
And they benefit from thatbecause that kind of experience
(35:39):
compounds over time. Their skillcompounds and they keep showing
up and publishing content inthat space and this is, at the
end of the day, one of the bigsecrets is is not doing that
everywhere but choosing 1 or 2places in your work where you're
like, I'm going to do this andspend more time on this better
than anyone else and I'm gonnaget incredulous looks when
people ask how much time do youspend on this. And you're like,
actually, I spend 40 hours aweek on my podcast. And people
(36:00):
are like, what? And you're like,oh,
Justin (36:01):
yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy (36:02):
I I love doing it, and I'm gonna keep doing it.
Justin (36:05):
I I do think there are high leverage places people can
spend their time that line upwith what you just said. Mhmm.
So for example, for this show,you and Chris find a clip that
you can put at the beginning ofthe show that takes extra time
to find a clip that hooks thelistener.
Jeremy (36:27):
Yeah. What I like about that is it actually really
aligns with this idea ofspending an unreasonable amount
of time in certain key places.And so I think there are
different points within alistener experience that matter
more than others. And so I reada newsletter by Louis Granier
from Everyone Hates Marketerslast week. This is a show that
has over a 1000000 downloadslifetime.
He said he actually spends outof his whole process, he spends
(36:48):
more time coming up with theepisode title and and the cover
art for it than he does on theediting and production and
everything else kinda behind thescenes. And his rationale here
is that the title dictateswhether somebody will click on
this or not. And you hear thesame thing about email subject
lines that dictates none none ofthe email content matters if
somebody doesn't open the email.And so these are the places,
(37:08):
these pivotal points where aperson will either listen to
your show or not. And I thinkabout cover art, show title,
show description to some extent,episode titles, the first minute
of an episode.
These are all decision makingpoints where I would spend much
more time on these places thanthe rest of it. And you hear
YouTubers talk a lot about thiswhere, like, they'll spend a lot
of time producing the video butthey'll spend double or triple
(37:29):
that on the thumbnail and thetitle because they know the
content doesn't matter ifsomebody doesn't click into the
video and it all hinges on that.And so I would think about these
key moments here like where issomebody not yet fully bought
into my episode or they haven'tclicked in on the show yet? This
is where I actually wanna spendmore time. And so kind of to
your point about, you know,putting in some extra time on
the post production, so oureditor, Chris, will make an edit
(37:51):
of the episode.
And then I'll go in and do atleast one more if not two passes
and remove more content toreally tighten it up. And so a
lot of times we cut out 20 or 30minutes. And this is a kind of
laborious process and like forme, it is it's actually really
fun because it's it'semotionally confronting to some
extent cutting out good stuffBut I also know it's compressing
the quality of the episode. AndI often think about it in the
(38:11):
terms of like the value density.Like every couple minutes,
there's something new thatpeople are like, oh wow.
That I never thought about itthat way before. And so this is
one of those behind the scenethings where it's like probably
the full conversation was great,but spending an extra hour
actually removing content makesthe listener experience of that
episode. They were gonna maybeclick play anyways but now
they're like, what? Oh, that wasso good. I'm definitely coming
(38:32):
back for the next episode.
So I think it's finding theseareas in your process whether
it's post production ormarketing, which I would say,
you know, episode titling andthumbnails are a 100% marketing
that are really going to have anoutsized impact on people's
decision whether to clickthrough or keep listening and,
and really spend more time thanother people might do on those.
So as we kind of wrap things uphere, what's your we're talking
(38:54):
about the 80 20 here of timespent on the podcast. So what's
your kind of 80 20 to leavepeople with, the small number of
things that you want them to totake away in terms of where
they're allocating their time?
Justin (39:04):
I mean, the the first thing I think of is in terms of
80 20 in a bigger scale is justbe the kind of person over your
lifetime that is interested inthe topic, that is building
relationships, buildingconnections, joining
communities, that is the true 8020. I spent 80% of my life
thinking about this topic,investing in this topic, and
(39:27):
then when I show up for the 20%that I'm recording, I can do
that with authority andconfidence. That's the real
answer. And then 80 20 willdepend on where you are at in
your podcast journey. I do thinkmost folks could probably be
making their show better Mhmm.
In some way. And that's theactual audio. That's the pacing.
(39:48):
That's shortening up theepisodes like you talked about.
And, also, I mean, if you'relistening to our companion
podcast, the roasts that we do,listen to those.
It's the same things we keeptalking about. Tighten up your
podcast cover art. Tighten upyour episode titles. We just
noticed on threads, TonyMastrorio says he will
unsubscribe from a podcast if hescans through the episode titles
(40:11):
and nothing's compelling.
Jeremy (40:12):
Yeah.
Justin (40:12):
So spend more time on the things that matter that
actually bring people in. So I Iwould kind of say all of those
things, production and thenpackaging are where folks should
be spending more of their time.
Jeremy (40:25):
Yeah. And I would add on to that. To me, the ultimate
accelerator and amplifier ofyour show's kind of potential
and growth is the show concept.And so I think coming up with a
unique combination of topic andformat and the way that you
explore it or present it, thisreally unlocks your potential
for growth. And what it does isit makes everything much easier.
(40:45):
So you can put in the sameamount of effort and you're
gonna get better results or youcan get the same results with
less effort, less money, lesstime, all of these things. And
so I think, you know, like we'vetalked about many times, we've
talked about quality, but Idon't know that we've talked a
lot about like the show concept.And so this the premise that the
show is based on so that whenyou give somebody that one
sentence pitch, you go to your10 of your ideal listeners and,
like, all 10 of them are, like,pulling up their phones and
they're like, wow. Where's thisshow been my whole life? And so
(41:08):
when you get to that point,everything else, you just get
way bigger returns on every houryou spend, every dollar you
spend.
And so I think that's where Iwould say is is really the
biggest impact that you canhave. This is is not something
that's easy and there are not,you know, a surplus of super,
super high quality, really ultracompelling podcast concepts out
there. But I think with wherepodcasting is going, this is
(41:30):
going to be more of a necessity,as a way to stand out.
Justin (41:33):
Mhmm. Yeah. 4 funny guys that get together for beers and
have a funny show is not gonnacut it. Like, if that's if
there's a spectrum, you know,there's a lot of 4 guys on a
couch trying to be funny Mhmm.Shows, and you can imagine going
from there onward.
There's a lot of topics andconcepts that if you put more
(41:56):
work into it and that, oh, wow.No one's really doing it this
way, or no one's really thoughtof it presenting it this way.
And I could put some work intothat, and that's what's gonna
grab listeners because it'sunique. It hasn't been done
before. People have never seenthat happen before.
People have never talked aboutthis topic in this way. I love
that. I love that positioning.And, again, it's hard because
(42:17):
it's kinda fuzzy, but this ishow you should be thinking. You
gotta think like Ira Glass.
Go and listen to a bunch ofinterviews with Ira Glass and,
observe how he thinks aboutmaking a show.
Jeremy (42:30):
Mhmm.
Justin (42:31):
And you gotta learn to emulate some of that. How can I
create a concept that'scompelling, that's not boring,
instead of just falling into thesame tropes that everyone else
is doing?
Jeremy (42:42):
So for everyone listening here, I would love to
hear from you. How much time areyou spending on your show? You
can get at both Justin and I onTwitter and the links are in the
show notes. And, we saw herethat, you know, most people who
submitted the survey werespending on average 10 hours a
week. Are you above that?
Are you below that? And what'sthe kind of breakdown look like
of that? So feel free to reachout to us on Twitter. You can
(43:02):
also reach us on LinkedIn or,leave us a voicemail, which the
link is also in the show notesand let us know there. And,
we'll maybe do a follow-upupdate on where our listeners
are kind of fitting in in thatspectrum and what their
allocation of hours was.
Justin (43:17):
Sounds great.
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