80/20 Podcast Marketing: Turn Your Limited Time Into Maximum Growth
People are always looking for the shortcut. And so a lot of times it's the person who actually puts an unreasonable amount of time into the thing that is more successful with it. And I think that this is something that is a really hard pill to swallow for a lot of us because we wanna do everything. We wanna be on Instagram and we wanna be on YouTube and we wanna have a podcast and maybe we wanna have a newsletter. And we wanna do all of these things really well, and we can only do so much.
Jeremy:And so it's making this decision consciously, where am I going to put an unreasonable amount of time into this? Welcome to Podcast Marketing Trends Explained. I'm Jeremy Enns from Podcast Marketing Academy.
Justin:And I'm Justin Jackson from transistor.afem. And together, we're digging into the data behind the Podcast Marketing Trends 2023 report to help you understand what it means for you and your show.
Jeremy:Our goal is to help you make better informed decisions about the way you create and market your show so you can spend more time on what actually matters for growth and accelerate your results.
Justin:Let's get into it. One thing I hear from podcasters all the time is just how long it takes to make a show. And I never really thought about it until a, we started working on this show together and I, I was reminded, and then I was looking at this graph in the report that talks about the weekly time investment. And to see it quantified like this is surprising. It's it's more hours per week than I would have guessed, and maybe than I would have admitted.
Jeremy:So one of the questions I have actually about this data as well, and we'll we'll kinda break down the numbers in a minute, but I suspect actually that these numbers here are underrepresenting the actual amount of time that goes into it because I think when I think through my own process with basically creating anything, it is optimistic, let's say. And so I'm like, oh, yeah. I spend, you know, 5 hours a week on, you know, doing my my newsletter, my my podcast or whatever. And really it's like 15 or something. And it's like, where does all this time come from?
Jeremy:But there's all this like admin and management and maintenance that is kind of behind the scenes. 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there that you don't really count. And I suspect that the numbers here are significant, but I think they're actually probably higher. So, maybe we should dive into these and break down kinda what we're seeing. And, just for some context here, we're again going by the growth rate, of the show.
Jeremy:So we've broken down the growth rates into 4 categories. There are the the top tier high growth shows that grew by a 100% or more a year, so they at least doubled their audience size. The next tier down is 21% to a 100%. So these were the shows that didn't double in size, but outperformed the median of all shows. And then we've got shows that grew by a little bit but less than the median, 0 to 20%.
Jeremy:And then the 4th category is shows that actually shrunk on a downloads per episode basis. So these are the 4 categories that we've broken down the time investment per week into. So, Justin, Justin, you wanna take us through the numbers here?
Justin:Yeah. So for the highest growth shows, the total amount of time invested per week was 12.1 hours, but 3.9 of that was marketing and 8.2 was production. Next category down 9. 1 hours and, around 7 hours on production, around 2 hours on marketing. Next group down that had 0 to 20% growth.
Justin:That's about 10 hours a week, about 6.4 on production, 3.6 hours on marketing. And then the low growth shows 9.5 hours total per week and 6.3 hours on production, 3.2 on marketing. On average, every show is spending about 10 hours a week.
Jeremy:Yeah. So you talked through the product time spent on production and the time spent on marketing. And the reason I asked this question is there's this old kind of idea that you should spend just as much time making the thing, whether it's art or a podcast or content, whatever you wanna call it, however you wanna define it as you do spend on marketing it. And so I was curious, you know, a lot of times people will say, you know, that's a 5050 split, just as much time on marketing as production. I know that I've heard some people in the content marketing space say you should be spending 80% of your time on marketing.
Jeremy:I think there's some assumptions here of, like, maybe you have a product that is complete and finished and doesn't also require ongoing, you know, creation. And podcasting as as a medium is an interesting place here where for some people, business owners, podcasting is marketing for their product or service. Whereas other people, podcasting is the product and they need to do marketing outside of that. So it gets a little bit fuzzy around the percentages here, but across all the shows, the typical show spends 10 hours a week on average on everything that they do marketing and production. And 31.5 percent of that was spent on marketing.
Jeremy:So they're spending about a third of their time on marketing. So 3.2 hours on marketing and 6.9 hours on basically everything else, production management, maintenance. And again, I would say that there is a lot probably on that maintenance and management side that is not actually getting counted here. My assumption would be when most people are giving their number here for this kind of, you know, 6.9 hours that they're spending on production, They are really thinking about research, interviewing, recording, editing is is my kind of guess.
Justin:Yeah. And I just wanna stop here, pause, and say, if you are a podcaster and you are making a show, let's just celebrate the fact that this is a considerable investment and well done. Yes. If you're if you're putting in the effort for this, it just makes me respect everybody who tries to make a podcast, because this is not an immaterial amount of time. It's a lot of time.
Justin:It's so well done. If you're listening to this and you make a show, my hat is off to you because this is not for the faint of heart. This is real, like, you gotta be in the trenches making this thing that you care about. So that's that's what really hit me is, wow, This is an investment. And Yep.
Justin:And people are probably underreporting what it actually takes to make a show.
Jeremy:Yeah. And, of course, this is not counting all the time you spend refreshing your stats page either. So, we could add in probably another couple hours a week, in that for for most podcasters. Yeah. And I think that, you know, what's interesting when I look at this is if you've created a podcast, probably most people listening, will look at this and be like, yeah.
Jeremy:I I am fully aware of the amount of time that this is taking from my life, and this is one of the most common pain points that I hear from podcasters. And what we wanna do in this episode is look at some of the ideas around, you know, where is your time actually best spent? Because we all have a finite amount of time that we have to allocate to the podcast. And for some people that might be 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week. If it's your full time gig and you go all in on the podcast, maybe you have, you know, a a big advantage there where you can spend more time on it.
Jeremy:Maybe if you have a team, you have more kind of person hours you can allocate to it. But at some point we all have some limit that we're operating within. And so we want to look at some of the things that maybe are high leverage tasks and uses of your time where you're gonna get more out of that and other tasks where you might think it's something that you should be doing that might not actually be getting us the best return on our investment. So, that's kind of what we're going to be diving into here. But the one thing before we move on from this data is when we look at the reasons for pod fade, I think this is it.
Jeremy:I think people going in have no idea just how much work it takes, and there's all these kind of hidden costs associated with podcasting. And so I think you get into this, you do a few weeks of it, and you're like, wow. I this is what I've signed up for. That was not quite what I was anticipating. And you make a decision, which is probably often the right decision and say, actually, I don't think I love podcasting as much as as this.
Justin:Yeah. And it it brings up other questions that people should consider. Do I really wanna do a weekly podcast? Maybe it should be every 2 weeks. Maybe it should be monthly.
Justin:You can use this data to think through, like, am I ready for this investment? I would encourage people to actually time track, like, actually get one of those time trackers. And every time you do something for the podcast, record it. If you do that, by the way, reach out to us. I'd love to see a weekly breakdown, but it's heavy.
Justin:And so use this data to inform some of your production decisions. What kind of show do I 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 places where people could be saving their time, energy, and enjoying making the podcast and still getting the same results or very close results to what they would get, but using less time.
Jeremy:Yeah. Before we get into kind of the 80 20 here of maybe allocating your time when it comes to podcasting, is there anything that stood out to you from the different categories of growth that might be worth exploring a little bit?
Justin:I mean, we talk about how important it is to have a good product.
Jeremy:Mhmm.
Justin:And the highest growth shows are spending the greatest proportion of their time on production significantly more. And so they are investing more of their time in crafting the product, which, again, your your number one referral source is going to be word-of-mouth almost with every podcast. And so if you're making a podcast that's so good that people are compelled to share it, then that's a pretty good investment of your time.
Jeremy:Yeah. That's the one that stood out to me where the the highest growth shows, the shows that doubled in size or or greater, they spent the most time overall by 2 more hours a week from the next best and so they were the average was 10 hours a week and, the next best was also 10 hours a week on the dot. They were spending 12.1. They also spent the most, on production and also the most on marketing, but marketing was actually pretty in line the number of hours per week that they were spending. And so here we look at, like, okay, if they did spend more time marketing a little bit than the average show, but they spent significantly more time, 8.2 hours a week on production versus everything else was basically around 6 and a half.
Jeremy:So they're spending 2 hours a week more on various production related tasks. Not that much more time on marketing, which to me, this was actually a little bit surprising. And so, you know, obviously I I teach people marketing and part of what we teach is around building a great product in the first place. But part of me was thinking my bias was towards, I bet the highest growth shows are gonna be spending, more time on marketing activities. And that just wasn't the case.
Jeremy:And so this was both surprising and also kind of like affirming in a way. Because the core of my philosophy as as is yours, as we talk about on the show here is like all great marketing starts with a great product. And no matter how great your marketing is, if you have a crappy product, there's nothing that can save you.
Justin: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 to make the best possible show we could with the amount of time we had. It was painful.
Justin:We finished recording, and then we're, like, let's record it again. Essentially doubling the amount of production time, I think the show was better for it, especially with new shows. Your first 2, 3 episodes, if you wanna make a good impression, you need to be putting forward the best possible product, and that might mean investing more time.
Jeremy:So you just made a good segue into this category here of getting into the 80/20 because a big part of my belief around this is that this actually changes depending on where you are in your kind of journey as a podcaster that that the highest impact place to spend your time when you're already at, let's say, 10000 downloads an episode is very different when you're releasing your first 10 episodes. So somebody in their first 10 episodes, where would you recommend they allocate the majority of their time?
Justin:Yeah. I was thinking about this before we started recording because there's so many factors. I was thinking about this episode I just recorded for my other podcast, where we don't release an episode every week. It's basically whenever we wanna record something. I reached out to 2 people.
Justin:Basically, the prep was we were all debating and arguing on Twitter, and I just said, let's take 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. I published it. My guess is that the total production time for that podcast, tops, was 3 hours.
Justin:But I'm not doing the editing. I didn't have to do very much prep because I was already seeped in the topic. Like, I'd been marinating in the topic, and my guests had been marinating in the topic. We also knew each other. We had rapport.
Justin:They had their equipment set up. It was, like, easy. And so so much of this depends on not just where you're at with your show, but everything else, all the other layers of who you are and who you are in relation to the audience and the topic.
Jeremy:This is what I think about all the time with people starting out is, like, a lot of people who are podcasters have had previous creative experience, but I think a lot of time the people who hit the ground running, they have been doing something that has gotten them to this moment where they are just primed to have success immediately. And part of that is is building a network and connections and just understanding content. Being a consumer of content and understanding how to fit into that ecosystem that you're creating in, that is a hugely hugely not even undervalued but people don't even think about that. But that's a huge kind of predicator of success. And so for me, I think a lot of when you're first starting out, you just have to be a student of the platform.
Jeremy:You have to listen to other podcasts. You have to just do the work and get your stuff out. And I think when you're in that early stage, I usually tell people you shouldn't really spend any time on marketing. And I can make the counterargument to that too because the way to get better at marketing is by trying marketing. But you also have to understand that your skills and your product probably aren't good enough yet for your marketing, no matter how good it is to be that effective.
Jeremy:And so a lot of times early on, I'm like, just get the reps in, just do the work, keep your expectations low and like hone that craft, study what other people are doing, and don't care too much about the kind of external, you know, download numbers, followers, all that kind of stuff.
Justin:I mean, also, another factor for both of us would be I mean, already this year, I I might have been a guest on at least 10 podcasts. So repetitions, the practice, figuring out what gets reactions, what gets shared, what gets responses. These are all skills. The culmination of all these skills and experiences is what you bring to the table. And so if you're brand new, you know, playing in this space, you're gonna need to put in more reps than somebody who has a lot of experience with this kind of stuff.
Justin:Yeah. So now with my other show, I can just invite somebody and know that they're gonna be a good guest. We can just talk as experts about the topic without much outline. I might write down, like, 3 or 4 bullets beforehand. But when I did my first interview podcast back in 2012, I was doing so much research and, like, all this outlining and researching the guest and, you know, it was a lot more work.
Justin:But now that I've been in this industry, I've been forming these connections, and it's just a part of, you know, my week is debating and thinking and talking about these topics. A lot easier to just jump into something and start going. But it really depends what stage you're at, what you want out of it. And, certainly, if you're brand new, it's gonna take you more time than somebody who's been doing it for a long time.
Jeremy: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 was talking about it with another friend who also is aware of David Perrell, and he was also a big fan of the show, and he was just angry. He the this friend, Andrew, is is not a podcaster. But, he, I was asking him if he'd listened to it.
Jeremy:He's like, man, I'm just so mad listening to it. Like, how does David Perrell, like, come out of the 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 was kind of, like, mock angry at it.
Jeremy:But, actually, you know, he's had a podcast that he did for probably 2 years or 3 years before this that it's been a couple years since he published it, but he had 2 years and like over a 100 episodes, something like that of interviewing experience. And so that was kind of the training camp for this, like, next project. And this is something I think about all the time where, you know, we're doing this podcast now. I want it to be successful, whatever that means. I don't really even have an idea.
Jeremy:The fact that we're doing it is successful for me, but I'm kind of like, this is a sandbox to get to test out new format, new skills, and we're gonna learn so much from doing this. And we already have and I don't know what we're in, like 9 episodes or something like that, that now the next show that I do, maybe later this year, next year, 10 years, all of these skills are translatable into the next thing. And so for me, I think a lot there's it's almost clear that there's, like, 2 timelines emerging here. There's where are you at with your show in particular and then where are you as a creative? Then we could add on a 3rd, where are you as a human?
Jeremy:It probably factors into that as well. What's going on in your life right now outside your creative work? That plays a huge role in how much time you can, allocate to the show and you know, how much kind of just mental and creative attention and energy you can give to it. So I think that it's it's gonna be very different for everybody based on those factors, but I think one of the things that I would say based on let's just take the kind of creative journey and the podcast journey. I think if you're early on in your creative journey, you wanna spend a lot of time just getting your reps in studying, not worrying about perfection, like trying to make a good show, but not getting too hung up on that that you're not hitting publish.
Jeremy:I think on the podcasting track side of things, maybe you already have some experience. And I think this is true even if you have a lot of experience as a creator and even a podcaster. I think the first number of episodes, maybe 10 to 15 episodes depending on what the show is. It feels to me like most shows don't really find their footing and lock in their format until you get a number of episodes under your belt. In any show, this is where you wanna spend a lot of time early on is trying to figure out like try things out and experiment and find out like what is the actual like soul of the show to some extent And the only way to get there is to try different things and see how it works.
Jeremy:And a lot of times, it's some random thing that just occurs and you're like, hey, that that felt really good. Like, let's do more of that and we'll lean into that in the future. And so I think early on the podcast side of things, no matter your level of experience, it takes some time and some reps to unlock the show, what for what it has the potential to be.
Justin:Even this show, we often will relisten to episodes, and we can hear it. It's like, we're overexplaining where our transitions aren't working, And we will send notes to each other of like, okay. I feel like we're we're getting bogged down here, and we need to try to improve on that gradually. The other thing I thought of is you you and I had all this practice talking about this topic just informally, you know, podcast movement. We did a few YouTube lives together.
Justin:We've had practice just interacting together. But even with all that practice, it still took us a while to find our groove once we got in the microphones together.
Jeremy:Mhmm.
Justin:And that's why we were willing to rerecord those first episodes, I think, because it was like, oh, we just need more practice. We need more just getting in the groove, figuring out what works for us. Yeah. And this is one opportunity, whether it's production or marketing or whatever, is especially in the beginning to view all of the opportunities for practice. If you have a show about politics, one simple way to practice is to talk about politics around the dinner table, talk about politics at the coffee shop.
Justin:There are places you can start employing that skill of, can I discuss this topic in a free form, free flowing way without getting too bogged down and making it compelling, making it succinct, all the things that matter? You can put in the reps in all the different places of your life. And this is also true even when you have been doing it for a while. Obviously, neither of us are experts on that yet, but these are some of the things that you wanna be spending your time on getting better on being cognizant, being mindful of. And I would be investing more time in the kind of practice than maybe, you know, spending tons of time on Twitter marketing the show or something.
Justin:It's better to put work into the product, into the practice, then there's some places you could definitely waste your time that don't matter.
Jeremy:Yeah. Okay. So I think we've covered the early stage there quite a bit when you're still in kind of, like, figuring out the show, figuring out your own skills, how you kinda fit into it. Let's maybe move on to the show that has traction. And now they have the same, let's say, just 10 hours a week, and they're looking to now make the most of that.
Jeremy:So a show that we've got a proven concept to some extent, it's gonna take some time to produce it, but they've kinda figured it out and they've got some some baseline level of skills. What are some of the things that you think are most valuable, uses of time for somebody with a proven show?
Justin:Yeah. I think once you have something that's working, something that listeners are responding to, something they like, I would switch to more experiments. For example, I like the idea of posting a bunch of clips from the same episode on TikTok or Reels or YouTube shorts and just seeing which ones get traction and which ones don't, what gets picked up and what doesn't. What gets responses and what doesn't. Or take your transcript, throw it into chat tbt, write a series of blog posts on the same topic.
Justin:Which of these gets traction? Which doesn't? What gets shared? What doesn't? I'd be experimenting with different channels that we talked about before, different places to promote your show.
Justin:I'd be experimenting with ads. This is once you have something that's working, you're taking that product that you've made, and you're saying, how can I get this into more people's hands? Like, how can I find new listeners? It's the time to start experimenting with that stuff. So I would increase if you can or be more mindful of, marketing experimentation.
Justin:What what comes to mind for you?
Jeremy:We could split this into, like, the must haves and the nice to haves almost. And I think I would still be really focused on the quality of the show. I think that's something that at some point you feel like you got a solid show and you may allocate less time to it actually. And sometimes it's like, actually, it still could be better, and you would still be better served spending your time there. So I think that that is still something that is is worth not taking your eye off the ball.
Jeremy:But outside of that, it's I almost feel like beating a dead horse here a little bit, but I think integrating yourself into a community and just being where your people are. And one of the things that I see people go wrong with this a lot is they wanna create their own community, which there is a there's value to this and there's a time and a place for it. But I think until you're at the point where you have thousands of listeners and a pretty decent sized following where it might actually make sense to cordon off a section of your most dedicated fans, few hundred people in some kind of, you know, WhatsApp group or a Slack channel or a Facebook group or what what have you. I think generally, you're better served just being active in the place where your people are already hanging out. And that actually gives you exposure to new listeners while also giving you an opportunity to hone your, you know, messaging and delivery at how you talk about the show on a regular basis with people who are not familiar with you already.
Jeremy:And so Mhmm. This is what what I would really think about is, like, finding that one community, not trying to be in, you know, 5 different Facebook groups, 10 different Facebook groups, whatever. It's like find one place that you can be in the center of the action kind of and show up there regularly. I think that's one of the highest value kind of returns on your time investment that you can have. Again, I think then thinking about the experimentation as well, but I think that a lot of times this just general niche activity, let's call it, in your space is the kinda like foundation layer where maybe it's not you're not spending like 5 hours a week doing that, but you're kinda chipping in every other few minutes a day, something like that.
Jeremy:Just checking in a couple of comments here and there being a presence in that space. And I think we've talked about this in a previous episode as well. Before people listen to your podcast, they need so many touch points with you. And so I would just think about, you know, how can I just on a daily basis, I don't need to be creating content, but I can be chiming in on other people's and eventually that kind of trickles back to the show? That would be one of the big things that I would focus on once you have a kind of proven show that you know when you tell people about it.
Jeremy:Their kind of eyes light up and they're like, oh, that sounds really interesting. Now it's kind of like, okay, well, how can I just have conversations with more people? And as you are starting out, you're still in that kind of less than a 1000 downloads an episode maybe range. I think that the fastest way to actually get people into your show is 1 to 1 small group conversations in communities. I think it does change a little bit once you start to get you're in tens of thousands and you're looking to scale up to 20,000 downloads an episode or 50,000.
Jeremy:You can't have that many one to one conversations anymore, and so you do need to start looking at more scalable marketing. But in my opinion, I don't think you're really ready for the scalable marketing tactics until you get to that point. And you've actually through repetition, through actual conversations with people or you actually understand how to talk about your show in a a way that just, like, clicks for people that they're, like, you give them your pitch and they're, like, wow. That sounds awesome.
Justin:I like this. I like this a lot. There's the you'll also be building up a library of episodes, clips, time stamps, transcripts that if you are an authority on a topic or you've put in the work on a topic, you can start chiming in in appropriate ways with this library of content you've created. Oh, you know what? I've talked to that expert before.
Justin:Here's a timestamp on this one thing we're all discussing here in this community that might be interesting. So you're using your library of podcast episodes as a resource that you can then share with other people, and that is a part of this marketing, part of the discovering what works, what's shareable, what's not, and what people respond to. And as people see you as a resource, an expert, a linchpin for a particular community, they're gonna start to seek you out. They're gonna wanna know I wanna hear more from this person on this topic.
Jeremy:Yeah. And I'll give you my my trick for this that I started doing this maybe a year or 2 ago, and it has been something I don't think I've ever actually, told anyone about this. But what I do when I am commenting on social media or in a another community or something like that, a lot of times there'll be a question that I'm like, Oh, this is a really great question. And I don't actually have any content on this yet. I'll actually use that comment section to start my first draft of the blog post or the podcast episode or whatever it is.
Jeremy:And so I'll actually write sometimes 300 words because I'm like, I'm gonna put this time in anyway and I'm gonna actually look really good when I give this really thorough detailed, answer in response to this person's question. And a lot of times people are like, woah. This was so helpful because it's more than what people expect from a comment section. But I know, like, I'm just I'm gonna put the work in now instead of putting it in, you know, next Tuesday when I'm writing the blog post on the topic. And now I already have my head start.
Jeremy:And so what I do is I I treat it that way and then I just copy and paste that into a document where I just keep all my, like, ideas and I'll it'll I'll kind of title it like, okay. In this community, this person asked this question and so now I've got like, okay. This is a question that I could maybe explore more and already here's my 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 kinda got the swipe file that I can say, okay.
Jeremy:Here's my thorough answer to this and I can just change the details in here and customize it to this person's situation as well. So, this is another way where I think a lot of times we don't be as helpful as we could be on social media when we're chiming into these conversations because it feels like, man, am I really going to spend 15 minutes writing out a comment and an answer to a question on Twitter? And it's like, well, I was gonna spend that 15 minutes writing the blog post, and it's the same. It's it's all written content. I might as well just do that now and win a new fan a lot of times in the process.
Justin:Yeah. If if people can see the Slack channel that you and I are in, whenever we stumble on a interesting tweet, an interesting Reddit thread, we are throwing that into the channel, discussing it, and kind of mining that as a potential topic for the future.
Jeremy:Yeah. So we've talked a little bit about where should we be spending the time. And to be honest, I think most of the high value time expenditures outside of actually networking and creating the show are they're pretty boring things. There's no there's no, like, big breakthrough here where it's like, oh, if you just spent 2 hours a week doing this, you'd be wildly successful. I think there's a lot of small optimizations a lot of times where you're just like making those investments in being a regular kind of contributor to a community.
Jeremy:That's the stuff that has the biggest impact over time. Now, I think on the flip side, there is a lot more to be gained from optimizing the things that you are not doing. And so if we look at this 80 20, we've got this like, okay, the 20% of things that gets 80% of the results. What's the other 80% of things that people are doing that maybe they are working to some extent, like there is some positive value that comes out of it, but it's not really worth the time investment that goes into it. I know I've got a a couple things on my mind, but I'm curious if anything comes to mind for you where people are kind of spending too much time for the results that that activity generates.
Justin:I mean, show notes is 1. You can always get better at making show notes, and I've fallen into this as well. But they're not as important as people Mhmm. Think they are. We've talked about this before as well, but spreading yourself too thin across too many platforms.
Justin:So you're spending an enormous amount of time
Jeremy:Yeah.
Justin: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 on Twitter. And then the next thing you know, you've spent 3 hours wasting your time scrolling and going to other things, getting distracted. I mean, those are 2 big ones for myself.
Justin:What's on your list?
Jeremy:Yeah. Show notes is the one that I always people obsess about this, and I think it's because it's a thing you need to have to some extent. Like, it doesn't make sense. Like, you go into your podcast hosting platform. You're not just gonna leave the show notes blank entirely.
Jeremy:But my suspicion is that podcast agencies and managers and producers sell their clients on the value of SEO optimized show notes, quote unquote, without really knowing what that means, not being SEO experts themselves as a kind of like value added, like, look at this fancy thing that you're going to get, which I get. I've been a service provider and I've run a podcast agency and clients ask about that kind of stuff. And so you're like, yeah, we'll do our best SEO, optimize your show notes. But personally, I have no evidence and I've never talked to an actual SEO expert who said, yeah. Going all in on podcast show notes like that's you're gonna hit page 1 with that.
Jeremy:I think if anything, it's gonna be based on the guest and probably if they're a famous guest, your show is probably not ending up on page 1 ahead of all of their own stuff. So I'm a skeptic in regards to show notes. And a lot of times, like, when I work with people, we'll actually do a time tracking assessment and I'll say, okay, for the next 2 weeks, track all the time you spend on your podcast. And a lot of times you look at the things like the show notes, the content repurposing. These types of things take up this huge amount of time and I'll be like, okay.
Jeremy:Our first job here is to just stop doing all of that or take it down to the absolute bare minimum because maybe we do wanna bring this stuff back in in a better version in the future. But right now, like we've kind of got bigger fish to fry and these maintenance tasks that you've kind of taken on and now have this ongoing cost associated with them. They're actually detracting from the time that you could be spending on updating your show concept in some way or working on the actual craft of the show that is actually going to have more positive impact than simply putting out the show notes. The test for me is like, go look at your analytics and that will tell you everything you need to know about the value of investing time into your show notes.
Justin:The other one that just came up in my mind is editing clips, like producing clips.
Jeremy:Mhmm.
Justin:I I have spent so much time on this, and there's all these labor saving tools out there, like with AI that are supposed to automatically generate clips for you. And even those, I find time consuming to use
Jeremy:to
Justin:find like, to go in and actually clip the right spot to make sure that they're and then to export them, and It can take so much time. And for most shows, it's probably not worth doing that. It would be better if you have hired an editor to say, hey. If you find something in here that you think is just a great 32nd clip, could you just, at that moment while you're editing it, export that clip for us 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, And that's one place you can save time instead of you going back into the episode and going, okay.
Justin:I'm gonna find all these clips. And I haven't found an efficient workflow for generating clips even with all the crazy tools that are out there. I I'm sure there's gonna be tons of podcast clipping people that will contact me now, but it just takes time. It takes time, and it can take a lot of time if you're not careful.
Jeremy:Yeah. This is I'm really glad you brought this up. And I think that this segues into the last kinda main topic that I wanted to talk about here on the aspect of where do you allocate your time. And I was having a conversation with somebody earlier today about clip repurposing and AI tools. And you might get this temporary advantage by getting this AI clip tool that now allows you to get your clips out on all these different platforms.
Jeremy:But to really take off, part of what's going on here is that you stand out. And if everybody's using the same AI software, nobody's clips are actually standing out. And so one of the things with so much of marketing is that people are always looking for the shortcut. And so a lot of times, it's the person who actually puts an unreasonable amount of time into the thing that is more successful with it. And I think that this is something that is a really hard pill to swallow for a lot of us because we wanna do everything.
Jeremy:And we wanna be on Instagram and we wanna be on YouTube and we wanna have a podcast and maybe wanna have a newsletter and we wanna do all of these things really well. And at the end of the day, it's like we can only do so much. And so it's kind of making this decision consciously where am I going to put an unreasonable amount of time into this. And one of the places where this shows up so regularly to me is when all the AI writing tools came out last year, people would sign up for my newsletter and they would start reading and they'd be like, man, this is so good. Did you get AI to do this?
Jeremy:And I was like, the this is a ridiculous question. Like, never in in the the whole history of humankind, nobody if you saw something that was great writing, you were like, no wonder it's great because there's an artistic genius behind it. Obviously, I'm referring to myself here. And, now we've got these AI tools coming out and people immediately think they can get this incredible quality emotion and pacing and ideas and content with 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.
Jeremy:Of course, I'm not using AI for this. This is one of the core parts of my creative business and practice and like I want to spend more time than other people think is reasonable on my writing. And I think that you talk to most really successful creators and this is what it boils down to a lot of times. It's like they love doing the thing. They want to spend more than anybody else is doing on it, time wise, more so than money, I would say.
Jeremy:And they benefit from that because that kind of experience compounds over time. Their skill compounds and they keep showing up and publishing content in that space and this is, at the end of the day, one of the big secrets is is not doing that everywhere but choosing 1 or 2 places in your work where you're like, I'm going to do this and spend more time on this better than anyone else and I'm gonna get incredulous looks when people ask how much time do you spend on this. And you're like, actually, I spend 40 hours a week on my podcast. And people are like, what? And you're like, oh,
Justin:yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy:I I love doing it, and I'm gonna keep doing it.
Justin:I I do think there are high leverage places people can spend their time that line up with what you just said. Mhmm. So for example, for this show, you and Chris find a clip that you can put at the beginning of the show that takes extra time to find a clip that hooks the listener.
Jeremy:Yeah. What I like about that is it actually really aligns with this idea of spending an unreasonable amount of time in certain key places. And so I think there are different points within a listener experience that matter more than others. And so I read a newsletter by Louis Granier from Everyone Hates Marketers last week. This is a show that has over a 1000000 downloads lifetime.
Jeremy:He said he actually spends out of his whole process, he spends more time coming up with the episode title and and the cover art for it than he does on the editing and production and everything else kinda behind the scenes. And his rationale here is that the title dictates whether somebody will click on this or not. And you hear the same thing about email subject lines that dictates none none of the email content matters if somebody doesn't open the email. And so these are the places, these pivotal points where a person will either listen to your show or not. And I think about cover art, show title, show description to some extent, episode titles, the first minute of an episode.
Jeremy:These are all decision making points where I would spend much more time on these places than the rest of it. And you hear YouTubers talk a lot about this where, like, they'll spend a lot of time producing the video but they'll spend double or triple that on the thumbnail and the title because they know the content doesn't matter if somebody doesn't click into the video and it all hinges on that. And so I would think about these key moments here like where is somebody not yet fully bought into my episode or they haven't clicked in on the show yet? This is where I actually wanna spend more time. And so kind of to your point about, you know, putting in some extra time on the post production, so our editor, Chris, will make an edit of the episode.
Jeremy:And then I'll go in and do at least one more if not two passes and remove more content to really tighten it up. And so a lot of times we cut out 20 or 30 minutes. And this is a kind of laborious process and like for me, it is it's actually really fun because it's it's emotionally confronting to some extent cutting out good stuff But I also know it's compressing the quality of the episode. And I often think about it in the terms of like the value density. Like every couple minutes, there's something new that people are like, oh wow.
Jeremy:That I never thought about it that way before. And so this is one of those behind the scene things where it's like probably the full conversation was great, but spending an extra hour actually removing content makes the listener experience of that episode. They were gonna maybe click play anyways but now they're like, what? Oh, that was so good. I'm definitely coming back for the next episode.
Jeremy:So I think it's finding these areas in your process whether it's post production or marketing, which I would say, you know, episode titling and thumbnails are a 100% marketing that are really going to have an outsized impact on people's decision whether to click through or keep listening and, and really spend more time than other people might do on those. So as we kind of wrap things up here, what's your we're talking about the 80 20 here of time spent on the podcast. So what's your kind of 80 20 to leave people with, the small number of things that you want them to to take away in terms of where they're allocating their time?
Justin:I mean, the the first thing I think of is in terms of 80 20 in a bigger scale is just be the kind of person over your lifetime that is interested in the topic, that is building relationships, building connections, joining communities, that is the true 80 20. I spent 80% of my life thinking about this topic, investing in this topic, and then when I show up for the 20% that I'm recording, I can do that with authority and confidence. That's the real answer. And then 80 20 will depend on where you are at in your podcast journey. I do think most folks could probably be making their show better Mhmm.
Justin:In some way. And that's the actual audio. That's the pacing. That's shortening up the episodes like you talked about. And, also, I mean, if you're listening to our companion podcast, the roasts that we do, listen to those.
Justin:It's the same things we keep talking about. Tighten up your podcast cover art. Tighten up your episode titles. We just noticed on threads, Tony Mastrorio says he will unsubscribe from a podcast if he scans through the episode titles and nothing's compelling.
Jeremy:Yeah.
Justin:So spend more time on the things that matter that actually bring people in. So I I would kind of say all of those things, production and then packaging are where folks should be spending more of their time.
Jeremy:Yeah. And I would add on to that. To me, the ultimate accelerator and amplifier of your show's kind of potential and growth is the show concept. And so I think coming up with a unique combination of topic and format and the way that you explore it or present it, this really unlocks your potential for growth. And what it does is it makes everything much easier.
Jeremy:So you can put in the same amount of effort and you're gonna get better results or you can get the same results with less effort, less money, less time, all of these things. And so I think, you know, like we've talked about many times, we've talked about quality, but I don'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 when you give somebody that one sentence pitch, you go to your 10 of your ideal listeners and, like, all 10 of them are, like, pulling up their phones and they're like, wow. Where's this show been my whole life? And so when you get to that point, everything else, you just get way bigger returns on every hour you spend, every dollar you spend.
Jeremy:And so I think that's where I would say is is really the biggest impact that you can have. This is is not something that's easy and there are not, you know, a surplus of super, super high quality, really ultra compelling podcast concepts out there. But I think with where podcasting is going, this is going to be more of a necessity, as a way to stand out.
Justin:Mhmm. Yeah. 4 funny guys that get together for beers and have a funny show is not gonna cut 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.
Justin:There's a lot of topics and concepts that if you put more work into it and that, oh, wow. No one's really doing it this way, or no one's really thought of it presenting it this way. And I could put some work into that, and that's what's gonna grab listeners because it's unique. It hasn't been done before. People have never seen that happen before.
Justin:People have never talked about this topic in this way. I love that. I love that positioning. And, again, it's hard because it's kinda fuzzy, but this is how you should be thinking. You gotta think like Ira Glass.
Justin:Go and listen to a bunch of interviews with Ira Glass and, observe how he thinks about making a show.
Jeremy:Mhmm.
Justin:And you gotta learn to emulate some of that. How can I create a concept that's compelling, that's not boring, instead of just falling into the same tropes that everyone else is doing?
Jeremy:So for everyone listening here, I would love to hear from you. How much time are you spending on your show? You can get at both Justin and I on Twitter and the links are in the show notes. And, we saw here that, you know, most people who submitted the survey were spending on average 10 hours a week. Are you above that?
Jeremy:Are you below that? And what's the kind of breakdown look like of that? So feel free to reach out to us on Twitter. You can also reach us on LinkedIn or, leave us a voicemail, which the link is also in the show notes and let us know there. And, we'll maybe do a follow-up update on where our listeners are kind of fitting in in that spectrum and what their allocation of hours was.
Justin:Sounds great.
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