Five podcasting things to evaluate yearly.
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
Intentional growth requires regular evaluation and adjustment. That applies to so many areas
of life and business, and your podcast is no different. So I've put together five things I
suggest you evaluate about your podcast every year so that you can make the changes necessary
to keep growing your podcast. I'm recording this in the middle of the year, in summertime, in July.
So this isn't like a New Year's thing. It doesn't have to be part of your New Year's resolution.
It's not stuff like, oh, change your copyright date every year or make sure that other things
are updated and anything like that. No, this is actual stuff that I suggest you take some time
to consider. And this doesn't cost you anything.
There are some tools you can use along the way that might cost, but really,
the real investment in this is your time to think carefully about these things, evaluate them,
and then make any adjustments that you need to along the way. If you'd like to follow along
with the notes for this episode, they are now reformatted in a different way. I'll talk more
about that in a future episode, but they're inside your podcast app, a simple tap or swipe away,
or you can get the full article over at TheAudacitytoPodcast.com
/evaluateyearly. And a little thing that amused me about this, it wasn't until after I
prepared this outline that I realized these five things fit nicely in my five cornerstones model,
which is profit, content, presentation, production, and promotion. I used to have profit last in that
model, but as I talk about in episode 388, I now think profit should be first because profit,
P-R-O-F-I-T, actually stands for something, which I will hit on multiple times in this episode.
So if you want to learn more about why you should put podcasting profit first,
go back and listen to episode 388. I've got that link in the notes. And I like how this worked out
quite nicely for this episode. So now starting with number one, your podcasting goals and profit
in a single word. Why, why do you want to podcast? And why should your audience want your podcast?
This is really about the goals you have for your podcast.
I call it the podcast profit paradigm, P-R-O-F-I-T. That stands for popularity,
relationships, opportunities, fun, income, or tangibles. It's what you might hope to
gain from your podcast, but it's also what you might hope to give to your audience through your
podcast. So every year, carefully consider what your podcasting goals are and whether you're
actually doing the right things to grow your podcast and your audience toward those goals.
It's okay to change your goals. I put this as number one because it's the most important thing.
And I'm doing this list in descending order instead of like number five, number four,
number three, number two, and finally, number one thing. I'm doing it the other way around,
one, two, three, four, five, because this first thing is so important to get right
and to refine it as you go. It's okay to change it as you go. If you got it wrong in the beginning
or things have changed since then, it's okay to change. You need to make sure that you're
to make the adjustments to then go along with that change as you evaluate these things.
So I put this as number one because it's most important and because everything else in this
list comes after this. And I think you should approach all of these things through that lens,
we could call it, of podcasting profit for yourself. And I think more importantly for you
to remember is the profit for your audience, popularity, relationships, opportunities,
fun, income, and tangibles. It's not just
about money. It's about all these ways that you and your audience can profit. So keep that in mind.
Look at your goals. Look at how you want to profit, how you want your audience to profit
from your podcast, and maybe see, do you need to change those goals? Or what kinds of changes
might you need to make in order to reach those goals better than you've been doing before?
Number two, your episode structure and flow. Are your individual episodes still accomplishing what
you want to do? Are you still accomplishing what you want to do? Are you still accomplishing what
you want to do? And this is the key. In the most efficient way possible, a great place to get some
insights to help you figure this out is looking at your retention analytics that you can see in
places like Apple Podcasts Connect and the Spotify for Creators dashboard. You can also see similar
information on YouTube if you cross post your episodes over to YouTube, whether in video or
what I call fake video. But since YouTube is not a podcasting platform, you can also see similar
information on YouTube. And consumption habits are so different on YouTube compared to in podcast
apps. I suggest you put less importance on the retention data you get from YouTube. It is still
insightful, yes, but not as valuable for your podcast as actual podcast analytics are that are
powered by what happens inside podcast apps. Your retention stats will then typically show you how
much of each episode is played. With that, you'll be able to see how much of each episode is played.
More information about where people skip or drop off inside of your episodes. Keep in mind,
you'll always see a downward decline with more people listening at the beginning and fewer people
listening at the end. That's totally normal. But the rate of decline and anything that breaks from
a consistent decline rate can give you more insight you can use for evaluating your episode structure
and flow. Maybe you need to move your more important call to action earlier in the episode or
maybe you need to start ensuring your audience knows about some extra value you're saving for the
end of the episode to encourage them to stick around until the end. Like I talked about in my
previous episode about the ideal length of episode closings. You can go back and listen to that if you
haven't already. But in all of your evaluating, keep considering it through the lens of your
podcasting profit goals for yourself and for your audience. Are your episodes structured in a way to
support those goals?
Number three, your podcasting workflow. Yes, podcasting can sometimes feel more like a chore
than a joy. Part of that could be what's in your regular workflow. Look carefully at that
podcasting workflow, your routines, and especially your personal progress within that workflow. Do
you notice your rhythm slowing down on a certain task or do some things seem to take more time
than they should? Do you often forget certain steps or do you really hate certain parts of
your workflow? Well, then maybe as you evaluate your workflow, you might start to see points you
could optimize by changing your methods or your tools. For example, and I'll talk more about this
in a future episode, I found ways to eliminate several small steps from my publishing workflow
for the Audacity podcast by investing time into improving my podcast publishing tool,
which currently is PowerPress. I built a PowerPress add-on for
WordPress that does certain things automatically for me, and I might even release that plugin for
free in the WordPress plugin repository. So let me know if you're interested in that.
I'm also experimenting with using the vast AI toolbox that I have in Magi. That's M-A-G-A-I.
I have an affiliate link for that in the notes. I am a paying subscriber. I earn only if you sign
up through my affiliate link, but I use it myself. I recommend things I truly believe in,
regardless of earnings. There's my little disclosure there. But I have been playing
with some of the vast AI tools in there to see if I can speed up some of the mundane tasks with my
own podcasting workflow, like creating my chapters. And in my case, I don't need the AI to tell me what
my chapters are, because I already know exactly what my chapters should be. It's the outline of
my episodes that I've prepared before I started recording. What takes the time, though, is finding
and just the copying and pasting of the headlines and aligning it with the right timestamps and
adding any links or images if necessary. That's what takes more time. And that's where I'm working
with some AI prompts and different models and such to try and see if I can automate that in a way
that's satisfactory to me. I'm very close to it. And believe me, when I get something that's
working, I will share it with you, because there are some ways that this could really be cool,
where you just give it your transcript, you give it your audio, you give it your audio, and you
give it your outline, and then it spits out the chapters in exactly the format that you need for
certain uses. I'm still working on that. That might be a ways away until I'm ready to share that with
you. And I will talk more about both that AI usage for the chapters, some other things that you can
do with AI and especially the toolbox inside Magi. And I'll talk more about my PowerPress changes and
how you could apply some similar thinking for your own podcast in future episodes. So stick around
and I'll see you next time.
Bye.
is about, that it still describes your podcast well, and most importantly, that it still supports
your podcasting goals in the profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, popularity, relationships, opportunities, fun,
income, or tangibles that you want for yourself and your audience. And if not, remake your trailer.
There's nothing that says you have to stick with your trailer for many years to come. You could
remake it every year if you wanted to. If you have a seasonal podcast, you could have a trailer for
your whole show every time you release a new season and update the trailer based on what new
kind of thing you've done with the latest season. You could also have trailers for the season. You
not going to get that crazy, right? Please promise me you're not going to get that crazy.
But consider making a trailer. This is longer than a promo. I would consider a promo to be
30 to 60 seconds. That's the kind of thing you might send to another podcast that they could play,
to advertise your podcast. Maybe you pay someone else to play it in their podcast, or maybe it's
just a little arrangement, a friendly thing that you have between other podcasters. That's a promo,
30 to 60 seconds. A trailer can be longer than that. It could be a minute, three minutes,
it could be five minutes. This is your chance to really demonstrate your passion,
demonstrate your knowledge, mention some of the things that you've talked about in the past,
as well as what you'll be talking about in the future. Talk about whom you serve. Think about
movie trailers. They give you the basic idea of the kind of story to expect. Is this movie going
to be an action movie, a comedy movie, a drama, a horror, anything like that. So you get that
genre idea from the trailer. You also get an idea of who's in the movie, what kind of content is in
it, what's the visual effects like, maybe even a little bit of a taste of the music for it.
Think about how movie trailers are made and how they excite people to check out the
movies. Apply that same thing to your podcast and consider updating your trailer every year,
if you can, but really evaluate it to see, is it meeting those goals that you have for your podcast
and what you want your audience to expect from your podcast as well? And lastly, number five,
your podcast description. After finishing the previous four evaluations, which were
your podcasting goals and profit, your episode structure and flow, your podcasting workflow,
and a podcast trailer, then it's time for you to consider your podcast description.
Not only should you consider whether it still accurately describes your podcast anymore,
but really look at it from the perspective of a potential listener and figure out how
compelling that description is. Does it really entice people with your podcast? Does it focus
on the value they will get from your podcast? Does it make promises you have delivered,
or will be able to fulfill? A reason I put this after making or updating your podcast trailer
is because the podcast trailer can be your chance to be more relatable, more passionate,
and audibly motivating. After you've explored the personable aspect in making or updating your
trailer, then you can optimize the more, we could call it scientific aspect of your podcast
description. AI can be a great tool to help you with this. AI can be a great tool to help you with
this. Now, you may be thinking, oh, I'll just throw my podcast description into ChatGPT and ask it to
improve it. Yeah, you could, but you might not get very good results. And that's because these
AIs are technically, they're called large language models or LLMs. They have different strengths and
weaknesses and will do different things based on your inputs and just based on the time of day,
practically. They'll randomly produce different results. And there are different models that
come at different prices and are better at different things like Google Gemini Pro,
Anthropic Cloud Sonnet, and OpenAI's GPT model, which is what ChatGPT uses. And they'll all be
good and give you some good guidance. And by the way, you have access to all of these if you use
Magi. And I'm not pimping Magi here because they're sponsoring or anything like that. I just am a big
fan of Magi because it has so many AI tools under a single low-cost subscription. They don't sponsor
podcasts. I know the creator of Magi. He's a fantastic guy, a good friend. And I get paid only
if you sign up through my link, which is an affiliate link. But I recommend Magi because I
use it myself. I believe in it. I would recommend it even if I didn't get paid for it because I
recommend things I truly believe in regardless of earnings. And the reason I recommend Magi over
ChatGPT is not based on earnings. I think ChatGPT might have an affiliate program. I don't know. I
ChatTPT because it's not as powerful as what you can do inside of some of these other models or
inside of a toolbox like Magi. So here are some examples of ways that you could use a tool like
Magi to really leverage the power of different LLMs. You could adapt some of these things with
ChatTPT or whatever free AI you have access to, or maybe you try this in Grok or anything like that.
That's up to you. This is just what I've tried some things and gotten some good results and just
some testing. And so some general guidance that you could try applying, but especially if you use
Magi, this will be much easier there. So here are some ideas. First, you could try giving your
description to Claude Sonnet with the writing tutor persona. In Magi, you get to choose these personas
that basically define what kind of assistant you're working with through the AI. So then you ask that
persona.
Using Claude Sonnet to evaluate your tone of voice. And if that matches your desired tone of voice for
your podcast, then that's great. If not, then maybe switch to the expert copywriter persona and ask
Claude Sonnet to rewrite the description with your desired tone of voice. For example, if the
description is currently formal, but your podcast is a fun podcast, then ask for your description to
be rewritten with a fun tone of voice. If that's not the case, then you can use the expert copywriter
persona.
Claude Sonnet is really good at being more analytical and accurate without getting too
creative. And that might be what you want in this case, giving you that tone of voice and adjusting
the tone of voice of the description you already have. You could also try giving your description
to Gemini Pro with the master persuader persona and ask it how compelling the description might be
for your potential audience that you will also describe in that same prompt.
For example, if you're a podcast creator, you could also try giving your description to the
master persuader persona. For example, you might say something like, here's my podcast description for
my podcast name here, and then enter your description. And then you add to that,
how compelling do you think this is for my target audience of, and then describe that target audience,
that demographic. Maybe it's men between the ages of 20 and 30 who have this particular occupation.
Maybe it's stay at home moms. Maybe it's people who love to play the piano at their spare time,
but not professionally, and they just want to get better at it. Anything like that. So try and
describe that to your target audience. And then you add to that, how compelling do you think this is
for your target audience. Another thing you could do is give your current description and a list of
your episodes by title, or even just by topic. Like these are the things I've done episodes about,
or just give it the list of your episodes. If the titles are description enough. So whichever
one's more accurate, give it your description and your list of episodes to GPT 4.1. That's
the latest version at this time. That's basically what you're using with chat GPT,
but then use the master persuader persona inside Magi and ask it to rewrite,
your description with the tone of voice you want, or try the marketing expert persona and ask it to
rewrite your description with popular marketing frameworks like problem agitate solution,
or before after bridge or segmenting, targeting, positioning, and such. What's good about GPT 4
in this case, and it's later versions and such, is that it does get more creative than Sonnet does.
You could also try the same prompt though with Gemini Pro or with Cloud Sonnet if you wanted to,
and see which one you like the results of better. Just keep in mind, every time you ask an AI for an
output, you will probably get something different. So don't think that, oh, this other one changed
this word slightly and therefore I should go with that. Just go with the one that seems better,
that you like better. Another thing that you could do if you need some inspiration is switch to
perplexity deep research and the assistant persona and ask it to research what's working for the most
popular podcast. So if you're a podcast creator, you're going to want to do that. So if you're a
descriptions and distill that into a formula you could try repeating. This will take longer for it
to do because it does actually go out there, it searches the internet, stuff that's indexed,
it finds specific links and certain information, and then it analyzes them with the large language
model that it has, and then it gives you the output. So be more patient with this one because
it takes a little bit more time to do that. But then once you have that output without switching
your chat, so you're in the same chat flow there, switch to Cloud Sonnet. So you are switching
models, but you're still in the same chat. Also then switch the persona to, you could try Master
Persuader or Marketing Expert, and then have it apply that formula to your podcast description
that you give it. So see, you could use one or multiple AI tools to discover certain things
about your description, whether just to help you evaluate it, to help you improve it, to suggest
things that you don't know about your description, to help you improve it, to help you improve it,
about it for you to make it better for your target audience. And that's why I like Matai so much.
Again, they are not a sponsor of this, but they do give you access to a bunch of these tools,
and they make it really easy that you can switch these personas and these models back and forth
inside the same chat flow. And it's something like $500 worth of tools starting at only $20 a month.
So if you're thinking about paying for ChatGPT, just don't. That would be a
waste, I think, because then you're getting only ChatGPT. Try Magi instead.
TheAudacitytoPodcast.com/magai. That's M-A-G-A-I. And I've got that link, of course,
in the notes for this episode. But no matter what the AI gives you, or no matter what AI tool you
use, evaluate it yourself and make adjustments that seem best to you. Please don't worry about
things that some people are spreading fear about as being giveaways of AI.
Instead, really focus on getting the tone closer to the way that you would speak without compromising
the goal of the description. Maybe even take that description and run it by some real intelligence
out there, some other human beings, and say, hey, what kind of podcast do you think this description
fits? Or does this interest you? Especially if you can find someone who is in your target audience,
show that description to them and ask them, does this seem interesting to you? Does
this seem like something relevant to you? Does it seem like something that meets your needs or your
desires? And if yes, then you've got a killer description right there. And maybe you didn't
have to use AI at all because you used real intelligence. But also just think of it yourself.
Try to put yourself in your audience's place because I'm going to guess you are most likely
a member of your own target demographic. So think about if you were not hosting the podcast and you
saw that podcast description.
Would you want to listen to that podcast? And if you're using AI, definitely look for any weird
patterns or unnecessary things. Like for an example, it doesn't do this so much anymore,
but in the early days of AI, when I first started using AI several years ago, anytime I would play
with podcast subscriptions, it would give me this typical lineback that was something like looking
for a new podcast. And then it would go on to describe the podcast. No one is looking for a
new podcast. You want to convince them why they should want a new podcast. That's what your
description needs to do. AI tools can help you do that. People can help you do that. With whatever
outputs you get from whatever AI tool that you use, don't delete any of them. Even if you don't
want to use them, you could pick and choose little parts of each one that you really like,
change it however you want to. You don't have to use the full thing that the AI gives you.
But save some of your favorite ones and try experimenting with them. Try one,
description for a couple of months and see how many new followers your podcast gets during those
couple of months and then compare that to a different description for a couple of months
and try radically different descriptions and as long as you are podcasting consistently
across those months and nothing big or major happens in the world or with your audience like
if you're podcasting about a tv show this show doesn't suddenly go on a hiatus and you're trying
to experiment during a hiatus that doesn't work as well but make sure that you are able to produce
content consistently across these multiple months that you're trying things and then you can see
maybe one description works a little bit better than the others you could even consider taking
both descriptions back to your favorite ai tool and telling it which one performed better and then
ask it why do you think that one performed better just keep in mind sometimes especially when you're
asking questions like
that instead of having it do something more analytical sometimes it will give you an answer
that makes grammatical sense but not necessarily factual sense so it might read well but it might
not be actually true just keep that in mind and sometimes just go with your gut especially if you
are your own target demographic no matter what no matter what tool you use to re-evaluate and
improve your podcast description the most important thing is that you're not going to be able to
focus on the profit the popularity relationships opportunity fun income or tangibles that your
audience will get from your podcast make it not about you but about them and their wants or needs
and then how your podcast fits them and their wants or needs because if your podcast doesn't
serve the audience you want to serve they're not going to stick around so you want them to know
that your podcast is the right podcast for them that's the goal of your description going back to
that first point the profit really think about why when you have your description why would someone
want to listen after they read this description and if the answer is correct and in line with your
goals then you've got a good description if you'd like to review these notes they are a tap or swipe
away inside of your app or get some of these links that i mentioned like to magi or any of these other
episodes that i talked about or if you're interested in learning more about the podcast you can go to
the complete article at TheAudacitytoPodcast.com/evaluateyearly before i go a quick peek at
the value for value community corner thanks to randy black for sending 150 sats and then 64 sats
150 just seems like a round number 64 i'm guessing like 64 bit and then brian insmaner might be the
mystery guy here with his numbers that he's selecting because still don't know what 406
was from the last episode and this time he sent
350
satoshis both of these gentlemen were sending these sats from the previous episode so if there's
significance to these numbers i don't know i just hope i'm not giving away nuclear launch codes and
also i took a peek over at my podcast reviews with my own tool podgagement and i saw that barnabas
has been leaving multiple five star ratings on my episodes through the good pods podcast app which is
supported by podgagement so if you want to track your own ratings reviews your global
rankings in charts and your podcast networking opportunities try out Podgagement at Podgagement.com
or if you just like to give value back to this podcast because of the value i've given you
consider what that's worth to you and consider giving back at TheAudacitytoPodcast.com
/giveback and now that i've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools
it's time for you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit i'm daniel j lewis
from TheAudacitytoPodcast.com thanks for listening
you