If you want to have a good podcast title, then avoid these words.
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast. I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
Your podcast title might be the single most important text for your podcast. The best
titles will clearly communicate your subject to potential audiences and stand out in relevant
search engines. Yes, there are plenty of highly popular podcasts with less descriptive titles,
like Serial. But they became successful despite their titles because they had a lot of good
marketing. However, even a quick look through the current top charts in Apple podcasts left me
having to do very little guessing about the subjects of most of those top shows because of
their mostly descriptive titles and relevant podcast cover art. Most of us podcasters don't
have vast marketing budgets to compensate for bad titles. But there are some words I
suggest avoiding in your podcast title. This will help you optimize for search, for uniqueness,
for branding, for comprehension, and for usage. The following are only guidelines, not laws.
So you can break these, but if you break them, break them intentionally, not accidentally,
break them with good reasons. And a good reason is not because it looks cool. Come up with
better reasons than that. Follow along in the notes for this episode or share this episode
with any other podcasters who would benefit from it. A tap or swipe away inside of your
app or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/avoidwords.
Number 1. Ambiguous cuteness. It can be cute to replace words like "to" and "for"
with the numbers 2 and 4. But that cuteness can cause confusion,
especially if your current or potential audience will need to type the name of your podcast
into a domain, into their podcast app, into a social app, or anything like that. Or maybe
you get cute with the spelling like "Wut Nuw with U?"
Don't do that. Please. Just don't do that.
If you do cute things with your title, you might have to always clarify it like saying
That's the number 2. Not "to," not "too," not "two," but the number. Make sure you type
the number, not spelling it out or anything like that. Or you might have to always spell
it out if you have some cute title or you do something weird like that. And that just
complicates your calls to action and makes it more difficult for your audience to take
action. I'm not suggesting you avoid all forms of cuteness, although maybe you should
consider it, but avoiding what would be ambiguous to a listener. If you do go with cuteness,
try to get the other potential understandings of your titles as domains and social media
IDs for the social media platforms that you actually promote. And those should be only
the ones where you actually participate. And then point those misunderstandings or typo
versions to the correct place. I see this often with websites where they register the
often mistyped versions of the domains, for one thing so that hackers and scammers can't
get those mistyped versions, but also just to make it easier for people that if they
accidentally misspell the domain, they still end up being redirected to the right place.
And if you're worried about your cute title being used uncutely by someone else, then
the best protection will come from claiming it as a trademark and registering that trademark
where you can. So that's number one, ambiguous cuteness. Number two, easily misunderstood
made up words or mashups. Similar to being cute, it seems the dot-com era made it popular
to make up new words or mash parts of words together. The latter of this actually being
called a portmanteau. For example, I could mash up entrepreneur and father to get entre-father
or fatherpreneur. Or I could mash up investment with analytics and get investalytics. However,
the key is to avoid easily misunderstood things. I actually think these mashups I just made
up might be easy enough to understand. And made up words or mashups are much easier to
trademark because of their distinctness. In fact, I have a pending trademark that leverages
this same idea. Language changes, yes. And some portmanteaus are so popular that they've
been defined in the dictionary, spellchecks don't flag them, and most people wouldn't
even have to wonder what you're talking about. For example, smog. We all know what
smog is, right? That's a combination of the words "smoke" and "fog" and that
started way back in the 1800s. I think everyone knows what a brunch is, and a word like infotainment
is inherently clear that it's combining information or info and entertainment. And
of course, our very own word "podcast" is a portmanteau of the words "iPod" and
"broadcast". So it's not inherently bad to make up words or portmanteaus, it's
only bad if it's easily misunderstood. For example, "BuyFriar."
That could be a podcast about purchasing air fryers. That could also be
easily misunderstood as "ByFriar," a podcast critiquing the writings of a past
friar like Friar Tuck or something like that. Although he wasn't a past Friar, he was
a fictional Friar. But even the word "fryer" might be commonly misspelled as "frier" instead
of "fryer." Just like how "whoa," which is the correct spelling, is so commonly
misspelled as "woah." And yet, it delights my heart to see my spell checker still flag
"woah" as a misspelling! Please don't let the world take this one. Let's spell it
correctly, please, it's W-H-O-A. Maybe that's a word you should avoid in your title altogether
because people misspell it so commonly. When you have a title for your podcast, try speaking it to
someone unfamiliar with your podcast to see if they properly understand what you're saying and
can even correctly guess what your show is about. And if there is still potential confusion, either
consider a different title or follow the same tip from number one to get the alternative
versions for domains and social media IDs if you want to catch those misspellings.
Number three, starting with "the". I've seen many strong brands weakened with a simple,
unnecessary "the". For example, consider the hilarious conservative satire site with
B in the title. Is it the Babylon Bee or Babylon Bee? Their own website isn't even consistent
with it. The logo and social IDs have "the" at the beginning, but the website domain and
copyright line exclude "the". So which is it, the Babylon Bee or Babylon Bee? I'm
a bit of a stickler for this. If an official title has a "the" then I will speak that
title no matter what. That's my own style choice and you might have your own preference.
For example, how would you refer to the Babylon Bee's website? Would you do it just the
way that I said it, saying "The Babylon Bee's website" capitalizing the T in
"the" no matter where it appears in your sentence? Or would you say "The The Babylon
Bee's website" where you have "the" listed twice, which would be technically accurate
if you're including the "the" in their title? Or would you try verbal gymnastics
to avoid that wording problem altogether? Which might actually be the better solution.
Using a "the" seems to de-emphasize the rest of the title. In the same example with
the Babylon Bee, it makes me think there are other kinds of bees besides spelling bees,
as if it's a well-known genre of content or publishing style, and this is merely the
The Babylon one, just like the Tire Museum. There are lots of other museums out there.
This is the Tire one. It's the museum about tires. It's the Tire Museum. There are,
however, some times when "the" is still good for clarity. I consider my own show title
to be an example of this, "The Audacity to Podcast". And side note, the reason why
I pronounce it "the" instead of "the" in this case is because the next word starts
with a vowel sound. So it's not "the" Audacity to Podcast, it's "the" Audacity
to Podcast. That's a mostly English thing I think that's a general good guideline.
And when I came up with that title, I debated the inclusion of the word "the" way back
in 2010. Because I always wanted to emphasize audacity to mean guts, courage, boldness,
and the like, I could not hear that as much if I titled it Audacity to Podcast. It really
needs that "the" in there. Plus, you might have noticed that I've been emphasizing it
stronger in how I say it here in the podcast as well. "The audacity to podcast." See,
I feel like that "the" in there just leads into it instead of "audacity to podcast."
"The audacity." I also think of that Grinch movie where he's like, "The audacity! The
unmitigated goal. The "the" in there helps emphasize it more and it makes sense. It's not
an unnecessary "the." I think it's a necessary one. And starting with "the" might still be a
good practice if your title must include the word "podcast" or "show," like "The Katie Smith Show."
And that leads into my next suggestion, which I'll get to in just a moment. If you do have to start
with a "the" in your title, please make sure you also get domains and branding without
the starting "the", which the Babylon Bee has done.
If you type in thebabylonbee.com, it takes you to babylonbee.com.
Do the same thing with your podcast.
I've done that for mine.
Try to do that for your own if you can.
Number four, podcast or show.
Now let me address the potential elephant in the room since I brought up the title of
my own show, The Audacity to Podcast. I'm using the word podcast as a verb in my show title. You
could replace that word with any other verb and the title would still make sense. For example,
"The Audacity to Bake", "The Audacity to Invest", "The Audacity to Read", or "The Audacity to Think".
You could also replace it with a verb phrase like "The Audacity to Cook Dinner", "The Audacity to
drive cars, but replace "podcast" in my title with a noun like "The Audacity to
Movie" or "The Audacity to Carrot" and you'll see that the title doesn't make
sense anymore or it even sounds childish. Thus, if I used "The Audacity to Podcast"
as a bigger brand name, my audio podcast could be accurately referred to as "The The Audacity
to podcast, "podcast" and I've actually heard it called that before. Yeah, that's
weird. Don't do that to yourself. But most of the time I see podcasters want to use the
words "podcast" or "show" in their titles, their usage would be as a noun and
probably unnecessary. On top of that, they're usually combining it with an unnecessary "the"
at the beginning too. Consider this for example, and I'm sure there's a podcast out there
by this name. I'm not mocking them or anything. I just came up with this title on the fly.
Which title sounds better? As a brand, Impactful Living or The Impactful Living Show? I think
the shorter, cleaner version sounds better. You could also imagine it in podcast openings
like Welcome to Impactful Living vs. Welcome to The Impactful Living Show. See, putting
the title in there without the "the" and "show" I think not only sounds like stronger
branding where, yeah, of all of the shows out there, this is the impactful living one
of all of those shows out there.
You're instead just saying "Impactful Living".
And it also just sounds really cool with the title.
Welcome to Impactful Living.
Like I'm not only welcoming you to the title of the thing you're now listening to, but
I'm also welcoming you to an idea, an existence.
I did something very similar with a short-run podcast that I did every day for a month a
few years ago.
I called it Inside the Podcasting Business.
So I didn't say, "Welcome to the Inside the Podcasting Business show."
I said, "Welcome Inside the Podcasting Business" as a little play on words because I was both
welcoming you inside my podcast business as well as welcoming you to my podcast, which
was called Inside the Podcasting Business.
I suggest also considering your search engine optimization (SEO).
Searching in podcast apps is still not the best experience at this time.
While some apps might smartly search for "and" when you type am ampersand and vice versa and
even handle different forms of words like plural and singular and even some misspelling
sometimes, the search engines can also be dumb sometimes. And things like starting with
a "the" can sometimes break that too. However, I think it might be untrue when some
people say that adding the word "podcast" makes your podcast suddenly less findable
because it's now competing with all the other podcasts that have the word podcast in their
titles too. At least that's my observation with some initial testing and even my own
show in Apple Podcasts. It really depends on how the search is treating the word. Like
with The Audacity to Podcast, when I type it into Apple Podcasts as the Audacity to
Podcast, the full title, my podcast shows up as number one both on the initial search
results screen and if I tap on show all. Now if I type in The Audacity 2, my podcast does
still show up first in the initial search results screen. But if I then tap on show all,
then my podcast is not first anymore. So it actually shows up first if I do put in the word
podcast. But then what if I had a title where the word podcast was kind of unnecessary?
Are you starting to see where the SEO part comes into play with this? Where your audience might
not remember to put in the word podcast. Now like in my title, it makes sense. You wouldn't type in
The Audacity 2 because I don't think anyone thinks my show is called The Audacity 2. They think of it
as The Audacity to Podcast. But if you have something like The Katie Smith Show or The Katie
Smith Podcast, they might just type in Katie Smith instead of Katie Smith Show or Katie Smith Podcast.
With an even deeper technical aside, this is a difference between what are called AND
and OR Boolean operators. Using The Audacity to Podcast as an example, the words "the" and "to"
might be considered irrelevant or stop words by some search engines and thus not even used in
the search. So that might leave "Audacity" and "Podcast" as the only search terms.
Looking at the AND and OR Boolean operators, the AND operator would show results that have
both audacity and podcast in the title and only those results that have both of them. But the OR
operator would show results that have either audacity or podcast or both. So you'd end up with
more results. You don't have to type these operators in most search engines anymore, but
some search engines automatically use one or the other in their backend and how they handle the
search query. A simple way to find out would be to see if adding more words gives you more results
and that would be the OR operator where every time you add an additional word it's bringing in even
more results because of that additional word match. Or is it giving you fewer results when
you add more words and that's the AND operator which is essentially a filter. You're now looking
for all the podcasts that have this word and this word and this word and therefore it would be a
smaller search result. For example, the podcast index search currently shows 11 results for
The Audacity 2 but only three results for The Audacity 2 podcast and of those three,
two of them are mine. So it's not a universal rule that adding the word "podcast" makes your show
compete in the search results for all other podcasts with "podcast" in the title. That
might be the case in some places, might not be the case in others. You just can't assume it.
Nonetheless, it's usually an unnecessary word for your title so it would be better to try to avoid
it for your title altogether. Where it's good to break this rule is when the podcast is using a
recognized name from a bigger brand. For example, if Microsoft started a podcast, it would be better
to be called "The Microsoft Podcast" than simply "Microsoft" because the brand is
so much larger than the podcast. Or if Apple started a podcast about the iPhone, they could
call it "The iPhone Podcast". But even in this case, I would suggest a completely
different name. Like for the Microsoft example, I would suggest instead of "The Microsoft
Podcast" something like "Microsoft's Business Computing". Or even move the brand
name to the artist field, take it out of the title so the title would simply be
"Business Computing" and then you'd see in the artist tag that it says "Microsoft" and
the artist tag is already searchable in all podcast apps I've tested. So if you
were searching for "Microsoft", a podcast no matter what it's called, if it has
"Microsoft" as the artist for that podcast, it would show up in the search results.
And, I still think it's fine to use podcast or show to help you get a domain that fits
your podcast title.
For example, I hosted a fan podcast about Disney's TV show Once Upon a Time.
Little aside here, note that I didn't say the Once Upon a Time show.
And we called our podcast simply ONCE.
In all caps.
That's the way we always referred to it.
But we used the domain and social branding of Once Podcast.
because "Once Show" just didn't sound right. I really had to emphasize that those are two words,
"Once Show" instead of "Once Show". It just didn't come out right for us. And when I started
those podcast episodes, I would always say, "You're listening to Once." Like that. I wouldn't say,
"You're listening to Once Podcast" or "The Once Podcast." I just said, "You're listening to Once."
And I felt that gave us a really strong brand to just say, "This is our title. Here it is."
Not "The Once Podcast" but "Once". You're listening to Once. It just sounded so much stronger
and we were owning it as this is our title. So if you can, don't use the words "podcast" or "show"
in your podcast title. Moving on to number five, publishing frequency like daily, weekly, monthly,
etc. This one is easy. If you add publishing frequency to your title, especially to the end,
then you might be binding yourself to that frequency. If you ever want to change your
publishing frequency, you would have to change titles. And if you ever skipped a normal publishing
cycle, then the name has essentially become a lie. If you're the something daily and you don't
publish daily for a week or something, then you're no longer daily. That's how it works.
There seems to be a noteworthy difference between using the term at the end of the title versus
anywhere else in the title. For example, "Daily Bible Reading" versus "Bible Reading Daily".
Maybe it's only me, but putting "Daily" at the end of the title sounds more like it's a
news broadcast reporting on something daily and publishing daily while putting the frequency
anywhere else sounds like it's helping to do that thing daily even if the podcast isn't published
daily. Another example of this could be "Improving Your Daily Health". So I'm not saying that the
frequency word itself is bad. It's really how you use it. And you might want to consider
not using it at all if it's at the end of the title as your publishing frequency part
of the title and not about what you talk about.
Number six, obscenities. Apple podcasts used to forbid obscenities in show and episode
titles or descriptions, really any text in your RSS feed. But they've since removed
that rule, except for podcast cover art, because their system can now automatically censor
written obscenities. Nonetheless, I recommend avoiding them in your title because it will
make it easier for other people to talk about your podcast and reduce some friction some
people might have in creating content, promoting your podcast, or even following your podcast.
I know this is slightly controversial and I'm not saying that you should or shouldn't
obscenities in your podcast. That's up to you. I'm talking about in your title.
Now, for example, you might have noticed that I never refer to Marc Maron's podcast by its name.
You probably know the name of his podcast. I don't speak it. This is because I don't use
profanity and I consider even his show name's abbreviation to be obscene because nearly everyone
knows what that abbreviation means anyway. So abbreviating it really isn't cleaning it up or
making it family-friendly. It's similar to if I censored the word "podcast" by removing the vowels
like that you just heard. You still know I'm saying or writing "podcast" so it wasn't really censored
because you know exactly what I just said. And before you say "having an obscene title hasn't
hurt Mark Maron's show? Well, consider that you really can't know that for sure. In fact,
I wrote an article that I link to in the notes for this episode. Go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/avoidwords
to get the link to that old article where I discuss why that whole "it hasn't hurt them"
thinking is really invalid. You basically need a parallel universe to thoroughly test it.
And, consider this, his show could very easily be even bigger under a different name.
So you can't know that it hasn't hurt him.
Just because he's successful doesn't mean he couldn't be more successful if he did
something different.
Also, I know of some people who will not listen to or recommend his show exactly because of
its name, even if the content was the same.
Plus, other podcast apps and directories might have different rules, especially in other
countries. Even if your content contains obscenities, it might be prevented from being featured
or included only because of the name or the cover art. I actually do the same thing when
I feature podcasts. I won't feature anything with obscenities or profanity in the title
or cover art. And back to Apple Podcasts, which does censor the text automatically under certain
circumstances, they do not censor images. And so they have a specific rule that there
There must not be obscenities in images.
If your podcast name uses obscenities, then you would have to censor your cover art in
order to not get kicked out of Apple Podcasts.
And then that's weakening your visual branding to not have your cover art accurately show
your title and represent your title exactly.
So I really suggest you consider not titling your podcast with any obscenities.
Number seven, with your name.
To clarify, I'm referring specifically to adding your name to the end of your title,
like "With John Smith", "With Jane Doe", something like that.
I'm not referring to building your show title around your personal brand, like
"The Joe Rogan Experience," "The Mel Robbins Podcast," "The Charlie Kirk Show," or "Conan O'Brien
Needs a Friend.""
Those are all built around their personal brands and those are fine titles.
Instead, I mean tacking on the "with your name" onto the end of your otherwise great
show title when your name already appears in other places or should appear in other
places.
Several years ago, before Apple Podcasts, there was a glitch in iTunes, yes that old
app, that prevented podcasts from being found by their artist names.
So if you searched for Daniel J. Lewis, the Audacity 2 podcast would not show up during
that glitch.
So back then, a popular podcast consultant advised everyone to put their names in their
podcast titles so they could still be found.
This would have meant renaming my show to The Audacity 2 Podcast with Daniel J. Lewis.
But that was a temporary glitch.
And it was a glitch.
I think it lasted for maybe only a few weeks at most.
Maybe it was even as little as one or two weeks.
Unfortunately though, that bad advice's damage was already done and a wave of highly
popular podcasts redundantly included the host names in the show titles.
And this is unnecessary and redundant for several reasons.
First, your podcast's artist text should already contain your name and it's almost
always displayed prominently with the title of your podcast. Title, author, right there,
next to your cover art, below your cover art, something like that, in almost all the places
out there. Second, every podcast app I've tested already searches the author or artist text,
returning podcasts then with your name, even if your name is only in that author or artist text
and not in the title. And third, voice-based assistants from Apple, Google, Amazon, and
other assistant tools will often speak or return both the title and author of podcasts
when you ask for them. So Siri, for example, might respond "Now playing the Audacity
to Podcast with Daniel J. Lewis by Daniel J. Lewis." It's just redundant and therefore
unnecessary. This is similar to when Apple started cracking down on keyword-stuffed podcast
titles back in 2018 when it was no longer a good idea because people abused it to put
in all of these keywords in your author tag or your title to try and be found for those
keywords.
The basic lesson from that, and I did a whole episode about this back in 2018, I have the
link to it in the notes for this episode at theaudacitytopodcast.com/avoidwords.
But the main takeaway from that is that text should go where it's supposed to go, not where
it's not supposed to go.
And podcast publishing tools have these multiple fields intended for specific content, and
the content should not be repeated where it's not supposed to be.
So for example, the title field should have only the title.
The author or artist field should have only the author or the artist names.
The description should have only the description.
Episode title should have only episode titles and not season numbers or episode numbers.
I've done an episode about that previously too, link in the notes.
And the copyright field should have only the copyright, and so on.
The whole purpose for having separate fields is to hold separate information and don't
let the streams cross.
I asked my podcast lawyer Gordon Firemark about trademarks.
And by the way, I earn no commissions by referring his personalized legal services, but I do
highly recommend him, even though I don't get paid for recommending him.
He said that putting your name in an otherwise non-distinctive title, like "Daily News with
Jane Smith" does not make the title any more trademarkable because the title is still
highly descriptive, not distinctive.
You're still describing the show as "Daily News with Jane Smith."
That's not a trademark.
And so there could be "Daily News with John Doe," "Daily News with Jane Doe," "Daily
News with Daniel J. Lewis. Those are all not trademarkable and they're not infringing
on each other. But this does open up another possibility and a reason why you might want
to put a "with your name" in the title in rare circumstances is when your title
is so generic that there are many other podcasts with the same title or something extremely
close. That's when it could be good to make your title a little bit different from the
others by adding your name, like Daily News with Jane Smith, while there is also the Daily
News with John Doe, and the Daily News with Daniel J. Lewis, and the Daily News with whoever
else, even though that can't be trademarked. This non-distinctiveness of the title allows
other people to do the same thing, using the same words, but adding their name to the title.
And you can do this too, to add your name to that non-distinctive, descriptive, very
generic title so you can help your audience be more confident they're picking the right
podcast when they get to yours.
Number eight. "Pod" and "Cast". Please avoid the cliche of stabbing your podcast title with pod or
cast. Your show doesn't need to be pod cooking or cooking cast. And come to think of it,
other than "pedia" from encyclopedia, I couldn't think of any time the media or distribution
format was chopped and stabbed into another word in the title. Can you imagine trying
to make mashups with the word "movie" in titles of movies like StarMovWars or Indiana
Jones V, or making portmanteaus with "music" in the latest music album titles, it doesn't
happen and if it did, it would look so weird. So why do we do that with the word "podcast"
where we're adding "pod" and "cast" to all of these things? I think this meta,
Cliché portmanteau practice is fine when you're making a product or service for podcasting.
For example, Podmatch, Castapod, and they get two points there because they're using
pod and cast but they actually flip it around.
Or Poddex.
Clichés aren't always bad, but you should still try to avoid them like the plague.
Number nine, emoji. [Loud gasp]
That's me imitating the sound that I imagine the emoji is making that I used for this point
that you may or may not see in the notes for this episode when you look at it in your podcast app.
But you can see the emoji over on the website at theaudacitytopodcast.com/avoidwords.
So emoji isn't actually a word that you're putting in the title, but it is something
that you might try to put in your title anyway.
And while emoji can be fun for your cover art or even your episode titles, maybe, avoid
them in your podcast title.
Some podcast apps still can't display emoji correctly.
They might either omit the emoji altogether, or they would replace each emoji with two
question marks in the title.
So if you have two emoji next to each other, then you would get four question marks.
And those question marks can cause some very unintended and unwanted meanings depending
on the title of your podcast.
Any place that generates a URL for your podcast might also have problems or make it a really
messy URL in order to properly encode the Unicode characters necessary to display an
emoji.
If you use emoji in your title, you might have to always remind your audience to not
type the emoji as part of your domain or social network IDs. Nonetheless, your audience might
try to search for your podcast with the emoji anyway, and how would someone even be sure
they're using the correct emoji? The emoji I used for this point is called "open mouth".
I was searching for it as the "wow" emoji because on Facebook you have the option currently
to react to different posts with more than just simply liking something. You can have
a heart, a hugging emoji, and there's this one emoji where it's an open mouth and it
looks like a person saying, "Wow."
That could be like, "Wow!" or "Wow!"
And maybe those two inflections mean different things to you.
So avoid emoji in your podcast title.
Number 10, hashtags.
are where there's a word or phrase with no spaces and a pound sign at the beginning of
it.
These trigger certain behaviors in some social apps like if you click on that and it brings
up search results for any other post that contains that same hashtag.
Or in special places they might even add a hash flag which is where there is an automatic
emoji that displays along with the hashtag like Apple does this for some of their events
or you might see this for particular sports events too.
So whenever you put that particular official hashtag there, this cute little emoji comes
along with it automatically.
But they're really pointless in your podcast titles and descriptions.
They do nothing for your SEO and they will look weird, but not as weird as emoji.
The only place hashtags are currently of any use is when you post a message on social networks
like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Mastodon, and even YouTube descriptions,
but not YouTube titles.
And in each of these places, I was specific to say it's about when you post a message,
not even when you're posting a link.
So you might see in some of these places, when you share a link, that it then embeds
part of that link into your message post.
So you can see a preview of the image, maybe a preview of the title, and a preview of an
excerpt of some sort.
But if there are hashtags in that preview or embed, that still does nothing for that
actual post.
The hashtags only matter in the message that you're posting on those social networks.
And each of these is a place where you would post about your podcast, not your full podcast
content itself.
So while it is good to hashtag the appropriate keywords from your title or description or
Or however you're promoting your latest episode or your podcast, in the messages you post
on social networks, don't put the hashtags in your podcast title.
A good exception to this is when your podcast is about something known by its hashtag, and
it's primarily known by that hashtag.
For example, while podcast movement 2022 had its own official hashtag, and that was #PM22,
capitalization didn't matter, but I always capitalize it anyway because it's an abbreviation.
That podcasting conference was not primarily known by that hashtag.
But titling a podcast, and this is the only example I can think of that's a really good
example of something known by its hashtag.
So if you title a podcast "#MeToo Survivors,"" where it's just the hashtag is #MeToo, no
spaces in there, "#MeeToo," that would be instantly recognizable because it was known
as the #MeToo movement. And thus, this would be a good reason to use a hashtag in the title.
It was known by that and known primarily by that. People would even say #MeToo. But other
things like podcast movement, even sometimes when we abbreviate talking about podcast movement
to each other, we might say "@pm22" but we don't say "@#pm22".
But don't start hashtagging keywords in your title merely because you think it will
help your SEO.
It won't.
And lastly, number 11.
Words that aren't your actual podcast title.
I hope this is obvious by now.
Your podcast title should be only your podcast title.
It shouldn't be a tagline or a list of keywords in attempts to manipulate your search engine optimization.
It should just be your title.
Adding keywords to a podcast title was very popular before 2018 and even I had recommended
adding keyword optimized taglines to your title and author tag.
Not merely a list of keywords but a tagline that maybe had one or two of those relevant
most important keywords for your podcast.
For example, The Audacity to Podcast's full title back then was "The Audacity to Podcast
- How to Launch and Improve Your Podcast."
And my author text was also using a keyword friendly tagline and it was "Daniel J Lewis
comma, podcasting industry expert and how-to-podcast teacher."
See I was getting in there, "podcasting" and "how to podcast."
This was an effective SEO trick back then, but some people caught on and then abused
the system with titles that would look like this.
This is not an actual title, but it is an accurate representation of many of the
titles I remember seeing back then.
"My Awesome Podcast - Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Passive Income,
Relationships, Bitcoin, Business, SEO, and Vanilla Cream Soda.""
Now that simulated title was 127 characters long, but I've seen some that
were longer than 250 characters and only the first 20 or so characters were the
actual title! The rest was spam! Apple cracked down on this keyword spamming in 2018 and
I shared some observations and testing around it because I let my podcast get kicked out
of Apple Podcasts. I wanted to experience what that was like. I wanted to see what triggered
it to happen and it was as I predicted. It was when my podcast made it into the top 200
of a chart, that that's when it triggered, and right then is when it got kicked out.
And I wanted to see what the experience was like interacting with Apple and what they
said I needed to do and what was acceptable.
So I let myself get kicked out, even though I knew by that time that I was stretching
the rules and I would get punished for it at some point.
But I did that for science.
And I share those observations in my past episode about that, and I have that link in
the notes for this episode at theaudacitytopodcast.com/avoidwords.
Now since 2018 when a lot of podcasters realized they have to clean up their titles.
Now some podcasters do still do it, yes, but they are not even in the top charts.
You might see it here and there and you can certainly report that or reach out to the
podcasters to point out to them that that's bad practice now.
But now that most of the popular podcasts are no longer keyword stuffing their titles,
I think it's actually quite nice to see concise titles that are only titles.
Brilliant!
There are some exceptions where you can include a short sort of expansion of the title.
For example, Apple did allow our podcast about Once Upon a Time, the TV show, to remain under
the title "Once-Once Upon a Time Podcast".
So that helped us because we could still be found if someone was searching for "Once
Upon a Time" and it did expand on our very short title, kind of explained the title,
but it's more just expanding on it.
And you can find some other even high-ranking podcasts with similarly formatted titles.
But if your title has to be explained or expanded, then it might not be a good title after all.
So these 11 things to avoid in your podcast title are number one, ambiguous cuteness.
Number two, easily misunderstood made up words or mashups.
Number three, starting with "the".
Number four, podcast or show.
Number five, publishing frequency, like daily, weekly, monthly, and such, especially near
the end of your title.
Number six, obscenities.
Number seven, with your name.
Number eight, pod and cast.
Number nine, emoji.
Number ten, hashtags.
And number eleven, words that aren't your actual podcast title.
If you're in this place of starting a podcast or maybe you have a podcast that uses some
of these words you should avoid and you're trying to come up with a better title, I would
love to help you with that.
I am now available again for one-on-one personal consulting where you get to sit down with
just me and just you and we can work through these issues to help you come up with a better
title or to help you figure out something else that you're facing in podcasting.
Whether it's a technical issue, a conceptual issue, you need some inspiration, some motivation,
a good kick in the pants to launch your podcast or you're trying to work some things out.
If you'd like to hire me for some one-on-one consulting, then please click on the link
in the notes or you can get that easily from the menu at theaudacitytopodcast.com.
Now if this episode has been helpful to you or you think it might be helpful and inspirational
to anyone else, I'd love it if you would share it.
And if you have some things to add to this, then please comment on the website as well.
And I know there might be some disagreement too and I welcome that.
If you have some other suggestions of things that don't make for good titles, feel free
to share them,
go to theaudacitytodepodcast.com/avoidwords.
That's also where you can go to share this episode out, get any of the links that I mentioned
in this episode and review the notes.
Or maybe you can review them and share them with a simple tap or swipe away inside of
your podcast app.
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 with a great title for passion and profit.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis from theaudacitytopodcast.com.
Thanks for listening!
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