Podcasts: Social Podcasting, Monetization, Discoverability

Uncategorized 7 Minutes

“Podcasts can turn commutes and chores into learning experiences.”

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❓ What You’ll Learn

  • How to determine if you have medium-audience fit?
  • How to repurpose your content for distribution?
  • How to get more listeners for your podcast?
  • What are the best podcasts for founders?
  • How to use AI note-taking tools?
  • How to get booked as a guest?
  • How to monetize a podcast?
  • What is social podcasting?


💎 Why It Matters

You can be a fly on the wall for conversations between great minds.


🔍 Problem

Ambitious people want to grow and learn on-the-go.


💡 Solution

Podcasts help listeners turn “mindless” time into learning time.

While hosts build connections with listeners through long-form audio.


🏁 Players

Podcasts

  • CTO Show • Mehmet Gonullu discusses the latest trends in tech and entrepreneurship.
  • Indie Hackers • Get the latest tactics, opportunities and stories from the best podcasts in the industry.
  • How I Built This • Stories from innovators about how they built it all.
  • Earn Your Leisure • Delve into financial success stories from diverse backgrounds.
  • Indie Bites • Bite-sized conversations with indie hackers that have started small, profitable and bootstrapped businesses.
  • Promise • A show dedicated to the underdog driven by purpose to make the world better. 
  • She Did It Her Way • Talks and interviews with successful female entrepreneurs.
  • Yo! Podcast • Spotlights incredible designers, developers, makers and entrepreneurs building their own future.
  • The Bootstrapped Founder • Arvid Kahl talks about starting and bootstrapping businesses.

Podcasting Platforms

  • Patreon • Earn from giving your fans a space to connect and discuss your podcast.
  • Podcast Hawk • Get booked as a podcast guest on auto-pilot.
  • Spotify for Podcasters • Free platform with creation, growth and monetization tools.
  • Podbean • Free podcast hosting and monetization platform.

Podcasting Tools

  • Transistor • Publishing tool to share your podcast.
  • Glow • Simple tool for podcast memberships.
  • OnPodium • Create a website for your podcast with premade templates. 
  • Podpage • Use your RSS feed to generate your podcast’s website.
  • Zencastr • Record your podcast guests in studio quality in your browser.


🔮 Predictions

  • AI-powered note-taking apps will make it easier to get key lessons and highlights from podcasts.
    • Note-Bytes uses deep learning to convert notes into podcast episodes.
    • Snipd lets you tap your headphones to save podcast moments to your library with an AI-generated transcript and summary.
    • Kris built Podcast Highlighter to make it easy to automatically highlight and transcribe takeaways from individual podcasts.
  • Social podcasting will allow audiences to participate rather than just listen. Leading to a more engaging podcast experience for everyone.
    • Intuit uses Riverside.fm to let customers call into their radio-like podcast.
    • Weekends Unplugged accepts short voice recordings from listeners via SpeakPipe.
    • Ronen built a reputation for facilitating conversations on a variety of Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. He quickly earned 3,000,000+ followers. 
    • Wolf Financial has hosted 3,000+ of Twitter Spaces on FinTwit. Audience members are often called up to the stage to ask questions and provide their own insights.
  • More podcasts will sell subscriptions. Subscriptions are a growing alternative to advertising for niche podcasts. Many will use both.


☁️ Opportunities

  • Offer services to help hosts grow and monetize their podcasts.
    • Podcast Lister charges $50 to list podcasts in directories on their behalf.
    • James Carbary helps B2B businesses build podcasts to grow their media brands.
    • Rory, Ben and Lizy started The Podcast Coach to offer bespoke podcast coaching.
    • Sam Laliberte offers growth consulting. She helps hosts launch, market and monetize their podcasts.
  • Start an agency to help guests find podcasts to speak on. Getting booked on top podcasts is hard without industry connections and a strong pitch. 
    • Kitcaster is a podcast booking agency that schedules podcast interviews on your behalf.
    • Speak On Podcasts is a fully-managed podcast booking service for brands and individuals.
    • Lemonpie is a podcast PR agency for companies and founders who need help getting guest interviews.
    • John and Phil started Podcast Bookers to fill their own needs of getting booked on podcasts as founders.


🏔️ Risks

  • Discoverability. Podcasts are hard to grow if you do not have a pre-existing audience to share your podcast with. Unlike easily searchable text, we are in the early days of transcribing and indexing audio.
  • Accessibility. If you want to build an audience in developing countries, you should be aware of the bandwidth that podcasts take. It’s hard to consume podcasts over a slow internet connection. 
  • Medium-Audience Fit. Unless most of your desired audience listens to podcasts, you will still need to publish content using other mediums. This can dilute your attention and resources. Is a podcast the best way to engage with your target market?


🔑 Key Lessons

  • Repurpose your content. Post your best highlights as short-form content on other platforms to market your podcast.
  • Entertain to retain listeners. Podcasters are performers first and foremost. If you aren’t constantly engaging people with valuable and interesting content, they’ll lose interest. 
  • Monetize wisely. Different audiences will resonate with different offers. Experiment with monetization strategies based on your understanding of your audience.


🔥 Hot Takes

  • Short-form podcasts will win. Modern audiences have short attention spans. They crave quick clips and segments. 
  • Don’t tell podcast hosts what to say in ads. Scripted ads come across as inauthentic to podcast listeners. Find podcasters who understand the unique benefits of your product and let them speak freely about it to their audience. 


😠 Haters

“Podcasts are notoriously low-converting for advertisers. Trying to get listeners to take action while they’re driving, cooking or doing laundry is difficult.”
While this is true, consider that podcasts have a longer sales cycle. Podcast listeners need time to build trust and belief in your product. But once you convert them, they’re likely to be high-value customers. Tools like Plink make it easier for listeners to remember and use information that’s shared.

“It’s already hard to attribute where my customers are coming from. With podcasts, attribution is even harder.”
The best (though imperfect) solution to the attribution problem is to offer custom codes and links for each podcast. If the offer is appealing enough, listeners will be inclined to use the code and give you valuable attribution data.

“Most podcasts are too long and not engaging enough to resonate with the next generation.”
There are ways to cater to new audiences within existing formats. Podcasts like the H3 Podcast are seeing success with live podcasts which have audience call-ins and comments. Others like Theo Von and Gin & Toxic use viral clips to attract new audiences.


🔗 Links

  1. What are your top 3 podcasts? • The tweet behind this report.
  2. The Next Phase of Social? Listen Closely • Andreessen Horowitz’s thesis on social podcasting. 
  3. The Complete Guide To Podcast Editing • How to edit podcasts like a pro.


📁 Related Reports


🙏 Thanks

Thanks to Cristian Concha, Thomas Sorheim, Arvid Kahl, James, Stewart Townsend, Swapnil Puranik, Milly Tamati, Simon Daley, Guillaume Tessier, Mehmet Gonullu, Jed Crystal and Darren Travel. We had a great time jamming on this report.

✏️ Harry researched and wrote this report. Dru and Emin edited this report.


📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0113 — Podcasts has more insights.

What you’ll get:

  • 31 Podcast Examples (244% More)
  • 9 Podcasting Platforms (125% More)
  • 21 Podcasting Tools (320% More)
  • 9 Predictions (200% More)
  • 11 Opportunities (175% More)
  • 6 Risks (100% More)
  • 7 Key Lessons (133% More)
  • 5 Hot Takes (150% More)
  • 12 Links (300% More)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

  • (📈 Pro) How does a software engineer earn $60,000/month from podcasting?
  • (📈 Pro) How did a comedian reach 1,000,000 downloads in 4 years? 
  • (📈 Pro) How to build your community around your podcast?
  • (📈 Pro) How to decide whether you should start a podcast?
  • (📈 Pro) What is driving the trend of podcast acquisitions? 
  • (📈 Pro) How to diversify your income as a podcast host? 
  • (📈 Pro) How are virtual influencers changing podcasts?
  • (📈 Pro) How to use lead magnets to get more listeners? 
  • (📈 Pro) How to use AI tools to produce your podcast?
  • (📈 Pro) How to help podcasters distribute their content?
  • (📈 Pro) How to make your podcast easier to find?
  • (📈 Pro) How to find advertisers for your podcast?
  • (📈 Pro) How to monetize your podcast with NFTs?
  • And much more…

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    Published by Illes

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