Want to uncover the secrets behind the success of Morning Brew's podcast? Join us for a riveting conversation with Josh Kaplan, their product manager of audio and podcast producer, sharing the keys to an authentic product and a loyal fan base. He delves into the critical role of understanding your audience and reveals how to leverage the subscription button to enhance loyalty.
Get ready to be enlightened on podcast growth strategies, as Josh spills the beans on converting newsletter readers into podcast listeners. Hear his insights on the intricacies of podcast discoverability across different platforms, and the power of marketing collaborations. Find out from Josh how Apple's 'New and Noteworthy' feature and compelling episode titles dramatically boosted Morning Brew's podcast growth.
As we wrap up, Josh guides us through the world of SEO, transcription, and cross-promotion strategies. Discover why providing transcripts can enhance your SEO, learn about the potential benefits of hiring a transcriber via Upwork, and get valuable insights on using cross promotions to amplify your podcast's exposure. Josh also sheds light on the importance of understanding your audience through feedback to inform better product decisions. This conversation is packed with incredible insights, whether you're a podcast newbie or looking to level up your podcast game.
Subscribe to Buzzsprout Conversations on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
Do you know somebody we should interview on Buzzzsprout Conversations? Reach out on Twitter.
Want to uncover the secrets behind the success of Morning Brew's podcast? Join us for a riveting conversation with Josh Kaplan, their product manager of audio and podcast producer, sharing the keys to an authentic product and a loyal fan base. He delves into the critical role of understanding your audience and reveals how to leverage the subscription button to enhance loyalty.
Get ready to be enlightened on podcast growth strategies, as Josh spills the beans on converting newsletter readers into podcast listeners. Hear his insights on the intricacies of podcast discoverability across different platforms, and the power of marketing collaborations. Find out from Josh how Apple's 'New and Noteworthy' feature and compelling episode titles dramatically boosted Morning Brew's podcast growth.
As we wrap up, Josh guides us through the world of SEO, transcription, and cross-promotion strategies. Discover why providing transcripts can enhance your SEO, learn about the potential benefits of hiring a transcriber via Upwork, and get valuable insights on using cross promotions to amplify your podcast's exposure. Josh also sheds light on the importance of understanding your audience through feedback to inform better product decisions. This conversation is packed with incredible insights, whether you're a podcast newbie or looking to level up your podcast game.
Subscribe to Buzzsprout Conversations on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
Do you know somebody we should interview on Buzzzsprout Conversations? Reach out on Twitter.
Me and my team. We make these calls, we email and we ask how'd you find out about the show? What do you like, what do you not like? After 20 calls, every three months you start to hear the same thing. So, while we want this data, everything, if you just dedicate some time to getting to know your audience, you're gonna hear trends and you say oh, that's how you discovered us, oh, that's what really pissed you off. Then you can optimize the product very authentically.
Speaker 2:Hey, everybody today on the podcast, I have Josh Kaplan. Josh is the product manager of audio at Morning Brew and he's the producer of their show, business Casual. It's been just over a year since Morning Brew launched their first podcast, business Casual, and since then they've done over a hundred episodes with people like Eric Schmidt, mark Cuban, andrew Yang If you scroll through the list, you'll recognize a ton of those names and so I invited Josh onto the podcast just to pick his brain and learn what they've learned over the last year. I want to hear about how they sell ads, how they've grown the podcast, and just pick his brain about how to run a successful podcast, especially when you're doing so much other content. So, josh, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 1:Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:And for people who don't know, could you just describe a bit of what Morning Brew does and how you launched yeah, would love to.
Speaker 1:Morning Brew is a business media company for the next generation of professionals. We started about five or so years ago as a company with one daily email newsletter. That caught you up on yesterday's business news. Alex and Austin, who founded the company, were looking at the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times and actually I was there at the University of Michigan with them as well when they were looking at this and we were all preparing for finance interviews, consulting interviews, and you would get into an interview and they'd say how do you stay up to date with the world? And we would all lie and say that we read the New York Times cover to cover, the Wall Street Journal cover to cover.
Speaker 2:Bloomberg.
Speaker 1:And so instead, alex started writing this PDF. That turned into a newsletter. That was one narrative Open the email, get to the bottom of the email, then you're good to go. No clickouts, no ask for additional time, written in the way that your friend would explain to you the business news. And that really took off. That really found the audience, it found the intention, it was valuable and we focused on that exclusively for a very long time until we started to expand our coverage area and the number of mediums that we were existing in, because we wanted to become a media company of the future.
Speaker 1:And so when we got into a couple of newsletters in, we said how are we going to go from text-based journalism into other formats? So Kinsey, who's the host of Business Casual, and I we came together and we said how do we go to the next level? And we looked at podcasting. People were really excited about it, we loved it. People had been asking for podcasts and we said, all right, let's do something that doesn't copy, keeping you up to date in the business world. Let's go a level deeper in the headline level.
Speaker 1:So we started to look at the medium as a way to tell stories. That weren't optimal for text, and then we've just continued on. We knew that this was going to be the entry point for the company into audio and video and we were going to keep learning and testing new things on different platforms. And it's been an incredible year since then that we can actually look back and say, wow, we've learned a lot, we tried a lot and now each additional product that we go and release, we can start at a much higher place. So it's been a really fun time getting that far. We love Business, casual and there's so much more in store, but I love talking about anything when it comes to growth, revenue, the content itself and, yeah, let's see where this thing goes.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I love that you stepped from having this incredible newsletter, which a lot of people I know at our company actually read every day, read it cover to cover, in a sense read the whole thing. I read Marketing Brew just to keep up to date what's happening in the marketing world, and I love that you moved from newsletters to podcasts because there is a natural they have some similarities which I think are really important, especially with, like, a shifting media landscape. There was a time when everybody thought Buzzfeed was the media company of the future because they knew how to use Facebook to grow. And you can now see some just I mean kind of embarrassing stats for Buzzfeed.
Speaker 2:When they can share a post, sometimes with millions and millions of followers on Facebook, and it only gets a couple hundred interactions Because that audience is controlled by Facebook. Still Facebook doesn't think it's a good post. They're not going to share it with everybody. The difference with email newsletters and podcasting is there is no intermediary. You are going to put something out into the world. People download it right to their podcast apps or they read it right inside their email. Is that an intentional decision that you made when deciding to get into podcasting?
Speaker 1:Yes, it was intentional. You made all the right points about why it's such a great medium and why it's similar to email newsletters. We liked being able to go direct to the listener or the reader, which is what we get. We like having the subscription button. As a company, we really like fitting into habits, knowing our audience. It's not a quantity play. How can we go viral tomorrow? How can more people find our content be entertained and learn from it and then incorporate it in their morning routine or in their running routine with the podcast or the commuting routine with the podcast? We don't want to become this endless scroll company where we're just creating so much content that you don't know what to do with it. We want to be part of it. We want to bring people along for the adventure. That's why we also do a lot of this stuff in public, where we tell people what do you want? Here's what we think. We explain the whole process of it.
Speaker 1:There's a lot about the media company that we've created that we can look back on and say whether it was intentional or not. We learned a lot from our predecessors. We looked at the buzz feeds. You see the vices of the world. We love Axios, we love the skin. We've learned so much from these other big players that have shown us what to do most of the time and sometimes what not to do. As far as emails and newsletters go, we've always been really excited about both of those. That's why we've been starting with those two first and foremost.
Speaker 2:The way we decide to do all of our podcast content, whether it be guides, podcast episodes or videos on our YouTube channel we pretty consistently are just asking people what they need help learning. The two areas that keep coming up are how do I grow a podcast and how do I monetize a podcast once I've actually grown up some of a listener base? I know Morning Brew has done a really good job growing the podcast business casual. I'd just like to hear after a year, how far have you been able to grow the podcast?
Speaker 1:You're getting right to it. You want all of the dirty data and everything that's so sacred about it. I wish I had more data. That's a whole other conversation about how hard it is to tell how performance is going and podcasting and how. Even a year of me paying attention it still baffles me most of the time. What we do know is that every week we get around 150,000 listeners on the entire catalog of the show. Another interesting thing to talk about is the back catalog and how that's becoming more relevant and more important to the overall health of the show.
Speaker 1:We released two episodes, one on Tuesday, one on Thursday. Each of those, by the end of the seven-day trail, gets to about 25,000. So we're getting numbers. Some weeks are better than others. It's not linear where it might be in other mediums. Sometimes you are better timed with the guests and the theme and what's going on in the world and sometimes you're not. But because of the library it goes like that. So on a weekly basis, 150k and then we've actually just crossed 6 million total over the lifetime of the show. That's been a fun. Another million to tally on and get to talk about. Those are the high-level metrics. There's a lot of other numbers that I like to think about and understand whether they're valuable or not, but I think that answers the main question about how big we've grown from day one, and I'll answer your next question before you ask it. The number one growth lever is having a newsletter. With a million, two million plus, it's the easiest, best hack in the world and if you've got one of those, you should start a podcast.
Speaker 2:So you've heard it. If you want to grow your podcast, just go ahead and grow an email newsletter to two million subscribers and then you're golden. We often tell people how difficult it is to get a podcast to go viral for a lot of reasons, and I do like that you're using the email newsletter, kind of saying like it is very difficult to build a podcast on its own and if you do have other ways to reach people or ways that people are already paying attention to you, that those should be the primary way that you grow your podcast. Do you have any? There have been any learnings, anything that you've kind of discovered along the way of how to take a somebody's reading the podcast and get them over excuse me, reading your newsletter and get them over to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I'll preface it with another learning is that the email newsletter has been phenomenal for launching the newsletter and sorry, I just made the same mistake Launching the podcast and gaining brand awareness that business casual exists. What it is, who Kinsey is that it's attached to morning brew, but it actually doesn't convert direct downloads that well, because when you open an email on the phone in the morning, you don't all of a sudden have 30 on structured minutes to just listen to the interview. That's not how people operate. So what we found is that we've started to advertise through the newsletter as time has gone on, about the awareness of it who's coming on this week, what are the topics, what are the testimonials and that started to pay off better. But as far as growing getting back to growing the podcast beyond it outside of newsletter, can I tap into that, cause I have a lot to say there? Yeah, absolutely so. There's no silver bullet, right? When it comes to growing these things. It is going to and it depends on the format of your show.
Speaker 1:But for an interview based show where we're keeping up with what's relevant in the business world, there's a lot of different aspects of growth. The one that I'll cross off the list is the podcast apps. I don't think there's a lot of discoverability happening on Apple and on Spotify right now. We have about 80% of our listenership on Apple, about 10% on Spotify. 10% goes to the rest of the handful of apps and I think there's some really exciting stuff happening on the technology front, but really I don't think many people are discovering the show via the apps at a large scale. I think that most of the discoverability is happening on social, is happening through other marketing collaborations. That allows people to drive back to our show and then say, oh right, that does sound like a compelling episode to listen to. I am going to carve out time for my ex activity tomorrow or when I'm working the day after. So a lot of the marketing and a lot of the. A lot of the growth that we've been trying to encourage is building on different platforms, using the YouTube search algorithm, working with guests to share throughout their companies and throughout their followings on social, breaking it up into little video clips for Twitter and Instagram and building up there.
Speaker 1:Kinsey going on other shows has been phenomenal, kinsey having now, I think, close to 18,000 Twitter followers as we record. This is an incredible asset because people like following people. It's the intimate medium. It all makes sense that people want to know the person who's coming up with this thing. So we all of a sudden have to make this relatively complex, but then we can simplify the whole thing. But on a week to week basis, we're constantly tapping on all of those different things, trying to distribute and show why the show is great. And it's not just saying go listen to the full episode, go subscribe. It's achieving the brand mission of business casual across all these other places. So then when we have a new episode, we have a much bigger launch pad to tell people about. So that's been what has actually been feeling more of our growth, and it's not like there's hey, here's the one thing you got to do all this stuff, I think. And so we've been hard at work and I think that's what's allowed us to grow over the past year to where we are today.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I have probably about 50 follow up questions to this, but let me jump into one that kind of shocked me. You said that you didn't think that the discoverability on the apps was super important, which definitely surprised me, because I know you were business casual, was a Apple new and noteworthy show for quite a while and at least looking across all of all the podcasts on Buzzsprout, it sounds like you are very, very Apple heavy. I think our numbers say 47% of all listens have been on Apple podcasts and you're saying it's closer to 80. Do you think that?
Speaker 1:there is a chance. I'm always surprised by your numbers. I don't know what's going on. I don't know why ours are so different. I wish I knew.
Speaker 2:Could it be that Apple promoted you for a new and noteworthy and got you a nice Apple bump in the beginning?
Speaker 1:I think that certainly helped a ton, by the way, and for me that was now this time last year that we were new and noteworthy. We launched in September. We got new and noteworthy and we did see a really dramatic bump. But I think I don't know maybe I'm wrong, but I would be surprised if that's really been such a big indicator of why, even today, the distribution is like that. I think it might have to do a little bit more with our audience. If I had to guess and just who they are and how it's been. But I don't know. I wish I knew.
Speaker 1:But new and noteworthy is an incredible growth letter. The thing is you can only do it once and so after that you gotta say, well, thank you for that. But what's next? And for me it's always been focused on what can we build as sustainable operations that allow us to constantly grow, rather than hoping that we'll get an Apple or a Spotify promotion in some shape or form. Right, and they're great to work with. I actually love the people on both of those teams, but it's a very crowded competition to try and get those promotions and maybe you get one once every now and then and sometimes you get lucky or it makes sense, but I think as far as really building a sustainable strategy, you gotta go back to what can you be repeatable, what can be repeatable and what can you get compound interest out of by building up those other platforms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that you're saying what kind of strategies can you use to get that compound interest so that things are growing faster and faster over time? But because I know that everyone watching this video and listening to this podcast is going to ask how did you get into Apple, new and noteworthy Again?
Speaker 1:the secret is we are growing this podcast off of a very large brand of Morning Brew, and being able to say, hey, we're gonna put Apple at the top of the newsletter that goes out to however many we had at the time caught their eye. Everything, I think, is a trade. Then nothing's for free. I think you always gotta say what's in it for them and to say Morning Brew is launching a new podcast, go listen. On Apple it says, oh, wow, we're gonna send a good amount of audience their way maybe, and I think that catches their attention.
Speaker 1:And we use that for guests. We use that for a lot of things because a lot of it is leveraging the assets we have a company and being a part of this Morning Brew ecosystem is really, really good for business casual. So I think that is why I'm sorry to anybody listening or watching to this that might not be able to repeat the same steps, but the whole Apple team is very receptive and I think if you say this is how I'm promoting Apple and this is why I'm bringing good content to your platform, they will hear you and they will work with you as best as they can. I won't speak for them, but I think, they will.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I mean you do want if you're hoping for somebody to promote your show, you definitely wanna show them a little bit of what's in it for them, that you see them as an important player in the field. Maybe, if you are a podcast that's Apple-centric, maybe you're looking at using the new Apple Podcasts embed player on your website, which is actually sending all your traffic to them, and that also is just going to increase the number of downloads that Apple's seeing, so that it will get surfaced a little bit more likely. They'll see hey, subscriber numbers are really shooting up for this podcast. Maybe we should take a look.
Speaker 2:One of the strategies I saw you actually wrote a really great blog post on Medium when you hit your first million downloads, so this was January of this year. One of the things you talked about was creating the right calls to action in your content, and I think this was specifically in your newsletter. Can you talk to us a little bit about your calls to action for people to listen to the podcast? You used the phrase things need to be short, negative and elusive. What do you mean by that and give us a little bit of idea of how you think about this?
Speaker 1:Short, negative and elusive actually is something is for the newsletter opens, which is something that, if you're doing email marketing for your show or for whatever you're doing, we have found and we've AB tested and the editorial team and the growth team that has been focused on the newsletter has absolutely perfected this at Morning Brew. So, jenny, neil, they have really broken this down to a science where if you're short, negative and elusive in the subject by an email, you're gonna get opened. But what I think we've learned from the podcast side of things is that that's not exactly true and it's something we've learned more recently.
Speaker 1:We used to be cute in the title and try and be elusive and try and bring people in when they see the title of the podcast and they say, oh, that might be interesting, but then we start to switch off and on as far as how specific can you be? What is the future of the cannabis industry? And when we're more obvious, business casual succeeds. That might not be true for every podcast, that might not be true for every audience in particular, but for the business casual business listener, we have found that they wanna know what they're getting themselves into and I think once you get into the audio. Then you have to story tell in a way that is still elusive, that keeps people going, that people wanna stay for the entire length of the episode, and that's, I think, where you can get a little bit more cute and a little bit more creative. But I think in the show notes and in the episode title, the shorter, the more obvious, the more information you convey, the better off you'll end up being.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So that aligns pretty much with what Apple also recommends. We actually just got an email pretty recently. When they're talking about they just released the HomePod Mini and they said you know, it's gonna be a lot more likely for people to listen to podcasts on these devices and the way one of the things they recommend is have short, concise titles that really let people know what the podcast is about, and it sounds like that's aligning with what you've learned. I think so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's already hard to make these decisions for such a significant amount of time. If we're asking for 35 minutes out of someone's day, that's a lot. That's a big commitment. It's not as easy as oh. Maybe you'll see what's behind this email. Do I want to buckle up for this? I think that means you have to show a bit more. I agree with Apple. We've seen what we've tried to test. Testing isn't as easy on the podcast front. It's not as scientific as the subject line testing is on email. But I would totally agree with what you're saying.
Speaker 2:One of the things that you're really good at in Morning Brew is repurposing content. I feel like everything that you share in the newsletter also is on social media. For the podcast, you have really great transcripts on the website. You do a really good job of getting all that content out on whatever channel people are on. I guess I just want to ask how do you repurpose content in a way that just doesn't make you go insane?
Speaker 1:When you say go insane, you're saying from the operations of it or from the audience making them insane.
Speaker 2:No, I'm definitely asking from the content creator side. For everybody who's putting out a podcast and feels this need to repurpose across a bunch of channels, is there a way to systematize that so that they don't feel overwhelmed that they have to promote in all these different areas?
Speaker 1:What I believe in podcasting is just for long form content is that you get your whole full length episode. There's a story that comes before the episode. Why did you choose to do it? There's a story that comes after the episode. What do people think? What did you learn after putting it out? What kind of responses?
Speaker 1:As far as the full episodes go, that's your anchor asset. That's your full length thing. What you have to figure out to do how to do is how to atomize it and how to take little pieces of it, whether it's quote cards, video clips, trivia, questions, who knows? You got to find out what works for your show and what works for your audience, but you got to get as much value out of the episode as possible. And then you got to redistribute it so that other people can enjoy and say, oh, that's a good point. That's an interesting thesis from that guest. That's an interesting statistic. I think I'll give this whole show a shot. Or the other way around. It says I listened to the episode and now I have something to share.
Speaker 1:Most people don't actually share the full episode because even when you send it to a friend, it's a hard expectation. Hey, humor me and give me 45 minutes of your time. But if you can say, hey, I'm already on my Instagram app, I'm already on Twitter, let me just flick this thing over to my friend Then you make it much easier to let people show that they're a fan of the show. So that's more conceptual. But as far as the operations go, you have your anchor assets, which is something that, like Kinsey as the idea generator, marilyn as the idea generator really focus on making the best possible full length episode. And then what we've done is as a team and we'll divvy up the responsibilities.
Speaker 1:I do the transcripts, somebody else does this, somebody else does that, some are freelancers and we say, hey, can you help us break this up into clips? Yeah, I mean, from there you just do it. It's not easy. It takes time. There's no secret sauce to coming up with the right captions, to finding the right clips to do. I don't know the secret to that. Maybe someone has a better way.
Speaker 1:Some people have tried to automate it. I've seen these softwares that pick out, based on the word analysis, what might be the most provocative part of the podcast. I don't think we're ready to outsource that to technology. Maybe one day I would love to get that off of my hands, but we know best. We were there for the interview. We've seen the whole editing process. We know what is the most compelling snippet. The shorter the better. By the way, we found that if you try and cut a minute and a half for Twitter, that's not good. You need like 20 seconds. If you're on YouTube, you can then allow yourself to go more, like four to six minutes. But it's been a whole education on these platforms and while I think I'm still podcasting, all of a sudden I have to give myself this whole operational and strategic education as to what's going to work best outside of the actual podcasting apps.
Speaker 1:And I think that's a really necessary component to growing these shows. We cannot just live and die by the RSS feed.
Speaker 2:I think that's incredible and I know that on our side we see a lot of this repurposing as a way to get in front of new listeners, because all the other platforms, all the platforms social media platforms in particular are built to get distribution. But it's mostly like one time you might get lucky and something goes viral and you're kind of just buying a bunch of lottery tickets every time that you share something on one of these sites and you're hoping this gets a ton of traction and then a bunch of people go, wow, that's actually a really interesting point from Ray Dalio and I now want to listen to this whole interview. Oh, this podcast actually has a great interview. I'm going to go listen to it right away.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's the name of the game right now.
Speaker 2:Now, one other thing you've written about is you wrote this great blog post on podcast transcriptions and one of the things you wrote I've got here is the real value of transcript is for hearing impaired users and non English first, but it also helps with SEO. We really believe in transcripts quite a bit at Buzzsprout, so I'd like to hear how do you think about the value of transcripts and what process do you go through to create those transcripts?
Speaker 1:Totally. I don't know which one's more important. It's hard to say. I want to be inclusive. We should be thinking of accessibility first. I think that's really important for all media. So I want to say that's just like that shouldn't even be a question. Everybody should be enjoying what we put out, regardless of wherever you are, however you are. So I think, whatever, just do it.
Speaker 1:I found somebody on Upwork. Again, this is something that people are trying to automate with software, and I think that day will come because that's the future. But right now, if we use the computer transcripts, there's always some sort of mistake and it doesn't flow well as written copy because there's all these filler words, there's all these little things. If somebody knows a better software that they really think works, let me know. I would love to try it.
Speaker 1:But we found somebody on Upwork. Her name's Dana. She's up in Queens when COVID receives work and I'll go get drinks or something like that, but she is just always on the ready to transcribe her episodes and she likes the content, she gets paid, it's great. And so then I take that transcript and I put it on the website and so then I can just tell that my SEO score by having all these big names and all these big businessy buzzwords are starting to collect a lot of weight over time, because the audio we know is searchable. Now I've seen a bunch of articles about how Google will index based on podcasting, but I think that, given how easy it is to add this to your operations, I think it's something that's really good, from the very first point I made, but also to the SEO play. I'm not an SEO wizard, but I can just tell from my Google analytics where the traffic is coming from and just as the months go by, my search volume that brings people into the website continues to go up.
Speaker 2:I love you talking about making sure it's accessibility first, because that really should be table stakes.
Speaker 2:We should just assume that we are making this content for everybody. There's accessibility for people who are hearing impaired or just hard of hearing, but there's also like, let's just get it out there so people can share it and the people can go and read it. Sometimes people can't listen to something, but they could read and they would enjoy just to read the podcast. Right then, and it's like we already talked about if someone's not a native speaker of English, translating, that is so much easier when there's a well written transcript which well written sometimes does not mean verbatim it can actually mean editing out segments, probably some of the segments that I might have just put into this answer. Okay, so one last promotion strategy I've seen you use is you have a group called the podcast promo exchange, where, if you have excess inventory for your ads, you'll do a promotion for another podcast in exchange for that podcast doing a promotion for you. So can you tell us a little bit about what's happening there?
Speaker 1:Yes, but I've got bad news for you. It doesn't work. I debunked myself. So this group is fantastic. There's a Slack group, you know. A bunch of people from a bunch of different companies are in there. Everyone's being super helpful to each other and welcoming and solves each other's problems and connects to all sorts of resources, which is just really cool for me to be a part of.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty early in my career, so to get to be exposed to professionals that easily is something special and unexpected, and for a while we would say, hey, if you have access inventory, if you have a certain ad space that's dedicated to swapping, let me know and we'll swap shows. Because what we saw in the newsletter world is that cross-promoting with other newsletters was fantastic. If you like email newsletters, you're more susceptible and more likely to like more email newsletters. We thought that would drag over to audio and that if you're listening to a podcast, you would give another podcast a shot. There's a couple problems with that is that by creating your own ad unit, you don't really know how someone's going to deliver your show, and so sometimes we would do a cross-promotion and they'd say, oh, I heard you on XShow. No way, I can't believe they did that for you. I'm like that wasn't free, that was marketing, but what we learned was that someone hit, someone miss and it was really hard to attribute. There are a couple tools and I'm sure I actually think you probably can speak to this better about the attribution side of audio to audio, but we were trying that and nothing was showing a dramatic uptick. So for the six months of the year we did a couple million of cross promos and then for the third quarter we backed off and I haven't really seen any sort of dramatic shift.
Speaker 1:So again, it's one of these data problems that I wish I could say. I know everything, I know that they 100% work, which ones do, which ones don't, but I think that the reality is that if you don't hear and if you don't see anything, it's not there. And I've seen and I've heard much better signals from other marketing things that we've tried to do, like the ones I was speaking to earlier. So I've actually backed off of the cross promotions. I think that the better way is to do a real integration and to have the host of another show on your show and then to have our host have Kinsey go on to another show where they can really do it justice and it's a real thought through partnership that you then put over social, you then put over your email, you put over your podcast and you really say I believe in this integration.
Speaker 1:I think my audience would like you. I think your audience would like me. We were shelling out a lot of cross promos to shows that if you asked me today, did you think that I was like I don't really think they would like it, and so I think it was a lot of learning. It was good to make those connections as well. We made some friends through the process, but it's not a strategy that I personally am continuing to pursue.
Speaker 2:Okay, interesting. So one of the other videos we recently just did was with Jordan Harbinger and for his podcast he said this was the main way he was growing. He'd grown the Jordan Harbinger show. So it'd be interesting to kind of compare and contrast how he's doing the cross promo and then how you've done it, maybe see if we kind of pull out what the differences might have been there.
Speaker 2:I totally feel your pain, though, on being able to attribute things. We've been completely spoiled by the attribution that we can do for Facebook ads, for Google. There's all this ad tech and there a lot of it is incredibly creepy in how good it is at tracking, and I think as marketers we maybe have gotten a little too addicted to it, because as soon as you get into a world of podcasting where we don't have it all which I think is actually at times a very good thing it is hard to figure out Like it. Did this purchase of a bunch of ads actually lead to something. For me it can be difficult to tell. So I know you have spoken, you know the team at Chardwell and those are really great guys and I think that's probably the best software. Is there other software that you've used for attribution and tracking?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we use pod sites as well. Charitable more so on the marketing side of things, pod sites more on the advertising side of things. I don't know if that's just by happenstance or if they're building their products to better target on one side or the other. But yeah, the guys at Charitable and pod sites and the whole team, guys and girls over there, everything they're doing, the podcast lord's work over there I think it's a whole. We could do a whole other episode about whether we want the data or not.
Speaker 1:I think somebody got mad at me on Twitter because they were like this whole thing with RSS is going down the dark side. I'm like have you heard of Google and Facebook? We're nowhere close. They're like you still should be diligent. I'm like, yeah, agreed, but like we got to do business, we got to figure out how to be efficient. So I think that what we're all doing is like complaining and they're actually building a product that will solve it, and someone has to have vision and says, okay, how are we actually going to build some sort of ecosystem that respects the user but also tells you when your work is actually productive? Because, like the reality, in which I'm just going to respect everyone's privacy. And then, you know, never make any real attribution or understand what's productive and what's not. Like, maybe I think I'm ethical enough to slow myself down, but somebody else is not going to slow themselves down and they're going to take laps around me, so I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's something that I think is very interesting at large about which tools we use, and I think somebody has to come in and say this is what the ecosystem should look like, where it's open, distributed, fair, good for everybody, which is really hard, but I think that we're still looking for more leadership and less complaining when we come down to the attribution conversation.
Speaker 2:There's a solid chance that the person complaining had a at bus sprout email address, because we've definitely been on the. We've definitely been on the. You know, watch out, for a lot of the mistakes of the internet have been connected to some of this creepy ad tech, and so I really like what Charitable is doing. They seem like they're trying to do everything in the right way, and hopefully we'll continue to find a way to let people measure the success of their campaigns without actually invading people's privacy.
Speaker 1:I've got one more point on the ethical of it. Ethics of it it is that we all think we want all this fancy data, but I think what we've, what I've found out and I love talking to these listeners and some of my friends now and somewhere already my friends but I me and my team we make these calls, we email, we ask how'd you find out about the show, what do you like, what do you not like? After 20 calls, every three months you start to hear the same thing. So, while we want this data, everything if you just dedicate some time to getting to know your audience, you're going to hear trends. And if you go toward the hundred true fans and you listen to the audience and you say, oh, that's how you discovered us, oh, that's what really pissed you off, then you can optimize the product very authentically and very real Cause if you ask good questions, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:What did you think? The basic stuff. There's no rocket science here, but I found that you start to hear the same thing over and over again and then that leads to a signal and then I can optimize from there. So some of our best pivots, instead of optimizing a little thing here and there and trying to tweak something digitally. We've made massive enhancements to the show because we just gone on the phone and said what do you think? So I don't know. I think that there's a lot of other ways to go about the end goal of data that can be solved with many different ways of just that. There's a lot of better ways that are not nearly as intrusive and get you to potentially better and bigger discoveries.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. I think it's very easy to look at numbers as the source of truth and then often miss the stories and the people behind those numbers. People will tell you with a lot more nuance you look at just Google analytics which site somebody came from, but they may tell you oh, I'd actually been thinking about you for months. I'd heard you on this podcast and I watched for YouTube videos. Then I saw a retired getting ad and then I finally was on this website and I clicked the link. You're going to get a lot more data and a little bit more understanding of somebody's purchasing decision if you talk to them, versus just seeing the one data point of them coming to make the purchase. So I know we've used over an hour of your time. Do you have time for some rapid fire questions before we go?
Speaker 1:Yeah, surely let's do it.
Speaker 2:All right. So what advice would you give to new podcasters just starting out?
Speaker 1:Get to know your audience and give them value, whether it's entertainment, education. Both give them something, solve a pain point and then keep on going and then just obsess over your audience and worry about everything else. Second, they will help you grow. They will help you monetize. Know the audience, make them the happiest people they've ever been.
Speaker 2:Is it too late to start a podcast?
Speaker 1:Hell. No, that's it. That's the whole answer. It's not too late. Make content. Everyone should be expressing themselves. Tell your story.
Speaker 1:Tell whatever story you think you need to go tell, but also put it in other places. Don't live and die by the RSS feed. Youtube is your friend. Audio grams are okay If you can get video, if you can get animation, somehow find a freelancer online, get creative, iterate on top of it, make your content, put it in both places, see what goes well and then keep going. You might start with a podcast and then end up with a video. You might start with a video and end up with a podcast. As long as you're expressing and storytelling and using Buzzsprout, then you're good to go.
Speaker 2:Should businesses be creating their own podcasts?
Speaker 1:Yes, again, people should be expressing themselves, but businesses should be owning their own media properties. I think I'm saying this is a media company that wants your advertising dollars. Own your own media channels. This is the future. This is the future of real estate. It's better than having a corner property in New York City. It's all about having your own audience and distribution and catalog of content so you can distribute without constantly paying somebody else to do it for you. I think the sooner these companies and most companies B2B, b2c bring in media as a cornerstone, the same way you have marketing, the same way you have revenue and this and product and engineering. I think everyone for internal communications, for thought leadership and being a champion of your employees, for customer acquisition, for customer retention, own your media. Everyone should be making content. This is the future. That's my biggest thesis right now that I'm super excited about. But 100%, start a podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much. We really appreciate you coming on to the podcast slash YouTube video thing that we're doing and just sharing all these insights you've learned, because there's not a ton of podcasts that are doing as well as you have been doing. If people want to learn more about Morning Brew or the podcast business casual, or just learn more from you in particular, where would you direct people to go?
Speaker 1:They've probably heard enough of me, but if you want more of my random thoughts I think I've been putting out more of my stuff through Twitter. I should write another medium blog post of some sort, but follow me on Twitter. I'm Jay Kaplan. 1. Check out Business Casual and podcasting. Follow Kinsey Grant at Kinsey Grant on Twitter as well. The show itself explores the different relevant business trend each week. I think that we're doing an awesome job bringing on really smart people to answer our questions, to explore that part of the business world. Give that a shot. Give me a follow, reach out, say hi. Thank you so much for having me on. This is really fun. It's nice to step out from behind the scenes and to be the one on it. It's super weird, but I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks again. Hopefully in the future maybe hit another 10 million downloads, we can get you back on to share even more things that you've learned. Sounds great. We'll see you there. See you there.