Where Should You Put Podcast Ads? Strategies for Placement and Listener Respect

Yes. What would do that is... a piping hot cup of java because you know i don't know about you but it's it's we had 70s we actually had 80s here and then it was like no no we're gonna go back to the 40s and i'm like the 40s i got a hoodie exactly and so that coffee pour is brought to you by our good friend mark over at podcast branding.co we've i've worked with him for a ton of stuff like ask the podcast coach school of podcasting podcast rodeo show pod your podcast website and podcast And you

know what? If I started a new podcast today, you know who I'd hire? That's right. The one, the only Mark from podcastbranding.co. He's got probably over, I don't know, close to 600 artwork that he's done now for people. And he's not just an artwork guy. I always want to stress that. He does whole websites. So if you're like, look, I need to take everything I do to the next level on how it looks. Then Mark is the guy you want to talk to. He's a podcaster.

He's been a graphic artist since he was a wee lad. Basically, he's been doing it forever. And he's going to sit down with you one-on-one and find out really what you want. He's also going to listen to your show to make sure that it matches your brand. So check him out. He's at podcastbranding.co. Tell him Dave and Jim sent you. Take me home

Dan, thanks for your sponsorship. Did Troy come

He says, maybe we need a School of Podcasting episode on where to fit in commercials if having more than one at the beginning is a bad thing. And my homework to you, if you want to witness this in life, go watch Friends. It comes on, it's like on from like 8 to midnight, I think, on Nickelodeon. And when they go to a commercial break, you can just, you know, you could drive to Milwaukee and back, and they will still be running.

And I don't know if, I am seriously going to do this with a stopwatch, because it might be that it's only two minutes, but all the ads are 15 seconds. Because the whole thing is you're waiting for them to come back because what's going to happen to Joey, right? These important decisions you're trying to figure out, you know, and they just go to another commercial and another commercial.

And this is also why if you watch at the end, instead of running the credits, they go to the next show and run the credits in the bottom right-hand corner and so that the actual content doesn't take up as much time so they can just cram it full of more ads because that's what people want. We probably paid way too much money for an old show, but then there are people like me that will watch it because you're like, nothing else is on. Oh, look, it's Friends.

It's up there with Seinfeld where I'm just like, eh, I know I've seen this at least six times, but it's the puffy shirt episode or the

And I love the fact now that we're talking about the lower regions of your body not smelling good. All the commercials now are kind of many. They're like, even here and down there. They're just all kind of like, we're not going to say that, but we're going to say down there, and we're going to look down. But it's just mind-boggling to where you go and you watch something and you're like, oh, it's the Thanksgiving one or whatever.

And then they go to a commercial and it is soul crushing because you're like, they're not going to come back for an hour. So I need to figure out how long is their break? Because it definitely, no, for those of us that grew up with Chuck Woolery and Love Connection, boy, there's something I haven't talked about in a long time. But Chuck Woolery would be like, I'll see you in two and two. Because it was like two minutes and two seconds or something like that.

So my thing is, My favorite, and this is like it's your show, do what you want, but I love the ad I can take at the beginning is the 15-second one because you can say a lot in 15 seconds. And I think it was Mark Maron used to say, you know, today's show is brought to you by Squarespace. We use it at WFPod, whatever it is, .com. It looks great, and you can do this. Find it at da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And that was it. And then let's start the show.

And then, you know, lock the gates and all would come in. And that I didn't mind because it was like it was really because about the time you're reaching for the skip button, it was over. And I know I don't listen to Joe Rogan a lot, but he used to put all his stuff in the beginning. And I think he's now scattering them out. And so I actually I'm not a huge fan of ads at the beginning. So I used to do my stuff at the end.

And then I would notice that the minute I hinted that the show was over, that'd be like, hey, thanks so much for tuning in. Don't forget, use the coupon code, whatever. People were gone. The minute I said, hey, thanks so much for tuning in, they ran for the exits. And so I was like, hmm, I'm going to have to put these in the middle. And so when you look up advertising, it's often included with the word disruptive advertising.

as in disruptive advertising, meaning, hey, now that I have your attention, I'm going to come in here and just kind of, you know, grab your attention and talk about this. And then hopefully that matches what you're going to say and then go back to our regularly scheduled program. So the middle thing, but I can also go in into my Apple stats and see that I can see right where people skip. So yeah, Danny Brown has one. The other reason I thought we could talk about this was is Stephen Bartlett.

Did you ever listen to Diary of a CEO? No. It's a really popular podcast. Guy turned down $100 million to do a podcast. I'm going to guess for Spotify, but I don't know. And one of the reasons he said was, yeah, I would have to increase my advertising by 300%. And I was like, well, good for you. Danny says, speaking of too many ads, this is a requirement for a platform if you want to use Spotify. Podcasters should allocate two pre-rolls and four mid-roll ads per each episode.

Like, that's a thing. And I was just like, yeah, where's my boy? I have my, yeah, here we go. Stephen Bartlett. I'll put this in the chat room. I think if I can find the chat, here's the chat room. But yeah, he said, I have a couple quotes here. If I can get, let's go to this screen. This is, the audio people are going, oh, this is so much fun to listen to Dave go. Where's the button?

Yeah, the 32-year-old, revealed one of the reasons why they turned the deal down was it would have meant at least a 300% more adverts on the show. Bartlett added, I believe there are smarter ways to monetize than piling on more ads. Amen, brother. Equity partnerships, long-term integrations, and creating your own products. Membership options are more innovative options that keep the listener experience intact.

So he was worried about the fact that he was just going to ruin his show by just littering it with ads. I haven't had less control. There you go. Hey, give me an ad. Give me $100 million so you can take control of my show. I've had less control over whether the show appears, meaning probably exclusive stuff, I'm guessing there. With the deals, you're often contactually incentivized to focus on certain platforms, and sometimes this means removing your show from others altogether.

For a show that's always been built on independence and accessibility everywhere, that felt like a step backwards. One of the beautiful things about podcasting is it can appear on all platforms at once, and the viewer gets to decide. And I was like, well, yeah. Now, that's also easy to say when you've built, you know, I don't know how many subscribers he has on his show. Am I not allowed to paste in the comments? No, I can't. You know, it's easy to say that when you're successful.

But, yeah, he's got, he does, I forget where I discovered him. But he does these really in-depth shows, obviously does his homework. He was at, I want to say, Podcast Movement in D.C. and explained that we had a team of like 11, and one of them was to just spend obsessing over like the first minute of a show to figure out how it could be better. He did things like he had it at a certain room temperature.

He did research to find out what the temperature guest's favorite music was, so he could have that playing when they walked in. Like, you know, which is what you do when you have a team of 11. But I'm like, I don't think I can do that. Yeah, he did get in trouble. Rich says, I think he got in trouble for advertising a product where he actually owned part of the company. Yeah, it was one of those, everybody and their brother is pimping some sort of green juice, whether it's athletic green.

Athletic green's gotten in, not so much hot, like a hot mess kind of thing, but They had a really high margin, apparently, on their product and would give people a decent cut for an affiliate. Like, oh, if you sign up and you sell a bag of Athletic Greens, you get 40% of the deal. And people are like, 40%? Well, yeah. And then other companies came out with kind of the same stuff. And lo and behold, it wasn't as expensive because you weren't giving 40% of your profits to somebody else.

So everybody else is like, I drink, you know, Premier Protein, because it's, you know, and then you own a big chunk of the company. That's an FTC violation. You have to let people know that. Dan says, podcasting overall is a good example of something Dave mentions a lot, that free is not a good business model. Yep, giving podcasts away for free makes it a different business model. It just, you know, it's kind of crazy.

But in terms of where to put ads, Jim, like with Gallup, like you guys are promoting your stuff. We are an ad. Yeah, I'm like, it is. But are there actual ads in your ad? No. Yeah.

And then they're like, hey, we have enough downloads. We could probably start taking ads. And I'm like, no, no, we're the ad. That's the whole purpose of what we're doing here, infotainment, right? The listeners love to listen to it and it supports the product. So we don't do it. I like the 15-second model in the very beginning. This is real popular on YouTube, and I think it translates to regular podcasts as well, which would be that this episode is sponsored by blah-ba-dee-blah-blah.

You know, get this, this, this, and that. Thanks for whatever, and then go into the thing. And then, you know, somewhere And I don't want to, everyone always wants to do mid, and I think mid's too long. I think it's good to come, you know, it would be good to have an opening segment of some kind that had some length. and then bring in your ad, get it out of the way, get that thing in there and get it out of the way, and then have the rest of the show. Can you do more than one? Absolutely.

You can do as many as you want to your show. You can do whatever you want with it. But, you know, we do, listen, we do two right off the bat, right? We do the music, and we do two episodes, and everybody's, everybody here on the live show knows the routine. They check in in the chat room, hey, good to see you, blah, while we're doing our ads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know what the skip You know, the skip numbers are for us on that. It's pretty predictable.

Your segment is always the certain length of the music because we play to the music. I keep mine 30 seconds. I try to maybe 30, 35 seconds. And I don't think we get a lot of complaints about it, right? Partly because both products are great. folks who list their listeners. Dan Lefebvre is out there in chat right now. He comes every single week. So people know Dan, it's good branding for Dan. Good. Same thing with Mark. They know Mark. And I mean, this show is associated with Mark.

I mean, the brand is so close now for both of them because they've spent so long, you know, being, being supporters or being sponsors of the show. Yeah. So I like the 15 second model. I like a, a ad somewhere in the middle. And then again, You know, could you get one in towards the end? Sure. I just like the consistency of brand in ads. I don't like, the one thing I don't like on YouTube is all these YouTubers shifting their sponsorships around. This week it's Squarespace.

This week it's Soylent Green. This week it's, you know, that seems, that's, you know, I want brand, personally, I want brand advertising that is committed to to the content that we're making here. So, you know, we used to take on, when I would take on paid ads on Home Gadget Geeks, I always made sure it was a tech product. It was a gadget, right? So in here, that's a, we're fairly appropriate. We're not trying to pimp beef jerky.

If they- If you're like, hey, this is the best thing ever, and then your audience buys it, and they're like, yeah, it broke the minute I took it out of the box, they're not going to believe a word you say. So you have to be very careful with that. I know some people are like, I just need somebody to pay me anything. I'm like, your integrity is a little more expensive than that. So don't go just give it. That is the definition of selling out.

And I'm like, well, that wasn't my experience, you know, but well, it was mine and it broke and it was, you know, whatever. And you're like, well, I'm sorry about that. It's not, I don't own the company. Right. So I, I, I started getting, that's not, there's some folks that are really good at that. That's not my gig. I just, I'm not interested in people. It's like, hey, I use this. It's like Christian, you know, Maple Grove Partners. I use him as, as a host.

He's been, he's hosted Home Gadget Geeks. From the very beginning. And, you know, I recommend folks for a look at that hosting. It should go over to over him, but he don't contact. I've had some people contact me. Hey, you know what? And I'm like, ah, no, no, no, I don't, I can't fix anything for you. That's not, I can't, I can't fix anything for you.

Nothing worse than non-related ads and sponsors reduces the authenticity feeling for me. And where it's clear, the creator is just in it for the money. As opposed to delivering something for the audience. Yeah.

If this show was 30 minutes long, but it's 90 minutes long. So we're going to do a second ad break. Yeah. So, and then Todd, I see your question. We'll get to that in a bit. And then there's the whole, Oh, Jody says, I've decided up to this point not to have a sponsor, but I'm rethinking the idea. I would promote you more like, you know, make yourself a little jingle and like, Hey, I've, you know, and just the, the soothing sounds of Jody Kringle. I like that.

And just, you know, if you need help with this, if you have a podcast or whatever, because we already like you. We're listening to your show. Obviously, we like your voice because we're listening to your show. And it's kind of odd. When we go to promote ourselves, we get all freaky. We're like, oh, it feels like, you know. And it's like, no, no, you've got them there. And Jeff sees this. I'm a big fan of just organic messaging during the show. Mine's live, then goes to a podcast.

We played with dynamic insertion for our own products. Yeah. I actually, on this show, last night, accepted, I don't usually, because we do enough of our own ads, but I saw an ad for Podmatch, which I use. Again, I use Podmatch. And so somewhere in this show, if you're listening not live, you may hear an ad for Podmatch, because I saw that. And that's via... Oh, so

Now, they didn't pay us. They could have. They didn't. And I don't want them to, kind of thing. But their marketing folks got involved and put us on their front page and promoted us through their social media account and stuff. And we really had a good show. It had some good information. It was good promotion for me. I'm really looking, you know, for me, I would... rather not get paid. I would rather get influence.

I would rather have my show being, I'd rather have that person I'm having on the show. You know, last week I had Erin Lawrence and TechEdgesCanada.com is her site. And I would, she actually, because we're using StreamYard, you can share on StreamYard, you can share your, the guests can share their YouTube stream and stream it on their account. And she was like, She's like, how do I do this? She's clicking. I'm like, oh, you don't have to do that, Erin. She's like, no, no, I want to.

And so we were streaming live as at Home Gadget Geeks, you know, or at The Average Guy.TV, as well as on her YouTube channel. And we picked up a handful of her, you know, folks that had subscribed to her channel. Very, very powerful. To me, that's the value. I can't make enough in ad revenue to have it make sense. I can make it in influence to, to build the audience, right. To find more people. And so that, for me, that's way more important in the ad space.

One is the relationship, and then two is the reach. That doesn't mean I give them a form letter that says, here's all the ways to share me. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. If that's what you do, that's fine. But I want that organic relationship that's strong enough that they just do it. They're proud of it. They don't, I'm not coercing them into it, or I'm not. You know, I'm not kind of being like, well, if you, I mean, if you're going to be on my show kind of thing.

So I, I like, I prefer that thought of relationship rather than revenue. That's just, that just makes more sense to me.

Episode 975, 976, and 977, there's Ray from Around the Layout, talking about basically smaller shows that don't have 10 billion downloads and that ended up getting... They treated their sponsors like partners. It was like, hey, who is someone that can help me amplify my message kind of thing? They're on the same part so that they want to promote you. And like with Ray, and Ray's show is about model railroads. And so he had one company that simply, Ray sent him a rubber stamp.

And when they ship out whatever they're shipping out to other male railroaders, they basically put his logo and his URL on the envelope. Perfect. And Ray mentions them in the show. So it's the other thing I thought it would play. And so to kind of answer Ray's question, like, where do I do it if I don't do it at the beginning? The only thing we do differently is the first thing that people hear on this show is our voices, right? Or in this case, my voice.

I introduce the show, then we go to ads, as opposed to hitting play and hearing, did you know, you know? by hitting play and going, I've got diabetes and I'm happy. No, it's, and I want to dance. So, yeah. But I was listening to a girl named a girl. Okay. Well, when you're my age, everybody's a, it's a young woman, Brett Cooper, who apparently was on the Daily Wire.

So if you're into the whole far right leaning stuff and she's very snarky, which I like, and she's talking about, I didn't realize this because I don't care about But Blake Lively, wife of Ryan Reynolds, got into this whole thing. And he said, she said, sexual assault kind of thing. And apparently she, like, if you at least listen to Blake or Brett Cooper, she kind of like, you know, shot herself in the foot pretty hard.

Like when the actual stuff came out, we'll see, I guess, when it goes to court. But it was, so anyway, so she's talking about this and how everybody loved Blake. And listen to how she translates. What's not the word? She transitions into an ad here. I was like, wow, that was pretty slick and obviously well thought out. So she's talking about Blake Lively and how when she first came out, everybody was like, oh, poor Blake, you're a victim.

Guys, my partners over at Ground News understand the problem with legacy media and the fact that they

Where am I going to put this ad and how can I do it? Because Ben Shapiro is another guy from the Daily Wire that just will be talking about something. And all of a sudden, the transition is so smooth that they're a sentence and a half in before you go, hey, wait a minute, they're doing an ad. And then about the time you grab your phone to click the skip button, the ad's over. And I was just like, and she does that really well. Ben Shapiro now does a thing where he has perplexity as a sponsor.

You know, it'd be like, well, that's only 38% of the people want to do. I don't know. Let's ask, let's ask perplexity. And then he just make a bit in the middle of it. But that's something I think I'm horrible at this. So I always just do the right after this, which is just so lame.

Like I said, I think Ground News, I think they've been coaching the folks on their affiliate because they all do it the same way. You know, I was doing this thing and I need to actually... I couldn't tell if I was getting good or trusted sources or not. And you're like, huh, I've heard that before, you know? And so, yes, listen, you can get cute about your transitions in there. You can get creative about sneaking the ad in or, or getting someone right up to it.

But then if you, then when you do the ad, somebody is going to be like, oh, that's the ad. And so I would, I'm not saying you can't do it. I just be careful because then people start, questioning every time you start going a direction. You're like, oh, is that going to be an ad? Like, am I listening to an ad now? Or is that a real thing? Just, I prefer to just try to be authentic in that and make it really clear. Hey, this is an ad segment kind of that we're moving into.

I mean, I do appreciate that. I do appreciate a smoother transition. a sneaky transition. You know, again, you get away with it the first and maybe the second time, and then it starts to sound a little disingenuous after all, in my opinion. It starts to sit down a little disingenuous. You're kind of like, okay, how are you going to trick me this week? How are you going to trick me with this transition or whatever? So just be careful. Again, there's a fine line in there somewhere.

You do what you want, but Careful with the sneakiness on that of like, oh, I sneaked him into another ad. I don't know if you want to be doing that with your audience.

Now, if, you know, in some, like in some cases, this is where I think the lines blur, you know, we have a long time partnerships with Mark and Dan and we speak those, you know, we speak fresh ads in there every single week, right? And so, you know, do we, you know, do we try to sneak those in? I don't think the audience, I mean, if you've been listening to this long enough, you know what we do. Like, you know what's coming up. It's not like we try and sneak it in on you. So I don't know.

It's a good, it's a good, these are, listen, these are all really good thoughts. I think as you're thinking about your own ad, strategy, there you go, strategery, as it used to be said, you, you can think through like, hey, what is, what will be the most effective and the most tolerable for my audience? And then do that. I mean, if you can make it funny, make it funny.

If you can host read in and, and they, you know, hey, if you can sneak them in and the goal becomes to find the the ads, you know, if your audience is like, hey, find my ads kind of thing. If that's a game you play with them, fine, right? That works. But I think what really matters is what is your audience used to? What are they, what will they tolerate? You don't want to do an ad and then have them hate you or the ad because of the way you did it, right? Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaking of that, Squarespace, it can provide you all.

And I'm like, yeah, but you're like, you know, again, it goes back to why are you doing this? But I think a lot of people, that's why it's always like I want to start a podcast and get ads. And I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. That kind of comes over from radio. But I wonder how many times people think my show isn't legit until I get ads. I'm like, no, no, your show is legit, you know, when you – either entertain, educate. You're holding someone's attention.

You know, you're getting them to do whatever you want them to do. Craig says our sponsors backed out when they weren't getting their ROI. These days we advertise our own teaching services. Yep. And it's working well. Yeah. It's promoting your own stuff. Jody did say, I mentioned earlier about she should promote herself and she says, oh, I do. So very good. That's good. That's beautiful.

And for some advertisers, like, hey, once, you know, once you've reached your entire audience over a, you know, six-month time period, chances are, no matter how much more advertising you do, they've either purchased the product, especially if it's a one-time purchasable product. They've purchased it, you know, in the tech space. You don't buy it, you know, a lot of that stuff you buy one time, and it lasts five to six years or whatever. So it's not like you're buying it all the time.

maybe different with other products, right? But at some point, like, it doesn't make sense to advertise anymore. You've, you've done your job for some products. You've done your job. You've reached, you know, you've reached the, everybody. I could see this when I did, I put a HelloFresh, you know, during the, right before the pandemic, we started using HelloFresh. And then during the pandemic, I would talk about it on the show and had a code.

And I think I maybe sold 30 or 40 boxes, whatever that is, to, you know, to people that were in it. Then it, Kind of dried up. Like you could see it was the, it was the bell curve, right? It was picked up. It was slow at first and then it really picked up and then everybody tried and everybody was who was going to try it, tried it. And I can't get, I couldn't get any repeat. Like, you don't get repeat stuff for that. It's just the first, it's just new customers.

So you're like, okay, at some point it didn't make sense to continue to have a HelloFresh ad in there because most people had done it. Now, could I do it again? Probably, because it's been three years maybe since I've done a HelloFresh ad.

Yeah. Let's move over to Todd's question, and this is something I've heard a lot about in different podcasts about podcasting. Has anyone had Spotify gotten music copyright notices all of a sudden? I've got a bunch over episodes that are over five years old. He goes, I just use music in my show transition from my copyright-free service, and they want so much information to verify versus YouTube. Yeah, this is, and Randy hit the nail on the head.

Oops, that's not the right Randy quote, but he's basically saying Spotify is a music service. And yeah, I heard them talk about this on the feed. I heard them talk about it on Buzzsprout's podcast. We don't know why, but they are coming out guns a-blazing.

And so I'm kind of, I haven't, I'll have to double check and make sure, because my feed, make sure the email that is in your feed, whatever that is, is something you check on a regular basis because they will eventually pull your whole show, I think in some cases.

But what they're looking for you to do is pull the episode, which the only company I know, which I've always scratched my head, this would be the one time where it comes in handy, is with Libsyn, you can go, hey, don't show this episode to Spotify. Like they have a feed for every, you know, destination and And even when I worked there, I was kind of like, what's the advantage of that again? But, you know, so if you get pulled from Spotify, that kind of sucks because they are the number two.

They have somewhere around 20% to 30%. But that's where you just tell people, hey, listen to me on Pocket Casts or whatever. But, yeah, and I'm surprised because I've got – I've had the thing for the school of podcasting. is by a guy named Neil Zaza that I got off a Sound Dogs CD back in the day. It was in the cutout bin. And I think I have the CD case in a cabinet over here. But I remember once it got a strike on YouTube.

And now the fun thing is I have permission, I still have the email, from King's X to play a snippet of their song. But that's the fun thing. I don't think it would catch it. It might.

because I've actually spliced together the, like, their chorus is twice as long, and I just have it where, like, if you like what you hear, go tell someone, and, well, they repeat that per a while, so I've kind of edited my version of that, but I'm always surprised that that doesn't get flagged, but yeah, they are, and it's kind of weird, even when they had their Do you remember when they're like, hey, you can play music on your podcast?

And then there was asterisks, oh, by the way, we have to approve every episode. Oh, by the way, only people that are paid subscribers can hear it. Oh, by the way, only on the app, which is very different than, hey, everybody, you can play music in your podcast. But yeah, they've done that, and it's what they're doing in their music service. If you want to hear music, go, which is great. I guess makes sense. They're protecting their brand and their content and things like that.

So keep that in mind. And then Ralph had another, oh, by the way, Todd the Gator going back to just openings and such said, I love the cold opens. Dave Jackson is personalized to the show as a trademark of the school of podcasting. I do this in my content sometimes as well as from your example. The fun thing was my last one was awful. I think it's awful. But I'd been watching the Dice, man. I went back and watched the old, you know, hickory dickory on the Rodney Dangerfield thing.

Is he still around? He's still around, yeah. And actually, what's really weird, I forgot what he was on. He's a really good singer. Like, that guy can sing. But I then went to do my intro, and I took Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow? and made it Mary, Mary, Your Podcast is Scary, Something, Something. And what's weird is it made sense for me at the moment. And then I went back and listened to it eight days later. And I was like, I don't even get that this is a nursery rhyme.

It just sounds like Dave is weird. And I was like, because I'm going to be talking about show openers and hooks in the future. And I was like, that technically wasn't a good hook. I don't know if that worked or not. But Ralph had a question. So, hey, AI and Descript, we're changing topics now. So feel free to mark this. He says, I'm changing topics. the name of my daily show, and the artwork. I'm moving from Ask Ralph Christian Finance to Financially Confident Christian.

Should I build this over a week or two or just do it? I would, yeah, again, this is the hard left turn. You'll, for me, and this is just me, when I go into, right now I'm using Pocket Cast, and I have a group called Podcasting, And when I go through that, I'm kind of looking at the artwork because I kind of know who I'm looking for.

There's one show I think I'm going to, I'm not going to say who, but I'm probably going to unsubscribe because about the last six episodes I've listened to were just meh. I'm like, okay, no sense doing that one anymore. But I am kind of looking for the artwork. And I also see the name of the show. And I think if you just drop that in there, there might be a weird moment where the listener might go, wait, What's this confident Christian thing? Like, I don't remember signing up for that.

I don't know. Is this something that Pocket Cast is now recommending things? I didn't do this. Swipe right, delete, go, buy. So that would be, I would always announce it. My customer service days always keep the customer informed, even when it's bad news. Like when the cable guy goes, yeah, we're going to be there somewhere between 10 and 4. And you're like, ah, okay.

Whereas if he actually said, we're going to be there at 3 o'clock, I would much rather have that bad news because I wanted them there at 10. But if he says, I'm going to be there at 3, and he actually showed up at 3, that would be good because then I could do something with my day. So anytime you can keep the audience informed, it's a good thing.

So I would let them know, hey, on this date, if you've got it all planned, you know, hey, on May 15th, we're going to switch the show from Ask Ralph to... And then the new name. And then on that date, be sure to do that, because otherwise the old integrity goes out the window. And then we were talking about this at the School of Podcasting, because Ralph's a member, that he's using Captivate.

And he could easily throw in a pre-roll, talking about things you say before the show, and just say, hey, thanks so much for tuning in. Just so you know, on May 15th, we're changing the name of the show from Ask Ralph to Confident Financial Christian. or whatever it was. I need to go back and look at that. Financially Confident Christian. And then, now let's get to the show. Bingo.

And then, you know, you could even, if you wanted to, put that in, and then after the name is changed, so now it's May whatever, and it starts off, and it's like, hey, just so you know, on May 15th, we changed the name from Ralph to this. Here's the show. And then it comes out, hey, welcome to the Financially Confident Christian. Blah, blah, blah.

And if you wanted to, you could... leave the pre-roll in on the ones that from the old show so when it starts off and it's like hey just so you know you're listening to an older version of this show back when it was called ask ralph it's now called so that way when it starts off with welcome to the ask ralph show the audience knows so there are all sorts of fun ways you could could do that to let people know

So you're getting, you have less battles you're fighting on an SEO from an SEO standpoint. So I like the change. Again, I was worried you were going to drop the Ask Ralph and I think you should probably keep that. That's a, that's an anchor for you there on the titling. Then if you're going to compete on SEO, if you're going to do those kinds of things, that term financially confident Christian would be, that is your key on that as far as search, as far as search goes, and building on that.

Now, generative AI is taking over, and SEO will soon, we will laugh about SEO. We'll be like, oh yeah, remember when we used to do keywords and those kinds of things? We're hearing from all the from all the sources. And of course, Google's being kind of tight-lipped about this. But the key words are being diminished. And how to, remember when we used to say in our titles, it needs to be how to do or how to or five ways.

There's some, there's some evidence that generative AI is favoring short, helpful snippets of the way you do things. That's what it's looking for, right? So you want to make sure in your, in your show notes, I think right now in your show notes episodes, you've got helpful content that's actually a step-by-step or walk people through things. Generative is favoring right now, seemingly favoring those kinds of things, step-by-step stuff to get stuff done.

So yeah, Ralph, I think, I don't, to be honest with you, I don't think it matters the time on how you do this. Let the audience know. That would be super smart. Make the changes. Most of your regular listeners could not even tell you the name of your show. Like they'd just be like, oh, it's Ralph's podcast. It's the money podcast. It's the, they don't, right? Most don't know. Especially if you come up with these crazy taglines, which you should, right? You should.

It's good for the first time they're looking for the podcast. After that, most listeners, they don't know. You know, I was always surprised when we would do in-person meetups, right? And these are people who listen to my Home Gadget Geeks show every week. Couldn't say those three words

Like I said, a good change from an SEO standpoint, Ralph, I think that makes a lot more sense.

So I wouldn't, I would definitely keep, that is your anchor friend. What you put after that is all SEO juice. You just need to, Just, I mean, at this point, you made a change from swimming in a pool with a whole bunch of players to a much smaller pool of players. And you could dominate if you, in the work that you do on your website, you can dominate that, the title, the financially confident Christian. You can dominate that from an SEO standpoint if you work it right.

Again, you can do whatever you want. That's just as we look at this, I would, that's what I'd do.

He's trying all this stuff, which is good, because the whole Edison, I didn't make 900 mistakes, they were 900 things that you know, led to me doing the light bulb or whatever. So there's that, but there also comes a time when you have to kind of give it some time to see if it is going to work. So, and that's the thing I did hear a YouTuber say that if your content and your strategy is working, you should see immediate growth. And I was like, Hmm, immediate growth. I'm like, I'm not sure.

Cause you still got to get it in front of the right people. That, that, that was one where I was like, I could see growth and growth of course means if I had one download this week and I had two next week and three, the next one, which is great until you get to, you know, now I have 90 and I have 91 the next week and still growth.

It's just before it was, you know, Oh my gosh, we doubled our numbers and now it's, you know, 0.0, you know, growth is, is depending on, Craig mentioned that he had one sponsor because they didn't feel like they were getting return on investment.

And that's where you have to figure out, I think the average, well, I think podcasting in general grows around 5% every year, sometimes three, that you have to figure out, well, if podcasting is growing 3%, why do I feel my show is going to grow by 20 in two months? I'm like, depending on what you're doing. That could be a little tricky. But you know what's not tricky, Jim? Our good friends that we like to call our awesome supporters. They're awesome. They're not tricky.

And they support us every month. And I deeply appreciate that. You can see them all by going to askthepodcastcoach.com slash awesome. And while you're there, you'll probably see a link for this thing called the School of Podcasting. That's the website I run that offers courses. It offers coaching, unlimited by the way, and community. In fact, I was talking via an app with people this morning.

And a pretty awesome community that has people like Chris from castahead.net and Ralph and Ray Arnett and a whole bunch of other people. Mark, I think, is in the chat room this morning. I saw him in there. Mark from Practical Prepping. It's an awesome community. Check it out, schoolofpodcasting.com. Use the coupon code COACH when you sign up. And when you're at askthepodcastcoach.com, you're looking at PodPage. It is a great way to make a pretty website without learning how to code.

It's made for podcasters. Check it out at trypodpage.com. And we're live streaming using Ecamm, and it's great fun. I'm using mine with Stream Deck, so when I just click a button or two, it goes over to different scenes and such. You can find out more about that by going to askthepodcastcoach.com slash e-com. And all these links, by the way, are in the show notes. And if you need more Jim Cullison, and hey, who doesn't? Well, then just go over to theaverageguy.tv.

Jim, honest, I know Jim gets nervous when he's on screen alone. I'm like, I am pushing the button. Theaverageguy.tv. And it is time to go over. And do the – I need to get some reverb. Wheel of names. Will it be Greg from Indie Drop-In or Craig from AI Goes to College? Or there you go. I'll have to change Ralph's artwork on the wheel of names because right now it just says Ask Ralph Christian Finance. Or will it be the one and only Jody Kringle? Jody, did I say congratulations on her award?

Did I say that last week, Jim? Say it again.

If you're into the Olympics... Keep the flame alive pod is the show you want to check out. And they've actually got to interview other people, other, you know, Olympians and such. And how fun is that? If you're, you know, you start off, it's a podcast in your basement. And next thing you know, you're talking to an Olympic athlete. How cool is that? So ladies, thank you for your support.

And if you, yourself, right now, listening or watching, does this show save you time, save you money, save you headaches? Does it keep you educated? Well, then you might want to just go to askthepodcastcoach.com slash awesome. Or if you are, I'm trying to find it now, in, here we go. If you're listening, I got to switch screens here, in Pocket Casts, you'll see where See the little, there we go. See the little dollar sign there.

That's a thing that's in pocket cast now where you can click on that. And that I believe will take you to either my PayPal button or a buy me a coffee screen. One of the two, I can't remember which one I hooked up to that, but that's the new thing. And I love pocket cast. I mean, I like love pocket cast. The only thing I hate about it is they don't do the live streaming, but it turns out that whole live streaming thing with the podcasting too. I won't say it's dead. Actually, I will.

I listened to the latest episode of Podcasting 2.0, and they kind of went, well, we thought that was going to work, and it didn't. And we're kind of bummed that it didn't work because of people fearing government regulations and such. But I sure don't hear anybody coming up with a plan B on that. So they were saying how cool it is that Pocket Cast now has – and if you have the funding tag – at your host. So Buzzsprout, Captivate, Libsyn, you can manually put it in.

I need to make a video on that. And then what that does is you tie that to whatever you want people to do, whether it's buy me a coffee or PayPal or whatever, your Amazon wishlist, things like that. But that's kind of cool. So yeah, Randy says, lit is not dead. That was not said on podcast. I didn't say lit.

I said the whole streaming Satoshi thing, unless you want to use Fountain, unless you want to use Podverse, like it used to be a big old, well, I could use, it just, it was hard, it got easier, and we're back to very hard. And I'm just like, in fact, I'm probably going to, the only, I have three shows I listen to in Podcast Guru. And it's kind of weird because I realized I hadn't listened to Todd and Rob in a while. And I was like, oh, they're in that other app. And I'm like, you know what?

I might just quit streaming SaaS to people because now I've got two apps. It'd be nice if they were all in one. and podcast guru isn't as cool as pocket cast. And I was like, this is, and then I got to do the bank to the stripe and strike to the app, to the Albie. And I'm paying Albie, whatever a month. I'm just like, eh, this, this was a great idea. It was a fun experiment. And I'm not saying it's dead. Dead is the wrong word. It's in a coma. It's in a coma right now.

And, and the, the people that love fountain and the people love pod verse are having a great time for me. Yeah. And here's the problem. I was really excited about that. I mean, I was like, yes, here we go, baby. And then when it went, that kind of crushed my heart a bit. And the fact that I was like, that's all right. Because I remember Dave Jones was working with a company that was so, there was so much potential. There was an NDA. And that was easily three months ago.

And they haven't mentioned it. And I think all the, like they just said, there was a bunch of services in the last episode. That like, this doesn't work anymore. This doesn't do it anymore. And they all left because of government regulations or potential. That was the thing that sucked. It was potential government regulations. And I was like, so yeah, Danny says streaming sats was too complicated for the average listener. Sam Sethia, true fans makes it super easy. That's the guy.

I think Sam, I'll have to go back and check because Sam made it really easy to fill your wallet. Like super easy. And then it went to your Albi wallet, which I know we're talking gibberish here, but it basically went into your wallet that I could use in whatever app I wanted. And I wasn't super keen on Sam's app. It did a little bit of everything, but it wasn't a – I don't want to say legit because it's legit, but it's a web app. So there were times it was a little wonky.

And Sam is now making a standard kind of app. And if I can still fill my wallet with that – I would use that to listen to the things that do the streaming stats. But it just – I was just like, look, I'm doing this for like three shows. Like what if I just give them five bucks in PayPal? Because I mean streaming Satoshi-wise, I was not making anybody rich.

I was basically throwing in $20 a month and then whatever shows I listened to, which meant most of it went to no agenda because their show is three hours long. And it was just one that I was like, I don't want it to go away. Yeah. Randy says the stats that came in for my music show last week covered my expenses for the months. Say that isn't in a coma. Well, that's it. But let's consider the source. Randy is a giant geek. Randy is...

See, that's not really fair, Dave, because that doesn't mean his audience is geeks. Birds of a feather. But he's probably really promoting Podverse, because this is what Adam Curry does. He promotes Podverse, Podcast Guru, and Fountain. Because all those make it really easy. I just don't like any of those apps. I don't mind Podcast Guru. I just need an easier way to fill. And what I guess I could do is fill my wallet with $60 instead of $20 and do it every three months instead of every one.

It was a little... I don't know. I think part of it is, again... The air got let out of my balloon when that went away, and I don't hear a thing about them trying to replace it. And they got really excited about the funding tag and the fact that it's in PocketCast. And I was like, you know what? If somebody clicks on that little dollar sign in PocketCast and sends me five bucks, that's a lot of Satoshis. That's a boatload of Satoshis. And I was like, maybe that's the new thing.

Yes, we have to pay fees to PayPal. Or buy me a coffee or Ko-Fi or Patreon or Supercast. I think with this show, if you click on it, it takes you to Supercast where you can be an awesome supporter. So I love that idea about it. I just, I was, words cannot express how disappointed I was when that went away. I was like, oh, but this was our way of, you know, the longer you listen, the more you make. It was, and it kind of, and it hasn't gone away because there is Fountain and there is Podverse.

And I kind of don't count the others because it's so hard to fill your wallet. I'm like, eh. So, yeah, I'll probably have

They don't want to interact on their phone with, and there's some that do, right? And there's some that, and this idea of how long I listen and all some of those other kinds of things. There's a lot of folks who don't want to manage all that stuff. They just want to listen. They'd rather have an ad or they'd rather subscribe to you. Through one of those other services, right?

And so I think we need to stop thinking, and maybe we're not, but we need to stop thinking that it's going to be the replacement for all these things and just know it's just another way. And it's not ready yet. Like the crypto space is not ready for this. And it's not the crypto space. Actually, crypto could do this pretty easily. It's the way we think about it. You know, it's like, you know, it's like Microsoft points.

You know, you go when you, you can, you know, you can, if you search on being, you can get some points and those points relate to dollars or somehow. And so I

Apparently, Randy's audience is very excited about it. He's got them all trained up on it. That's it. When I listen to Todd and Rob, Todd... pushes that he pushes it hard right on those and of course the more you talk about it the more you educate your your listeners about it the more you give them some options to do it the easier it's going to get for them but for most podcasts sorry friends it's just not it's just still too hard we've got to get we got to make it easier

I'm saying I'm disappointed that the live streaming Satoshi thing apparently isn't coming back. And that's okay. It just means we can check that off that, okay, we tried that. Didn't work. Didn't work now.

But somebody's going to go, but what if, you know, and we're always kind of putting the bug in the ear, like, hey, Apple, what about that Apple Pay thing that you have? You know, wouldn't it be cool if there was somehow to make a button and Apple, you could take your 30%, even though we wouldn't like that, but it would be easy. And we're looking for easy, you know, and you've already got our credit card. I'll take 70% of a watermelon versus 100% of a grape any day.

So yeah, I'm not saying 2.0 is dead binding me. I'm just saying I was disappointed when streaming went away. And for me, it's like, there's only a few shows I listen to now because a lot of people just like, they just, they're not promoting it as much. So I'm kind of like, well, you know, so it is what it is.

And I know there's some, there is some desire to cut out the middleman with this, with Open. But that's, I don't know if that's, if that's a reality, right? I mean, even, even in the crypto space, while today, it's seemingly, you know, transactionally free, so to speak, it's not. And it's not going to be. Someone's going to want a slice of this pie. There's going to be things that need to be paid for. Like, you know, those kinds of, you know, those kinds of things.

It was like when we said, oh, yeah, you know, Bitcoin will replace currency. There's no way that blockchain is ready to replace. I mean, Ethereum is barely ready to do it. And they've been, that's a blockchain been engineered for this kind of thing. And you kind of, yeah, it was a hope. But the technology is really not there. It's not ready for it. And man, you know, especially on some of these blockchain currencies, the more transactions you do, the more expensive it gets, right?

You get incented to push your transaction through on a timely basis by doing what? Raising the fee, right? So, you know, we've got a ways to go on this. Will it happen? Yeah, I think at some point it will. Is it ready? Probably not. Yeah. We're just, we're just not ready yet. It's just not there. All the, all the pieces are in place.

But, you know, depending on the scenario, but there are also things where I want to hear shows about a situation or, and Adam was talking about, because Adam's really getting into, Adam Curry has Godcaster now, this service for churches that want to do live streaming, but they want to do podcasts and things. So you might want to go, no, I want to hear, like he has, if you go to I think it's hellofred.fm. Because he's in Fredericksburg, Texas. Let me see here real quick. Hellofred.fm, he guesses.

Except I spelled heel Fred. Yeah, see, that's not the same thing. It's my whole right hand not working the way it's supposed to these days. Hello Fred, yes. That redirects. And so what it is... is he's got all these shows now, and they're all apparently from Fredericksburg. You can even call in a number there, and if I click on these, I will get a live, not so much live, but you will get a streaming show. And it's interesting, because I haven't hit play on anything.

But he was saying how people in the future, you could have an app that's either A, all about, you know, or all from location. That's just a thing because I think James Cridland has worked on this and has added a few pieces, parts that really makes it much more flexible than the original one. Again, going back to really good ideas usually don't come out of the gate. It's like, hey, but what if we did this with it?

And so I'm still not following 100% why this is so like people are really jazzed about this, but I'm sure I'll eventually catch on. when I'll see somebody do this. So yeah, Daniel says the mentions of podcasting 3.0 are just corrupting the conversation because they don't like the name podcasting 2.0. Yeah, Dave Weiner didn't like the name 2.0, but

What are you talking about? And so you kind of need a nerdy page for the nerds to implement the geeky stuff. And then you need one that's very, very dumbed down to like, here's what this can do. Like, this is what's happening. So yeah, Randy summed this up very nicely. He says, Dave Weiner is such a douchebag. I've never met the man, but I've heard comments. And I'm like, hmm. So yeah, Danny says there are too many tags, features at the minute. Focus on those that are really...

Getting lift, continue to educate why these are awesome and build from that. Yeah, that is something the podcast standards project was supposed to do. They were supposed to get together. They're all going to hold hands and go, okay, let's all work on the location tag. And then everybody would work on the location tag. That's what it was supposed to do. And then, you know, it did whatever it did. So yeah. You know, it's, it's, yeah. Somebody said this in here.

They need like, and I've heard this said before. Yeah. Danny said the whole 2.0 movement is needing better marketing and education. Make it easy and simple. What the benefits are and ignore the tech aspect of it. Joe average doesn't care about the ladder. Yeah. We don't care how the sausage is made. We just want the sausage. And so they're getting there. It's a little, it's a little rough around the edge. It's a little harsh at times. And I know I listened to 2.0 last night.

And there was a spot where I was like, I need to make a clip of this because it was very much for designers and developers. It was talking about, you know, how the code goes through and does this. So yeah. Randy says, Mr. Weiner has a track record of fighting with anyone who takes the RSS spec and tries to do anything with it. Yeah. He was not happy that Adam tweaked it to make it a podcast.

So, you know, yeah, but it is, you know, Coach Dave chiming in, I want to meet the working group that figured out how we standardize the two-letter combinations that we use to refer to states.

It's this tension, this conversation, this arguing, this protection, protecting it, not protecting it. This is part of the open standard. And it's part of open source. And that's why a lot of people don't like open standards. because anybody can have an opinion on it. But these opinions are good in the sense that it's good that we battle these things out. It's never fun when your way doesn't get implemented or it doesn't get done or what you decide to do doesn't get implemented.

That makes it hard. Nobody likes to be on the losing side of things. But this conflict, this tension, working things out, having these open conversations, I don't know if we need to name call people, but these open conversations that we have, I think if done in a constructive and a healthy way are healthy for the industry, for the podcasting industry. I think we need to still continue to have these conversations and and just say, yeah, this is helpful and this is not.

Or we get Apple who just comes in and takes it and does what they want and says, you'll like it because we can force this to happen. Yeah. you know, alphabet with Android coming in saying, well, this is what you're going to have. And we hate that. We hate when Spotify, when they come in, right? I just mentioned the three big ones, right? So you hate it when that happens.

I think what we have to make sure in the open community, in the podcasting community, we need to make sure that we're not shooting, you know, we're not shooting our own team here in, in the way we do things. I've probably been guilty of this from time to time as people say stuff, and you're like, Oh, but that's, you know, whatever. And you say things that you wish you hadn't said. But you, but we need this open debate. It's open source. It's, we're trying to get something going here.

We need this debate. It's healthy. Let it be healthy. Let's keep it being healthy debate. I guess is what I'm saying.

And then the, uh, the ability to like the reason this hasn't moved forward, like why they, the standards project hasn't been able to do that is you've got, you know, older companies that, that have lots of what they like to call tech debt meaning well we built this on a system it's on this and that and then you got the young whippersnapper company like oh we're on the new thing and we're like we can just flip a button and it happens like why aren't you keeping up and so then you can't have

everybody move at the same time because some people are old warship and other people are you know rowboat and you're like what are you talking about just turn right and they're like hold on we'll be there in two years you're like ugh so

Then you start, and you get more, the more customers you get, of course, then the more demand you get for different requests, and then you got to start prioritizing the requests, and then people get mad. Well, why can't, I've been asking for that for a year, and why can't you get that done? Well, because there's 45 other things that are ahead of that, that I've got, right? There's only so many things you can do. So it's kind of the tyranny of the platform, right?

You get to the sweet spot, and then most platforms just want to continue to grow infinitely. So they never stop growing, instead of just stopping and saying, Hey, this is what we're really good at. Let's just stay here. And make sure we do this one thing really well. Very few can actually, I think, can actually do that. We just get too much like, no, now I want to be like them and I want to add this thing. Then you have these behemoth platforms that eventually just aren't that good anymore.

But I still am blown away by how many people are not. I'm like, why would you? So there are times when it's like, well, here's another thing you have to step over. We actually have it set up So that when you go in, like not everybody wants to write a blog. So when you go in, there is no blog option. You go in and go more, I think it's more pages now. And one of those options is blog. And when you click on that, it adds it to your navigation because not everybody wants that.

So if we had all the features that are in there, when you'd log in, you'd be like, yeah, like what are all of these buttons and stuff? And it's like, so we kind of let you customize that. But yeah, you can just, keep adding more and more features to where it then becomes hard to navigate. So

Maybe there's some things you never use in your car. But then a lot of organizations are like, yeah, but we need a jet. We need a jet fighter. There's no way a person coming off the street can just get in that thing and fly it, right? And I feel like some of these platforms have churned themselves or their desire is to turn themselves into a jet fighter. You're like, yeah, that's great, but you know, we have this saying, options equal confusion.

And you get in a cockpit of a jet fighter, you don't know what any of those buttons mean. You know, you don't have any, you're like, I should just, you know, of course, for the folks who went through the bike to the car to the jet fighter transition, we all know we made those transitions. We learned how to fly that kind of thing. But then you're bringing folks in who don't, and we got to, yeah, it's

And so if you don't have anything in that, the little dollar sign won't show up in Pocket Casts. because that's what it's looking for. But that's what's happening. Jim, what is happening over at Home Gadget Geeks this week?

Thanks to the chat room. We're here every Saturday, 1030 Eastern, askthepodcastcoach.com slash live. Always fun to hang out with you peeps. And we will be here next week with another fun-filled episode of Ask the Podcast Coach. Ask the Podcast Coach