Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a show designed to help you launch and grow your podcast. I am your host, Gino, and twice a week I will release a new episode with different tips and tricks for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering to planning intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will be a bite sized tip to help you podcast. Hello everybody out there. Thanks for tuning in and thanks for spending some time
with me here on Helpme Podcast. Today we're going to talk about dynamic ad insertions or dynamic content insertions. What they are, what they're used for, why you need them, and maybe we'll talk a little bit about the future and where I theorize dynamic ad insertions going. So first off, let's get everybody on the same page and talk about what a dynamic ad insertion is to make sure that everybody understands what they are. So what a dynamic ad insertion or
dynamic content insertion is? It's a feature that your podcast host allows you to do, and they don't all allow you to do this. And some of them are hidden behind paywalls or not hidden, but they're in the higher pay tiers. For example, I use Transistor as my host, and I can't do ad insertions unless I have the medium tier package. But what a dynamic ad insertion or content insertion is, it allows you to insert pieces or clips of audio into
an already published episode. So when you go to upload your podcast to a hosting site, you upload one MP3 file and that's it. It's audio. Let's say it's 30 minutes long. So if I have dynamic ad insertion, I can actually go into the audio file and pick a location within that 30 minutes. Let's say minute 15, for example. Exactly halfway, I can go into the 15 minutes mark and click a button to basically say, this is where I want
my dynamic ad. And at that exact timestamp, at the 15 minutes mark, it will then stop the MP3 that I uploaded and play a secondary MP3 file, most commonly an ad. So basically what it means is that instead of putting an ad in my final MP3 file and not being able to change it ever, I can now insert this ad and independently change what the ad is without changing the podcast. This is helpful for when you want to change up your ads
and make sure that you're keeping things relevant. So basically, you can change out that secondary MP3. So the main MP3 is the podcast itself. The second MP3, let's say, is an ad. So if I swap out the second MP3, I can now have a different ad within the same podcast. Hopefully I'm doing a good job of explaining this, not sure that I am. But the point is, you can change out your ads and you don't have to have the same ad over a period of time. So you can have six months go
by. And if you have a new person that wants to advertise on your podcast, you can remove the old ads and just put the new ones in. So this opens up more options for you to be able to sell ads because you don't have to make new episodes to have new ad inserts. This is super helpful because not only can you do this with just advertisements, but you could also do this with
Intros and Outros. And even if you want to just put an audio segment where maybe you're talking about relevant offerings or it's kind of an ad for yourself, you can do this with any sort of audio and where it becomes helpful is it makes your evergreen content always relevant to the listener. And especially with intros and outros. If you come out with a new season and you have a new, more relevant intro and it sounds better or maybe it's not as boring
as your old one, you can literally swap it out. The only thing that you need to do from editing standpoint is leave space for this insertion. So for example, I have a client that has a little music trigger that they use to have all their dynamic ad insertions placed around and it's basically just like a little jingle that kind of like swells up in volume and then stops. And there's, like, maybe a second pause, and then there's a swell of the
same music. And then it comes back down. And this, like, five second audio clip is used to place in the episode. So when I'm working on the episode and I'm editing it, I'll find a place where I think will make a good ad and I just put this little jingle in there. So I don't put any ads, I just put the little jingle in there that's a couple of seconds long. So then when I go to upload that podcast I can then identify right at this little
jingle spot, whatever that timestamp is. That's where I want you to insert the ads so it seamlessly plays an ad sandwiched by those two jingles. Now, you don't have to have a jingle in order to put an ad insert into your podcast, but you do want to make sure that you're not like cutting off somebody's voice, right? You want to put it maybe either at the beginning or the end of the episode so you don't have to cut somebody off mid sentence or maybe design your podcast to where you have a natural
break and identify that timestamp. So when you go to put that ad insert in, you know exactly where to put it. Where I really like the use of these ad insertions or these content insertions is for when you're offering your own services to somebody, right? So for example, with this podcast, in the future I may offer some services that I have for podcasters. I would love to be able to have a 32nd audio clip placed somewhere in
the episode. Probably like maybe right after the intro where I would say, now I have this course for sale, or I have this consulting, or I have a group program going on and I can change that based on what my offerings are and I could put that on all my old episodes. So when somebody goes to listen to this episode,
they can now hear what's relevant to them. So it really keeps your listener relevant and informed with your new offerings and your new content or whatever it is that you want to tell your listeners. And it makes repurposing your content or having evergreen content even more
relevant. So I think that this is a genius thing that hosting sites have been providing for some time now and it's going to be really helpful for selling more ads, for keeping your intros more relevant and even just being able to connect more closely with your fans and with your listeners. And I think you're just going to see more of this in the future and
you're going to see more people offering this in the future too. And my hope is that they won't put this in the higher paid tiers and these hosting sites will give access to even people at the low tier to be able to use dynamic ad insertions because I think it's helpful and very relevant. And right now I think especially Transistor, although I really like Transistor and I haven't had any issues with it. They definitely use the dynamic ad insertion as what separates you from the
first to the second tier. So it seems that Transistor has figured out that this is a valuable tool and this is what they're using to separate tier one and tier two. It would be nice if the lower tier had dynamic ad insertions as well. So I hope this makes more sense as to what ad insertions are if you didn't know what they were before. Who knows, maybe by the time you're listening to this episode, there will be a dynamic ad insertion placed in this episode.
Only time will tell. Thank you for listening, I appreciate all of you and I will see you on the next episode. We've reached the end of the episode and if you enjoyed this podcast or you got something from it, you might be interested in my weekly newsletter that I send out every Monday morning, full of podcasting tips, tricks and news. So if you like this show, you might like this newsletter. To sign up, just go to the show notes and click the link. Thanks for listening and happy podcasting.