Deep Dive into Blubrry’s Thrive Bundle Features – PCI 409

I'm Todd Cochran, CEO of Blueberry Podcasting. And I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist here at Blueberry. Today, we're going to explore the features of our Thrive bundle available to advanced hosting customers.

You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting, all with the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in. And, of course, this month, it's free to everybody for the month of August. So I know that we've got a couple of weeks

left before the end of the month. So if you haven't played with Thrive, this is your chance through the end of the month. But, you know, first off, you know, the Blueberry Thrive Bundle is really a comprehensive suite of tools that are designed to enhance your podcast experience and make it easier for you to create, promote,

and, of course, analyze your content. And, boy, we've got this thing loaded up, and we've initially made the Thrive product. And I believe correct me wrong, Mackenzie has been out maybe about a year. Yeah. I'd say safely at least a year for sure.

Yeah. We we, you know, we thought this would be a great place to throw extra stuff in, and and we've continued to add value to Thrive to the point now that I don't know how much more stuff we're gonna be able to add to it, at the price level that it is, because we've really, we've really added a lot of features. But, you know, I think at in the top overview, it really is broken down into, metrics, the the dynamic ad insertion, quick links features, Apple Podcasts reviews, and then

our AI stuff. So I guess we can kinda go over what is included in the Thrive package. And, again, if you're an advanced hosting customer, that's a $20 a month or more account, you can upgrade when we basically, at the end of the month when the free trial ends, for $10 a month. And I think what we've added to the package, just with the AI stuff alone is worth the value considering many of you

are already paying for third party services. And ultimately, with Thryv, anything else we're, adding on to the to Blueberry hosting packages is to make it so that you can spend less money and you can save money. And what's amazing to me is we've we've given the AI, even before Thrive was free, everyone gets 5 uses of each of the tools, and, it's way, way underutilized. So if if you haven't played with it, please do, this month while you have full access to

everything. But let's let's really start off with

talking about the the advanced podcast metrics. So as we've talked about pie, a lot will come to that at the end. But why don't we talk about the features that you get with the additional, with Thrive with the, with enhanced podcast metrics? So there's really 3, distinctions here with the advanced, information. 1st and foremost is episode comparison.

So this is available where you are able to compare up to 5 episodes to identify the trends and optimize your strategy based on, you know, the results of that, what you think you're seeing here. So you can we give you a nice little graph that says, like, this show moved this way in terms of statistics as opposed to this show which kinda plateaued and then shot up for some reason, and that's kinda up to you to figure out necessarily why. But it's a great way to compare.

For example, this show, seeing, like, do people like to listen to all 3 of us together? Do they prefer when we kinda do more 1 on 1, you know, you and I or something like you and Mike or me and Mike? Whatever these are, we can kinda go and compare those. Another one is the listener and subscriber data. This one's really cool. It shows you the metrics for your for your shows for people who are, in fact, what we can tell that they are actually subscribed to your show.

This is something that people have asked us for and every other hosting company for years, for, you know, over a decade now of they're like, how many subscribers do I actually have? And we can't give you a full 100% confident number, but based on the the trending data of how it works of just how many people are getting this getting episodes downloaded immediately, that's what we're basing it off of for the most part of these people are, in fact, subscribed as opposed to how many people just

listen one off. Even if they are regulars, they're still not getting it right away. And then the average daily plays, that one's cool because it tells you, kind of like your long term growth as opposed to the overall consumption of, like, what happens day to day and just the overall, you know, of of what is happening to your show in general. But, Todd, I'll let you I'll let you talk about this new one that we've had come out recently that is that I think is really cool as well.

Yeah. The e we basically, wanted we the request we got from from all of you was, okay. I'm having a 100th anniversary show, or I'm doing x, y, and z, or I did a marketing event, or I had a special guest, or basic an event, a specific event that happened for your show. So what we do is we have an event tracker now where you can put in a specific event. Let's say it was a 100th anniversary or or or maybe it was a marketing campaign on Facebook. And what we do is we we set

a window for you. We actually say, okay. This was the state 10 days before the event and then here's through the event plus another 15 days, here's what happened when you click on the event tracker and you can look the statistics specifically around the event, around the 100th anniversary. Did we get the bump in listeners? What, you know, what was the view for that event timeline? And it really allows you to drill down into specific events you did for your show.

We've gotten a lot of good feedback on this so far by the Thryv users that said, hey. Now now I you know, I've even though I've done a a boost in Facebook, now I can put that boost date and time period in. This is okay. Over over these 3 days, I boosted this specific episode, and you're have the ability then to go back in stats and see if you actually had an effect, if you if you gain listeners

or not during that time period. And, again, we give you a window and after so that you can kinda see the state as it was and then how, you know, the state afterwards. So this event tracker is something that, I'm really proud of this particular addition to the, the platform. Of course, the category comparison as well, the how you stack up against other shows within your specific top level category. Mhmm. And if you're doing the way we set that up is really we we you know how many episodes a

month you're doing. If you're doing 4 a month, you're gonna know what your episode average is that we provide to you, then you can compare to other shows that are doing different numbers of episodes 1, 2, 3, or 4 plus. You can kinda see where you fall in on the medium on that. So that's something again is, I'm pretty excited that we've added. And, again, these are essentially 5 things that we've added to advanced stats that you get for additional $10 plus the additional stuff we're

gonna talk about. You know, these, these specific metrics that we've added are really, I think, some of the most organic ones that we've added because they really do come from the conversations that we've had with our own podcasters saying, you know, we're we're going over, like, how can you analyze your data? And they're like, okay. Well well, can we do this? And it's like, no. But that's a really good idea. That's kinda how we ended up with the event tracker as well.

So I think, like, the these more in-depth stats data metrics that we come up with, they are really originated from from you, our users. So keep keep the, information coming. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things we are asked about,

asked for by the folks that use our services, they said I I want to do dynamic ad insertion, but I I don't wanna be a pro customer. So what we did is we kind of found a happy medium. We said, okay. Let's offer a pre roll only to anyone that's on Thryv. So, basically, it allows you to monetize or promote an event. Like, right now, when you're listening to this episode, you heard a promotional audio clip for this free month to thrive that's running

right now. So that pre roll that you heard is something that's used for our d a I. Now at the end of the month, we'll remove that advertisement and, we'll put something else in there. Or, again, add promotion, special announcement. You can put that through all of your past episodes. So this enabling pre reel allows you again to even monetize your content or again promote something that you're doing.

And, what you can what you can set up is you can set up stuff in advance, or for a period of time so you can have something run for 3, 4 days and then come off that campaign and boom, the the other campaign takes over. So the dynamic ad insertion piece, again, that you get as an add on to Thryv is really just something that was requested and a lot of folks did not need to go to the pro hosting account to be able to get pre, mid, and post.

So we've given everyone that's an advanced hosting customer the ability to do dynamic ad insertion. So, again, a a great additional feature. Again, and so maybe you don't need all of these features, but what's kinda cool is you have the opportunity to do that. And, Mike is the one that's managing our pre roll, for this particular show. And, so it's, you know, it's real simple to set up and and operate. And he'd be happy to show you how to do it. Absolutely.

And another thing that we have is a quick links advanced feature. So for those of you don't know this, pay attention. How many of you have a Linktree account or something similar? How would you like to have a Linktree type of page for your podcast? And we call this quick links. And quick links is, based upon a very good URL podcast dot show forward slash your keyword, and it's basically a great page. It shows off your show description, latest episode. There's a player,

your subscribe options, your social media links. But what we did with, the quick links for an additional features for quick links through Thryv is to be able to give you some, enhancement. You wanna go into that enhancement a little bit, Mackenzie? Yeah. Sure. Some of the customized stuff that you can do is you're just able to add more links in general.

You can add these to like, it can be your social media pages, any donation links that you have, whether that's something through podcasting 2.0 or something a little more simple, like just PayPal. But you can do, as well as those extra places, you can add in Google Analytics tracking, which is really cool so that you're able to kinda do all of this together. And and really what we did is the quick links as a product that everyone gets being a customer at Blueberry.

This is just a little bit of an enhancement. We put this out online. We gate made it available for free for everyone that's a hosting customer, and then we said got some feedback. Hey. I'd like to add x, y, and z to my page. And we said, okay. We'll we'll add that to be part of Thryv. Now one thing that,

many of us do is we go over to Apple on a regular basis and we look at our reviews. We ask for reviews on Apple Podcasts and various places where we have our show. Well, we made it so you don't have to go over to Apple to get that. We have it available right in the stats system where you can view and share your Apple Podcasts reviews directly from the blueberry stats dashboard. And what this really does is helps you to promote your podcast

accolades. People that have given you a 5 star review and said this is a great show. You can share that on social media directly through the stats dashboard where these Apple Podcasts reviews, are brought in automatically. So I I think that in itself is just to save you a little time, give you the one click interface to share, really just as kind of a nice little enhancement for being a Thryv customer. Now, again, everything we've talked about is available for everyone this month. It doesn't

doesn't matter what service level you are. You get to try this for free, but, of course, we would be be we would be remiss if we didn't say it is we also have

the AI features for you to utilize and I wanna preface something about the AI section. You may be using a third party service. You might be using chat gbt. You might be using Claude. You might be using a paid service already. What we did when we really thought about the design and launching of our AI product was number 1, how is it gonna make you a more effective podcaster?

Number 2, how are you gonna have a much higher show production value in your metadata, your show notes, your chapter files, your transcript, all this information that we put out in the production piece? How can I get a faster email template to email my listeners if you have an email list? How can I do audio clips? How can I do video clipping now? So, really, what we've done is we've designed the AI system

to be able to streamline. Now from a time standpoint, when I was using all those 3rd party tools I just talked about, my production time was great much, much longer. And when we designed this from a flow standpoint, what we wanna do is be get you in and out, get you in, get your show notes, get your m art or episode art, get you a great description, get you a a great description, gets you a chapter files that are already pre populated, so all this can go just one click.

Basically, if you're a dashboard user, it automatically gets put into a draft episode. So all you gotta do is go and edit and publish, and it's all already linked in. If you're a PowerPress user, then you have to cut and paste stuff over into your podcast, but we made it easy with easy copy links. But the social captions and the clip highlighter that is probably the most underutilized at this point is essentially a headliner replacement.

We've been a partner of a headliner for many, many years, but what we've done is we have a toned down, and I think probably this product will serve about 9 you as the way it is today without any additional enhancements. Really gives you a powerful way to promote your podcast. So oftentimes people ask me, Todd, how do I grow my show? And I say, well, are you using these tools? Are you using the social captions? Are you using the clip highlighter?

Are you using the post production platform to have more rich show notes and all this additional even I, my are usually like a paragraph at the most with some credits and stuff. Now my show notes are richer than they have ever been, and I'm actually seeing a uptick in a show that's been in production for almost 20 years. Mhmm. Seeing an uptick in listeners, just because more people are finding the content because the metadata

is richer. So, you know, that was a big preface here, but give this AI tool a try. And you say, AI, well, the device I give you is it gets it right about 90% of the time, and it's not perfect. And using an AI assistant, is not a replacement for common sense. But it'll get you to the 90% solution majority of the time with minor editing. And, I think that's the key here. We're using the stupidest large language models we'll ever use. It's only gonna get better from here on

out along with this tool. Matter of fact, we switched one of the, production units, not production units, one of the tools to a different, language model because it just was we weren't getting good outputs. So we made a flexibility that the system can grow as language models change and whoever becomes out on top, and maybe even sometimes even cheaper to do it will be able to move to different platforms very easy. I don't know,

Mackenzie. What's your what's your feeling so far on the podcast AI assistant?

You know, whenever we're I'm I'm the one that gets the episode out. We all kinda do different, planning leading up to recording the episode and then that's all of us. But I am the one that gets the episode out, and I have realized that by using the AI tools that we've included in this, I'm just really only in like 2 to 3 tabs at a time.

It's really just cutting down on all of the different sites that I was going to before, whether it was looking for information or, you know, finding links or just going back to, like, oh, okay. Now I have to get an image from here, and I have to do this and this and this, and it's just all in the same place. But like you said before, you know, we we're constantly going back to and and tweaking these. Like, we did just change the language model because AI is constantly changing.

And and the way that we started these projects with this compared to what they are now is is so vastly different just because these tools are moving so fast, and and I'm really proud of us for how we're keeping up with it because we are basing it off of what we're seeing podcasters use, and we wanna be able to have them just go to one place to get all of those things taken care of at the same time. I think that's our biggest, advantage at this point in time.

I become more efficient and actually, if I go back because I started experimenting more than 6 months ago. I go back, let's say, a year and I look at my show notes from a year ago, and then I look at my

output now, it's a 100%, a 1000%. So, of course, if I have a better description, I have better titling, I have all throughout the show notes, it's just more metadata to get chewed on and for people to be say, oh, there's something here I wanna watch and I can jump or listen to and I can jump to it, boom, that quick. So I think that there is, you know, just give it a try and

and give us your feedback too. We wanna hear your feedback and if it gives you an output that sucks, let us know that it sucked because while the AI is not perfect, it is really truly at the point now where it's a 90% solution. And, just give it a try. Let us know what you think. Get it free all the month of August, play around with it and test it. And, even if you don't have an episode coming up for the end of the month, go in and play with

it from a previous episode. So, Mackenzie, just did we cover it all?

I think we did. This is the time to use Thrive and tell us what you want out of it. We are turning this off on September 1st. You know, midnight, August 31st, this is off, and you are able to do whatever you want for the next, you know, however many days there are left in this month after this. You gotta start paying for the add on. So this is your time. Yeah. Use it for free while we've got it and, you know, build the use case.

Yes. This can replace a tool I'm paying for and or I need it to be improved to really make it work for my production. So thank you and our feedback is always welcome to Podcast Insider. I believe that's the address, [email protected], I believe, is the address. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week. And in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information.

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