Welcome to Podcasting Tech, a podcast that equips busy entrepreneurs engaged in podcasting with proven and cost effective solutions for achieving a professional sound and appearance. I'm Matthew Passi, your host and a fifteen year veteran in the podcasting space. We'll help you cut through the noise and offer guidance on software and hardware that can elevate the quality of your show. Tune in weekly for insightful interviews with tech creators, behind the scenes studio tours, and
strategies for podcasting success. Head to podcastingtech.com to subscribe to this show on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, and join us on this exciting journey to unlock the full potential of your podcast. Alright. Taking you out to the West Coast, we are chatting with Philippa Gaines. She's the president of Websites That Win International. She's twenty five years in digital marketing strategy and analytics. Philippa,
thank you for joining me on the show today. Yeah. Good morning, Matthew. Great to see you. So I I'm curious. How did you, you know, having done marketing and digital marketing for over twenty five years, right, you've you've been at this well before podcasting was a thing. So how'd you kinda find your way into, you know, helping and guiding podcasters when it comes to strategizing and understanding whether or not their content is successful?
Yeah. I mean, I essentially, I guess, you know, because a podcast is a strategy in some ways. Because a lot of people are, doing podcasting in order to, obviously, get more visibility, to sell, you know, their services, their expertise, their products, etcetera. Right? So podcasting is actually essentially a marketing strategy as well for many people. And therefore, part of my brief is is also to help those people make that work better for
them. So what are some of the, like, what are some of the things that when new clients come in, especially podcast clients come in, like, what are some of the the big, big mistakes, the big red flags, like the lost opportunities that you were seeing from them, off the bat? Yeah. So for podcasts specifically, I think there's a couple of things. One that I see a lot is if you think about the typical website where people say, here are my recent podcasts. Right? It's a long
list. And as you create a new podcast, the the newest one goes to the top of the page. Right? And everything else moves down. And as everything else moves down, that means that the chances of those lower podcast being seen by a visitor get less and less because people don't typically scroll. So what you can see, because you can see how many people view each each each episode, is is that those visitor numbers or those viewer numbers just completely drop off after the first, say, top three.
And I mean, in many ways, that's a real shame, right? Because there's probably really great content in in those episodes that both the person who was the guest and also the, you know, the the podcast host can benefit from having that visibility continue. And so one of the things that we can do or that I've done with some of my clients is to make suggestions like, hey, let's let's think about how to use this content again and again. Like, can we, a, I I know some
hosts repromote it, which is helpful. You know, they'll they'll go back and they'll do things like I mean, over the new year that we've just had, I saw a whole load of, best podcast of twenty twenty four lists. Right? So you you get another chance to cycle it round. But for example, creating category pages on the website. So maybe you can you can categorize the content of the podcast in with different ways, different hashtags, different keywords, whatever. So you split them up
in some ways. So you haven't just got one long laundry list. You've got maybe, almost like a a presentation list and and then detail pages and so on. Almost like a leak, an e commerce site. Right? But for podcasts. I'm curious these days, I feel like we rarely travel to websites to scroll, to find information. I feel like information is pushed at us from all angles, from email, from ads, from social,
from videos, from friends. Right? Like how often do people really get pushed a podcast episode, even a blog post article, read it, then go back to that main list and start looking through other ones. Well, I'm, you know, I think that depends on on each individual. And and obviously, using analytics, you can tell that. But I'm also thinking about the
fact that people are looking in search engines for content. And sometimes, they will look like if you have an in a search engine on your own site, which is actually a great idea because it's great market research, they will look in that search engine. Right? So so if you have a really well known podcast on, I don't know, leadership, for example, they might look for aspects of leadership, team team building, or, you know, in your search engine to see what else you've got,
and that can happen. Plus people are doing keyword searches. And don't forget, you know, we YouTube is also a big search engine. It's the second most used search engine after Google. And, of course, it's actually owned by Google anyway. Right? And so if you have good keywords on your podcasts, those people will look for those in and those podcasts will appear in YouTube
results as well. So that's why I'm saying that just just making some text around your podcast so that the search engines can can find out or can can index it is also really beneficial in in promoting your content. Yeah. It's funny. I I always told people, I used to work, a long time ago I worked for the Wall Street Journal and one of the things that helped us with our podcasts were once we started to embed audio players into other articles or, you know, into like a related article. It's like,
oh, you're reading about this story? By the way, check out this episode from three months ago that, you know, is kinda similar. Is that something that you see being beneficial and and working? And, you know, I know podcasts have, like, a hundred or, you know, a 50 episodes and 200 blog posts. It's a lot of work to kinda do that, but is it worth that investment of time and effort?
Absolutely. And, again, if you're somebody who's selling services and you're podcasting because you're building your expertise, your authority, and your credibility, then, of course, on your website, along with the podcast episodes on that page, you can also have a sidebar, for example, with calls to action that highlight maybe your book or your your services, your free consulting call, whatever it is. Right?
So on that page, you're not just promoting your podcast, but you're promoting what other aspects of what you do you want people to see. And, and obviously, the more you draw people to your pages, the more they're gonna see those other calls to action, which is actually how you generate the revenue. Right? So let's get back to the crux of what you do, which is really look at our analytics.
What what do podcasters do wrong when it comes to reviewing their analytics, analyzing their analytics, and using that to form a strategy? Yeah. So the other thing I actually wanted to say about podcast, analytics and specifically, I mean, this also applies to videos, is that one of the other things that you can tell is how much of the podcast people actually listen to or how much of the video people actually watched. And I see a huge amount of drop
off because, I I I tell this story. I had a client who absolutely prolific video maker, and he did a lot of interviews, which, you know, podcast interview, whatever. Right? And he was horrified to hear when he had no idea. When we looked at his analytics, he he would start off this whole thing with a good morning. My name is blah blah blah, and I've been doing this for a hundred years and, you know, and it was boring. I mean, he did it every time.
And people people just dropped off. By by by thirty seconds, fifty percent of his his audience for the video or the podcast or whatever had gone. That's crazy. Right? And by a minute, ninety percent of them had gone. And he had no idea. And I said to him, you've you've got to start the thing by saying, good morning. Today, we're gonna talk about this, and it's gonna be really
exciting, and you're gonna learn this. And you need to listen to it to the end because at the end, we're gonna and it sounds cheesy, but it helps and it works. Right? You need you need to hook people and get interesting pretty quickly. And I see this a lot that people do drop off. I mean, people's attention span, as we all know now, is, is really, really short. Right? I, I couldn't agree with you more. It's something that whenever I was consulting clients, I always talked about,
no cat talk. Right? You know, when we were starting out, Marc Maron, WTF podcast was the biggest thing, and he would go on and on for ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty minutes about his personal life before he'd bring on the interview. And so we would work with these business clients who were like, well, I wanna talk about myself too. It's like, yeah. But you sold to your audience that this podcast is about x. Nobody cares about your cat. So stop wasting
everybody's time, and let's get right to it. And, yeah, it's, you know, if you're a comedian, if you're doing something that is more relationship building, more community building, more, you know, about you, personality based, fine. Show us your personality. Tell us about what's going on. You know, talk about your cat, your dog, whatever. But, right, if you're doing an investment podcast about what's going on in the markets,
I don't care. Tell me what's going on with the markets. Right? Let's get to it. And to your point, if if you're hearing this because I I to this day, there's still people who don't realize that they can find that kind of information. If you are not yet, if you are not yet connected to your show through Apple's podcast connect, do so right away. Claim your show, get your show, do that. That will give you some of the best analytics to do exactly what
Philip was talking about, which is tell you, like, great. Here's your audience. Here's where they're dropping off. Here's how long they listen for. Here's here's the percentage of completion. Here's how many people listen who are actually followers of your show or how many people came along just because you had a great guest on it. So, you know, to to do what you were talking about, definitely make sure you're on Apple Podcast Connect, and, we'll be sure to put a link in the show notes so
you can you can find that. So so let's go back. So what other analytics are podcasters either missing or not using correctly to analyze their show and understand how well they're really doing? Yeah. I mean, I I think those are the big ones. And as I said, my my the the focus of my consulting is is to help people
with their business strategy overall. Right? And therefore, most of the time, I'm if I'm working with somebody who has a podcast, it's because they're using that podcast to grow their business. So that's what I'm looking for is the relationship between the podcast and and their overall business outcomes. So and part of that is is how successful the individual episodes are, which we've just talked about. And then part of it is is what do people do as a result of
listening to the podcast? And are there things that you want them to do? Are you making those clear? Are you driving people to those outcomes? So not only is it are you driving them to those outcomes, but are you tracking that? Right? Like a lot of pockets were obsessed with downloads. Right? If the point of this is to sell services, right, you can get 10 sales off a hundred downloads or 10 sales off a million downloads. The first one is more successful. So, so how do you make sure
that you are like, what are some of the tools? What are some of the tips? What are some of the things that you tell your clients to do to make sure that people who are checking out your content are then doing the things that you want them to do? So, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm a marketer. Calls to action are really important. Honestly, in my experience, if you if you literally don't tell people what to do next, the there's a very high chance that they won't.
Because people you can't lead people to figure it out. You and you've got to be in their face and say, hey, by the way, I do this. Is this, you know, interesting to you? So there's the very specific, if you like this, if you'd like more, if you'd like to talk to me, here's what you do next. Right? And there's also less specific and less quantifiable things like what, you know,
we call brand awareness. So if you see searches for your name, for example, going the numbers of people searching for your name, you know, they've heard the show, and then later they look for your website. But they know your name because they've heard the show or they look
they look for the show, you know. So so looking at whether the number of people look proactively looking for you is increasing and can also and again, on social media, we we, haven't mentioned social media yet, but again, you know, this all extends into your social media presence as well. So that you can see whether just the number of
people who have heard of you goes up. And, you know, there's that thing about PR and people hearing about you, that that something like people need to hear your name or your like five, nine times or something before they remember it. Everywhere seven or nine or 11 before they'll do anything. Right. So, so all of that benefit is something that you can also measure. Do you encourage clients to use like specific tracking
codes and all their links? So, like, not just, you know, here's our newsletter link, UTM code podcast, but do you also say, like, no, make sure you say which podcast episode you're doing, which, or, you know, which category it's in so that you know what kind of content is performing better than others? Yeah. Great question. It's really helpful if you're doing an email newsletter, for example, where you're promoting your podcast, or even if it's a link off
of a social media posting. You can add, a little bit techy here, but you can add what we call UTM parameters that and you can look up what that is in Google. It's not hard to do. And you can get, tools that will build them for you if you say what you want them to say. Right? But it's then it will specifically say this link was to this podcast episode. It was or it was this specific ad
campaign, this specific email newsletter, whatever. And then you can start seeing which type of content, which type of messaging, which types of calls to action, which social media platforms, you know, are the most effective for you. And again, that can really help inform your, what you do in the future.
So let's go back and let's talk about social media. What are podcasters doing wrong when it comes to promoting their content on social media, more importantly, measuring how successful they are doing on social media? So again, I I mean, I'm so I'm not a social media strategist. I'm a
website strategist. But again, if you're using social media to drive people to your website where you have your podcast and also the other things that you offer, you you wanna make sure that you're getting quality visits. So you wanna make sure that the people who come in from social media are engaged in what you're doing. The I e, they listen to the podcast, maybe they go to other pages. Right? They don't just take one look and walk
away. And and that's why we want to make sure that we're tagging things so that we know exactly which posting each visitor came from. Because what we're looking for, as I said, is is which are the quality visitors? Because Because I
think you said this earlier, you can have a million visitors. And if none of them buy anything or do any of the stuff you want them to do, sign up, you'll need to subscribe to your channel, whatever it is, then who cares if you had a million visitors, right, to some extent. So really understanding where where your quality traffic comes from, is is really important. And which therefore, you know, do you do better when you
promote on Instagram than when you promote on LinkedIn? I I you know, it will be different for every business, and I think that's a really important thing to say. Like, don't believe stuff that says everybody should be doing TikTok or Facebook. Well, we still can. I don't know. It it it's really important to figure out what works for your business. That is also something I've always said to folks is, you know, what's the best
number for my podcast? I don't know what your podcast is about. Right? If you're doing a craft podcast, well, you should be on Etsy and Instagram. If you're doing a business podcast, well, you should be on LinkedIn. Right? So it's not it's not about what which platform is best for podcasts, which best your
podcast. I just wanna go back. You were you were talking earlier about that call to action and, yeah, I I've always had the sense that, you you know, I I don't say this to be cruel, but as a podcaster, you have to assume your audience is dumb and lazy. So if you don't tell them what to do and you don't make it as easy as possible for them to do it, they are not going to and
you're gonna be very frustrated with the results. Are there particular ways to frame your call to actions or, you know, talk about them that tend to, you know, generate more success than than others, or are there common ones out there that you're like, god. I wish people would stop using this as a call to action. It never works. Well, a, and this is a huge thing that I see a lot is make sure that people can see them. I know this sounds really stupid.
But a lot of times you see the call to action is way at the bottom of the page, or it's at the top of the page and it disappears. But, you know, there's nothing wrong with having more than one multiple calls to action if you like. But a lot of the time, one of the big problems that I see is that the call to action just isn't even obvious to people. Which I mean, a lot of this is, I I find with analytics, it's just kind of, duh, you're kind of hitting
your forehead stuff. But and and that's, you know, I don't blame site owners for that because one of the things that I think happens is that we're all so close to our own staff that we it doesn't occur to us that people can't see it, or it doesn't stand out to somebody who's never seen this stuff before, because we know it's there, and we're so used to it. And I've had this a lot, you know, site owners will say, but it's right there. And you say,
yeah. You can see it. Oh, it's in the menu bar. Yeah. Right. But if I don't look at the menu bar, then I'm not gonna see it. Right. So number one, definitely make make sure that we typically have more than one in a page and you people can see it. And and and the other thing is is make it action oriented to whatever it is that you're you're looking for them to
do. And so maybe sign up for our newsletter, but if your newsletter has something that's a really valuable offering with it, you know, get x, whatever x is now, or or something like that that actually builds the benefit into the call to action. And and the thing about analytics is it's quite easy these days to test. The point of analytics, right, is is not just to see the numbers, but to
say, what am I gonna do about this? And we can make our best guess about what it is that might be going wrong or might improve the results, but you actually need to test. So it's quite easy to get to get tools that help you do that by sort of changing the wording on the call to action, serving up different variants at different times so that you can see the results. Right? So you can do all this. You have to think about it a bit, but it can really pay off. What would you say to the idea of
white noise? So, you know, there are some podcasters and this is true, not just podcast. This happens all over the place, but, you know, you you say the same thing every single episode. Right? Your intro is exactly the same. Your intro is exactly the same. Use the exact same language to the point where now your regular listeners are kinda tuning it out. Do you think
that's a problem? Do you think it should be you should be rotating call to actions or, you know, rephrasing them every time just so that they don't get stale and and lost in the noise? You know, I think I think that's a consultant's favorite it depends answer. I gave a lot of those back in the day. I know what you're talking
about. Well, you know, a, if it's short, I mean, we've already talked about not having massively long intros in any way because it's it's just, you know, and there's always gonna be a proportion of people who've never heard it before. If you know it works and it's short and catchy, I mean, look at all the comedians that have catchphrases that we all know and love and we just expect them to say them. Right? And if they don't say them I mean, I I'm from The U UK, as you can hopefully
hear. That is suspicion. You know, and and there was when I was a a kid, there was a comedy duo that had this song they would sing at the end of every every every it was a TV show. Right? And I mean, you were waiting for them to sing it because it was a great song. And if they didn't sing it, it was something was wrong. So so sometimes those standard endings and things can be helpful anyway in that relationship
building that you talked about. So I I I mean, again, you can look at your results and you can see when you start that standard beginning or standard ending, do a lot of people tune out? If they do, then maybe that's a clue that it's time to change it up. I mean, the good news about analytics now is that we have all sorts of data that we didn't used to have that we can harness to say, how do I make this better? Makes a lot of sense. We've been chatting with Philippa Game. She is the
president of Websites That Win International. You can learn more at websitesthatwin.com. Philip, before we let you go, we have a couple questions we'd like to ask everybody who comes on the show. First thing is, I know you're not, you know, technically a podcast expert, but, you know, I know you've been doing a lot of podcast guesting and you
work with clients through their podcasting. Is there something about the podcasting space, whether it's from the listening side, production side, data side, whatever, that you would like to see improved in the near future? Sometimes, I like sites that give you a transcript as well. I know that's more difficult, but I guess with AI, it's easier now. And I'm talking about a consume as a consumer. Because sometimes, I know that the guest is talking about something that I really wanna hear. I
don't have a lot of time. I'd love to be able to just get what they what they said in an easy, quick, like, without having to listen to the whole thing. You know? Or maybe it will tell either with the ones that have summaries that say, you know, at five minutes, we start talking a bit about this, and at eight minutes, we're talking about this. So you can sort of jump in just, when you're when you're short of time, but you really want the information.
Do you think it's okay to use AI transcripts that have not been cleaned up? Like, you know, AI is good, not great, but real transcripts with the full fix are, like you said, they're not cheap. I know. That I know. And I agree. And I I think that is an issue. Maybe that will get better. But and I don't obviously, it's not helpful to read a transcript. Because we don't talk in in structured sentences when we're talking. I just changed my direction in mid sentence. Right. And that's hard to read if
you're trying to read it. So, yes, it would be nice. And I I get that that's expensive. You asked me, you know, blue sky question, what would I like to see? And so that was my answer. Oh, no. No. No. I I agree with the I agree with your answer. I was just curious as, you know, again, with the website analytics and whatnot, if there's, you know, if there's a big downside to them being AI generated and not, you know, human curated. So, appreciate that.
Is there any tech on your wish list that you're looking to get for podcasting, mic, camera, software platform? Like, something that, again, you know, would just would just be great, for the world of podcasting. Probably something that that, I don't know. I am pretty happy with my setup, but I I mean, there's something that doesn't exist that might, you know, make me look better in on camera or something with, with my, with my camera and my zoom and my, you know, lighting and stuff that
that I don't have to mess with, you know? Just set it up and go. But it knows what to do, and I don't have to think about it. That would be lovely. Alright. Fortunately, we are working on a solution for just that. So I'll be back in touch with you about that one. Excellent. And lastly, are there, podcasts that you listen to that are your absolute favorites that whenever they have a new episode, you are going to listen to them or, you know, you'll never miss
one of their episodes? I'm I'm afraid it's a UK based podcast. Is that right? Which one? What's give him love anyway? I'm I'm a I am a politics and news junkie. And and there's a a couple of podcasts that I get out of The UK that would the rest is politics. And then, I I'm actually just just going into my favorite, podcast directory here to, there's one called the rest the rest is politics, and there's one called the news agents. The rest and there's a rest is politics US version of the rest of
politics. But they're they're really good, discussions of what's going on with really experienced broadcasters and journalists. And, and there's the one called the the news agents as well is is I love. And then there's actually one called the rest is history, which is amazing exact stories from history that they really dive in-depth into things that we didn't know about, you know, or that we could know more. And they make it really interesting
and human and yeah. Love it. I I'm a I'm a fan of good political and or history podcast, so I will, give that one a spin. Once again, it's Philippa Games, president of Websites That Win International. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thanks for joining us today on Podcasting Tech. There are links to all the hardware and software that help power our guest content and podcasting tech available in the show notes and on our website at
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