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. Taking out to Denver, Colorado, we are chatting with Lindsay McMahon. She's the cohost and CEO of the All Ears English and All Ears English podcast. Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Yes. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you for having me here. Glad to be here. So let me
start by asking, how did you kinda start your podcast journey? What led you into wanting to do a podcast that helps teach English communication around the world? Yeah. Well, it was 2013. It was very early days for podcasting when I started. Out there. Yes. More than ten years ago now. I had been teaching English around the world. I had lived in Japan. I had lived in South America. I had lived in New York City, just teaching to adults, to global professionals who
wanted to improve their career opportunities and live abroad. And so I thought we needed a tool like this. I saw that classroom learning doesn't always work, especially the way it was being done around the world, and I thought that we could use technology. At the same time, podcasting was starting to become popular kind of on the fringes still, but I could see it was it was going somewhere. So the two kinda came together, and that's when we launched in 2013.
Very cool. I'm curious. What is it that is being done in the classroom that you saw and you were like, there's a better way? Yeah. Well, you know, when I got hired to work in Japan, I worked for a conversation language school, and those types of schools cropped up due to the, practices that were happening in schools that students had been going through. Essentially, in Japan, you memorize the way you learn to read is by memorizing kanji. Right? You memorize 2,500
kanji characters. So what I think was happening, and maybe still is, I'm not sure, I hope it's gotten better by now, is a memorization. Right? And I don't think languages are meant to be memorized. The reason you learn a language is for human connection. That's our entire philosophy at All Our English. And so it's taken in isolation. It's taken, like, doing math problems or memorizing Kanji characters. And there's not a lot of speaking in the classroom. There's not a lot
of listening. It's mostly writing and reading. So students aren't ready. When they get to the, you know, business level, they're just not ready to perform in English and connect. So how did you look to improve upon that through the podcast? Yeah. What we did, our format is is still kind of different from what you see. There there's a lot of new podcasts lately that are great that have cropped up. But at the time, when we launched, we were one of the only, double hosted
shows. So we always have two hosts. So that's what we do. That's one thing that's very important because students wanna learn conversational skills, and you're not gonna learn back and forth conversation, unfortunately, with one host as well. And so we give them we let them see two hosts coming back and forth with each other, the chemistry, the connection. How do I comment on what someone said? How do I tell a story? How do I interrupt politely, but in a realistic
way? We give them a % real English, which is what they're looking for. We don't edit our show very much, to be honest. Why do you think that it has taken off from there? So you you started doing this in 2013. You have this background in teaching English around the globe. I imagine your co host also, you have a similar background teaching English to to folks all around the world. What was it that when you were starting to do
your podcast that you thought maybe this will help? Maybe this will, you know, help us find some success or more importantly, this is gonna help our audience find success. What were some of those tactics and, you know, things you put in place early on? Okay. So in terms of tactics, one of the good early decisions we made was the color of our cover art. Couple things. The cover art is huge. When you first launch, that's all people have to go on, is what your podcast looks
like. We decided to go with a bright color, and it's still we still use a bright yellow, and that's always helped us stand out. It's a very simple thing. If everyone starts using yellow, then no one will stand out anymore, but, you know, it pops right on the screen. And we definitely got the word out. As soon as we launched, we announced it to our networks. We we weren't shy about saying, hey. We're launching a
podcast. You know, sometimes people are a little shy about their work when they launch. They'll let me publish 10 episodes, and then I'll let people know about it if people like it. No. You just go go for it from the beginning. Friends and family. Right? They can share it with someone else. And we know that, you know, in terms of how you get more downloads, especially in Apple Podcast. You wanna get more followers, more people to follow your show, and this
leads to more downloads. And the more you get in a short period of time, the more that will lead to. So it becomes like a positive snowball effect. We also put ourselves on the cover, and and this is not very revolutionary now, but at that time it was, especially in my industry. So at that time, not a lot of ESL teachers or EFL podcasts were actually putting their faces on the cover. It was much more of a trying to stay professional, staying behind the scenes. We actually didn't have this
whole vibe of professionalism. We had more of a fun vibe to what we were doing. And so I guess the lesson for your listeners here is look at what people are doing in your industry and try to do something a little bit different. You know, what can you do? What is the standard of what people are doing and what might your audience want that could be slightly different, a different format, different way of presenting the cover art, a different yeah. Just a different way of conceiving of the
show. I wonder why folks in your industry weren't putting themselves on the cover. I mean, for for those listening who who are wondering why is that so important, you know, for many people when they see actual faces, actual people on the cover, it makes the content more relatable, more
personal, it makes them want to more engage with them. So, you know, understandably, putting you and your co host on the cover, you're real people now, someone who, you know, probably garners more interest than just the nameless, faceless, you know, podcast cover art. But I'm curious why you think others in your space weren't doing that, if that was a conscious choice or, like you said, just, revolutionary at the time. Yeah. I don't know. I think podcasting kinda came up from the
tech world. Right? It was kind of a techie thing in the beginning. Maybe it was people that were just more comfortable with their voices, which is fine. It's their own style, their own personality. I think maybe people didn't seem see it as being as performative as we saw it as we see it now, as we saw it. Maybe they thought, I'm teaching English. I don't need to be a character.
You know what I mean? I don't need to be a personality. And we see it as more we're personal we are our true personalities for the most part on the show. We share things from our lives, but I think a lot of teachers separate maybe their personal lives from the teaching, at least in the classroom. So maybe that was the thinking. I don't know. I mean, it's not that everyone was not doing that, but the majority weren't. And so I think that's a big way that we stood out. Alright. And, love the the
use of yellow. Previous guest, Harry Duran, also on here talking about his show and the use of yellow and how he made that stand out now. That was a a big part of his brand. So certainly advice we've seen before, although, like you said, if everybody goes yellow, though, it won't be as, impactful. So don't just go yellow, but, you know, right, try to stand out is really the key. So looking at the All Ears English podcast, you are up to, it looks like, almost 2,300 episodes. Am I am
I looking at that correct? Correct. Yeah. That's totally correct. I mean, we do five episodes a a week, and we've never missed an episode. We've been going since 2013. So if you do the math on that, we we bumped up from four to five just about a year ago. So How did you how do you keep that pacing, that stamina? Are you just recording every single day, or are you doing, you know, like, blocks of recording? Right? Recording a week or two
weeks at a clip? Yeah. No. We definitely don't record every day. It's not easy. And you do have to you know, when you hire your team or when you recruit your cohost, however you wanna set up your your podcasting team, you need to make it clear that this is how we do it. So our team, my team, they know that we publish five days a week. It's nonnegotiable. It's not if we feel like it. It's not if we're inspired. There is a system that makes sure we get that done five
days a week. And the way we do that is we do chunk and block off recording times each week. So I have, first of all, I have I've just had one person leave the team. So currently, we have four of us. There sorry. Three of us who are on three different podcasts. It's ideal to have four or five for for three podcasts so you have extra people,
extra combinations. However, we've got three for three podcasts at this point, so we will be actually looking to hire a couple of new cohosts to join the team this spring, just kind of a side point. However, yeah, we set up a system where I record twice a week with one cohost. We do about two and a half hours on a Wednesday morning, and then Thursday afternoon, I record two and a half hours with a second
cohost. And that other cohost records two and a half hours with the fourth cohost on a sec a separate date. So that creates enough content for to keep us about a week or two ahead. When people need to go on vacation, we we record in advance, and we have a system. Our editor gets the files. Our VA puts the files in, you know, in the host, in megaphone.
Everything is kind of systematized. So the only thing I really do is record the podcast and the WIFMs and the titles, and every the team does the rest for the most part. Gotcha. And I like that, like, round robin system where everybody has a little bit of a chance to work with everybody else on the show and kinda creates a
little bit of variety. So having done this since 2013, I'm curious, what are some of the the new tools or the new tactics that have come along that you think have changed the game or that you have found to be most impactful in whether it's, you know, the sustainability of the show, right, being able to keep it going for as long as you
have, or in the show's success. You talk about having, you know, almost 2,000,000 followers of your show in Apple Podcasts and whatnot with, you know, 4,000,000 downloads a month, nothing to, you know, nothing to shy away from. What do you think are some of the things that have helped you along the way, to reach those those levels? Yeah. I mean, so we do about 4,000,000 downloads a month. And on our other shows, the other shows are a little smaller. They do between
205 downloads a month, I believe. And one Oh, so poultry not it's terrible. So one thing that we've done that we've started doing the last two years, and we saw I think we saw about 25% growth between 2023 and 2024, not in downloads, by the way. It's important to note that in verified listeners. And that is the metric that the industry is is starting to actually look for and look at.
And that's really important because downloads are not a great metric. It's currently the metric for advertising, and it's it's where the industry is, but we will move over time over to verified listeners. We've seen that kind of growth because we do a monthly we call it a relaunch. So we have three shows. Every month, we choose one show, and we relaunch it, quote, unquote. Just means we promote it. And what we do is we use the other shows. Right? So we do a feed drop on the other
shows to drive to the show being promoted. Feed drops are the most effective thing we've seen. We don't track them anymore, but we tracked them for two years on Charitable, and they work really well, especially if there's a match with the audience. And, obviously, with us, it's a network around ESL and so different subcategories of ESL, but it makes sense. So if you have that kinda match and you do that, it act actually really works well.
Very nice. What would you say were some of the other things that you have done to help grow the show? Or I I guess, like you said, it's less about growth and more just about, like, have found success with the show. Yeah. Well, I mean, dynamic ad insertion has been a huge surge forward for the entire industry. We migrated our show to megaphone. We started dynamically inserting ads and promos, by the way, promoting we're reminding people to hit follow, which is huge, huge,
huge. Reminding people to check out that other podcast, right, which is a tool we utilize in our relaunch plan every month. So dynamic ad insertion is a big deal as well as monetizing the show with sponsors, which we started doing. We started doing it in 2014, and then we stopped doing it, and we came back to it in 2021. And so I I think in terms of the industry at large, dynamically inserting your ads and your promos is
a huge deal. I'm sure because of the the content that you talk about, you know, you get lots of people who, one, right, they see your success and they wanna ask you questions, but, two, you probably have folks who are going through your courses and thinking, well, now that I'm more comfortable with the language, now I wanna do something. Is there advice that you give out or there, you know, common questions that people are asking you about podcasting that you find
yourself answering all the time? Yeah. For sure. So questions about launching and, you know, what should I do when I launch. One thing that we did that I I think still works, and we did this when we launched our most recent recent show, which was business English in 2022, is launched with a number of episodes already in your queue. Because if you think about it logically, you're probably a podcast listener. We're you know, makers of podcasts are also listeners of podcasts. Right? Hopefully.
And you know that when you find a new show and it's just a trailer or it's just one episode, it's really disappointing. And you're much less likely to hit follow because you just don't know if you wanna hit follow and add that show to your your real estate in your in
your queue because you don't know if you really like that show yet. So what we do is we launch with, you know, six to 10 episodes already in the queue for them to see if they like the show, and then we really push, please hit the follow button, hit the follow button to make
sure you don't miss an episode of the show. I wonder too if, you know, for a while there, people would say you put three to six episodes in the queue, and that's because it triggers more downloads and therefore gains the algorithms and convinces people you're more successful. But I wonder too if when you launch with 10 shows, if it makes people feel like you've been around longer than you have. It kinda gives them, like, confidence that this is a show that is you know, it exists. It is, already
established. It's obviously sustainable. They could do this much content. Do you you think any of that might play into the psyche as well? For sure. And you also hone your message. I mean, to be honest, that's my next tip, and this is why this matters. Frequency of publishing, there's there's a use for it in the sense of you'll figure out your voice. You're not gonna find your voice on episode one. Right? We found our our trademark,
and it's more than a trademark. It is a it is a value. It is the reason we work on this show, and it is connection, not perfection. And we trademarked the phrase, but we also say it in every episode. Connection not perfection. And as it applies to language learning and also broadly life, and it works because everyone can relate to that. Everyone says, yeah. That feels right. I
want connection. I'm I'm always torturing myself over trying to be perfect, and we just show them how to do it in language learning. So it's like a evolutionary thing. If you can find a a message that you really believe in, but you're not gonna find it on day one. You're gonna find it on episode 55, right, or episode a hundred two. So that's why there is something to be said for publishing more frequently, and you're just getting everything out, figuring out what you
actually believe when it comes to your industry. What is your unique angle on your industry? You can't find that by sitting and thinking about it. You have to talk through it. At least that's the way I to I figure things out is by talking through things. I I am exactly the same way. Somebody will ask me a question and I'll be thinking around as I'm talking, I'm solving the the the problem, like, as I'm speaking. Must be a podcast. Nextion
Not Perfection. You know, well yeah. I Nextion Not Perfection, I think, is great especially in in, you know, teaching folks language. Right? It's we communicate with so much more than just our words.
And if you can build up a good connection with somebody, even if you don't have a perfect grasp of the language, you can communicate what it is you're trying to say and hopefully work through it and build a relationship and, you know, build that that that communication, that strength, that connection. So I think that's I love that phrase and, damn jealous that you trademarked it. We are chatting with Lindsey McMahon, CEO of All Ears English and the
cohost of the All Ears English podcast. You can learn more about that at allearsenglish.com and a bunch of other spots which we'll have links to here in the show notes. Lindsay, before we let you go, we have a few questions I'd like to ask everybody in the show. Alright. One, since you've been in the space for so long and you've probably seen a ton of improvement, but I'm wondering, is there another spot in podcasting that you would like to see improved, whether it's from the creation,
distribution, even the listening consumption discovery side? Is there one thing where you're like, god. I wish podcasting did this better. I think I would like to see and I think there are always, you know, new software tools cropping up, but around getting people introduced to each other, I think that's how we met on PodMatch. Right? So tools where you can I'm not sure if we met maybe we met on there. I'm not sure. But ways that you can meet other podcasters
yeah. Because guest guest hosting or guesting rather, being a guest on another show really helps your show grow. That's one of the strategies that, I didn't mention, but it's really it's an important way that we grew. So more software and more websites cropping up to introduce so that people can be introduced to each other that might add mutual value to each other's shows. I'd like to see more of that. You can never have enough of that, to be honest.
I couldn't agree more. And by the way, if you're curious about PodMatch, which is the platform that Lindsay and I were able to connect on, we'll have a link to it here in the show notes below. Check it out. Alex, who was a previous guest on the show, just put together a fantastic platform, continues to improve it all the time and well worth the time and investment
there. You you kind of alluded to it, but my second question is, is there any particular tech on your wish list, like, something that's already out there that you you just haven't pulled the trigger on or something you're like, god, I wish somebody would make this so that I can do my job better, hardware, software, anything in between?
Well, I don't if any of your listeners, use do video to go along with their podcast or if they do any filming on the side, if they sell courses, that kind of thing, I just bought a teleprompter, and it's called prompter. So I haven't taken it out of the box yet, but I have a feeling there's a major that this Elgato? Yeah. Elgato teleprompter. So I'm not gonna endorse it yet because I haven't used it, but I got a lot of
good recommendations for it. So I am looking forward to using that. There is a problem that we have where we film a lot of, VSLs, video sales letters, a lot of intro videos because we sell courses as part of how we make money in our brand. And it's really cumbersome having your notes on a piece of paper that you have to get get up every, you know, five lines and then tape up a new piece of paper. And it's just it's just very slow. It's a slow process. So I'm looking
forward to trying this teleprompter. I would also like some really, I would like more technology around rec recording like this. We've tried Riverside. We've tried SquadCast. They're all decent programs. We're on StreamYard right now, but I would just like to have more options. You know? You can never have too many options, like I said. That is very, very fair. And, yeah, I I I got that prompter. I love what it can do. I love its capabilities.
What I'll say to anybody listening who's thinking about it, it works best if you have the right cameras for it, whether that's a really good DSLR camera with a lens or Elgato's actual webcam,
right, they have plates that are built to make it work better. I've tried it with a few others that weren't a % compatible and what I got was a lot of glare on the screen and and not a great picture, but the the prompter itself worked great and whether you're using it to read text on the screen while looking directly into the camera or even just using it to interview someone where you can see them. You're doing a a an amazing job with eye contact on the camera, so I'd be curious about your
setup later. But, you know, for a lot of folks like me, my camera's here, but, like, you're over here, and so it's I look a little shady, or shifty, so to speak, but, the prompter definitely can help, with those things. And, you know, we'll throw a link to that here in the show notes as well. And then, you know, like you said, people who create podcasts are also big listeners. Any shows on your playlist, like, you know, when a new episode drops, stop what you're doing, you're gonna
listen to it, or you're never gonna let a new episode get by? Yeah. I mean, I like, Professor G. I've been listening to that lately. Scott Galloway publishes some interesting content. I also listen to, like, science, health, and nutrition podcast like Zoe. It's called z o e. It's a, I think, a British host. I listen to Vox. What is it? Today Explained. Not Vox. It's Today Explained. Yeah. And I also listen to the, you know, the journal and the daily. So I'm
a major podcast listener for sure. But right now, I don't have a show that I'm incredibly passionate about. So I'm on the hunt for a new one. Very hooked hooked on, for sure. You hear that podcast? There's another listener, available to be, to be your, you know, huge fans. That's right. Made some good content here for Lindsay. Yep. Lindsay McMahon, CEO of All Ears English and the co host of the All Ears English podcast. Been doing it for over
ten years. Amazing stuff. Keep up the great work, and thank you for joining us today. Well, thank you, Matthew. It's been great chatting with you today. I appreciate it. 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 podcastingtech.com. You can also subscribe to the show on your favorite platform, connect with us on social
media, and even leave a rating and review while you're there. Thanks, and we'll see you next time on Podcasting Tech.