The Surprising State of Podcasting in 2021

The Surprising State of Podcasting in 2021

Pat Flynn:
So podcasting in 2020, pretty interesting. Couple of things happened. Number one, we passed one million total podcasts. Number two, pandemic, it affected numbers. Number three, now that we're in 2021, there's some new stuff we need to pay attention to. And I thought, "You know what? I'm going to find somebody who has access to data that I don't have access to so we can have the best and most up-to-date information about what is happening in the podcasting space right now."

Whether you're a podcaster or not, this information will help you because whether you get on to other podcasts or you are creating a podcast of your own, you'll have more information to know what to do with so that you can make sure that you spend your time exactly where you need to spend it. So we're bringing in the head of marketing over at Buzzsprout, which is our preferred and recommended hosting provider for audio for your podcast. Buzzsprout is the place. If you want to check them out: SmartPassiveIncome.com/buzzsprout. You get some extra time on your plan if you go through that link. [Full disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

But anyway, we're going to speak to Alban Brooke, again, head of marketing who has access to all this crazy information. This is a bonus episode of the Smart Passive Income Podcast because stuff is important. There's some big numbers that we're talking about and very surprising, almost like, gasping numbers kind of stuff. So make sure you stick around. Let's cue the intro. Here we go.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it's all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host - his perfect day would be a boat on the lake with a fishing pole and his family - Pat Flynn!

Pat:
Hey, it's Pat here. Thank you so much again for joining me. Today we're talking with Alban Brooke, head of marketing, to talk about some of the surprising things happening in 2021 with regards to podcasts, and what we could do to better prepare ourselves to take advantage of this amazing platform. Obviously, you're listening to a podcast right now, so you understand the power behind it. You know what a podcast is. But what is going on out there in the world right now? Let's talk about it. Here he is, Alban Brooke, head of marketing at Buzzsprout.

Alban, welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thanks for being here, my friend.

Alban Brooke:
Thanks Pat. Thanks for having me.

Pat:
Excited to chat with you, especially with your work over at Buzzsprout and all the access you have to data and all this understanding about the industry that we just, as podcasters, often don't have access to, and whether you are thinking about starting a podcast or you have one already, I'm really excited to have the ability to sort of tap into what's going on on your end. But I'd love to know sort of what is your role at Buzzsprout? And kind of we'll just take it from there.

Alban:
Yeah. So I'm the head of marketing at Buzzsprout, but that allows me to do a lot of things. So we do a lot of content marketing and so a large portion of what I do now is I'm a teacher and I'm helping people get their podcasts started, evaluate if it's the right channel for them, sometimes telling them that maybe it isn't. We just get to interact and go along with this journey with everybody else in podcasting.

Pat:
That's cool. I love how you had mentioned like maybe this isn't for everybody. Can you speak to who should be podcasting and who shouldn't be podcasting?

Alban:
Oh man. Yeah, I love that question. I often frame it in this way that it's like when people ask about podcasts, I'm going to say, "Well, we have to first look at what are your goals for... Why do you want to become a content creator in the first place? Do your goals align with podcasting?" I'm perfectly happy to tell people, "You're trying to sell teeshirts, that you should probably be on Instagram. If you're just trying to get the largest audience possible and just get people to pay attention to you, TikTok is actually a great way to do that." So there's lots of different mediums for that. But if you want to be doing something with podcasting, that's on demand, long form audio content that people can be doing something else while they're listening. If your goals align with that type of content, this is just a brilliant media and one that I've fallen in love with over the last six years.

Pat:
So what would be an example or goal, to be more specific, that a podcast would lend itself perfectly to?

Alban:
So anybody who wants to discuss something and go in depth, really get into the nuance, teach, unpack arguments, or bring people along a long journey, if what you're saying to someone doesn't fit into a tweet and it doesn't fit into maybe a blog post because you want it to be a little bit more informal, that's where podcasting really shines. You don't have to have a clean, crisp, single answer. You can instead explore an idea. Some podcasts are doing it for as long as a short audio book. You can really get into the nitty gritty and help people think through things with a little bit more nuance.

Pat:
Cool. I love that answer. Thank you. Then, I know you at Buzzsprout have a ton of data and stuff. I'd love to know sort of where are we at in the state of podcasting in terms of just like how many are there? I think a lot of people are considering starting a podcast, but everything has been about podcasting the last few years, and it's seemingly very saturated. We're seeing a lot of celebrities come on platforms. They're ranking with all these NPR and super high end shows now. How can we even compete? Can you give us some insight?

Alban:
Oh man. Well, when something's growing, the thing you always feel is, oh, if I'd only started a podcast back when I thought about it. I mean, we see it right now with people talking about, "Well, I heard about Bitcoin years ago. If only I'd bought a bunch of it then and sold it now, I'd be rich." Well, what you're doing is you're actually looking for a reason to be hard on yourself for not starting sooner. So all this data, let's dive into it. But I don't want people to hear it and be hard on themselves for not doing it in the past because the best time to do something is either 10 years ago or to start right now. So hopefully this is encouraging to everybody.

There's definitely fewer podcasts than people think. There's probably somewhere in the order of 1.7 million podcasts. But when we started digging into this - and this is data that I pulled from MyPodcastReviews.com, over a million of those podcasts aren't launching new episodes. They haven't launched a single new episode in 90 days.

Pat:
That's crazy. Big shout out to Daniel at My Podcast Reviews as well, by the way. Great service. Okay. So you're telling me that nearly half of the people who have a podcast aren't actually staying consistent and staying up to date with it.

Alban:
Yeah. Then it gets even kind of crazier because then there's also about half of them have never launched 10 episodes. They haven't hit the 10 episode mark. Those are mostly going to be people who started podcasting and realized it probably wasn't something they were passionate about. So when you combine those two datasets together, what we end up with is there's only 377,000 podcasts that have published anything since October and they have at least 10 episodes ever. So that does not feel like too far of a hurdle to hit. If I say, "Hey, I want to launch a podcast in the next month or two and I'm just going to commit to doing one a week for two and a half months," then you're going to be in this kind of rarefied group that is actually makes up something like you're the top 25 percent. You're in this rare group that's actually still doing it and has hit that 10 episode mark.

Pat:
Well then the idea that you might be able to create a podcast in a particular niche, chances are you're going to be the go-to show for it, right? There's even less people to compete with when you niche down. So are these numbers worldwide numbers, by the way?

Alban:
Yeah, these are worldwide and these are... He pulls all this data from iTunes or from the Apple Podcasts. By doing that, he's really seeing across the world in different languages, so it's not all English, how many podcasts there are.

Pat:
That's crazy. I know a lot of people who want to start a podcast in another language. Just really quick on this topic, because I know we have a lot of international listeners and they want to start a podcast too, but it's like, "Oh, well there's not that many listeners." Where do you feel on that in terms of somebody wanting to start, for example, a podcast in Spanish?

Alban:
Yeah. I mean, Spanish speaking podcasts are the fastest growing besides English. There's incredible listenership in all of South America, Central America. Spanish podcasts seem to be doing really, really well. Then a lot of European languages, you just see a lot. I feel like I keep running into German and Dutch and French podcasts. If you're in one of these groups, if you're a native speaker, well, then podcast in the language you feel most comfortable in because, yeah, the audience is smaller, I mean, the listenership is smaller, but the competition is also smaller as well. This is, again, you're trying to find something you're passionate about, something you're enjoying. If you're able to do it in your native language, you're probably going to have a bit more passion for it anyway. That's going to allow you to kind of push through when things are tough.

Pat:
Why are 700,000, no sorry, more, more than a million podcasts not continuing their shows? What gets a person to stop after even less than 10 episodes? I think we should talk about this so that people who start a podcast don't fall into that statistic and come out the other end as one of the top 25 percent.

Alban:
All right. So I like to think of this by analogy with music. If you were to look on TV, you could see lots of people are famous guitar players. They're in bands or playing guitar and they look amazing and you get excited and you'd go, "I bet I could do that." So you go down to your local guitar center and you pick up a guitar and you may only - and I was in this group when I bought my first guitar - you don't even go to 10 lessons. And you realize the passion isn't there and there's nothing wrong with that. If the passion isn't there for you to do podcasting, the passion is probably there for something else and then you can dive into that.

So I think for some people, they go into it with maybe a false hope or they don't have the passion for it, or the goals that they had for podcasting have been filled. So we have a podcast on Buzzsprout that I created with one of my coworkers called How to Start a Podcast, and it was a short series teaching people to podcast. Well, we haven't updated that in about a year because once we put it out, as the short series, our goals were completed and it's still getting downloaded 10,000 times a month and so -

Pat:
Yeah, same with my YouTube videos on the same topic. It's just a lot of the stuff is evergreen and you might not need to have a weekly show for all eternity. You can serve its purpose.

Alban:
Yeah, absolutely. So you've got people who it may not have been a great fit. You have people who maybe all of their goals have been satisfied. I mean, right now, I think, nobody has a better excuse than COVID and everything that's happened. So it's perfectly reasonable if you are saying, "Hey, I'm taking a break and I'll come back to this later."

Pat:
On the other hand, I know some people, several students of mine in my courses who have started podcasts during COVID and are doing extremely well. Some people who have watched my YouTube videos who are doing extremely well. I'm thinking of a friend of mine, Martin, who has a podcast about mental health, who's just about to cross a million downloads.

Alban:
Wow.

Pat:
But he's kept up with it, right? I know that there were times in his history and many other podcasters' histories, including my own, where we go and we start, we're on fire, we're excited, and then it starts to feel like a drag. It starts to feel like a chore. It starts to feel like I don't even know if I should continue to do this. How do we in that moment determine whether or not it's a pivot point for us to move on to something else or to actually stick it through?

Alban:
Well, I think it's important to, when you get to those moments, identify which pieces you love and which pieces are the drag. So for some people, the editing is really tough. For them, I would say, "Hey, let's look at maybe outsourcing that, or maybe changing the format of the show to reduce the amount of editing." There are people who love the editing and don't like the prep. They get nervous being behind the mic and that's not the thing they love. Well, I have a few friends that have just started. They do editing now and that's their full-time gig. You can find the piece of this that gives you life and fulfills your passion and dive into that wholehearted. So it doesn't mean you have to drop everything about podcasting, it may just mean dropping the aspects that just don't provide life to you.

Pat:
Now, it's one thing to start a podcast. Even if we have passion, there's a point at which we need to understand that we have to get other people to find our show and to listen to it. One of the hardest things that I've come to learn about podcasting is it's not like YouTube. There is no algorithm. There's nothing really helping us be found other than hoping, sometimes word of mouth. I know that there's things like guest podcasting and other ways. Yes, there is SEO on your website for your show notes and such. But what's working right now in 2021? What is working best to have people find the great content that we publish out there that otherwise would have just sit there and help nobody?

Alban:
Yeah. So all of the things I would recommend for growing a podcast are always going to come back to leveraging other networks. Actually, one of the great things about podcasting is that it's not all algorithmically driven. It's not like Twitter that if things are popular they get retweets and they become more popular. With podcasting, it's actually pretty insulated, and most people still find it through word of mouth. Now, that being said, plug into all the other networks that you have access to, especially when you're getting into more niche podcasts. Let's say... I actually ran across this one the other day. There's a breed of dog called the golden doodle that's a poodle bred with a golden retriever. And the people who get these dogs, they love them. Well, somebody started a podcast about it.

So what I would recommend them to do is to go find the Facebook groups dedicated to this dog breed and interact with that group and share insights in the group, but also they can see, "Oh, you're also doing this podcast." Invite people from that group onto the podcast. Become part of that network so that you can grow your podcast there. You can do this through blogging. You can do this on Quora, you can do this on Reddit where you're engaging an audience providing real value, and then also linking back to the podcast.

I love thinking about podcasting in a little bit of a different way than I think about Twitter or I think about social media in general. The engagement rates... I mean, I guess YouTube actually is the best example since we're both doing YouTube and podcasting. On YouTube, we're lucky if we get two and a half to three minutes of engagement on a video.

Pat:
Yeah, it's crazy. It's kind of disheartening sometimes.

Alban:
I guarantee, if you pull open on Apple Podcasts the engagement rates for Smart Passive Income, your engagement rate's going to be something like 30 minutes per episode. What it means is, yes, the numbers for our YouTube channels can sometimes be 10 times or more larger than our podcast audience, but we're actually getting 10 times the engagement per person on the podcast. So what that means for me is when I go to conferences, people don't come up and say, "Oh, I've seen the YouTube channel that has millions of views." They come and say, "I actually listened to your podcast that has tens of thousands of views." Because those are the people who remembered me. Those are the people who've engaged week after week for hours at a time, and they don't just see somebody and go, "Oh, I think I saw that guy on the internet one time." They come up and they go, "I've been on this journey with you for years."

So the bar to whether or not I have a successful podcast in my eyes is 100 people consistently listening to me when I get behind the mic every week. Where on YouTube, I may need to be getting thousands or tens of thousands of views to really feel like I'm making an impact because I know most of my viewers, at least on our channel, are watching for a couple of minutes and then moving on to something else.

Pat:
Yeah, it's very similar to my YouTube channel as well. Plus, we're combating the recommended things and all the ads and everything that's there. Once the person's listening to your show, they're on a drive, they're on a walk, they're at the gym or what have you. Like you said, you've got them for 30 minutes plus. I can tell you that our show gets anywhere between 65 to 90 percent retention rate on episodes, and that's 30 minutes to one hour's worth of my voice and or the guest's voice in their head and that's incredible. When you want to talk about building a true relationship with your audience and building superfans, as y'all know that I love to talk about, to me, there's no better medium for sure.

I think a lot of people are definitely convinced. Of course, there's people here who are podcasters who are listening, who are like, "Yes, we know. Podcasting, great, totally. This is why we do it." But we still struggle with findability, right? I think I want to keep talking about this, because this is definitely a struggle. I do agree with you, getting into other networks, and I love the idea of showing up elsewhere, and if you could provide value to that audience or even connect with the founder of those groups and provide that person value, well, then you can get into different people who don't know you exist yet and get the endorsement from the forum owner or the podcast host or wherever. That's where I think there's magic involved.

What are your thoughts on social media to grow your show and how might one best utilize social media to grow one's podcast? I know that that's often the most common route that people go and then they get disappointed because they're not getting the results that things didn't go as viral as we had hoped. So what are your thoughts on social media for supporting a podcast?

Alban:
If you want to go the social media route, one thing people do that's kind of a red flag is they try to be everywhere, and that's very difficult because the type of content that performs on LinkedIn is very different from the type of content that performs on Twitter or Pinterest. So I would say start with the one social media platform that you personally are drawn towards. So for me, that's probably more Twitter. For a lot of people, it's Instagram. Wherever you find yourself spending time and your audience is spending time, that's where you want to be. Start with one.

Then just do normal things. Try to bring insights from the podcast to that media to provide value without asking people to go listen to the entire episode. You see people constantly just drop naked links and say, "Listen to the new episode." That's never going to get an engagement. But if you were to take an audio snippet - Buzzsprout has something built in, we call it visual soundbites, where you can create an audio snippet with a visual component, you drop that in, people are enticed to listen to 30 seconds. If there's an insight there that they found compelling, they're much, much more likely to click through. So there's been some studies on this. If we just have a video with just a waveform, you get three times as many clicks as if that was a static image. So that's a pretty quick, easy one.

The power of social media is this back and forth conversation. You may put something out about your podcast and then your fans can actually engage with you and you can begin that conversation. So making sure that you're engaging them so that they feel important and they are empowered to then share the podcast with somebody else. We often think of ourselves as being too small to really put ourselves out on social media. "I don't have a ton of listeners. People won't engage. I'll feel embarrassed. Maybe when I'm bigger."

But actually, when you're really big, you actually can't respond to every comment. It becomes very difficult. When you're small, you actually have this secret power, which is you could treat everybody like a person and you can respond to everything they say. You can engage with them and then share their insights on the next episode. You could do some really crazy things that it's just not available once you start hitting 10,000 plus downloads per episode.

Pat:
I agree with that. That's what I tell my students too. It's like, your advantage is your ability to make one-on-one connections with people and to get to know your audience faster and better and understand what their pains are, and then be able to probably create better episodes sooner than most people who are so deep into a space already could. That's huge. So thank you for bringing that. There's definitely an advantage to being small. I do believe social media, although there are a lot of pluses and minuses about it, I think that for me, it's not a place to get more traffic. I can get more traffic from it, but to me, it's like you said, it's about the relationship building, the access, the connections.

I think if I am going to share something, I don't want to just have like a cookie cutter, "Oh, here's the one minute of the episode," and it's just like an interesting part of the conversation. I want this little snippet from Buzzsprout and the tool that you have to go out there and in and of itself, just that snippet alone, provide value to really get people to go, "What? I need to share this." Versus having it be used to sort of tease something that then gets people to click. Because as I always say, people who see that are people who already know I exist. I would much rather have it be something that people who know me want to share with other people. They're not going to share a teaser. They're going to share something of value that in that moment, in that minute, does a really good job to sort of teach or inspire or motivate or educate or whatever.

Thoughts on using video, along with podcasts? There's this thing called video podcasting, which nowadays people are like, "Oh, I'm just going to turn on the camera and pop it onto YouTube." You and I know that video podcasting has a history with Apple. It was actually like a podcast that people have to download. It's not like that anymore. But what are your thoughts on turning on the camera and how to utilize, for example, YouTube, to expand the reach, grow the show?

Alban:
Man, for years I pushed back on it and I didn't think that it was all that great. And then people like Joe Rogan really pioneered the space and proved to us, yeah, when you have incredible guests on your podcast and you can grab snippets... He did two things and this is the game plan. I mean, it is the perfect way to do video podcasting. He recorded all of his podcasts in video and audio at the same time. Audio went out completely unedited as a podcast. Video was put up onto YouTube. He was also live streaming every episode so that people could watch as it was going up. But then he would add an intro and an exit at the end, outro, and he'd put that up. But then they would go over it for, I think, I mean, the rest of the week and they would grab snippets out and they would upload those as separate clips.

With those clips, what's so powerful there is, those are really nice bite-size ways for people to get exposed to your podcast. So they see that over on the recommendation tab. For anyone getting started on YouTube, everything is about that recommendations tab. It's the front page of YouTube and the recommendations on the sidebar. When you can give YouTube these small clips with discernible content, like they promise it's going to be Jamie Foxx talking about his experiences with creativity and I go, "Wow, that sounds interesting," and I can click that and then I can listen to it, I go, "Man, this is great. He has a full three hour interview with Joe Rogan? I would love to listen to that." And if I enjoy the video, then I can go, "Well, actually this is a whole podcast. I could just listen to the podcast." So if you're going to do YouTube or video podcasting, that is 100 percent the way I would recommend people to do it.

Pat:
Same exact way I recommend too. I've done some workshops on video podcasting and that's exactly what I teach. The other cool thing about this is then you get to take advantage of YouTube's algorithms. Like you said, the home and the browse and the recommendations, and the cool thing is once people watch one, YouTube's going to do a lot of work for you to get them to see other things. So you can create multiple clips. I would just recommend that each clip is a standalone about a specific topic with those keywords that are in there, like contained in and of itself, that four minute clip does the job to provide value. And then you can let people go into the rest of the full episode, if that happens to be on YouTube on a separate channel or your podcast even just in audio format. So thank you for that. That confirms sort of my beliefs about video podcasting and how it should be done.

I've done that every once in a while. I interviewed MKBHD on the podcast. I turned the video on, I have some video clips on YouTube and those have been seen 18,000, 20,000 times. Recently did this with an interview with Rob Mauer from Tesla Daily, and that had gone really well. Plus, because he is a YouTuber, he wants to share YouTube videos with his YouTube audience. So now I have an outlet for them instead of the friction of, "Hey, Youtubers, go to this podcast." Then of course which directory and there's all these other decisions and friction that has to happen.

Alban:
One common point that we keep kind of circling around here is we're not asking people to come to us. We are going to our potential audience. On Twitter, we're not asking people, "Hey, click this link, this scary link you don't know where it goes, and come listen to my podcast, please." We're saying, "Hey, we're going to give you all the real insights and the value here." For people that are on YouTube, or you know the audiences on YouTube, don't ask them, "Oh, why don't you just follow me to this podcasting thing and download a new app." We go, "We're going to come to you. Until we can establish a level of credibility that will make you... Like, you'll crave to go get more and so you're downloading the app."

If you're always trying to convince people to take the next action, when you have to do a hard sell, it feels like people are getting immune to some of these hard marketing tactics. I love so much more just giving things away, teaching for free, showing people things. And when they say it's ready for the next step, then you go, "I've got a whole podcast. I have a course, I have a product." Then they can come back to you and ask for more on their terms.

Pat:
Thank you for that. As we wrap up here, a couple more talking points. Number one, I wanted to discuss sort of what's coming or what's new in 2021 that we as podcasters can pay attention to that could support our show and provides value. But specifically first, before we sort of open it up, I would love to discuss if you have any thoughts about Clubhouse, and it's a new app, a new social app that sort of just came out that allows for some really cool audio-only interactions, but live with people. I've seen a few podcasters use it very, very smartly to bring their audiences in and have connections with them and almost become even more authoritative. What are your thoughts on Clubhouse and how might a podcaster use it to the best ability?

Alban:
So I'm by no means a Clubhouse expert.

Pat:
That's okay.

Alban:
I have always showed up to watch. The real value, I think that the thing that Clubhouse is tapping into right now is that we all want connection and we all want to be able to talk to people back and forth and have these conversations. And Clubhouse is providing the back and forth aspect. I would be very interested to see them provide a way that those conversations could actually be saved and then distributed so that people could listen to them later on, on like an open podcast feed, a way that they could be archived. But I've definitely seen podcasters do this where they're having conversations and you can go and make yourself the authority. There really is a power to putting yourself out there and being one of the first content creators to take a new medium seriously.

Pat:
Yeah, I agree. It's worth definitely experimenting with. When a new social media platform comes about, it's important to, number one, you never know, is it going to go well? Is it going to go away? But either way, you might as well reserve your username, right? Just in case. So I got PatFlynn there. Now I'm finding, I'm having an amazing time connecting with people and getting brought up on the "stage" to then have access to talk to people and then bringing other people on the stage who raised their hand. There's a whole audience there. It almost feels like I'm at a conference and I can just kind of walk into these different rooms mid conversation or mid presentation, and I can choose to leave quietly if I wanted to. It's just so interesting. Then of course, I can create my own room if I want.

So cool. That's interesting. I think it's definitely worth experimenting with as a podcaster to see what you can do there, or at least connect. We'd love to follow you there or anybody who's listening to this just @PatFlynn, of course. But any other things that we can look forward to in 2021? Any trends, any sort of just insights from your end being in the industry, working at Buzzsprout that we can maybe get some forward-thinking and sort of information about?

Alban:
Sure. I mean, one of the big trends of 2020 that is continuing is the development of the podcast namespace. So everyone listening may not know this, but podcasting is built on a open protocol RSS feed, and that's what distributes podcasts. For years, that hasn't moved forward very quickly and it needs to. There's a lot of things that we could do to make the experience of listening to podcasts more fun. So imagine if you're on your app and you're able to leave messages for the podcast hosts that they actually could listen to inside the app, or being able to see the transcript in real-time, or be able to see where the podcasts are recorded. You could actually see what spaces. All those things are things that the podcast namespace is working on.

So it's the Podcast Index, and they're trying to develop this more. Buzzsprout's been very much involved, and we're really excited to see the community come together rather than trying to pick out one app to kind of own all of podcasting, like we maybe kind of see in YouTube and video. Instead, having kind of a variety of options so that everyone can pick the right platform for them but we can still get access to a lot of really cool features.

Pat:
Where can we go to make sure up to date with a lot of that kind of stuff, all the new trends and whatnot? Where would you recommend?

Alban:
You could probably follow Podcast Index on Twitter. They post a lot there. We definitely talk about it a lot in the Buzzsprout newsletter. I know Podnews talks a lot about it.

Pat:
Podnews is great. Yeah.

Alban:
I would recommend just, as you're a podcaster, kind of keep up to date and see if the host you're working with is actually pushing into these new spaces. Because if we want podcasting to stay this open ecosystem, more similar to email and blogs and less like YouTube and social media, it's going to require a lot of competitors and different groups to work together to develop it. I love that this group, the Podcast Index has kind of taken the forefront in saying, "Hey, we're going to start doing this. We're going to kind of mediate between a lot of competitors and people who always don't play nice and see if we can move podcasting, take it to the next level."

Pat:
Wow. Thank you for that. Alban, thank you so much for your time today.

Anybody who's ever thinking about starting a podcast or maybe you have one already and you're not quite happy with your host, I'd highly recommend checking out Buzzsprout. You can go through our affiliate link if you'd like, we do get a little bit of a commission for that, but you also get some additional bonus time added to your plan if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/buzzsprout. Of course, just, you can check out Buzzsprout, sign up to their newsletter, get access to their channel on YouTube, which I've seen, it's very great. Thank you, Alban and the entire team over there for everything that you guys do. Any final remarks or words of encouragement for those stepping into the world, or who are already in the world of podcasting today? [Full disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Alban:
You know, there's a outsizer reward for everybody who's creating content. You're not just getting to connect with interesting people and you're not just able to get opportunities to new things. You're actually doing something really healthy for yourself, exploring what matters to you, and getting your voice out to the world. There really is something very healthy and very good about not just consuming content, but actually to create it yourself. So I really believe this. Even if you didn't end up with us, that would be perfectly okay with me. As long as you're creating, there is a lot that's very good for you to become someone who's producing content.

Pat:
Thank you, Alban. We appreciate you. All the links and such are in the show notes and best regards to the team and thank them all for all the great things that you guys have done and continue to do for us and we'll chat soon.

Alban:
Sounds great. Thank you, Pat.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview with Alban. Alban, thanks for coming on, my friend. Always appreciate having Buzzsprout's ear to lend itself to us because we don't have access to the things you do. So appreciate the heads up, and wow, definitely a great opportunity to still start podcasting, especially as it's actually not as many as we think that we're actually competing against. So if you'd like to start a podcast, obviously we have a lot of resources for that. You can check out Power-Up Podcasting. You can become a member of SPI Pro if you'd like.

Or if you already know what you want to do and you want to get involved with a host that actually will help you, that has some really cool factors and things that help you with your podcast, including the magic mixer, which normalizes your shows to make it sound proper, just like our show sounds right now. If you want to make sure that you have good support, if you want to make sure you can, almost with one click, get into all the places you need to get into, Spotify and Google Podcasts and Apple, of course, and all the other places, it's all in there. It's super easy, the user interface... That's why I love it, because you don't have to fight anything. It's just easy. So check them out. Go through our affiliate link. You get some extra time added to your plan, SmartPassiveIncome.com/buzzsprout. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/buzzsprout. [Full disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Thanks again for listening in today. I appreciate you subscribing to this podcast. If you haven't done that already, make sure you do that. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/buzzsprout. Or again, you can check out PowerUpPodcasting.com to check out our course that has helped thousands of people start their podcast. That's it. Thank you so much, take care, appreciate you, and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Peace out and Team Flynn for the win. Cheers.

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