by: AskPat 563 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 563 of AskPat. I don't know why I said it like that but anyway we have a great question today from Molly, who's amazing—you can just tell by her personality, you'll hear it right away, she's awesome. She's been a fan of SPI and what I do for a while and I'm so happy to feature her question here today.
All right, here's today's question from Molly.
Molly: Hey, Pat. This is Molly Mahoney from ThePreparedPerformer.com. And first of all, I know I've told you this before, but you have seriously made everything possible for me with my website and my business and I'm so, so, so grateful, so thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, my question. So, I launched recently a video podcast, and I did it as a video because I have had more success with connecting with my audience with my YouTube channel, so I thought if that's the way I'm connecting to people, that should be the best way for me to be able to reach out to them. And I've heard you talk about your video podcast. I love watching it, and I remember you talking about how when you put it on YouTube, that it also comes up in search results and stuff like that. However, now that I've launched it and figured all that craziness out, I am wondering if maybe I should have just made it an audio podcast. I'm worried now because I didn't think about the fact that I don't think it can come up in Podkicker or any of those other podcast apps, and I also was hoping that I could use your app on your plugin and stuff on my website for playing the podcast; I didn't think about the fact that a video podcast won't play on there.
So, I'm wondering now if I can have it as an audio podcast as well as a video podcast, or if that's weird, or if I should just start a new RSS feed for the audio version. What do you think?
Okay thank you, thank you, thank you again so much. You're the best, you're the best, you're the best. Okay, bye.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Molly. What's up? Sorry, I'm just trying to copy how awesome your voice is there. Probably not as good, but anyway, all of you listening to this, you gotta check out Molly. She's great. ThePreparedPerformer.com is her URL, and Molly, it's cool to hear that you've gone through this process you're learning from. Not necessarily your mistakes—I don't think it was a mistake to launch a video podcast. A video podcast is a great medium. It's very underutilized. There's a lot of opportunities there. SPI TV is doing really well, actually, getting a lot more views on video podcasts when they're published within the first few weeks on iTunes. However, YouTube eventually catches up because of search engines, and I have subscribers there also, so it kind of balances out. So, hopefully you are repurposing those videos for those podcasts on your YouTube channel too.
But, should you have made it just an audio? Well, I feel like it depends on what the content is. A lot of video content is not meant for audio, and what I mean by that is sometimes there's a lot of podcasters who have both video podcasts and an audio podcast and the video podcast and the audio podcast is all the same except, obviously the audio podcast doesn't have the video. And a lot of times those podcasters fail to realize just how bad the experience is in audio format when things are being referenced in the video format, so if you say things like, “Oh, see this thing here,” well, that doesn't mean anything to somebody listening to audio. “Okay, so the third part of this chart, as you can see here on the right hand side,” that just makes people feel left out. You don't want to do that.
So in your videos if you do anything like that that references anything visual, then turning that audio, ripping out that audio and putting it into an audio podcast, would not do you much good and actually might hurt you. And I've on purpose unsubscribed from podcasts that do video because I only listen to audio podcasts because I'm doing something else at the same time. It's just a bad experience.
However, there are some podcasters out there that do an amazing job of doing it on video because they are great on video like you are, Molly. But they make sure not to reference anything visual, for example, or if there is something referenced visually they also make sure that they say it in a way or follow it up with something that the audio listeners can pay attention to. And that's totally fine, if people know that there's both versions as long as both versions are getting what they need to know. It's when one feels left out, that they're gonna feel left out and actually drop out or unsubscribe or even worse, leave a negative review, which you don't want.
Now some of those podcasters, for example, are Andrew Warner from Mixergy, Jaime Tardy from Eventual Millionaire. They do their interviews over video, but then they rip out the audio and then they have an extra way to get exposure in iTunes through a separate RSS feed. So that's exactly what happens. So there's an RSS feed for the video and there's an RSS feed for the audio, and that RSS feed for the audio gets put into an audio-only podcast, and that's what then can be played on all those audio players like the Smart Podcast Player. Thank you by the way for that plug, and iTunes in the audio section. And of course more people listen to audio podcasts than watch video podcasts, so you're gonna be able to reach more people too. Plus you're just giving people more options for hey, however you like to consume this content. If you want to watch a video of me, great, here's this option. You have it on YouTube you have it on iTunes, whatever you prefer. If you prefer to listen on audio, here's the audio podcast, so you're giving people no excuse to not listen to you or watch you or consume you in some way, shape, or form.
So, not a stupid idea at all if you wanted to do that, and you'll likely see you're gonna get a lot of downloads on your audio version, even if you have the video podcast already. Now, do make sure that you keep track of the downloads on the video podcast on iTunes, 'cause there's a lot of people who go through the trouble of producing it in that way. Now, that said, if you are already doing YouTube videos, it's not that much extra to put them on iTunes, but what I was gonna say is that a lot of people put in a ton of work on platforms that don't have a lot of traffic. So just make sure you're keeping track of the downloads of those video podcasts to make sure that it's actually doing anything for you, and if not, then you can just skip that part of the process and do everything else that is working.
Woo. Molly, you're awesome. Thank you so much for bringing the energy. I think it kind of filters down into me, into my answer for you today. So, I hope this answers your question and makes you happy, because you've been an awesome supporter of what I do, and I just want to continue to support you and serve you too, Molly. So, in addition to that, of course I'm gonna send you an AskPat t-shirt, totally, and I look forward to hearing about how things go and continuing to serve you down the road. So thank you so much, Molly. I appreciate you.
For everybody else out there listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com, click on that red record button, just ask away. It doesn't matter what kind of mic that you have as long as I can hear you. It's my job to answer your questions with good sound quality; it's your job just to ask the right questions. And of course, without those questions, this show wouldn't exist. So, I appreciate you. Ask the questions at AskPat.com. Woo!
All right, so the last part of this show is the quote of the day, and that is from Mary Smith today. And that is, “The only place success comes before work, is in the dictionary.” Boom. Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks, guys. Bye.