Time for a new episode of The Story Behind the Lemon, my podcast about podcasting and the fun of running a business in the world of podcasting. (New episodes drop, as the kids say, every Friday afternoon.)
You can check out the website for it at podcast.lemonproductions.ca or hit up the subscribe page to subscribe to the show in your favorite app. Here’s the subscribe link for some of the popular apps:
I hope you enjoy the podcast. I’m excited to continue telling both my own story in podcasting as well as answer your questions about podcasting. I’ve been podcasting for almost 10 years and it’s awesome to see how it’s grown and changed over the years. I continue to believe that it’s one of the best ways to engage and communicate with your audience, fans, or potential customers.
Surprise! 🎉 I’ve got my own podcast (finally). It’s all about podcasting (surprise!) and the fun of running a business in the world of podcasting. New episodes will drop, as the kids say, every Friday afternoon.
You can check out the website for it at podcast.lemonproductions.ca or hit up the subscribe page to subscribe to the show in your favorite app. Here’s the subscribe link for some of the popular apps:
For the first episode – which is actually the 6th episode – I’m starting a series on the what, why, who, when, and where of podcasting. First up: What is a Podcast?
You can listen right here on the site thanks to Transistor’s sweet embedded player – in dark mode (cue dramatic music):
Why Didn’t You Use a WordPress Plugin?
Podcast nerds will notice that my podcast isn’t hosted inside of WordPress at all. I’m actually using the built-in website provided by Transistor.fm, my podcast hosting platform of choice.
The main reason is because I want to podcast – not manage a website for podcasting. Plugins break. WordPress falls over. Web hosting goes down. I’d rather rely on Justin and Jon (co-founders of Transistor.fm) to worry about that stuff so I can focus on the thing I want to actually do: record a podcast about podcasting.
I believe a website is an important thing to have for a podcast. But the reality is that so many of the top podcasts have awful websites. Which doesn’t mean you should give up on having a nice website – but also a lot of time, energy, and frustration is wasted on a website for a podcast instead of doing the actual podcast. And while there are still more people than you think who listen to podcast episodes on websites and not in apps, those kinds of folks don’t generally care what the website looks like or have any allegiance to it’s branding. They just know to click the link in the email or Facebook post each time an episode comes out and sit and listen.
p.s. Want to subscribe to just such an email? You can do so right here, right now:
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Why Are You Telling Us on Episode 6?
It’s not for the myth of “having 3 episodes published so that you get more downloads and higher rankings in Apple Podcasts”. I just wanted to make sure I was actually going to do the podcast regularly before I told the world about it. It’s much easier (and less embarrassing) to try it out for 3-5 episodes and make sure it’s going to stick than to tell the world about something, only to stop doing it 2 episodes later because you don’t enjoy it.
Got Questions for a Future Episode?
If you’d like to send in a question for a future episode, there’s a few different ways to do it:
I hope you enjoy the podcast. I’m excited to continue telling both my own story in podcasting as well as answer your questions about podcasting. I’ve been podcasting for almost 10 years and it’s awesome to see how it’s grown and changed over the years. I continue to believe that it’s one of the best ways to engage and communicate with your audience, fans, or potential customers.
I answered a viewer question over on my YouTube channel – subscribe here! – about how to add sound effects and music backgrounds to a podcast or live stream.
Farrago is an app from Rogue Amoeba, maker of fine audio products for macOS, that functions as a soundboard on your computer. You can load it up with AIFF, MP3, or WAV audio files that then can be triggered with your keyboard, mouse, or MIDI device.
In Rogue Amoeba’s words:
Farrago provides the best way to quickly play sound bites, audio effects, and music clips on your Mac. Podcasters can use Farrago to include musical accompaniment and sound effects during recording sessions, while theater techs can run the audio for live shows. Whether it’s providing quick access to a large library of sounds or running through a defined list of audio, Farrago is ready to assist!
Farrago is easily the best designed soundboard app for macOS. Unless you need more robust playlist and queue support that something like QLab offers, Farrago is the app to get for your audio playback needs.
Rogue Amoeba offers a free download to try it out, and then it’s only $49USD to buy it.
While you’re at Rogue Amoeba’s website, be sure to check out their Ultimate Podcast Bundle if you’re in the market for Audio Hijack, Loopback, Farrago, and Fission for a great package deal.
In the video, I also touch on a few other apps besides Farrago that you might be interested in checking out:
One neat thing that most modern podcast hosts have added to the analytics you have on your podcast is what devices or players people listen to your podcast on.
On Transistor, the host we use for all our podcasts over at Goodstuff.fm, it’s presented as a “Popular Apps – The most popular apps your audience listens with”:
There are a lot of variables that could affect how someone might listen to the shows on Goodstuff, such as:
Style or topic of show. (i.e. Tech focused vs non-tech might favour custom apps vs using built in apps or web version)
Hosts with varying social media following
Start date of show. Some have been around longer than others.
Stats not being reported properly due to the fact that podcast stats aren’t an exact science
Here’s how 8 shows on Goodstuff compare with their popular podcast players stats:
Baseline
Clockworks
Daily(ish)
The Goodstuff Morning Show
I Guess We’re Grown Ups Now
Show Me Your Mic
Way Too Seriously
The U2 Podcast
A few observations:
Two of my own shows, Daily(ish) and Show Me Your Mic, have a lot of Web Player usage.
Not every show has been submitted to Spotify – or was only recently added to their directory. So Spotify stats might be off because of that.
Some shows have more of a iOS focused audience or host(s) while others are more Android friendly. If someone shares a show within an app like Overcast, which is iOS only, it might have a larger audience there because hosts with Android only just can’t share within the iOS ecosystem.
What Should You Do with Your Podcast Stats?
So what? Should this affect how we market or publish our shows? What does the fact that Show Me Your Mic has a lot of web player listens vs The Goodstuff Morning Show’s popularity with Overcast listeners mean?
I don’t think anyone should be hyper focused on their podcast stats – spend more time recording and refining your audio than staring at stats please! It is worth looking at your stats every now and then to see if people are listening where and how you assume they are. For example, you might be surprised to find out you have a huge audience on Spotify. That might lead you to figuring out that someone with a large audience blogged or tweeted about your podcast and linked to your Spotify feed instead of your website.
In our case, we might want to consider changes to our website if that’s where most people are listening to a show. We might want to encourage folks to us an app to subscribe if we think they might not know how. Or maybe we could throw some other marketing efforts for other shows on our individual episode pages to draw listeners of one show to another show.
Show Me Your Stats!
I’d love to hear, via the comments below or on Twitter, what players are most common or popular among your podcast subscribers. Are you surprised by what you see or is it exactly what you expected to find?
