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So how do you measure podcast success? It has to be in the context of your goals. I run Come Alive Creative and we begin the conversation with these three questions: What is your goal? Who is your target audience? Why a podcast? There is no hard and fast science when it comes to what “success” looks like for each podcaster. It will vary depending on the answers to the above three questions. Goals can be things like improving relationships with other professionals in the industry, establishing the client as a leader in the space, and generating leads for the workshop. In order to know what to measure, make sure your podcast has clear goals first.

Why do you care about podcast analytics and data? You care because you want your podcast to be successful. You want evidence that your show is reaching and being enjoyed by an audience. Podcasts are big investments of time, money, or both. While starting a podcast may be easy, making one that is worth listening to is much harder. My team and I recently wrote an article, Podcast Analytics: How to Measure and Use Podcast Metrics to Make Your Show Successful. You can read the whole thing over on our website.

Chances are that, at some point in your career, you’re going to need to interview people.  A little tip that I have for you today: you want to respect your guest’s time. I have been hosting podcasts and conducting over 350 interviews or so now and something I’ve absolutely learned is to respect your guest’s time. Start on time. End early. Before you start, clarify the stop time, and make sure the guest doesn’t have anything scheduled immediately after you. If they do, pay attention to that. Try to stop early so they have enough time to transition.  If you do need to go over, make sure to check first. That type of stuff goes a long way. Interview Tips from @RealJeffLarge

Throughout my career, I’ve interviewed a lot of people and there’s a lot that I’ve picked up along the way. For you as a marketer, you’ve had opportunities, or instances, in which you needed to interview other people.  There are certain things you want to keep in mind as you approach people and begin working with people in this interview context. One of them is to be understanding. Things come up. Just the other day, I had four interviews scheduled back to back and two of them had to cancel. One person happened to be stuck in an airport and the other person simply worked all day long and needed a break. He knew himself well enough that he wouldn’t perform well in the interview and asked to reschedule.  Both are rescheduled and, worst case scenario, I got back two hours of my life on that particular day (and I still have those interviews scheduled).  Again, things will happen. Be flexible. Be understanding. Interview Tips from @RealJeffLarge

I’m currently prepping for an interview with Kristen LaFrance – she works in customer retention and is the author of a great article I’ve shared, Churn Buster Retention Bites: January 2020.  Her retention bite #1: customers are better than metrics. “Here’s something I’ve been chewing on: are the metrics we live, breathe, acquire, and retain even that powerful? Can we really base every business decision on numbers alone?” Spoiler: her answer is No. She argues that the people themselves are better than these metrics. I’ve been working on this a lot recently because metrics and data DO matter, but she makes a point that numbers are just a tool.  Churn Buster Retention: January 2020

Chances are you’ll need to interview someone at some point in your career, especially in marketing. I’ve picked up some tips along the way by doing a lot of interviews – one is to simply practice good communication. This means: answer all basic questions about the interview. Things like, how long will it last, what to expect, how you’re going to connect, etc. Give them a sense of what will be talked about so they are calm and comfortable. Beyond that, remind the interview guest before it happens, maybe a day or two before. And, afterwards, always a follow-up thank you. Keep these things in mind if you want to hold and conduct good interviews. More Interview Tips from @RealJeffLarge

Apple Podcast has recently updated some of the requirements for their podcasts and their submissions, specifically on things like the artwork. Before, they just had standard pixel size, dimensions, resolution, file type, and color space for the artwork. But, it looks like they added that images can’t be blurry, misaligned, smashed, they can’t have any explicit content on the covers themselves, and they’ve even added some notes on trying to use an asterisk to cancel out some of the letters.  So, there’s a whole bunch of newer specifications that could mess up what you have or affect what you’re planning to use. Check out the link below to review the requirements.  Apple Podcast Requirements

Today’s tip comes from Kristen LaFrance’s Churn Buster Retention Bites (January 2020) article. Under Retention Bite #3 she says,  “Think about the first emails your customer gets post-purchase: Order confirmation (transactional), shipping info (transactional), delivery notification (transactional). Maybe a review request 1–2 days later? Feels meh, right?” She goes on to talk about this time she legit forgot she was part of a subscription until it showed up at her house. Now, here’s the thing – she argues that there should be communication between the order and the shipment.  And, I find this really interesting, because, honestly for me personally, I don’t know what to put or say all the time. But, there is something lacking beyond this constant transactional interactions – where are those human elements?   What are the things that you can do to make your company more relatable, more human, etc? Kristen does give some examples and I’m sure you can find more.  Churn Buster Retention Bites

Are you utilizing every opportunity you get to learn from the people you’re serving?  Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time in conversation with my existing and past clients about the business, the experiences and what I can glean from them.  I stumbled upon this article about customer exit interview questions that I found really helpful. I have one client who we helped launch a 3 episode pilot of his series and now he’s decided he’s just going to focus more on the writing portion of his work, not on the audio. Going through the exit interview process with him, this article was helpful in asking the right questions (both of him and of myself).   Customer Exit Interviews

The other day I mentioned an article about How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails. Today, I want to give you a potential solution to this – it’s a website you’ll want to check out called Hey.com It’s a new email service that’s about to roll out from the team at Basecamp. There’s an intro you can read and it seems promising. Hopefully, it could be an answer to some of the problems posed in the article I mentioned previously. Hey.com

As marketers, we have to conduct interviews. It could be for a podcast, customer or product research – whatever it may be, I’ve picked up some tips along the way. I posted a list of them to Twitter, and here is the first – find out if your potential guest is even interested. Do they care? Do they want to? People are busy with lots of obligations – don’t take it personally.   Just simply ask. Provide context and see what they say.  Interview Tips from @RealJeffLarge

It’s finally happened – Vine’s successor, Byte.  Byte is now available on i0S and Android. The link below is from a Verge article discussing Byte, which is the long-awaited sequel to the short-form video app. Learn more about Byte in this article

Today’s tip comes the article Churn Buster Retention Bites: January 2020 – this is an article written by Kristen LaFrance, and I want to highlight tip #2 which is the Tale of Two Beauty Brands.  She poses the question – is it worth using a serious discount to pull in new customers? She goes on to say that Brand A gives a 33% discount on the first purchase and Brand B does a 10% discount on the first purchase. According to her data, “Brand B is retaining two times as many customers as Brand A.” It’s the whole concept around perceived value v. true value, and I really like what she has to say here.  Churn Buster Retention Bites

If you’re anything like me, you like to learn. And who better to learn from than your clients! Lately, I’ve been investing a lot of time into talking with my clients and learning from them. Things that are going well, why they’re buying, what we’re helping with, what we could be helping with, all sorts of stuff. In the process of doing this, I stumbled upon a site called BuyingTriggers.co – it’s a done-for-you customer interview service. It has some well-trusted organizations already using it, it’s run by intelligent people but to be honest I haven’t used it. I’m intrigued, though.  The stuff that I’ve seen including price points, endorsements, companies that they’ve worked with, the people behind it – it all seems pretty good. If this is something you need for your business, it might be worth checking out. Buying Triggers

As marketers, we have to talk to people often – and interviewing is part of the gig. I’ve lost track of how many interviews I’ve done in my podcast career but it’s probably in the neighborhood of 350-400. One tip I’ve picked up is to be patient. People are busy. One of my recent interviews on my personal podcast I began contacting in May of 2019, and it wasn’t until 8 emails and 1 in-person meeting that they finally scheduled to be on the show in January of 2020. Sometimes these things take. Be patient. Interview Tips from Jeff

If you are a podcaster, you may have been paying attention to the smart speaker space – how to get your podcast into the voice search platforms.  I recently came across an article from Bixby on How to Get Your Podcast on Bixby. They give a tutorial that includes set-up, testing, video, etc.  If you’re trying to stay on the forefront of the voice search tech wave, you’ll want to check out this link. How to Get Your Podcast on Bixby

Today I’m sharing a guide from Basecamp – the one I’m reading is from the “Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication”. It includes their rules of thumb,  general philosophy, etc.  They have roughly 30 of these guides – you can take a look and compare them to where you generally align with how communication should be handled.  The two that I want to highlight are #1 and #8.  The first states that, “Few things are as important to study, practice and perfect as clear communication.” And the second (#8) cautions, “If your words can be perceived in different ways, they’ll be understood in the way which does the most harm. “ Written communication is extremely important, being succinct and clear, and direct with the things that we have to say.  Written communication oftentimes is the easiest way to be misunderstood and taken out of context.  Reflect on questions like, “Am I being clear? Is there another way this could be misconstrued or misunderstood?” Basecamp Communication Guides

Chances are that you’re going to need to interview people at some point in your career – whether it’s for a podcast that you run, customer research, etc. Having good interview skills are important.  The one thing you can to help yourself out (and your guest!), is to do your homework. Research the people you need to talk to and understand what it is that you’re going for with this interview, beforehand. Have an objective. Have a focus or a goal. Pre-interview, if possible.  Sometimes, in special situations like narrative podcasts, people aren’t as good as they look on paper. Or, somebody who might surprise you might be an awesome fit.  Do what you can and try to get your homework in there. Research and know why you’re walking into the interview.  Jeff Large Twitter

In the article, How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails, the author dives into how companies can purchase data scraped the contents of your email inbox. Email apps, like Edison, can sell your content data to companies in the finance, travel and e-commerce sectors.  We want to be vigilant with our data – there are a lot of people profiting from it. Always review the user agreements, especially with free apps to make sure your data is safe. How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails

I recently ran into a situation in which a job I was quoting would require production help from all over the U.S. I have a personal situation coming up that will inhibit my ability to go out and record in the field for this job, so I needed a solution. After a significant amount of digging, I found 3 websites – if you’re in a spot where you need to hire a professional to go do something for you, like audio or capture field recordings or maybe B-roll for video, etc. I haven’t used them yet but I’m excited to – they were a pain in the butt to find! AirMedia.org SoundLister.com ProductionHub.com