Measuring Success: The Secret Sauce for Podcasters

When you first start podcasting, it takes a lot more time than you thought it was going to.

And today I'm going to give you a tool that's going to help you speed that up and help the growth of your show also speed up.

It's actually fairly simple.

Welcome to youo Podcast Consultant.

Small Lessons with Big Value.

With more than a decade of experience and millions of downloads, this hall of fame podcast is a featured speaker, author, and mentor to thousands.

Now he wants to work with you.

He's your podcast consultant, Dave Jackson.

All right, hang with me.

I got a quick story last week.

I'm a diabetic and I wear one of those cute little glucose monitors on my arm.

And last weekend my blood sugar level was at a very high level.

Not in a good way.

Like, there's.

There's your typical level and then there's kind of like high.

But okay, this was like high.

You should do something about it, not go to the hospital.

High, but not good.

And one of my hobbies is riding my bike.

And so I threw my bike on the back of the car, rode to a beautiful park, rode for an hour, and I get in the car and I'm super sweaty and had a great time.

And I looked at my glucose and I was back down in the normal range.

And I was like, huh.

Who knew riding your bike for an hour, working up a strong sweat and just keeping your heart rate elevated for an hour would do that?

Good to know.

Well, this week my friend was in from out of town.

He brought me some food that I probably shouldn't have eaten.

And so here it was again, Friday night, and my glucose monitor is like, I don't know what you ate, but don't eat any more of that in a really not good place.

Again, not go to the hospital.

High, but not good.

I rode my bike again for an hour.

Different path this time, but I rode it for an hour, worked up a good old sweat, got a new bike seat that's a little more comfortable on my tush, and was like, wow.

I get back to the car, put the bike on, I'm all sweaty, I'm toweling off, I look at my blood sugar level, and again it's back into the healthy range.

So what did we learn?

We learned that exercise, not just being active, but exercise that raises my heart rate and I do it for an hour, is really good for lowering my blood sugar level.

Now, Dave, what the heck does this have to do with podcasting?

Well, there are a couple things.

Here's some fun filled words of wisdom.

When I was in my 20s, I read a lot of books by this guy named Peter Drucker, and he had one line, what gets measured, gets managed.

He also said, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

There are all sorts of great quotes about things, you know, when it comes to measuring things.

James Clear had one.

You do not rise to the level of your goals.

You fall to the level of your systems.

And there's the old joke, 50% of my marketing doesn't work.

I'm just not sure which half.

And so I use a tool called Switchy.

I'll put a link to it in the show notes.

And what you do is, let's say I have a link to my episode and I get that link, and it's where people can listen on my website.

I throw it into Switchy, and I can then have it.

You can actually have a domain like, I have a domain support this show, and then slash, whatever.

But you could make up your own domain, whatever you want to do.

But the bottom line is Switchy gives you a link.

And you put this into your Twitter.

And if you wanted to, you could have one link for Twitter, one link for Instagram, one link for whatever you know, or you could just categorize these as social media.

But if you really want to know what works, you want to keep things separate.

And so you could put that there and maybe even use that same link a couple different times, because they're all going to link back to your website where people can listen to that episode and then you can go later and see, well, how many people clicked on that.

Because you may find that you're spending a lot of time, and I still call it Twitter or instagram or.

Or TikTok or whatever social tool you're using.

And you may find that one of these does a whole lot better than the rest, which means you can kind of quit doing the other ones, you know, if you want to every now and then.

But this one really seems to be getting engagement.

Or you may find, like, my buddy Gary Arndt, who gets over a million downloads a month, he quit all of his social media.

And I'm like, oh, man, what happened to your downloads?

And he said, absolutely nothing.

And these are the things you want to do.

What you measure, you can improve.

And then when you find out what works, like riding your bike for an hour on a tow path, working up a good sweat, you can go, huh, maybe I should do more of that as opposed to things that don't work.

Now, there are other things you can do when you're testing, like, be careful, especially on your website.

Like if you go in and say, well, I'm going to change the title of my episode, I'm going to change the artwork, and I'm going to switch some of the keywords.

Well, if that works now, you don't know which thing worked.

Was it the title?

Was it the thumbnail?

What was the deal?

So when you do different tests, change one thing and one thing only and let that go for at least a week or two.

It all depends on how much traffic you're getting.

If you're getting a ton of traffic, well, then maybe you only need a week's worth of data.

If you're not, maybe you need to let that sit there for a month or six weeks or something of that nature.

But we all get frustrated, especially when we're first starting and we're trying things and we're not sure what's working, what's not.

It's because we're not measuring anything.

We just look at downloads and go, well, we got less downloads.

Okay, well, we don't get much data on where our audience came from besides Apple and Spotify.

You're like, great, but how did people find us in Apple and Spotify?

And so when it comes to your promotional stuff, like, I'm always amazed.

For me, I get more traffic to my website from my newsletter than I do on social media, and it's by a lot.

Now, that doesn't mean that social media doesn't work.

It means it doesn't work as well for me.

Because your mileage may vary than my newsletter.

My newsletter outperforms that, which is why I use a tool called Whisper Flow that I can just talk into the microphone.

It transcribes it instantly, and it makes it super easy to write a newsletter.

So there's another tool you can check out.

I'll have that in the links in the show notes out@podcastconsultant.com 248.

Because this is episode number 248, and I know what you're thinking.

Dave, you said podcasting takes a lot of time when you first start, and it does.

And now you're saying to add another step to the process.

Yep, I totally get that.

But I'm here to tell you, look at it long term, because what it's going to enable you to do is find out what works and what does not.

And then you can stop doing the things that don't work or at least cut back on them or whatever you're going to do and lean into those things that do work so that you become more efficient and then your audience actually starts to grow faster.

It's still is not fast.

I'm not here to say by using a link tracker your show is going to grow by 30% overnight.

No, but you can stop doing those things that don't work now.

If you need help with your podcast, these are the kind of things I help people with.

I can show you how to use it.

It's all there.

Go over to schoolofpodcasting.com sign up for either a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription and that comes with one on one consulting with me me in addition to the step by step courses and an amazing community.

It's all there.

Go over to schoolofpodcasting.com and when you sign up use the coupon code Listener.

Thanks so much.

I'm Dave Jackson.

I've been helping podcasters for over 20 years and I can't wait to see what we're going to do together because I want to be your podcast consultant.