Latest / Buzzcast / Can AI Find Your Podcast? A Real-World AEO Test

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Can AI Find Your Podcast? A Real-World AEO Test · Buzzcast

0:00
Jordan: Have you guys seen this new podcast discovery app?
0:02
Jordan: It's called Dial Flipper and it's like an old time radio one.
0:05
Jordan: I downloaded it.
0:06
Jordan: It's really cool.
0:07
Jordan: It's like a free app on an iOS.
0:09
Jordan: I don't know if it's on Android too, probably.
0:12
Jordan: But what it is, is like you go in and you create an account and it asks you what your like favorite podcasts are and like what kind of topics you're into.
0:22
Jordan: And then it does like an actual like dial where you hear the static of like the radio tuning and it'll take you to like different podcasts.
0:32
Jordan: And so you can like them or flip them, and then you can like gather up different podcasts that you're interested in.
0:37
Jordan: And it was actually really cool, but it was kind of weird because what it does is it drops you like right in the middle of the episode.
0:43
Jordan: And so there were a few that dropped me like right in the middle of it, and it was like one of those like programmatic ads.
0:49
Jordan: And so it felt a little, yeah.
0:51
Jordan: And so it felt a little bit like when you're on the radio and you're like, oh, ad, and you're like skipping.
0:56
Alban: Yeah.
0:56
Alban: I like the concept.
0:58
Alban: That's a good idea.
0:59
Alban: That yeah, there have been times I've been driving and our local NPR affiliate is on.
1:05
Alban: And I remember once listening to, I think it was Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
1:10
Alban: I didn't know what it was, but it's a podcast episode and it's with somebody who sounds like a chef and it's really interesting.
1:15
Alban: And he was traveling somewhere and he's telling this funny story, and then it turned out to be Anthony Bourdain.
1:20
Alban: And I think if you'd have told me it's Anthony Bourdain, I might have gone, this might be a good episode.
1:25
Alban: But something about like being exposed to the whole story, it being interesting, and then finding out who the interviewer was, who the guest is.
1:33
Alban: It's kind of nice to find to like discover podcasts that way.
1:37
Kevin: It is a good idea.
1:38
Kevin: I've I've had thoughts around this myself because it reminds me of cars used to have the seek and scan functions on their radio.
1:46
Kevin: You guys ever used that?
1:47
Kevin: Mine still does.
1:47
Kevin: Oh, good.
1:49
Kevin: I never used it all that much in the car, but conceptually, like it makes sense, especially when you were doing a road trip or something, and the stations that you normally would go to, like on your presets, don't work anymore because you've driven too far out of your home environment.
2:03
Kevin: And so then you just start, you know, you go into seek mode or something and like trying to find new stations in new areas.
2:08
Kevin: So this kind of sounds like that, but for podcasts, the challenge, of course, is how do you not drop somebody right into a boring part or a weird ad or something?
2:16
Kevin: And then how do you also make it contextual?
2:19
Kevin: Because if you drop them in the middle of a conversation, that's not a great place.
2:22
Kevin: Like topics change as podcast episodes go on.
2:25
Kevin: So you kind of want to start at the beginning of an interesting topic or something.
2:28
Kevin: It's something that the platforms have done a pretty good job at.
2:31
Kevin: Like, well, I say platforms, but I guess I'm thinking short form media like social sharing sites.
2:37
Jordan: Oh, okay.
2:38
Kevin: I like the idea of a podcast app being able to find interesting segments of podcasts, let you preview those, and then just like immediately tap just to keep listening or to start from the beginning or something like that.
2:50
Jordan: I think Spotify tried doing this a long time ago.
2:53
Jordan: I mean, they it's still, you can still do it where you can just like scroll.
2:56
Jordan: But for me, it almost feels like the Instagram doom scroll.
3:00
Jordan: And I get really tired of that motion of just like flipping up, flipping up, flipping up.
3:04
Jordan: What I like about this is like there's just like a flip button and it like switches it, and then you get like that nice little animation of like the radio thing, and then it flips to like another one, and it feels a little bit different.
3:14
Jordan: It feels a little less like I'm doom scrolling.
3:16
Jordan: It actually feels like I'm browsing like at a Blockbuster when you're like trying to find the right movie for the night.
3:22
Jordan: You know what I mean?
3:23
Jordan: and I was trying to figure out how to get around that problem of getting dropped just right in the middle of a boring episode.
3:30
Jordan: And I don't know if that's really on the podcasters.
3:33
Jordan: I think the only thing we can do is just hope that we are producing like good quality audio because I definitely think that if you're producing like audio that is clean and crisp and tightly edited, and you're not leaving long spaces in between people talking, then you're probably okay.
3:50
Jordan: But it's probably more on the apps to figure out a way for the algorithm to find the most interesting places in the episode to drop people, right?
3:59
Kevin: I mean, I think you are right.
4:00
Kevin: Three, four years ago, Podcast Namespace added a tag called sound bites.
4:05
Kevin: And when you create a soundbite for your episode, like the tag specifies that you should go ahead and list where that soundbite starts and the duration of that soundbite in your RSS feed.
4:14
Kevin: So then the idea was that podcast apps could pick up on those signals and would have interesting points to drop people in at if they wanted to build something like this.
4:22
Kevin: But soundbites never really took off.
4:23
Kevin: Like podcasters weren't creating them enough and at least listing them in their feed enough that there was enough volume of data for a podcast app to reliably build a feature around that.
4:33
Kevin: But now it almost feels useless because um as long as you're publishing a transcript, LLMs are really good at reading transcripts and finding interesting clips, and they could probably drop you in without the podcaster having to actually point out the most interesting parts.
4:48
Kevin: And they can self-improve too, because they know, like, oh, I'm gonna identify 10 clips, I'm gonna drop, you know, five people into this one and five people into this one, five people into this one, which one actually results in more people listening longer or listening to the full episode, and then it drives more people in that direction or it finds more clips that are similar to that one.
5:05
Kevin: And so, yeah, I think you're right.
5:07
Kevin: Like algorithms are gonna take over this functionality.
5:10
Kevin: We are not gonna have to do this as podcasters.
5:11
Kevin: But there's also other helpful signals in the RSS feed, like chapter markers.
5:15
Kevin: So if you create chapter markers, then at least it's a starting point for where topics change throughout.
5:21
Kevin: And so you don't have to just drop them randomly into the middle of an episode.
5:23
Kevin: You can say, Oh, well, at least I know a chapter starts here, so I can drop them in at that to that point.
5:27
Alban: I might zag here a little bit.
5:30
Alban: I kind of like it dropping you into random spots and even the random spots sometimes being an ad.
5:34
Alban: It's like how many times I walk in and the TV's on and somebody else is watching, and you're kind of like, it catches you for a minute, and then you're kind of like, oh, this is like vaguely interesting.
5:43
Alban: And there's something about that you didn't select it that you're more likely to give it a chance.
5:49
Alban: And I think when I'm in selector mode, then I'm like, oh, now I'm browsing, I want to watch look up reviews, I want to find the best thing.
5:57
Alban: But if I just walk in, like when I was in law school, my one of my roommates watched a ton of TV.
6:02
Alban: I'd walk in, and like the only reason I ever watched The Sopranos is because he always was watching the Sopranos.
6:07
Alban: And so I'm exposed to a new show and I'm like, oh, over time I learned like this is pretty good because I gave it more of a chance because I was kept walking in the room when it was on.
6:16
Jordan: When I'm in seek mode, I will typically judge the podcast cover art.
6:21
Jordan: I just I can't help it.
6:23
Jordan: Like, I can't get past it.
6:24
Jordan: If there's bad cover art, I am probably not clicking on the podcast because my assumption is automatically that like the audio is probably bad.
6:31
Jordan: But when I was flipping through, there was this true crime podcast that popped up.
6:37
Jordan: And oh my gosh, the audio is so good.
6:41
Jordan: They had beautiful, like kind of like music bedding underneath them discussing the story, and they would go, the host would go in and out of like talking about the story, and then the other host would then go into story mode and narrate what was happening, and then they'd pause and like have commentary on it.
6:56
Jordan: And it was so good, but the cover art was terrible.
7:01
Jordan: And like I was just like, I would never have clicked on this, but this is so amazing.
7:05
Jordan: Like, I'm I'm gonna listen to that podcast now.
7:08
Kevin: I'm so drawn to podcast solutions that are not only like eyes free, because again, I like podcast listening when I'm doing other stuff.
7:18
Kevin: And so eyes free, but I also hands-free.
7:22
Kevin: I know there has to be like some sort of intent action that I have to take.
7:25
Kevin: Like if I'm on a some sort of seek scan app like this and it's playing clips maybe 30 seconds at a time.
7:31
Kevin: And if I don't do anything, it's gonna go to the next one.
7:33
Kevin: But if I do like it, I need to be able to do something.
7:35
Kevin: But that's something I do.
7:36
Kevin: I want to be able to do it without having to like take my phone out of my pocket or get the phone off the table if I'm like walking around the house or something.
7:44
Kevin: I almost think apps like this need to think about like, don't show us the podcast artwork.
7:48
Kevin: Don't give us a UI to you know, flip to the next one or you know, change all these settings.
7:53
Kevin: Or once you get them dialed in anyway, like the whole experience should almost just be like nothing on the screen.
7:59
Jordan: Kevin's just pitching pod is blind again.
8:04
Kevin: I just want to click the little like volume thing on my ear or something, and that's an indicator that like, oh, I want to hear more of this.
8:10
Kevin: Like that's it.
8:11
Kevin: Like don't, you know, go off of seek mode.
8:14
Kevin: And then if I go like volume down or something, or if I double tap it, then go back into seek mode.
8:18
Kevin: I wonder like who who's gonna be brave enough to to build an app like that.
8:21
Kevin: That like once you start it, the screen's just black.
8:24
Jordan: You should do it.
8:25
Alban: But that's kind of okay.
8:27
Alban: So somebody built this for YouTube.
8:28
Alban: I don't remember now, I'm gonna forget the name.
8:31
Alban: Something with Hacker News and YouTube in the name.
8:34
Alban: What they did was they went through every video recommended on Hacker News over the last 10 years.
8:39
Alban: And so they found all these very kind of like scientific and programmer type videos, kind of this nerd culture, but they're mostly like long form.
8:49
Alban: And then it was like, okay, this is the playlist.
8:52
Alban: This is all the stuff they could show on this website.
8:54
Alban: Every video does not show the thumbnail.
8:57
Alban: Instead, it shows a frame from the middle of the video.
9:00
Alban: So you got a random frame with the standard title, and it's like demarketed YouTube.
9:08
Alban: And it's all like really, you know, like, oh, it's a two-hour talk about some programming language.
9:14
Alban: And for people who this is the kind of stuff you would want, it's kind of nice to have this unoptimized version.
9:21
Jordan: Yeah.
9:21
Jordan: I think I just I would kept picturing when we first were doing the video podcast and we weren't doing thumbnails for it.
9:28
Kevin: And do you remember like our Spotify thumbnails where it was just like, oh no, like just always grabs the the worst possible like one eye closed.
9:38
Alban: Right.
9:38
Alban: I want to use this app.
9:41
Alban: And I also want, I think the best thing about live is experiencing things with other people.
9:47
Alban: It'd be cool if you know, really there's only like 10 podcasts playing at a time and they're truly like a stream.
9:54
Alban: And then when you switch the dial over and you end up on an episode of criminal, like it's a bunch of other people listening at the exact same point at the exact same episode, and maybe there's a chat in there.
10:06
Alban: Like it'd be fun to have some sort of podcasting experience where you can at any moment jump out and say, Okay, I want to go listen to that whole episode from the beginning.
10:14
Alban: But if you're in like radio mode, then you're kind of just there with other people.
10:19
Kevin: I know there's an audience for this.
10:20
Kevin: I'm not part of that group, but TikTok has done like they they seem to be making some inroads in this space.
10:25
Kevin: And and I think they're still mostly like on the live side.
10:28
Kevin: Yeah.
10:29
Kevin: But the idea that it doesn't have to be live, that you can create tranches of people who are listening to a like a a playback schedule and they're listening together.
10:38
Kevin: I mean, that we could be a really good fit for podcasting.
10:41
Kevin: Again, not for me.
10:42
Kevin: So like I can't build stuff that I don't understand.
10:45
Kevin: Like I don't understand the draw.
10:46
Kevin: I don't understand, I can't get in the headspace of somebody who'd be interested in this.
10:49
Kevin: But I know it works.
10:51
Kevin: I've shared on this podcast before, I shared how I was in an Uber and the guy was listening to a live TikTok and there was a bunch of other people in there, and they were paying money to like do weird things to the person who was on the thing.
11:02
Kevin: Like in my example, was he was paying money to give, like put a hat on the guy, which I'm like, why are you paying money to do that?
11:10
Kevin: But video gamers, you know, they pay for skins and stuff like that for their characters, so like, why is it any different?
11:16
Kevin: I mean, pay a dollar, you get to make the host wear a funny hat for a minute.
11:19
Kevin: Why not?
11:22
Alban: I saw one that was like a TikTok live where the girl is like in a chair that can like spin around like it's a roller coaster.
11:30
Alban: Yes, I've seen this.
11:31
Alban: And I don't know what the I mean, I just saw a video of it online.
11:35
Alban: I didn't see it live, but she's like playing a video game and then it's like for ten dollars, it'll spin.
11:41
Alban: And so people are just paying, and she's just you know, basically riding this roller coaster ride, pretending to try to game, but really just making money.
11:48
Alban: Yeah, but that isn't the world that I want to live in.
11:51
Alban: But the world I do want to live in does have some elements of live interaction.
11:55
Alban: That's what radio had, and it kind of like going to the live interaction.
12:01
Kevin: I know.
12:01
Kevin: I love real life.
12:02
Kevin: Real life is good.
12:04
Kevin: I know.
12:04
Kevin: I don't like the simulated real life that that we do online.
12:08
Alban: But like, you're not gonna probably sit down and listen to a random episode of a random podcast with me.
12:15
unknown: No.
12:16
Alban: Unless we're in the car.
12:16
Alban: Right.
12:17
Alban: And I think it's like it would be kind of fun.
12:19
Alban: Every once in a while, I'll end up watching something live on YouTube, and you'll see people in the comments, and sometimes you respond to them.
12:26
Alban: When we were, I don't know, a year ago, we were in Hawaii, and there is a there's gonna be a volcano eruption, and so we're trying to time it to be on the big island to see it, and there's all these live cameras of the volcano, when will erupt?
12:39
Alban: And I'm in there and it forms a little community of the 80 people watching, all hoping.
12:46
Alban: Everyone's, I'm like, oh, we're down here on the south end, and people are like, oh, I'm over here, and you're kind of like connecting and you get to know people.
12:53
Alban: It's makes it so much more enjoyable than if it was just like a random video.
12:59
Kevin: I do, I do think this stuff works a lot better for video.
13:02
Kevin: And as podcasting is moving more into video, I think a lot more of this stuff will start to make sense because this stuff is just engagement.
13:09
Kevin: Like you have to be on your phone again.
13:11
Kevin: So if you're already watching a video, then why not open up a little chat window and chat with other people who are watching the video the same time you're watching it?
13:19
Kevin: That's fine, but you're fully engaged.
13:21
Kevin: And I don't have that, I haven't had that crossover experience yet.
13:26
Kevin: For 99% of podcasts that I listen to, I listen to them and I'm listening to them while I'm doing something else.
13:32
Kevin: And so anything that would require me to be looking at my phone and typing or reading or anything else, it breaks that experience for me.
13:40
Alban: Yeah.
13:40
Alban: Okay, you you I think you've talked me out of it already.
13:43
Alban: I'm like imagining that I would like this, and then I'm imagining now, like, oh, am I gonna be running, listening to this, and then pull out my phone?
13:52
Alban: No.
13:53
Alban: Okay, my doing stuff around the house?
13:55
Alban: No.
13:55
Alban: So I'm only gonna be doing it when I'm sitting there looking at my computer, doing what?
14:01
Alban: Yeah.
14:02
Alban: Okay, there's not really a time where I'm going to listen and then want to interact with my phone to chat with random people.
14:09
Alban: It made more sense when we're all bored waiting for the volcano to erupt and we're like, did anybody see six minutes ago if it like if it started to erupt or not?
14:17
Alban: Like that was a better scenario for it.
14:20
Alban: This is not a great scenario.
14:21
Alban: So I rescind my request for someone to build this.
14:24
Jordan: Alban, I think your request is just like a little early because if you think about it, once we all have neural links, then this is gonna be like no problem.
14:32
Jordan: You don't even have to look at your phone.
14:34
Jordan: Yeah, you can just think it.
14:36
Alban: Great.
14:37
unknown: Here we go.
14:43
Jordan: Welcome back to Buzzcast, the podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout.
14:49
Jordan: Guys, I know that you have heard of SEO.
14:52
Jordan: Have you ever heard of AEO?
14:55
Alban: Oh, yes, AEO.
14:56
Alban: Some people call it GEO.
14:59
Alban: You've got people who just call it AI answers.
15:02
Jordan: Yeah, that's what we're talking about.
15:03
Jordan: We're talking about answer engine optimization.
15:07
Jordan: So this is basically making our content easier to find and reference in AI searches because a lot of times what people are using Google for is searching like a question.
15:18
Jordan: And then Google Gemini will like pull up a bunch of like different references, but it'll like summarize it all together.
15:24
Jordan: And so it's sourcing from like Reddit and websites and blogs and podcasts.
15:31
Jordan: And so I have I've heard of this a lot more recently, just in like the last few weeks.
15:35
Jordan: It's kind of been on my radar.
15:37
Jordan: And so I was wondering if AI could find one of my podcast episodes.
15:44
Jordan: And so what I did was I did like a little bit of an experiment and I searched, like pretending to be somebody who was interested in like a topic that was specific to one of my episodes, and it did not surface the exact episode that I was thinking of, which was really sad because I was very specific in this.
16:05
Jordan: So yeah.
16:07
Alban: I'm looking for a Peter Pan bedtime story or something, and then it didn't show up.
16:12
Jordan: Yeah, like literally like that.
16:13
Jordan: So I thought we'd like walk through the experiment and what I found to help improve surfacing our episodes in search.
16:22
Jordan: How's that sound?
16:23
Alban: That sounds awesome.
16:24
Alban: Can I start with a little bit of a warning, a little disclaimer?
16:28
Jordan: Of course, yes.
16:29
Alban: This feels like a total snake oil area right now.
16:33
Alban: That every marketing conference I go to, every SEO conference, every one of the talks, every Twitter thread I see, it all is like, did you know this is really important?
16:44
Alban: You've got to do these five things, which hopefully you probably were already doing those five things, but they're like, you got to do these five things.
16:50
Alban: Also, solution, I will teach you how to do it if you pay for my course, if you hire me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
16:57
Alban: SEO is very much like this for years.
16:59
Alban: Lots of marketing stuff is like this.
17:01
Alban: People are better at marketing the fake marketing that they're telling you to do than actually doing it.
17:06
Alban: And so it's just because it's new and we all know it's important and it's a little bit hazy and it's changing.
17:14
Alban: It just feels like we're a bit in the wild west with AEO or GEO, or if you just call SEO still, it's all kind of back like where SEO was maybe 15 years ago.
17:25
Alban: That it's a little bit people are making stuff up sometimes and telling you 100% I know what I'm talking about.
17:33
Jordan: Oh man.
17:34
Jordan: Here's kind of also what inspired this is there was an episode of Happy to Help where Priscilla and I had Leslie O'Flaha,van on, and she was talking about how to optimize your help articles to surface in these AI engines.
17:53
Jordan: And it's different.
17:54
Jordan: Like I think that ask engine optimization is a little bit different than search engine optimization because search engine optimization, you're just trying to get the keywords to surface.
18:05
Jordan: Whereas with ask engine optimization, you're trying to hit exactly the answers that people are looking to get.
18:12
Jordan: You're trying to word things in a way where the AI is going to kind of come through and easily grab this like parsed information and pull it in and surface it and then source your website.
18:25
Alban: My take on this is that the fundamentals are the same.
18:29
Alban: And they're the same because whether it's Chat GPT, Claude, or old Google search or even Alta Vista, they're all trying to do the same thing.
18:39
Alban: They're like, there's all this info out there, and we want to find the very best stuff and we want to give it to people at the exact moment they want to answer a specific question.
18:49
Alban: And what they've done is they've created all of these variables that signal quality.
18:55
Alban: And so it might be length of article, it might be depth of the stuff they're writing about, it might be hitting the keywords, it might be showing, oh, we tell you we're going to teach you how to start a podcast, but we didn't skip the microphone part.
19:10
Alban: So then they see, oh, it's completeness.
19:12
Alban: It could be you're an authority.
19:13
Alban: It could be you have some unique research.
19:15
Alban: It could be any of the thousands of variables that go in, but they're all still a proxy for would a real person want to read this because it was valuable and good?
19:24
Alban: And I think that the world we're in right now with AI search is just a little bit new.
19:31
Alban: And so it's not as sophisticated as Google has become over 20, 30 years now of refining the search algorithm and trying to filter for quality.
19:42
Alban: You still there seem to be a little bit more of like hacks that were probably around in like 2010 in SEO world.
19:49
Alban: They seem to now be in the AI search world.
19:52
Alban: That's my take.
19:53
Alban: I'm happy to be proved wrong because I don't think that I'm the I don't want to become the snake oil salesman myself.
19:59
Jordan: Well, I don't either.
20:00
Jordan: I do think that there is like a balance though.
20:03
Jordan: Writing for SEO, to me, it feels like you're literally just information dumping on a blog.
20:10
Jordan: Like I think of those like mommy blog recipe pages, and you just have to like go through like their family history and you're just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.
20:18
Jordan: And then at the very bottom, there's a recipe.
20:21
Jordan: And I feel like writing for these ask engines instead is a little bit backwards.
20:26
Jordan: It's almost like you're flipping it.
20:27
Jordan: Like you want that like core information just up at the top, and then you can have the filler information for SEO below it.
20:34
Jordan: And there's a balance between trying to write for AI and then also write for people.
20:40
Jordan: And another part of it is we also want to make sure that the information being surfaced is accurate because AI will take a lot of like inferences.
20:49
Jordan: And so you have to be like crystal clear with what you're writing too.
20:52
Kevin: Okay.
20:52
Kevin: All right.
20:53
Kevin: I'm I'm intrigued.
20:54
Kevin: So you're talking about writing.
20:56
Kevin: Where are we doing this?
20:57
Kevin: I mean, I know where we write in podcasts, we we write episode descriptions, we write like whatever show notes, same thing.
21:04
Kevin: We write chapters, we write titles.
21:05
Kevin: There's a specific way that we need to start thinking about these things now that's different now that like search has changed.
21:11
Kevin: Is that what you're saying?
21:12
Jordan: Well, you don't need to.
21:13
Jordan: We don't need to do anything.
21:15
Kevin: We want people to be able to find our episodes.
21:18
Jordan: I think so.
21:18
Kevin: And I think the way that people are like the tools they're using to search out content, whether it be podcast content or blog content or websites because they want to buy something, that's all changing now.
21:28
Kevin: Like you used to just go search in search engine of your choice for most people, that was probably Google, and it would give you a list of websites that you would then click on.
21:36
Kevin: And then hopefully, if they were searching for something about your podcast, your podcast would be your podcast website would be listed as one of those things.
21:42
Kevin: But now, more and more, you're not getting a list of things.
21:45
Kevin: Or at least first, you're getting an answer.
21:47
Kevin: And maybe under that answer are a few sources, and then you're getting a list of stuff.
21:51
Kevin: So if you want to be at the top, if you want to be a part of that answer, that's what we're talking about, right?
21:55
Jordan: Yeah.
21:56
Jordan: And more and more people are finding podcasts through AI recommended.
21:59
Jordan: It or s or pulling a quote or a clip from them and linking to it.
22:05
Jordan: So I don't see why you wouldn't want to not prioritize.
22:09
Jordan: I'm trying to think of the word for it.
22:10
Jordan: I mean optimize.
22:12
Alban: I think it's like I think that maybe what I was trying to say with the snake oil stuff is not that this is snake oil, but that the things that we will do to try to optimize for AI are very similar to the things that we would do to optimize for SEO.
22:24
Alban: They're very similar to what we should be doing for people.
22:28
Alban: Because at the end of the day, these are all intermediate steps to making the podcast experience better.
22:34
Alban: And what is good for people, I mean, it's why we built transcripts.
22:39
Alban: We do know that podcasts with transcripts get way more recommendations in um in Google, but also in AI search.
22:47
Alban: We see when you have a good transcript, a high quality transcript, maybe one that you used Kevin's autocorrect so that you can clean it up and so everything the proper nouns are right.
22:57
Alban: If you're doing all of that work, then it's a better experience for everybody.
23:01
Alban: If someone's searching for a quote, they can find you.
23:03
Alban: If they want to listen to a part, they click on the timestamp.
23:06
Alban: Each of those things ends up becoming a signal to AI, SEO, everything else.
23:13
Alban: Hey, the people who built this care enough to go through the work to make sure it's a good experience for you.
23:20
Jordan: Well, okay, so let's let's walk through what this experiment basically entailed.
23:24
Jordan: And then um, our listeners, I hope our listeners try this with their podcast too.
23:28
Jordan: So the first thing that you want to do is you want to go to an AI search engine.
23:33
Jordan: I went to one that does not know me at all.
23:35
Jordan: I just went to like something random on a different account and it has no prior knowledge of like who I am.
23:42
Jordan: And you you think about like what your listener is going to be looking for.
23:46
Jordan: What is it that they are going to be searching for that they would potentially stumble upon your podcast?
23:51
Jordan: But you don't want to go like too broad with it.
23:54
Jordan: So if you just type in like audio to help with sleep, that really can't compete with giants like sleep with me or like get sleepy or the calm app, it's going to recommend things that get bajillions of downloads.
24:07
Jordan: But if I type, I want a bedtime story podcast for adults with a female narrator and gentle background music, then maybe my podcast might pop up.
24:17
Jordan: Probably not, but maybe I have a fighting chance.
24:20
Jordan: So I wanted to use um, there was an episode of Happy to Help where we had Meghan Gallagher on and she specializes in like customer support metrics.
24:30
Jordan: I knew that this was one of the episodes that wasn't performing as well as I thought it should.
24:35
Jordan: I feel like it's a really good one.
24:36
Jordan: I knew that maybe the title and stuff like that wasn't super specific.
24:42
Jordan: And so I started with this one.
24:44
Jordan: And so, what will your target listener type in their AI search engine?
24:48
Jordan: So for this one, my baseline search, I said, I manage a small customer support team.
24:54
Jordan: We track CSAT and response time, but I don't feel like those tell me whether we're actually helping customers.
25:00
Jordan: What else should we measure?
25:02
Jordan: And then it pulled up all the information.
25:05
Jordan: And what you do is when it pulls up the first bit of information, you look at where it's pulling from.
25:11
Jordan: So of course, this is like a big industry.
25:13
Jordan: So it's pulling from things like Salesforce and all these websites that have huge blogs and they're optimized to heaven.
25:20
Jordan: So then you get a little bit more specific.
25:22
Jordan: And I said, okay, can you recommend podcast episodes for this?
25:27
Jordan: It pulled up some podcast episodes, and not a single one was happy to help.
25:32
Jordan: And this was like the specific episode topic.
25:35
Jordan: It was the specific thing that we were trying to improve in our listeners' lives, and it didn't pull it up.
25:40
Jordan: So that was womp, a fail.
25:45
Alban: I actually just tried this live.
25:47
Alban: I pulled up a private window and then I went to ChatGPT, not signed in, and just said, Hey, are there any podcasts about podcasting?
25:55
Alban: Which are the best?
25:56
Alban: And it pulled up a list of podcasts about podcasting.
25:59
Alban: The the very best one is podcasting made simple.
26:03
Alban: Number two, it comes out of school of podcasting and Buzzcast.
26:07
Alban: We are the first ones that don't have podcast in the name.
26:11
Jordan: Ooh.
26:11
Jordan: Not bad.
26:13
Alban: I would I would bet, honestly, if we were to change our name, it says podcasting the title, we'd have a better shot at this.
26:20
Kevin: I wonder if that's that's one of the things that's changing, though, Alban.
26:23
Kevin: Previously, keywords were so important when you're dealing with something that was looking for is trying to have a direct tie between the what the person searched for and the results that it returns.
26:35
Kevin: And then it was, you know, Google's big breakthrough 25 years ago was the the page rank algorithm, which was then the they started indexing how many other websites are linking to the website that is ranking well for the keyword that the person just searched for.
26:47
Kevin: And that was a huge indicator that it was a high quality site.
26:50
Kevin: But now that we have the idea of context, I'm wondering if keywords become less important.
26:56
Kevin: It can understand the full context of what that show is about.
26:59
Kevin: And so it's missing the keyword match.
27:01
Kevin: You know, again, that might be why we're number three or whatever on the list is that you just brought up right now, but I'm thinking that over time that it's gonna become less important.
27:10
Alban: The queries have definitely changed.
27:11
Alban: You know, in the old days, the best query in the world was best credit card.
27:15
Alban: You could rank for anything you want to rank for best credit card, because when people searched it, one page came up and that page was gonna get to refer you out to Amex and get a big kickback.
27:24
Alban: No one searches that now.
27:25
Alban: Now they're going to the ChatGPT and they're typing in, okay, I spend $200 a month on this, $100 a month on this, all this data.
27:34
Alban: So optimize my credit card points for me.
27:38
Alban: And we're not talking about a two, three-word search that applies to everybody.
27:44
Alban: You know, everybody's doing the same two, three-word search.
27:46
Alban: It's all these totally unique, like 17-word searches or four-paragraph searches, or with typos and everything.
27:54
Alban: Like we're getting much more sophisticated.
27:56
Alban: And certainly that's how I'm finding podcast episodes where I'm typing a ton of stuff in and I'm talking about all these different things I'm thinking about.
28:05
Alban: But one of the things that Jordan's mentioning is when the ones I kept seeing come up were consistently ones that the transcript was on the page.
28:15
Alban: That was the source that kept coming up because they were being indexed as a website and the website contained a podcast or a link out to Apple Podcasts.
28:25
Alban: And then that's where I ended up long term.
28:27
Alban: But the intermediate step was you want this stuff to be exposed to the web so it's easy to find and identify what's this about so you can be surfaced in an answer.
28:37
Jordan: That actually segues nicely because what happened is I was like, okay, well, we're not surfacing.
28:43
Jordan: And so I go to Chat Chu T.
28:44
Jordan: I'm like, help, we're not surfacing.
28:46
Jordan: I go, what can I do to fix this?
28:49
Jordan: And one of the first things that talked about was reviewing the transcript because you want it to be pulling your transcript into the information.
28:56
Jordan: So that means that you need to have an accurate transcript.
28:59
Jordan: That means you need to edit your transcript, you need to have correct spelling.
29:03
Jordan: So through the Buzzsprout transcript editor, there's autocorrect.
29:08
Jordan: So if there's something that you are trying to rank for in like keywords or it's something that you definitely need to be surfacing correctly, like if you travel a lot and you're visiting all these like exotic locales and you need to have these named correctly, so that somebody, if they're planning a trip to like Aruba and they're searching for things in Aruba, then it's going to surface your podcast and it's going to pull from your transcript.
29:34
Jordan: The other thing with that is that a lot of times these AI responses will include quotes from your transcript.
29:41
Jordan: So we actually just added the ability to have ums and uhs automatically taken out and you can add that in too.
29:49
Jordan: And I think it looks so much nicer when AI pulls it in because what it'll do is it'll quote you.
29:55
Jordan: And instead of having something like, um, well, you know, if we go to this thing, um instead it'll say, Well, you know, we go to this thing, and it just it looks a lot cleaner, and someone might be like, Oh, this person seems really astute.
30:10
Jordan: And then they click through to your podcast and listen to the full episode.
30:13
Kevin: And realize you're not in our case.
30:16
Jordan: Yeah.
30:16
Jordan: But at least you look like it.
30:18
Kevin: I think that's a really good point, Jordan.
30:20
Kevin: I would also say, like, this is this is embarrassing to say, but I will say it.
30:25
Kevin: Technology is changing so fast that I really like the idea of having accurate transcripts, but at the same time, the technology is getting so good, it's becoming less important.
30:36
Kevin: And so I like the idea that we give podcasters the tools to quickly, efficiently, effectively, whatever, make your transcripts really great.
30:46
Kevin: I love the fact that we do that at a part of Bud Sprout.
30:48
Kevin: But just like Google got really good at finding synonyms to the things that you were searching for.
30:53
Kevin: So it's not just the exact keyword you're typing in, they would also find similar things.
30:56
Kevin: And if those had really good results, like high page rank or something like that, they would surface those.
31:02
Kevin: The AI-powered search results are also getting really good at that.
31:06
Kevin: I would say even better.
31:07
Kevin: And here's another thing.
31:09
Kevin: Like while I'm on the embarrassing train, I may as well go and share some more.
31:13
Kevin: But like I think it's this happy to help episode when I was doing some a little bit of research on this topic.
31:19
Kevin: I noticed that the chapter title spells on that episode that you're talking about for Meghan, the her name was spelled M-E-G-A-N in a chapter title, but the episode title and the guest information, it's M-E-G-H-A-N.
31:31
Kevin: Yeah.
31:32
Kevin: And so I saw our own show.
31:34
Kevin: I don't know if you spanned that as well.
31:36
Jordan: I did find that.
31:36
Jordan: And that is something that I am correct a little bit later.
31:40
Jordan: Oh, okay.
31:42
Kevin: Sorry.
31:42
Kevin: I'm jumping ahead.
31:43
Kevin: But it kind of ties into the point that I'm trying to make is that like AI knows it's the same thing.
31:48
Kevin: Like in the context of the answer that it's trying to give you, it understands there's two different ways that people spell Meghan.
31:55
Kevin: And we might spell it like the transcript spelled it one way, the episode title has it a different way.
32:00
Kevin: It probably also knows which one is correct, but regardless of which one you search for, it's going to still give that result like weight.
32:08
Kevin: And probably the proper amount of weight, just because it knows it's a common, it's not an error, it's just two different ways that people spell the word mega.
32:16
Alban: Yeah.
32:16
Alban: The signal is still important.
32:18
Alban: So Kevin and I play in a pickleball group, and there's a guy whose name is George, but it's spelled Jorge.
32:25
Alban: But he goes by George.
32:26
Alban: If two people texted me and said, Oh, I just saw George, and one of them spelled it Jorge and one spelled it George, I know who the person is.
32:35
Alban: And yet the person that spelled his name correctly, I would identify as this probably is the person who knows him a bit better and is a more of an authority on whatever they're talking about.
32:45
Alban: And I still think, A, I can figure it out.
32:48
Alban: And yet the signal you're sending could be we're not as focused, we don't do as much research, it doesn't matter as much to us.
32:56
Alban: And if I saw Meghan spelled incorrectly and I'm trying to recommend between two or three options, I'm definitely going to recommend the person who spelled her name right.
33:07
Jordan: Yeah, that was one of the things that it said was really important is to make sure that the chapters are very clear, they're accurate.
33:16
Jordan: so you want to make sure that your spelling's correct in your chapter titles too.
33:20
Jordan: you also want to rename vague chapter titles so that listeners can tell exactly what is going on in that section.
33:27
Jordan: So one of the examples of the chapters that I fixed was um the popular metrics teams default to, which is fine.
33:34
Jordan: I thought it was a good chapter.
33:36
Jordan: And then it said that you want to be a little bit more specific to say CSAT, response time, and average handle time.
33:44
Jordan: So we are going for like big time specificity in this.
33:49
Kevin: You can't just say like the metrics, actually list out what the metrics are.
33:53
Jordan: Exactly.
33:53
Jordan: And then that way AI can also like identify very quickly, like, oh, there's a chapter here, and it could probably pull that like timestamp, and I mean, obviously it can do that through the transcript too, but it's just like another thing where it can recognize that the information is there.
34:09
Kevin: Yeah, you know what this reminds me of?
34:10
Kevin: Is this good timely, it's timeless advice from an old college professor that I had years ago.
34:16
Kevin: But I was it was doing a um a journalism class and she was talking about the difference between like what makes a good press release.
34:23
Kevin: And um, so we're all brainstorming what makes a good press release and doing research and all this stuff.
34:27
Kevin: And she's like, well, ultimately at the end of the day, it's not having all the facts right.
34:31
Kevin: It's not writing the most compelling intro or the best hook.
34:34
Kevin: It's not getting all your company information correct at the bottom.
34:37
Kevin: That's not really what makes an excellent press release excellent.
34:40
Kevin: What makes it excellent is the fact that when you send it, it gets published.
34:43
Kevin: And how do you do that is by making sure that the person who receives it, they have to do little to no work before it gets it goes to publish.
34:51
Kevin: That's what makes it good.
34:53
Kevin: And so there's some specific things that you could do, like the formatting and rules that sort of apply, like using what's the style, Alban?
35:01
Kevin: AP style.
35:02
Kevin: A P style writing and stuff like that.
35:04
Kevin: Like if you if they read it and it's not using AP style consistently and correctly, then they have to fix things before they publish it.
35:11
Kevin: That's work for them, they're probably not going to publish it.
35:13
Kevin: And so what you're talking about, Jordan, makes the same thing.
35:17
Kevin: It's a computer doing the analysis, but you're trying to make it easy for the computer to do the analysis.
35:22
Kevin: Yeah.
35:23
Kevin: Like the computer uses energy, it uses tokens, it has to index all the stuff.
35:26
Kevin: The easier that you make that for the computer, the more likely it is to make it into a like a quick, easy recommendation.
35:34
Kevin: You've made it easy to index this content, it's easy for it to understand this content, easy for when somebody searches about customer service metrics to be like, oh, here's a chapter and a podcast that is talking about the exact metrics that they're looking for.
35:46
Alban: This is like some of the most underrated device underrated advice you can give anybody.
35:52
Alban: Make it easy for people to do the thing you want them to do.
35:56
Alban: If you want to hang out with your friend, say, Do you want to go see this movie with me on Thursday night?
36:02
Alban: Don't text them and say, Why don't we hang out anymore?
36:05
Alban: It's not the answer.
36:06
Alban: The reason they're good, now they're invited to come up with answers for why they shouldn't hang out with you.
36:11
Alban: No, just send them an invite to the thing you want.
36:14
Alban: It's such good advice.
36:15
Alban: Make it easy for the thing you want to happen to happen.
36:18
Jordan: Part of that too was Leslie in that happy to help episode, she talked about a really good approach that you can keep in mind and it makes this so much easier.
36:28
Jordan: It's her bite snack meal approach.
36:32
Jordan: So, what you do is you give listeners and AI a bite of what the episode is.
36:38
Jordan: So that's gonna be like the title.
36:40
Jordan: And you are very, very specific about what this episode is because if they're looking for information, they just want to look directly at the title and have like a bite of it and they go, okay, I know what this is about, I know the answers I'm gonna find here, I know where this is.
36:56
Jordan: And then you have a snack, and the snack is going to be in the episode description.
37:01
Jordan: And so instead of having this like long-winded description where they have to read a whole bunch to like actually figure out what the episode is about, you want to give them like a single sentence and then maybe some bullet points.
37:16
Jordan: And then the meal is going to be the transcript and the rest of the episode description.
37:21
Jordan: So if you just think about it like, okay, my title is a bite of what's happening.
37:26
Jordan: I need to be like very specific.
37:27
Jordan: They can look at it and know exactly what they're gonna get out of this episode.
37:30
Jordan: I know that in my description, at the very top of the description, I'm going to have a quick one-sentence summary and then I'm going to include the key takeaways of like what is being said.
37:41
Jordan: And the other thing that's interesting is when writing for AI, you also want to be um hyper-specific about who is giving these takeaways.
37:51
Jordan: It will say Meghan Gallagher recommends that you pay attention to these specific metrics.
37:58
Jordan: And here they are.
37:59
Kevin: Let me ask a question from the podcast expert and the marketing expert because I'm confused out of my mind that I go on, I was on Facebook and I saw a clip of a podcast episode from Diary of CEO where Stephen Bartlett is interviewing some doctor.
38:16
Kevin: I think he's a surgeon.
38:17
Kevin: And I kind of feel dumb because I'm like, I guess everyone knows who this is, but I don't.
38:23
Kevin: And he's talking about stuff that I find very interesting.
38:25
Kevin: And so I want to listen to the whole episode.
38:27
Kevin: But in the description of the clip, there's no name of the episode, no name of the doctor.
38:31
Kevin: And so I click into the comments and I start reading all the comments.
38:34
Kevin: And a lot of people are asking the same questions like, who what episode is this?
38:37
Kevin: I even opened up my podcasting app on my phone and I went to Diary of CEO and I looked down like the past 20 episodes.
38:44
Kevin: I didn't see anything about a doctor talking about any of this type of stuff.
38:47
Kevin: And it has pictures of all their guests, and I'm like, none of them are this person.
38:50
Kevin: So then I'm back to Facebook and I'm looking, I'm like, I guess I got to go through the comments more.
38:54
Kevin: And I'm going on more and more and more.
38:56
Kevin: And finally, at like comment 200, somebody named the doctor.
38:59
Kevin: And I was like, oh my gosh.
39:00
Kevin: So then I go back to my podcasting app and then I search for the doctor and I find the episode.
39:03
Kevin: And and I'm like, certainly, diary of a CEO isn't like they're not so stupid that they don't know to do this.
39:10
Kevin: And then so I start thinking, like, are they hacking me?
39:13
Kevin: Are they like, they know that it's engaging?
39:16
Alban: They know that you watch the seven times because you were fronting the whole time.
39:20
Kevin: And I had to go into the comments and I'm getting ready to write my own comment.
39:23
Kevin: Like, will somebody just answer like who this is?
39:25
Kevin: And is is this a marketing hack, or is this just a lazy like intern posting clips from Diary of a CEO and not putting any information on them?
39:34
Alban: I don't know if it's a marketing hack.
39:36
Alban: I think sometimes you get the incentives are not aligned with the listener.
39:42
Alban: I mean, you're in here, the audience, but who is deciding what you see?
39:46
Alban: It's a combination of Diary of a CEO and Facebook.
39:49
Alban: Mark Zuckerberg does not want you to click a link and go off to Apple Podcasts and go to a totally different website and now get off of Facebook.
39:56
Kevin: I totally get that.
39:57
Kevin: And I I get that you don't want to put a link in there that will drop engagement.
40:00
Kevin: But why can't we at least put the person's name?
40:03
unknown: Yeah.
40:03
Alban: I don't know.
40:04
Alban: Maybe I think I mean I could see, I'm not telling you this is true.
40:07
Alban: I could see a pretty strong argument.
40:09
Alban: Well, as soon as we put the name in there, people are able to find the name and they leave.
40:14
Jordan: All right, sorry, tangent, side tangent, but well, now I'm thinking I need to go delete anything where we mention where you can find our podcast.
40:22
Kevin: I know.
40:23
Kevin: I think we're being too helpful.
40:24
Kevin: None of what you're suggesting is bad.
40:26
Kevin: Like you're talking about putting good bites, good snacks, and good meals together for people, not shady stuff.
40:32
Kevin: And so sorry to disrupt you, Jordan.
40:34
Jordan: No, it's fine.
40:35
Jordan: I kind of feel like your rabbit trail ties into the next point that I have, which is make it clear who's speaking in your clips, in your episode description, in the transcripts, especially in the episode description, you want to say who the guest is and what their expertise is, like what their position is in the industry, or you know, if they have so many years of expertise.
40:59
Jordan: And this reminds me of Alban was talking about like establishing that you're an expert in your field really helps with search engine optimization.
41:06
Jordan: I think it also helps with these AI answer bots, like pulling the information because they go, ooh, this is a smart person who knows what they're talking about.
41:14
Jordan: And here's a quote from them, which we have correctly written out in the transcript because we edited our transcript, you know?
41:22
Jordan: So definitely like having the people attributed to your podcast, making sure that you have them in your contributors profile on Buzzsprout.
41:32
Jordan: We have that whole page.
41:33
Jordan: You can do a whole profile and have links, and everything is just like tied back to them.
41:39
Jordan: And then also if someone is asking a question about if there are any experts in a certain like category or any other works that like voice actors have done and they have been on your podcast, it will pull that.
41:52
Alban: It's awesome to be able to link that all together.
41:54
Alban: I should say, I know that some of the platforms have started to experiment with this.
41:59
Alban: So I think YouTube is one of them.
42:00
Alban: If they have a big, long podcast, when they try to clip it, they will actually try to tie those clips back to the main episode.
42:08
Alban: And that makes sense because all of the content is living on YouTube.
42:12
Alban: So YouTube isn't worried about recommending other YouTube things.
42:15
Alban: They just would not love it if they're recommending it and now people are immediately off site.
42:20
Jordan: And if the answers are surfacing the clips, you want to make sure that people know who's speaking or where they can find the episode.
42:29
Jordan: Like that's really important too, because you want your podcast to be discoverable.
42:33
Jordan: Yeah.
42:33
Jordan: So I did all these things, I fixed our episode, I made sure that the transcript was accurate.
42:39
Jordan: I fixed spelling in the chapter markers, I updated the episode description and the episode title to be a little bit more like AEO friendly.
42:49
Alban: Wait, when did you do this?
42:51
Jordan: I did this yesterday and I gave it overnight.
42:55
Jordan: I waited until the morning.
42:56
Jordan: I didn't jump right on the I just want I just wanted things to simmer for a little bit.
43:01
Kevin: It's still pretty quick.
43:02
Jordan: Is it?
43:03
Kevin: I think it's still pretty quick, but let's hear how it went.
43:05
Jordan: Okay.
43:06
Jordan: Well, so this morning I went into another like incognito mode and went into my AI and I asked it the exact same question.
43:18
Jordan: And this time, happy to help.
43:21
Jordan: The episode with Began Gallagher was number one.
43:25
Jordan: No, all the responses.
43:26
Jordan: Yes, it was.
43:28
Kevin: You were overpromising.
43:30
Jordan: I'm not overpromising.
43:31
Alban: What did you search?
43:32
Jordan: I searched the exact same thing.
43:35
Alban: Can I tell can I see it right now for myself?
43:37
Alban: Sure.
43:38
Jordan: Yeah.
43:38
Jordan: It said I manage a small customer support team.
43:41
Jordan: We track CSAT and response time, but I don't feel like those tell me whether we're actually helping customers.
43:46
Jordan: What else should we measure?
43:49
Alban: CSAT?
43:51
Jordan: C S A T.
43:52
Jordan: It's like customer satisfaction.
43:54
Kevin: What should I listen to?
43:55
Kevin: What did you what did you type after that?
43:57
Jordan: Yeah, what else should we measure?
43:58
Jordan: Do you have any episodes?
43:59
Jordan: That I should listen to podcast episodes that I should listen to about this.
44:03
Kevin: Oh my gosh.
44:04
Kevin: Jordan, I did it.
44:05
Kevin: I typed in something slightly different.
44:07
Kevin: I manage a small customer support team.
44:09
Kevin: We track C Sat and some other metrics.
44:12
Kevin: What podcasts should I listen to that would help me figure out what else we should be measuring?
44:16
Kevin: Number one recommendation answered first sentence.
44:20
Kevin: You should listen to what you should actually measure and support on the Happy to Help a Customer Support Podcast.
44:25
Kevin: Yeah, mind blowing.
44:27
Speaker 3: Yeah.
44:28
Alban: Yeah.
44:28
Alban: I got the same thing.
44:29
Alban: I gave it a different question and it worked.
44:32
Kevin: I love that you and we have a featured like little article over there that shows the podcast artwork and everything.
44:38
Alban: You completely set us up by starting and not telling us that you actually ran this as an experiment.
44:43
Alban: And I went, I gave the whole time snake oil.
44:46
Alban: I don't know about this.
44:47
Alban: I don't know if it's working.
44:48
Alban: And it did.
44:50
Kevin: It's working for me right now.
44:51
Kevin: Yeah.
44:52
Kevin: That's amazing.
44:53
Speaker 3: Yeah.
44:53
Kevin: And a Spotify link and an Apple Podcast link and then the Buzzsprout link.
44:57
Kevin: That's crazy.
44:58
Jordan: I think it takes like a little bit of time, not that much time.
45:02
Jordan: If you have, you know, ChatGBT help you.
45:04
Jordan: I mean, it's a lot better than it was.
45:07
Kevin: At the end of the day, you have to start with a good product.
45:09
Kevin: Like you're trying to market and make awareness for a product.
45:12
Kevin: If the product's not good, you might get some awareness, but it's going to fade very quickly because the product's not good.
45:17
Kevin: So I think one of the advantages you had is that Happy to Help is an excellent podcast.
45:22
Kevin: It really is.
45:22
Kevin: And I'm not just saying that because it's a buzz brought production.
45:25
Kevin: I'm saying it because it's like legitimately really good.
45:28
Speaker 3: It's so good.
45:28
Kevin: Chris gets amazing guests on there.
45:30
Kevin: Jordan does a great job editing.
45:31
Kevin: Like the whole production is amazing.
45:33
Kevin: So you guys have a good product.
45:34
Kevin: Now you're trying to market it and surface it for people who are doing this type of stuff.
45:37
Kevin: I'm absolutely amazed, though, that you went from like getting no result for the podcast to a very similar query or queries, like the one you ran.
45:44
Kevin: Albans was slightly different to be being the number one result for all of us.
45:49
Kevin: That's shocking.
45:50
Kevin: in a the best way.
45:52
Kevin: it's also about to get like really, really easy to make these updates like to your entire podcast catalog very quickly.
46:03
Kevin: Yeah.
46:03
Kevin: for anybody that uses any of the AI like development environments, you can do this today because BuzzBrout has a really great API.
46:11
Kevin: So if you use um Cloud Code or Codex, you could grab your API token, connect to our API, and update all of your episodes very quickly.
46:20
Kevin: You could be like, I want to um what is the term?
46:23
Kevin: What's the what's AEO.
46:25
Jordan: A E-O.
46:25
Jordan: I've got to wrap my head up.
46:28
Kevin: I want to do AEO for all my podcast episodes.
46:31
Speaker 3: Yeah.
46:31
Kevin: And it could probably walk you through that and it could update hundreds of episodes very quickly.
46:35
Kevin: And that's going to get even easier for people who are like non-coders or don't run the the more technical versions of these AI robots on their boxes because we are very soon to announce um some other technology that's going to allow you to do it just through a standard chat UI.
46:52
Jordan: Wow.
46:53
Jordan: That's a tease.
46:54
Jordan: It's a little bit of a tease.
46:55
Jordan: It's office.
46:56
Jordan: Wow.
46:58
Kevin: Maybe on the next next month or so.
47:00
Kevin: You'll probably just be able to just go chat GPT and just be like, here's who I am.
47:05
Kevin: Help me authenticate and connect to my BuzzRout account.
47:07
Kevin: And then you can ask it questions about your podcast specifically and you can have it make changes to your podcast specifically.
47:13
Kevin: And you don't, you won't have to be have any coding knowledge at all.
47:16
Kevin: But that's not here today.
47:17
Kevin: But if you have a little bit of coding knowledge, go ahead and do it today.
47:19
Kevin: Connect to the API and go for it.
47:21
Jordan: I love it.
47:21
Jordan: I'm interested to see what happens.
47:23
Jordan: So I would love our listeners to actually send us Fan Mail if they do the same experiment with their podcast.
47:30
Jordan: just improve one episode that you really enjoy, but maybe isn't getting enough traction, or one that you think would surface if you were asking um a related question in ChatGPT or in Gemini and it's not servicing.
47:46
Jordan: Like you should try these and then let us know what happens.
47:50
Kevin: Jordan, stop.
47:51
Kevin: Don't don't wrap it up here.
47:52
Kevin: Oh, I'm I'm giving you a challenge.
47:54
Kevin: You should write an AEO skill for podcasters.
48:00
Kevin: Yeah.
48:03
Kevin: Yeah.
48:04
Kevin: So there's these things in the in the coding world that you can it are basically like instruction sets or props um instructions that you can write up.
48:12
Kevin: They're very simple, but you can then feed them into AI tools, and then you could just be like, use this skill and make my podcast better.
48:21
Kevin: And then all of your instructions for how to do AEO for your podcast are in the skill.
48:26
Kevin: So then podcasters don't even have to know anything.
48:28
Kevin: You just say, here's the skill, can you apply this to my podcast?
48:31
Kevin: And then you could say you can even connect to my podcast, and here's my um, here's the API for Buzzsprout, here's my token.
48:38
Kevin: Again, that's for advanced people, or here's what we'll call later.
48:42
Kevin: We'll talk about the next version of that for anybody.
48:44
Kevin: But I think maybe by the time that we have that tool out so people can connect to their Buzzsprout account through a standard chat tool, it would be really good to have some skills.
48:52
Kevin: And maybe this is this is the leading one.
48:53
Kevin: This is a great idea.
48:54
Kevin: Yeah, this would be a great skill.
48:56
Jordan: Oh boy.
48:56
Jordan: Okay, so I'm gonna have to improve my skills on making skills.
49:00
Kevin: That's right.
49:00
Kevin: It's a big skill circle.
49:02
Jordan: This is really intimidating, but I'm excited about it.
49:05
Jordan: All right, let's get into some Fan Mail.
49:11
Jordan: First up, we have a message from Eric from Twilight Zone Media, and it's all caps.
49:16
Jordan: So this is, I'm assuming, screaming.
49:18
Jordan: I want the rebrand kit.
49:20
Kevin: Like this, I'm getting like the scenes from like Willie Wonks and Chocolate Factory, like Brugasalt.
49:26
Jordan: Yeah.
49:26
Kevin: Brug Assault just stopping around.
49:27
Jordan: I want the rebrand kit.
49:28
Jordan: I want the rebrand kit.
49:30
Jordan: This is referencing our podcast starter kit that we talked about on, I think, the last episode.
49:36
Kevin: Yeah.
49:36
Jordan: And it is so good.
49:38
Jordan: I don't, I don't, I haven't seen anyone write in yet saying that they messed with it, but they should really do it because I'm dying to see.
49:45
Jordan: But yeah, podcast rebrand kit would be sweet.
49:48
Alban: I know that Dennis reached out to everyone who's done it.
49:50
Alban: And so he's gotten a bunch of feedback from people and ideas for how to continue to improve it over time.
49:56
Alban: I think we need to make this available to everybody as a rebrand as an option because it's very common to start your podcast with a you know one crystal clear idea, and then 30 episodes in, it's different and it's changed a bit.
50:12
Alban: And that's a positive.
50:13
Alban: Now you have a better idea of what the show's about.
50:16
Alban: It'd be that's a really good time to go and do a slight rebrand, not like a total change of like, oh, let's update the artwork, let's change the description.
50:25
Alban: Maybe they want to do it so that they can show up inside of AI Search.
50:29
Alban: So we got to figure out a way to do it, Eric.
50:32
Alban: thank you for the all caps.
50:34
Jordan: All right.
50:34
Jordan: And then we also got a message from Kevin from OK Let's Learn.
50:38
Jordan: Great podcast.
50:39
Jordan: Thank you for everything you do at Buzzsprout.
50:41
Jordan: Kevin has two questions.
50:42
Jordan: First, can you talk about location stats?
50:45
Jordan: I listen to my own podcast and it's never reflecting where I actually download it.
50:49
Jordan: Many times it's at least 30 to 40 miles away.
50:52
Kevin: Oh my, my, my.
50:55
Kevin: This is a very common question.
50:57
Kevin: It's a very good question.
50:58
Kevin: I feel like we have just never done a really good job of addressing it on the stats page, which we really should.
51:02
Kevin: So, mental note again to myself.
51:04
Kevin: so the way that podcast stats are calculated is that we use the IP part of the IP address can be tracked back to certain locations.
51:12
Kevin: Those locations can be super broad.
51:14
Kevin: Sometimes they're pretty narrow, sometimes they're super broad, and sometimes they're not accurate at all because they're just running through data centers or various networks, or you might have a VPN turned on at all.
51:23
Kevin: So, like use the location stats as a um a big grain of salt and as a broad sort of measure of where your listener base is kind of coming from.
51:34
Kevin: But it's definitely not like GPS pinpoint, it's not like life 360 accurate.
51:39
Kevin: You can't track your podcast listeners and figure out did they stop at the convenience store on the way home when they were supposed to be home at 11 and now it's 115 and they're at you know the gas station getting a monster energy in the middle of the day.
51:50
Alban: I'm all of a sudden feeling a lot of sympathy for your voice.
51:52
Kevin: Yes.
51:53
Kevin: You can tell I'm the father of teenagers.
51:55
Kevin: But it's it's it's not that.
51:56
Kevin: It's it's just super broad.
51:58
Kevin: And especially on mobile networks, it can range quite a bit as your um IP address changes a lot as you're driving around.
52:05
Kevin: So that's kind of the short story.
52:08
Kevin: even if you're at home and even if you're not using a VPN, it's still just because of privacy stuff.
52:13
Kevin: Like even if we wanted to, we probably couldn't do this stuff.
52:16
Kevin: There's some technical limitations, there's some legal limitations, there's some moral and ethical limitations.
52:21
Kevin: And so it's it's going to be broad.
52:23
Kevin: And sometimes it's going to be more accurate than others, but that's why sometimes you you can't even see yourself kind of popping in and listening to your own podcast.
52:30
Alban: Yeah.
52:30
Alban: We might be able to solve this not by trying to make the stats more specific, by trying to communicate the fuzziness that's really there.
52:39
Alban: You know, I can see when I get download, I my downloads will show up as Jacksonville, but they may not show up in the part of Jacksonville that I'm in.
52:46
Alban: Or sometimes they might show up just outside, or if you're running it through a VPN, maybe even a totally different location.
52:52
Alban: It might be a good idea to try to build something into the UI to make it clear this general area is growing, but you we don't show something super specific because if we don't, then you don't feel like it's wrong when we're giving maybe a false sense of specificity.
53:11
Jordan: Yeah.
53:11
Jordan: Kevin's second question here is advertising within podcast apps more cost effective for getting listeners than social media ads since those audiences are already like and then he follows it up with which platforms, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or others, do the best job helping people discover new shows?
53:30
Alban: The best in the world is Google, where people used to type in, how do I find a credit card?
53:36
Alban: And then they would be like, How about an ad for American Express?
53:39
Alban: And you're like, Oh my gosh, you found exactly what I wanted.
53:41
Alban: And American Express is like, you found the exact customer that I wanted, and you were the matchmaker.
53:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
53:48
Alban: That's the best case scenario.
53:49
Alban: And the closest thing to it is overcast because overcast, when you're in the search or when you're listening to a podcast and you have it open, that's when it's popping up here is a podcast you might want to listen to.
54:06
Alban: And they are relatively cheap.
54:08
Alban: And so we did it for a bit and we were able to get new listeners for sub ten dollars.
54:15
Alban: They weren't super cheap, but like all the way to subscribed because they were interested in podcasts, they could see about our show, they'd click it, and then all they have to do is click one button to download or subscribe.
54:26
Alban: The problem that you'll get with something like a mopod is they're like, oh, somebody's trying to get some gems for a game on Android, and then we incentivize them to listen to 30 seconds of a podcast on a different website.
54:42
Alban: People aren't looking for you, and so it's really hard to convince them to go subscribe.
54:46
Alban: Yeah, because they're not saying they want to subscribe.
54:48
Alban: They may not even have a podcast app.
54:50
Alban: You're talking you're asking them to do six things.
54:52
Alban: So my take is yes, apps are the best, apps are great, and the apps in particular are the ones that actually will let you advertise inside the app UI castbox, overcast, and a few others will allow this.
55:05
Alban: I think we have a podcast on it.
55:07
Kevin: Pocket cast is very expensive.
55:08
Kevin: The the way they implement it, I don't love, but because it again requires eyes.
55:13
Kevin: So I talked in the beginning of this episode.
55:15
Kevin: Like, I don't want to, if I'm listening to something, I don't want to have to look at my phone.
55:19
Kevin: To for your ad to show up in Overcast, you have to be looking at your phone because it's just a display ad.
55:24
Kevin: It's not an audio ad.
55:25
unknown: Yeah.
55:25
Kevin: But Sprout Ads is the answer to that, which is you upload a 30-second clip of like a promo for your podcast episode, and then we will play that audio inside other podcasts that accept your ad.
55:40
Kevin: I don't know that that is more effective or less effective than Overcast.
55:44
Kevin: Overcast has got bigger, you know, generally bigger numbers.
55:48
Kevin: The advertising game in general is hard.
55:51
Kevin: You have to get so many impressions to get such a like low number of conversions that it ends up your cost per conversion ends up being pretty high.
55:58
Kevin: For somebody like Buzzcast, it's okay for us to pay $10, $15, $20 a listener because we have a, we're not just trying to promote a show that we do as a hobby.
56:07
Kevin: This show helps is a show to promote a business that generates income.
56:12
Kevin: And so it's like part of a marketing budget and part of the overall like cost per acquisition for a customer that we're willing to spend.
56:19
Kevin: And so when you're doing something like that, it you can justify higher numbers.
56:23
Kevin: If you're doing a hobby podcast, or if you're doing even a semi-pro podcast, um, and you end up you're spending more money on your podcast than it's making you because it's a passion project, it gets really expensive to say, oh, I can pay $10, $15, $20 to acquire a listener.
56:37
Kevin: That the math doesn't make a lot of sense in cases like that, which is why we often recommend like other alternative ways to market your show.
56:46
Kevin: You spend less money, but maybe more time, like guesting on other shows or having guests on your show and then cross-promoting each other, stuff like that.
56:54
Alban: We got a message from Fernando, from Fernando's logbook.
56:57
Alban: Kevin, we need to have a chat.
57:00
Alban: How dare you?
57:02
Alban: This is I don't know that we need the dramatic reading.
57:05
Jordan: How dare you steal that car?
57:07
Alban: How dare you?
57:08
Alban: For the last few years, I've been a proud Padell player.
57:12
Alban: It's just paddle.
57:13
Alban: Padell, right?
57:14
Kevin: That's what they all say.
57:15
Kevin: No, paddle.
57:16
Jordan: Padell.
57:17
Kevin: Padell.
57:18
Kevin: It's not that fancy.
57:20
Kevin: It's just paddle.
57:21
Kevin: Proud.
57:23
Alban: Kevin, how dare you?
57:24
Alban: He's a smoker now.
57:25
Alban: There we go.
57:26
Alban: Last few years I've been a proud Padel play.
57:29
Alban: Paddle.
57:30
Alban: Paddle player.
57:32
Alban: And then because you keep mentioning pickleball, in a moment of weakness, I decided to try it.
57:38
Alban: It was Monday, 9 30 in the morning.
57:40
Alban: I loved it.
57:44
Kevin: I wish I had the story went going the other direction.
57:46
Kevin: I want to play paddle so bad.
57:48
Kevin: And I've talked with lots of people who played paddle and they love it.
57:51
Kevin: And I think people who play pickleball will love paddle, and I think paddle players probably love pickleball.
57:55
Kevin: I mean, what's the difference between them?
57:58
Kevin: paddle is in a like an enclosed court where there's walls all the way around it.
58:03
Kevin: They're usually like clear plexiglass, and you can you're still trying to get the ball into the court space, but you can bounce it off the walls to get it into the court space.
58:11
Kevin: And you can take it as far as sometimes the ball goes outside, like over the wall, and you can run outside and hit it back in.
58:16
Kevin: And it just looks crazy and fun.
58:18
Kevin: It looks so good.
58:19
Kevin: I'm sure I would love it.
58:20
Jordan: Okay, I've seen this, and it's always depicted whenever there's like a very wealthy person in like TV and movies, like having like a crisis, and they're like taking it out in the paddle court and they're in that like glass enclosed casing.
58:35
Jordan: Like it's always depicted in that way.
58:37
Jordan: I always that's a that's a wealthy person's game in my mind.
58:41
Kevin: Maybe.
58:41
Kevin: Maybe that's why I haven't been able to play yet.
58:43
Alban: Maybe sometimes, Jordan, that's racquetball in movies.
58:48
Alban: Oh if oh if both teams are on one half of the court and there's really only half a court, that's probably racquetball.
58:55
Alban: But paddle is there's a fence down the center.
58:59
Alban: It it looks like a ton of fun.
59:01
Alban: If we had a court in town, I would 100% go play.
59:05
Jordan: Okay, so paddle is poor man's racquetball.
59:07
Jordan: Got it.
59:08
Alban: Yeah.
59:08
Alban: I don't know.
59:09
Alban: It might be even more sophisticated than racquetball.
59:12
Alban: I feel like racquetball has fallen out of favor.
59:14
Jordan: All right.
59:14
Jordan: Well, thank you all for sending in your FMO messages.
59:18
Jordan: And don't forget to do the experiment that we talked about earlier and write the end to us.
59:23
Jordan: Let us know how it goes.
59:24
Jordan: So until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.
59:33
Kevin: Hey guys, we have a the Buzzsprout team meetup next week.
59:37
Kevin: We are gonna be in what's the name of the town?
59:39
Kevin: Charleston, Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina.
59:41
Kevin: I always get Charleston confused with like Greenville and Savannah.
59:46
Kevin: Savannahsville.
59:47
Kevin: Charlottesville?
59:48
Speaker 3: Oh sad word.
59:49
Speaker 3: Is that place?
59:50
Speaker 3: I'm on the West Coast.
59:53
Kevin: I just feel like there's a whole bunch of little towns up in the Carolinas.
59:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.
59:56
Kevin: I guess Savannah's in Georgia, but to me, they're just all like somewhere between one and four hours north, and people go there on weekends.
1:00:04
Kevin: But we're going to one of them.
1:00:05
Kevin: Charleston.
1:00:06
Kevin: Is that the one?
1:00:06
Kevin: Yeah, we're going to Charleston.
1:00:08
Jordan: I've never been to Charleston.
1:00:09
Jordan: I'm really excited because I love quaint little East Coast towns, and I never get to go except for when you guys fly me over for work.
1:00:19
Kevin: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
1:00:20
Kevin: I I think this is one of, you know, all a lot of these little towns are notoriously haunted.
1:00:25
Kevin: Oh Jordan likes spooky things.
1:00:28
Kevin: We just had Halloween last week.
1:00:30
Kevin: Yeah.
1:00:30
Kevin: And then somebody put together an opt-in like ghost tour thing one night.
1:00:35
Kevin: And I'm pretty sure Jordan was the first one to sign up for that.
1:00:38
Jordan: Mm-hmm.
1:00:38
Jordan: You know what's really funny is like just a quick sidebar.
1:00:43
Jordan: you know where I get it from.
1:00:45
Kevin: This whole thing is a sidebar.
1:00:47
Jordan: You know where I get it from.
1:00:48
Jordan: It's my mother.
1:00:49
Jordan: And it's her birthday week this week.
1:00:52
Jordan: And she texted me.
1:00:53
Jordan: I had no idea what her plans were for her birthday.
1:00:55
Jordan: She texted me, her and five of her gal pals like all got into a van and they drove up to Montana and they're staying at a haunted bed and breakfast and they're spending the whole week ghost hunting and doing ghost tours in Montana.
1:01:08
Jordan: And I'm so jealous.
1:01:10
Jordan: I wish she invited me.
1:01:13
Kevin: I think it's so the the whole idea of ghost hunting is bizarre, right?
1:01:16
Kevin: Because isn't the whole idea of ghosts is like they kind of haunt you, like they come after you.
1:01:22
Kevin: But then there's people who are like, no ghosts are coming after me.
1:01:26
Kevin: I've got to like flip the table and go after them.
1:01:30
Alban: Yeah.
1:01:30
Alban: I've got like a poorly screwed in light bulb that like it flickers sometimes.
1:01:34
Alban: And I'm like, yep, see, that's how you detect the ghosts.
1:01:39
Jordan: I love it.
1:01:40
Jordan: It's so, it's so cool because I mean, especially if you're into history, I think that you're a little bit more inclined to enjoy these ghost tours.
1:01:49
Jordan: Any ghost tour that I've been on, it is a glorified history tour of the town that you're in.
1:01:56
Jordan: And so I think that's kind of part of the fun, is like, oh, this person can still haunt this place, but they had a really interesting life and they did some cool stuff.
1:02:04
Speaker 3: Right.
1:02:05
Alban: That's true.
1:02:06
Alban: Is that so is that the allure that you're when you go to St.
1:02:09
Alban: Augustine, they have tons of these and they'll walk you around and they'll tell you the history, and you're like, oh, interesting history, and they're like, and then they died and this terrible thing happened, and they could be here right now.
1:02:20
Alban: And you're like, ooh, okay, next history story.
1:02:24
Jordan: That's exactly it.
1:02:25
Jordan: It's just like, it's just like a really like exciting version of like a history lesson.
1:02:31
Alban: Ghost tours are the original true crime podcasts.
1:02:34
Alban: So it's like they're kind of telling you a little bit's true, but then it's like, oh no, something could happen to you.
1:02:40
Alban: And you're like, oh my god.
1:02:42
Jordan: Exactly the feeling.
1:02:43
Jordan: And you get like that little bit of like excitement where it's like um going through like a corn maze in the dark.
1:02:48
Jordan: I don't know if you guys do that down there, but there's just no.
1:02:52
Jordan: So I mean, in the autumn, we've got like haunted corn mazes and stuff like that.
1:02:58
Jordan: And so, like the farmers, like there'll be like certain areas where they'll like cut a maze into the field, and then there'll be like guys with chainsaws like hiding in it.
1:03:06
Jordan: And then um, as you walk by, yeah, and then they don't have chains on it, but like as you walk by, they graze your ankles with them and will like chase you through the corn maze, and it's a stupid thing.
1:03:18
Jordan: Like you're in a you're in a field, it's not fun, but there is an exciting element, like you feel like you might expect it.
1:03:24
Jordan: Just to be clear, weird.
1:03:26
Alban: You're going through a corn maze and there's people hiding in there with chainsaws, and the only benefit is they don't have chains.
1:03:33
Alban: Yeah.
1:03:34
unknown: Yeah.
1:03:34
Alban: I would not be able to.
1:03:36
Jordan: You wouldn't?
1:03:37
Jordan: Oh man.
1:03:38
unknown: No way.
1:03:40
Jordan: It's so fun.
1:03:42
Kevin: Well, here's what I'm wondering, Jordan.
1:03:43
Kevin: Can you would you I don't think I'm signed up for the ghost tour.
1:03:46
Kevin: I said I might want to opt in like in the moment.
1:03:49
Jordan: You said I like to make game time decisions.
1:03:52
Jordan: Yeah, I recall.
1:03:53
Kevin: Yep.
1:03:54
Kevin: So maybe game time I'll come, but maybe game time I won't.
1:03:57
Kevin: But whether I'm there or not, I want you to like record some of the best moments so that we can chat about them and talk, share them with our Buzzcast listening audience.
1:04:05
Speaker 3: Oh, it's gonna be so stupid.
1:04:08
Kevin: Perfect.
1:04:09
Speaker 3: I love it.
1:04:10
Kevin: Let's see what happens.