How to Podcast Over The Holidays

Speaker 1 (00:02)
Hello and welcome Podcast me anything and asking anything for all things podcasting.

Speaker 2 (00:06)
I'm your host, Ben Kley.

Speaker 1 (00:07)
And I'm joined here in the studio with Matthew passing the podcast control. Matthew and I wanted to move the conversations beyond the podcasting 101 Topics move into the intermediate to advanced podcasting strategy to reach your goals, to interact with the show, submit your questions to be answered live, book a podcast, Mathew, or find the notes from today's show head on over to podcastneanything.

Speaker 3 (00:28)
Com.

Speaker 2 (00:31)
Welcome to another episode of Podcast me anything. I am here with Mathew Passy and we've got some really good topics lined up in the queue today and one that it almost still baffles me that it's still even a thing and that it's not a synopsis as anything within podcasting. And that is reviews and the news out of Spotify today that we're going to dive into the Spotify, just launch ratings. And as we are prepping for this, I equally got excited and went in there and gave my podcast a five star review, which I'm sure you've already done as well.

Speaker 2 (01:00)
Mathew, on your podcast. So what did that news mean to you when you first saw it?

Speaker 3 (01:07)
It's funny you say that because I actually haven't done it yet. I'm one of those people who I recognize the power of Spotify. I understand how important they are. We've talked about how much muscle they're putting into the space. In fact, even today, as we're talking, they may announce another huge acquisition and adding to their portfolio of podcasting companies, but I never use it. I never use it for music, and I don't use it for podcast consumption. I've always found it a bit cumbersome. And for music, we've already got Amazon Prime to get music.

Speaker 3 (01:39)
There Apple music. One, it tells me I really got to pay more attention. Actually, the listening experience on Spotify. But two, I think what it's really going to mean is that most of your favorite podcasts and podcasters are going to start changing their interests, changing their outros, changing their call to action. And instead of saying leave a rating and review on Apple, they're either going to also say, leave us five stars in Spotify or they're not going to mention Apple at all anymore. And I think that's going to be pretty big.

Speaker 3 (02:09)
One of the reasons why that I think people are going to do that is one it's so much easier, right? You just boom five stars. Did you actually write a review? Literally.

Speaker 2 (02:19)
And it pops up. But the thing that says how many stars you want to give is just as easy, like as going on Amazon and giving something five stars. There was no extra headache, there was no people getting lost and accidentally giving a review on the Apple podcast app that we already diagnosed and dropped into. And there wasn't like scroll down to the bottom. It was right there at the top is right next to follow.

Speaker 3 (02:41)
Right. So one, it's super easy for anybody to do. It's simple as five stars boom, done. It'll make a big difference, probably in listings and search results and stuff like that. Two. Unlike Apple, the reviews in Apple are segmented by the country stores. We're in the US, so we automatically are opening up the US version of the podcasting store. Well, if we have Canadian listeners and they leave us a rating and review, we wouldn't necessarily see that. When we go to look at our listing of our show in the US store, we'd have to change it to look at the Canadian podcasting store to see our ratings and reviews there.

Speaker 3 (03:20)
Now you could sign up for some third party services, right? Charitable. My podcast reviews from Daniel Day Lewis, a bunch of places where you'll get that stuff in your inbox. But for most average users, they don't think about all these extra services. It's just like, I know people are giving me a review. Why can't I see it? Because they're not in the right store. So the fact that all the Spotify reviews are just right there no matter where they're coming from, is going to make it easier.

Speaker 3 (03:42)
And then, of course, Spotify is just making waves. Right? Everybody's posting their year in a review of their podcast. Everybody's posting their ratings right now. So I think the big takeaway from this is as a podcaster, you should if you're not already take Spotify seriously as a place to promote your content, promote your show, use their shareable features for creating Instagram reels and audio clips and things like that and invite more people to check it out there because it seems like the world is just moving in that direction.

Speaker 2 (04:22)
I'm glad you mentioned the Instagram part, because it is also the best way to create Instagram story for a podcast, because it does it automatically. It looks nice. And right at the top of your Instagram story, it gives you a link to go to Spotify to listen to that episode. There's no actual going back to get the episode link. Like there might be an Apple or taking a horrible screenshot of your podcast player. It's designed to look nice when it gets to Instagram, which Instagram is designed to look nice when you post something.

Speaker 2 (04:48)
So creating that headache and taking it out of there is definitely nice. I want to pause here for a moment because one thing that has always been bothering me, but I've never really figured out why is that? We shop on Amazon based on the reviews. If we have 300 million selections of something on Amazon 100% of the time, I am basing my final decision on the reviews, the rankings, what people didn't like about it, what they did like about it. We buy all these different things.

Speaker 2 (05:16)
We do Google Maps for all these businesses. I don't go to a place that has a bad Google review that's locally or for anything. But yet in podcasting, what do you think has made it take so long for everybody? Like, why isn't it more synopsis across every podcast player to do some type of rating and review?

Speaker 3 (05:38)
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think for so long we've kind of relied on Apple being the source of that kind of information. There are some other apps that are doing. A podcaster does a really good job of it, but because it's such a fragmented space and people are listening to stuff on so many different platforms and so many different ways, a lot of the platforms just haven't really thought it necessary. Or maybe the technology was just too cumbersome. Or maybe it requires too much work, because what happens if someone posts a bad review?

Speaker 3 (06:08)
The host complains, hey, this person didn't even listen to the show. They posted a bad review. How do I fix this? Right. Maybe the platforms don't want to deal with the and I know this is a pejorative term, but the Karens of the world complaining about them getting a bad review on their platform or anything like that, or just having to moderate these reviews and comments, which often are a source of spam for a lot of platforms that offer comments and reviews and things like that.

Speaker 3 (06:34)
So I am not shocked that a lot of platforms don't have the rating and review feature automatically built into it. But I do think this kind of simplistic five stars for Spotify, where it's just a quick tap and you're done. I think it's going to blow up pretty quickly. I think your Twitter feeds, your Facebook feeds, your podcast listening is going to be consumed with podcasters asking for five stars. And by the way, another perk to Spotify in general, are the analytics that Spotify gives you.

Speaker 3 (07:06)
So if you have your show claimed in the Spotify back end, right podcasters Spotify. Com and you go and you look up your show, Spotify is able to provide you more insight into your show than most other platforms will, because they have the ability to tell you things that others don't. Right. So most of them will tell you starts and stops and listen. Well, not even starts and stops. We're starting to see a little bit more like how many real plays versus downloads or how many people are, like engaged listeners on Apples what they're using.

Speaker 3 (07:41)
But Spotify right now is the only one that could tell you. Hey, here's the breakdown of your show in terms of male female age range, because people have to be logged in to use it. So Spotify really knows who is listening to your content. And while you can't assume that that's 100% true, you can extrapolate from that some decent information about your show and think, oh, great. We've got 85% male listeners. You can either think, Well, we better keep catering to mail or you might think, hopefully you're thinking we need to do a better job of attracting the ladies to our show or creating content that caters to the ladies.

Speaker 3 (08:19)
But you don't get that kind of demographic data anywhere else. So I think if you haven't already pay more attention to Spotify, make sure you're including a Spotify button and subscribe button. Right. And everywhere you do it and make sure you're encouraging people to give you five stars there because I think you're going to see that it makes a difference. Oh, and by the way, back to what you were saying earlier about the whole Instagram video thing and sharing from Spotify directly on Instagram and having to get the link, it's hard enough right to get the link.

Speaker 3 (08:51)
But what link are you providing? Right? We always tell you put the link to your website or the episode page on your website. Well, now you've got to go to the website, go to the episode, copy the link, right with this share feature. If you do it from Spotify, the links are already in there. You're done. So I agree with you. It's pretty easy to share via Spotify, maybe just do yourself a favor and include links to your content and other places in the show description.

Speaker 3 (09:14)
So people who see it click on it and don't want to be stuck in the Spotify universe can at least find you in your other place.

Speaker 2 (09:21)
Another random hack that I use Spotify for is because Apple has such inconsistent downloads of does it automatically download? Is this my latest episode, or is that the latest episode of that podcast? And I actually sometimes never know on Apple, and I just kind of keep pulling my finger down, waiting for it to refresh and pop up that latest episode. I am always going to Spotify to find out. Did I hit publish correctly today? Because I have always found Spotify and knows exactly what's published for my podcast.

Speaker 2 (09:48)
It's always immediately there. I never even have to think about refreshing. It doesn't actually download the audio until I click it, so it's not taking up any space. And so it gives you a very real time presence of what your podcast looks like to the world without a lot of fanfare and in the world of like where Apple makes this complicated for some reason that we still have yet to figure out. It has also been just a very good way to validate is my podcasting making it to the Internet correctly?

Speaker 2 (10:13)
Did it publish? Right. And what does it look like from the show notes? And it just looks the way that you need to in a very simple way.

Speaker 3 (10:21)
There you go. Another vote for focusing on your Spot. And by the way, Spotify platform Agnostic you can listen on an Apple device Android device. If you've got Amazon Fire device, you probably listen there. You can listen on any desktop.

Speaker 2 (10:35)
It reminds me of podcasting because Roku kind of sits in this middle for TV players that it's not Google. It's not Amazon. It's not Apple, but actually you can watch Apple TV on your Roku device. You can watch Google stuff on your Roku device, and it sits in this middle where it actually has a really good share of the market. It has a really good way to connect with people. It's low cost barrier to entry. And Spotify has kind of been that agnostic tool that globally can be accepted and isn't going to be outdated by Android re changing themselves.

Speaker 2 (11:06)
That like Spotify is not going away because it's married to music, and that area is not getting any smaller now.

Speaker 3 (11:13)
And as we saw with their latest acquisition, they're investing plenty. They're not.

Speaker 2 (11:19)
They haven't even took the foot off the gas to say, you know what? We should probably make sure these companies are all integrated before we keep going. I can't even imagine the size of their acquisition team right now and how much they probably streamlined that process to acquire, integrate and to keep moving without having to worry about what we leave behind.

Speaker 3 (11:38)
And by the way, watch out for when they make video, open up their video platform to everybody. That will be a direct shot not only at Apple, but a big shot of you.

Speaker 2 (11:50)
Yeah. And I could easily see the content creator being more agnostic towards Spotify because it has a trifect ecosystem of music, podcast and then video that you wouldn't be susceptible to all these different things that can happen.

Speaker 3 (12:04)
Yeah, I'll tell you right now, I have clients already asking me, how do I get my video on Spotify? And if they could, they would absolutely be on there. So when that comes, it's going to be a tidal wave of people who want to put video on Spotify.

Speaker 2 (12:16)
Well, let's switch gears here and go into our deep dive question because it is a timely question for the upcoming holiday season. And this is something where it can kind of get muddled with. You never want to quit a podcasting. And so you always have this fear if I take my foot off the gas and break my episode shriek, oh, my gosh. The thing's going to explode. Or what happens if I actually become a podcast statistic and become pod faded and I go out of the existence because that one week becomes two and three.

Speaker 2 (12:43)
And so most people I think go through the holidays, keep publishing. I'm one of those for the same reason that I just said. So I'm curious as a consultant that has to provide a lot of different information to a lot of different types of podcasts. What is your holiday break advice?

Speaker 3 (13:00)
It's interesting because I think it changes a little bit from year to year this year, the actual holidays fall on a Saturday. And so for many of the content providers that I work with, most of them are publishing on, like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That seems to be peak publishing day for the people that I work with. And so the holidays really have no impact whatsoever. Whereas in previous years of the holiday fell right on Christmas Eve was Wednesday into Thursday and somebody drops on a Thursday or Thanksgiving.

Speaker 3 (13:26)
Great example. A lot of my clients who drop on Thursday is like, Why don't we put your episode out on Wednesday? So it doesn't get lost in the holiday shuffle. And a bunch of them did it and they saw great numbers and Wright Super happy about it. What do you do during this time when it falls on a Saturday? Do you either a not change your plan and just barrel through which listen, if you have the content, you have something to talk about, you have some stuff stockpiled.

(13:49)
Great.

Speaker 3 (13:49)
Yeah. Put some stuff out on a regular day. Don't worry about it. If people are off, probably means they might have some extra time to listen if it is a work related thing and you think they're not going to focus, okay, they might listen when they come back. But what I actually think could be even more effective is to acknowledge the holiday and do something special. Right? There are some folks who are like, it's the holiday. No one's around. No one's taking my interview request can't put out content, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 (14:16)
Do I just go dark? I think if you really, really don't want to put anything out, I think going dark for those two, maybe three weeks, like you said, is possibly the worst thing you can do. I don't think it will be absolutely catastrophic or disastrous to your show, but of all the options that are out there, it is probably my least favorite to go completely dark over the holidays. So what are some things you can do either one? A lot of my clients are doing this.

Speaker 3 (14:45)
They'll replay an episode from earlier in the year. We'll record a quick introduction. Have to be very long. You can talk for 30 seconds, two minutes, three minutes, and just say, hey, everyone, we're coming up on the holidays. Want to take this moment and wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, a joyous quantity. Whatever you're celebrating, whatever is important to you and your audience, maybe just a generic happy holidays. I don't want to get into a fight about what's the proper salutation in this case.

Speaker 3 (15:07)
But take that moment. Send a message to your listeners. Thank them for joining you throughout the year for listening to your content, for enjoying the show. Let them know, listen, it's the holiday season, and we're probably not too focused right now on X, Y and Z. That said, I wanted to give you something. So here's a replay of either a your favorite episode throughout the year. B the most popular episode that came out throughout the year, or see maybe a fan favorite, right? Or you opened up and said, hey, everyone, what episode should we replay?

(15:45)
One?

Speaker 3 (15:46)
It keeps you top of mind with your audience. You get the benefit of remaining in their feed. Those episodes get automatically downloaded. And so when people are going to listen, you're still there. They don't forget about you. You don't have to worry about inactivity, possibly shutting down automatic downloads, things like that. So that's one way you can do it. I've actually got some clients who have actually done a mega episode, right? They'll do that same intro. Hey, it's the holidays. And to celebrate, we're going to give you this huge episode.

Speaker 3 (16:15)
Here's our three favorite episodes. And literally, we'll just boom, boom, boom, slap three episodes back to back to back in one feed or replay them all. I tend to think just one episode is enough, but some folks like to bulk up on their downloads. You do you really doesn't matter. But what's probably even more effective than those two? I'd say also, by the way, if you're going to do a regular episode, just be very conscious of when you're recording it first, when it airs and make sure you are somewhat topical.

Speaker 3 (16:52)
Right? You're not saying if you're recording something at the middle of December, that's going to run the first week of January, right? Don't be saying Merry Christmas or Happy New Year. You have to be cognizant of when you're recording content with when it's going to run. So you don't sound silly, but you could just put out regular content or what a lot of folks are doing that I think is even more effective, is some sort of best of show. Right? Grab some clips from your top shows, not the whole episode, but grab meaningful clips.

Speaker 3 (17:24)
Two minutes here, five minutes here, twelve minutes here, drop a couple of narrations. Right. Again, it doesn't have to be very long. 30 seconds, two minutes. Hey, back in January, we spoke to Ben Killoy about the Military Veteran's Dad's podcast, and it got such a huge response. And this time of year, when we're in the holidays, I think it's really important that we talk about our service members and that we want them to be with their family. So here's a little clip of Ben talking about blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 (17:52)
Drop in the clip. Maybe add a little transition music or a chime or something to signify that we're going from pre tape content or from live new episode content to old content. And just do that doesn't have to be very long. Listen, we don't have to fill a full hour. If your episodes are normally an hour, you can do 20 minutes. You can do 3 hours, but it's a nice way to stay top of mind with your listeners. Give them a little bonus. Oh, and by the way, if you're trying to grow your show cool new listeners, this is all new content for them right now.

Speaker 3 (18:25)
They might hear. Oh, that was a great little snippet of Ben Killoy. I should go back and find the real episode. And right now you've gotten someone who's going back into your archives and finding old stuff. So I would say, try not to just ignore this time, right? Try not to just go dark and say, we're out of here. Even if you don't want to record any more stuff, put something in the feed, spend a half hour creating two quick episodes that you can easily republish just so that you kind of remain top of mind with your listeners.

Speaker 2 (19:00)
What I absolutely love about that is the repurpose part. There was a month in August where life was getting a little bit crazy. I wanted to slow down. I wanted to kind of enjoy the last month of summer, so I actually paused my interview show, and so there wasn't any holidays or anything special, but I paused the interview show because I was like, I just need to slow the pace down here. I already still had a solo show on Friday, and so what I also did with that solo show is I still did that content.

Speaker 2 (19:24)
I would talk about whatever I was going to talk about. But then for that Monday show, I would actually publish an actual homework episode, so it was only three minutes long. I would be like, I want you to go find this number, and I would put a link in the show notes, and it would be to my web page and it would get the download from them getting the homework. But then it will also go back and get the download. And it was a very simple way to keep the feet alive to keep me showing up in there so that they don't forget about me.

Speaker 2 (19:47)
They don't go try to find a replacement for me, but I was staying relevant within it. So sometimes depending on where you go or what you think you can do or even just this is a great moment to shoot yourself to death and then almost be stuck on making the right decision. And I also want to maybe switch and ask one question before we move on to our question for you is when is it the right time or what is a good question? Because there's another strategy.

Speaker 2 (20:14)
Just ignore the holidays, because if your content is evergreen, people are finding you whenever they have the permission to not listen to you on Christmas Day. If you're published on Christmas Day, say like you're a Saturday episode, there's nothing saying that they're going to listen to it anyhow. It's their own choice. They could listen to you on Sunday, they could listen to it on Monday. Is there a world where you would advise just keep on going and maybe even not really acknowledge the holidays unless you have something that maybe directly ties it with your podcast.

Speaker 2 (20:41)
But I think for evergreen content, there could be a world where you just keep on going and the listener can make the decision to do what they need to.

Speaker 3 (20:49)
I think it's really easy to say yes, absolutely. Just keep on trucking. Don't even acknowledge a holiday. Just put out an episode. It doesn't matter that it's December 24 or December 17, right? A Friday drop is a Friday drop for you. That said, don't be surprised if you do that that you get some listeners who turn around and you're like, Come on, man, you need to acknowledge a holiday, right? It's possible you can get a little bit of a backlash from it. I don't think it's really going to happen in earnest or something that'll dramatically impact your show's performance or your impact with the audience.

Speaker 3 (21:25)
But I would say you're not just putting out content. You are building a relationship with your audience. So I think it's okay even on generic, timeless content that you're dropping this week because, oh, I didn't realize this was Christmas week, right? I just drop on Tuesdays. I think it's still good to kind of address your audience because you think of them as real people and say, hey, listeners, Merry Christmas, happy New Year, joyous Quanta, happy Hanukkah, happy Easter, happy Veterans Day, whatever it is coming up, I think it's just a good practice to pretend that there's a real human being on the other side of this, as opposed to just a download.

Speaker 3 (22:14)
So that would be my only caution against that.

Speaker 2 (22:17)
You gave me a great analogy of almost illustrating why what you said and what I potentially proposed was a bad idea because imagine a Christmas party for an ugly sweater, Christmas party for work. But imagine you're the guy that doesn't really want to acknowledge Christmas. You just want to acknowledge that this is a business event, and I'm going to go and I'm going to have great conversations and you go in with just a suit and you're going to be that guy with a suit in the middle of a holiday spirit where everybody's having great conversations or having jokes about their ugly Christmas sweaters, and they're having that human connection of what Christmas really feels.

Speaker 2 (22:50)
And like, we all love the holiday, not just for the present, but the feeling and connection of memories. And you would also potentially be that guy that brings a cold feeling to that party. And by bringing a cold feeling to that party and not acknowledging the human element of what they're feeling every day, trying to build a relationship with that listener, you just became that guy that walked into a Christmas party, ugly sweater party at Christmas with a blue suit and said, hey, let's talk about business when everybody wants to talk about Christmas.

Speaker 2 (23:18)
So it almost creates, like, an ignorant feeling and they're going to disconnect a little bit from you. So I like the way that you said it. You have to acknowledge where people are and their thoughts and you speaking that they don't exist almost just makes you ignorant. It feels like you're probably not ignorant, but that can project that. And it's not something you want.

Speaker 3 (23:37)
Yeah. You don't want to walk into the holiday ugly Christmas sweater party. And the first thing you say to someone is, by the way, we're your GPS reports, like, Shut up, enjoy yourself. Have a drink.

Speaker 2 (23:50)
Also, something I tell myself regularly is don't take yourself too serious. Always lighten up the mood. And Christmas is a great time to bring that lightened up and a good time to highlight your Christmas memory, to tell more about your own stories of Christmas, to bring more of you to the podcast and share a little bit of you and what your Christmas means to you. So it just brings an entirely new way to connect. And those holiday memories are the most powerful. So if you share a memory from your childhood about Christmas, there's a good chance that someone's going to have a memory like, oh, man, I just remember that.

Speaker 2 (24:20)
I'm really glad he mentioned that, because now I even feel more connected that we have more in common.

Speaker 3 (24:26)
I'm going to draw from a really old movie, but I'm going to draw from the movie Stripes, and I don't care what you celebrate. I really don't. I don't want to get into an argument about war on Christmas. Should I say happy holidays? Honestly, the fact of the matter is it's a time of year. Should we be nice to everybody all the time? Yes. But this time of year, we try to be a little extra nice. And so to those people who are not, I'll say in the spirit or who are basically in response to say, Lighten up, Francis, just have some fun.

Speaker 3 (25:06)
Enjoy the moment. And you can go back to being a stick in the mud in January.

Speaker 2 (25:11)
Yes. And there's a lot of ways, even if you don't want to take Christmas series in the context of most people do, there's a lot of ways just to still have fun with the holiday, either through creativity, through jokes, through stories. So I really encourage, I think to me, the highlight of what we just went through is take the holiday as a chance to be different. Show who you are. Get them to connect more to who you are and don't necessarily just treat it as another podcast day.

Speaker 3 (25:36)
Yeah. Acknowledge it and listen. There are plenty of shows that do bestows that have no problem, and they acknowledge and look, it doesn't matter if you listen to the show today or in six months from now, people will still relate. You will still create more of a relationship with your audience.

Speaker 2 (25:53)
And as we've been talking about for the content, dynamic, creation and ad insertion, this is another opportunity where you could actually insert a holiday message in all your episodes at the same time, but then also equally just as quickly take it all away.

Speaker 3 (26:07)
Yeah. I mean, I would thoroughly encourage people if they're using dynamic insertion technology, whether it's to put in content or their ads, to add that theme to your messaging that goes out in December, then change it in January and change it in February. It's low hanging fruit for your messaging in December to have some sort of holiday greeting or some sort of Christmas stick in there like Ho Ho Ho, Merry blah blah. Whatever is going to work for you, but yeah, enjoy the moment.

Speaker 2 (26:37)
I love that. So let's wrap up with our final question into the question for Matthew. And this one is kind of really big because some of the big podcast players just got a big, massive class action against them for not having transcript friendly systems in place for people that need transcripts for anybody that has the accessibility issues with trying to use a computer. And there's all those different tools to make it more accessible. So let's just park here for a second with transcripts. Do we need them?

Speaker 2 (27:04)
Should we worry about it? When do you worry about it? Because there's a lot of shooting that can go on with transcripts, and you could really shoot yourself. I should be doing that. I don't have time for it. So what's the right answer for a person that's maybe already started podcasting? We've been doing it for six months is transcript, something we really need to add into our strategy.

Speaker 3 (27:27)
Here's what I'm going to say with SiriusXM. They are a big target, and it makes a big statement going after a publicly traded company like this with Deep wallets and all those other things do I think this community who, by the way, first and foremost, they're not the enemy, right? I just want to start off by saying it providing transcripts should not be something you do simply to avoid getting in trouble. It should be something you do because there are folks who are unable to listen to your content, who you should still welcome into your community.

Speaker 3 (28:03)
Welcome into your listenership. Right. So the first thing is just accessibility should not be seen as a burden. It should be seen as an opportunity to expand who you are able to welcome into your listening audience. So let me start with that. But I think what you have to think about is not that the National Association for the Deaf is going to start suing every single person who doesn't include transcripts in their podcasts and on their website. But they could, and I think at this point not that you immediately need to start transcribing your podcast and posting them immediately and have this done by the end of January of 2022.

Speaker 3 (28:45)
But I think you need to at least start to put that process in place today or start to think about what your strategy is going to be to put that into place today, so that at some point it is done. It is easy, as you said, if you have a library of hundreds of podcasts or 60 podcasts or 30 podcasts. It's going to take time to get this done. And so it's a lot easier, a lot more manageable if you're transcribing three to five shows a week or ten shows a month and working backwards to make some progress versus saying to yourself, let's say some deadline is going to hit right.

Speaker 3 (29:27)
At some point, someone's going to say if you don't offer a transcript by January 2023, you will face a fine. Then everybody and their mother is going to be trying to get a transcript in December, and you're going to be scrambling and in trouble, and there's not going to be you don't want to be part of a bottleneck. So I think what this news is one. It's an opportunity to realize that there is a large community of people who you want to be more inviting and welcoming into your content.

Speaker 3 (29:57)
Two, it is a time to realize now is the time to create a strategy. And admittedly, real human generated transcripts are expensive. There is no way around that, right. If you want another person to listen to your content and write what is happening verbatim, it is going to cost you money. There are services that do it, and roughly the rate is somewhere on the order of one dollars to like a dollar, $50 per minute. And so if you have a 60 minutes episode, you're looking at anywhere from $$60 to $90, let's say to get that done times that over 100 episodes.

Speaker 3 (30:31)
And you've done the math. It's not going to be cheap. That said, I think in this world and in this age and especially for smaller podcasters, individual podcasters, if you're a big brand budget for it, just make it happen. Right? You're going to be a target, get it done. No offense or buts about it. But if you are smaller, independent, I would say start to look into automated transcripts, which could be done a lot cheaper. At the very least. Start putting those up. So at least you have something on there that makes it a little bit easier.

Speaker 3 (31:09)
There are automated transcript services that will charge you per minute, but at a fraction of the cost, maybe $0.10 a minute or $0.20 a minute. There's also transcription services that will do it sort of like a monthly fee. Right. If you have descript, you can upload your content to describe and get the transcript from there. Now, even if you're a big service, by the way, you can still use some of these monthly automated services, and then you only have to pay somebody to clean up the transcript versus having to generate it from scratch.

Speaker 3 (31:44)
And I think the going rate for that would be a lot cheaper. The human toll capital would be a lot cheaper than what it would take for someone to do it all from scratch. But there are ways to get this done. There are ways to get this done economically. And I think you need to start thinking about it, budgeting for it, planning for it, and even going into your back catalog and doing it, because at some point you are either going to face some potential legal ramifications or if nothing else, you might just get called out for it, and it won't be a good look, right?

Speaker 3 (32:23)
You just don't want to have that kind of bad press. Even if you think it will not be a significant impact, you will still see people talking negatively about your show over something that is totally within your control to avoid.

Speaker 2 (32:37)
And I think what we're going to probably see is an industry change in compliance. So they're probably before you're penalized, they'll be just more compliance notifications, either through podcast players, like some type of badge that this one is transcript or Ada compliant. And there probably will be maybe a newer generation of probably apps to actually make it easy for someone that's Ada looking for a podcast to try to get those transcripts, because right now, even if you had transcripts, there's not an easy way to my knowledge that there's an app that's sucking them all in so that you can quickly find them in the same way that we can find the audio file.

Speaker 2 (33:12)
And that part is probably something that we're going to see a big change in these. Our podcast podcast meeting and Cause Pods both have transcripts on them, and we use Happy Scribe for that. And it's an automated service. And the basic that we get out of it is the SEO boost initially. So you also get Google ability to see more words to per page and the more words per page. Google rewards you for that from SEO perspective, and they have a better idea of what this page is, and they have a better idea of who needs it in their search results.

Speaker 2 (33:43)
And I think the other thing to segue here is there's a difference between indie and actual brand podcast focused on this that if you are a brand, that if this is your voice as a brand, then this is something that you definitely want to shore up. Like you said, if you've got the money budget for it, if you're in any podcast, me anything, it's something you just have on the horizon, and that it's one of those for I'll even say for this process when I'm preparing these episodes, I create the episode, I create the final product.

Speaker 2 (34:11)
I export that. I've got my final MP three file while I'm working on all the other things. I uploaded the Happy Scribe because it's maybe like a ten minute process. So if I were to randomly do that in my process, I forget about it. So I uploaded the moment I've created it, I've exported it. And then when I'm doing all the show notes, all the graphics it's transcribing. And then the moment I have the web page moment up. I'm creating all the stuff on the web page.

Speaker 2 (34:35)
I paste in the transcript because it's done by then. And Bob's your uncle and boom it's there. So if you find a service like Happy Scribe, there's a lot of them out there. It's a great way to just do the simple step like I just described. I think there's also a moment to go into your process and think like Descript is a good one, but it really works best if you are using Descript to actually edit your episode. So it's actually sometimes maybe depending on what your actual editing process looks like, that's going to determine what your transcription process looks like as well.

Speaker 3 (35:07)
Yeah. And this also means that when you are thinking about your technology providers, whether that's your hosting company, whether it's your website, all those different things, make sure they are making the tools available that you need for transcription. So we know that there is now a transcript tag that is available in some hosting companies. It's part of the new standard of RSS. I think they're calling like RSS 3.0 or something like that. But so I would look at hosting companies that offer the transcription field and the transcript Tags that you can offer that.

Speaker 3 (35:44)
And two, I would make sure that whatever service you're using to display your content as a way to easily showcase your transcript, like with Pod page, there's a field right there. You paste the transcript in when you look at the episode. It's got a little link that says Show Notes, the one that says transcript. You click, that brings you to the transcript. And then the nice thing is it keeps it reduced so it doesn't take up a whole page. But if you want to see the whole thing, boom, you can expand it.

Speaker 3 (36:14)
And same thing with your website. I think it is important to put the transcript on your web page, like Ben was saying for that SEO function for the accessibility. But what I hate to see from folks is you go to their episode page, you see the player, you see some buttons, you see Show notes, and then you go down, you see the transcript, and now you're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling all the way through this transcript. And now your footer and other marketing considerations and your call to action at the bottom of your page.

Speaker 3 (36:43)
They are so far down. People are never going to get to them. So make sure you're using some sort of like accordion type feature where by default your transcript is accessible, especially to the Google crawlers, but minimized so that people can quickly get to the bottom of your page and kind of skip the transcript if they don't need it. But if they do need it, they can easily click a button and have full access to it.

Speaker 2 (37:08)
There was something that I was learning as we were working with our website. And often I was just talking to someone this morning about it. We often don't know what we need to Google. So like what you just said, the word accordion. Most people would be like, oh, that's a really cool feature that it expands and they just click it. It goes away. It doesn't look. It looks nice when it's closed. It looks great when it's open. How do you even think about doing that? That just seems like maybe it's something fancy and WordPress that I don't have access to.

Speaker 2 (37:32)
No, that is literally just going into your widgets and WordPress and probably typing accordion. And there's most likely an accordion widget in your WordPress. So whatever website you have, I would Google that hosting service with the word accordion on the end and learn the skill to create that because that word right there could have been something that listened to this before you didn't know. And now you know it. So Google those two words together, and it's not hard. It's a lot easier than you think. But without the word accordion, what the tech world calls it, it's often hard to even figure out like that looks just out of reach.

Speaker 2 (38:04)
I don't think I have a fancy web design like that.

Speaker 3 (38:07)
And let me tell you the only reason I know it is because I was that person who was spending 20 minutes one night Googling trying to figure out what is that feature called exactly? Because I was trying to find it for a Squarespace site. And Squarespace doesn't have it in a way that worked well with transcripts. It works well for, like, FAQs, where it's like the question and then you expand it. But it always started open, and maybe it's been improved. Or maybe it's better now not trying to take a moment to poo poo Squarespace necessarily.

Speaker 3 (38:35)
But I spent one night super frustrated with this a few years ago. And so when we were building the Cause Pod site, that was like, one of the most important features to me was I want the ability to integrate transcripts, but I want them to start out closed and be easily opened. And so I found out that the term was called accordion. I build most of my websites using like, Elementor. Elementor has a ton of cool accordion widgets out there. Maybe you have to do Elementor Pro or plus or add ons.

Speaker 3 (39:05)
Or primarily, there's a bunch of different options out there, but yeah, that's what you're looking for. It'll make your content accessible and crawlable by Google. But it will also make your website manageable when people are scrolling through it quickly to get to all the different things on there. Instead of having to scroll through a million words of text. I've also seen, by the way, where some people link the transcript on another web page altogether. So right. It might be podcastmeanything, podcast, 21 transcriptranscript. The transcript itself lives somewhere else, or you could attach a PDF, but then it becomes much less searchable correct.

Speaker 2 (39:42)
And you want the text to sit within the huge HTML file that Google is actually scanning to try to figure out what is relevant about this page and who needs it and what's the SEO or keyword optimization that it would apply to it. So that's like the initial win that you can get. But then long term, if you are brand, you're preparing yourself to create something that the world is looking to accept. And there's a lot of we see it on LinkedIn. We see it not so much on Facebook, maybe a little bit, but on LinkedIn, there's always an option for every image you post on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2 (40:11)
What's the alternate text of this? Because those Ada moments in their search engines, I believe, reward for that alternate text type stuff where it looks for. Are you more compliant than most? And it will bring that stuff to the surface and they'll figure it out better as well.

Speaker 3 (40:28)
Yeah. It is going to be a little bit more work, and it sounds like an inconvenience, but more and more as I'm going through social media, I am seeing where somebody is posting content and somebody is quickly coming up to be like, hey, Where's the alt text or where is this? There is a growing number of people who are feeling left out, and it's not fair. We should try and do better. That's all correct.

Speaker 2 (40:53)
And so like I said, we don't want you to stress out. We want you to think about it, and there is a lot of easy ways to get a quick win, but then you align toward the long term that maybe when you get a sponsorship to pay for the transcription so that it doesn't take if you're a brand that you could easily think of, someone that wants to help support this, and that money gets routed towards the transcription service or even saying something like transcription for this podcast are brought to you by, blah, blah blah.

Speaker 2 (41:18)
That is standard lingo and TV or different things like that. Like all that.

Speaker 3 (41:23)
Yeah. I mean, I have some clients. The transcripts used to be part of their premium offerings. I don't know if that makes sense in the world we're living in today, but it used to be that transcripts weren't even part of the accessibility factor. It was just that their particular target audience were voracious readers, and they liked to have text content in searchable databases. And so making that transcript available was a real benefit in a premium offering that people were paying handsomely to get access to for a podcast episode that was available for free.

Speaker 2 (42:00)
Well, Matthew, it is that time to wrap up this episode. We went into some great content. We talked about the news of Spotify. I don't think we're ever going to stop talking about Spotify because they're always going to be coming out with something new. And we're always going to try to figure out why is this taking so long? Just like those star ratings. Then we dived into how to deal with the holiday day break, and then we wrapped up with this transcripting area. So we got a lot of different content, but another rich episode.

Speaker 2 (42:21)
Thank you, Matthew, for joining us, and we'll be back for another episode of Podcast me. Anything. Bye.