I had the opportunity to go to Pod Fest 2020 in beautiful Orlando, Florida. It was awesome, a ton of networking, a ton of great panels I met a ton of cool podcasters and I wanted to make you a video of the top five things I learned about the podcasting industry and bring them back to you, just in case you didn't get to go to pod fest
Here are the top five things I learned at Pod Fest 2020.
#1 Is it too late to start in 2020?
There are 650 million blogs being posted online right now and there are only 900,000 podcasts out in 2020, but it gets better than that. Only 226,000 have published an episode in the last 90 days. So if you think it's too late to start a podcast or podcasting is saturated, you're totally wrong. Apple podcasts gets 90 million active listeners, every month. So if you think about ways to reach 90 million people, and the competition of only having 226,000 active podcasts, your odds are really great for reaching a wide audience, very quickly.
#2 Podcast length.
Everyone always asks, How long should my podcast be. And the truth of the matter is, is there's no real answer, but I got to watch an amazing panel by Rob from Libsyn where he took all the podcasts that are published and did some mathematical averaging and found out that the top podcasts, typically average at about 67 minutes in an episode. So does that mean you need to do a 67 minute episode. No, but what it means is if you're afraid to do longer form podcasting, you shouldn't be afraid off, just remember that you want to be educating and entertaining as much as you can. So don't make a podcast 67 minutes just to do it. Just make sure that you're not afraid to do longer form podcast episodes. If you're doing a shorter podcast on purpose.
#3 It's okay to not monetize your podcast.
That's right. It's okay to not have ads on your podcast. And there's a really good reason why. If you're looking to put ads and make money from your podcast, and you do it too soon you will end up making pennies on the dollar podcasting. Currently podcasting pays a $7 CPM rate for advertising. If you're advertising on a podcast with less than 100 downloads per episode, you're basically making pennies per episode. Now, you're much better off doing an affiliate program or potentially, creating a product or service that you can advertise while you're growing, and the magic number that advertisers are looking for currently is about 5,000 downloads per episode, so don't worry if you're not there yet, you will get there! Remain consistent, don't give up. 5000 is the magic number per episode that advertisers are generally looking for for partnerships.
#4 How many episodes to launch with?
Rob from Libsyn shared some stats about trends in the ideal amount of episodes to launch with. He found that podcasts that launched with a single episode did way better than podcast at launch with five to ten episodes. You may have heard in a course or on a blog that you need to launch with multiple episodes and there is some value to launching with a few episodes initially, but they found that by launching with one episode, you give your audience a chance to give you feedback and be a part of your growth, your audience wants to be a part of you growing and becoming the biggest podcaster around. So by launching a 10 episodes, you're just basically saying to your audience: “I don't want your feedback, I already know what I'm doing.” If you launch with one episode, you can get your audience's feedback and adapt to what they're looking for. And who knows, they might even give you a really great idea or a really cool concept for your next episode!
#5 The fastest way to grow
We all want to know the new magic bullet on how to grow our audience and how to reach more listeners, and all the panels that are into this question came up, and there was a resounding single answer. the fastest way to grow your podcast is to be on other podcasts. So we may think. “hey I've got a podcast I don't want to be a guest on someone else's podcast”, but there's a couple things that happen First you're networking, and you're leveraging somebody else's audience, and making your presence known that you're an awesome podcaster, The network grows, and you will be connected through other people to be guests on other podcasts and of course have them on your podcast so if you're looking to grow in 2020. The number one response from Pod Fest 2020 was to be on as many podcasts, as you can if you want to grow your audience.
Those were my top five takeaways from Pod Fest 2020. I learned a ton of other things that I can't cram into this short video, I got to meet a bunch of new people and I met some online friends in real life, it was a really great time so I can't wait to see Pod Fest 2021 I'm excited to go back and do it all again.
Let me know in the comments what was your favorite tip of the five. Which one will you apply immediately to grow your podcast?