Growing Your Podcast On YouTube

Today on the podcast I’m going to talk to you about YouTube.

I know - you’re probably sitting there thinking, “but I’m already doing ALL the things”.

Before you think I’m just adding another thing to your list, let me run you through the numbers.

YouTube is now the third biggest way in the US that people listen to podcasts. In Australia, YouTube is number one! Very, very closely followed by Spotify and Apple. Honestly - if you feel that your target market is on YouTube, you have to get onboard with it.

In this episode I run through some easy ways you can work out if your target market is on YouTube and, if they are, the reasons why being there could be really helpful for organic growth.

Importantly, you don’t need to have a video recorded. At the very least you can have episode artwork and, in really excellent news, YouTube no longer penalizes static images. I share lots of creative options you can use to get around not needing to have a fancy video recorded.

I also talk about the ways you can be onboard and engage with YouTube that doesn’t require a bunch of time, but still enables you to build a slow growing presence.

Slow growth. This is key - don’t jump onto YouTube and expect an explosion in growth. And even more importantly, don’t use it as a vanity metric. The focus is not on the number of views, but on getting your material up there and allowing people that want to find you, find you. The point is for it to sit there and slowly grow.

So - think about YouTube, think about the ways you can use it to your advantage, and if you’d like some help with it, get in touch with us here at Bamby Media.

And for a more in depth look at a bunch of growth topics, then take a look at my monthly masterclasses on our Pod Lovers+, which you can join from within our Pod Lovers free community.

Resources:

Article mentioned in this episode

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Transcript:

00:00
Welcome to Pump Up Your Pod what is going on everybody, I hope you've been having just such a wonderful week, we have been training new staff here at Bamby Media. And it's been great. It's been really, really good to get to know some new people and get them trained up, get the internet sorted, make sure it's all flowing and wonderful. And most of my week has been reviewing and quality checking the staff what they're doing and making sure that everything is right, so that we still submit the work to the level that we normally do. So yeah, it's a little bit slower for me, but it's the kind of thing I love doing. I've been really enjoying it.

Today on the podcast, I'm going to be talking to you all about YouTube. And I know I've spoken about YouTube on the podcast before I've touched on it. As far as video, podcasting is a thing that you need to think about. And I want to go into it in a little bit more detail today. It's one of these things that if you have a podcast already, you're probably sitting there thinking, Oh, she's gonna tell me that I have to do more things, isn't she? And I'm already doing all the things. So when am I supposed to do that? YouTube is now the third biggest way in the US that people listen to podcasts. In Australia. YouTube is number one, very, very, very closely, followed by Spotify, and Apple. So you've got three front runners now, where there used to be Spotify and Apple kind of, you know, kicking each other in the face and trying to get to the top spot, YouTube is there. And it just silently creeps in there, just Hey, guys, nothing to see him. Don't even worry about it, bam. And it's there.

You have to get on board with this. And you have to do something about it. If you feel that your community that your network that the target market that the audience that you're trying to chase is on YouTube. And this is something that you can probably do a little bit of market research for yourself. So if you have a different social media platform that you engage with regularly, let's say for example, you're on Instagram, you could do a Instagram poll on your stories. And you could ask a question or something like that and say, How much time do you spend on YouTube? Put a few different answer options in there. And that could gauge for you how engaged your particular listenership is with YouTube as a platform outside of Instagram. Because they could be connecting with you on socials on Instagram, but not listen to your podcast, but they might be on YouTube. And you're just missing that whole area.

There is a massive amount of people that use YouTube as like a listening device as well. So they're not even watching it. They just have it open as a tab. And they put it on clicking on something that they want to listen to or watch. But mostly they're listening, let's say that say it's their work day or something, and they've got YouTube on, they just have stuff going and playing while they're working on something else. In fact, my little brother, I remember he used to do that all the time, he would be, I believe listening to other people play video games, he wouldn't even be really watching them a lot of the time he'd be doing something else. And listening to them talk about games. Lots of people do this. It's definitely more men than it is women. As far as the skew of people that even just use YouTube, you've got a higher proportion of men that are using YouTube and engaging with that on a daily basis. But there is a lot of females in there too, that you're just missing out on depending on who you're trying to chase. And if you're trying to get a whole new target. If you're trying to get organic reach to someone that has never known about you before and you use your keywords correctly. You've got good titles, and you have a presence on YouTube, then they will find you if you're updating regularly on YouTube, if you're going in there every now and again and you're commenting on things. you've subscribed to some stuff, and you have decent titles. You've got, you know, a bit of work going into your episodes on YouTube, they can get found. YouTube is a very slow growing machine as you would imagine because it's huge. Like it's like a needle in a haystack sometimes to be able to find things and when you first start a channel on YouTube, you'll be like, Oh my God, I've got like no subscribers.

04:48
I've got like, five views on my videos. What is the point? The point is for it to sit there and grow and just be available for people. The more you do it, the better you get at it. And the bigger the presence, you will gain. There's lots of things that you can learn from YouTubers, if you go in, you know, research how to grow on YouTube, there's a whole bunch of things and tactics that you can use, it doesn't have to be something that grows really fast, it just needs to be that you have a presence there.

Bamby Media has been very slowly getting our YouTube presence happening as well. I just upload stuff there, I don't expect anything from it, other than for it to sit there and grow quietly. And I just keep doing it and posting it knowing that there are people that are engaging with it, that wouldn't be engaging with it at all, if it wasn't there. So it's important for you to think about that. And put a little bit of time in if you're one of our clients, or even if you're not one of our clients, and you don't feel like you can handle this yourself, then certainly reach out because on all of our packages that we have, there is an option to include a YouTube video upload and you know, to put the show notes and chapter markers in there, put the transcript in there, do a little bit of work on YouTube, make your headers good and all those sorts of things, create a presents for you, and then update that for every episode that you have of your podcast, we'll do a YouTube version as well.

Now as I talk about that, there are actually a few ways that you can upload to YouTube and use YouTube. That means that you don't have to always record a video version of your show. YouTube used to hate it when you would just have like an image of your show, and then just have the audio running. You know, like there was nothing to engage with it was just like a static image. And then the podcast would just play. YouTube used to hate that. But they have openly said just recently, in a release that they did, they said this is okay. Now, they will not going to penalise you for doing that. So at the very least you could have some episode artwork that is in the widescreen format, and then just have the audio baked into it. And you could have that as your presence, you'd have a playlist that is just your podcast, and you could have all your episodes there. And in fact, Bamby Media is going to go back and do that for ourselves. For all the episodes, we have that video episodes, we're going to go back and fill those in

There are other ways that you can engage and upload to YouTube and actually make a presence on there. So you could also think about whether you want to use it and have a full episode on there. And whether you want to have video that goes with it. So you want to record your podcast episodes, if they're guest episodes are you going to use Riverside FM, and then maybe just put that up, don't do anything fancy just have like a templated thing that Riverside sets in and then you just upload that you could do that. You could make it more fancy and have all the production value and the lighting and all those sorts of things, that's going to cost you more money, it's going to take more time and those sorts of things. But the payoff for those sorts of videos is way bigger. But it doesn't have to be that. Or you could shoot in the widescreen format on your phone, or you could shoot in the portrait style on your phone and then have the sides sort of blanked out if you have a look, I'll share one of my YouTube videos just so that you can see when I've done that just because I needed to create reels and do repurposing much quicker. And I didn't have the space to make a widescreen shot look good. So I just did it in a portrait style. And then Alex here at Bamby Media just put some sides on it and made it look, you know, kind of on purpose so that there was a video version, and just playing with that. So there's those sorts of things.

There's also as I said, the audit it just the static image with the audio going through the back of it, you could also make just an audiogram happen for the whole thing as well. If you don't want to do a full episode, you could also just use shorts, the YouTube shorts function, and just have a snippet of your episode that is under a minute long. And that's all you share to YouTube. But you still have a presence there and you have a short for every episode.

So there are ways to do it that don't require you to invest a whole bunch of extra time, but mean that you can get your stuff on there, so that you can start to build a presence there that you don't already have, like anything that you do in podcasting, you are probably most likely not going to explode and get a crapload of downloads really quickly if you don't have a big presence anywhere else. But it's okay. Because all you're doing with your show is trying to create a bigger community, engage with people in a new way. You're going to convince people that were on the fence about you to engage with you because they are learning from you they find you interesting because your content is cool, because they liked the way you look, they liked the way they use sound. You know, there's just so many reasons why podcasting is great. No matter the amount of downloads you get, no matter the amount of views you get on YouTube, don't use these things as a vanity metric for yourself to go, oh, I have to get this amount of views, or everyone's going to look at my channel and think I'm really crap. Who the flip cares? No one, no one cares about that at all. And if they do, then they're not the other audience that you're chasing anyway, all that you should be concerned with is putting that stuff up there. And allowing people that want to find you to find you, giving them a reason, giving them an option, giving them an opportunity to actually engage with you because you are there.

Think about YouTube. Think about the ways that you can use YouTube to your advantage. Get in touch with us here at Bamby media.com. If you need help doing that, if you're a podcast client of ours already, obviously, it's easier because we are already doing other things for you. But if you're not a podcasting client, it doesn't mean we can't have a conversation about how that can work for you.

If you want more in depth looks at these kinds of things where I go into this stuff, curated information, and I do master classes on a bunch of growth topics. I would consider joining the pod lovers plus group, which is in our pod lovers free community you can join from within there. And every month I run a masterclass that I pop in there and then we can go into it in further detail within the actual group there as well. So think about that, if that's something that you really want to start learning more about and engaging in a higher level with me about stuff that would help you grow your show. And I'll leave a link to how to do that here in the episode description. Have a good day everybody and I will chat to you again really soon.