How Long Should Your Podcast Be? (and where to find the answer)
School of Podcasting: Expert Tips for Launching and Growing Your Podcast
Limitations of completion data and anomalies
Dave warns about one-off behaviors (e.g., dentist visits) and missing Apple stats, urging patience for data.
Nobody shares a video they didn't watch. Nobody shares a podcast they didn't listen to, so how do we get people to listen? This week we follow up form last week's episode about measuring success without downloads and today I talk about completion percentage in Apple, Spotify, as well as Google Analytics. Josh Liston explains how he and his co-host from the SAKÉ THIS show.
How Long Should My Podcast Be?
The stand ard answer is "as long as it needs to be an not a minute longer." However, another way of looking at this is to ask, "How long can you hold someone's attention?"
You Can See How Far People Listen to Your Show
The Apple Dashboard: https://podcastsconnect.apple.com
The Spotify Dashboard: https://creators.spotify.com
Question of the Month Audio Tools
Last week I had a ton of replies to the Question of the Month. The issue is some of you have a ton of bass. Some of you are so clear it's almost shrill. Other have lots of background noise. This use to take me FOREVER to deal with until I started using tools from Accentize. I use a tool called DXRevive Pro cleans up the audio. Their Dialogue Enhance helps adjust the tone and remove noise. Then they have a free plugin called DXLevel that adjusts the volume levels (and it's free).
Takeaways:
- How Dave thinks about episode length (and why “as long as it needs to be” actually works in practice)
- How to use Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Podcasters to measure completion percentage and attention, not just downloads
- Why video and YouTube completion rates look so much worse than audio—and how not to let that crush your ego
- How to use Google Analytics or Fathom to see which episodes and pages really resonate
- A behind-the-scenes look at the audio tools Dave uses (Accentize DX Revive, Dialog Enhance, and the free DX Level plugin) to make listener submissions sound more consistent
- An update on the “free version” experiment of the School of Podcasting and why future focus is shifting to live cohort-style classes
Dave also shares a listener contribution from Josh Liston of the SAKÉ THIS podcast, with two non-download ways he measures success for his Japan-focused comedy show.
Mentioned in this episode:
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Question of the Month: What is a "Newbie Podcaster"
Poll Question: What makes someone a “newbie podcaster”? Is it how long they’ve been podcasting or how many episodes they’ve published? Is it something else? How would you define a newbie podcaster? Leave your answer at schoolofpodcasting.com/question by November 27th and don't forget to mention your show and your website address so I can link to it in the show notes. (Please try to keep them under 5 minutes if you can).
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