Today on the Audience podcast, Sam Chlebowski brings you the latest episode of the Castos Creator’s Spotlight series. In this series, Sam talks with content creators (just like you) about where they came from, where they’re going, and also their tips, tricks, and advice for new podcasters.  In this episode Sam is joined by Joseph Bennecke from the Brews with the Homies podcast. In this episode, Sam and Joseph focus on building communities around podcasts and around beer. Joseph talks about how passion and friendship has fueled their podcast and how they are amassing a community around that passion. He gives tips on how to get started, how to build your audience, not to mention, a few tips on glassware as well. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at castos.com/subscribe. Today you’ll learn about: How Joseph and Brews with the Homies got started  The community around beer Drinking it fresh versus collecting your favorites How glassware and environment impact beer Jumping in and getting started with your podcast What should the format be? Enjoying the process Growth of the podcast and building the community Open lines of communication Utilizing giveaways  Marketing techniques Natural conversations versus scripted content Joseph’s recording process Resources/Links: Brews with the Homies Podcast: https://brews-with-the-homies.castos.com/  Brews with the Homies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brewswth/

Audience

Craft Beer & Conversation: The Perfect Recipe for A Podcast w/ Joseph Bennecke

On this episode of the Audience podcast, Matt talks with Arielle Nissenblatt about building a community around your podcast. There are so many great takeaways from this episode, from community engagement to building an audience, podcasting habits to monetization. Arielle lends her expertise in answering Matt’s questions about podcasting and Twitter. Arielle is a podcast expert in every sense of the word. She founded the EarBuds Podcast Collective in 2017, a podcast recommendation engine which sends a themed newsletter (including five podcast episodes centered around that theme) each week. She has also been the emcee for the Outlier Podcast Festival, attended the Salt Institute in Portland, ME for documentary studies, and has worked with podcast industry leaders to establish the Podcast Taxonomy system. The Podcast Taxonomy system aims to systematize roles for audio and podcast production. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at castos.com/subscribe. Today you’ll learn about: Mental investments to building community Where to house your community Questions to ask to establish what your audience and peers want Beta testers as community members Where is your audience most active? Getting through the overhead of customers that know nothing about podcasting Engaging and gripping content Monetization and independent creators Arielle’s podcasting and Twitter habits Resources/Links: Arielle Nissenblatt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arithisandthat?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor  Arielle Nissenblatt’s website: https://www.ariellenissenblatt.com/  Castos Academy: https://academy.castos.com/  Castos, private podcast: http

Ushering in a community for your podcast w/ Arielle Nissenblatt

On this episode of the Audience podcast, Matt talks with podcast veteran Nathan Gathright about his latest venture: Steno.FM. The podcast 2.0 movement is bringing a lot of great things to podcasters and listeners. This also means transcripts. Descript is great for podcasters who need to work on their own podcasts, but what about listeners? There are a limited number of podcasting apps that have transcript features. Enter: Steno.FM. But we’ll let Nathan talk about that. Matt and Nathan also talk about the future of podcasting, the latest in podcasting news, what’s going on with Apple, and Nathan’s tips for new podcasters. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at castos.com/subscribe. Today you’ll learn about: The story behind and development of Steno.FM Where is the podcasting industry going? Apple’s bumbling of podcasts The “Twitter Tips” feature and getting paid  Apple’s ruling and in-app purchases Steno.FM and podcast transcripts Why transcripts are so important to Nathan and why they should be important to podcasters How Steno.FM works Resources/Links: Nathan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/NathanG  The Lightning Network: https://lightning.network/  Steno.FM: https://www.steno.fm/  “Apple must allow other forms of in-app purchase, rules judge in Epic v. Apple”: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/10/22662320/epic-apple-ruling-injunction-judge-court-app-store  Twitter Tips: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/bringing-tips-to-everyone&n

Nathan Gathright of Steno.fm

In this episode Craig takes you behind the scenes with 3 Castos team members as we describe the process of the brand redesign we're launching today.  Recreating a brand, even after just a few years, is a major undertaking, but one that every brand (and yes, your podcast is a "brand") should consider.  Taking the time to properly align your mission, vision, and goals with the actual visual elements that you put out into the world goes a long way towards conveying brand consistency and trust with your fans.  Resources Mentioned In This Episode: 3 Hour Brand Sprint Castos' Tempo Style Guide Castos Originals

Behind The Scenes Of A Brand Redesign

 There aren't many more well-understood growth channels for a brand's audience than social media. But like a lot of things when it comes to growing your brand, it's often not complicated, but it's hard. Twitter in particular is a favorite for brands (and let's face it, your podcast is a 'brand' whether you've admitted it to yourself or not) to grow their reach and drive traffic back to a website. Today Craig sits down with Bridget Willard, social media management pro, and someone who has been helping the Castos team manage their Twitter presence for the last few months. The Castos team decided to invest in a dedicated person to help with social media management, and Twitter in particular, because they know that it's vital to meet your audience members wherever they want to engage with you. When it comes to podcasting we know this as listing in directories like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts. But the conversation often goes on beyond just the episode, and for a lot of podcasters the social media platform of choice is Twitter. In this episode Craig and Bridget talk through: How Bridget approaches organically and genuinely growing a brand's audience Particular tools and frameworks that you can use to grow your own social media following Why Twitter in particular is such a great platform for bringing traffic back to your website Why connection and a sense of belonging drive everything that we do when it comes to marketing our podcasts What the end goal of engagement on social media should be for us all Hope you enjoy this conversation with Bridget. To find out more about her please check her out on BridgetWillard.com 

Thriving On Twitter with Bridget Willard

On this episode of the Audience podcast, Stuart talks about a different type of podcast. While most of the Audience podcast episodes focus on podcasts and podcasters who want to glean financial value and brand awareness from their work, other podcasts originate from a group of friends hanging out.  Today, Stuart focuses on a few podcasts which have started off that way. Renee from the ConspiraTea Podcast and Gavin from the What Kind of Monster Are You Podcast share their formula for success and how their podcasts have helped their friendships evolve. This begs the question, do you and your friends have a podcast in you? If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at castos.com/subscribe. Today you’ll learn about: The effectiveness and challenge of gleaning value from podcasts The different approaches to podcasting ConspiraTea: Starting a podcast...that already existed outside of podcasts ConspiraTea’s research process and how to create a podcast that feels like a conversation How improv and podcasting with friends are similar  What Kind of Monster Are You: Turning conversations into podcasts How the podcast has helped their friendship My Brother, My Brother and Me The Fantasy Footballer’s Podcast Resources/Links: ConspiraTea Podcast: https://linktr.ee/conspirateapod  What Kind of Monster Are You: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/what-kind-of-monster-are-you-what-kind-of-AqIwdmX9YKU/  My Brother, My Brother and Me: https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/my-brother-my-brother-and-me/  The Fantasy Footba

Podcasting with Friends

On this week’s episode of the Creator’s Spotlight series, Sam talks with Chris Desmond about how to start a conversation and engage with your podcasting community. Chris’ healthcare background easily transferred into a podcasting hobby. It has since morphed even more, changing from a hobby, to a mental health tool, to a resource for the healthcare community. Sam and Chris share their advice about how to create these communities as well as tips for interviewing, making the editing process smoother and faster, and the advantages of setting up a recording schedule. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at castos.com/subscribe. Today you’ll learn about: Grounding yourself and setting up a recording schedule Chris’ tips for interviewing guests Chris’ background in healthcare and how it led to podcasting Burnout and how healthcare practitioners take care of themselves Tips for new podcasters Tips for a faster podcasting process Batching podcasting duties Balancing your time between podcasting and your personal life Tools for editing Why Chris decided to develop memberships for his podcast Advice for podcasters who have a professional community Resources/Links: The Art of Healthcare Podcast: https://the-art-of-healthcare.castos.com/  The Art of Healthcare: http://artofhealthcare.nz/  Uncomfortable is OK Podcast: https://uncomfortableisok.libsyn.com/  Mighty Networks: https://www.mightynetworks.com/  Descript: 

Starting a Conversation and Engaging Your Community with Chris Desmond

Today’s episode is all about saving time as a podcaster, especially a solo podcaster.  Running a podcast resembles running a small business more than you might have guessed...or hoped.  As small business owners, you’re responsible for wearing many hats. If you’ve ever launched a business, you quickly found out that not only are you the owner but you’re also the:  Head sales person Customer support lead Accountant Janitor Food runner And the president!  If you’re a solo podcaster, you’re responsible for:  Producing the content Creating the content Wrangling logistics like guests and recording time Audio engineer Marketer and promoter Coffee addict (sorry, that’s just me)  Lots there right? Here’s the good news...many of us who are solo podcasters are also small business owners...yay. Wait, I said good news didn’t I? That means with everything else we have going on how the heck are we going to produce a successful podcast with the limited time that we have? I’ll reveal some of the helpful tools, apps, and theories I’ve leveraged over my career as a podcaster.  By the end of this episode, hopefully you can take a few nuggets of this wisdom away with you.  Hey, by the way, if you’re looking for a great place to start your podcast or maybe you’re bored with your old podcast host -- look no further than Castos.com! That’s us, that’s who makes this podcast. We’re building a platform for the podcaster like you, who desire something clean, fast, and powerful for all of your podcast needs. Want to start a podcast network? Check! How about connecting up to your WordPress marketing website? Done! Sell private podcasts or members-only content? You bet!  Learn more about Castos at castos.com or drop us an email hello@castos.com, tell them you heard it here, on the Audience podcast.  Start with the mindset Please don’t skip past this section, I know you might have rolled your eyes a bit, but I think this is important -- especially if you’re a new podcaster. Getting in the right mindset sets the foundation to managing your time as a busy podcaster.  Tip #1: What’s your goal? We need something to measure, something that gives you feedback that reassures you’re headed down the right path.  I don’t care what it is. It could be downloads, retweets, email subscribers, ad revenue -- give yourself something to aim for, which will help you build processes in the future to save time and become more efficient.  P.s. if you’re brand brand brand new, with no goals, I always love to point to growing an email list first. Jump on something like Mailchimp.com to make that process easy.  Tip #2: Develop the plan I’m a terrible planner. Maybe like you, my super power is just diving into a creative project and...creating.  Starting something new is exhilarating and a chance to show the world something new you’re capable of. Until 3 months from the starting line you’re just clicking the dozens of open tabs in your browser thinking of something new to do.  Have some structure heading into the show like: Define a solid show premise to keep you on track Outline guests or topics ahead of time What’s your go-to market strategy When will you measure and reflect on the goals you set Plans can be complete plans like outlining seasons OR having plans for each episode. I built a career on podcasting not having plans for shows and guest

10 Ways to save time as a busy podcaster

Today’s episode is all about new podcast apps + podcast 2.0.  It’s a big topic, and a bleeding edge one for most of us, suffice to say this one episode wouldn’t do the whole of it justice. However, if there’s one thing I leave you with, it’s that you’re encouraged, as podcast creators, to go out and explore.  If you’ve been hearing more and more about this from other shows you listen to but are still left scratching your head, well, allow me to illustrate it for you.  To do that, lets start with a quote from friend of the show Evo Terra: “Apple Podcasts has been fumbling the ball since April of 2021. Treat their non-stop stumbling as a gift. Anchor/Spotify is now making RSS feeds optional for all new podcasters that join their platform. Again, take that as a gift. They’re distracted. They’re doing their own things which may not align with the larger podcasting ecosystem. It’s up to you, to me, and to and the companies we pay to host our podcasting content to take advantage of these gifts and push podcasting to the next level. Podcasting 2.0, even. As I’ve said for years on this program, please spread this idea with other podcasters and get them as excited about the future as you are. “ The podcast industry’s perfect storm “Treat their (Apple’s) non-stop stumbling as a gift.” That’s a thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  Let’s face it, Apple’s backing of podcasting in the early days helped make podcasting more mainstream. Lots of us wouldn’t have jobs if _Steve Jobs_ didn’t take the stage showcasing the pod fathers first show. Watch Steve Jobs demo podcasting in iTunes for the first time  But the Trillion dollar brand has meandered along the last decade barely giving us a working portal to submit our shows, let alone advance the industry. A feeling which has compounded during their updates to the platform earlier in the year where podcasters were left scratching their heads:  “Where is my show?”  “Why are my episodes disappearing?”  “Why can’t I submit a new podcast?”  Questions which still don’t have answers.  I know this because I see our support desk at Castos, and Apple’s lack of effort with transparency costs us time, money, and in some c

Podcast 2.0 apps + your new call to action

In the last episode we talked about Tom Webster's approach to using YouTube for growing your podcast. A quick recap of that is: Use Youtube because it's a powerful search tool for topic heavy podcast episodes. Make your show more shareable; leverage something other than audio to do that. After shipping that episode, I felt like, while it was great I said we should be considering video -- I didn't really get into how you could that for your show. More specifically, if you're already neck deep in producing your weekly audio show, how the heck are you going to find time to do video. I think for a lot of us, and I'm guilty for encouraging this, the "just ship it" method is great. Grab your phone, grab your earbuds, start recording and get your content out there. Once you can start to measure your shows success, that's when many us start investing in better audio tools. Wether that's an upgrade to your microphone or spending $300+ on Hindenburg or a Descript subscription. Both tools, by the way, I cover on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/castos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U_g8a9aNFA Where am I going with this? The novice audio creator, you and me, find ourselves tasked with creating better audio and better shows as time marches on and suddenly Edison research data says…hey, do video too! It's a big lift. So what can we do, the solo creator, do to help make this whole video thing easier and why? Back to the Why for a second… Aside form the quick key points mentioned earlier, I think it's healthy to make your why all about the audience. Why do we want to augment audio with video? To make the experience better for the listener, give them content in a different context, and build a deeper connection. The second why is to give your podcast the opportunity to punch into the best moments of each show and get that out into the world -- in video. If you ran up to someone on the sidewalk and said "hey listen to this 45 minute long audio episode" they'd probably laugh at you. That's what it's like dumping your episode on to social media. But a 30 second video or audiogram clip? Much better chances. So what type of video is the best for podcasters, at least in the year 2021. Audiograms Audiograms are probably the most commonly used video clip you can produce for your podcast. You've seen them before, they generally display your show's cover art and an animated waveform as the video plays. There are a lot of tools available to create audiograms, a very popular tool called Headliner will make your job easy. Bonus for Castos customers, if you're on our Pro plan and above, you have access to this for free. Descript another one of Castos integration partners also creates audiograms in their software. Video clips with subtitles If you're looking for more full-length synergy between your podcast and YouTube channel, i.e. everything in your video is engaging to share, adding subtitles to your video clips works great too. Lots of tools can help you generate an SRT file -- a file that houses a timestamped closed caption -- and add it to your video clip export. I'll recommend Descript again because it kills two birds with one stone: the transcript and the video edit. Combine the best of both worlds If you spend any time in the marketing or business world, chances are you've come acros

Thoughts on using video to grow your podcast

Matt is back from vacation. On this episode of the Audience podcast, he tackles the subject of growing an audience in the most tactful way possible. Matt offers tips and advice based on statistics, his own expertise on podcasting, and through the lens of his unique perspective from being in the industry for so long. Even after the biggest year in podcasting, the classic word-of-mouth marketing techniques are still best. Listen in to find out how to utilize it best in 2021, for your podcast. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at castos.com/subscribe. Today you’ll learn about: Word of mouth is still best Places to find podcasts: Podcast Index Podchaser Give people a reason to listen to the show How to tactfully and effectively ask people to share your show The importance of and how to build a community How to build an email list Are QR codes the key? How to use YouTube to your advantage Resources/Links: Podcast Index: https://podcastindex.org/  Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/  Tom Webster’s Keynote: http://www.insideradio.com/podcastnewsdaily/to-be-discovered-edison-s-tom-webster-says-podcasters-need-to-reach-into-new-places/article_c8b7e27a-f60c-11eb-8ed0-7fab7c703dd4.html   Castos Academy: https://academy.castos.com/  Castos, p

Growing through word of mouth

On this episode of the Audience podcast, Stuart talks about creating podcasts and episodes with narratives. Narrative podcasts have their own format and their own style but are not limiting within the narrative format. Stuart explains what makes a narrative podcast different from an interview podcasts and how to craft one well. He also goes over best practices, the pros and cons, and how a narrative podcast can make you stand out in the sea of podcasts out on the internet right now. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at castos.com/subscribe. Today you’ll learn about: The art of creating a narrative Interview versus narratives The pros of narratives versus interview formats How to craft a narrative Examples of podcasts with great narrative formats Understanding your topic  Cold opening versus a welcome section Creating a limited series versus a biweekly or monthly schedule Series outlines The Bow and Arrow analogy Resources/Links: ObscureBall  Descript: https://www.descript.com/  Castos Academy: https://academy.castos.com/  Castos, private podcast: http://academy.castos.com/private/  Castos, website: Castos.com/ Castos, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/castos   Clubhouse video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8729ZpWpmIw

Crafting a Narrative Podcast

Our quest to put the best podcast growth strategies to the test. An honest, unfiltered, and realtime view inside one brand&#39;s journey to growing an impactful podcast

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Audience

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