As an award-winning podcaster, Daniel J. Lewis helps others launch and improve their own podcasts for sharing their passions and finding success. Daniel creates training resources and podcasting tools (like My Podcast Reviews); offers one-on-one consulting; is a keynote speaker on podcasting and social media; and Daniel hosts a network of award-nominated shows covering how to podcast, clean-comedy, and the #1 unofficial podcast for ABC’s hit drama Once Upon a Time.

In this knowledge rich interview, Daniel will share with us:

• 2:18 – How he got started in the podcasting business.
• 6:52 – How to use podcasting as a leverage to grow your business.
• 9:04 – The benefits of launching a podcast.
• 11:32 – How to choose a topic for your podcast – should you go for broad or niche?
• 21.25 – What can you do to inspire your audience to take action and subscribe to your podcast.
• 22:23 – Where to place your “calls to action” in every episode.
• 24:52 – Some tips and strategies to promote your podcast and increase downloads.
• 30:54 – Should a podcaster obsess on hitting a target of 1 million downloads?
• 34:18 – Points to consider if you should relaunch or rebrand your podcast
• 37:26 – His opinions on the already saturated podcasting industry and how can one still make a profit out if it.

“Don’t try to be perfect; just launch” – @theRamenNoodle
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Download the Audio Master Class

In Daniel’s masterclass which can be downloaded in the show notes at entrepreneursforachange.com/55, Daniel will be teaching us valuable knowledge on ways to monetize your podcast.

In this educative session, you will learn:

• 0:49 – How to cut down the cost of podcast production to save money.
• 2:31 – An easy tip to decrease an audio’s file size without compromising its quality.
• 6:01 – How to prepare good quality content for your show notes.
• 10:28 – Ways to monetize your podcast, in direct and indirect ways.
• 18:27 – Should you or should you not have podcast guests sign immediate release agreements?
• 19:34 – How you can re-purpose podcast content into information products that you can sell.
• 22:18 – Tools that can be used to promote or syndicate your podcast.
• 25:18 – Daniel’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs who wants to venture into the world of podcasting.

Mentioned in this interview

• Noodle.mx
• The Ramen Noodle Clean Comedy
• Once Upon a Time Unofficial Podcast
• The Audacity to Podcast
• MyPodcastReviews.com
• Social Subscribe & Follow Icons plugin for WordPress
• This Week in Tech
• The Ultimate Podcast Guide – John Lee Dumas
• Tropical MBA

Where to Find Daniel

• Visit Daniel’s Website
• Daniel’s Personal Blog
• Daniel’s Facebook Page
• Follow Daniel on Twitter
• Check out Daniel on Google+

Full Episode Transcript

0:56 Lorna:  Hello, amazing Changemakers.  I’m here today very, very excited to bring to you my guest, Daniel J. Lewis, who has been a bit of a mentor to me in my journey in podcasting.  Daniel is an award-winning podcaster and he helps others launch and improve their own podcasts as well as to share their passions and find success through podcasting.

1:23  He’s created a number of training resources and podcasting tools.  He also offers one-on-one consulting as well as speaks about podcasting, social media, and WordPress.  Daniel has hosted a network of award-nominated shows at Noodle.mx covering how to podcast as well as clean comedy, and the number one and unofficial podcast for ABC’s hit drama Once Upon A Time.

1:48  So in my journey of podcasting, Daniel’s blog which is chock-full of fantastic information has really helped guide me through this process.  He’s also been really helpful to me answering my late night tweets in pretty good time.  So thank you so much Daniel for all your help.  I’d love to ask you, how you got started with your podcasting business and who exactly do you work with?

2:18  Daniel:   Thank you, Lorna.  Well, I work with anyone who wants to get podcasting as part of their hobby or as part of their success and however they define that.  When I started podcasting, I didn’t have ideas of grandeur or making a business of this.  It really started with when Apple released iTunes 4.9 in 2005 and that was the version where they added the podcast feature into it.

2:43   I heard my boss at the organization where I worked at that time told me that I could find content and listen to it for free.  I thought “Well that sounds cool,” so I looked up technology and I found This Week In Tech and a couple of other podcasts and listened to them.  I realized that I could do this.  I know how to edit audio.  I know how to create WordPress websites.  I kind of know how to work with an RSS feed.  I’m familiar with some audio, microphone techniques and such.

3:15  I saw a model of how I could do my clean comedy, which was on my original podcast the Ramen Noodle Clean Comedy which I still host today.  I saw a model for how I could do that and I started that then in 2007 but it took me two years to release nine full episodes because I was trying to be a perfectionist.  So I didn’t really start taking podcasting seriously until 2009.

3:38  Lorna:   I understand how that can be.  When I first got started podcasting, I tried to do everything myself and it took me about a year and a half until I actually finally launched my podcast.  So, yes.  There can be a lot of technical details and nuances to understanding how to podcast successfully which I’m excited to talk to you about today.  So let me just kind of rewind a little bit.  When you started getting into podcasting, you actually had a job and it’s now what you do as consultant for podcasting.  Is that your full time job?  How does it work?

4:19 Daniel:  Right.  I was working full time back then as a designer.  I fulfilled many different design roles within a single organization – presentation, web design, print design and such.  I started the podcast while I was there.  Eventually, after I’ve accomplished every goal I had in that organization even the goals that seemed impossible to accomplish, I was kind of in this limbo area where I didn’t have any other goals within the company, didn’t know where else I could go, wasn’t sure what to do, was kind of suffering from some burn out here and there.

4:51    Around that time is when a couple of things happen.  One, I was engaged to my now wife, Jenny, and I also launched The Audacity to Podcast, which is the show I now host that teaches people how to launch and improve their own podcast.  That was in 2010.  Around that time, I was talking with my fiancé and she challenged how about I set a goal that one year from then, I would be completely full time self-employed.

5:20   I thought that’s great.  I’ll go ahead and set that goal.  But I didn’t know how I would actually reach that goal.  That’s when I launched The Audacity to Podcast just feeling like I have something to say about the podcasting industry.  I have experienced to bring that others aren’t bringing.  But when I saw the success that it was receiving in the number of people contacting me asking to hire me for my help to get them into podcasting, I realized this is that missing piece where I could start my business which back then I was thinking a web design business.

5:53   I would start that design business and be able to promote it through my podcast through other podcasters.  That’s how then I did launch one year later full time self employed in June 2011 and it’s been growing and changing ever since then.

6:12 Lorna:   Wow, fantastic.  So podcasting actually created a whole new business and career for you so that’s very, very exciting to know.  Now, I’d love to find out since there’s been a real explosion around podcasting, how can podcasting actually help a person grow their business?  So I can understand that you’ve taken your expertise with podcasting and now you teach others how to podcast.  But let’s say if you took another aspiring entrepreneur who had an interest in a particular area but didn’t want to teach about podcasting, how could they leverage podcasting and grew their business?

6:52 Daniel:  Well, you have to look at what is relevant.  So if you are trying to build a business around video games and your podcast is about basket weaving, it’s not going to connect very well.  They’re not relevant to each other.  So you have to come up with something that is relevant and that you are passionate enough to talk about even when no one is listening because when you start your podcast, nobody is listening.  We all start with a zero audience members.

7:16   So turning it into a business all depends on how you want to approach this content creation.  The amazing thing about podcasting is that it gives you an opportunity to establish yourself as an authority in the space.  If you have a blog – yes you can establish yourself as an authority that way – but having a blog is a less personal interaction with an audience.  People could be coming, reading; they don’t hear your actual voice.  They don’t see your face and your blog post could be heavily edited.

7:50  You can edit them to the point that they are worded perfectly and beautifully, Pulitzer Prize winning blog post.  But in a podcast or it’s either audio or video, people are hearing and seeing you use your actual voice, your real words.  While you can do some editing – especially in audio, you can do some editing to cover up certain mistakes like saying uhm too much or you trailed off and you want to edit out a certain section.

8:18  The main thing that people are getting is they can see how well you understand the information, how passionately you present it, and how clearly you can communicate that information which shows your expertise much more than just writing.  So people began to know, like and trust you because of the information you’re freely giving out and giving out really professionally really well.

8:43  So that then when you have a business behind your podcast – It could be a product, a service, consulting, affiliates, podcast, and sponsorships.  There are many different ways to make money with a podcast.  But when you pursue these things, then people will take action on them because they know, like and trust you.

9:00 Lorna:  Daniel, why launch a podcast?  What are the benefits?

9:04 Daniel:   Well, you’re establishing yourself as an authority.  When you present the information and communicate it very clearly, in a way that’s more passionate than just writing information.  But also, having a podcast gives your audience or potential audience a new way of consuming your content.  There are many great podcasters out there who have also been writers and bloggers, but they’ve said things like they’ve received more of their audience because of their podcast than because of their blog.

9:36    People can relate with the podcast much more.  They can consume it much more easily.  Like I listen to podcast while I’m working, while I’m mowing the yard, while I’m driving and these are all audio podcast.

9:48    I can’t read a book or read a blog post in all of those cases.  Many people will also be listening to our podcast while they are working in their dead-end job, absolutely hating their day.  But your podcast could be the bright spot in their day that they look forward to that day that you release an episode so that they can consume your content.  So you’re building stronger relationships with people because they are carrying your voice with them wherever they go, sometimes where no other human can go.

10:17 Lorna: Definitely.  I have to agree there were many moments where I would listen to the The Tropical MBA podcast from my cube, from my corporate job and it just gave me the will to live so I totally hear you on that.

10:32  So let’s say we have an aspiring podcaster, how do you go about choosing the topic to podcast about?  For example, when we see someone who is a podcasting phenomenon like John Lee Dumas and he just basically came out of left field produced of single podcast everyday about entrepreneurship.

10:56   He amassed a huge audience. He produced a lot of content but entrepreneurship is really broad and yet somehow that worked really well for him.  Not all of us can come and become podcast machines like he was but at the same time, I think the difficult thing to know is how broad of a topic do you cover or how much do you niche down to cover the interest of a specific demographic?  What are your thoughts on that?  Broad or niche?

11:32 Daniel:  There are two sides to it.  The broad side is getting very congested in the podcasting space.  If you just have a general technology show, you’re going to be up against competition like This Week In Tech and so many other very broad, very big podcast.  So the broader you are, the bigger the competition is and the harder you’ll have growing an audience for that.

11:58   If you grow an audience, you’ll have a harder time getting them to take to action on things.  So if you have an audience of 20,000 people, maybe only 100 of those people would actually take action on something.  It’s like the billboard approach where thousands of people are driving by the billboard, very few of them actually care enough to take action on what they see from that billboard.

12:20  So when you are picking a niche, try to focus in more on that niche.  Instead of just the technology show, maybe focus on a particular kind of technology like home technology or entertainment technology or health technology or video gaming technology or niche down even further like if you have a video game podcast, you could talk specifically about fantasy games on the Xbox One and that’d be your specific niche.

12:51   When you niche down like that, you build a much more passionate following that also takes action more when you give relevant calls to action within your content.  That would be the kind of stuff that actually makes you money like getting a sponsor.  If it’s a relevant sponsor, you get your audience to go visit their sponsor try their product or you create a product or service yourself that appeals to this niche audience.  So you have actually a better success with a niche audience even though you’ll probably have smaller numbers.

13:26 Lorna:  What about if you’re dealing with a particular audience demographic that has specific interest that could easily be split off into different podcast?  For example, I have this desire to launch a new podcast that’s oriented towards a demographic of people that really enjoy going to Burning Man.  So you’ve got interest in mind expansion and brain and body hacking.  Then you’ve got an interest in alternative lifestyles and relationships and an interest in sustainability and technology.

14:02  I’m trying to figure out does that end up being three podcasts or could it be under the banner of one?  What are your thoughts on that?  I mean demographics are harder to nail down rather than just like one specific product type like fantasy Xbox games, for example.

14:21 Daniel:  Right.  You really need to know your audience and know whether it would fit better for you to split these things off into separate sites and separate podcasts.  For example, we have the podcast about a TV show Once Upon A Time.  The channel, ABC, did a spin off series that was a short run spin off series called Once Upon A Time in Wonderland.  We knew all of our audience would probably be interested in that spin off but we also knew that not all of our audience would actually watch the spin off.

14:52  So what we did is we would regularly cross promote our other podcast, but we created an additional podcast to appeal to the same audience because the content was relevant enough and connected enough.  We did host it on the same website just under different categories.  But if you have more broad separate interests, then it might serve you better to create completely separate podcasts.  That way you can optimize each of those podcast for specifically that content that you want to share and not trying to blend everything together and be the ultimate podcast but you have the separate niche podcast, and then you can have crossover.

15:35  By having more podcasts, you also have more opportunities for creating niche products and services or getting niche sponsors for each of those and having in a way multiple streams of income, diversifying your talents and your content and your expertise.

15:52 Lorna:  Wow.  So I’m really excited about the monetization conversation that we’re going to have during our master class which you can get from the show notes.  Going back to the idea of creating multiple or different podcast but hosted on the same sites.  With your scenario with Once Upon A Time, you have a spin off and you have your original podcast.  They’re both just separate podcast but different categories on the same website?

16:23 Daniel:  Right.  So that way it’s reaching the same audience and it makes perfect sense that way because this two TV shows are designed for the same audience.  But if I have completely separate topics like I have The Audacity to Podcast which is about podcasting, and The Ramen Noodle which is a clean comedy podcast, they make better sense to be on completely separate sites so that way I can do the search engine optimization for each site.  I can do the marketing for each site, the branding, the style, the content.  Everything there fits with each particular site.

17:00   With my Once Upon A Time in Wonderland example though, there’s so much crossover that they did fit best on the same site but separate podcasts.

17:10 Lorna:  That’s very, very good advice.  Thank you.  Once you have your topic, I know there’s a lot of obsession with trying to hit a new and noteworthy list.  So do you have strategies that you recommend?  Let’s say you’re just starting off and you don’t have a website that already gets a lot of traffic.  You don’t have an e-mail list.  Does that person have any chance at all in being able to hit new and noteworthy when they’re just starting off from scratch?

17:42 Daniel:   Definitely.  You have a chance because we all start from zero but first think about do you really need or want to be New and Noteworthy?  It is a nice boost – one thing that you need to understand is that New and Noteworthy is actually two lists combined.  One is a list of new podcast and the other is noteworthy podcast.  I’ve been in New and Noteworthy twice before with old podcast.

18:10  Yes, each time I see a nice little bump.  But when you first start out, you’ll see a big spike and you will see a drop off after that.  So almost don’t pay attention to your numbers at all while you’re in New and Noteworthy.  But the most important thing for you to do is right from the beginning, regardless of whether you make it into New and Noteworthy, is to have great content that engages with your audience, gives them helpful or entertaining information and relates with them in some way.

18:42  Then give them a call to action to help you out and the way that you can get them into New and Noteworthy or featured in other ways or just simply rank higher in iTunes.  The most important parts of that within iTunes as a podcast directory is get people to go into iTunes and click subscribe.  They need to rate your podcast that is leaving that 1 to 5 star rating as well as write reviews for your podcast.  The written reviews are very valuable.

19:14   That’s why I’ve created a service of MyPodcastReviews.com that automatically e-mails you your reviews.  When you sign up you also get a list of seven ways to get more reviews for your podcast.  But because when you know what your reviews are, then you can thank people for those reviews.  People love hearing their names mentioned by people they respect.  So when people hear that you mention someone who reviewed you, then other people will want to leave reviews for you, which helps grow your podcast.  It’s also really encouraging to see what people think of your show.

19:51 Lorna: This is interesting.  Gosh in this fantastic blog post John Lee Dumas wrote – I think it was called The Ultimate Guide to Podcasting. I’ll include the links at the show notes but he does mention that the best way to ask people for reviews is at the right time and the right place. So, when people are tweeting, when people tweet you, email you or Facebook, message you, thanking you for the show, for example. So, that’s what he did when people would reach out to him online, thanking him for the show, he just replied back and say, “Hey, I would really appreciate a review and send over a URL. It was a pretty URL ogling to the show.”

20:34  Now, given that most people are listening to your podcast while they’re shopping for groceries or in their car or in their job, how do you get them to take that action because the fact that they’re actually listening to your podcasts and not in front of the computer, and then when they are in front of the computer but then they may not be listening to your podcast, so if you don’t get the response that John Lee Dumas was getting, if you don’t have email list to email people to ask for reviews, if you’re not getting people tweeting you or Facebook messaging you, then how do you get them to review straight off to your podcast? Do you have any recommendations on how to inspire people to take action?

21:25 Daniel: It really is about asking at the right time and at the right place because people don’t want to hear you start your podcast asking them to do something, giving you money, leaving your ratings or reviews, you need to give them your content first. You hook them with your content and in fact, that’s how most people get into subscribing to your podcast, is they like the content first, then they like the personality, than they will feel like they need to reciprocate in some way and so that’s why, if you want your audience to do something, you need to ask for it at the end of your content, after you’ve already gained their trust. The best way to do this is make it easy, simple and memorable for your audience.

22:12     I asked people to go to theaudacitypodcast.com/iTunes. I make a very friendly link like that as well as for my show notes and I try not to give a lot of URLs because the more URLs I share in my episode, the last people won’t really remembering. So I just tell them go to the show notes and I give them a very specific easy to remember URL for that and for something like iTunes I can say, go to theaudacitypodcast.com/iTunes and also, I have those links very prominently on the website. So everything is linked from the website, so it really doesn’t matter what page they’d go to on the website, they see certain calls to action but in my podcast, I make it very easy for them to remember by making it simple.

23:01 Lorna:   Oh, okay. So you make that asked only at the end. You don’t pepper your podcast with the mentions of where you can rate and review. Because I’ve listened to podcast where the first thing that I ask for is, like, “Hey, if you like this, rate and review and there’s another ask and there’s other ask, so do you recommend in just making one ask at the end?”

23:23 Daniel:  Right, at the end, near the end, maybe in the middle and it depends on how many things you need to ask your audience do, like, in once upon a time podcast, sometimes we have a sponsor, we always have donations, we always have people to thank for reviews and we always want to ask for feedback. So that’s potentially four calls to action in our podcast and the way that I do that is I spread it out through the podcast in our longer episodes, which for that show or sometimes around an hour or a half of content, so I spread it out throughout there, not asking them all to do it all at once but spread it out. Thank the sponsor one point, thank our donators of another point and give a link to donate. It’s after though, we’ve already given content established the relationship of some sort. Give value first and then your audience will feel like reciprocating in giving value back to you.

24:17 Lorna:  Got it. Okay. So the biggest challenge for many new podcasters is getting their downloads from the hundreds to the thousands. You mentioned earlier that, okay, if you make it to the new and noteworthy you might get a bump and subscriptions and downloads but that tends to drop, so, are there any strategies that you recommend to keep the downloads and the subscriptions increasing? How would you promote your podcast?

24:52 Daniel:   Well, before you work on promotion, you really need to make sure that you have something worth promoting. So I talked about four areas of quality. Three of them have to do with your podcast.

25:04  The first area is your content.  Is your content good enough, engaging enough, helpful enough, entertaining enough, that people will want to share it? Second, is your presentation of that content clear, concise, understandable and engaging?  Third, is your production enhancing the presentation which is enhancing the content instead of distracting from it because you can have overly produced content and you can have under produced content where it’s very hard to enjoy it because the noise are so bad or the quality is too distracting, anything like that.

25:37  So those three areas are focused in your quality, your content, your presentation and your production.  When you have those, well, then you’re not fighting against yourself to promote. So that’s when your promotion quality can come in because each of these built on each other.

25:55   So when you have something that’s worth promoting, the best way to grow your audience is with relationships and word of mouth. With relationships that is engaging with your audience as much as you can, try to reply to their comments, their tweets, their emails. It’s not entirely scalable but that’s okay.  While you still can, do what you can do. While you still have a small audience of hundreds of listeners or maybe thousands, below thousands, if you can engage with people, do it.  Show them that you care at a point yes, you’ll outgrow that, but that’s okay for later on. Do what you can now and try to know something about these people build relationships.

26:39  The other thing to leverage is word of mouth. This is the way that most podcasters learn about other podcast is they hear someone mention it.  And in fact, that’s how most people get into podcast is they hear someone else say something about podcast.

26:55   So, find a way that you can leverage word of mouth either empowering or equipping your own audience to spread the word about you that is with social sharing buttons on your websites or emails, something that’s actionable that your audience can do.  Sometimes it’s even just asking your audience. “Hey please go to the website and click the tweet button on this episode to show us that you like this.”

27:17   When you ask people to do something for you, after you’ve already provided them value, they will love to do that for you especially if that doesn’t cost them anything. They will love to show their support.

27:30 The other way you could leverage word of mouth is by interviewing other people or having guess on your show and then getting them to talk about their appearance on your show like I’m going to deal with this discussion that we’ve had is that after this publishes, I’ll share it with my audience, so some of my audience will come over, they’ll probably stick around and decide, “Hey, this is great content. I want to stay subscribed to this podcast.”

 27:53   The other thing is being interviewed on other shows. I know some of your audience will come over to my show after hearing me here on Entrepreneurs for Change and they’ll decide, “Hey that guy sounds cool, fun, exciting whatever I want to see what else he does.”  So, word of mouth is your most powerful way of getting more people to your podcast and word of mouth is built on relationships.

28:17 Lorna: So, if you’re to dial back your experience of podcasting, was there a while where you felt like you’re just talking to a void or was there a point where you saw your interest in your podcast hockey-stick and just really spike?

28:36 Daniel: Oh, yes. It was the early stage for me, where I just wasn’t taking it seriously. I wasn’t trying to produce high-quality content or I was trying too hard on being too perfectionist.  And I wasn’t working well on building relationships with people. I was in some ways focusing too much on the numbers.

28:57  And later on then, I look at my numbers, and then it surprises me to see, “Whoa! I’m higher than I thought I was.” It’s really about focusing on building those relationships, getting that word of mouth, not so much focusing on the actual numbers.

29:14  In fact, I recommend don’t check your numbers every day.  Wait a few weeks before you check your stats for particular episode. And that way, you can see and be surprised that yes, your audience is growing and you’re most importantly building relationships with people.

29:31 Lorna:   Yes. I think that’s a really good point that you’re making too because I know for a fact that a lot of podcasts are obsessed with getting a million downloads to their podcast. And so, part of my quest has been, “Oh my God, how do I reach a million downloads?” And it’s interesting when you mention the gaps to position between the stats and then the actual power of the relationships you’re building with your podcast because for me, these relationships have just been so valuable and so important; podcasting is for me been a bit like networking on steroids.                                    

30:15   But I’m curious about your thoughts on reaching a million downloads. I know you’ve reached more than you’ve reached several millions of downloads already. So, what are your thoughts on how we might be able to achieve that and whether you should even obsess?

Daniel:  Well, when you look at it with a plain number like that, there are so many ways where you get to that number. I’ll let you in on a little secret here.  You could just make one million podcast episodes and get one person to download all of those episodes. And boom!  You’ll hit a million downloads. So that’s an exaggeration but that’s really true. That’s how you can, in a way, gain the system.

30:54  This is why I wrote a blog post about “Don’t believe the myth of monthly downloads, or weekly downloads, or daily downloads,” because it’s really quite meaningless. The more episodes you have in your archive, the more frequently you release episodes, the more downloads you’ll have in a time period so that number really meaningless but if you want to get to a bigger number, then just release  more contents.  That’s an easy way to get there but what you should really be looking at would be your downloads per episode.

31:26   After about a month or at least four weeks, that gives you an impression of how big your audience actually is. So if you see that each download or you see that each episode receives five hundred downloads after about four weeks, then you know you have about five hundred people listening to you. And the thing that you should never say is the word “only”. Or like, only have one hundred people downloading my episodes. Think about it.

31:55  That’s one hundred people coming back with week after week or maybe even day after day listening to you, valuing your opinions, your perspective. You can change the world with just a hundred people. So don’t think of it as “only” a hundred people. Think of it as you are speaking to an audience, a faithful audience who cares about you, who cares about your content and they’re coming back time after time.

32:26  So build up your relationships with them, and find ways to serve their needs more.  So if you want to increase you downloads or grow your audience from hundreds to thousands or to millions, you could look at doing things like simply releasing more contents but especially look at the content that people want, you really need to know your audience or your potential audience for this. And then, find content that you can create for them like I did as a test a while back.

32:54  I did some search engine research and discovered that a particular keyword was very popular in search engines related with podcasting. So I created an episode, this was a test, I created an episode all about that topic that people were searching heavily for. I named it that. I search engine-optimized my post and all of the stuff. I didn’t do any black-half techniques or weird back-linking or anything like that. I just created quality content. That episode is my most downloaded episode because I sought to be helpful with that. And I know that episode contributed to bringing more people faithfully back to my podcast.

33:38 Lorna:  I really like the way you reframed that. Thank you so much. Regarding the question around rebranding and re-launching podcast, I know this has come up for the tropical MBA folks because I know that previously, it was Dan’s podcast and now they’re TMBA and so it’s interesting when I looked at why they did that and how and what they were able to do with an iTunes and didn’t seem like they could do much. And so I’m curious to know from your perspective, why would anyone want to rebrand or re-launch a podcast?

34:18 Daniel:  When you’d want to consider this would be when it actually makes sense. Yes, that’s a round-about answer. You have to figure out. Are you talking about the same content or are you just doing a name change or visual change anything like that?  If you’re doing that, then I don’t think you should re-launch your podcast.

34:38   Certainly, don’t re-launch just to try and get in your noteworthy. That’s not a good way to do it. That would be like a restaurant owner having another grand opening because they weren’t happy with the turn-out of for their first grand opening. It’s not a good way to go but there are those times where as you go on, you decide, “Okay, I’m finished talking about this or approaching it from this particular perspective.” That’s when you could consider retiring that podcast, leave it available, so everyone can download it and start a new podcast about a different subject.

35:11  You could change your approach and make it more seasonal where you’ll have season one, season two, season three. That often gives you the privilege of being able to revisit old content, but you re-visit it from a new perspective like I recently did a series where I was challenging the podcasting assumptions that could have been a season for the Audacity to Podcast, like you’d have the season that’s all about the basics, a season that’s all about live streaming, a season that’s all about video, a season that’s all about audio, stuff like that. I could do it that way but I prefer to just go weekly every single week.

35:47 So you really have to look at what kind of rebranding are you doing. If it’s just slopping a new label or a new design or a new music, or something like that in your podcast, then you shouldn’t re-launch it. But if you’ve been gone for a while and you’re completely changing your approach, you have new hosts, you’re talking about new content, then really, you have a separate show.

36:12 Lorna:  Okay, because I know the changing the RSS feed can just be a hassle, and so if one wanted to rename their podcast, and just have a new name, and a new graphic, you could certainly do that within your existing podcast that would simply have the old RSS feed but you could still just rebrand it within the same show.

36:36 Daniel:  Exactly. Like with the Ramen Noodle in my clean comedy podcast. It used to be called just the Ramen Noodle and no one searches iTunes for the Ramen Noodle. Now, it’s called the Ramen Noodle Clean Comedy. And people are searching for clean comedy. So, I did a rebranding and also originally it was about funny stories as a bachelor. Now I’m married, so I changed the branding a bit but we’re still doing the same thing; we’re still sharing funny stories and relating in a clean comedy way. So we didn’t re-launch but we did re-brand.

37:09 Lorna:   Okay. That’s really good to know. Great. So we’re coming to the end of the segment. I’d love to leave you with the last couple of questions. First is, do you think the podcasting market is over saturated these days or do you think there’s still opportunist entering to profit?

37:26 Daniel:   I definitely think there are opportunities. Yes, it is saturated but that’s where you really need to niche down.  Focus on that particular area of niche where you can dominate that niche. And maybe you won’t have tens of thousands of downloads, maybe you will. But there is still plenty of information to be gained, plenty of expertise.

37:48   Here’s the thing, you may have competition but no one has your experience, your perspective and your style. So, it’s okay to enter a niche that already has other podcasters in that niche because you’re bringing something else to the table and look for ways that you can create community with those other podcasters instead of competing against them.

38:11 Lorna:  I really like that perspective. Thank you so much Daniel. How could we be the best way to touch with you?

38:17 Daniel:  The best place to go is theaudacitypodcast.com. That links to my personal blog, my other podcast, my Twitter account, my email address and also there on theaudacitypodcast.com. I have a special podcasting pre-play text sheet that you can go through before you press record on that episode to make sure that you get the best recording possible and that’s available for you if you sign up for the newsletter and that’s all at theaudacitytopodcast.com.

38:44 Lorna:  Absolutely, thank you so much. I have to say, guys, the amount of valuable information that I’ve gotten from audacity podcast has helped my podcasts launched in so many ways. So, if you’re thinking about launching a podcasts, definitely go and check Daniel’s blog out first and read up before you hit record and read up before you hit launch because it will make your life so much easier. Thank you, Daniel.

39:14 Daniel:  You’re welcome, Lorna.

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The post [E4C55] How to Reach 1 Million Podcast Downloads on iTunes – Daniel J. Lewis of Audacity to Podcast appeared first on Ignite a Movement | Entrepreneurs for a Change with Lorna Li.