061: Podcasting Year In Review (Download Stats Revealed & Lessons Learned)

This post is a companion post to the actual audio episode.How ‘Experts’ All BeganIn late 2015, Anthony and I here at Evolving first started discussing the idea of doing some sort of ‘show’. It’s something I’d wanted to do for a while, and would finally be able to with his help. We saw it as a great way to help marketing Evolving SEO, do something I would be passionate about, while adding value to the SEO community.But aside from calling it a ‘show’, I had no idea if it was going to be live or pre-recorded, video or just audio, with guests or just solo.So … without much of a plan on January 20th 2016, I messaged Marie Haynes to try out doing an interview.As you can see, this resulted in a fast “yes”. (Thanks Marie!)But now the real work begins:What should I even ask her?When will the first episode air?Will it be live?How long should it be?What if it doesn’t go well?And finally…How was I literally going to record it?My confession is (and I don’t even know if I’ve told Marie … surprise Marie!)… I didn’t even have software to record a Skype interview until … 2 minutes before our Skype call.I was quickly Googling “record Skype calls” seconds before our call, found Skype Call Recorder, paid the $30 bucks … and we were on our way. (And it’s the software I still use today).As you can see … I’m really good at planning ahead.BUT despite my shortcomings, I’ve generally been good at acting on something when I’m super excited about it.And when I finished recording Marie’s interview, I realized, ‘Wow! That was … fun! I wanted to do more of that.’So I was just so damn excited to capture that feeling again, I immediately invited and booked the next SEVEN guests within the next 24 hours:They all said yes, and we had momentum.Two months later, we launched.Launch Date: March 15th, 2016After 2+ months of work we’re launching “Experts On The Wire” a Digital Marketing Podcast. Listen to the intro here https://t.co/5MerjsDzPG— Dan Shure (@dan_shure) March 15, 2016By the time we launched the show and I tweeted that, the next 4-5 interviews were already recorded and queued up. (That was a smart, early decision. Although I’ve sometimes fallen behind with the post-production, we’ve always had a full queue of guests planned ahead of time.)Our Podcasting Stats RevealedEpisodes Published In One YearSixty.A Quick Note About Podcast ‘Downloads’A Podcast ‘download’ can mean eitherSomeone downloaded the file from a Podcast player to their device (ie: iTunes to their phone), and will listen later.Or someone streamed the file from any Podcast player or the player widget on this website.Podcasting metrics are shockingly primitive, so all we really have is a ‘download’ which as you see needs to be understood as a rather abstract metric.Downloads By Month(Note: March will probably hit 10,000+ since this screenshot is from the 15th)Top 10 EpisodesInteresting to note that the most listened episodes have a few factors in common:They are recent (not too surprising)They are about SEO specifically (unlike some shows about broader marketing topics)The outlier “45 Copywriting Tips” is because this show was also syndicated on CopyBlogger’s ‘Elsewhere‘ showBest DayFebruary 27th is the day Jeff Sauer’s episode about Analytics for SEO came out. I’m not sure the episode specifically had to do with it being the best day. We could have just hit a nice peak of subscribers, and exposure from communities like Growth Hackers.Best Day: Update!Since I actually didn’t get around to posting this by the 15th … our new best day is … March 16th!Yes, the day after our anniversary was our first day with 1,000+ downloads.The funny thing is, everytime we hit a new peak, I always get nervous it’s the best we’re going to do. I can’t fathom a 2,000+ download day right now, but it will probably seem like nothing when it comes!Single Episode Listening Trends