Use Your 2024 Podcast Data to Assess Progress & Create Benchmarks Ep 150

Are you a fellow podcaster? If so, I recommend you review your podcast data and stats for the past year. Your data can be used to help create benchmarks as well as to help you assess your podcasting progress. 

In this episode, recorded on Sunday, January 19th, 2025, I reflect on my podcast's achievements over 2024. I discuss the importance of assessing your podcast's progress by analyzing both numeric and qualitative data. I highlight my goals and milestones, including regular publishing, expert positioning, and my experience with tools like Descript and Buzzsprout. 

I share insights on the effectiveness of certain podcast strategies, listener statistics, and my editing process. Additionally, I touch on monetization options and incentivizing methods for podcasts. 

00:00 Introduction and Yearly Reflection

01:04 Podcast Goals and Publishing Frequency

01:30 Expert Positioning and Episode Mix

02:01 Episode Performance and Listener Insights

06:16 Buzzsprout Features and Achievements

08:31 Editing Techniques and Tools

12:53 Monetization and Future Plans

14:13 Conclusion and Listener Engagement

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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.

Visit mellermarketing.com

Let's connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendameller
(click MORE to invite me to connect and mention you listened to my podcast)

Chapters

• 0:00 Podcast Reflection and Progress Analysis
• 7:10 Podcast Growth and Optimization

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back. As I'm recording this episode today is Sunday, january 19th 2025. Starting to plan out my year, and I also started to look back at what I did in 2024 and realized I did an episode on my podcast in the beginning of January of this year past year, I should say where I reflected upon my accomplishments with the podcast, and I decided to do another episode this year where, in this episode, I'm going to reflect back on my podcast for the entire calendar year of 2024. Now, as is probably common with a few of you, your podcast is an extension of your business and I always recommend that you look at your own data to assess your progress over time. Some of this will be numeric data and other will be anecdotal data or qualitative data, but I'm a big believer that you should be looking at your results over time because it helps you first in establishing benchmarks so you can measure your own progress against yourself, and you can measure your success if you have specific goals set up for different initiatives of your organization. Now, with regards to my podcast, my year two goals were to make sure that I was publishing regularly, and I started at the beginning of the year with having a goal of publishing once a week, and then I realized I was already publishing twice a week, so I continued to do twice a week up until probably about early November I started to shift back to once a week. Twice a week. Up until probably about early November I started to shift back to once a week. I also wanted to make sure that I was shifting my mix of episodes, and I learned this technique from Adam Shibley, who has a great podcast. It's called Podcasting Business School, and he talks about the two-third expert positioning technique, where two-thirds of your podcast episode should be you talking and sharing expert advice to your listeners, whereas the other third can be a variety of different things, maybe where you're interviewing people or you're featuring others or repurposing content, etc. But I really wanted to shift more towards that. All right, so how did I do? Well, in 2024, I had a total of 88 episodes that were published.

Speaker 1: 2:06

As I mentioned, I did have twice a week publishing from January through November, and then I shifted to weekly, and I think there might have been one week in there where I had a head cold or something was going on with my business, where I might have skipped a week. I had nobody complain about that, by the way. So that's a little side note and key takeaway for you Don't stress yourself out if you miss a week of your podcast. You can always jump back on, like I did. And I did shift down, as I mentioned, from twice a week to once a week. Why did I do this and why this might be a good idea for you as well.

Speaker 1: 2:38

It's a lot of work publishing two episodes and I realized over time it was starting to become. It was feeling like a chore. I wasn't enjoying it as much. So I decided just to shift back to one episode a week. I didn't really make a big announcement about it, I just did the change and what I found is that nobody complained. Nobody reached out to me and said, hey, I used to get two episodes from you and I'm only getting one now. So that was an effective shift and it really helped me from a workload perspective shift. And it really helped me from a workload perspective. What else? Okay? So in year one I had 36% of my episodes were expert positioning and 64% were not, so I had definitely an opportunity to improve. In year two I did a little better. I didn't quite get to the two thirds, but I did get to 51% of expert positioning so a little over half and 49% other. I made the move in the right direction and that's what I'm focusing on here Now in 2024, I did add in profile audits where I featured people but it was really me doing the asking, me giving the advice to other people.

Speaker 1: 3:39

So it's really great expert positioning and I did do a total of 22 episodes of those LinkedIn profile mini audits this year. That represented 25% of my total podcast episodes. Now, a few of those did convert into clients and that really wasn't a goal. It was more or less just a goal to move towards expert positioning. So it was a nice little side benefit. A few of them did convert to clients and a few of them I featured my existing clients students who are involved in my Recipe Pro, for example, or other current clients that I just felt like had a really interesting background and could be a great guest on my show. So that was a part of that mix. I also increased solo interviews, which were 23 episodes in 2024, or 26% of my total stats. I can compare that to 2024. So I have a year over year comparison data point that I can look at and definitely this is exponential.

Speaker 1: 4:39

The more you have in terms of podcast episodes, the more people can binge listen to your episodes and I think that really does help with your total downloads over time. If I look at my top five episodes of all time, this was kind of interesting. Four were from 2023. So again, it just shows that people aren't just listening to current episodes, but they're also listening to a lot of those past episodes. And I'm really not doing any marketing or merchandising of my 2023 episodes. Every once in a while I'll drop a link there, but I'm really focusing more on marketing my current episodes. So that to me, shows the power of having a great podcast and people scrolling through that podcast directory and looking for some of your past episodes. In my top five, I also had one was from 2024.

Speaker 1: 5:23

As far as top apps, buzzsprout was telling me that, as of today, apple represents 54% of my listeners, with 67% listening on an iPhone no surprise there and 79% from mobile. The second highest category is 10% of my listeners coming from the Buzzsprout and Bed Player. Not a surprise, because I've started directing people to that landing page where they can then just listen to the episode direct or choose their favorite directory. The next category, following that, would be 8% on Spotify, and I've not really put a lot of time and emphasis into being on Spotify, but it does show me that I'm getting a small portion of my listeners coming from there. At this point last year the numbers were just a little bit lower. Apple represented 51% compared to 54% and 79% were coming from mobile. That's the same year over year.

Speaker 1: 6:16

I also poked around a little bit inside of Buzzsprout and they give an achievement section inside there and it's kind of interesting because they give you milestones to work towards, and they had two categories that I'm looking at here podcast downloads and episodes published. In terms of podcast downloads, I've acquired 12 total achievements and my latest was the 75,000 downloads achievement and they tell me that, as of today, I'm 1,219 downloads away from 10,000. So stay tuned for details on that. Now, as I earn these badges, I think they send you an email and I definitely see them inside the platform. What I recommend that you do is share the badges in social media posts that they provide you, but I recommend that you include the link to your show, whether it's your podcast page or your main platform, if it's Apple or other, because we want to, not just to celebrate those achievements, but we also want to drive more listeners, and what I found is this technique is really powerful.

Speaker 1: 7:10

If you're telling people, gosh, I've gotten to 7,500 downloads, people are like, wow, that's impressive. Now they don't know that 7,500 is not as impressive as 75,000. There's not a lot of people out there that have gotten to 7,500. So it's still an impressive number. And if you provide them a place to listen, that success creates more success. I think that's really important. Now, I always include both the link and I include the graphic, and sometimes I make modifications to the graphic that Buzzsprout gives me. I'll go inside Canva and I'll add in some animation, like some confetti in there, so it has a little bit of movement to that graphic. So that's a technique you could think about doing as well.

Speaker 1: 7:48

In terms of episodes published, buzzsprout says that I've had seven total achievements and the latest was the 100th episode achievement. Now, as you go up, so the achievements become a little bit harder to get, and they're saying that I'm currently 103 episodes away from 250 total episodes. And if you've been following me along here, you know that I said I was decreasing the number of episodes that I do, so I'm only had 52 episodes in 2025, unless I change my mind and start doubling up. So I'm not going to hit that next achievement until sometime in 2026. I'm okay with that. I know why they put these different milestones in place here, but something to look at and something to consider in terms of your own achievements.

Speaker 1: 8:31

Now, from an editing perspective, some months in my business I work with the VA, and other months it's just me. In the business, I have a process in place that I loosely follow. When it's just me, I'm a little bit more loose on it. When I'm working with the VA, I'm a little bit more structured on that process because I want to make it easy for that person to help me. My goal is to prep the social media assets at the time of post-production and I'm trying to keep that work to a minimum. Now there's been some times where I've just published the episodes and I really haven't done a lot of event marketing and I can see that in my downloads I'm not getting as many download episodes in those weeks.

Speaker 1: 9:03

I do rely heavily on Descript and the more that I'm using Descript, the more that I love Descript, especially these features Remove filler words really good for removing those ahs and ums in the editing. I'm going to use this feature in this episode here today Finding the highlights I find that that's really helpful If you're looking for soundbites. It can find the highlights quickly and then you can go back into I go back into Buzzsprout and then I create the soundbite downloads from there. Draft show notes is really helpful. I find that that is even better in Descript than it is in Buzzsprout. Isn't that crazy? But I find that it's true. And most recently I started moving these episodes into a blog post in the form of a LinkedIn newsletter and I I've been using that feature and I really like the summaries that they're coming up with. So I have to say, whoever's working over there at Descript love the work you're doing and the AI tool has been really helpful for me and my business.

Speaker 1: 9:55

Now inside Buzzsprout, they do have some additional features create soundbite. I like that feature where you can create like a 30 second or so. You can expand it or you can shorten that, but a sound bite where it has the show art in the background and you know some quick sound bite of the show itself. I like to use that on social media, especially on Instagram and sometimes on LinkedIn as well. Email link to the episode. I've been using that more often, so just driving people to the Buzz Sprout page to listen to it, as opposed to the landing page where they pick their favorite show. Okay, I've been using that a lot the share link and that's the one that drives people back to the landing page where they can choose their podcast player of choice to find your show, and that's helpful. I use that link in my monthly podcast summary email. I have that going out to about 5000 people right now and I also give my email list, by the way, the opportunity to opt out of podcasts if they're not a podcast listener.

Speaker 1: 10:49

Now I do pay for the upgraded version of Buzzsprout and I had to take a look at what I'm doing right now with this, and this is a good thing to do if you are self-employed. Just look at how much you're spending for these subscriptions every month and look and see are you using all the features of that? Right now, I'm paying $47 a month, which isn't a lot, but I took a look at this and actually discovered that I'm getting up to six hours of uploads a month Now if I'm doing only four episodes a week, and those episodes are 20 to 30 minutes. If I'm doing a longer interview it might be 40 minutes in total. I'm usually falling well under the six hours per month. That does give me the ability to add in more episodes for future months and I can get those banked up and ready to go, but I'm really falling below that six, so that's fine.

Speaker 1: 11:34

The other thing is Magic Mastering. I'm using that from Buzzsprout. I do find that that helps with sound quality, of equalizing the sound between myself and my guest if I have two of us on there and just making sure that's a really good sound quality. So I think that's worth paying for. I did discover I'm paying right now $20 a month for their co-host AI tool and I really don't care for their AI tool. I'm sorry Buzzsprout if anyone's listening, but there's too many mentions of phrases like treasure trove. I never use that and I don't find that their summary tool does a good job of really summarizing my language and the content from within the show.

Speaker 1: 12:10

I was finding that I was editing over top of their summaries too often and it was becoming a chore for me to do so. So I stopped using it and I started using some of those same tools inside Descript and I really find them helpful. So just notice, I'm paying additional $20 a month for this as an add-on. I'm not finding an easy way from Buzzsprout to cancel that. So I sent them an email and I do see it's a $20 add-on on my bill, but I can't find any place to cancel. Now, that's a marketing technique. They're trying to create a hurdle because you might have someone go. I'll just keep paying for it. Nope, not me. I'm going to try to reach out to them and get that canceled. So again, some really helpful insights there as it relates to editing both from a descript and from a Buzzsprout perspective.

Speaker 1: 12:53

Now, while I was in Buzzsprout, I was also poking around and I realized that there's a way that you can sign up to run Buzzsprout ads. I don't know if you knew that, but you can. You can monetize your podcast if it sits on Buzzsprout, but you have to have at least five episodes, a thousand total downloads in the past 30 days, and your episodes have to have at least 23 minutes long in terms of content. Now, I meet all criteria except the thousand downloads. If you recall earlier I said the past 30 days. I was think I was under like 400 total downloads. So certainly could be something to aspire to. I'm not quite sure if I want to start running ads or not, but might be something to test out, see how much revenue is coming in, and that could help to offset some of the costs that I'm paying for this podcast.

Speaker 1: 13:35

Right, and there's also a support show link option that you can add inside Buzzsprout where people can randomly show their support by sending you money, and there's a couple different ways that they can do that. I remember PayPal and there's a buy me a coffee and a couple other things like that. I'm not looking at setting that up right now, but I might look at setting that up for 2026. We'll see. And, by the way, I am an affiliate for both Buzzsprout and Descript. If you use my links, you get discounts to sign up for each of those services and I get incentivized for you in case, in the future, you do sign up for the paid services. So use my links if you'd like to try either. I do have those inside of show notes. All right, my friend. That is it.

Speaker 1: 14:15

I hope you enjoyed listening to my podcast summary for 2024. And I do hope that this episode inspires you to look at your stats if you're a podcaster like me. By the way, if you're on LinkedIn, send me a DM. If you do have a podcast, and tell me the name of your show. If I'm not already listening to it, I'd love to give it a listen. I'm always listening to podcasts when I walk my dog, pepper, in the morning and I'd love to put yours into my rotation. I hope you enjoyed the show and I look forward to seeing you on LinkedIn. Have a great day.