Some Lessons Learned from Podcasting

Late last week, I linked to the most popular episodes of our Thinks Out Loud podcast, with a promise to dig into what that data suggests about content marketing generally and podcasting specifically. And, so that’s what I’m doing.

Top Post Methodology

We use two different ways to track “popularity” of the podcast. The first set of data comes from our hosting service (Blubrry.com), which ranks the most popular episodes as follows:

1. Are You Ready for Facebook’s Graph Search?
2. Is Social Media a Waste of Time?
3. Does Podcasting Make Sense? a Digital Marketing Case Study
4. What Do Your Customers Need?
5. Small Business Podcasting Overview
6. Where We’re Headed In 2013
7. What Are You Doing?
8. It’s All E-commerce
9. What E-commerce Really Means
10. What Everyone’s Talking About

Our second data source is Google Analytics, which is only configured to report traffic to our main blog here.

1. Is Social Media a Waste of Time?
2. What Teens Teach Us About Marketing
3. How to Construct Your Web Presence
4. Everybody Hates Google
5. Does Podcasting Make Sense? a Digital Marketing Case Study
6. Tell Me a Story
7. The Why’s of Mobile
8. Social Is People
9. What Do Your Customers Need?
10. What Are You Doing?

The most obvious point is the lack of overlap between people receiving the podcast through Blubrry (many of those via Google Reader, which we’ll get to in a moment), and those reading/listening on the website itself. Only 3 episodes—”Is Social Media a Waste of Time?”, “Does Podcasting Make Sense?”, and “”What Are You Doing?”—appear in both lists. And 3 of the top 5 episodes in each list differ, with the Blubrry traffic skewing more towards the two podcasting topics offered, social media generally, and basic customer insights.

By contrast, the Google Analytics list ranges all over the place, covering social media, mobile, search, podcasting, and marketing generally, much as traffic to the blog itself also does.

Without going into all the nuances of where the Blubrry-hosted posts get their traffic, it appears that those finding the podcast on sites geared towards that medium are more focused in their interests, while those on the website reflect broader interests. Which, if you think about it, makes sense. Most traffic to this site comes from search. And any given page might rank well and receive traffic regardless of the listener’s query. On the other hand, those receiving the podcast from Blubrry either subscribed on that site, via iTunes, or via Google Reader. So their choices reflect specific interests and not broad searches.

Whether to focus the podcast more narrowly in hopes of driving more subscribers then becomes a key question and one I’ll continue to think about going forward.

Traffic Sources

I mentioned a moment ago that Google Reader represents the single largest referral group reported by Blubrry. Which sucks, given Google’s recent announcement that they’re planning to retire Google Reader. (You can learn more about that development in our episode “The More Things Change…”.

The episodes hosted on the blog itself get lots of traction from Twitter and Facebook. Again, not a huge surprise given the number of followers we’ve amassed over the years. What I’m beginning to wonder though, is whether two different audiences exist: those who specifically subscribe to podcasts and those who enjoy more “traditional” social channels. I don’t have a clear picture of this yet, but will likely conduct some further digging to uncover what I can here. If you’ve got an idea and a free moment, post it in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think.

General Observations

Regardless of whether listeners join in from Blubrry or the blog, all the episodes seem to have a long “shelf life,” picking up new listeners and subscribers every week. It’s no surprise that some of the most popular posts have been around a while. And I suspect the list will change over time as more searchers/subscribers find time to listen to past episodes.

In terms of the quality of traffic, podcast listeners spend slightly more time on the page than general readers, while bounce and exit rates are a good deal lower (a very Good Thing). I do receive roughly the same number of email subscribers and slightly fewer conversions, but the general numbers remain very positive.

Conclusion

Podcasting continues to be an experiment for us here at Thinks Central. We’re still drawing a picture of our listeners and what they want. If you’re one of them, you can help by commenting below or dropping me an email at podcast@timpeter.com.

In any case, the podcasting definitely drives value for us, and I hope for you, too.

I’ll keep sharing what I’ve learned. And in the meantime, thanks for listening.

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