Podcast Audit: The Lovable Survivor

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There are a lot of moving parts to launching and producing a podcast. Lots. You need to think about not just about putting the content together and recording it and editing, but about how you present your show. 

And last week on the profitable podcaster, I shared with you my 7 Point Framework For Podcast Growth. I also shared with you that I am offering podcast audits where I apply that framework and give you objective and honest feedback on how you can grow your show. 

And today, I’m excited to bring you one of those audits. Will, from the Lovable Survivor, has snatched up one of the early bird price audit. And he has been gracious enough to let me share it with you here on The Profitable Podcaster.

Now, Will had a stroke at 37 years old and decided to start a podcast where he is a survivor talking to other survivors. Because there’s not a lot of information out there for people who have a stroke at such an early age. And so I think that this is such an interesting show. I’m really grateful that Will let me share this audit with you.

If you want to watch the actual video, this is up on YouTube. I will link that in the show notes, which you’ll also be able to find at [profitablepodcaster.fm/309]. But for now, let’s get into the intro and then the audit.

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Hi. I’m your host, Joe Casabona. And my podcasts have been profitable from Day 1. I’ll share everything I know with you here on the Profitable Podcaster. 

Hey, Will. I hope you’re doing well. I have the audit ready for you. So, I just wanted to walk through some of these things.

I have Apple Podcasts up on the screen. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But first, I want to kind of give you my initial reaction, thoughts and what I’m thinking as I put all of this stuff together. 

So, first of all, it’s you have a really good start. Four episodes plus the trailer in is really good. I like the general branding and the color scheme. The name of the show is really good. There are a few things I think we can really improve here. 

So the first thing is, you are in most directories, which is good. You’re not on YouTube. But I think that’s the number one place that you need to be. And when we get to like your action items, we’ll definitely talk about that. 

iHeartRadio is another good place to be because iHeartRadio is a really popular podcast brand in general.  So, you definitely wanna make sure you’re there. And then Castbox, Pandora, Spreaker and Stitcher. These all have pretty clear submission instructions. I’ll include those in the report when I send them. These are just links to the directories now, so you can kind of see all the sites. But you’re in most of the major ones. I think if you need to pick one, it’s gotta be YouTube. Over a third of American adults discover podcasts on YouTube. And so you being there will increase your chance of discoverability.

Okay. So now let’s review  title, description and artwork.  I think the number one thing that you should do is remove podcasts from the name that is in the title of the podcast or n the fact that it is a podcast. So, the Lovable Survivor. And then I would take it one step further. 

If it’s not just going to be about you, I saw you write someplace that maybe you’ll do interviews. if it’s mostly focused on your journey, I think the Lovable Survivor is great. if it’s going to be you and other people and you’re building a community around here, and actually I didn’t even type these thoughts out yet. I was just really excited to record the video.  But I will type some of these thoughts out for making money,  after I walk through this. But if you are gonna build community around this, you might wanna make it Lovable Survivors so that’s, if you’re going to highlight other survivors, I think that’s the thing to do. But if it’s mostly your story and your advice and your research, then the Lovable Survivor is good. 

Your description, I think is the place where you can use the most improvement here. You want your description to read more like a movie synopsis than an about page, which is how it, and as a matter of fact, I first saw it on your about page. 

And let’s go back to Apple Podcast here. I first saw this on your about page. I thought this is a really good about Page. Aand then I also saw it right here. So, if you haven’t looked at your podcast in Apple Podcasts yet, I would strongly recommend you do that Apple Podcasts and Spotify just to see what users see when they are scrolling the directory, right? And so what they’re gonna see here is, “What’s up everybody? I’m Will, AKA the Lovable Survivor.” So, picture this. You probably have lost people because again, this is very conversational. It’s a long block of text. if I were to write this description, I would wanna hook somebody immediately. So maybe I would say something like, “Imagine having a stroke and then being diagnosed with MS before the start of a Global pandemic.” Boom! Now you have their attention. 

And then later on, maybe the next sentence again, they should be like three or four sentences, right? Enough to get people interested. But then you go on to say, “I wanna share my struggles successes with you.” So you can finesse this text a little bit, distill it into two or three or four sentences and say, again, something like, imagine being diagnosed with a…or imagine having a stroke and then being diagnosed with MS right before the start of a global pandemic. That’s me. and I started this podcast because I know that there are not a lot of survivors telling their story, and I want you, I wanna tell my story. I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve spent the last three years researching and experimenting to find out what works and what doesn’t. 

And then you end with, “So, let’s do this together and build a community of resilient survivors looking to take back control of their lives.” That’s how you include the audience. So I think you can distill the description there. Hook them. Tell them what the show is about, and then have that call to action. That, “Hey, this is for all of us.” And I think you can get a lot more listeners that way because right now, this just kind of sounds like what you would say, again, this is a good about page, but we want more of like a movie synopsis. 

Moving on to, well, we’ll get to the episodes in a minute. The artwork, I actually really like the artwork. I love the branding and the colors. Like I said, what I would do is put less text on this because again, people are scrolling, they’re not gonna read all of it. So, I might like make your avatar a little bigger. And then navigating second chances. I think that should be the big text, right? You can get rid of a podcast hosted by survivors for survivors. You can put that in the tag in the description if you want.  I think that would be a good place for that. But like navigating second chances, I think is the thing that will get people to stop scrolling and be like, second chances. What is he surviving? Right, because that’s now you open that loop,  that feedback loop, that curiosity loop. So I would say that maybe make the title a little bit bigger and then navigating second chances keep or get rid of the waveform again.

I think like, that’s fine. I think, people are…people will know it’s a podcast. So you don’t really need it, but It adds a little extra element to it. So, that’s my advice. I’m not a designer, but I know like, you know, when people are scrolling, looking for podcasts, they’re definitely not going to read these struggles, successes, science, navigating second chances the way it’s written in there, right? They’re gonna see Lovable Survivor. Maybe they’ll see your face. Maybe they’ll see a podcast hosted by, but they’re probably gonna scroll after that, right? Whereas if you make the title bigger, you make your avatar a little bit bigger, and then you say, like,navigating second chances, like that’s gonna be the thing that hooks people, I think. 

So with that, let’s talk about episodes, titles and descriptions, right? So again, this is what people are going to see. 

So, it looks like Apple Podcasts, Will like do the two lines for the title so people will see that. Spotify and other directories might not, so it might get cut off. Your goal here for these episode titles is to optimize for search, right? And so episode, space, dash number, space episode. Space, dash space number, space, dash, space takes up a lot of room in that. And in some, I share a screenshot in the report, but in Pocketcast and other directories, they’ll include the episode number already. So, it’s gonna be redundant. It’s gonna take up space. 

What you want is, again, you wanna open that feedback loop, you wanna hook somebody. So,  you know, I might call:  Episode one: What It’s Like Having a Stroke at 37?”, right? Because that’s gonna hook somebody. Most people who have strokes are not 37. They’re older than 37. So this is the thing that I would wanna try to do as you title your episodes, right? So, again, What It’s Like Having a Stroke at 37. You know, managing, I mean, managing the initial wave of overwhelm. I think that’s really good, right? Like, “Oh wow! This…Yeah, this guy had a stroke and MS (Muktiple Sclerosis) (Multilpe Sclerosis)”. That’s a lot to process all in one time.  And so, that’s the kind of stuff that you want to think about when you’re doing the titles. 

Same thing with the descriptions. This episode, in this episode, you can get rid of that, right? The, in this episode part is implicit. And you know, I did the same thing. You know, the first like hundred episodes I had in this episode. The first hundred episodes are just like Episode 01: Jason Coleman or whoever I interviewed. And so this is stuff that I’ve learned, but again, this is gonna be scannable. People are seeing just a few sentences. And so in this episode,  especially like in this episode of the Lovable Survivor, that’s taking up almost an entire line of text, right? where you want to hook the listener.  So that’s what I would recommend for your descriptions. 

Luckily, like all of this is changeable now, like nothing’s permanent. You can change these and the feeds will automatically update and it’ll be great. So, that’s what I recommend you do for the titles and descriptions of the episodes.

Again, here’s that screenshot, right? So you see S one, E three,  right next to episode three, right? And, it looks like Some of this, it looks like nothing’s getting cut off here, which is good, but, again, you wanna make sure that it doesn’t get cut off in other episodes or in other directories.

All right. We’re coming up on time here. I wanna try to keep this less than 15 minutes. 

Your call to action doesn’t sound like you have one. So you definitely wanna have one, right?  In the beginning, we will, we’ll get to this in your intro but, even if it’s not your newsletter right now, ask them for ratings or reviews. Ask them to share with a friend. Send them to the current website if you want and ask for feedback there. But, follow you on Twitter. I noticed that you have your Twitter profile. Your tweets on the page, right? You want the listeners to take some action.

I also noticed that I think you’re using Buzzsprout, if I’m not mistaken. And if you are using Buzzsprout, great. They have something called dynamic content. So you can add a pre-roll call to action and then change it when you, and then change it for every episode when you do have a website ready.

So that’s what I would recommend. You mentioned like maybe a newsletter. Definitely do the newsletter and make that your call to action. But you want something super clear and super obvious because podcasting for many is a multitasking activity. And so when you only have their attention for a little bit or you don’t have their full attention, you want your intentions to be clear.

Okay. So critique your intro. Your intro music’s too long. I think it was like 20 seconds. We have 60 to 90 seconds to hook the listener when they start listening so I would start with a cold open, right? 

You mentioned that you’re probably gonna start doing outlines. I think that’s really smart. I can also get off topic, as you probably noticed here. But I would absolutely like three bullet points to say right off the bat before the intro music, “Hey, everybody. I wanna tell you the stories of my biggest struggles. I wanna tell you how at 400 pounds I fell out of a wheelchair and what that meant for my recovery, right? What fell out of a wheelchair like that?” When I listened to that part of your episode, that shocked me. So, put that right in the beginning and that means I’m gonna keep listening, right? 

I would also…there’s your intro music is a little loud when you’re talking, right? There’s something…I don’t know what you’re using to edit, but most editing software will have something called docking, which will or auto docking, which will automatically lower the volume of the music when you start talking. So this is… I like Audacity has this. Descript has this. ScreenFlow has this. I don’t know if GarageBand…I don’t think GarageBand has it. So you’d have to lower the volume manually. But you wanna look into auto docking because especially with your outro which I just ended up listening to the whole episode with your outro. I can’t even hear you at the end, right? And so you wanna make sure that the music is docking. 

And then finallty, 12 minutes in, you said, “Okay. Let’s get to the first topic.” I think an outline’s gonna help with this, right?  You wanna make sure that you get to what you promised you’re gonna talk about in the title and description, because again, we have those 90 seconds to hook the listener. I have some…I have five podcasts for you to swap with. I need to fill in this part. Recommended strategies for helping you earn money.

Sponsorship’s, obviously a good way to go as you gain listeners like you mentioned, right? I think you’re uniquely positioned. I found the same when I was researching podcasts to swap with. There’s not a lot of survivors telling their own stories. 

And so what I recommend, right, is if you’re mentioning something that’s helped you with your recovery, whether that is like an online learning site, a medical journal, or some useful tool, reach out to those brands and say, “Hey, I’m a survivor. I talk about how much your product has helped me. Would you like to sponsor my podcast? Would you like to support somebody who’s putting out the word for survivors?”  

The other thing that you could do is lean into this community, right? So I’m thinking like this could be a free premium model. I don’t know what you’re thinking about. This is a kind of longer play. But if you have a community right, then in that community, you can offer, maybe only paying members can comment on your episodes. Or maybe they get ad free extended versions. Maybe they get behind the scene stuff. So I think that there’s an opportunity there. 

Okay. wrapping up, there are some resources here for finding podcast swaps and this is my Making  Money SMASH framework. If you want to go through that exercise and maybe you’ll come up with a better answer than me based on your goals and your future, things that I couldn’t glean from doing the audit but your main actions to take. 

So here are the five things that I think you need to do next in the order in which I think you should do them.

1. Update your title and description

2. Update your episode titles based on the advice I gave you 

3. Make your intro a cold open, and call to action. Again, this is moving forward. You can add the call to action using dynamic content if you’re using Buzzsprout, which I think you are.

4. Excuse me, update your artwork

5. Get your podcast on YouTube.

I wrote that last, that’s going up here. I think that’s gonna be really important. 

So that’s it. 

Will, thanks so much for purchasing the Podcast Growth Audit. I hope this helps. And if you have any follow up questions, let me know.

So there you go. I hope you enjoyed that audit. 

If you want to hear more episodes like this, let me know by clicking the feedback link in the show notes. If you want your very own audit, you can head over to [podcastliftoff.com/audit] and sign up there. I’ll ask you a couple of questions and then I will turn that bad boy around in seven business days.

So again, that’s over at [podcastliftoff.com/audit].

Thanks so much for listening to The Profitable Podcaster. 

For all of the show notes, you can head over to [profitable podcaster.fm/309]. 

And until next time. I can’t wait to see what you make.