Invisible Shows

00:00 Hello, and welcome to How To Get Discovered. I'm Maya. And I'm Tom. This is a weekly show about how podcasts get found. Search, discoverability, all the dull plumbing that decides whether anyone outside your existing audience ever hears what you've made. Which Maya thinks is the most important thing in podcasting. Correct. And which I think is, for most people, a distraction from making a better show. So that's the next 10 episodes, really. Pretty much. Quick introductions, since it's episode one. Maya came up through content marketing before she started making podcasts, and you'll hear it.

00:40 She thinks every episode is an asset, and nothing is ever finished. Guilty. And Tom's had a show on the go for 10 years, so he's seen every growth hack this industry has ever got excited about, and he's outlived most of them. All of them, I'd say. The plan is simple. Each week we pick a topic and argue about it. Occasionally, one of us changes our mind. By episode 10, one of us will turn out to be more right than the other. Me. We'll see. This week is Invisible Shows, where I try to convince you that most podcasts are almost impossible to find unless you already know they exist, and that it's a much bigger problem than anyone in the industry admits.

01:24 And I'll be arguing that it's real, but smaller than she thinks, and that most of the cures are worse than the disease. Can I start with a thought experiment? Go on. You'll like this one. Someone, call her Sarah, has a long drive tomorrow. She's never heard of your show, never heard of mine. She picks up her phone and searches for something to listen to. What does she type? Depends what she's into. Beekeeping. She's just got her first hive and she's slightly terrified of it. Fair enough. Bees are terrifying. So she types, Beekeeping Podcast for Beginners. Does she find your show? My show isn't about bees. Tom.

02:09 Fine. If it were about bees... No, probably not. She'd find the two or three big ones, the ones she's half-heard of already. And there might be a dozen brilliant beekeeping shows out there, including one that's perfect for exactly where Sarah is right now with her one nervous hive. She'll never hear any of them. That's the whole episode, really. Great. So we can all go home early. We could, but you'd disagree with me, and people came for the arguing. They did. God help them. Walk through what happens when you publish an episode. You upload the audio to your host, the host pushes it out to Apple and Spotify and everywhere else.

02:52 Your subscribers get a notification. And then what? Then it sits in the feed. Forever, in theory. In practice, it sinks. Next week's episode lands on top of it, and by spring, it's 20 episodes down where nobody scrolls. Sure, but the people who care have already heard it. It's done its job. Only for the ones who were already listening. Every episode you make is something a total stranger could get value from in three years' time, and there's nothing for them to find. It's an audio file on a server. Google mostly goes by the words around it, and so does ChatGPT.

03:31 To anyone who isn't subscribed, it might as well not exist. I'm going to stop you there, because I've been doing this for a decade, and the shows I've watched genuinely grow. Not chart spikes, actual growth. Grew because they were good. Someone tells a friend. The host turns up as a guest on another show. A listener becomes a recommender. That's always been the engine. I'm not arguing with word of mouth. It's real, and it's how most shows grow. But it's capped by how many evangelists you've got, and evangelists are rare. What happens to everyone who hasn't got one of those in their life? You make the show good enough that they will have. But they still have to find it before they can fall for it. Hmm.

04:16 That's the gap. You've done the hard bit already. The episodes exist. The only thing between them and a new listener is whether they can be found at all. And here's my problem with the whole discoverability world. I know podcasters who spend more time on keywords than on the actual episode. Their shows don't get better. They just get more anxious. That's fair. And I'll give it to you now so you don't have to keep saying it. There's a version of this that turns podcasters into bloggers who happen to own microphones. And I don't want that either. But there's another version where the work you've already done gets a second life, and the show itself doesn't have to change at all.

04:57 Go on then. Although, Sarah has a a search box. Apple has one. Spotify has one. She's not exactly helpless. Try it, honestly. Those boxes are brilliant if you already know the show's name. If you don't, in my experience, they lean heavily on show names, titles, and a line or two of description. So you get the shows with beekeeping in the name and a big following, and then it falls off a cliff. And the episode where some smaller show spent 40 minutes on Swarm Season? Lives inside an audio file called something like Episode 63, June. That's every show I've ever made. I know. I've seen your feed.

05:41 Most people think of their back catalogue as an archive, a record of what they did. I think it's an asset you're not using. Can I have that without the LinkedIn voice? Fine. Think of an episode of yours from two years ago. A good one. There's one on negotiating freelance rates. Came out really well, actually. The guest was brilliant. Is any of it less true now? If anything, it's more relevant. Everyone's freelancing. How many people heard it when it came out? Whatever my audience was back then. And this week? Almost nobody, I'd imagine.

06:21 Why? Because it's old. Except you've just told me the advice isn't old. The only old thing about it is where it sits in the feed. Meanwhile, somewhere this week, a freelancer is typing, How do I put my rates up without losing clients? And your brilliant episode doesn't come up. Not because it's worse than what does come up, because Google doesn't know it exists. Now, I did have transcripts. Did you? For a run of episodes, yes. Paid a transcription service a frankly upsetting amount of money years ago. Nothing happened. Where did they live? On the show notes page. Under the player. One long block of text? No headings? No timestamps?

07:07 Possibly. Having a transcript and having one a search engine can actually use are different things. A wall of text under a player, Google can technically read it, but it can't tell that this bit's about raising your rates and that bit's about chasing an unpaid invoice. To a search engine, your whole page was one enormous, very boring paragraph. Is this where you tell me I did it wrong? No, you were early. Doing it properly used to mean a developer and a few months of your life. Now there are tools that read your RSS feed, transcribe the whole back catalogue, and build each episode its own searchable page, with chapters, so someone can land on the exact bit they were looking for.

07:50 PodHerd, presumably. PodHerd's one of them. It's where this show's archive lives, as it happens. Podherd.com/slash HTGD. So weigh what I say with that in mind. Let's say I buy it. What actually changes for my freelance episode? Picture it on a proper page, with a chapter called How to Raise Your Rates with Existing Clients. A freelancer searches more or less that phrase. Now there's a page that's actually about their question, written in the words people actually say. Maybe they land on it, read 30 seconds, hit play on that chapter, and stay for the whole thing. Then they go and listen to the next one. You're very confident about this freelancer.

08:33 I'm not promising a flood. Most of these pages will do nothing much for a long while. But some of them will keep picking up one stranger a week for years. And you only made the episode once. Here's what bothers me, though. Not all of my back catalogue is the freelance episode. Some of it is two blokes rambling about a news story that stopped mattering in about a fortnight. And nobody's going to search for that. Which is fine. I'm not saying every episode deserves a second life. I'm saying the good ones are being punished for being old, and the dated ones were never going to get found anyway. So you'd let the rambling ones quietly die. They died years ago, Tom.

09:15 I'm only talking about the ones that are still breathing. That's a bleak way of putting it. Maybe. But you've probably got a dozen episodes in there that are still perfectly good answers to questions people ask every week. That's not nothing. I'm not converted. But I'll accept my transcripts weren't doing what I thought they were doing. That's a bigger concession than you realise. Don't push it. I think the actual disagreement between us, the thing the whole series hangs on, is who you're making the show for. Go on. You think the audience that matters most is the one you've already got. Depth over breadth. Serve the loyal listener, and the rest takes care of itself.

09:59 More or less. Although serving them well is also how you get new ones, because they talk. And I agree with all of it. If the people who already listen don't love it, nothing else matters. But there's a second audience. People who'd love your show if they knew it existed. And I think you owe them something too. That's literally everyone on Earth. How do you even think about that? Like this. Right now, somebody is searching for the exact thing your show is about. They've got the question, and you recorded the answer two years ago. They're going to get an answer from somewhere today. The only question is whether it's yours. That's a good line. It is, isn't it?

10:43 Shame it's describing the wrong person. You keep talking about someone with a specific question looking for a specific answer. And most podcast listening isn't like that. It's commuting, walking the dog, doing the washing up. People aren't searching, they're browsing. They want company, a voice they trust. Fine, but how did they find the voice they trust in the first place? They walked in through some door. For a lot of people now, that door is a search. They Google a problem, land on an episode, and if they like the host, they come back for the next one. Six months later, they're your dog walker. I'd say a lot of them walk in because I was a guest on someone else's show.

11:25 Brilliant door. How often does that happen? Few times a year, if I'm organised, which I'm not. And it works because a stranger already trusted that other host. Search is a cruder version of the same thing. The stranger trusts their own question, and you happen to be the answer. One door depends on you being invited. The other ones open all the time, whether you're doing anything or not. So search is the front of the shop, and loyalty is the back. And most podcasters have built a beautiful back room, warm and cozy, full of regulars, with no front door. That's annoyingly good. Thank you. Doesn't change my worry, though.

12:09 The podcaster who spends all week fiddling with titles and never makes a better episode is a real person. I've met loads of them. So have I, and we should keep checking ourselves against that all series. If the show's boring, none of this matters. Agreed? Agreed. But assume the show's good. The work's done. What can you do so the work you've already done gets found without turning into somebody who's lost the plot? Fine. I'll bite. For 10 episodes. Next week. Where your transcripts should actually live. The Whose House Are You Building one? Your own domain versus somebody else's platform. And you're going to have an opinion about a C-name.

12:54 I have never in my entire life had an opinion about a C-name. You're about to. Can't wait. Thanks for listening to How To Get Discovered. See you next week. Bye.