Compounding

07:21 That's a horrible feeling. I had a version of it. And? Angry at myself for about a week, then angry at podcasting for about another week. Then it turned into something useful, which is that the episodes are still there. They didn't expire. The launch isn't the whole return, it's the deposit. That's a very marketing sentence. It's also true. Here's my real objection. In month two, how do the allotment pair know any of this is happening? From where they're sitting, a trickle and nothing look exactly the same. They look at two things: which pages people are landing on and where those people came from.

08:03 Start with the first one. That tells you which episodes strangers actually want. That's often not the ones you're proudest of. The allotment pair might think their best work is the interview with the seed historian, and the page that keeps getting visits is 12 minutes on slugs. Of course it is. And the referrers tell you how they got there. Google, mostly. But then chatgpt.com shows up, and perplexity.ai, which is how you'd know the AI stuff from a few weeks back is real and not wishful thinking. Then a Reddit thread where someone asked about clay soil and somebody linked the episode. Then somebody's newsletter, which you'd never have known about otherwise. That last one's the one I'd want to find.

08:46 A person going out of their way to recommend you. So would I. If they're on PodHerd, its analytics show them which pages people land on and the sites that sent them, on every tier. The advanced analytics, the search insights, and the Google Search Console integration come in from Grow the Herd Up. Search Console's the one I'd actually open. Why that one? Because it's the only bit that shows you the near-misses. In Search Console, you'd see the searches where your page turned up and nobody clicked. If the slug episode is appearing every day for How to Get Rid of Slugs Without Pellets and nobody's clicking, that's not a search problem.