You Ask, I Answer: Old School Podcast Marketing?

In this episode, Lauren asks, what are the three biggest old school podcast marketing techniques we need to bring back? So by old school, we're talking the first age of podcasting, which is 2004 to 2010. There's basically been you know three-ish eras of podcasting. There's the the original wave, which was 20 uh 2004 to 2010. There's podcast winter, which was 2010-2015.

There was the uh serial era, which is 2016 to uh 2019, 2018, 2019, and then there's the modern era. Uh the oldest of the old school techniques. There are three that people have forgotten about. Uh the first one is the promo. Promos are nothing more than a 30 to 60 second ad spot that you create uh and then you trade with a a podcaster, presumably um someone who has a similar audience or an audience you'd like to reach, um, and whose show is roughly about the same size as you.

So back in the early days when I ran the financial aid podcast, uh, I would trade promos with uh CC Chapman's Accident Hash. I would trade uh with the daily source code. Um when it came around, marketing over coffee uh was one of the early shows. Um there was this group of folks uh called New England podcasters. So uh Clinton Alvard, uh Steve Garfield, uh oh gosh, I can't remember the the the one couple.

Oh get in so much trouble. Um John Wall, Scott Monty, uh the the old school uh school New England folks. And we would all have promos for each other's shows. Uh we'd run them as if they were ads. Um we didn't trade any money, we didn't trade any tracking codes, nothing.

It was just you know a way to to help grow the medium back in the day when they were maybe 50,000 podcast listeners total in the world, right? Because back then you needed um your own podcatching software of some kind. Uh support for podcasts wasn't introduced into iTunes uh until like I think it was 2005, might have been 2006. I'd have to go back and look. Um so in the early days, you had to download them either by hand or with uh software you had to download uh for podcasters had to create their own uh RSS feeds uh by hand.

So it was there was a very small audience. So anything that you could do to tap into other audiences of the people who were really, really podcast efficient autos. Um promos was a great way to do it. Second thing, guest hosting. Guest hosting again, one of those things where you would show up on somebody else's show and you would do an episode of their show as if uh you were them.

So uh I guest hosted uh U-turn cafe. I did I guest host Accident Hash? I don't remember. Um and a few other shows, uh a couple of folks guest hosted my show, the Financial Aid Podcast. And it was a way for audiences to experience the hosting mannerisms of um somebody else with the same content.

So uh, for example, John Wall go guest hosted the Financial Aid Podcast, and it was we usually did it around April Fool's. Um that way it was, you know, people didn't take it too seriously. Um and it was it was done in in in good fun and and stuff. Those worked really, really well because again, it's a way to introduce people. You would typically tell your own audience, hey, um, next week uh John's gonna come do my show, I'm gonna do his show, so catch me over there.

And you know, obviously, people who was were already subscribed to your feed would hear the other host um on your feed as well. It's a great way to share talent, to share new and different ways of people running their shows. Uh a lot of it was a lot of fun. The third um technique that I think needs to come back are collaborations. Now, this is not new, it should not sound new because obviously people have been talking for the last you know 10 years about YouTube collaborations and stuff, but podcast collaborations date back much much further than that.

Um I believe it was either 2005 or 2006 that you saw some of the first very large-scale collaborations. Um I want to say uh uh Adam Curry's Daily Source Code did a mass collaboration of uh podcast, it was about 75 of them, I think, um, all contributing tracks, uh singing tracks to uh if every day were Christmas. And I I think that was 06. Again, it was a huge, huge thing. It got some airtime, it got noticed.

Um there's a initiative in 2007 um led by Mark Nemkoff, um, called Bum Rush the Charts, and that was to uh see if the Apple music was iTunes at the time uh algorithm could be influenced by a large number of people um purchasing it, recommending it, reviewing it, and stuff all on the same day. And the answer is yes, uh, at the time that was possible because again, it wasn't a huge universe of people. It didn't take much more than you know, a thousand people to move uh an album. Nowadays, of course, uh, with the size of these audiences, it's much more difficult than that. But those collaborations were ways, again, of people teaming up, pooling their resources, uh, and being able to create content and create works that they could not have done themselves.

It was it was simply was not uh possible for an individual or even a couple of individuals to marshal that many resources. Now, what you'll notice, and this is in some ways absent from the podcasting community to the extent that it was in the old days. All the old school techniques are based on community, on a tight-knit community of podcasters who are friends, right? You know, New England Podcasting was by no means a giant, you know uh monolithic uh organization. It was 15 people who hung out at Kelly's Roast Beef at the Jordan's Furniture on Route 9, you know, once or twice a month, um, and just getting together and talking about what they were working on, what they were doing.

Uh Steve Garfield's Boston Media Makers, very similar uh type of group. The communities of podcasters were what enabled all these techniques. Today, does podcasting have the same kind of community? I would argue not as much. It does, and there certainly are groups of people who are uh in collectives and pods and stuff like that, but not like it used to be.

Because again, it was a smaller universe, right? It was a it was a much smaller universe. The number of listeners was a rounding error on a Nielsen chart, right? And so folks were not competing with each other. They were competing with mainstream media just to get noticed, right?

Just to have anybody tune in. In your early days of podcasting, you might know each of your listeners personally, right? All 50 of them. Umadays, it would be more difficult. When you look at all the pitches that come in the inbox of people who want to be a guest on your podcast and stuff like that.

I'm thrilled that podcasting has scaled as much as it has. I'm thrilled that podcasting is as popular and as well known as it is, but that comes at the expense of not having as tight-knit a community and of it being a much more commercial enterprise where you know people are charging guests to be on their show and stuff like that. Like I yeah, sell ads or something, but that that's just kind of odd. Um so that community is not necessarily as strong. Now, there's there are communities within different groups, like for example, Jason Falls has uh a podcast network and a marketing podcast network, and Jason's you know one of the OGs as well.

So uh his idea is to create that uh, you know, that sense of community among uh a niche of podcasts. Uh HubSpot has its own podcast and community. There's a lot of different um podcast communities. The thing that is missing though is that global sense where you could show up on somebody's music show and it wouldn't necessarily be the same audience, right? It wouldn't be uh people with similar interests, uh, people who listened to Accent Hash or U-Turn Cafe, probably didn't listen to the financial aid podcast or they weren't financial aid people or or you know parents or administrators they were just you know regular folks so to make these techniques work you have to foster a sense of community with fellow podcasters so that you can trade things and make the exchange of value equitable among all parties.

But those would be the three things that that should make a comeback um among communities and and I would say the community as a whole itself would be great to see come back. But really good question. If you like this video go ahead and hit that subscribe button.