Binge Factor Media

Jayme, thanks so much for joining us. I’m so glad to talk about Blonde Haired Girl To Go. I love that you have the to go at the end but you’re the Blonde Haired Girl. It makes such sense. This is a different style of show than some people are comfortable with. We don’t get to talk about it a lot here. I’m going to jump right in and give you what your Binge Factor is. Your Binge Factor may be the reason why some people don’t like it as much as the people who love it love it. It is the fact that you have a brutal personal sharing style show. When I say that by brutal, I mean your beauty brutal on yourself that you are very self-critical in the process in exposing and raw in what you’re exposing out to your audience. It doesn’t feel like a lecture but there’s learning happening.

I personally don’t like necessarily being told what to do generally. I’m sharing my own process of discovering, learning, obstacles, ups and downs of the process of my content. I do appreciate you noticing that and it is my style.

It’s what people love and it’s probably why you get a lot of feedback saying that they love your show, that they’re appreciating and listening to it, it’s that reason. That’s why I say to people that your Binge Factor can be very different. Your Binge Factor doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. It’s for the right kind of people for your show.

The other thing is I find that a lot of people are putting out content that’s even similar to mine, a lot of times, they present as having it all together. They got it all together, every day is a perfect day, it’s all perfect all the time and they’re in bliss all the time. I sit there and it has not been like that at all. I do get very much into the process and how it is, at least for me. I feel like that can be relatable to other people because it’s not a state road for anyone.

I always say, if it’s all hunky-dory, amazingly beautiful and life looks like those choreographed pictures were on Instagram, where everybody is wearing matching clothes in your family and they’re all smiling, I go, “This is a lie.” I have my aunt in Connecticut. She’s got these beautiful pictures of her family. I guarantee you, every single one, there’s at least one kid not smiling even though they’re beautiful pictures. That’s how it works in our lives.

Thank you for showing that. We appreciate that and it’s a great contribution to the podcasting community from that. You’ve got this show that has been growing since July 2019. You’re probably stumbling with some technical things and some growth issues for your show. It might’ve gotten out of the gate well and I want to talk about that but it might be stumbling along the way. This might be a great opportunity for you to present this in that rawness way that you do already, allow the audience to also come along and take a good look and analyze their own shows in that same way that we’re going to do with yours now.

Tell me a little bit about why you started the show. I got the fact that you were doing YouTube before because I listened to one of your very first episodes. You had YouTube and you’ve been doing that. You decided to start the podcast, at least from what you said there is because you thought this would also be convenient for your audience to have it in the car but why do it?

I can delve a little bit more deeply into the subject matter.

You thought you could do that better on a podcast.

This sounds crazy but I tried to make every single YouTube under ten minutes. It was like this ten-minute blurb. In my podcasts, I go into depth with the subject matter, that’s number one. Number two is I found that when I’m on video, I can’t be as honest as I can in a podcast.

That’s so interesting that you say that.

I’m a lot more honest and a lot more in-depth on my podcasting than I am on my YouTube station.

Your purpose was for having a longer format that felt more authentic and being able to be more honest, which felt more authentic. It fits it better. Did you have a business purpose for it? Was there a business reason that you have a show, to begin with, the YouTube and everything? Did you have a business purpose, marketing or any plan for that?

Authentic Personal Podcast: When I’m on video, I can’t be as honest as I can as in a podcast.

I started everything that I have been doing because I had an experience. I have this experience and I started chronicling it on YouTube. After a year of my YouTubes, I started to do podcasts. I was still doing my YouTubes but I started to do podcasts and everything that I do has to do with this experience that I had.

Do you want to tell the audience a little bit about that because they haven’t heard your show yet? They’re going to go check it out. That usually happens after this. You’re going to have to go check out Blonde Haired Girl To Go because now we want to know but why don’t you give us a little hint about what that is?

I went to bed one night. This is the truth and it’s very far out of the norm.

That’s the fun of what we get to here. Go for it.

I go to bed one night and I’m in despair. I’m so upset. My life has completely fallen apart. If you watched my first YouTube, I was a mess. I woke up in the middle of the night, surrounded by the most amazing love that you could ever imagine. It felt like I was levitating in my bed and I don’t remember exactly how long I was in this state but I fell back to sleep and I woke up different. Before this event, I had been having these weird things happening. I would see the numbers like 11 11 and I would go to this cafe that I love to go to and the total would be $11.11. That was so weird.

I started to see that and I had all these other weird things happen. In 2016, I started to notice this shift but this happened in the summer of 2018. It was like this dial was turned up. I was having these things happen and it was this constant stream of information that was coming at me that was incredibly challenging to sift through. I had some events that you would have to read in my book.

There’s a book, Blonde Haired Girl: My Summer of Mystical Events, that outlines this whole story. You’re going to want to check that out. It’s this incredible shift that happens and you decide that you have to share. You have to let others come along and experience that with you. That’s what you started with the YouTube but why did you think it had to be ten minutes? Is that some prevailing advice you had heard? I’m curious because sometimes it’s that, like, “I hear that.” Sometimes it’s, “I can’t stand up personally watch a YouTube video for longer than ten minutes.” It might be your own personal view of it. What was it for you that made you say this needs to be ten minutes?

That was it.

It was the way you consume video.

If somebody rambled on longer than ten minutes, I don’t have time for this.

I was reviewing before our call a video that we’re putting out as a company and it’s not even a five-minute video. I realized I had tuned out one minute and a half into it and I didn’t listen to it. I had to go back so it took way more time than it should have because I can’t even concentrate that long on a video personally so everyone is different. This is typical, Jayme. This is not a criticism of you or anyone else who thinks this way but when I first got into podcasting, the prevailing opinion was it shouldn’t be longer than twenty minutes.

I knew it couldn’t possibly be true because even people like Joe Rogan were doing their show at the time and theirs was over an hour. It didn’t make sense. When I looked around and I said, “Why is this? Some entrepreneur somewhere would say, probably John Lee Dumas would say, “It’s because the average commute time is twenty minutes.”

I know because of where I live that there is no average commute time because some of us never leave the house. Our office is here. That didn’t make any sense to me. That was where I quickly abandoned that as advice but when it’s our own viewpoint, that makes it harder because we have nothing to go against this. Were you a podcast listener at the time or at the time you started podcasting? Are you a podcast listener now?

Not really.

Don’t worry. There’s no wrong answer here. This is common. If I surveyed all of the podcasters that I’ve interviewed and all of my clients, 90% of them are not podcast listeners. They’re participating in a media type like you were on YouTube that they don’t have a personal experience viewing or listening to. They don’t love it as a media type.

I did before. I listened to Wayne Dyer, who is somebody that has deep meaning for me personally. I had listened to him quite a bit in different times in my life when I wasn’t doing well. If it’s somebody that I value what they have to say, it has deep meaning for me and I do. I had learned a lot from YouTube before I started doing YouTube. I had listened to a lot but now there is so much out there. It seemed like in 2019, COVID-19 hit and then everybody started making podcasts.

They’ve all dropped off. For those of you who aren’t aware, there’s been a significant drop-off since June of 2021 in terms of podcasters sticking with it. We went through a year in 2020 without as many people quitting their show as we had had in prior years but we’re back now to the high rates that were happening in 2019.

We’re seeing probably 75% to 80% of people quit their shows this year. That is because they’re going back about their business lives. It wasn’t a right fit. They don’t have as much time as they thought, there are a whole bunch of reasons why that’s happening but it’s happening at a slightly higher pace than it had happened prior so we think it’s probably going to continue at that pace. The marketplace is going to shrink and you might be the sole blonde standing.

Blonde Haired Girl: My Summer of Mystical Events

It could be awesome for you. I always love to look at a marketplace of any kind whether it’s a personal marketplace, a professional one, it doesn’t matter but I look at it as a market. You have choices that you’re making like we make at the store or anytime we go to a shopping bazaar. We’re making choices about what we’re going to consume. The choices that are available to them are getting very polarized right now. We have lots of choices that are highly cultivated and curated by a network. Their sole purpose is to run ads. That’s why they’re created. It’s like, “I’m going to hire this celebrity and pay them so that I can run ads from Pepsi, Amazon and Microsoft.” Whatever it might be, its purpose for the show is being developed. That’s what networks do.

There are indie podcasters developing them for their own personal, business reasons, community and mission reasons. They come from a different place. What we see right now is that it’s still a tremendously large portion of independence. They quit their show at a faster pace because it’s harder. You don’t have money and networks support but they quit their show at a faster pace for their own personal reasons.

The network shows fail faster. They fail because their purpose isn’t aligned with the purpose of the show. What you get out of it doesn’t always feel right to you. They succeed less often in achieving their goals. You can succeed more often because you’re authentically doing this. This matters and is personal to you and the people who are attracted to that get that from you. If you can keep going and it’s working for you, you should but sometimes there are things that aren’t aligned. The videos weren’t aligned for you. They didn’t feel completely right. You shifted into podcasting. What things aren’t feeling aligned for you with your podcast? Where are you feeling like it’s not quite jelling and working for you?

Before I answer that question, I love ideas so that’s why I do what I do. I love doing this. I love podcasting. I don’t see myself leaving any time and it’s not going to happen but one of the things that I have to admit gets my GOAT.

Let’s see if we can come up with some ideas to not get your GOAT anymore. I love that.

I paid attention to my stats. My show started out small. It has been pretty steady ever since it took off a little bit. It’s not like millions of people are listening to my podcast but I’m happy with where I’m at.

You’re seeing growth over time, which feels good because that means people are joining, sharing and coming.

I have a small but pretty steady audience that is very faithful to my content on YouTube and on my podcasting. What gets me is that the most popular ones are not necessarily my subject matter.

What do you mean by that, which one is more popular?

They want me to talk about politics, election, Trump, Biden, the COVID-19 and vaccines.

That’s subject matter controversies. Why do you think that they want you to? Are they emailing you messaging you or is it happening over social media?

I know that because there are more people who listened to that one.

You see a listener spike in those episodes. I’m going to hit on something technical for you. This may explain it without saying that it’s the controversy of it. You have a common methodology for titling your episodes. The problem is sometimes those titles don’t necessarily make sense to the outside world as much as they make sense to you. You have an episode named Blind Faith. You have another one named Smoking Hot. The problem with that title, there’s nothing wrong with it. It was intriguing but I had no idea what I’m going to get when I listened to that.

Maybe a little bit of expansion on that, how blind faith can change your life? Do you see what I did there? I don’t know that episode, I didn’t listen to that one in particular. I listened to three of your episodes. That one didn’t happen to be one of them. How Blind Faith Can Change Your Life, Smoking Hot, body Image and Mindset Mean Everything. You’re expanding on that title a little bit more so that I understand what’s in it for me to listen. The others, when I say January 4th, COVID-19 Mandate or COVID-19 Testing and Rightness, I get what that’s about because it’s so in the news and what’s going on in general.

I want to hear now Jayme’s viewpoint, I probably wanted to hear your viewpoint on fiscal responsibility too but maybe I didn’t get what that was going to mean. By adding COVID testing and rightness to it, you gave me the direction that I might want to hear. Something we can all do better in our titling is giving people an indication of what’s in it for them to listen. It doesn’t mean we have to list out everything we talk about on the episode but give them a gist of where it’s going to go and you might see an increase in listenership across more episodes where they get it. The others are getting it because it’s a topic that is like, “I know that person. I know what that means.” It’s more obvious to them.

That may be simply the reason. If I’m busy and I don’t have time to listen to every single one of your episodes,  what I’m going to do is skip around to the one that resonates with me or something I’m struggling with or dealing with we may not have the same commonality. Until you align that, you’re helped. That’s one of the things that would change your listener base. Here’s the other thing someone is going to find your brand new in the app that is podcast app.

In other words, a friend who listened to the show didn’t share it with me. Someone who already listens to your show said, “You have to listen to Jayme’s show. It’s great, here it is.” That happens but when it’s blind, meaning they’re coming into an app and they’re looking for a show that can help them deal with things, the only things that they have to go on are the title of your show and your name. I wouldn’t know either of those things if I didn’t already know you. The description of your show, the titles of your episode and the descriptions within those episodes, it will also not just pop up shows to me when I search for something but it’ll pop up titles and episodes as options as well.

Those are the only things that are searchable, which is so small. They’re not searching for what you’re saying in the episode. Apple’s not giving that up to people. If we want to be found by more people who are already podcast listeners, I call it the 2:00 AM principle. If you’re up at 2:00 AM and you needed help like you were talking about Wayne Dwyer being your go-to guy because you knew you could get what you were looking for and you could get the support.

When I don’t know what that support looks like, my go-to thing to do is to go to wherever I consume content the most that are personal to me and for podcast listeners, that’s personal to them. The podcasts ecosystem, they go there and they search for something new. They’re out there desperately searching. What a shame if they can’t find someone like you to help them when you’re there because something technical is preventing that. That’s why I raised this to you and to the community that’s reading, that we want to make sure we get found.

Authentic Personal Podcast: There are indie podcasters developing podcasts for their own personal reasons, their own business reasons, their own community reasons, and their own mission.

Would you recommend me going back and renaming the old podcast or starting from here on out?

I would start from here on out. If you feel like it’s becoming more even and successful as you start to have a couple of your controversial ones in there too but you still feel like it’s evening out better then go back and do that. This is the thing if someone’s finding you, they’re going to go to the beginning and listen to all your episodes but they’re also going to skip around because they don’t have time to consume everything because you have a lot of episodes since you’ve been publishing since 2019. That is a lot of episodes. They can consume better and do a better job of being able to skip around and help themselves in their biggest point of need.

If you do, eventually retitle them but don’t do it immediately. See how it feels, get into the rhythm of it and then work your way backwards as you want. What I would do is title the ones as you go back to the back that you feel are strong and helpful to people and skip the ones that you’re like, “It’s not as important anymore.” Do the ones that people should have consumed more of that one. That one was a good one. It could help more people. You know what they are so do it that way because you don’t need more work. The other side of that is the other thing I would love for you to have beefed up is your show description. Your show description is so short. This is the most common thing I see on every single show that’s out there. 99.9% of shows have this problem.

You have a single paragraph but the show description section is the most searchable thing from all of the podcast apps and you have a single paragraph but yet you have 4,000 characters to work with. Writing more in there is essential in the process. I usually do this as separate coaching but I’m going to do it right here quickly because it will help everyone. If you’re going to rewrite that, simply sit down and talk into your mic and then transcribe it. It’ll help you write it better. It’ll be easier. Answer three questions for yourself. If I’m finding Blonde Haired Girl To Go for the first time as a listener, what do I want to know? What is the show going to bring me in terms of change in my life benefits to me? What is it for me, the listener?

We want to put that first and foremost. If we answer the question, what’s in it for my listener but we answer it as if we’re talking to the listener because that’s the best way to write that, we’re going to do a better job of getting that across. Talk for about five minutes on that. That’ll give you enough content to pull pieces from to build probably your first two paragraphs. The next question is about you. Why is Jayme uniquely suited to bring this podcast to the world? What am I bringing to this? This is not your resume. This is not that you don’t want a little piece of that, the bestselling author and the title of your book should be in there but beyond that, if you’re going to build a whole paragraph about it. It’s like, “Why am I doing this? Why am I uniquely suited to help you through whatever it is that was in the previous portion?” Bring you those benefits.

The last piece is because you already have the benefit of having your show, for those that haven’t built one yet, it’s like imagining what this would look like but you already know. Here’s what you’re going to get by listening to the podcast, the episodes and topics I’ve talked about. Maybe highlight some of your top topics that you think they should listen to because if they read it, they’d go and they’d pick those upsets. Keep in mind, almost nobody reads more than the first paragraph. You didn’t do anything wrong by only writing a single paragraph but the bot that is Apple, Spotify, Google, all of the listening apps, reads the whole part. That’s in characters.

The purpose is somebody types in that phrase and types in something they want the bot to scroll through the 4,000 characters and find you as a match for that. We want you to come up as a match more often. That’s its purpose. It doesn’t have to be amazing journalism or marketing messaging. It has to get the point across and get the words of what you’re talking about and what is in it for the listener at the end of the day. You’re going to do great. Do it that way. That’s a simple way to do it. Because you’re much better on the mic, you feel like you can go in-depth, it’s a better way than sitting down and writing it.

Those are the things that are going to change the visibility of your show. You’ll see more steady growth over time because the listener base on podcast apps is growing. They’re growing at a fast pace. As I told you before, there are lots of people quitting their show. I don’t know about the way you consume entertainment but the way that I consume Netflix, for instance, I look for shows. If it shows it only has one season, I don’t listen to it. I don’t watch it because I’m not sure they’re not going to leave me hanging at the end of the season. It frustrates me and I don’t know if they’re coming back.

Podcast listeners are very smart about this. They go and look when your last most recent episode was. If it was 2019, they’re like, “I’m done with that.” If it was 2020, they’re done with that, unless maybe you had 100 episodes and it seemed like it was complete. They didn’t find anyone else podcasting on this and they were like, “This seems like a series of more complete and more than 100 episodes. They will consume that because they give that credit for having completed something. They expect you not to have left them hanging at the end. Some people do. That’s what we call pod fading because you quit and forget to tell your audience why you quit.

I always don’t understand why it doesn’t take that much effort to make a closing episode that says, “I’m done with this.” I don’t understand that. It seems like it shouldn’t take much effort, five minutes on the mic to thank everybody and close it out for them. People would like closure. We like a beginning, middle and end. You’ve got a lot of episodes here and you’re constantly posting. That’s a good thing so they’re going to be more likely to choose you as that competitive audience decrease.

They don’t have a place to go. They need to find something new and we want them to find you because they’re out there looking. That’s where you’re going to see a boost coming up, especially as so many shows are pod fading. Those are some of the basic things that I had for you. Do you have any thought process about how you’re thinking you might shift the show next? Is there something you’ve wanted to try out but maybe aren’t sure what it’s going to go over well?

I had done this silly advertisement.

I can say this from having listened to your show is that the word advertising is what you didn’t like about it to begin with. That’s why it didn’t resonate with you.

I go back and listen. I made a mistake. Say I put it on a meditation that I have a few. In all of the podcasts that I have, I have three meditations that I have recorded and then you have this horrible advertisement. I took the advertisement app out of almost every single one of them and I decided that I didn’t want to necessarily monetize my podcast. It’s not that I don’t want any monetary gain from my content, I do but I decided to focus more on book sales or a different avenue rather than my podcasting.

Even then, I have to admit. I don’t listen to podcasts but I do. I love Coast to Coast. It is up there with my favorite. He does all of his advertising. Frankly, I find it incredibly distracting because it’s why I’m sitting there. It’s like, “I don’t have time to sit there and listen to this. It seemed like they’re long too and sometimes it’s even more than one advertisement. It’s like three advertisements and sometimes they break up the podcast with an advertisement and then come back.

That’s a common thing with a highly produced show. Independent shows don’t have to run like that. You don’t have to run in that format. It also depends clearly on a host. In other words, if you’re not pre-recording, you’re recording the advertisement in your show as you do it or you’re editing it in later yourself, there are podcast hosting platforms that allow you to put the ads in and on. Typically, they’re in all the wrong places like Anchor and Spotify puts them at the beginning. Megaphone does allow you to put them in a couple of places but it cuts people off if you didn’t plan for it. It can sound like too much commercial.

That’s what it is. It’s too much interruption. It’s like when we watch it on TV and we’re like, “That’s that many commercials.” It can be like that with some of them. When we developed our Podetize platform, I purposely developed it so that we could block episodes from having them on it at all in case they were sensitive subjects like your meditations. We put it so that it was never streaming onto the front and back because then you don’t get your content. Here’s an ad before they ever hear from you and brand new to you is already in a bad mindset. I never liked that.

I wanted you to be able to take them in and out so that you would have the ability to say, “I have a brand new book that’s launching, I’d love to promote that opportunity right at this moment but in a month from now, it may not be what I want to offer. I want to have a private live event and I’d like to offer that opportunity to my audience.”

Authentic Personal Podcast: What a shame if listeners can’t find someone like you to help them when you’re there, just because something technical is preventing that.

I like to look at them as relevant. If we are putting some relevant opportunity in front of our audience, it’s a good thing. If we’re pushing advertising to our audience, maybe that feels like a bad thing. Thinking about how we look at them and what they are is as important as how we technically execute them. The model that Coast to Coast is following and I know it because they follow Joe Rogan’s model and a whole bunch of other people model who has that network support system.

In the network support system, they know that host read ads do better that if the host tells a story and makes it sound like it’s integrating, they think they’re fooling the audience into, “This is an ad hoc. I’ve decided to offer this. I wasn’t paid to do it. I’m doing it anyway.” It doesn’t come across that way. Your signals were already on. It becomes disingenuous over time if you follow the model like you’re doing it on purpose. Have you ever taken one of those webinars where they’re giving shout-outs to an audience but it’s a prerecorded webinar and it feels weird? You know it feels weird like you sense it’s off. To me, that’s what happens in the host recorded ads when they go in that style where it’s a forced style of conversation. I never liked them.

That’s not how we ever do them here. If it’s an ad, we’re going to be straightforward about it. That’s how we’ve always done it. We’re going to be straightforward, “This is an ad. There’s a little bumper music on it.” You know this is distinctive and we’re going to keep it short. I did a 3D print podcast with Hewlett-Packard as a sponsor but we did a partnership in our sponsorship. They gave me access to great people who had never been interviewed on a podcast before. I got to bring my audience something new and unusual. What happened is naturally when I was introducing that guest coming on, I would rave about Hewlett-Packard’s openness.

That wasn’t a commercial but they did pay me to sponsor the whole series. In a sense, it was but it was an honest appraisal of how it felt in the sponsorship model and how I felt about them as a company. That would come across naturally in the conversation but that was a bonus. They didn’t pay me to say that. It wasn’t purposeful. They didn’t give me a script for that ad. We did it that way and there were a couple of ads. That’s how that worked. There are ways to do that to reward the people who you feel are giving great opportunities that your audience can benefit from and do it in a more opportunity and relevant way.

Monetization, let’s talk about this because this is a big deal. There are lots of alternative ways to monetize the show. I’m going to be straightforward and honest that most people cannot monetize with ads anyway and make it worth the while. I saw the statistics from the advertised cast. There are about 300,000 podcasts on your average hosting platform. In those 300,000 podcasts, they only had 3,000 of them that qualified for advertising. That’s a small percentage of shows that even qualified for the advertising. They call it the per mil, the per 1,000. We call it a CPM, clicks per 1,000 is what we do online but it’s per play and per download. It’s that per 1,000 downloads that you’re being paid on.

The rate was the average rate. The average across those 3,000 shows was only $21. For the most part, most people who have an advertising company help them place those ads split that, split that with the advertising company. That means you were making about $10 to sell out your hard-earned audience. For every 1,000 listeners you had, you made $10 to give away your audience. To me, I look at that and go, “That’s not monetization. That’s not what podcasters intended when they want to make money off of it.” What would we like? We might like clients, ticket sales for our next event. We might like to sell more books. Those are real opportunities for monetization that don’t have to be a direct result of an ad on my show for the book sales.

It can simply be because someone’s consuming me, they want my book. They’re going to tell a friend or give a friend a book instead of trying to get a friend to listen to your show, which sometimes isn’t always easiest. I might gift my sister your book something like that. That might be something that I do to help out and I’m rewarding you for giving me such great free content because I bought one of your books and gave it as a gift. I’m also helping other people by getting them exposed to you. What we want to ask for on our show more often is to ask for a give-back. If you’re benefiting from this, please tell and share with someone else. The best thing you can do is tell people about my book.

You’re not saying, “Buy my book.” You’re saying, “Tell people about my book.” At that moment, you’re reminding them you have a book. As they go to buy it, they look at it and they go, “I could benefit. Let’s buy one, get one.” By asking them to pay it forward for the contribution, you’ve earned that, Jayme. You’ve done a lot of wonderful episodes with a lot of givebacks. You’ve earned the right to ask for that opportunity from them. This happens all the time. We don’t tell people, “How can you help me?”

The other thing I would like to say to you, Jayme, is don’t pay attention to your stats. This is like weighing yourself on the scale every single day. There are anomalies you know nothing about. You’re laughing. This is my big nitpick thing that I go, “I want my clients, listeners and I want you all to stop looking at your stats on a daily basis, even a weekly basis. Let’s look at them once a month and then let’s look at the growth rate. I’m at least glad you’re paying attention to the growth rate, Jayme because so people don’t, they get caught up in like, “Why did I have enough listeners when I launched that episode?”

It could have been that it was something that happened in the world. It was voting day. People were too busy to listen to their thing or it was a holiday and people were having barbecues with their family. You don’t know what happened there. You got to give them a chance to catch up on your show but if you feel like I dropped a show and it didn’t happen, that’s going to get to you over time and it can get discouraging quickly. If we’re watching the trend over time and we’re seeing it continually grow, we’re not falling into that. In June of 2021, we saw a gigantic drop in listenership. There were lots of people who decided at that moment to quit their show without understanding where it came from. What we found out from exploration in it, it was solely an Apple thing.

It was because Apple’s platform does the largest amount of listenership. It’s typically about 60% to 70% of most podcast listeners come from an Apple device of some kind, usually the mobile phone, the Apple app. The app and the podcasting system that is Apple had gotten an update to it and it crash. It took them almost two and a half weeks to get it up into running at full speed. Apple was not serving out podcasts at the pace and rate that it was. If you saw a dip in June, everybody saw a dip in June. I can say that because I can look at 1,000 shows stats and see it happened to every single person at the same percentage. Not the same number of listeners but the same percentage of drop happened.

When we look at that, we think a-ha industry thing was going on. This is typical. We typically see a rise in September. Every single year, we call it the fall boost. People are getting back into the swing of things, realizing they’re headed into the end of the year. They need to make some business progress some personal growth progress. They’re feeling like they need to crunch down before the holiday start so they want to do that. They concentrate on themselves in September and October a lot more than they do at any other time of the year, except for January. We always have our January resolution time too. These ones, we see the growth there. If you were looking at that and in September you’re thinking and then in November you go, “What did I do wrong?” It’s not you.

That’s why we want to watch the growth pattern over time. We want to even out the way we look at it and say, “I am making progress. I am gaining listeners and weight.” It’s probably not the way we want to go but the idea that maybe some people do. I’m holding steady in that growth and it is not trending over time. What we do want to do is look at the episodes and say which ones are resonating. Why are they resonating?

Let’s do an analysis of it for ourselves and say, “What was I doing there? Was it simply the topic and the subject? Was it perhaps some other factor in those shows of what I did differently?” Analyze those for ourselves and replicate them. What I can see clearly is there’s not much difference between your more controversial topics and your other topics because you’re raw in everything that you do when you come across as very honest and what you do. I don’t think there’s a difference in there. It’s simply the title.

Keep in mind that our metrics are vanity metrics. It’s not that they’re not expressing our listeners but we could have a listener who joined our show over a weekend and binge listened to 100 episodes that skew our results. That’s one single listener but they listened to a lot of episodes. That’s another reason why we want to watch it over time because it says, “I’m getting 5 to 7 new binge listeners every month. Look at that growth factor for me.” That’s a good thing because that involves residual over time growth.

I will do that.

Jayme, I can’t wait to hear what new ideas, episodes and topics you bring to it. It’s so wonderful to see this spontaneous content generation that podcasters like you do because you’re simply tapping in and driving off of, “How do you feel now? What di you think about it? What you might’ve dreamed about?” You’re going with that. That’s wonderful because that’s never-ending. You’re not going to lose momentum because I doubt you’re going to stop thinking and dreaming tomorrow.

I’m not ending anytime soon.

Jayme, thank you for bringing Blonde Haired Girl To Go to the podcasting world. I wish you the best of luck as you continue and move forward.

Authentic Personal Podcast: If we put some relevant opportunity in front of our audience, it’s a good thing. On the other hand, if we’re pushing advertising to our audience, then maybe that feels like a bad thing.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

—

I mentioned there was going to be lots of coaching and lots of things woven in here. Jayme was such a great subject for this because this style of a show where you’re the one talking, you can get so into the personal side of it that you have a hard time looking at it objectively. It’s seeing what you’re doing right and what might be able to be improved. It’s a little hard for you to do it yourself because it does feel so personal because you’re giving so much of yourself like Jayme is every single time you do an episode. I would hate for it to come across as critical in any way, shape or form but we want more people to have an opportunity to hear you when you’re doing that style of the show. That’s critically important because it’s harder for you to go out there, promote and market something that is so personal.

If we can get some of these technical things right and let them do some of the work for us, we’re all going to be better off of that. That’s something that we’d like to do. I don’t know if all of you realize this. I’m going to make a quick little opportunity offer here as Jayme and I was talking about. It is that at Podetize, when we regularly do events, if we’re out there at a cheap podcast or a local podcasting event, we offer something we call Host in the Hot Seat. That’s an opportunity for you to come and be coached as I did with Jamie although it’s not as big a hot seat when you’re on my show because I’m not grilling you and it’s not as fast-paced as we do it.

What we do is we take a look at your show, see how it is from searchability, give you some outside perspectives on what we see because we know what is successful. We give you maybe some example podcasts you might want to check out that might be similar to you but might give you some new ideas so we can do all of that. We call it a Show Audit. Sometimes we want to do those audits at the beginning or the end of each year. There’s an opportunity to do that. You can go straight to the website at Podetize.com and you can insert, right down, set on a calendar, go right to a strategy session and be able to have a Host in the Hot Seat style audit for your show and get an output side perspective. There is no cost to this. We do this for anyone who has a show that already exists.

You want to have two episodes under your belt so that we can at least hear that before we can take a listen and go further. When we do it at a trade show or at an event, we can’t listen to the show as I do here. I listened to three of Jayme’s episodes of Blonde Haired Girl To go and it gives me an opportunity to experience the conversational side and find out what’s going on in the show in case I have any suggestions there. Jayme is doing all things right there so there’s wasn’t anything to suggest on that now but typically, there is. That’s an opportunity for you. I hope that you’ll take that up. In it you can level up your show for the next year.

Don’t forget to go to Blonde Haired Girl To Go. Check out her show, some of the things, her YouTube, what she’s doing and all of those different places you can understand and see the style of the show. Jayme has got some raw, interesting topics that you might want to consume while you’re there and help enlighten yourself as well. Additionally, I don’t want you to forget to mention it because we didn’t mention it on the show and I don’t want to leave you hanging. We don’t like any open loops. We want to close that loop, that she has some books and the books are called Blonde Haired Girl Mystical Summer.

She also has Blonde Haired Girl Thrival Guide. The four steps to your ideal life. There’s a companion workbook that goes with it. Get out ahead of it. Those three books are all available. I’m so glad Jayme came on the show and I’m so glad she reached out to me. Be brave out there. This is what I hear again from people, “I didn’t know that I was successful enough for your show.” There are all levels of success here on this show. Sometimes they are people who have millions of listeners. Sometimes there are people who have hundreds of listeners. That does not matter to me.

What matters to me is that you’ve got to show you’re dedicated to keep moving forward on and you have some success factors. Something is working for you whether it’s working for how you personally handle the show or how you’ve marketed and pushed it out there. Either way, we want to hear those success factors. We want to analyze your binge factor, find out what that is because that can help more people out there but it also gets you great exposure for your show. Come and get some publicity, apply to The Binge Factor. You can go to TheBingeFactor.com and apply under the guests’ section. Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next time with more of The Binge Factor.

Important Links:

• Jayme Tener
• Blonde Haired Girl To Go
• YouTube – Blonde Haired Girl JKT
• Blonde Haired Girl: My Summer of Mystical Events
• Coast to Coast – Podcast
• Show Audit – Podetize
• Podetize
• Blind Faith – Blonde Haired Girl To Go Podcast Episode
• Smoking Hot – Blonde Haired Girl To Go Podcast Episode
• Blonde Haired Girl Mystical Summer
• Blonde Haired Girl Thrival Guide
• TheBingeFactor.com