225 | Why I'm Betting Everything on YouTube

I'm betting everything on YouTube. After seven years of podcasting and trying every growth strategy under the sun, I've finally found the one platform that gives us the podcast growth strategy to rule them all. You see, most podcasters are still chasing growth in all the wrong places, using tired tactics like social media engagement hacks, podcast guesting, or plastering AI-generated clips all over their social media feeds. And if it feels to you like growing a podcast has gotten harder and not easier, that's because it has. The online landscape and the different platforms have changed, but most podcasters have not caught up yet. The truth is, podcast audio listenership growth has flatlined, yet video consumption is exploding. And if you want to grow a podcast in the here and now, you need to be where the people are actually looking. My name is Kev Michael and this is Chief Audience Officer, where it's my job to help you build an audience of buyers. Over the past five years, I've helped more than 500 entrepreneurs to grow and monetize their podcasts, but here's the problem. For the past year, I've been kind of stumped on how to reliably generate repeatable podcast growth. But I'm not stumped anymore, and after today, you won't be either. Because here's what we're going to cover. First, I'm going to explain why it's been so dang hard for you to grow your podcast, and why it's not really your fault. And then, I'm going to walk you through the six powerful reasons why YouTube is now the smartest and most strategic place to publish your podcast, from search and short form to audience growth, and yes, monetization and sales. So if you want this to be the year, that your podcast finally blows up and generates you and ROI, stick around and let's get to it. Okay, so before I get into the reasons why I believe that YouTube is the strategy that podcasters should go all in on, let me share with you the three seasons of podcast growth that I have experienced that leads me to believe that this is the move. If your goal is to grow and monetize your podcast. So I started as a podcaster in 2018. Back then, I was a software developer at a big health insurance company, and I wasn't super passionate about software or health insurance, but I was an am passionate about my hometown, which is Philadelphia. And so I launched a podcast about Philly called Philly Hoot. And so for the next two years, I grew that podcast. I went full-time. I became a full-time creator before that was a thing. And the way that I grew that podcast was very different than the way that you grow podcasts now. I grew that local show through local listserv. So that was email lists that a bunch of Philadelphia people were on. I made an Instagram bot that went 24-7. I had this little tiny computer called a Raspberry Pi. And I coded it so that it would scrape Instagram every day. And it would go to the guests of my podcast. And it would follow everybody who followed that guest. And back then in 2018, there was this convention where if someone followed you on Instagram, it was polite to follow them back. Remember that? Follow for follow. So that's how I grew the Philly Ho Instagram. I had a bot just following people. And people would then follow the Philly Ho Instagram back. Then after they followed, they would start to get my audiograms. And so in 2018, a great way to grow a podcast was by posting audiograms. And basically, if you don't know what an audiogram is, it was a video that had a tiny animation on that you put to your podcast audio. Because nobody was filming podcast video back then. And back in 2018, believe it or not, posting videos on Instagram was new. It was kind of controversial. People are like Instagram is for photos. Why are there videos? But if you posted an audiogram that just had like a little bit of movement on it, people's minds were blown because images were moving on Instagram. This was not even 10 years ago. Crazy, right? So 2018 to 2019, that was how I grew my podcast. I grew past 100,000 downloads. I grew past six figures in revenue. And then 2020 happened and COVID hit and everything changed. And this is the first time that I experienced everything changing when it comes to podcast growth. So then COVID hit and what happened was everybody flocked to Facebook groups. People were on Facebook groups 24, 7 and Facebook knew this. And so they boosted Facebook groups. Back then, if you logged on Facebook in 2020, 2021, all of your notifications would come from groups. And it was really easy to grow an audience with Facebook groups. So with that, I created a framework for how to do that. And called it targeted daily engagement. The idea was you go on to Facebook groups and you go on to social media platforms and you engage with people for 15 minutes. And back then, when you did that, people would follow you. And back then, when people followed you, they would see everything that you post after they followed you. Not so much anymore, but back then, that was the case. So for two years, I helped people grow their podcasts by getting them to engage on social media for 15 minutes every single day. And it worked. Their podcasts grew. But throughout 2019, 2020 and 2021, TikTok was growing like crazy. And it was completely disrupting the online media world. And by 2021, all of the social media platforms have been tick-tockified. Which means that when you logged into a social media platform, you no longer saw stuff from people that you followed. You saw a 4U page, which showed you stuff that the algorithm thought you would be interested in. And so once that happened, Facebook completely abandoned Facebook groups. Now, Facebook groups are an absolute ghost town. And targeted daily engagement doesn't really work anymore. Because people don't really follow people as much as they used to. It's just different on social media. And even then, if somebody follows you, they're looking at their 4U page. They're not looking at their follow feed anymore. So even if someone follows you, they're not really going to see your content. So in 2021, there was another tectonic shift on how to grow an audience. And that's when the algorithms took over. Now, at this point, 2021, grow the show has scaled. We've had hundreds of clients come through to grow their podcasts. And I'm like, what the heck? The way that I teach people how to grow their podcasts stopped working. So I got to hurry up and figure out another way to help people grow their shows. And I did, through extensive testing, what I discovered that at that point in time, podcast casting was crushing it. So if you just got yourself featured on like 20 podcasts a year, you could grow your podcasts really, really easily. It was like this hat. So I created a new system. Targeted daily engagement became targeted podcast pitching. And the idea was if you focus on getting featured on one other podcast per week, your show would grow exponentially. And that was true for most shows that I worked with. And so I adapted my business, which helps podcasters grow and monetize to helping them execute targeted podcast pitching. But then once again, two years after that started working, it suddenly stopped working. And that's because the cat kind of is out of the bag when it comes to podcast casting. Everybody knows that it's a great way to grow your audience. And because of that, it's no longer a great way to grow your audience. It's way more competitive now to get on podcasts. People have kind of heard the same interviews over and over again. So listeners aren't as enthralled by interviews. And so it's really not the best way to grow anymore. So that brings us to like the 2024 era where me, the podcast growth guy is like, what the heck now? I've seen three different seasons where growing an audio podcast is done in three different ways. And those ways were cycling really, really quickly. So if you've been podcasting for a while and you've had this whiplash, where you're like, what the heck? I feel like everyone keeps talking about different ways to grow a podcast. Which way is the way? It's because it has changed this fast. However, I don't think that's true anymore. So now this brings us to 2024 where I was like, okay, podcast pitching is not really working as it once was. What is the answer now? And what I discovered from studying podcasts that are starting to blow up in 2024 and 2025, they're doing it in one of two ways. Way number one is that they get really good at short form content. So they blow up their audience on something like Instagram or TikTok. I'm talking to the tune of 100, 500,000 subscribers, even a million subscribers. They got a huge massive audience on a short form platform. And then they launch a podcast. Now there be dragons there because what I've seen is that not everybody who's good at short form content does well at long form content. They are too similar but separate skills. So for me, given that my mandate has been to help entrepreneurs with podcasts who grow and monetize their show, I'm looking at these strategies and thinking, okay, which of these do I want to teach my audience to do? So I looked at short form. I've done some testing with creating short form video on Instagram and TikTok and stuff like that. It hasn't really clicked for me. I have never been a short form creator. And so I was like, that's probably a great way to grow but that's not within my skill set. So I probably shouldn't try to teach other people how to do it. So let me turn my attention to the other way that I have noticed shows are growing. And that is YouTube. Now what's funny about this is I'm a little late to the game here. And after looking at YouTube, understanding how it works and here's the key, helping some of my clients to grow on YouTube. Now I am all in. I know for sure that this is the strategy to use if you want to grow a podcast now. And I strongly believe that this strategy is going to be immune to the two-year whiplash cycle that we podcasts have experienced over the past six. And so these are the six reasons that I'm going all in on YouTube now and in the future to grow and monetize a podcast. Reason number one is discoverability. There is no algorithm for audio. It is the plight of podcast growth. Audio only podcasts are the most difficult to grow an audience in my opinion. And that is because there is no algorithm. There is no bit of code that has been written and is there specifically to take your content and show it to the people who might be interested in it. It does not exist like it does on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or YouTube. Now Spotify is making an attempt at this. And if you browse podcasts on Spotify, you're going to start to see that it's starting to recommend new shows to you. That is a great sign for us podcasters. But here's the catch. Spotify is prioritizing shows that are publishing video episodes and short form within Spotify. So if you are an audio only podcaster, it has never been more difficult for you to grow. And the truth is in order for you to grow your audio podcast, you have to go grow your audience elsewhere or you have one of two options. Option number one is that you essentially buy ads on other audio podcasts or try to get featured as a guest on a bunch of audio podcasts due to tons of swaps. And that is a valid strategy. But if you don't have any audience and you don't have money to blow on the podcast ads, that's not something that you can really feasibly do. So what you're left with is you have to go somewhere else and grow your audience somewhere else and then port that audience to your audio show. And that's what I've been helping to people do here at Grow the Show for a long time. My first show was that I grew my Instagram account. I got featured in the press and I emailed a bunch of people and got them all to jump into the audio feed. Then with Facebook groups, it was go grow your audience in a Facebook group and get them into the audio feed. Now with podcast casting, it was a little more pure because you were getting on other podcasts. But like I said before, that's not working as much as it once did. So again, if you're an audio podcaster, there is no algorithm. There's no discoverability. People have been talking about this for as long as I can remember as a podcaster. But YouTube is nothing but discoverability. In fact, sometimes it becomes a little bit of a problem because too many new people are discovering your YouTube videos. If you look at your metrics a lot of the time, 50 to 80% of the people who are watching any of your videos have never heard of you before. And there's sometimes when you don't want that to be the case. But for us, we're looking at audience growth. That's a great problem to have. So reason number one is audio podcasting has no discoverability. YouTube has nothing but discoverability. Reason number two is supply and demand. What do I mean by that? Now, this is anecdotal. I don't have any double blind studies to prove this yet. But I talk to podcasters all day every single day and I am a podcast listener myself. And what I can tell you is that the amount of time that people are spending listening to podcasts is not going up. That piece of the pie is not growing. And to prove that, just think about your own podcast listening behavior. Do you spend more time listening to podcasts today than you did a couple of years ago? My guess would be no because podcast listening is a companion behavior. And what that means is people listen to podcasts while they're doing something else. So it might be working out. It might be going for a run, going for a walk, cleaning your house. It could be commuting or a handful of other things. But people listen to podcasts while they do those things. And the problem is they're not spending more time doing those things. People are not commuting more. They're commuting less. People are not cleaning more than they used to. People are not generally working out more than they used to. So they're spending the same amount of time listening to shows than they used to. With video though, that is not true. Have you told anybody in your life recently that you want to spend more time looking at screens? No, you've told them you want to spend less time looking at screens. Everybody's in that same boat. And yet we are all spending more time watching videos, short form, long form, whatever it might be. We are spending more time watching videos than ever before. So here's what this means for podcasts. As time goes on and the world wakes up to the benefits of being a content creator, more people become content creators and businesses and people spend more money making their content good. So as time goes on, content becomes more competitive. With audio, that's really bad because the demand for audio content is not going up. But the supply of audio content is going up and is getting better. Compare that to video where yes, the supply of video content is going up but the demand is also going up. So that means that it's less competitive. There's more room as the market grows of video creators, the market of video consumption is growing so it's just simply easier to get attention. And to illustrate how podcast viewership particularly is seeping into other parts of people's lives, I was speaking with a client recently who just hit the 35,000 subscriber mark on their podcast channel. They just launched their show a handful of months ago. They're already at 35,000 subs on YouTube. I got on a call with that client recently and they came to me and they said, hey, I think there's a problem with my analytics here because it says that 15% of my views are on TVs. That can't be right. And I said, no, that's absolutely right. 10 to 15% of podcast episode consumption on YouTube is happening on TVs. People are choosing to put a podcast on over Netflix. What does this mean for you? Your podcast can make you literally a TV star. That wasn't the case a couple of years ago. Reason number two is that the attention that people are spending is changing and so we need to adapt with that attention. Reason number three is that YouTube has short form and long form in one platform. So earlier, I told you about how a great way to grow your audience right now is by doing short form video on any of the short form platforms. However, the problem with growing on short form on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, or whatever else you can post short form videos is that if your goal is to grow your podcast, you have to grow on that platform and then get all those people to leave that platform and go consume your podcast somewhere else. That is very hard to do from a behavior perspective. It's very hard to get someone scrolling Instagram reels to stop and go listen to your podcast. It's almost impossible. But on top of that, the platforms don't want that. Instagram doesn't want you to send traffic to YouTube or Spotify or Apple so they prevent it from happening. However, if you're publishing clips of your podcast and you're publishing on YouTube, it is so easy for them to just jump over to the full version. And in fact, you can link it so that there's a button that says, watch the full video here. So on YouTube, you have short form and long form in one platform. And while it's not going to be as much growth as you think because everybody says that shorts don't grow longs as much as you think, it still is going to be more than posting shorts on other platforms. Reason number four is search and SEO. YouTube is the number two search engine in the world and it is owned by the number one search engine in the world. I personally have never cared about SEO when it comes to audio podcast growth, but you cannot deny the power of SEO when it comes to YouTube growth. Case in point, the very first YouTube video I ever published on this channel, it's actually about targeted daily engagement, the social media strategy that I told you about earlier that work a couple years ago doesn't work as much anymore. When I published my first video episode in January of 2022, the video got about 100 downloads in its first week. The audio version of that episode got about 1000 downloads in this first week. So one week after publishing in January of 2022, the YouTube video had 100 views, the audio version had 1000 downloads. Fast forward six months, the YouTube video was at about 900 views and the audio version of that episode was at about 2000 downloads. So at that point in time, 2022, I was like, clearly audio was the way to go. Look at how the audio version of my episode has performed double the video version. However, fast forward three years later, the audio version still at 2000 downloads. It stopped getting new downloads after six months. The video version though is about to top 16,000 views. So that video has been getting new views and it's been getting me new leads and sales for three years because people search for how to grow your podcast on social media. So what does this mean for us podcasters? Well, unlike audio, where you post something and the vast majority of the downloads happen within the first week, if you do it right, your YouTube episodes are going to be bringing you reach and views and new audience for years to come thanks to search and the algorithm. Reason number five is superior metrics. We're all business owners here. We love metrics. In fact, we probably track too many metrics. That's why it's so hard for us to be successful audio podcasters because there are virtually no audio podcasting metrics that are useful. There's really two metrics. There's how many downloads that your episode get and what is your episode completion rate, which by the way, nobody knows to check that one anyway. So pro tip, check that out and see where it's at. But basically what podcasters do is they publish an episode and they look at their downloads. That's all that they get to look at. And if their downloads aren't going up, they have no idea why it is. This has been a struggle for me helping podcasters for years because even though I now at this point can tell you if a show is good or what needs to be adjusted or whether the questions are good or whether the intro is good, whatever it might be, without any type of metrics, it's all subjective feedback. And it's just very hard to say, here's what you need to improve in order for your audience and your show to grow. That is not the case with YouTube. YouTube has more metrics than you can ever want to look at. And here's an example of why this is so impactful. So I was working with a client just a couple of weeks ago who came on and I said, let's grow your show on YouTube. And the first thing that I know to look at now when helping a podcaster grow on YouTube is to look at their click-through rate on their videos. This client came up, his click-through rate on his videos was averaging 1.8%. That's because he had horrible titles and awful thumbnails. And so we said, okay, right now, about two out of every 100 people who sees your video is clicking on it that is not enough for growth. We needed to make it more. The way that we make it more is by improving your titles and thumbnails. So we did, I said, make your titles this way. Do this with your thumbnails. The next week we met again and his most recent video had a 6.9% click-through rate. A huge jump. But here's the thing, the video didn't have more views yet. So he was like, what the heck, you told me to change my titles and thumbnails and your views didn't increase. I said, yes, but your click-through rate did, your click-through rate for X, which is an amazing leading indicator and tells me that if you keep doing it this way, it's only a matter of time before you get more views. Sure enough, two weeks later, I get a message in Slack where he said, holy crap, it worked. And in just a couple of weeks, he went from 30 to 300 views. And I know the goal is to get more than 300 views. But to 10x your views in two weeks is a really good sign. And that would not have been possible if we couldn't first look at the leading indicator, which was click-through rate. If that was an audio podcast, we'd be making guesses on what to change. Not so on YouTube. YouTube gives you real feedback with real metrics that you can use to reverse engineer growth. And then finally, the big kahuna. Reason number six, why I'm all in on YouTube and why this is going to be the place that I grow my podcast from now on, is that YouTube is the only platform that reliably pays you to market your own business. YouTube actually rewards growth, not just with reach, but with money. And if you get to a certain point with your channel, if you get a certain amount of videos, a certain amount of subscribers and a certain amount of watch time, you literally make money. You can make up to $25 or more per 1,000 views. And for a lot of business podcasts, it's between 10 to $25 per 1,000 views. Think about that. If you have a video that gets 100,000 views, you can make $2,500. And some podcasts get way more than that. There is no other platform to my knowledge that pays you at this level. Now what's funny about this is, none of this is new information. It's all just new to me. And if you're consuming this episode still, it's probably new to you. So I'm excited to share that I'm going all in on YouTube. You're gonna hear me sharing what I'm learning in real time about YouTube. And I highly recommend that you consider taking the leap. Come on in, the water's fine, it is time. If you're still trying to grow your podcast the old way through engagement hacks or hoping a big guest move the needle or something like that, stop, start treating YouTube like your primary platform. And here's the thing. Your audio platform is going to grow faster because you're actually growing your audience. So that's gonna do it for this video. Real quick though before I go, if you are ready to go all in, I am launching a brand new cohort of the Grow the Show Accelerator this July. This episode's coming out in 2025. So if it's before July 2025 and you're a business owner making over 10K a month and you've started publishing your podcast on YouTube but your show is not growing yet, this cohort is going to be for you. It's gonna be a 12 week program where we get your show growing. What's cool about this is that I'm doing a lot of this stuff in real time. So I'm gonna be a couple chapters ahead of you in YouTube growth, which actually is better for your learning. I have a couple examples of clients that I've worked with recently who've gotten explosive growth, more growth than I have so far on YouTube. So I know this stuff is going to work for you as well. So that's interesting. Click on the link in the description and apply now or starting in July 2025 and everybody who joins before that gets a really, really big discount because this is the beta cohort for the YouTube Accelerator. All right, my name is Kev Michael. I'll see you in the next one. Real quick before you go. If you're a podcaster trying to grow on YouTube and you're still spending hours editing or you're working with a team that just cleans up the audio and calls it a day, you need to check out podcast boutique. They've been my go-to production team for over five years and now they've built something that's tailor made for YouTube first podcasters. It's called record and forget and it's exactly what it sounds like. You record your episode, send them the raw files and they take it from there. High quality audio and video editing, YouTube optimized titles, thumbnails, descriptions, show notes, uploads, clips, everything. But here's what makes them different. They don't just polish the content. They help you script your content, trim the fat, shorten your episodes and increase viewer retention, which is the number one factor in YouTube growth right now. And because they're in lockstep with me, anytime I uncover a tactic that helps podcasts grow and monetize, especially on YouTube, they implement it for their other clients too. So if you're still DIYing post-production or you're not seeing results from your current team, go to podcastboutique.com and tell them that I sent you. All right, I'll see you next time.