226 | The Secret Advantage YouTube Podcasters Have (and How to Use It)

Have you ever felt stuck trying to grow your podcast? Yeah, who has it? If you're an audio podcaster, you've experienced it where you put out episodes week after week, but you get nothing back to tell you what's going well, what's working, and what you should change to grow faster. That's the grind of audio-only podcasting. But what if instead, if you published a podcast episode within 24 hours, you already knew what to fix, what to double down on, and how to make the next episode better? Well, I've got good news for you. That's how it works on YouTube. My name is Kev Michael. This is Chief Audience Officer. And this episode of the show is for podcasters who are trying to grow their audience on YouTube. Today, in this quick episode, I'm going to share with you why YouTube gives podcasters a growth edge and how you can use it to accelerate the growth of your show. Let's dive in. So a couple of weeks ago, I was working with a one-on-one client, and we were working on transitioning their podcast from audio-only to YouTube. And we got on a call, I gave them some feedback on what needed to be improved about their episodes, and they received it well, and they responded, awesome, we'll implement this, and we'll check back in a month or two to see if it worked. And I said, what do you mean a month or two? We're meeting again next week. And they kind of like jumped, and they were started a little bit, and they were like, well, you've said before that a lot of times it takes 30 days to see changes when you make changes to your podcast. And I was like, holy crap, you're totally right. I've said that in episodes of my podcast, I say that in my course material, because in the audio-only podcasting world, that is true. You see, we audio-podcasters have been conditioned to move slowly with very little actionable feedback. And that's because, as an audio-podcaster, you only have two meaningful data points to track how you're doing, and most of the podcasters who aren't like you and don't pay attention to the stuff that I put out, think it's only one. They think it's just downloads. They publish something, they see how many downloads it got. You understand that we also look at our completion rates, which indicates how much of each episode people have listened to. But even that isn't a fast-moving indicator. So, for the past five years, I've been helping podcasters on a 30-day feedback loop, where I give them some feedback. They take the feedback, they implement it, and we check again in 30 days what changed. Did their downloads go up, and did their completion rates improve? And even with completion rates, once we get a show, it's completion rates to 65, 75%. We don't really look at them anymore, because as far as I'm concerned, that podcaster knows what to do. They know how to create a show that holds people's attention. So, we don't have to keep checking that. So, after completion rates are fixed, we get into this cycle where I give them my subjective feedback. I make guesses on what they can do to grow their show. My guesses are really educated because I've been doing this for seven years, and I've worked with more than 500 shows. So, I have a lot of experience in helping shows grow. And so, I'm able to listen to a show and say, hey, this is what I think you need to do in order to grow. But, the 30-day feedback loop is really frustrating because it takes 30 days to get any results. So, you make changes today, and then 30 days later, you look at the numbers, and you can't even remember what changes you made. So, this is one of the many reasons why it is so hard to grow an audio podcast because there isn't much of a feedback loop. Well, if you're one of the podcasters who's decided like me to focus on growing on YouTube, that is no longer the case. And that is because on YouTube, you get immediate data, and you can improve every single week. And that's because YouTube gives you immediate feedback. As soon as you publish a video, you're able to see stats on how it's performing. And so, now what I do for myself and for clients is that we look at two metrics within the first 24 hours of a video publishing. We look at click-through rate, and we look at average view duration, ABD. And we look at those numbers in the first 24 hours, and in the first seven days. So, if you're somebody who has click-through rates of less than 2%, that means that your titles and thumbnails aren't good. You can improve your title and thumbnail for your next week's episode, publish it, and within six hours, look at the click-through rate, and see, is it higher than 2%, if so, you have improved. And that means you have made your titles and thumbnails better. And that is an indicator that your show is about to grow because you can look at numbers that are improving. This is what I'm loving about YouTube as compared to trying to grow an audio podcast. The feedback is clearer, it's faster, and it's more actionable. Now, the reason I'm sharing this with you today is this. If you are trying to grow your podcast on YouTube, you have to forget the habit that I might have helped you learn, which is to not look at your numbers all the time. Literally, for the past five years, I've told podcasters, stop checking your downloads every day, check them on a weekly or a monthly basis. In YouTube, that's not the case. You can check your numbers within a day or so, and learn. So now, we are changing guidance, and we're saying, if you're a podcaster that's on YouTube, do not wait a month to analyze your performance. Look at every episode's performance every single week. We want a fast weekly feedback loop. Now, a word of caution. Weekly feedback does not mean that your show's gonna grow overnight, and it does not mean that you should expect to see your views skyrocket week after week after week. You still need a long-term mindset to succeed as a podcaster and on YouTube. The algorithm does often take time to trust and understand who you're trying to reach, and who the algorithm should show videos to. But if you subscribe to a weekly feedback cadence, the algorithm's gonna learn much faster. So not only are you learning on a weekly basis, but the algorithm is learning on a weekly basis, and that is how you grow fast. So here's my action for you today. If you are podcasting on YouTube, I want you to institute a weekly feedback cadence where every single week you are looking at your episodes, click to the rate, and average view duration within the first 24 hours and the first seven days. Even if you don't know what is good and what is bad for CTR and AVD, all you need to do is compare this week's episode to last week's episode. And if the numbers go down, see if you can understand why, and if the numbers go up, see if you can understand why. The same thing is true with total views. You want to look at these numbers every single week and use that data to make small improvements to the next episode. If you think of every single episode of your podcast as a test, as a little experiment, and each week as a new chance to improve, your show is going to grow much faster without much extra work. So that's going to do it for this quick hit episode of chief audience officer. Now, this feedback cadence change is so important that I am literally rebuilding my podcast growth program from the ground up to use a weekly feedback cadence. So for the past five years and three different versions of my growth programs, we have used a monthly cadence to measure growth. And that made sense because that was kind of the shortest cadence you could use with an audio podcast. But now I'm going back to the foundation and completely rebuilding how I help podcasters grow and monetize, doing it on YouTube and instituting a weekly feedback cadence. So much so that my initial cohort of Grow the Show Accelerator 4.0, which is launching in July 2025, is going to feature a weekly feedback cadence where every single week I'm giving direct private feedback to every single podcaster in the cohort for 12 weeks in a row. That's how important it is for you to have a weekly feedback cadence. So if you're hearing this and you're interested in learning more about that, click the link in the description to apply to the cohort. If not, my hope is that you take away from this to look at your numbers weekly so that you can grow faster.