231 | Why Grow The Show is Back: The YouTube Algorithm Secret I Had to Learn the Hard Way

Have you ever poured your heart into an episode of your podcast, perfect intro, amazing content loaded with value, only to watch it flop with barely any views on YouTube? It's maddening. You wonder, what gives? But get this, that killer video might not have failed because of bad content or even because of a bad title or thumbnail. It might fail because the right people never saw it. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that grows your podcast. My name is Kev Michael and I am your podcast growth coach. And today on the show, we are tackling one burning question. Why do great YouTube episodes sometimes fall flat even with great packaging? And what can podcasters do to actually grow fast on YouTube? To answer that, I'm going to walk you through a personal lesson that I learned the hard way after a couple high value videos of mine totally tanked. Spoiler alert, it wasn't the thumbnail or title, it was who saw it. So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through the crucial insight that has caused me to un-rebrand this show and I'll map out what that means for you. And we're even going to look into how one YouTuber accidentally built the wrong audience and how that locked him out of his original content goal. So if you're serious about growing your podcast through YouTube and not just, you know, shouting into this horrible void, stick around for this episode of Grow the Show. All right. So first, let's address this. If this is not your first time seeing my content, you may notice that I introduced the show as Grow the Show instead of Chief Audience Officer. And if you're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or another pod catcher, you'll notice the Grow the Show logo is back and you might be asking what gives. Well, it's because of the insight that I'm about to share with you here today. So here's how it went. I, in May of this year, rebranded my podcast from Grow the Show to Chief Audience Officer to expand beyond podcasting and talk more broadly about audience growth. And I published a couple episodes of this podcast while I was doing that. I was sharing my thought process in real time. I was garnering feedback from people. And then a couple of things happened that I was not expecting. First of all, I thought that rebranding this podcast to Chief Audience Officer would allow me to simplify my life as a creator because it widened the aperture on the topics that I could talk about. And if I'm being honest, I shared this before, part of the reason for doing that rebrand was things were getting a little stale for me. I have been talking exclusively about podcast growth for five years and I started to feel a little burnt out about it. So I was excited about the idea of exploring other types of content like email and social media and other audience business building stuff. So I was like, okay, cool, let me claim this term, Chief Audience Officer, which when I announced it, everyone was like, what does that mean? And I kind of wanted that because I wanted to plant a flag in the sand and claim a term for myself. So I started publishing content on YouTube about various topics like email marketing, repurposing alongside podcasting content. And I announced this rebrand and like I said, my plan was I was going to expand. I would still talk about podcast growth and my product would remain about podcast growth. I would, like I said, widen the aperture and I would expand to not just helping podcasters grow and monetize, but to helping business owners grow an audience. Now, this rebrand for me personally internally as a creator and as an artist served its purpose and that it got me excited again. As things felt new and I was thinking about what content I could make again. So it served its purpose in that regard. But the other purpose that I thought it would serve, it actually totally didn't. I thought it would make my life as a creator more simple because I would have one podcast and all of the content and the topics that I could put into that podcast, which I've told over 500 clients over the past five years, not to do, but hey, I'm a human being as well. I'm not immune. So that is what I wanted to do. So I rebranded the show. I announced the rebrand and so a couple of things happened from there. Number one, as I got more excited about creating content and I started thinking about it. You know, when I was walking my dog, I would be thinking about what content I want to create, which is a good sign. That's where you kind of need to be if you're going to put good content out there. I started thinking, okay, great, how can I grow this show? How can I grow chief audience officer? What can I do? And I started getting back really deep into podcast growth and what I discovered as I've been talking about for the last month is that YouTube is where it's at right now. That is where podcast growth is. That is where it is easiest. It's not easy, but that is where it is easiest. And it is now time that I recommend all podcasters get into YouTube. Okay. In the past month or so, I've been making exclusively episodes about how to grow a podcast on YouTube. So I rebrand the show from Grow the Show to Chief audience officer. And then for six weeks in a row, I start publishing just podcast growth content. So I kind of looked back and I was like, this is pretty funny. I said I was going to expand a little bit and I've been talking almost exclusively about podcast growth content in site number one. Insight number two. And this is the big one. And this is what you need to understand if you want to grow on YouTube is this. I started publishing episodes of chief audience officer that weren't specifically about podcasting. They were about how to make great calls to action in any content. They were about how to build an email list. They were about being a chief audience officer in general. And so I started publishing these episodes to my podcast feed in my YouTube and what I discovered, particularly on YouTube, is that it was getting no reach, all virtually no reach. So if you look at my YouTube channel for the past two months, the episodes that have gotten the far least amount of views, we're talking under 200 were the pure chief audience officer episodes where it's not necessarily about podcast growth. And it's more about how to build an audience to grow a business. Whereas if you look at the episodes I published on YouTube about podcast growth hands down, we're talking some of them got 20 times more views than the episodes that were not about podcast growth. And the irony is that the episodes that weren't about podcast growth, in my opinion, had better packaging and I just put more effort into than the episodes about podcast growth. So why are the episodes about podcast growth doing so much better? Well, part of it is probably just I've been talking about podcast growth for five years. So I'm better at it. I have more good insights to share. But I was confused. I was like, what the heck? This is crazy. These videos are so good about email marketing and social media growth and being a chief audience officer like these crush. And they were literally people commenting on those videos saying, why do you think YouTube isn't showing this? This is so good. Why does this only have 100 views? Well, I brought this up to the founder of a thumbnail agency that I really respect. And I was telling him about the rebrand of Grow the Show to Chief Audits Officer. And he said, can I give you some advice? And I said, please, of course. And he said, if you're going to make this switch to Chief Audits Officer, I recommend that you start a new YouTube channel. I was like, what do you mean? I've had my YouTube channel for, you know, three, four, five years now. I'm up to 3,000 subscribers. He said exactly. You have 3,000 subscribers who are all people who are interested in podcast growth. And those people may or may not be business owners, and I look in some of them aren't. But the thing is, what YouTube does is when you publish a video, YouTube shows that video to your subscribers first. And then it says, okay, how did this video do? Because the thinking that the YouTube algorithm does is the people who are going to like this video the most are the 3,000 people who have subscribed to your channel. They have opted into getting content from you on a regular basis. So what YouTube's going to do is YouTube's going to show your new video to those 3,000 people. And then if it does well with those 3,000 people, then YouTube will show it to the general public. If your video does not do well with those 3,000 people, it will show it to no one else. It literally puts your video in the basement, never to be shown again. So what the owner of that thumbnail agency helps me realize is that I was publishing email growth and offer and business content to an audience of people who are mostly podcasters who that's not what they subscribed to. They subscribed to podcast growth content. So again, if you look at my channel for the past two months, the videos that talk about podcast growth and even to the point where the videos that have the word podcast in the title perform far, far better than those that do not. And those that are topiced around overall audience growth, even though some of the audience growth videos, I think will get people more results and get people to make more money than the podcast growth ones. That's just not what the people followed me for on YouTube. So he said what you want to do is you want to create a separate YouTube channel that's about for chief audience officer topics and keep the current one for grow the show for podcast growth stuff because I said I'm going to keep publishing podcast growth stuff. So I was like, ah, interesting, okay. Now there are several other much bigger examples of this concept happening right now. So one of my mentors, Ravi Abuvala, has over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. He doesn't consider his YouTube channel a podcast. He's published several thousand videos, I think, and he's got over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. And he recently started a fresh YouTube channel, which to me was is remarkable because he's basically leaving behind 100 K subs. He just published a video recently where he explained that he built those 100 K subs on a lot of like beginner business content, like tutorials on how to use, click up and how to use LinkedIn and stuff like that. And lately he's been publishing some really high level business owner content and it's not getting much reach at all. And he ran a test in the background where he published one of his previous high level business owner videos on a new fresh channel and it performed far better and reached the right people. So he said, oh, my current audience on my channel is beginner business owners. And they are not resonating with my high level business stuff. And so now I published the high level stuff and it doesn't get shown because the beginners don't engage with it. And I've even seen this on a really extreme level where there is a business influencer who had a really strong YouTube channel talking about business. And then in 2021 in the height of the crypto craze, he started making some crypto videos and his channel exploded. He got over a million subscribers. Well, guess what? 900,000 of those subscribers wanted crypto content. So once crypto crashed in 2022, he tried to go back to talking about business growth stuff, he got no reach anymore because YouTube would show his videos to the people who subscribed to his channel who wanted crypto stuff. And they'd be like, I'm not a business owner. This isn't crypto. I'm not going to watch this video. And so the YouTube algorithm, which is not smart enough to be like, oh, he used to publish business growth stuff. And now he's publishing crypto and now he's back to business growth. So let me show his videos to a bunch of business growth people. The YouTube algorithm is not that smart. It is just, hey, this channel has X amount of subscribers. How does this video do it? Those subscribers. Good. Great. Let's show it to more people like the subscribers. So what does this mean for you? You just need to understand that if you have any subscribers at all in order for your episode, in order for your video to be shown to strangers, which is what you want, by the way. When you say, how can I grow my podcast, what you're asking is, how can I make it so that strangers who have never heard of my podcast before consume one episode? That is the moment your show grows. And in order for that to happen on YouTube, yes, you have to have a good title and a good thumbnail. And so you have to have a solid click through rate. But then after that, your video has to get through the subscribers. And what that means is your video gets shown to those subscribers. They engage with it. They click on it and they watch it. It has a good click through rate and a good average view duration with those subscribers. Then YouTube says awesome. Let me show this to more people like those subscribers. But if you have a bunch of subscribers and you publish a video, even if it is the greatest video ever created, ever, if you've got a solid base of people and the video does not get through those subscribers because they don't watch it. They don't click on it. They don't consume it. It doesn't perform as well as your past videos. Your video gets relegated to the basement and never shown again. And so you don't grow and you don't reach new people. And so for some of you, this means that if you have recently rebranded your podcasts and you're going after a different avatar, a different demographic, a different psychographic, you may need to start a new channel. And so what does this mean for you right here and now? Well, there's a couple of camps that you might fall into. If you're in camp number one, you have no idea who your avatar is. You might have some subscribers on YouTube or no subscribers on YouTube, but you really don't know. If I asked you, who is your show for and what does it do for them? If you don't know that clearly, you have to start there. And just as a reminder, what I say is you need to be super clear behind what is the point A that your podcast reaches people at and what is the point B that your podcast is promising to them. You've got your avatar and you've got your promise, your point A and your point B. If you don't know what your point A and your point B is very, very clearly, I would start there and don't even worry about the YouTube algorithm because the YouTube algorithm is what's going to build around your point A if you do this right. So my current YouTube channel, which up until very recently was branded Grow the Show, has a very clear point A, which is podcasters who want to grow. And the point B is they have grown and monetized. So anytime I publish a video that's about podcast growth or monetization, the video does well because the video gets through the subscribers. But as soon as I start publishing chief audience officer videos, which is for a different point A, it's for business owners who are looking to have an audience driven business. That's the point A that chief audience officer points to. So when I rebranded my show, I changed the point A and the point B. Well, that did not work on YouTube because I publish C-A-O content, which is for this point A, YouTube shows that video to people that are in this point A, which are podcasters, who want this point B, the video does not get through and so it doesn't get seen. And that's where the advice came from to start a second YouTube channel. So ideally, I keep the current one that I have and I start a new one for the general business owner stuff. So if you don't know what your point A is or the point B that your show is promising, start there and don't worry about figuring out the YouTube algorithm until you know that because you're not going to be good at this until you get good at that. If you do know what your point A and your point B is, then you want to look at the YouTube channel that you already have. If you're starting perfectly from scratch, great, exclusively published content that is for the same point A and that promises the same point B. So what you can't be doing is saying this episode is about real estate growth. This episode is about success. This episode is about sleep. You can't do that right now. You can't build a show off of that at this moment in time. There might be other shows that you admire that are doing that now or even that grew their show five, 10 years ago in that way, but you can't do that now. It's a different landscape. You have to pick one point A and one point B and just hammer that same point A and point B for a year or more and your show is going to grow so fast that it'll afford you the ability to expand out later. Or you might be a podcaster that's in a weird purgatory where you've got this channel. You've had the channel for several years. You've published tons of different videos over the years. The channel might even have a few hundred or even a few thousand subscribers, but you really have no idea who those are. If that's you, start a fresh channel and you can even take episodes that you've already published on your current channel, publish the same exact episodes to the new channel and see how it performs and that's what I'm going to be doing. And so that brings us to where am I right now? What the heck is going on with Grow the Show and Cheap audience officer? Well, what's clear to me is that, first of all, Grow the Show has way more life in it for a couple of reasons. Number one, at the beginning of this year, I was kind of down in the dumps about podcast growth in general because it is so freaking hard to grow audio feeds right now. But what I've realized is that YouTube is where it's at. So podcast growth in my opinion has reset the shot clock. I think there's another five to 10 year period where podcast growth can be explosive. So I'm like, okay, that kind of resets that five year clock on Grow the Show. Secondly, after rebranding the show two months ago, what's clear is that pretty much everybody who's still following me is following me for podcast growth stuff. And even on my audio feed, that's the stuff that's doing well. So there is still room for this type of show. Third, anecdotally, I have heard from people that they have said they've been trying to recommend Grow the Show to other podcasters. But now that the feed is branded Cheap audience officer, there's just this extra layer of confusion. And also I changed my name at the same time. So people are like, yeah, his name is Kevin Schmittland and it's just called Grow the Show. Although he changed his name and now it's called Cheap audience officer and people are like, wait, so what do I search for? So there's just tons of confusion going on. And you know me, I love simple. And so while I believed that switching to Cheap audience officer would make things simpler. I thought it would make my life simpler. It definitely has not made your life simpler and it actually made my life more complicated as well as evidence by the things that I have explained here. And as you've heard, I've completely relaunched a new version of my Grow the Show accelerator. At the time of this recording, we have just kicked that off. We are in week zero or about to get into week one. And so Lord knows I'm going to have plenty more podcast growth content to talk about over the next few months, years. And so the reason why I have unrebranded the podcast feed that I currently have and brought it back to Grow the Show is that there's just way more juice to be squeezed out of Grow the Show. Cheap audience officer on the other hand, here's what I'm going to do with it. Number one, I'm going to start a new YouTube channel and test the other Cheap audience officer videos that I've already made. So I've made a couple of episodes of Cheap audience officer. I published them on this feed and this YouTube channel and they didn't perform as well as I thought they would. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new YouTube channel and just test how they perform on that channel. As far as an audio feed goes, I'm going to create a new audio feed, which will be linked in the show notes of this episode. And honestly, I'm just going to have it sit there for a moment because, as I mentioned, I have breathed new life into Grow the Show and creating podcast growth content. And so I'm just going to focus my energy on that for the moment. If you are a business owner who is interested in Cheap audience officer and interested in learning how to build an audience around your business outside of podcasting, feel free to subscribe to Chief Audit's Officer in the separate podcast feed that will be linked in the show notes. I have no idea if or how often I'm going to be publishing content there. But anytime I have something to say or something to make that kind of falls outside of the realm of Grow the Show and podcast growth, I'm going to put it on the Cheap audience officer feed. Who knows? Maybe in the future, I will switch my attention to publishing there primarily on a weekly basis. So Chief Audit's Officer is going to go on the back burner. I'm going to be testing. I'm going to be learning and Grow the Show goes back on the front burner. And finally, just the personal lesson for me is that super ironically, I had to take a step back from podcasting to fall back in love with it. So I really strongly believe that me getting excited about this rebrand of my show into Chief Audit's Officer just got me excited again in general. And as you know, as they say, action leads to insight more than insight leads to action. So I started taking more action. I said, all right, cool. Let me grow Chief Audit's Officer and I was like, whoa, wait a minute, there's so much more work to be done with Grow the Show. So that's what I'm going to do. So here's what's going to happen from here on out. This podcast feed, this YouTube channel is going to go back to be branded to Grow the Show. You, you who have been with me through this short rebranding process are going to look back and be like, remember when that was just Chief Audit's Officer, it's going to be like Coke and New Coke. Remember when that happened? Coke had introduced New Coke in order for people to fall back and love with Coca-Cola Classic. So that's what's happening here. So my name is Kev Michael, that part ain't changing. I am your podcast growth coach. This has been and will continue to be Grow the Show and 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, 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, cut the fluff out, shorten your episodes and increase viewer retention. 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. Alright, I'll see you next time.