245 | Interviews Don’t Grow Your Podcast… Unless You Do This

Do interviews grow your podcast? Everybody seems to think so, but why is it then that when you've featured guests on your podcast, it hasn't really grown your show? My name is Kev Michael, I am your podcast growth coach and I see this all the time. I speak with podcasters who are perplexed as to why their show isn't growing. Despite the fact that they have had amazing guests on their show and sometimes even a couple of well-known big names, so what gives? Does interviewing guests actually grow your podcast or is it secretly holding you back? Well, I wanted to answer this question once and for all, so I dug into the analytics of my shows and several of the over 500 shows that I have helped over the years and what I found shocked me. Today on Grow the Show, I'm going to reveal the podcast growth secret that flips the script on interviews and I'm going to show you what to do to finally make them grow your podcast. Let's dive in. Okay, so for the past few years, I have been saying a lot on my podcast grow the show that interviews do not grow podcasts and this is because I have been looking at podcast data for several years and in 2021, 2022, 2023 and a little bit of 2024, what I was seeing is that on the audio platforms like Spotify and Apple, solo episodes were performing much, much better if you measure it by completion rate and anecdotally, I saw this to be true with my show and the shows that I work on where shows that were publishing solo episodes were growing faster than shows that were having guests on their show all the time. And this was a huge insight because most people who launch a podcast launch the same show. It's 30 to 45 minute interviews. You asked the guest about their background. What makes them successful? It's kind of the same thing over and over again. So what I learned from this and what I saw was that if you published solo podcast episodes, your show did better. People listened to your episodes longer. Your show got shared more and overall you got more downloads and for business owners, you got more sales from solo episodes. So for the past few years, I've been telling podcasters maybe dial back on the guest interviews a little bit because we're seeing solo episodes crush. However, I saw a totally different story because when I dug into the shows that I was helping on YouTube, I found the opposite to be true. And I found that interview episodes were doing more to grow YouTube channels. Now, how can I tell? Well, in order to understand why interviews are helping YouTube channels grow better, you need to understand what the important metrics are to grow a YouTube channel. And what I have found is that the most important metrics to focus on if you want your YouTube channel to grow is click the rate, which is the percentage of people who click on your episode when they see it as an option, average view duration, which is on average of the people who watch your video, how much time did they view? So it's like a time watch time, which is the total number of hours and minutes that human beings have spent watching your video. And then 30 second retention rate, which is the percentage of people that are watching your video 30 seconds after it starts. Now, those are the biggest four metrics that I have found indicate whether a podcast is going to grow on YouTube. And I can dig more into what those metrics are and how to manipulate them in a separate video if you want. Just comment below if you want that. But what I found is that when I dug into YouTube channels, the YouTube channels that published guest interviews oftentimes had more views on their guest interview episodes. And that was surprising to me. I was like, whoa, that's really interesting. These videos tend to be way longer. They're like 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes. So why is it that these get views because I'm willing to bet that people aren't watching all of these videos. But when I dug into the YouTube studio data, because when you already grow the show accelerator client, I get access to your YouTube studio. So I look at your metrics and tell you exactly what you need to change in order to grow. What I found is that guest episodes got much higher average view durations and way higher watch times. And that is the ticket. Because if you want to grow on YouTube, you have to focus on improving your click through rate and your watch time. Those are the two biggest metrics that grow a YouTube channel when you get better at those metrics. Like I said before, what I've been seeing on audio is that solo episodes really perform well and guest episodes don't perform as well. But I'm seeing the complete opposite on YouTube if we define performing well as watch time and average view duration on YouTube. People are publishing five, 10, sometimes 20 to 30 minute solo episodes and those have way lower average view durations and watch times. And I'm seeing this from my own show right now. I just published a guest interview this week to my YouTube channel. And the average view duration is 14 minutes on that guest interview, which is like an hour long, which is almost nine minutes more than my regular average view duration, which is at about five minutes. Compare that to my the watch time on the video that I published yesterday at around this time. So this video has been up for 24 hours. And currently the watch time on that video is 297.3 hours. So 297 hours, humans have spent consuming that video that I published yesterday. Really crazy, which is 277 hours more than my channel usually averages when I'm publishing solo episodes. So these metrics are so much higher. And the reason behind that is when people consume long form interviews, a lot of people will put the video on and then go do something else while the video's on in the background. So even though that person wasn't paying full attention to that video, they were still watching it and YouTube counts all of that time, right? So like that one person watches for 60 minutes, that is going to skyrocket both the watch time and the average view duration. So you don't need your whole audience to consume the whole episode. You just need some people to consume the whole episode. And it really makes these metrics, which are so key to growth on YouTube, absolutely explode compared that to a solo episode, whereas you talking to the camera and the nature of that content is that people are paying full attention to it. So if at any point, like this one, if at any point someone loses attention, they click away or they turn it off. Okay. So this is the huge insight that makes interviews perform way better on YouTube. But why is it still that when you're publishing episodes on YouTube, nothing's happening. It's not getting any reach. Well, the answer is in order to get high average view duration and high watch time, you must first get people to click on your videos. So if you are not seeing views and you're not seeing growth on your YouTube channel, look at your click-through rate. Go into the YouTube studio and look at your click-through rate. And I'm willing to bet that you will see numbers that are below 3%, which is not what you want. If your numbers are below 3%, YouTube is not going to show your videos to people. It means that people are not clicking on your videos. And the reason is because your thumbnail and your title and potentially the topic that you chose to package that interview around are not interesting to people. People don't see it and click on it. You know how good that interview was. But you did not successfully get strangers to want to listen to it. But if you can get some people to click on your video, if you can increase your click-through rate from just 2.9%, which is usually a video that doesn't do so well, and increase it to just 3.9%, that video will do much, much better. And that is likely to get enough people to click the video to where some of those people will consume the whole thing in the background. And it'll absolutely make your watch time and your average view duration skyrocket, which will make YouTube say, holy crap, because here's the key. This is why interviews are doing so well on YouTube right now. YouTube's sole goal is to keep people on YouTube. They want to keep people watching YouTube. So when YouTube decides what videos to offer people, it looks at two things. Number one, which videos have titles and thumbnails that people are actually going to click on. Instead of clicking on other videos that might interest them, that is indicated by your click-through rate. But the next thing they say is, okay, of the thousands of videos that I could show this particular person right now, which ones are most likely to keep that person on YouTube the longest. And the metric that indicates that is watch time. More so than average view duration. So while what I'm seeing is that interviews can grow your show on YouTube, the number one thing that you can do to make that actually happen is learn how to package those interviews in a way that gets people to click. And what is involved in that is, like I said before, having great titles, having great thumbnails, and positioning the interview around one specific topic. That's how you do it. Now recently I published a totally separate video about how you should title your videos. That I have found is going to get you most of the way there. But you also need to learn how to do thumbnails and how to pick the right topic of the many topics that you covered in your 60 minutes and say, this is what this interview is about. So if those are interesting, do you let me know in the comments? And I will make a future video about those things. And that's going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. So in summary, I am revising what I've been saying for years. I used to say that if you want your podcast to grow, you should focus on solo episodes. Now I am discovering that really the best shows have a little bit of both. They've got guest episodes that are well packaged. So people actually click on the episodes and they also have solo episodes as well because those generate more sales. My name is Kev Michael and this is Grow the Show.