267 | ChatGPT Doesn't Know How to Grow Your Podcast (Neither Does Claude)

This is Grow the Show, the podcast that grows your podcast. My name is Kev Michael. I am your podcast growth coach here to tell you today that chat GPT does not know how to grow your podcast. Neither does Claude, neither does Gemini. I tested this. I opened fresh brand new accounts on all three platforms with no history, no context on me and what I talk about and I asked the same question, how do I grow my podcast? And the answers were really bad. Not bad like, you know, slightly off, bad like, if you followed this advice, you would waste months and thousands of dollars and wonder why nothing is working. I started with Gemini. Gemini told me that the number one thing to do is to clip my episodes into short form clips. Number two was guest appearances. Don't hate that. Number three was SEO optimized show notes. That's not doing much. And number four was to run paid ads in podcast apps. Oh my gosh, you can do that, but it is definitely not the best way. As GPT was a little better, it mentioned getting clear about your show and your packaging, which impressed me, which is directionally right. But then it said consistency is your growth engine and that distribution through clips is where most of the podcast growth actually happens completely wrong. Then I asked Claude. Claude said to niche down because broad topics are hard to stand out in bad advice. It recommended optimizing titles with searchable keywords. I don't think that should be the top priority. It suggested creating audio grips. It told me to transcribe episodes to get CEO. And it said to invite guests because quote, they'll share the episode unquote. You and I both know they are not going to do that. And then it said, once you've done all those things to run targeted ads on Spotify. Oh my gosh, don't do that. Now I've spent eight years growing podcasts. I've helped over 500 shows and grow the show clients have generated more than 30 million downloads. And I can tell you that most of this advice is wrong. Or at least it all comes with crazy caveats where yes, this could work if you did this. And maybe if you tried it this way, but you shouldn't do that first. And the problem is most podcasters don't know this. They're going to open up their favorite app. And they're just going to say, how do I grow my podcasts? And they're going to get this huge answer and be like, oh man, great. Let me do those things. And they're going to be stuck at under 100 downloads for years. So let's go through some of this advice and talk about why it's really not the best advice and why it's not what I would recommend and why it pains me to know that there's so many podcasters out there that are getting this advice and going to take it. So we'll start with the first one, clip your episodes into short form videos. That's where growth happens. This is the advice that I see the most and it drives me absolutely crazy. Next time you hear somebody say that clips are the best way to grow your podcast. See if you can track down the source. If it's another podcaster, ask them where they heard that. Just every time it's either a software company who's selling you an AI clipping tool or it's a person who runs a clipping agency clips can grow a short form audience. If you do them very well, if you have one or both a famous face and a fancy space. But the thing is even if you do clips really, really well, it really doesn't transfer as much to long form podcast listenership as you think. So clips are not a podcast growth strategy. They are a gravy strategy. It can be gravy on top of the main strategy to grow your show. And it's something you can do because it's easy to repurpose, but it should not be your primary lever. And it is absolutely not the top way to grow a show. Ask anyone who has actually built a large podcast audience who is not a stand up comedian that is also touring the country and has a Netflix special. They will tell you the same thing clips don't really do much. The second one is niche down. This one sounds right and used to kind of be right. But nowadays it's subtly and very importantly wrong. You do not want to niche down. You want to get more specific. There is a real difference. When you niche down, you lower the ceiling of your show. You say, I'm going to make my show interesting to less people. But when you get more specific about who you're for and what you promised them, you actually lower your audience a little bit less and you actually make it easier for the algorithm to find more people. When you niche down, you eliminate human beings from being a part of your audience. When you get more specific, you eliminate human beings for now. But in the future, they may become a part of your audience. Knitching down, shrink your audience, getting specific, grows it. The next one, the top one that Chad G. Patis said, be consistent. And if you Google how to grow a podcast, this is the top answer everywhere. Just be consistent. Put in the reps. Show up every week. And it'll work. If you consistently do the wrong thing, you will consistently get no growth. Consistency is table stakes. It is not a strategy. There are tons of people in this world who go to the gym four times a week and their body has not changed in 10 years. They have been consistent. Why don't they have six packs? Because they're consistently not doing the right thing or not doing enough of the right thing to get what they want. But there isn't anybody on the planet who has a six pack that isn't super consistent. So consistency is table stakes, but it is not a growth strategy. The next one is SEO Optimized Show Notes. This is the one that I get flacked for all the time. I don't believe in SEO being the top strategy to grow a podcast. There are other podcast experts who believe it and have generated great results for people. That's awesome. If that works for you, great. But what I have found serving more than 200,000 podcasters over the last eight years, I just checked my CRM. More than 200,000 podcasters have somehow consumed, grow the show's content. And those are just the ones whose email I've gotten. There's probably more, but I can tell you that I've seen and worked with a lot of podcasters over the last eight years. And in most cases, they misunderstand SEO. But first, just think about it for a second. SEO means somebody is searching for information, search engine optimization, someone is searching for information. If they find a link to a 60 minute podcast episode from someone they've never heard of, are they going to stop what they're doing? Get out from their computer, go walk around the block for an hour and listen to that audio podcast to get the answer to their question. No, they want the answer immediately. By the way, people aren't even searching Google anymore for stuff. They're searching chatbots now. They're asking chatbots for information. So SEO itself is kind of dying. But overall, I've never believed that a podcast's main core growth strategy should be, I want people to search for information and find my podcast so that they listen to it. In my experience, it just doesn't work that way as often. What I've also found over the last eight years of SEO, people yelling at me that I'm telling people not to do SEO is that the people who have gotten huge success with SEO for their show are people who understand SEO. They're often tech people, software developers are people who do SEO optimization for their business. They're like, this worked for me, everyone should do this. But the problem is the layperson doesn't understand that SEO is more than just keywords. Keywords is one ingredient of SEO. There's page load speed. There's domain authority. There's so many different things that go into SEO that's in addition to search terms. This is why somebody can open up a podcast app and search for your show exactly, literally, like for the first two years of Grow the Show. If you searched Grow the Show and Apple Podcasts, my show didn't come up. You had to search Grow the Show Kevin and only then Grow the Show came up for two years. And that's because SEO is more than just keywords in the podcast apps on Google, et cetera. So again, there are podcast experts who help podcasters with SEO. Great. Experts awesome. Rock and roll. But for you, the person who hasn't hired an SEO expert to grow your show, I don't recommend you take on SEO as your main strategy. The next one is invite guests. They'll share the episode. You and I both know they're not going to do that. They almost never do. This is one of the most persistent myths in podcasting. And I watch people build entire growth strategies around it. It really doesn't work. You don't want to rely on the guests sharing your episode because they're probably not going to do it. And honestly, when I'm a guest on other podcasts, they're like, will you share it? And I'm like, I'm sorry. No, my team is yelling at me because I'm not sharing enough of my own stuff. I can't share your stuff. What's also true is that our guest doesn't come on your podcast to do you a favor and bring their audience to you. They're coming on your podcast because they want your audience. They think that you have an audience. They want some of it. The guest is there for the audience. Now the caveat to that is that right now on YouTube, guessing is a top strategy. Why is that? Well, it's not because the guest is going to share. It's because of two reasons. Number one, if the guest is well known, you can use their name and likeness in the packaging of your episode. So if you have someone like Tony Robbins or Alex Hermosi or Mel Robbins on your show, you best better put their face in the thumbnail and maybe even their name topic for a different day, whether to include their name in the thumbnail or the title. But suffice it to say name and likeness crushes on YouTube if the person is famous enough. So what's also true is that YouTube now has a collab feature where if that person has a significant YouTube audience, they can click a button and that episode will be shown to their subscribers. That is a strategy that we are seeing do crazy things on YouTube. So growing your podcast audience with guests is so back. But not because the guests are going to share because you can leverage YouTube, their name and likeness and collabs to get them to share. But again, all they have to do is click a button and then your stuff shows up on their feats, same things true on Instagram. Okay, the last one is run paid ads on Spotify or in the podcast apps. Oh my God, horrible advice, absolute money pit, just no. Now I used to talk about running ads in podcast apps because it used to kind of be okay if you had the money to spend and you had a broad enough show. But I personally believe that listening in the podcast apps is super dying and that Spotify and YouTube and Apple are just going to be the big three for a long time. 5, 10 years ago, there was a much bigger percentage of people who listened on all the many different pod catcher apps, but I really don't think that's the case anymore because as podcasting becomes more mainstream, fewer and fewer people do that. They just go to YouTube, they go to Spotify, they go to Apple. So I don't really think it's worthwhile to run ads in the podcast apps and definitely not paid ads on Spotify. Spotify is going to tell you that, oh run ads, you'll get listeners to your podcast. Maybe I haven't seen it as a plan and just in general, I don't recommend running paid spend to your show until you have maxed out all of the other growth strategies. Okay, so I do want to give credit where it's due. Not everything the chatbot said was wrong. Claude actually nailed one thing. It said that appearing as a guest on top podcasts in your niche is the number one fastest growth tactic. That is true. Touchy PT also surprised me by mentioning packaging, getting your titles and thumbnails right. That was cool to see. I was happy to see that. And Gemini actually mentioned AEO, answer engine optimization, which is actually a pretty forward thinking suggestion given that people are increasingly using AI to search for stuff. So all three of them mentioned guesting and promo swaps, which is good. So there were good nuggets in there. But the problem is that those good nuggets were buried in really bad advice. And if you're a business owner who just launched a podcast and you don't have a ton of time, you're going to scan that list, you're going to see clips, you're going to see SEO, you're going to see guests, you're going to see consistent, and you're going to spend the next six to 12 to 24 months doing things that don't move the needle. And you're like, what the heck? I'm doing what I'm supposed to do to grow your podcasts. And I'm like, no, if you were, you would get growth by episode four. So that is the danger. Not that it's all wrong. It's that the wrong stuff is louder than the right stuff. So here's the big question. Why is it that all of this advice is so bad, right? AI is this amazing, miracle thing that knows everything. Why is it giving us horrible advice? Well, it's because AI chatbots are trained on publicly available data. They aggregate conventional wisdom and conventional wisdom about podcast growth, anyway, is overwhelmingly wrong. Think about it. If the conventional wisdom were right, most podcasters would have huge audiences, but they don't. According to Buzzsprout's industry data, 75% of all podcasts that are currently publishing get fewer than 100 downloads per episode. That is the friends and family zone. And that's not the bottom. That is three out of four podcasts. The conventional wisdom is failing almost everyone who follows it. And part of the problem with this is that podcast download numbers are private. Now YouTube is changing this. YouTube, you can see how many views a video has or how many subscribers people have. But with audio podcasts, nobody knows how big your show actually is. So when someone gives podcast growth advice online, it's really hard to verify that they've actually grown anything. A lot of podcast experts have launched shows, but launching is easy. Growing is a completely different skill. And on top of that, a huge chunk of what ranks on Google for how to grow a podcast was written by companies who are selling podcast-related products and services. Those blog posts exist to convince you that their tool is what you need. They're not trying to teach you, they're trying to sell you. AI chatpots do not know the difference. They just scrape all the information and serve it back to you as if it is true. So what can you do about this? Look, AI is still incredibly powerful. I use cloud every single day. I literally use it to help me structure this episode for you. But the key is that you can't take the stock out of the box, advice at face value, not for podcast growth, and probably not for whatever you're an expert in either. Go try it right now. Open a fresh chat and this is important. Do it on a new account. And this is important because your current account has already absorbed some of your expertise from past conversations. So if I asked my account, how do I grow a podcast? It's basically going on to recite everything that's in the Grow the Show course. But that knowledge doesn't transfer to anyone else. A fresh account is what your potential clients and customers are getting when they ask for the advice that they should be asking you for. Ask it the question that your clients ask you most often. I bet you the answer that it gives is mediocre at best and confidently wrong at worst. The real power of AI isn't in what it knows. In what happens when you train it on what you know, when you give it your actual experience, your frameworks, your actual data from what worked and what hasn't, it becomes a completely different tool. And so that's what I'm trying to build for folks. And honestly, that is my goal for everybody that comes through the Grow the Show Academy, the Grow the Show Accelerator, anybody who works with us here at Grow the Show. And actually because of that, on April 30th, I'm running a live workshop inside the Grow the Show Academy where we're actually going to solve this. We're going to build you your own AI podcast producer. It's not going to be an app that you have to pay me $100 a month for forever. It's going to be your own clawed project trained on my methodology from eight years and also trained on your show. And by the way, I'm going to teach you how to reposition and refine your show so that more people want it. So we're going to train a clawed project on your show, on your business, and then on my methodologies, what's worked growing over 500 shows over the last eight years. It's going to know how to write titles and thumbnails based on my research of over 10,000 top performing episodes on YouTube. It'll write interest scripts that actually hook people. It'll create calls to action using battle-tested copywriting frameworks. It'll draft your social posts, write your emails, build lead magnets, all in one chat. And again, a chat that you own. So if you've been using the stock version of Chat GBT or Gemini are clawed to help you with your podcast and you're wondering why your results aren't there and why your show looks like everyone else's because that's the last thing. That's what everybody's doing. So everyone's titles look exactly the same. This is why. The stock version doesn't know what actually works because it's taking the advice of the 75% of people who have no podcast growth. Yours will. So if you want to join that go to academy.growthescho.com, you can join us. We'll be doing the workshop on April 30th. We'd love to have you there. We'd love to help you build out your own private clawed podcast producer. You can grab the link in the description. And of course, on top of that, if you are a business owner who is not interested in figuring all this stuff out in your own and you just want to bring in me to train your team or you want to bring in my team to just do the work for you, we have those options as well. You can go to accelerator.growthescho.com to book a call with me and we can talk about that. But either way, regardless of who you are, what I want you to take away from this is Chat GBT, clawed Gemini, does not know out of the box how to grow your podcast. So you should not ask it what to do and you should not take its advice. You should listen to experts who have real experience doing the thing and listen to the data that they have found. All right, that's going to do it for this one. My name is Kev Michael, I'm your podcast growth coach and I will see you in the next one.