73: Should You Number Your Podcast Episodes?

Should you put numbers in front of your podcast episode titles? This is a question that I get all the time and is weirdly controversial. So in this quick hit piece, let's answer that question. My name is Kevin Spiddlin. I am the creator, host and CEO of Grow the Show, which is here to help you grow and monetize your independent podcast and to become a seven figure podcasting entrepreneur. And today I want to address a question that I get all the time. Should I put numbers in front of my episode titles or should I leave them be? Now, this is weirdly controversial and I see people arguing about this, which, first of all, who cares? Why are people arguing about this? But nonetheless, there are some people who feel really strongly about this. So I'm just going to tell you today why we do number episodes here at Grow the Show and why I think it's a good idea to do so. This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts. 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Now the other camp, other folks will say, don't put numbers in front of your episodes because it's clunky, it's ugly, Apple podcasts doesn't like it, the Apple Podcast app has a separate field that you're supposed to put the number in and it's just messy and I don't like it. And also, a lot of people say that it hurts SEO. However, my take is always, I am optimizing for human discovery, not search engine discovery. I would rather make it so that it's really easy for people to tell you about my podcast rather than a search engine to tell you about my podcast, come at me, whatever. I know there's a lot of SEO professionals out there who really hate when I say that. But what I'll say is this, all I know is as a podcast listener when a podcast has its episodes numbered, it makes it really easy to find older episodes and it makes it really easy to recommend episodes to other people. For example, so I listen to the Tim Ferris show a lot and some of my favorite episodes are some of the earlier ones, episode like 150. And so when I want to go listen to episode 150 of the Tim Ferris show, he's now on episode like 1000, since he has numbered his episodes, it's really easy for me to scroll all the way down to 150. If he was a podcast that did not number his episodes, I have no idea how I would be able to find that episode in my podcasting app. I would have to search for the title and hopefully I remember exactly what the title was. The same thing is true for recommending episodes of our own show. So for me, I haven't memorized that episode eight of the Grow the Show podcast dives into my framework for social media growth, which is called targeted daily engagement multiple times per week. When talking with Grow the Show audience members, I will specifically reference check out episode eight of the Grow the Show podcast to learn about targeted daily engagement. It's easy for me to recommend. It's easy for them to find. If I didn't have the number in front of the episode, then they would have to just keep scrolling until hopefully they saw the phrase targeted daily engagement and let's be honest, they're going to give up before they come across it. So I am not telling you that you have to number the episodes of your podcast. All I'm saying is I number the episodes of my podcast and I do that because in my opinion, it's a much easier experience for the listener to navigate through different episodes and more importantly, it's much easier for the listener to recommend specific episodes to their friends, which means it's much easier for them to help me grow the show and isn't that why you're here to grow the show? So that's it. I do recommend putting numbers in front of your episodes, SEO folks, I apologize once again. I know you're going to argue with me about this, but I am more concerned about the human experience than the search engine experience. Please don't come at me speaking of word of mouth. If you have gotten any value from this podcast ever and you know anybody else who is an independent podcast or who wants to get more listeners or monetize their show, I ask you, let them know about the show and recommend to them a specific episode that you think they would find super helpful and super valuable. If you scroll through this podcast feed, you're going to see the numbers. So go out, look at the numbers, the episodes that have stood out to you as valuable, take note of the number and tell one podcast or friend that they should check it out. It would be extremely helpful for the show to grow and also you'll be putting into practice what I just taught you. So that's it for this quick hit. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I'll see you in the next episode of Grow the Show.