Here's Why YouTube Podcasts are CRUSHING Right Now | Ep. 66

Curious about the real difference between a podcast and a YouTube podcast? In this episode, I break down why video podcasts on YouTube get more reach, how to avoid common mistakes, and the best strategies for growing your audience. I share my own experience, practical tips, and why YouTube’s discovery engine is a game-changer for podcasters.

✨ Cringe or Binge: How does your channel rank? Download the VBA app to analyze your channel in 1 simple step. It’s free! https://videobrand.link/app

📹 Be Binge-worthy on YouTube: https://videobrand.link/become-bingeable

🟣 Video Brand Academy: https://videobrand.link/vba

🎥 CRUSH IT ON CAMERA GUIDE: https://vidpromom.com/crush

🎧 Video Brand Infusion Podcast: http://meredithmarsh.co/podcast

📲 Download my FREE Video Brand Academy app! 👉 https://videobrand.link/app

👉 Consistent Sales of Your Course with YouTube: https://youtu.be/GBhulsp0s-4

📹 Follow on YouTube for Video Podcast: https://youtu.be/zkscCExxg9Y?si=B2EAIPxJV0-jEP-7

Transcript

Podcasting and YouTube are really kind of like as good as it gets for long form multimedia content, but YouTube and podcasting have been slowly sort of melding together in the last couple of years. So what's the deal? What's the difference between a podcast and a YouTube podcast, or a podcast episode and a YouTube video, and if you take your existing podcast and start a YouTube podcast with it, or if you add a YouTube podcast to your existing YouTube channel, can you make sure that the content you create reaches as many people as possible? We're gonna dive into that here on episode 66 of Video Brand Infusion. My name is Meredith and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business. I have a lot to say about this topic. I've been doing my YouTube podcast, video podcast for like maybe a year and a half now. I've talked about this before, but there are some podcast slash video slash YouTube podcasting mistakes that I keep seeing around like branding and guests and titles, and we're gonna dive into that stuff too. Now, a couple of weeks ago, I was scrolling through threads, my second favorite social media platform after YouTube, and I saw that somebody had posted that they just recently launched a podcast. They launched an audio version and they launched a YouTube podcast at the same time. And what she said was that the audio version is performing so much better than the YouTube version. So, of course that piqued my interest, and I was really curious about this because if she has the stats to back it up, like I wanna see them as a YouTube creator, as a YouTube strategist, I wanna see this, right? So I responded and asked, did you upload a video podcast to YouTube or was it a static image of your podcast cover art with just audio underneath because there's a big difference between how one is gonna perform over the other. She didn't respond, so I sleuthed it out on my own. And what do you know? Her YouTube podcast, I'm putting that in air quotes, is a static image with audio underneath. So I wanna get this outta the way, right at the very front of this episode here. When I'm talking about a YouTube podcast or a video podcast, I'm talking about where there's actual video moving video happening in the frame, not just a static image or a static image of like artwork. I am talking about either a talking head, talking to the camera, like what I'm doing right now, or multiple guests that happen to be on camera, or even just a wide shot of a room of people at a table talking. Not necessarily looking at the camera, but they're there. You can see them talking to each other or even just if you're showing something on your screen, even if you're showing slides or something on your screen. I still think that is way more likely to succeed as a YouTube podcast than just putting a static image with the audio underneath. So that's what I'm talking about here, a real "real" video, not just an image with audio. To be totally honest, I am not sure that putting your podcast artwork with audio underneath is even really worth the brain cells worth of effort it takes to put that podcast on YouTube. I think you should turn your camera on first of all, but second of all, you know when I introduced myself, I said I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business. We're talking about video marketing, and I think having a video podcast on YouTube in conjunction with an audio podcast that goes out via RSS is like the absolute best of both worlds because it's really easy to do. If you're doing YouTube videos, it's really easy to just let rip to the RSS and if you're recording your audio podcast with your video on, it's really easy to edit it the way that you normally would, but upload the video part to YouTube. So I think having it be hybrid is absolutely brilliant. And I like, every time I hear somebody say, "whoa, if it's a piece of content on YouTube, it's not a podcast," I wanna poke my eyes out. Actually, I wanna poke the eyes out of the person who's saying it. Because it can be both. It can be both. Video Brand Infusion podcast is both. You can find it on YouTube or Spotify or any of the other podcast players that episodes go out to as audio. I think you should. It's worth the, I think, $12 a month that it costs to have a podcast on Buzzsprout. That's where I host the audio version. I think I pay 18 because I have magic mastering, which allows me to upload the video file to Buzzsprout and it will turn it into MP3 and it will go out as audio after it makes my audio sound better. Although Dscr does a pretty good job of that anyway, so for $18 a month, to me personally, it's worth it to get my long form content, my video podcasts out to people who prefer to listen to podcast content on a podcast player. And quick side note here, I did a breakdown in episode 48 of how the YouTube podcast and the podcast in general was going after 12 months. So that's been a few months since I did that, but at the time it was 82,000 views on the YouTube podcast, episodes on YouTube versus 2,600 downloads of all of the audio version in whatever platforms that they went out to. That's the reality of how much more reach you have by putting your content, your podcast content on YouTube as a video versus just having it go out to the audio platforms. One of the most important things to keep in mind with a YouTube podcast is YouTube is a discovery engine. You can search for topics or search for podcast episodes or podcast show topics through Spotify and through Apple Podcasts, but they lack a robust recommendation algorithm that YouTube has. On YouTube, your podcast episodes can show up in search. They can show up as suggested videos. They can show up on the YouTube homepage, right? That's how you gain momentum and gain an audience on YouTube. That's why YouTube is so powerful, like in general. So why not put your podcast content there? In addition to the discoverability, YouTube has engagement features. This is one of the things that I really struggled with this way back, like years ago. I did start, I think I started two different podcasts that were audio only and I don't know, I abandoned them after not very long. And one of the things that I found that I just absolutely missed is that you're just like talking into a void. When you publish an audio podcast, there's no comments back to you. There's no likes. There's just like, how many people listen to this? There's other ways you can get people, you know, I hear this a lot, like, oh, message us on Instagram, do this, do that, join our Facebook group. And with YouTube it's all right there. I know that Spotify has introduced commenting, I believe, and Buzz Sprout has their fan mail feature where your listeners can actually just like click a link, it opens up your text app on your phone, and they can like text a message, but you can't message back. It's not a comment. It's not like a public comment. There's no back and forth and it's like, we replaced the fact that there was just a one-way broadcast out into the black hole of the Podcastosphere with another one-way broadcast back to us, completely lacking any sense of community or even conversation. And on YouTube, you have it all right there. You have the comments. You can have a back and forth conversation which is so beneficial as the person creating the content to get feedback from the audience. A like, a comment, even just like, "Hey, thanks for your video." The engagement really helps to kind of keep you going. If people ask questions, it gives you future content ideas and not just, you know, a broadcast. So on the technical side of things, there really is no difference between a YouTube video and a YouTube podcast video. They're both YouTube videos. You upload them the exact same way that you would anything else. There's no difference in how you upload the videos. The only thing that makes a regular video into a podcast is that you designate the playlist you're adding it to as your podcast playlist. And when you do that, then you get the podcast tab on your YouTube channel. Like on the homepage, there's a podcast tab and you can have multiple podcasts there. Those podcasts are just playlists. So when I go to upload my YouTube podcast for Video Brand Infusion for this episode here, when I'm done editing, I'm gonna go to YouTube and upload it just like a regular video. And I'm going to put it in the Video Brand Infusion playlist and that's how YouTube knows this is a podcast. Now it goes on my regular channel. Like if you're subscribed and you have the bell notifications, it's gonna say, "Well, Meredith published a new YouTube video." It just happens to be a, you know, considered a podcast. Like there's really very, very, very little difference technically between a YouTube video and a YouTube podcast video. So once I upload it to YouTube, I then open Buzzsprout, hit new episode, and upload the same exact video file to Buzzsprout. So between YouTube and Buzzsprout, they're both gonna upload, they're both gonna do their compression thing. It's the same title, it's the same content description. So the video description is the podcast description. All of the other links and other like info things that go below the description. I have that stuff as a default on YouTube, and I have that stuff as a default on Buzzsprout, so I don't have to add in, you know, if you scroll down in my description of this video or if you're listening to it in a podcast player, you can scroll down and see there's like a link to Video Brand Academy or this or that. Or like my, you know, crush it on camera guide and things. That stuff shows up there by default because I have those settings set up on YouTube and also on Buzzsprout. That's just a settings thing. And then I schedule the YouTube video and the Buzzsprout episode to go out at the same time. Usually Sundays, usually 3:00 AM. Is there anything magical about 3:00 AM Eastern? No. I just know that I have an audience in, you know, UK and Europe area. And so like, I wanna just kind of get in early to the English speaking countries and then let the time zones, like, it's kind of like dominoes, you know, just like the video and the podcast already there in the other time zones and the western time zones. As you know, people wake up for the day. So I also like to publish it early and then when I wake up in the morning I have like stats to look at and maybe some comments and things like that. Kind of see how things are doing. So for me it's really just a personal preference, but regardless of whether it's a podcast or a regular YouTube video, I think publishing it early in the day for the earliest of the language that you are targeting with your content makes a lot of sense. Now, when I did first start my podcast, I had a different audio version. I had a little segment at the very end that would say, if you're listening to this, you should know that. Like it's a lot better over on YouTube where you can see. And it was just like a quick, like, I don't know, a 30-second little blurb, but probably even less than that. And I eliminated that because it was an extra step and I thought like, you know what? It doesn't matter. Like the people who are listening to it as a podcast probably found me because of YouTube. They already know that the YouTube is there, so I don't need to try and get them over there. YouTube itself, the algorithm itself does such a great job of getting my content to the right people. I don't need to try and use my podcast to do that. Right. Does that make sense? So that's the technical side of it. But just starting a video podcast and calling your YouTube videos a podcast isn't going to magically bring more views, right? There's nothing really magical happening. To use YouTube to reach more people, you still have to have good or even great YouTube strategy and build your binge-worthy library of content. Now, YouTube does have a. If you go to your YouTube homepage at the very top, under the search bar, there's like these, sort of like buttons or tabs, kind of, and there is one for podcasts. I have it for podcasts. It may be, you may have different words up there than I have, but I have all, and then I have podcasts. So there is this sort of separate podcasts, YouTube homepage that YouTube probably wants you to think is beneficial to helping you get your stuff in front of more people. I think it's just the YouTube homepage, but for videos that are designated as podcasts. So it's still doing the same thing that the homepage does. It's just filtering out anything that's not considered a podcast. I wanna point that out because in case you hear YouTube saying like, "Oh, one of the benefits is you're gonna be featured on the podcast page." I don't know that that might be true, but I don't see that as like a radical benefit of just designating your videos as a podcast, so I'll talk more about strategy in just a minute, but I want to also mention that you can think of your YouTube podcast or your video podcast as if it's just a regular YouTube video or treat it like it's something different. There's no strategy behind, well, I designated this as a podcast and it has its own artwork and it has different intro music, and so therefore this is gonna do something different on YouTube. YouTube is gonna kind of treat it like a YouTube video, so you can treat it however you want. Right. It's kind of like, what's the difference between a vlog and a regular YouTube video? There isn't really, it's just like a little bit of a different format and it might even not be a different format for you. If you look at my videos, you know, a lot of 'em are just talking head, most of my, you know, quote unquote regular videos are me sharing my screen where I'm showing something like a descr tutorial or something like that. So for me, the format of my podcast videos is just like a little bit different 'cause it really is just me talking to the camera and you probably are multitasking as you listen/watch this, right? I mean, I'm not actually, you don't actually have this tab visible on your phone or computer monitor right now, right? I don't know. Maybe you do. Let me know in the comments if you're actually sitting there watching me talk to the camera. So if you are starting a YouTube podcast or a podcast from scratch, and you're gonna make it a YouTube podcast, your whole channel can be just your episodes. Maybe there is no such thing as a regular YouTube video for you. Maybe it's just episodes. That's fine. You can do both, which is what I do on my channel because I had an established channel already with tutorials and regular videos, and I wanted to add a video podcast, and I'll talk about why and my thought process around that in just a moment. You have a channel where you have like some things are a podcast, some things are a regular video. Maybe you also do live streaming. Maybe you also do shorts, which is not a good idea if you're trying to use YouTube to actually grow your business and build your list. But that's a topic for another day. But it's really up to you. There's no one right way of how you kind of approach YouTube podcasting because, as I already pointed out, there's very little difference between a regular YouTube video and a podcast video. It's really just in how you approach it and what feels good to you, what makes sense to you and your own video brand. So I mentioned that when I started my video podcast, I had an established channel. I do a lot of tutorials and educational how-tos. I wanted a sort of a way to compartmentalize a certain section of my spider web. So if you are in VBA, you know all about the spider web strategy. There's a certain section of my spider web that's not really necessary to show my screen. Not even really necessary to teach something per se, but it's the stuff that pertains to like the business side of business and using YouTube for business and YouTubeing your business. As I like to say, it's not necessarily a tutorial. It's really just like a discussion, my viewpoint, my experience, my expertise, and so it made sense to kind of keep it on the same channel, but designate it in its own little container and let's just call it a podcast and let's just approach it like, I know I'm not going to show my screen, so I have to create content that's not referencing something visual. Right? Which is why sometimes when I make air quotes I say, I'm putting this in air quotes out loud because I know that this is intended to be listened to in addition to watched. So the way that I approach the content is it has this extra constraint of I'm just going to approach this like you can't see my screen 'cause you can't. I'm going to approach this like you can't necessarily even see the video or see my face. For me, it just kind of made sense for where I was at in my business and what I wanted to do on my channel and the things I wanted to talk about coincided really well with YouTube announcing like, "Hey, we're doing podcasts now," so it made sense for me to kind of experiment with it in that way. My experiment has turned out great. I'm so happy that I did it, but you can tell if you go to the homepage of my channel that you can see there's a difference in the thumbnails. So to me, it just kind of made sense to compartmentalize the podcast episodes, even though now I feel more and more like it was all in my head. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter if they have cohesive, like these are my podcast thumbnails. I started changing my thumbnails a little bit, by the way, because it started feeling redundant and it started to become more comfortable to just have these easy, repeatable thumbnails, and comfort does not usually like almost ever equal interest, intrigue, get people's attention. That's what the thumbnails are supposed to do. I'm sort of in an in-between phase with my podcast thumbnails, but the way that I approach the creation of the content is in its own little world, so to speak. And if there's one thing I want you to take away from this video, it's that there's nothing magical about flipping the switch and calling a video a YouTube podcast right there. It's not, you don't get a magical boost in the algorithm or anything like that. The secret sauce is great YouTube strategy, which I'll get to in just a moment. So there's nothing magical about it. It's just deciding I'm gonna make these videos a YouTube podcast, and that is just what's gonna work for me and that's what I wanna do. And so if that's the case for you, then you should do it. I do, however, think that if you want your video podcast to reach as many people as possible, there's a couple of speed bumps that I think you should avoid. The first one is making every single episode an interview where you're interviewing other experts. And I've had so many conversations about this, and I'm very, this is one of the hills that I will die on as a business owner, creating long form content, creating YouTube content, podcast content. Your intention with creating content is to attract an audience, build, know, like, and trust, not necessarily to platform other experts but to establish yourself as the expert. That's why you're in business. I think from a logical point of view, that just makes sense. It makes sense to me that my podcast episodes, especially as a YouTube podcast on my channel with my name at the top, it makes sense that it's me talking to the camera and not that every single episode is me interviewing somebody. In fact, I actually think that interviews are one of the most boring mediums for a podcast. And if you listen to some of the top interview podcast shows, they're not so much interviews as they are conversations. And so I'll just leave that little Easter egg there for a future episode when I have a guest outta my podcast. It's almost always, I think at this point it's almost always been a client or customer, a member of VBA in some capacity. Right. I love showing off my Video Brand Academy members because it helps lift them up, platform them when they have reached certain milestones or had really, you know, found really good success at doing something specific. I wanna bring that to you and celebrate them at the same time, but it also helps make the case for why Video Brand Academy is an amazing place to be if you're a business owner who wants to grow your audience on YouTube. And I think it's really easy to fall into a trap of like, it's comfortable for me to interview and have conversations with people on camera, so I'm just gonna do that instead of just me being on camera. It's a comfort thing. And I think if you wanna establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, you gotta stand up, you gotta stand up yourself and let yourself shine. And so that's all I'll say about that. Number two, I think having your episode number at the beginning of your title, having your podcast name in the title, like you don't need that stuff, should not be in your title. That is very like an old school way of thinking about podcasting. This is episode number 66 of Video Brand Infusion, and then this is my topic. Always lead with the topic, always lead with that juicy topic title that makes it enticing and intriguing, that makes people want to click and actually watch. The podcast name doesn't matter. If I ran into one of you on the street and I said, “Hey, what's the name of my podcast?” I bet you wouldn't know what it is, right? Because the Video Brand Infusion, it doesn't matter. That's just my compartment for these videos. The topic is what matters, right? The content is what matters. That's what should be in your title. And that's kind of what I mean by having great YouTube strategy. It's really no different than what I teach inside a Video Brand Academy about building a spider web, building a library of binge-worthy videos. That's the fastest way to grow your audience on YouTube. And if you have a business that you wanna grow your audience so that you can grow your list, so that you can generate consistent revenue in your business, it starts with building a binge-worthy library of content. You grow your audience. The traffic comes one of the best ways. One of the quickest and most efficient and most effective ways of doing that is by using the three by four method. So if you haven't been doing the three by four method already, or if you're new here and you are curious what that is, or you need a refresher, I'll put a link to that down in the description or the show notes of this video and everything that I teach with the three by four method applies to a video podcast or a YouTube podcast.