From Globetrotting Travel Photographer to Daily Podcaster with 13 Million Downloads with Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere Daily
Podcast Bestie, the Podcast
Episode 2 Show Notes
Guest: Gary Arndt, creator and host of Everything Everywhere Daily
Host: Courtney Kocak, Podcast Bestie founder
📣 Attention: Season one of Podcast Bestie, the Podcast is now in session! New episodes will drop every Monday in April and May.
Today, I’ve got Gary Arndt of Everything Everywhere Daily on the show unpacking his journey from globetrotting travel photographer and blogger to daily podcaster. His latest podcast was a lucky pandemic pivot that now has 13 million downloads and counting. Gary shares his strategies for making Everything Everywhere Daily a successful show — everything from shorter episodes to paid advertising to promo swaps to joining a network.
If you missed the last episode, check out Podcast Websites That Convert, Plus SEO for the Web & Podcast Players with James Cridland of Podnews.
Thanks to Michael Castañeda for mixing and mastering this episode. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @plasticaudio.
A big thanks to our BFF for sponsoring this episode:
mowPod is an effective, targeted way to promote your show. It's already trusted by industry giants like Conde Nast, iHeartMedia, and HubSpot Podcast Network, and that's because it works. But mowPod isn’t just for the big guys — mowPod Boost is perfect for indie podcasters. It’s actually been my favorite paid advertising experiment to date, and you can try it for just $100. Plus, if you are a Bestie, you get 10% off with this link: https://boost.mowpod.com/?referrer=podcastbestie. Try it, and let me know what you think!
If you want to sponsor a future newsletter AND episode, you can purchase your ad spot here.
I’ve also got a FREE promo opportunity for the Besties: Leave a five-star rating with a review on Apple Podcasts, email me a screenshot with your name and the name of your podcast, and you’ll get a free shout-out on the next episode.
Thank you to the following Besties for their reviews:
💸 Wanna advertise on Podcast Bestie? Here’s info about offerings and rates.
TRANSCRIPT (This is a rough AI-generated transcript for immediate accessibility, please excuse any mistakes.)
Speaker 1
My name is Gary Arndt, and I'm the host of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Speaker 2
Hey, podcast besties. Welcome back to the show dedicated to making your podcast the best it can be. I've got Gary Arndt on the show today, and we're going to unpack his journey from globetrotting travel photographer to daily podcaster. His latest podcast was a Lucky Pandemic pivot that now has 13 million downloads and counting. Gary shares his strategies for making everything everywhere daily a successful show, everything from shorter episodes to paid advertising, to promo swaps to joining a network. But don't be intimidated. Gary's not new to podcasting. He has had some time to learn the ropes.
Speaker 1
I have been podcasting for a long time, so I started off yeah, I started a formal podcast back in 2009 called This Week in Travel, and I did that until the pandemic kind of ruined everything about travel. And I'd even been doing streaming audio back and around like 99 and 2000 through Winamp. Like I played with an EverQuest guild and I was like the deejay for the Guild and everyone would just listen on Winamp. So that was before. And I also did a thing called All Game Radio. Back then again, it was just live streaming. We never recorded anything. I don't know why, but so I've been doing it a long time. But most people know me for travel photography.
Speaker 2
Your photos are gorgeous. I am blown away.
Speaker 1
Well, thank you. So in 2007, I sold my home and I thought I would travel around the world for a year. And one year turned out to be a decade. I just kept traveling and I was on the road full time, eventually got an apartment, but I would still spend half to a third of the year on the road. And February 28th, 2020, I came home for my last international trip in Portugal, got COVID the first week of March, and in that month, everything in my life changed. The entire travel and tourism industry collapsed. All my income disappeared. I guess 95% of it all the traffic to my website, all the affiliate income, all the contracts I had signed up to do photography, all gone. And I didn't know what to do. At first I thought this would be over in a few weeks like everybody did. Like, Oh yeah, April May will be we'll be back to doing this. And that obviously didn't happen. And I talked to some people I knew who were rather higher up in the travel and tourism world, and they told me it's like, no, no, no, this is going to take years. And I was already having problems with the world of blogging and social media before this started, that there was a lot about it that I just didn't like. In the old days of blogging, people used to follow you through RSS. You had an RSS reader and they would read everything you wrote or at least see the headline up here in their feed, and your website was your social media, and people would come and comment. And so as I was traveling around the world, I would just write my thoughts about a place I wasn't doing SEO. I would use some clever title upon a song lyric or whatever, and I just wrote my thoughts and people would leave comments and that eventually all died. When Google killed Google Reader and everything started to go towards, you know, they would follow you on Facebook or Twitter rather than your website. And then it devolved into clickbait. And today, most travel blogs, 90% of their traffic is coming from Google. So everybody's writing the same few articles. Top 15 Things to Do in Blank.
Speaker 2
Google killed Google Reader in 2013, so Gary had already become disillusioned with blogging in recent years anyway. And then the pandemic happened, which was catastrophic for his travel, blogging, podcasting, photography business. So Gary had to come up with a Plan B and fast.
Speaker 1
So I had an idea of a podcast a few years ago using the name of my website, everything everywhere that was not going to be travel focused. It was going to be more educational history focused, falling back to the things I learned while traveling, but not talking about where to stay, where to eat, things like that. I got the artwork done. I got everything about it done, and I began doing research for my first episode, which was going to be explaining why the Mona Lisa was the most famous painting in the world. Why was this painting of a random Italian woman who wasn't a queen, She wasn't in the Bible. Why? Why is this the most famous painting? And I ended up with enough research to do like a three hour show that kind of did the math. And I realized this probably wasn't going to work as a business. So I shot the idea and came back to it after the pandemic and I was like.
Speaker 2
Can I just say more? Podcasters should say that to themselves, like, This is not going to work as a business. Let me kind of read to all this. You know, most podcasters would have ran with that three hour podcast on the Mona Lisa besties. This is an important takeaway. Thinking of your podcast as a business from the very beginning can help you develop a concept that's more likely to be sustainable, cost effective, and meet the needs of the market. And even if you're not thinking of your podcast as a way to make money necessarily, you definitely don't want it to be something that causes you to hemorrhage time or money, especially if it doesn't have a clear upside.
Speaker 1
At one point I met a friend. We were both speaking at an event and we were in the speaker's reception. And here he was. He's been very successful. He's had many books on the New York Times bestseller list. He ran a massive event where he had like, a thousand people show up and he stopped the event and he stopped everything else. I asked, why? Why are you doing this? He said, Because I started a daily podcast and it's the best thing I've ever done. And so I thought of that and I was like, okay, let's let's revisit this idea, but let's think of a daily podcast instead of doing one three hour episode. What if I just did a ten minute episode instead of taking a howitzer to a topic? What if I used a shotgun approach? And that's kind of filling an evolutionary niche that a lot of history podcasts don't take. Most podcasts take one subject and they go really, really deep, right? So I was thinking, okay, what if I what if I took the opposite approach? What if, instead of being the bricks, I was the mortar that I offered a little bit of something every day that somebody could appreciate? That's just kind of an overview or an introduction. So I did the math on that, and that worked out really well. For example, if you had a one hour podcast that had 14 ads in it, that would probably be excessive, I would think, for most people.
Speaker 2
Right?
Speaker 1
But what if you had a daily podcast with two ads in it that turns out to be 14 a week, but you don't notice it because it's split up over seven different shows. And so I was like, and I just, you know, okay, average CPM up above. I was like, Yeah, and the thresholds you need for the number of people listening because you're doing an episode every day that's seven times the number of episodes in a weekly show. You get more downloads. I was like, while you can hit a threshold for actually making a living off this a lot less. So I pitched this idea to some of my friends who had a very popular podcast, and they all had the same response. One This is a great idea. Two, you're insane because this is going to be a lot of work. And so I created a list of 100 show ideas, and for July 1st, 2020, I released the first show, and it's a scripted show. So every day I'm writing a 2000 word script. I basically write a term paper every day. So my show I released today that I did last night was Biography of Harry Houdini. Show Tomorrow is going to be a brief history of paper, and I'll do everything from topics in science and mathematics to geography, to history, to biographies, you name it. Learn something new every day. That's kind of the premise of the show. And it was a difficult thing because it's not the kind of thing people are looking for. No one says, Oh, I want to find a show about everything.
Speaker 2
Right?
Speaker 1
Right. And it violates all the rules. People tell you about podcasting. Oh, you got a niche down. You have to get a real specific niche. I'm like, No, my show is literally about literally about everything. It's in the title. So it took a while. There's always been steady growth, but it really took a while for things to kind of ramp up. And what I ended up finding is that people were, once they found the show, they became obsessed with it.
Speaker 2
It's easy to binge.
Speaker 1
Exactly. They're like Doritos.
Speaker 2
Yes.
Speaker 1
It's a ten minute thing. And if I have a three hour show, I'm asking a commitment of the listener that's very large. And I don't know if you notice this, but of all the podcasts I listen to, I always listen to my daily podcasts first because they're short and I can get them out of the way, right? So Pod News with James Cridland, first thing I listen to, it's 5 minutes done and I can clean out my my queue of podcasts by getting rid of the daily ones. And people started saying, Yeah, I listen to this on my commute. I listen with my children, I take them to school, we listen at night, and all of a sudden I started getting groups of people that I never thought about that were listening to the show and people started saying, Yeah, Gary, I've listened to every episode. I was like, What? And then people start saying, I've listened to him twice or three times, and mind you, I almost have a thousand episodes. And so I created this thing called the Completionist Club. And if you ever remember Saturday Night Live, where they have the five Timers Club.
Speaker 2
Essentials, five Timer's Club is four hosts who have hosted the show five times or more. And whenever it happens, they do a segment and make a really big deal about it on the show.
Speaker 1
Like Steve Martin and Martin Short and they all have their smoking jackets in this fictitious five timers club. So I created a similar thing, the Completionist Club. And so when someone from a new country joins us, they are well, then, you know, I'll have some food that I know from their country or some reference and, you know, just talk to the keys. The doorman, he'll he'll let you in. And you know, if you're in the Canadian club. We always have Caesars and Poutine available. Stuff like that. So it became kind of a gimmick. So yeah. From the rather humble beginnings of the show, we've had 13 million downloads now and we've had a million downloads on average for the last three months. And yeah, I think the show still has a lot of potential for growth.
Speaker 2
13 million downloads is no small feat. So Garry's strategy definitely seems to be paying off. And having shorter episodes in general is a trend that I have been noticing in podcasting over the past year. And I think episode length is something for podcasters to consider or reconsider and potentially experiment with.
Speaker 1
The longest episode I've ever done was 18 Minutes, and that was on my episode of The Sight and Sound magazine Decadal Survey of the greatest movies of all time. And that was just because I had a lot to say about all the different movies. I think the shortest one I ever did was five or 6 minutes, but they average about 10 to 12 minutes.
Speaker 2
The shorter episodes, I do think there is something to, you know, for a first time listener looking at that and being able to say, yes, I'm going to commit for this first time, and then it's easier to say yes to a 30 minute or a 40 minute podcast.
Speaker 1
I think there's a lot of truth to that. I think you have to respect the listeners time. And the nice part about doing a scripted show is that the episodes are always very tight. When you do an interview show, there's a tendency to ramble and talk about other things and you have to do more editing. The editing and production of my show is super easy. It's the easiest thing I do. The hard part is the writing and research, and I think that's that's one thing I got from this that I think most podcasts you could probably get some from is to make a show tight, remove a lot of the extraneous parts of an interview that aren't necessary to get down to the essentials to respect the listeners time.
Speaker 2
Yes, I totally agree with that. And I do think there's a definite correlation in growth when you do that. Okay. So let's talk about your process, how you, you know, get ideas, how you research them, how you script them, how does that kind of work? Are you doing it every day? Are you batching?
Speaker 1
I do it every day. I could batch it if they were written, but it's the writing and research that takes the time. So the average episode takes me about 4 to 6 hours to do.
Speaker 2
Okay.
Speaker 1
Almost all of which is writing and research. So what I do is I have a running list in Google Docs that I just every time I come up with an idea, I put it there. And so right now it's about 825 episode ideas. And every time I do an episode, I come up with a new episode idea, right? Because it just kind of one begets another, begets another. I'll be doing an episode on something and then I mention it's like, Oh, I should really explain what that is in another episode. So I'm never going to run out of ideas.
Speaker 2
Yeah, you did that in one of the episodes I was listening. You were like talking about Game theory or Out of Africa or something, and you were like, Oh, and actually I'm going to do an episode about, you know, whatever that's related. And you called it out in the episode and I was like, Oh, I bet that's how it works. I bet he gets ideas. You know, it just kind of trickles out. It's like a web.
Speaker 1
Yeah. So I don't know when that new episode is going to occur. For example, I did an episode on the Babbage Engine, which was the first. It was a mechanical computer created in the 19th century. And the first computer programmer was a woman by the name of Adam Lovelace, who was enthralled with the Babbage engine and figured out how to actually do stuff with it. And I did the Babbage Engine episode. I was like, Oh, and add a Lovelace. I will do an episode on her in the future. And I did. And about once a week I'll run a rerun just so I get a day off. And I made sure to run the Babbage Engine episode just before I did the Ada Lovelace episode. So, you know, and then add Lovelace like, well, then there's a whole bunch of people in the history of computing like Grace Hopper and other people that Vannevar Bush all had these ideas about computing. And this just goes to new ideas that you can do. And like I said, it never kind of ends.
Speaker 2
So what have you found to be your best sources that you can kind of rely on and go to over and over again? And do you have a rhythm for fashioning the script or kind of a regular format you follow?
Speaker 1
It depends on the topic. So there needs to be some sort of story arc.
Speaker 2
Right?
Speaker 1
Even if it's like tomorrow's episode is about paper. Okay, so I'll start by talking about papyrus, which is not paper, but the Egyptians developed papyrus first, and I'll explain why papyrus was not paper and why it was never a great solution because it was hard to make the Chinese then made paper proper, you know, how was it different and then how did paper spread? And then the different techniques for making paper and then the different uses for paper, because paper was originally just made for things like writing. And then eventually we got to the point where we were packaging stuff in it and wiping our book with it. Well, you know, that's a long it's a long way from the Gutenberg Bible to Shaman. And the process of making paper, you know, there's a lot that goes into it. So there has to be some sort of arc. And I always have that problem for a lot of shows. It's like, Yeah, okay, I know I'm going to start it or I know how to end it. And I'm like, Well, what? How do I explain this other part? And a lot of times I found it's by simply explaining or providing more expository that I can get over the hump. And I also have to realize that a lot of people may not be familiar with the topic at all. I'm usually pretty familiar. The reason I chose this kind of podcast is I felt that this was something I had a comparative advantage in. I have five degrees in five subjects. I spent ten years traveling around the world.
Speaker 2
You got to put it to good use.
Speaker 1
I got all this stuff and because of the pandemic, I had a lot of time on my hands. So I felt I was one of the few people that could pull it off and would pull it off. So I know a little bit about a lot of these things before I start writing. Like I could give you a couple sentence summary of it. And then a lot of times the research is filling in the gaps, getting dates, statistics, things like. So I did a recent episode on Rosie the Riveter, which is basically women in the home front during World War Two. And finding statistics on this was actually surprisingly hard, the number of women in the workforce and that I probably spent half my research time just trying to do that.
Speaker 2
So like, where would you for that? Like, are you just Googling all the sources you can or are you, you know, doing databases? Like where are you kind of going?
Speaker 1
It depends. Like I said, it's all over the place sometimes because it's a ten minute show and I'm really just trying to provide a summary. I will find sources that just give me too much and I really need to kind of summarize it down into the basics. And I'm always leaving something out. So that man, it really depends.
Speaker 2
But a lot of these topics, you could even go to Wikipedia to just be like, okay, what's the gist of it? And then start, you know, zeroing in on like your idea for it. I'm sure you're more advanced than that, but I'm just saying, but.
Speaker 1
Wikipedia can be a mixed bag because sometimes it's too much and sometimes that's not enough. And I have to go someplace else to find an alternative. That kind of explains it better. So because there are some topics I do off the top of my head.
Speaker 2
Really? Like what?
Speaker 1
Anything about math. I have a degree in mathematics, so I did an episode explaining infinity and I was this was a really hard episode because trying to do this without visual aids is difficult. And so there's a proof in mathematics called the can't or diagonal proof in there's no one Vance mathematics at all. It's very easy to comprehend, but it basically proves that some infinities are bigger than other. And that's a statement that at first it's like, well, that makes no sense because infinity is is infinite. Then you go through it and you can show that, well, no, there's some infinities bigger and you're like, Oh, so that was kind of a risky episode. I didn't know if it would fly, but I guess it did. But yeah, anything dealing with mathematics, I'll do it now. But I have an episode coming up in the history of negative numbers, which we don't think twice about, but that was a huge philosophical breakthrough for people. The idea that a number could be negative or even zero zero came from ancient India, and there were a lot of cultures that had a resistance to zero because how could there be nothing? So yeah, those are the ones. And I did one back in in 2020 when the election was taking place. I never talk about current events in the show. That's one of the things I did a study of one star reviews for podcasts and I always found that there were there were two things that came up unnecessary politics, meaning if you're going to do a political show, go nuts, be a political show. Nothing wrong with that. But trying to insert politics in snarky comments usually always backfires. So I never do that. And I don't use any foul language, which again is there's a podcast I used to listen to. I love that. I listen to it. For years the hosts were incredibly crude and it always came back to bite them. Where people there's there are some people that don't care about language and that's fine. I don't really care. But there are some people that are turned off by it and there are guests that are refuse to appear on the show because they were so crude. And I realized that there was no real benefit to it. And then what I then realized is that people started saying, Oh, I listened to it with my kids, or I listen to teachers, we're saying we I assign this for homework. And I didn't think of that when I started the show. But then I realized this is a huge side benefit that I can now tap into these things, whereas if I was using expletives, I couldn't have done that.
Speaker 2
Plus, you don't need it. This is in game theory, like, right. Okay. So and then, yeah, I imagine like the recording, you're just like doing it until you get one or two takes or three takes or however many you know, if you flub something, you just do pickups. How does that work?
Speaker 1
Yeah, So I just start reading until I get to a point where I flub up or I want to give the emphasis a little different and then I just move the waveform back. I use GarageBand. To a break in the sentences for the paragraph, and then I just start from that point again.
Speaker 2
Super efficient.
Speaker 1
And so by the time I'm done reading the script, it's fully edited and done. So that's what I was saying. The the production is very simple. The only thing I really have a hard time with is the pronunciation of certain non-English words, especially proper names. And I have to rely very heavily on different sources for that. Google Translate actually works really well if it's a popular language like French or Mandarin Chinese or, you know, Korean. And then if you've ever noticed in Wikipedia, usually the very first thing after the main word of a topic will be the pronunciation in IPA script. And there's a thing called IPA reader where I can cut and paste the thing from Wikipedia, paste it, and then it will pronounce it properly based on the IPA pronunciation. So if I'm and a lot of times if you read a word for the first time or you read someone's name, what you're pronouncing it in your head may not be the correct pronunciation. So and then I'll also go down. There are other pronunciation websites or even YouTube videos where I'll just look for someone who's using that word or that name in context. So I at least have an idea of how it's used.
Speaker 2
Oh, that's such a good hack. That is IPA dash reader dot x, y, z besties once more IPA dash reader x, y, z. To figure out those pronunciations you're unsure of, that is such a good hack. And speaking of good hacks, I want to tell you about our sponsor, Mo Pod. Mopar is a high powered way to promote your show that all the big networks are using seriously. It's already trusted by industry giants like Conde Nast, Iheartmedia and the HubSpot Podcast Network. And that's because it works. And Mo Pod is not just for the big guys. Okay, Mo Pod Boost is perfect for indie podcasters and it has been my favorite paid advertising experiment to date. You know this if you are a paid bestie subscriber and it works like this, Mopar Boost is a native programmatic advertising platform and it puts your podcast episodes in front of targeted listeners wherever they happen to be on the web. And that's what I love about it, because like if you're advertising on a podcast player, yes, you're reaching people who are interested in podcasts, but they might not be interested in your topic. And with Mo Pod, you're reaching people that are definitely specifically targeted to be interested in what your show is about. And it's simple and super easy to get started. Seriously, it takes like 5 minutes and you can follow along in basically real time with the MO Pod Analytics dashboard. And not only that, but you can try it for just 100 bucks. You're going to see the bump in the first couple of days. And if you are a bestie, you get 10% off with the link in the description. So you are definitely going to want to check that out, go down to the link in the description, get 10% off, try out mo pod boost for yourself. I think you are going to love it. So let me know what you think. And now back to our conversation with Gary. Let's get into what was your kind of like launch strategy with this show?
Speaker 1
Step one was get Out the Door. And I spent my first month on the podcast making sure the podcast was available everywhere. Pandora took forever or Spotify took a while, Apple took a while. I claimed my podcast wherever you could claim a podcast, I did that. And the other thing I did is I ignored every podcast guru that was out there because one and I've noticed this in blogging as well, a lot of the gurus never had successful shows because if they had successful shows, they would be making their money off the show, not telling people how to do podcasts. So I look at, okay, who has successful shows? Well, these big networks like Wondery and iHeart and whatnot, what do they do? And what I found and I also like listen to a lot of interviews with Jordan Harbinger and Tala Holla, and they all kind of had the same thing. Social media doesn't work. The thing that really works is promoting podcasts on podcasts, and that's the same thing I found growing. You know, I have a very large following on Instagram and Twitter, and I found when I grew those audiences, it was the same thing. You grow an audience on the platform you want to grow. Same is true with podcasting because 100% of the people listening to a podcast ad or a fee drop are listening to podcasts. And I should add that when everything went south for me with with travel, I was basically broke, right? So I did not have a lot of money to invest in this. So the plan was grow the show by whatever means possible. And then as I could get some some money, start to come in, invest all of it into growing the show, put it all into promotion, it gets a little bigger, more money comes in, throw all of it into promotion and kind of like a flywheel or pushing a large rock. As you keep doing it, you build up momentum. So what I started doing was buying ads and podcast apps and the first ones were podcast addict and overcast. I think those are the easiest ones to get into because you don't have to have a huge investment.
Speaker 2
The CPMs are kind of high though.
Speaker 1
Oh well, okay, I need to explain this part. So one of the things I did when I did the math on how this works is I figured out the value of a subscriber. And it's a very simple calculation. You determine the average CPM for an ad number of ads per episode and then the number of episodes you have per year. And that will determine the average value of a subscriber for a year. Because I have a Daily show that's, let's say a third of a thousand leads, a little more than that. But to make the math easy, so one CPM is 1000 ads, right? So by having a Daily show, an individual will be worth one third of that or an RPM for the total number of ads I have in an episode. If you have a weekly show that's about 50 per year, that's about 5%. So the average value for me, just in terms of advertising for a subscriber is approximately $16 per year. And that would be less than that if I had. Simply a weekly show with the same number of ads. A weekly show may have more ads, so you would have to adjust that. But using that as the base number and it's not a perfect number, I get a lot of people listening to my back catalog that would increase it a little bit. Some people don't listen to everything that would decrease that. But using that number, I can get between 1 to $3 for a subscriber. On places like overcast or podcast addict. So it actually is an extremely good deal, not a bad deal, but you need to know that number before you make the investment. And a lot of places I found where they do promotions, they will pay you per listens or downloads and I have no interest in that. I really am looking for subscribers. Now I understand someone needs to listen to the show before they make a decision to subscribe. But that's that's where I first started putting my money place, like Podcast Republic. And then I started investigating every other app, and every app does it differently. So you have to really do the research. Pod Bean pocket casts Player Dot FM Castbox.
Speaker 2
Do you do Buzz Sprout?
Speaker 1
Yes, I've done that a couple of times.
Speaker 2
What did you think?
Speaker 1
I did it the first week they launched it and it was okay. And then I did it months later and it was a very different experience. I did like 10,000 downloads worth, and it was all done within 10 hours.
Speaker 2
Oh, really?
Speaker 1
Like, I had so many people that. Yeah, like, I think one of the things I would recommend that they do is actually dynamic pricing, because right now I think the supply of ad inventory is much greater than the number of people buying it because they've set it at a $20 CPM. And if they allow that number to fluctuate based on supply and demand, I think they would probably be bringing in more money. That's what Overcast does.
Speaker 2
Uh huh. Interesting. So the second time, like if they were served within 10 hours or whatever you're saying, like did you see that growth on your end?
Speaker 1
My show is one of the problems is as the show gets bigger, it becomes harder to tell if something works because I have fluctuations within the course of a week. You know, my biggest day I'll be getting 30 some thousand downloads and on a Saturday, which is always my worst day, I'll be getting 20 some thousand. So that's several thousand variation over the course of a week. So if I did get a thousand extra downloads, it would be hard to tell because you can't attribute that. So at a certain point, once you have a feel for how things work, you just kind of have to trust the system and know that it works. And again, you can always just fall back. If I spent $200, that was my last buzz brought by, which was not which is not a lot. Knowing that I get a $16 per value for a subscriber. Let's be conservative. Let's say that's ten. Just to make the math easy. I would only need to get 20 subscribers. And that's a pretty low conversion rate. A conversion rate that's so low, I'm fairly confident that I can get that.
Speaker 2
Okay, that's awesome. Any other places? You know, obviously, it was easier to tell in your early days, like if you were going to rank them, what would be like your top two that you're like, Okay. I would definitely do these again.
Speaker 1
Podcast Republic is a place I'm pretty much I advertise nonstop every month just because it's a very good deal. Pod Bean I thought was a very good deal for what I spent with what I got. The worst was probably Castro and player Dot FM.
Speaker 2
Okay.
Speaker 1
Player Dot FM provides a lot of gaudy numbers. If you ever look at a podcast and play it on a FM, you'll see, oh, tens of thousands of subscribers. And I think happens is you are simply subscribed by default to anyone who downloads the app that while your ad is running. And so you get these big gaudy numbers for subscribers, but it doesn't translate into downloads. Yeah, what I care about is, is people actually listening to the show.
Speaker 2
Have you tried Maupin?
Speaker 1
I have not, and I've looked into it. I don't understand where they're getting these listeners from. I pay money and then I get listeners. Then it's a big black box in the middle, so I don't know what's happening. And then like I said, I don't care about listeners. I care about converting. Right. I might be willing to try it in the future to see if I can get some sort of conversion. But as of yet, I haven't.
Speaker 2
Gotcha. Well, for me, I mean, I'm much smaller, so it's easier for me to tell, like when something is actually translating into downloads for me. And so far, mobile seems like the best. But I'm not, you know, I'm not tracking subscribers in the way that you are. Okay. So let's talk about swaps and fee drops. And you're saying this is the number one way to grow an audience. What was your strategy and experience?
Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, swaps are basically free, and if you're doing dynamic insertions, it makes it a lot easier to kind of use up available inventory and. I signed on with a network now, so they handle a lot of that. So when I get a request, but they're also doing a lot of that. So we just did a swap with the show that's done by the Discovery, the Time Warner Discovery. We've done it with the TED Talks. We've done it with Pushkin Media Grammar Girl. A lot of higher end networks. They've kind of discovered me as as the show has started to grow. So we've done swaps with them. I'm sure we'll keep doing a lot of them in the future. Every time there's a new Wondery history episode or podcast or season that comes out, they tend to buy either a fee drop or they just buy ads on my site and usually at a pretty high CPM, which also gives you some insight as to what they're doing and how they value running ads that they're willing to pay a much higher CPM. And the Joint Harbinger show is the same thing. I was contacted by them and the CPM they were offering was much higher than average. So just to give you an idea, there's there's definitely value there and I'm going to be doing more of that right now. I'm kind of in a hiatus. The show has kind of run past my ability to sell ads, so I signed on with a new network and now they're ramping up the sales funnel. We got more advertisers, so revenue is now starting to come in and once more money starts coming in, then I'm going to go right back to reinvesting. I'll pay for my rent and then everything's going to go back into the show. So I'm guessing that's going to restart again in June. And my goal for this year, and I still think it's very possible, is to try to do be doing $100,000 a day by the end of the year.
Speaker 2
Good for you. Okay. So were you at the beginning handling your own swaps and fee drops? And how are you finding people are you didn't do that on your own?
Speaker 1
Yeah. Up until the start of this year, I was pretty much doing it on my own with with a couple exceptions. And as you grow, people kind of find you, they start to see your show popping up, you know, next to some of the shows on their network. And it's like, Oh, this show. Then they click on it and they look at the number of reviews and go to refine it and everything is like, okay, they're a player. So maybe that's a show that we could look at in terms of advertising on.
Speaker 2
So a lot of it's inbound.
Speaker 1
Yeah, but I'm going to be actually one of the things I'm going to be doing is there's a Facebook group that has a lot of history podcasters in it, and I'm just going to go to all of them and say, I want to monetize your show, Contact me. I will pay you X amount, you know, whatever your downloads are for a fee drop. And most of them, I'm pretty sure all of them have shows that are smaller than me, but that's fine. A lot of them have smaller shows, but they have a really their listener base is a good target for me, so I think that would work very well. We're also doing other things. We're in talks right now to a very large nonprofit organization that has a particular day which is celebrated every year. And so I'm going to do an episode on that day about the day and the history behind it. And then in turn, they will promote that episode via their mailing list to all their donors and volunteers. No money changing hands, but hey, it's great. And that's the benefit of doing a show that is about everything. I can do an episode and damn near anything I want, so long as that's kind of interesting. And we realized, well, we could replicate this with a whole host of things. We could work with any large nonprofit group, we could do something with AARP, and I could do an episode on the history of Social Security or the history of retirement, and how a long time ago that didn't exist. And, you know, so there's all sorts of opportunities like that for the show. We just need to explore them.
Speaker 2
Hey, besties. So Podcast Bestie. The podcast already has 20 ratings on Apple Podcasts. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your help. And I want to shout out the BFFs who have made my day and left reviews. So thank you to Ken Volante, host of the Something Rather than Nothing podcast. Thanks so much to Jean Liberman from the show Volunteer Technologist. Thank you to Matt Gill, Julie, host of the Life Shift podcast. You're going to be hearing from him with a Q&A soon about video editing. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much To Diana Joy Spencer, host of the Multi Passionate Mastery Podcast. Really cute podcast. And thank you, Lauren Purcell, podcast marketing extraordinaire from Ting Media with podcast, the newsletter and a bunch of other wonderful things that you should be following. Thank you to Ariel. Alison Blatt from Earbuds and Ting. She's got an amazing new show, the Trailer Park podcast, which you should check out. Thank you so much, Tom Madison from the Just a Person podcast. Thank you to Becky Taylor, host of This sounds a Bit Woo Woo to Me podcast. Thank you so much to Jodie Murphy from Dork Tails Story Time, a podcast, four kids and their geeky grown ups. And I am missing a couple of you because I couldn't find your email and I was like a detective trying to put together who I thought the reviews came from and I couldn't quite piece it together. So if I missed you in this roundup, I want to give you a shout out. So please hit me up. Let me know that you left a review and I will correct that in the next episode. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you to those BFFs who left reviews. It seriously means so, so much. So if you want to get a shout out on the next episode, I would love to do that. Please go to Apple Podcasts, leave a five star rating and review and then you can either email me a screenshot with your name and the name of your podcast, or you can just leave that information in the review itself. And I will give you a shout out on the next episode. So now back to our conversation with Gary. And the thing that I'm bumping on with this daily podcast is the daily aspect, right? Like it's hard enough to do all your other work and obligations with a weekly show. It just doesn't seem sustainable to produce a daily show without batching. But somehow Gary's managing.
Speaker 1
I do my episodes, I make them fresh every day. Usually I am done recording, I upload, it's available for download hours later, and before I went to podcast, my sleep schedule was so screwed up. I was going to bed at eight in the morning and I would literally record and people would download it instantly. And again the issue is, is the ability to research and write. So one of the first hires I'm going to make as soon as I'm able to is a writer to try to take some of that burden off me.
Speaker 2
Yeah, if I were you, that would be my first hire too. So. Glass box. I know. David Sagara, What has been your experience? I'm just curious. Did you keep your IP?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I own all of the intellectual property. I produce the show. I'm responsible for everything. They're responsible for bringing in advertisers and marketing and potentially other business. You know, relationships are developments that could happen down the road. We we haven't officially signed the contract, but if it should ever happen that someone's interested in turning everything everywhere daily into a Netflix series or something like that or a book, you know, they would certainly probably be involved with it. But it's been night and day compared to the network I was with beforehand, night and day.
Speaker 2
In what ways?
Speaker 1
Well, the network always worked for didn't have a sales team. They just arbitrage advertise cast and would forward me an email from them that I had to approve. Oh, that's all it was. Yeah. And they did next to nothing in terms of they didn't even talk to me for like nine months, even though I was the biggest. I started out as like the smallest show on their network. And by the end of the year, I was the biggest and they were trying to say, Oh, well, we're responsible for your growth. I'm like, The hell you are, guy. I spent thousands of dollars this year promoting my show that you had no involvement with and didn't even ask about. No, you are not. You sent one email on my behalf that led to a fee drop that I asked you to send, and that was it. But yeah, the monthly meetings they have, they have a whole staff. They're getting me lined up to appear on other podcast guests with fee drops. You know, they have bigger shows in their network, so doing stuff with them, it's just been an overall far better experience. I still consider myself an independent podcaster in so far as I produce the show, I own the show. Everything that that you hear as far as getting the show out the door, all the editing and production, that's all me. So it's still a one person operation except for ad sales. You know, the biggest problem I see with most podcasters is, is that they don't. It's like, I want to talk about something. The end and they just talk about it. They don't think of an actual format for the show. You know, I think that's very important and they don't invest anything in it. This is a media property, a podcast. It's no different than The Avengers. The scale is different, obviously. But The Avengers, the Second Adventures, the last adventure movies that came out, everyone in the world knew this movie was coming out, right? It was part two of a series, yet they still spent $200 million in promotion. Yeah, right. So if they have to do that, why do you think that a podcast can magic this discoverability problem in podcasting does not exist? Hmm. Or I should say it's no different than it is discoverability in music or books or television. Everyone thinks, Oh, if we just had a YouTube for podcasting now, do you know how many tens of millions of YouTube channels there are that no one watches? YouTube does not solve that for them books. Why does someone sign with a publisher as opposed to just releasing a book by themselves? Primarily, it's promotion and distribution. That's the real reason for it. Why does someone sign sign with a recording studio and music? It's promotion. And so with podcasting, promotion is really kind of the thing. And if you don't do any promotion or you just rely on sending out a tweet or an Instagram post, nothing's ever going to happen because the people on social media and the reason why social media doesn't work because it's primarily people who already follow you. And when you launch a show, by all means, tell your audience about it. But after they know they've already made the decision to listen to you or not, and the constant promotion of new episodes probably isn't going to do that much.
Speaker 2
For the final question I'm just going to ask. So I have Lauren Purcell, who you probably know she has podcast, the newsletter, and she's a marketing podcast marketing guru. But she suggested I do a recurring question for everyone. And I love that idea and I think I want my question to be, you're going to be the first person, but to be audit me, basically. So I have private parts. Unknown. It's about sex and love around the world. It's been going for years. I've been iterating on it. That gets about 25 to 30 K downloads a month. I only release twice a month. And then I have the bleeders about book writing and publishing. Newish, like six months I release that biweekly to and then podcast bestie, which I'm just starting I guess. Do you have any tips for me? I'm hearing I should be spending a lot on promoting my podcast. Should I be rethinking shorter episodes? Like what would be your tips just on the basis of whatever, you know, going into this for me going forward, if you could give me like an assignment.
Speaker 1
So I went to look at what your podcasts were. Podcast besties. I know what that shows about. Given that you have a show about sex, I assumed that the Bleeders was about menstruating.
Speaker 2
Oh, that's hilarious. That's why I added that tag about book writing and publishing. It's really just a play on that misattributed Ernest Hemingway quote.
Speaker 1
I got that after the fact. But when you just hear something about the bleeders, I had no idea that was about writing it.
Speaker 2
Well, I get it.
Speaker 1
And I think when it comes to podcast titles, I've seen a lot of success, at least like in the history niche. The most successful shows are the History of Blank. MM The history of World War Two, the history of Rome, the history of England, the history of France, because that's what people are looking for, right? And I think that even with a show like mine, technically speaking, the title of my show is accurate. I just don't think anyone is searching for it. They kind of stumble upon it, fall in love with it, share it with their friends. So that's why it's kind of taken a while for it to ramp up. So I do think that literalness in a title is really important. So I know what Podcast Bestie says about podcasting, the sexy one. I kind of get the idea what it is bleeders. I had no idea. I had like, Oh, okay, that's what it's about. I think the benefit of a shorter show. And if you're not doing a scripted show like me, you can batch them. Is that yeah, you are increasing the number of downloads and if you want to use advertising and it depends on your how you're monetizing as well, roughly speaking. And there's a lot of gray area. There are three types of podcasts. There's the Hobby podcast. Doing it for fun. There is an ad driven podcast like mine where you want to have a massive audience to get as many downloads as possible, as many ads. And then there's the type of podcast that can have a smaller audience but still be financially successful where they're selling their own product or service. Yeah, they're a coach or they have a online course or whatever. And I think you need to figure out which one of those bins you're in and there can be some overlap. A writing podcast is most probably going to fall into that bin where if you have a service or product that you're selling along side of it, that you could do pretty well.
Speaker 2
Yeah. So, you know, with private parts unknown, I do sell ads and I'm at the point, you know, if I sold more ads, it would actually be profitable. I pay for the show, basically, but I don't really make much money off of it. But I was thinking, you know, the reason I do bi weekly with that show right now is because I really put a lot into the episodes. They're longer, but maybe for those in-between weeks I could be doing something that's shorter, more of a mini. So maybe that plays on something I had done before where it's not a huge production lift, but I'm still staying in touch with my audience and increasing my ad revenue.
Speaker 1
The easiest way to increase your your downloads is to double the number of shows. And I tell this to people, even if weekly shows one of the reasons why Jordan Harbinger has been so successful is he does an interview show. But he has three shows a week. He does two interviews, and then he added a third show, which is him answering questions and doing Q&A type things, which is just another opportunity for him to run ads. So even if you have an interview based show, I think that can maybe still be the pillar of your podcast, but then do a second show a week that's maybe just you or you and a co-host or whatever that is easier for you to produce, but is another opportunity for people to listen to you. If people truly like the show, I think they will be more than happy to listen to more of it.
Speaker 2
Guess what best is I have already started implementing this tip. I'm doing shorter episodes in between the longer episodes for private parts unknown, and I'm calling them Quick years, which is a pretty cute name for it. And I think this is actually going to be a great way to do organic assuming a feed swaps as well. So I'm really excited about it and I will keep you posted and let you know how it goes. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to podcast, bestie, and thank you to Gary Arndt for sharing your journey and the great advice that came along with that. So make sure you check out everything everywhere daily to learn something new in just 10 minutes and check out my other podcast, Private Parts Unknown, which is about love and sexuality around the world and the bleeders about book writing and publishing. For more of my audio creations and you can follow me between episodes at Courtney Kozak, that is K, OCR, K on Instagram and Twitter, and I send out lots of newsletter exclusives to my besties as well. So of course, make sure you're signed up for podcast Bestie on Substack That's podcast bestie, Dot Substack ecommerce slash welcome and the link is in the episode description. Until next time. Happy podcasting by bestie.