Fixing Listener Drop-Off: Three Technical Traps That Break Podcast Contact, Search, and Traffic

Well, let me start with saying like, this is what we want you to understand.

It's like people are listening to your podcast on a listening app, right? That's the only way that they find you unless you're doing all the work on the other side, right? And if you're promoting yourself on social media somewhere, if you're promoting yourself in an email newsletter, chances are those people are already connected to you, right? So this is for you to connect with people who don't know you yet, and more specifically, the subscribers of your podcast.

Or someone who may have just like tapped into an episode and is checking it out and hasn't made the decision yet to subscribe.

Right.

So this is where we're talking about.

So this it's executed or where you're seeing it happen.

The mistakes are happening somewhere else.

But where we're seeing it happening is it's visible in the player apps.

Yes, for sure.

The player apps are, right, the biggest culprits, I think, that are holding people back.

But there's also your hosting platform.

And I know, Tracy, this is one of your pet peeves, too.

What's the number one issue you have with podcast listings, each of our shows, that people probably don't even know has happened to their show that's holding them back?

So it's the email address, right? So, and we've done a whole episode on this.

Apple claimed that they were trying to help your privacy concerns and spam email issues by hiding the email address for your show.

I don't know about you, but I have a special email address for my show because I want to make sure people can connect with me.

And if that is being blocked, then...

I'm not going to have anybody reach out to me in any kind of meaningful way without having to do a lot of work to find me.

If they can't click through that, it's one of the biggest problems I have.

I agree with that 100%.

I wish the public, and you can decide, hey, it's a public-facing email address, and there's this one you're going to put out there.

I wish the apps would display the official email address.

It also, there is, you have the ability to have your official email address be a part of your show listing in the RSS feed.

This gets a little technical, and I'm not going to go down a deep technical rabbit hole today.

But a lot of the a few, but three or four of the podcast hosting companies out there have made it as a default that your email address for your show is hidden from your RSS feed.