How has podcasting changed during the pandemic? We talk to a panel of international guests Mo (More Sibyl Podcast), Olivier (Awaken the Awesome), Bettina (NRI Woman) to pick their brains about listenership, how to win a sponsor, imposter syndrome and reflections on 2020 for these stellar podcasters in light of Covid-19.

Reach out to Mo (More Sibyl Podcast) -

Podcast - https://www.mosibyl.com/

IG - https://www.instagram.com/mosibyl/

e-mail - talktomo@mosibyl.com

Reach out to Olivier (Awaken the Awesome) -

Podcast - https://awakentheawesome.podbean.com/

FB - https://www.facebook.com/awakentheawesome

e-mail - awakentheawesome@gmail.com

Reach out to Bettina (NRI Woman) -

Podcast - https://nriwoman.com/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/nri_woman

e-mail - hello@nriwoman.com

Reach out to Naga – 

Twitter - @n1n3stuff / @PassionPeop1 (https://twitter.com/ThePassionPeop1 )

Facebook - The Passion People Podcast

email - naagasubramanya@gmail.com

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thepassionpeoplepodcast/

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Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Olivier: [00:00:00 ] I think what worked for Joe Rogan is the community, not just from the fact that he brings a very, wide array of very interesting guests his approach, but what he really bank for him is a community.  So Spotify recognize that, and there's a huge potential, a huge community that came with that. And also the numbers showed it on YouTube. So I think the community is a very, is a very big aspect of it.

[00:00:19 ] Bettina T: [00:00:19 ] So what are my options? Is it sponsorship? Is it going to be you know, selling merchandise? Is it going to get consulting gigs? Is it about creating a new product? It's exclusively with my audience. Is it about creating a product with a sponsor that then fits with my audience? So there are so many different avenues that one can consider.

[00:00:36 ]And by sponsoring the podcast, they are reaching out to those women in a way that would be much more cost effective versus just advertising on say Facebook or Instagram or whatever.  So I think because of that you know, that niche definition of our audience there is an alignment for certain sponsors who are keen to come on the show.

[00:00:55 ] Mo: [00:00:55 ] It took me while can I get comfortable with asking people to chip into my passion [00:01:00 ] project? Because I felt that when I started, I wasn't putting a lot of effort into it and I felt like a, almost like a fraud asking them to put money

[00:01:08 ]Naga S: [00:01:08 ] hey everyone. Hello and welcome to a very, very special episode of the passionate people podcast. Today, we have Olivia Mo and Betina who are all fellow podcasters, and we're going to discuss about how podcasting has changed for them over the last eight to 10 months  because of COVID and what they're doing in terms of their monetization efforts.

[00:01:32 ]Let me again, take a moment to thank you for taking the time out. And I'm just so excited and so pumped to be having this conversation because we've all been part of our community of podcasters, and I'm really excited to know how things have been for you guys. So my first question at the start is that how has your listener numbers changed over the last eight to 10 months?

[00:01:56 ] And have you. Been running the show continuously, or [00:02:00 ] are you on a season break.

[00:02:01 ]Mo: [00:02:01 ] So my show usually takes a hiatus between December and April, and it was kind of a good opportunity for me to at least at least take that break without having to worry about putting my show on another break because of the virus. And so when April came around, I started really slow.

[00:02:19 ] Did something on mental health? Check-in I didn't want to get people on zoom and do like a live show cause everybody was doing live shows then. So, no, I haven't taken a break as far as listenership. Well, the numbers are in so good. Cause I use anchor, which is also another thing we can talk about. It's not really great for like tracking a lot of stuff, but I think that qualitatively, the engagement has been good.

[00:02:39 ] I felt like I made more deeper connections with, some of my top listeners this year. Which is always very important to me. I don't get too bogged down about, you know, how many thousand downloads you have or things like that, because anybody can just download. But I did listen in, I didn't engage in.

[00:02:53 ] So how I measure engagement is, you know, people commenting or sending me emails or letting me know, what they liked about a [00:03:00 ] particular episode or what they didn't like and things like that. So in that regard, I would say that my show has been fairly, quite successful this year, despite COVID.

[00:03:08 ]Bettina T: [00:03:08 ] Just going to say that it was a little bit different for us because we usually work in seasons. And so typically we do a run from March to June, July, and then another one from September to December. But this time when we were supposed to come out with our episodes in March and COVID happened entire production was delayed because for us, we produced,  it works quite well when the children are in school and that, you know, you get that little window because our podcast is slightly different.

[00:03:34 ] It's like a produced narrative style podcast. So it requires a decent amount of work. And when COVID happened and it started homeschooling and stuff, the entire production thing got shifted. So we actually launched our podcast, I think in October, instead of in sort of March, as, as we had planned initially the numbers definitely we saw a drop because we not consistent, but.

[00:03:58 ]In the period that [00:04:00 ] we were consistent the numbers are constantly rising. But the interesting thing is that too loud, the COVID period, despite not having you know, released any new episodes, we still have people come back and listen. We had new listeners coming across from different parts of the world.

[00:04:13 ] So we don't use anchor. We use a different podcast platform to host a podcast and we can actually track and see how many listens have come, how much they've listened, how much of the episode they've listened. And it's quite interesting. So it's roughly around 20 minutes. We usually get about 80% of listenership of the entire episode.

[00:04:34 ]Naga S: [00:04:34 ] That's industry like top of the industry,

[00:04:38 ] Bettina T: [00:04:38 ] is it?  It's probably because you know, it's, firstly it's produced. Secondly, it's just, it's like 20 minutes. So it's not 25 minutes. Just the whole episode is that much. And the last sort of three or four minutes, it's like the outro, which is, you know, the next episode and you know, thanking the team and those kinds of things.

[00:04:56 ] So, yeah. So pretty much. So we have a decent listenership. Yeah.

[00:05:00 ] [00:05:00 ] Naga S: [00:05:00 ] That's great. What about you, Olivier

[00:05:02 ] Olivier: [00:05:02 ] for me, actually, I have to say COVID was actually kind of interesting for me. It was actually a great opportunity because I don't run seasons. I basically, I'm kind of a guerrilla style. I try to run it through like, as on a weekly basis, I do a self-imposed break in the summer because you know, running a full-time job, a wife and two kids, I make this podcast happen.

[00:05:23 ] However I can. So, but I do have a very solid production calendar, but when COVID happens, Then I actually doubled down. Because I basically understood if I'm stuck at home, guests are stuck at home. So that opens up your calendar pretty much. Cause everybody had cancellations, people who had bookings and speaking engagement stuff, all that got canceled.

[00:05:40 ] So they're stuck at home. So that's where I doubled down and I pitched, I pitched like, Hey, can you record?  So in terms of booking guests, that was really helpful helped me out throughout the year in terms of listenership. It actually, I actually did notice a a slow uphill curve.

[00:05:54 ] Why? Because. I'm not sure if you guys noticed there's an explosion of podcast is going out right now. So a lot of people are [00:06:00 ] taking this time off to do a little bit, little bit more lis