Ep 95: Does Individual Episode Artwork Affect Your Podcast Downloads?

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[00:00:13] Verity: I'm Verity. This is the lazy girl's guide to podcasting where we talk podcasting tips literally everything about podcasting it's wonderful welcome to the community. Back in episode 34 when I released an episode which was titled is Apple Podcasts Turning Into YouTube? Now this episode was published in August of 2023, so coming up for a year ago now, and it was off the back of Apple Podcasts making an announcement that they were going to be having episodic podcast artwork functionality for your podcast. So what this basically means is every time that you put out a podcast episode, you would be able to have a little thumbnail, 3,000 by 3,000 pixels, same as any other podcast artwork size, but you would be able to have a piece of podcast artwork that was specific to just that episode.

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[00:01:37] Verity: It's the visual images. It's the clickbaity titles. It's the colors that drag us in and make us want to listen to an episode or watch something, we will happily scroll past something that doesn't have a very interesting title or the thumbnail doesn't grab us very much. So I actually quite like this opportunity from Apple Podcasts because maybe if your title for an episode isn't catchy enough maybe you could draw somebody in with the episodic graphic instead. However it did also get me thinking where I was like isn't this just podcasting try trying to be YouTube a little bit?

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[00:02:30] Verity: So for the last 50, 60 episodes, I have been creating different podcast artworks for the majority of the episodes. I haven't done for every single one because sometimes I've had some weeks where I'm like, do you know what? The content's just gonna get out. If there isn't a different episodic thumbnail for that particular episode, then do you know what? It'll just default to lazy girl's guide to podcasting cover art anyway.

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[00:04:07] Verity: It was 4 months old, so I would expect to see that growth, basically. And then I saw a crazy amount of growth from January through to April of 24 when I switched my podcasting host to captivate fm. They've got loads of growth tools in there which really, really helped me get in front of a wider audience and more of my target audience, and that's a conversation for another episode. But my point is is that between August 23 and the time of recording this particular episode, which is now the first June that I'm recording this in 2024, but I don't think that the episode graphics have made any significant impact on my downloads. I think there's been a lot of other factors that have affected my downloads such as drill down the analytics, realized when I was publishing promotional content on Instagram, I was finding that actually that was having no correlation with getting more listeners into the podcast.

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[00:05:31] Verity: And one of the other things that I do is I publish blog posts on my website, on my blog, and I link through to the podcast episodes. That also helps, with my downloads and listenership, but I wouldn't say with all of these different things that I've tried and it's difficult because, you know, from, like, a experiment validity point of view, there is no validity to this whatsoever because I've tried so many different things concurrently with the podcast that I can't say yes this particular thing did or didn't help, but looking at when I tried and experimented with different things I can definitely say that the episode graphics or the individual episode graphics for the podcast have had no significance to the podcast growth or if they did it's maybe being like, you know, the tiniest percent. So I guess the question is is do I think that it is worthwhile, and am I gonna continue creating singular episode graphics for the podcast? And, actually, I think I probably will just because it's part of my podcasting workflow now and I think the couple of episodes that I've done or the few episodes that I've done that haven't had episodic graphics, it's kind of irritated me because it then doesn't fit this whole, like, theme that I've got going with episodic graphics.

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[00:08:51] Verity: I'm Verity. This is the lazy girl's guide to podcasting, and I will see you next episode.