Going Global: Grow Your Podcast Beyond Borders (Replay) – PCI 477

0:00 Hello. I'm Dave Clements, customer relations and video production here at Blueberry. And I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer relations. And today, we're talking about how to take your podcast global, reaching new audiences outside your home country. Yeah. Because most podcasters tend to start thinking pretty local. But thanks to how podcasting works, your show could already have international fans that you didn't even realize even from episode one. Yeah. It's, definitely goes worldwide. And if you're in Apple Podcasts, you're in Apple Podcasts everywhere. If you're in Podcast Index, you're in Podcast Index everywhere. That in itself will get you international listeners.

0:45 You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Dave Clements, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting with all the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in. So we wanted to talk about why you should think globally because, you know, some podcasters think small, which is perfectly fine. Local like, hyperlocal shows are great too. But, expanding your reach, can actually help you grow your show faster, and it helps you feel more connected to, you know, the outside world, and and your audience. You you get a lot more diversity, and you, you know, you get to talk to different cultures and people like that. And you can also, like, get some, like, fresh ideas or or some feedback maybe you might not get if it's coming from your neighbor.

1:48 Yeah. Correct. You know, it helps you build your community outside of your home country. You know, and, you know, most of the people who are listening to this show are probably in The US or Canada or England or something like that. But, you know, there may be people all over the place, and same with your show. You know, there may be somebody listening in some country you've probably never even heard of. So, you know, it it, you know, helps you appeal to sponsors and collaborations outside your home country. You know, I was looking through my stats. I've been doing that NAPOD promo thing this month, on my personal show, and I was looking through my stats. And, I had a download from Antarctica, And that's, like, really cool. You know? I don't know what country they're from, but, you know, nobody's from Antarctica. But they were obviously currently there, so that was pretty cool.

2:45 Yeah. That is pretty pretty wild. Yeah. And, of course, if you, you know, look at your stats panel, you're on Blueberry, look at your stats panel, we have a whole geographic section, and it'll show you all the countries that you're getting downloads in. And, you know, if you notice you're getting a bunch of downloads, say, in Japan, you know, maybe if one of your topics or guests or something would have something to do directly with Japan, maybe do an episode about it. Do something like that. You know? Or just mention it on the air. Hey. I got my one listener in Antarctica. Hi. How's it going? You know? That kind of thing. You know? It it it it helps you appeal to, you know, people not sitting where you're sitting.

3:31 You know? Yeah. That's that's something that I got to experience with, one of the most recent shows that I did where we had, you know, people listening in Canada, which isn't odd, really. They're not too foreign. Right. Right. They're not too foreign. But then, you know, this guy actually starts interacting with the show a lot, like, having full on conversations with every member of the cast. And, that was actually really cool and really struck up some interesting conversations. And then he would be like, oh, I don't understand this thing because it just was, I guess, too American.

4:13 Yes. Cultural references, they call it. Yeah. Yeah. So One thing is Americans, you know, we don't tend to pay much attention to the news outside of you of The US. Right. Like, you know, somebody in Canada probably knows more about American, news than most people in America. Just being honest. Yeah. You know? And we know nothing about what's going on in Canada most of the time. And it's not because we don't want to. It's because it's just not something that we pay attention to. Our country's big enough. Canada's big enough that we got enough stuff going on. We kinda pay attention there. But don't don't discount that. The rest of the world may be interested in your topic.

5:02 The rest of the world may, you know, not understand some of your, you know, slang and and all that kind of thing. You know? I can't I'm trying to think of an example. I can't really think of one right off top of my head, but, you know, even even English other English speaking countries. You know? You you were recently in London, and, you know, they talk different over there even though it's the same language. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. You know, and most I would say the majority of other countries, they do speak some form of English, but they may not understand some of that slang. So you have to kinda be careful to make sure that you don't isolate, too much.

5:47 But, obviously, don't let that, like, ruin the cadence of the show or anything like that. And, I mean, it could even be helpful, like, earlier on in your show. Like, you just casually mention, like, where your show takes place. You know, for for my very first show, we didn't I tried not to get hyperlocal, but my cohost would like to reference events that were happening in the city that we lived in. So, you know, that was always interesting because people would be like, oh, I've heard of that city before, and then there's a conversation that can happen. Sure. You know, you know, there's no no problem referencing local stuff, but maybe explain it a little more.

6:32 Exactly. That kind of thing, you know, like, you know, around around here, deer season is a big thing. Well, in other countries, nobody hunts deer. Well, if I was gonna, you know, if I was gonna reference deer hunting, I'd have to explain that's kinda normal here. You know, it's a national holiday on the opening day of deer season, you know, stuff like that. You know, not that, you know, just using that as an example. Yeah. And, I mean, holidays are that way as well. You know, we we come up in The US, we come up on Thanksgiving. A lot of other countries celebrate Christmas, and, obviously, everybody's celebrating New Year's to some some degree.

7:16 But those are also things to keep in mind when you realize you have that global audience is, you know, maybe talk about more than just your holiday that's coming up, or explain your holiday a little bit more. Because even in 2025, people may not understand what American Thanksgiving is, based on and things like that. Yeah. This is bringing up Canada. Their Thanksgiving is in September. Right. I I I talk on the ham radio with a guy in Canada, weekly, and, you know, he said, oh, it's Thanksgiving this weekend and blah blah blah. You know, like, really? Oh, ours isn't until next month or whatever. So Yeah. There are things like that. You know, every country has different holidays. You know, we we tend to schedule them on Mondays, which is kind of interesting, You know? And and what'll happen, you know, even with our support line, we'll get calls from outside the country that that that don't celebrate Memorial Day or don't celebrate Labor Day or whatever other Monday holiday we have, so they don't really understand. And then vice versa, you know, there's some places that celebrate holidays. You know, we have a couple of team members from The Philippines, and they have different holidays than we do.

8:33 And so they don't understand. You know? They're like, oh, you mean we're not working Thursday and Friday this week? Cool. Yeah. Yeah. And and that kind of carries over into, you know, time zones. Oh, yeah. Something that I had to be very mindful of just living in The US was our our crew, we went over like, we went went from, you know, Eastern time zone to central, mountain. Like, we covered, I think, every single time zone because our our our dungeon master lived in Spokane. So, you know, he's three hours behind me, so we had to, like, do the math, figure out when do we actually record things. But then, like, you know, you wanna keep those in mind for doing, like, live events or special things, or maybe you adjust when your episode drops so that it kind of hits both a more local audience or your international audience at the same time. You know, that reminds me, like, James Cridland from Pod News. Mhmm. He does a daily show.

9:42 He's in Australia, so he's, you know, twelve or thirteen hours different from US East Coast. But, you know, most of his listeners and also newsletter readers are, you know, in The US or Canada or, you know, Europe even. And so he schedules it, to go out in the mornings, East Coast US time because that seems to be the most universally accepted time for something that he's do you know, just to get the news out. You know? I I like to listen and or read his newsletter in the mornings, And here I am in the East Coast time zone. You know, if he was putting it out Australian time, he'd put it out at midnight, my time, which still work out for for, you know, reading it in the morning, but still, you know, that that he does that intentionally to to put it out, you know, for East Coast US time. And plus, it gives him all day to to do it, and then he puts it out and goes to bed.

10:44 Yeah. Smart. Smart. So, yeah, that's something to keep in mind, you know, whether you're using, the PowerPress plugin or Bluberry Publisher, you know, right there in the Bluberry dashboard. You can schedule when your episodes go. Just don't do it at the top of an hour, like, exactly 5AM. Everybody does it at that time. So, you know, give it five, ten, seven minutes, something like that. I always I always go at 04:20AM. That's usually if I schedule, I schedule for that. And that's that's just me. There you go. And that's just a, you know, random number, that I use. And that way, it's off the top of the hour, off the bottom of the hour, because a lot of computery things happen at the top of the hour.

11:31 Mhmm. Yeah. On the Internet, you know, cron jobs around at top of the hour and all that. So, you know, if you're on a WordPress installation, there might be a thousand processes that are going on on that server at the top of the hour. So Yeah. Just, you know and that may cause your schedule to not run. And and if you do schedule, always check when you get out of bed to make sure it went. Exactly. Yeah. So one other thing that, I didn't really think much of until we were, like, prepping for this episode is how important transcripts can be to an international audience. Because if you have a transcript, even if it's in English, it's really easy to get translated into Japanese or something else, and you're gonna lose a little bit, Yeah. In transcription and things like that. But it it makes it a little easier for people to follow. And I think that's really cool because transcripts weren't really a thing a handful of years ago. A lot of people weren't using them, and now many, many, many more people are using them.

12:37 Yeah. And even even some of the places do it automatically. You know? Spotify and Apple both transcribe it if you don't. And if you do, then they'll use yours. But if you don't, they do it for you. So that's a much more universal thing. And what's nice about a transcript, again, like Dave said, is people can follow along. If you're not a native speaker of the language that you're listening to, it sometimes is better to have the text also flowing at the same time. Mhmm. You know? Then, of course, our player does that if, you use our transcription service or if you use AI transcript from our, PAI system, you can, you know, it'll it'll scroll on the player as they're playing it on your website. Now, you know, in the apps, it's different.

13:31 Right. Again, Apple and Spotify do that automatically, and some of the other ones do as well. But, but that helps. You know? And, yeah, translating a transcript, you know, you could throw it into chat g b t and say, hey. Make a Spanish version of this, and and it does a pretty good job. I understand. I don't know Spanish, but it looks right. And you could you know, if you you find that you have a lot of listeners in a particular country, maybe throw a transcript, you know, just a text file on your post. Say, hey. If you wanna read this in Spanish, here's the download for you. Yeah. That's a really good idea. Easy for them. Make it easy for them. If if that's the case, you know, now in my case, you know, with my personal show, you know, it's pretty local.

14:21 You know, I'm in fact, you know, hyper local, I would call it, almost. Mhmm. Although I did have an episode about Iceland, that drops tomorrow morning that I recorded. You go. Translate here. Maybe, yeah, maybe I'll put an Icelandic transcript in there. That might be cool. Yeah. Good idea. But, yeah, just, you know, have fun with it. You know? Definitely, you know, reach out to, you know, people in other countries if if that's what you're going for. Now, you know, if you're talking about, you know, something that is local, well, that may not be applicable. But, you know, you'd be surprised, though. Even if I do something local, you know, you still get people downloading it from other countries because it's worldwide.

15:07 Mhmm. And, you know, maybe they wanna travel to where you're at or where you're talking about. Yeah. You know, maybe that's what they're doing. They're doing their research before they come visit or something. You know? Yeah. Another thing genre. Yeah. Another thing I think about is, you know, where I live, we have, a pretty big Latino population. So Mhmm. Even if I was doing something hyperlocal, it could benefit my show to have a translation available, that is in Spanish or Mhmm. You know, other other languages that they're speaking because I know that there are other Latino countries that are not just speaking Spanish. We have a pretty big Arabic community here. So, you know, maybe I do that.

15:54 I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's something to keep in mind. Like, again, don't let it stop you from creating the show, but keep it in mind, when you're doing show notes or when you're speaking about certain things, because I think that really opens up your listener base even more than you might expect. For sure. And, you know, one of the things you can do also is get into some of those directories in other countries, other regions. You know, on Blueberry, we have instructions how to get on to Deezer, which is, mostly Mainland Europe. GeoSavants, India. Ghana is India. And I can't pronounce this one. But Angami.

16:36 Angami. There we go. That's, mostly in the Arab countries in the Middle East area. And, you know, that's, you know, that that's another way to kinda reach out to those areas if if those areas would be, you know, a fit for your show. You know? Again, a a show about deer hunting probably isn't gonna go so good on, in the Arab countries. You know? It's true. Maybe. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe they do do deer hunting. But Yeah. Yeah. And then also, like, this translates into social media. So when you're sharing your episodes or highlights or or things like that, you could use international hashtags. So there's, like, hashtag podcast Brazil or podcast India or, you know, UK podcaster or something like that.

17:29 Just look them up and try those out. Maybe that gets you more traction. Maybe it doesn't. I know several years ago, I actually had a crossover episode where somebody else did an episode of my show, and I did an episode of their show, and they did an episode all about British culture. So we kind of did that same thing where we made sure that we used tags that were popular over in England, which I thought was really, really fun and really cool. And it grew the grew the show, believe it or not. Yeah. Yeah. It's you know, it is amazing. You know? Like, you know, certain genres do really well in certain countries.

18:13 Mhmm. You know, like, every you know, Brazil for some reason. And I don't I still don't understand this, but Blueberry has a lot of Brazilian customers. Yeah. And, you know, it it's it's an outlier because, you know, the number of people down there, as opposed to the percentage that are using us for podcasting, is bigger than you would think. And, you know, no rhyme or reason for it, but, you know, if we were to promote a little more on this show, maybe we would, you know, hey. Let's go. Hey, Brazil. You know? How you doing? You know? Whatever. Yeah. So we're saying it now. Hi, Brazil.

18:53 Yeah. Hey, Brazil. How's it going? But yeah. You know? You could also, you know, share, like, highlights and, you know, you could translate some of the quotes, throw up on social media. That might be kinda fun. You know, like, I I do, you know, I used to live in Iceland, and on Icelandic Independence Day, I always put a post on Facebook about Iceland and Icelandic. And, you know, it doesn't really help my podcast, but I just think it's kind of fun. So Yeah. You know, Icelandic is a weird language to begin with. But, yeah, actually, ice in Iceland here's a here's a stat for you.

19:35 The literacy rate in English in Iceland per capita is higher than that in The U The of The of The U you know, US is lower in per capita English, proficiency. Yep. I believe that. I really do. Yeah. And, you know, it's it was interesting up there. You know? You go you go into a store or something, they start talking to you in Icelandic, and then they wait a second, and then you go, yeah. I don't know Icelandic. And, oh, okay. And they talk to you. They got better English than I do. Right. It was great. You know, another thing, like Dave said, you know, he he he did a collaboration where, you know, you guys swapped shows, but, you know, imagine doing that with somebody in another country, or maybe that's what you did. I you know? But No. They were not British, but they love British pop culture.

20:29 So Yeah. Yeah. But if I mean, I had I had some online friends that were from, you know, Nottingham area and and places like that. I should have got them on my show, and I didn't because I didn't think about it. Yeah. It's always, always interesting to, collaborate like that. I, you know, keep talking about Iceland. There's a show called All About Iceland, and I was a guest on there back in 2020. I still get comments once in a while from that episode. You know? Hey. You know, we heard you on the all about Iceland show. You know? It's a a gal up there that ex pat. You know? She's a US citizen, but married an Islander and lives in Iceland.

21:16 And she does this show. She's been with us for a long time, but like I said, I just did an episode for tomorrow's release about Iceland. So I did mention that that episode, and I wanna reach out to her. She might be a good candidate for podcaster of the month. Yeah. Sure. Why not? So but, anyway, we're talking inside baseball here. Anything else, you think we should bring up before we close this out? No. I mean, just just remember that we've got a lot of tools, under the hood here at Blueberry. And so, you know, you can you can tinker around and adjust any of those.

21:57 Go back to old episodes, change some things up, add another transcription. Whatever you wanna do, you can do all of it, no matter which Blueberry product you're using. Yeah. That's good. So that about does it for this episode. And wherever you're listening from, thanks for listening. Hello, Brazil. Yeah. Remember, podcasting doesn't have borders, artificial or any kind, unless, you know, it's a walled garden of some sort. Yeah. But, with the right tools, whatever your message is, it can reach literally anyone anywhere in the world. Right. And, of course, you can use Blueberry stats to, figure out where your listeners are, and and, you know, you could speak to them directly.

22:42 You know, it's an audio medium. Say something. Right. And if you can't say something in their language, just use the transcription and translate it. Yeah. There you go. So anyway, you can subscribe to and or follow Podcast Insider on all the places. And, of course, if you can't find it anywhere else, go to podcastinsider.com, and we'll see you next time. And hello to our global community. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week. And in the meantime, head to podcastinsider.com for more information, to subscribe, share, and read our show notes.

23:22 To check out our latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast, visit blueberry.com. That's Blueberry without the e's. We couldn't afford the e's.