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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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