The Ultimate Podcast Movement 2018 Round-up

I can’t believe what an awesome week the team and I have just had in Philidelphia at this year’s Podcast Movement!

The conference is the biggest and best in the podcasting world so every year, we come with high expectations of Dan and Jared – and as always, they did not disappoint!

The conference itself was full of awesome and actionable talks, workshops and breakout sessions. There was such a diverse range of speakers from different backgrounds giving attendees the skills they need to OWN their podcast in absolutely every way!

Below is a little round-up of our highlights of my Podcast Movement 2018 – I already can’t wait for next year’s event!

The talks

There were so many great talks at this year’s Podcast Movement but the below are the ones I felt were really something.

How to Become Loved as a Podcaster (By Those Who Hate Podcasts!) by Amy Woods

Content marketing queen Amy Woods from Content10x delivered an amazing talk on how to become loved as a podcaster even by people who HATE podcasts… (apparently those people sadly do exist!)

She explained that 2/3 of your potential audience will never hear your voice because they simply don’t listen to podcasts. Therefore to reach these people, you must create a strategy to repurpose your podcast’s content into different formats and locations to make it something they will read.

Create Your Million Dollar Podcasting Funnel with John Lee Dumas from EOFire

Who better to teach us how to create a million dollar podcasting funnel than the king of podcast monetization, our Co-founder John Lee Dumas himself?

In this talk, John took us through his step-by-step process for creating a winner podcasting funnel aimed at helping you to monetize what you’re already doing in a big way.

This was my first time hearing John speak in person and it was fantastic – he’s every bit as eloquent as he is on his podcasts and always eager to help anyone who manages to grab him after for a little extra advice.

If you ever get the opportunity to see him do a talk, I’d highly recommend it.

Pat Flynn’s Opening Keynote

Pat Flynn rose to fame with The Smart Passive Income Blog which lead him into the world of YouTubing and podcasting.

His keynote speech was one to remember – he brought his little boy, Keoni on stage to announce their latest venture – a new podcast called “All of Your Beeswax”.

All of Your Beeswax aims to help listeners start conversations about helping others, overcoming challenges, and thinking like a kid again.

Google Podcasts and The Future of Podcasting

I’ve produced a lot of content recently for you on both Google’s new Podcasting Strategy and the Google Podcasts App so it was great to see their Product Manager, Zack Reneau-Wedeen doing a talk on Google Podcasts and the future of podcasting.

All Podcast Movement attendees received this Google Podcasters “Podcaster Toolkit” in their Podcast Movement sponsor bag but Zach has made it available to download from his Twitter, too.

In the talk, he discussed how Google has pre-loaded the app onto all Android phones without users having to manually download it.

Google also hopes to close the gap between them and Apple, the latter of which say that there are currently 550,000 podcasts, with 18.5 million episodes, available on their iOS app.

Forget CPM! How To Price Your Influence For Advertising with Jess Kupferman

Any talk with our Brand Ambassador Jess Kupferman is guaranteed to be a good’n, especially when the subject is sponsorships.

Jess is well-known as the industry leader when it comes to podcast sponsorships and in this session, she explained how the CPM monetization model only rewards the biggest shows with the least amount of audience interaction and how, as a smaller show, you can monetize your podcast with OR without the help of an external agency.

Building Your Brand, Growth and Tribe with Angus Nelson 

Angus is from the Up In Your Business Podcast and his talk on Tuesday was all around building your brand, growth and tribe.

Angus is actually a Podcast Websites member and the team and I couldn’t have been more proud to see him up on stage doing his thing – he’s a born public speaker and fantastic podcaster.

Beyond Downloads: Creating a Niche Brand & Active Community that Sponsors Adore

The Podcast Websites team were up early on Thursday morning as Mark, Ramona, Jess and Podcast Websites member Jeff Bradbury from TeacherCast were speaking on the panel “Beyond Downloads: Creating a Niche Brand & Active Community that Sponsors Adore” alongside Mike Morrison from The Membership Guys and Kara Lamerato from the Wedding Planning Podcast.

This was such an engaging panel discussion as each speaker is an industry leader in their niche. They discussed how it doesn’t matter about downloads – you can still create an incredibly profitable podcast.

Social, Economic and Political Equality in Podcasting: Do We Really Have to Talk About It? with Giovanna Rossi

Giovanna is another of our fabulous members and well-known in the podcasting world for her women empowerment podcast Well Woman Life.

Giovanna is passionate about promoting a more equal and just society and her talk “Social, Economic and Political Equality in Podcasting: Do We Really Have to Talk About It?” discussed 10 things that podcasters can do to address social, economic and political equality in their podcasts whilst giving actionable tips to make podcasting more inclusive.

The meet-ups

Podcaster’s Paradise and Podcast Websites Meet-up

The Podcaster’s Paradise and Podcast Websites joint meet-up event on Monday was a brilliant introduction to the conference as we caught up with our Co-founder John Lee Dumas, Kate Erickson and Podcaster’s Paradise and Podcast Websites members over a few beers and food in the hotel’s restaurant.

Podcast Websites and AWeber Podcast Movement Meet-up

Now, of course, we’re slightly biased about this one but our joint meet-up event with our favourite email marketing software company AWeber was FANTASTIC!

100 of you joined us at Lucky Strike Bowling Alley to catch up with friends old and new, have a few drinks and food on us and choose from bowling, table tennis, pool and more activities. It really was a blast.

Rock The Castbox Party

Podcast Movement did warn us that this would be “the big one” that wasn’t to be missed – and they weren’t lying!

The Rock The Castbox party was held in Reading Terminals across the road from the Philidelphia Marriott Downtown Hotel – a huge venue that, by day, is home to tens of stalls selling every kind of food and drink imaginable.

By night, the seating areas had been cleared to make way for a huge dance floor. The DJ was AWESOME and kept putting on classic after classic that made it nearly impossible not to get up, or continue to dance.

And everything in-between…

A spontaneous karaoke night 

As brilliant as the Rock The Castbox party was it DID finish at 10pm, which left a confused and slightly inebriated bunch of podcasters wondering where on earth to go next?!

The answer? Karaoke, of course! I think I speak for the entire room of podcasters when I say that Wednesday night was one of the highlights from the entire trip.

We danced, we drank and we bonded as we sung classics like Bohemian Rhapsody (Izzy’s choice), Don’t Look Back In Anger (Mark’s choice) and I Wanna Dance With Somebody (my choice) and many, many more until they quite literally had to kick us all out.

We also learned a lot about our Co-founder John Lee Dumas’s taste in music as he did a rendition of I like Big Butts and I’m a Barbie Girl… haha!

Announcing Poductivity

This year we had not one, but two stands at Podcast Movement: One for Podcast Websites, the other for our exciting new development Poductivity.

We can’t say much at this stage – well, we can’t actually say anything except that this will TRANSFORM the podcasting world.

Want to know more? Of course you do. Sign up for early access here.

The world’s most intense game of Jenga 

What started out as a friendly game of giant Jenga between Mark, Izzy, Kieran and our good friend Jonathan Oakes from the Trivial Warfare Podcast quickly turned into what I can only describe as the world’s most intense game of Jenga.

Mark and Jonathan VS. Izzy and Kieran battled it out for well over 30 minutes as their giant Jenga tower stayed ridiculously upright despite its dwindling stability.

There were at least four times that we were convinced that it was game over, so many in fact that the whole event DREW A CROWD.

That’s right, we had photographers snapping away, people recording videos for their Instagram stories and cries of “Surely not?!” each time the tower defied gravity and stayed put once more.

Eventually, Jonathan was the one to take it one brick too far and the tower came tumbling down. Are him and Mark still on speaking terms? Who knows. That’s the dark side of Jenga for you, folks.

Running up the Rocky steps (even in 30-degree heat, 70% humidity and whilst wearing JEANS!)

That’s right – we couldn’t leave Philidelphia without recreating the infamous scene from Rocky, which we did with enthusiasm despite the 30-degree heat, 70% humidity and the fact that many of us were wearing JEANS. I have never been so sticky in my whole entire life!

And last but not least… selling out of EVERY SINGLE PODCAST MOVEMENT 2018 T-SHIRT!

Now, we knew that our T-shirt was undeniably the best one there but we didn’t expect to COMPLETELY sell-out of every single size during our time at Podcast Movement 2018! That’s 750 T-shirts people!

Thank you to everyone who picked up a T-shirt and to all the amazing attendees we saw wearing theirs with pride throughout the conference.

So popular was our T-shirt in fact, that we are going to put it on sale for anyone who wasn’t at Podcast Movement but wishes to own one.

Launching our free tier of The Podcast Success Academy 

And last but not least, we launched our free tier of The Podcast Success Academy at this year’s Podcast Movement!

Podcast Websites members will know that The Podcast Success Academy is an incredible resource in itself – it’s full to the brim of workshops, downloads, resources and courses on all the skills you don’t think you NEED to be a successful podcaster – from marketing, branding, monetization and more.

It’s so good in fact, that we thought it was about time we opened it up to the wider public and not just our members.

So we’ve launched our brand new free tier where you can get a taster of some of the awesome resources inside The Podcast Success Academy.

Sign up for the free tier today.

So, that’s it for another year! Thank you to everyone who made our Podcast Movement 2018 the incredible event that it was. Every year the team and I are humbled by meeting our members and hearing how we have helped you along in your podcasting journey.

I can’t wait to see you at next year’s event but if in the meantime you have any questions about Podcast Websites and what we do, just drop me a line via email, I’d love to hear from you.