Help Me Podcast

Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a show designed to help you

launch and grow your podcast. I am your host, Gino, and twice

a week I will release a new episode with different tips and tricks

for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering to planning

intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will be a bite sized

tip to help you podcast.

Hello everybody out there. Thanks for tuning in and thanks for spending some time

with me here on Helpme Podcast. Today we're going

to talk about dynamic ad insertions or dynamic

content insertions. What they are, what they're used

for, why you need them, and maybe we'll talk a little bit

about the future and where I theorize

dynamic ad insertions going. So first off, let's get

everybody on the same page and talk about what a dynamic ad

insertion is to make sure that everybody understands what they

are. So what a dynamic ad insertion or

dynamic content insertion is? It's a feature that your podcast

host allows you to do, and they don't all allow you to

do this. And some of them are hidden behind paywalls or not

hidden, but they're in the higher pay tiers. For example, I use

Transistor as my host, and I can't do ad insertions unless I

have the medium tier package. But what a dynamic

ad insertion or content insertion is, it allows you to

insert pieces or clips of audio into

an already published episode. So when you

go to upload your podcast to a hosting site, you upload one

MP3 file and that's it.

It's audio. Let's say it's 30 minutes long. So if

I have dynamic ad insertion, I can actually go into

the audio file and pick a location within

that 30 minutes. Let's say minute 15, for example. Exactly

halfway, I can go into the 15 minutes mark

and click a button to basically say, this is where I want

my dynamic ad. And at that

exact timestamp, at the 15 minutes mark, it will

then stop the MP3 that I uploaded and play a

secondary MP3 file, most commonly an ad.

So basically what it means is that instead

of putting an ad in my final MP3 file and not being

able to change it ever, I can now insert this ad

and independently change what the ad is without

changing the podcast. This is helpful for when you want to change up your ads

and make sure that you're keeping things relevant. So basically, you can

change out that secondary MP3. So the main MP3 is the

podcast itself. The second MP3, let's say, is an ad.

So if I swap out the second MP3, I can now have a

different ad within the same podcast. Hopefully I'm doing a good job of

explaining this, not sure that I am. But the point

is, you can change out your ads and you don't have to have the same

ad over a period of time. So you can have six months go

by. And if you have a new person that wants to

advertise on your podcast, you can remove the old ads and just

put the new ones in. So this opens up more options for you to be

able to sell ads because you don't have to make new episodes to have

new ad inserts. This is super helpful because not

only can you do this with just advertisements, but you could also do this with

Intros and Outros. And even if you want to just put

an audio segment where maybe you're talking about relevant

offerings or it's kind of an ad for yourself, you can

do this with any sort of audio and where it

becomes helpful is it makes your evergreen content always

relevant to the listener. And especially with intros and outros.

If you come out with a new season and you have a new, more

relevant intro and it sounds better or maybe it's not as boring

as your old one, you can literally swap it out. The only thing

that you need to do from editing standpoint

is leave space for this insertion. So

for example, I have a client that has a little music trigger

that they use to have all their dynamic ad insertions placed

around and it's basically just like a little jingle that kind of

like swells up in volume and then stops. And there's, like, maybe a

second pause, and then there's a swell of the

same music. And then it comes back down. And this, like, five

second audio clip is used to place in the episode. So

when I'm working on the episode and I'm editing it, I'll find a place where

I think will make a good ad and I just put this little jingle in

there. So I don't put any ads, I just put the little jingle in there

that's a couple of seconds long. So then when I go to upload that

podcast I can then identify right at this little

jingle spot, whatever that timestamp is. That's where I want you to insert

the ads so it seamlessly plays an ad

sandwiched by those two jingles. Now, you don't have to have a jingle in

order to put an ad insert into your podcast, but

you do want to make sure that you're not like cutting off somebody's voice, right?

You want to put it maybe either at the beginning or the end of the

episode so you don't have to cut somebody off mid sentence

or maybe design your podcast to where you have a natural

break and identify that timestamp. So when you go to put

that ad insert in, you know exactly where to put it. Where I really

like the use of these ad insertions or these content insertions is

for when you're offering your own services to somebody, right?

So for example, with this podcast, in the future

I may offer some services that I have for podcasters. I would love to

be able to have a 32nd audio clip placed somewhere in

the episode. Probably like maybe right after the intro where I would

say, now I have this course for sale, or I have this consulting,

or I have a group program going on and I can

change that based on what my offerings are and I could put that on all

my old episodes. So when somebody goes to listen to this episode,

they can now hear what's relevant to them. So it really keeps your

listener relevant and informed with your new offerings and

your new content or whatever it is that you want to tell your

listeners. And it makes repurposing your content

or having evergreen content even more

relevant. So I think that this is a genius

thing that hosting sites have been providing for some time now

and it's going to be really helpful for selling more

ads, for keeping your intros more relevant and

even just being able to connect more

closely with your fans and with your listeners.

And I think you're just going to see more of this in the future and

you're going to see more people offering this in the future too. And my hope

is that they won't put this in the higher paid tiers

and these hosting sites will give access to even people at the low

tier to be able to use dynamic ad insertions

because I think it's helpful and very relevant. And right now

I think especially Transistor, although I really like Transistor and I

haven't had any issues with it. They definitely use

the dynamic ad insertion as what separates you from the

first to the second tier. So it seems that Transistor has figured out that this

is a valuable tool and this is what they're using to

separate tier one and tier two. It would be nice if

the lower tier had dynamic ad insertions as well. So I

hope this makes more sense as to what ad insertions are if you didn't know

what they were before. Who knows, maybe by the time you're listening to this

episode, there will be a dynamic ad insertion placed in this episode.

Only time will tell. Thank you for listening, I appreciate all of

you and I will see you on the next episode.

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notes and click the link. Thanks for listening and happy

podcasting.