Should you translate your podcast to grow your audience?

Today on 5 Minute Mondays, I’ll discuss whether or not it makes sense to translate your podcast to grow your audience.

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Transcript

Travis:   0:00
today on five minute Mondays, we'll discuss if it makes sense to translate your podcast into other languages. Welcome to five minute Mondays will bring the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing now.  

Travis:   0:17
This week, just like last week, we're gonna be diving into the listener Q and A and answering a question this week from Eric about translating your podcast. And so here is Eric's question. How would you go about translating podcasts, two different languages to reach other audiences who might not speak the primary language on your show?  

Travis:   0:37
So my first instinct is to say, Just don't even worry about it. Don't even worry about translating your podcast into other languages. So if you have an English podcast, don't worry about going through the effort of translating that into Spanish. For one, it creates so much more work than just having one podcast because it's not like a block where you send it through Google translate and you're done. You literally have to re record the podcast in that language. You have to completely edit it over again. You have to do all the post, processing your toe, upload it you everything that you would do for your podcast. Double that. And so the question in my mind is, Would you get a greater return on your time investment doing that as far as growing your audience or with that time, be better spent doing other things right? If the goal is audience growth, I just don't see translating it into other languages to really be the best strategy.  

Travis:   1:36
Now, if you look at your listener location stats in your podcast host and you see that most of your listeners air in Central and South America, then maybe you should consider switching to a Spanish speaking podcast, right? So that is where the conversation gets more interesting for me is if your audience is kind of grouped in the Spanish speaking countries, or if 90% of your audience lives in Germany than okay, maybe German would be a better language, but I would just choose one. I would choose one language. The language you think's gonna give you the best bang for your buck for your podcast audience and then just focus on growing that podcast.  

Travis:   2:13
Another kind of separate question that you might be wondering is, what if I do like an English podcast on Monday and then a Spanish podcast on Thursday in the same feed? Would you do that? And I would say no to that as well that if you are gonna do more than one language, make them separate podcasts. And the reason for that is because when someone subscribes to a podcast, they're listening to the podcast in the language they prefer. So if they're subscribing to your podcast and they speak English, they don't care about the Spanish podcast episodes. That's not what they're gonna listen to it. They're just gonna listen to the English ones. Same thing with people that are showing up for the Spanish podcast episodes. So if you want to do multiple languages, I would do them a separate podcasts. But instead, I would just encourage you to choose the language that makes sense for you and then focus on marketing that show instead of spending all of your effort trying to translate your podcast into different languages.  

Travis:   3:07
Well, that's it for today. Hit the subscribe button. If you're watching this on YouTube, or you can subscribe to the five minute money's podcast in your favorite app. Squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. And if you have a question like Eric that you would love for me to cover on a future episode of the podcast, make sure that you click the link on the show notes. You can fill out the form, leave your name, your question and ah, you know you have a good chance of getting that answered here on a future episode. Well, thanks for listening and is always keep podcasting.