2-Year Check-In: My Favorite Captivate Features + NEW Captivate Spark AI [Ep. 173]

 
 

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Here’s what to expect from this episode:

Back in episode 69, I shared about why I switched my podcast host to Captivate. Fast forward two years, and I wanted to do a follow-up episode and share with you about how I'm liking it and what some of my favorite Captivate features have been.

I've had some conversations with a lot of you since I made the switch, and I know that many of you have actually gone ahead and made this switch over to Captivate, and others of you have reached out to me talking about how you've been thinking about making this switch.

And so if that is you, or maybe you're somebody who is in the planning stages of your podcast and you know that you're going to need a host, hopefully, this episode will be helpful for you and give you some more insight into using Captivate as your podcast host.

I'm diving into some of my favorite Captivate features, including podcast playlists, templates, paid memberships, analytics, and more, but I'm also excited to share about their new AI feature, Captivate Spark!

If you've been thinking about trying out Captivate as your host, you can use my personal affiliate link to sign up. Hopefully, you can tell by now that this is a platform that I use and that I really, really love, so if you do decide to try it and use my link, you'll get a free 30-day trial. So, if nothing else, you can get in there, poke around, and try things out to see if it is the right platform for you.

And if you've been wanting to switch over to Captivate but maybe just don't have the time for it or don't even want to learn how to do it, I can set up that transfer for you! You can always email me at sara@podcastingforeducators.com or send me a message on Instagram @podcastingforeducators, and we can talk through this a little bit more.

And don't forget to enter my podcast mic giveaway! You can enter by leaving me a review on Apple Podcasts (including your name or Instagram handle) or by screenshotting any episode that goes live in October (and tagging me in your Instagram stories @podcastingforeducators). Choose one or both (and get two entries), and I will announce the winner in the first week of November!

Topics Covered:

  • How Captivate has both form and function

  • Creating playlists and episode description templates

  • Dynamic ads and analytics, including link analysis

  • Captivate customer support and paid memberships

  • Their new AI feature, Captivate Spark

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Favorite podcasting resources:

  • Sara Whittaker 0:01

    Your podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business, but how do you manage it all bring in new listeners and convert those listeners into customers. That's what the show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whitaker, classroom teacher turned podcast manager, and I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators.

    Hey there and welcome back to another episode of podcasting for educators. Thank you for spending some time with me today. Back in episode 69 I shared about why I switched my podcast host. So I used to host with one platform, and I decided to switch over to captivate for podcast hosting, and that was a little over two years ago, and so I wanted to kind of do a follow up episode and share with you about how I'm liking it and what some of my favorite features have been I've had some conversations with a lot of you since I made the switch, and I know that many of you have actually gone ahead and made this switch over to captivate and others of you have reached out to me talking about how you've been thinking about making this switch. And so if that is you, or maybe you're somebody who is just kind of in the planning stages of your podcast, and you know that you're going to need a host. Hopefully this episode will be helpful for you. Before we get into that, I want to remind you that we are in the last couple of days of October, at the time that this episode goes live. And this month, I'm doing a giveaway. I'm giving away my favorite microphone, the ATR 20 100x and you have just a couple more days to enter that giveaway. So to enter, all you have to do is either write a review on Apple podcasts for this show. Just go to Apple podcasts, scroll on down to the very bottom. You can select your five star review, and then you can write a quick review about this show. If you don't have Apple podcasts, no worries. There is another way to enter. You can screenshot this episode or any of the other episodes that have gone live during the month of October, add it to your Instagram stories and tag me, just to show me that you're listening and help spread the word about this podcast. And that will be an entry for the microphone giveaway. If you choose to do both, you'll get two entries, and I'll be announcing the winner the first week of October. Okay, so this should be a pretty short and sweet episode. I first off, just want to say that I am very happy with the decision to switch over to captivate I have really loved being on this platform. Have not had any issues since switching over. And I'm just going to kind of run through some of the things that I love the most about it. Number one, I absolutely love the look of this platform. I know that maybe that's like that doesn't really seem that important, but when it's something that you are logging into every single week, it's nice to have a platform that looks nice and that functions well, and captivate does both of those things. It's very like clean and modern looking, and some of the older podcast hosts are not that way. So this, this was a nice change, for sure. Another feature that I absolutely love is that captivate has the ability for you to create playlists right here. Inside of Captivate, if you aren't familiar with podcast playlists, it is exactly what it sounds like. It is a playlist of specific podcast episodes. So inside of Captivate, you just click on the playlist button, and you can click on Create new playlist. You can name your playlist, you can give it a little bit of a description, and then it lists out all of your episodes. It even has a search feature. So if I wanted to create a playlist about all of my episodes that talk about podcast growth, I could just type in the word growth, and it would show me all of my episodes that have the word growth in them, and then all you have to do is drag and drop the episodes that you want to include in that specific playlist over to the right hand side, and then hit Create playlist, and there it is for you. And then there's a Share button that you can either embed into your website so that these episodes actually show up on your website, which is really cool to do, like on a show notes page, or it gives you a link to share out that you can use to share about your playlist in emails or on social media or in a Facebook group, lots and lots of options there. So it makes it really easy to create podcast playlist. And this is a really cool growth strategy in itself, podcast playlists. I actually have a podcast playlist toolkit that teaches you a little bit more about why you should be creating podcast playlists, different types of playlists that you can create, how to create them, ways to promote. Am ways to organize them and just like how to leverage this strategy overall. I'll leave a link for that in the show notes. It's a really like quick resource to go through, and it's going to be something that you can implement right away. So if you're interested in podcast playlists, whether you host on Captivate or not, you can create playlists. You can actually create playlists on Spotify as well. But it's kind of cool with Captivate that you have the ability to do this right there inside of the platform, so I'll link that in the show notes for you. Another really cool feature that I like inside of Captivate is that you can create templates for your episode descriptions, and you can set it as like an evergreen template, so that every time you create an episode, you you know, a lot of us have those links that we include in our episode descriptions at the bottom that are the same every single time, like our Instagram links or the link to show notes, or, you know, whatever it is. And so you can create this template, and that will pop up for you automatically every time you create a new episode so you don't have to type in the same thing every time. You don't have to copy and paste, it's just right there for you. Another great feature inside of Captivate are dynamic ads. So dynamic ads, if you aren't familiar, are ads that you can record and include in your episodes, either at the beginning of your episode, somewhere in the middle of your episode, or at the end of your episodes, and this is different than actually baking them into your episodes at the time of editing. The way that this works is that you would record an ad, you would upload it to captivate and then you can apply it to whichever episodes you want to literally with the click of a button. So if you wanted to have an announcement or promote something at the beginning of your episodes, you could record that, add it to captivate and click one button that would apply it to all of your episodes, and then it's just as easy to take down. So maybe you'd want to run an ad for a week or two weeks, you would click this button. It would get added to the beginning of all of your episodes, and then when you want to take it down, you would just uncheck the box and it would be those ads would be removed from your episodes. More and more hosts are adding this ability to add dynamic ads, but what I really like about Captivate is that it's included in their price, you don't have to pay extra to use it, and I really love that. With the mid roll ad, you can customize where you want it to go. Some other hosts, they automatically choose the spot for you in the middle of your episode, which you know it's done with AI. So it's not always put in the best place it could be put, like in the middle of a thought or in the middle of a sentence, but with Captivate, you can actually choose exactly where you want that mid roll ad to go. And then you can tag those ads so that you can bulk replace them. So if you have, like, an ad running in the middle of your episode, you can add a tag to it that it's a mid roll ad, and then when you're ready to replace it with a new ad. You can do it really easily, again, with the click of a button. Captivate also has really great podcast analytics. If you aren't already looking at your podcast analytics, I definitely think that you should be doing so at least once a month. But with Captivate, it kind of gives you there's this Analytics tab, and when you click on that, there's this overall summary, kind of like an at a glance situation that's really helpful to just kind of like pop in. Maybe, if you're somebody that pops in every few days, or maybe once a week, you can kind of pop in there and see how things are going. And that snapshot shows you how many unique listeners you have, as well as how many downloads you have that day, the day before, the last seven days, the last 28 days, the last 90 days and all time. It also gives you your download averages per day, per week, per month and per 90 days. So that's kind of a cool thing to quickly look at as well. It will tell you that day's trending episodes. So that's really neat to see which previous episodes people are listening to, just really quickly at a glance. And then it shows you on this view, it also shows you your overall downloads by month in a bar graph form, so that it's really easy to look at and kind of see how your downloads have progressed month to month, then you can dive in deeper. What I like to do every month for myself and for my clients, is to go in and look at things per episode. So I go in and check downloads for each episode to see how many downloads the episodes have gotten on the first day they aired, after seven days, after 30 days, after 90 days, and after a year. So I can kind of see the progression of downloads at a per episode view. Now I will say this is time consuming to look at things that deeply with Captivate as well as with. Most other hosts that I've ever worked in when you're looking at downloads at a per episode view, you do have to go in and just change the date range. So if you're looking at a specific episode and you want to know how many downloads it got in the first seven days that it aired, there's a Date Range button, and you can choose the custom date. So you would choose the day it went live to seven days later, and it would show you how many downloads it got in that time. So, I mean, it's easy enough to do it, just does take some time to do it, once you get the hang of it, it's something that you can get in the habit of doing monthly. I will say that buzz sprout, which is another podcast host, makes this specific process a little bit easier, because you can click on an episode, and it will then have tabs that you can just click on that show you it had this many downloads after seven days, this many after 30, this many after 90. So you don't have to, like choose that custom date range, if that makes sense, which does make the process a little bit quicker. So that is one thing I would love to see improved inside of Captivate and inside of so many other hosts. And then Captivate also shows you you can hit on a button called listener behavior, and it will show you which apps most of your audience is on. It'll give you an exact breakdown of how many downloads were from Apple podcast. How many were from Spotify, overcast podcast addict, on and on and on, as well as some other cool information about your listener behavior. So overall, really great, pretty thorough analytics. Inside of Captivate. One other cool feature that I'll mention that I just I haven't utilized as much as I would like to, are their link analysis. So you can actually, when you include links with your dynamic ads or just in your episode descriptions, you can create these links inside of Captivate and then it will become a tracking link, so it will track for you how many clicks these links are getting. So that's a really cool way to track some of the ROI of your show would be to set up these tracking links, and then it will give you some data on these links, you know, how many clicks they had, what what were the dates that these clicks happened, all of that good stuff. And then the other thing that I've been loving about Captivate is just that it does have a very great active Facebook group, and their customer support has been fantastic. There have been times where I've had questions about, you know, my podcast or a client's podcast, and I can just type in that. There's a chat box that you can type into when you're logged in, and somebody is always super quick with responding to me, and I can tell that I'm actually talking to a person, not just a computer, and they've always been able to answer my questions same day, no problem. They also do a lot of really great free trainings on their YouTube channel, and they're they'll always email about those, and there's been some really, really good ones. So I mean, even if you're not hosting with Captivate, they are a really great resource, just to follow on YouTube and learn from them that way, since airing my last episode about Captivate, when I first switched they have added Captivate memberships. And so this is a way to monetize your podcast. This is kind of like Patreon, if you're familiar with Patreon, but with Captivate memberships, you can create different bonus content as well. I mean, you could, you could do so many things with this, but you can create different tiers that people would pay for. So maybe, you know, tier one would be that you are releasing a bonus, one bonus episode per month or per week. And maybe people would pay, you know, five or $10 a month for that. And then the second tier could be the bonus episode as well as a live Q and A. And then the third tier could be something additional. So you can set up these different tiers of bonus type content that people would pay for membership style per month. You get to set your pricing, and you get to set what kind of features you're offering to people, but that is all done right there inside of Captivate, so lots of potential for ways that you could use that.

    And then the last thing I wanted to mention is that at the time of this recording, Captivate just released their new AI feature called Captivate spark. And I mean, this was just released like in the last two weeks, so I just added this so I could kind of peek in there and share with you what it looks like. And it's really cool right now they're charging $5 a month for it, and I pay for Captivate yearly, just like a one time annual payment. So when I added this, it went ahead and charged me for the year. Just a heads up, I wasn't sure that it would do that, but it did, which is fine, $5 a month, I feel. Is very, very reasonable. So how it works is, when you've recorded your episode and you've got it ready, you upload it to captivate as you normally would, and then there's a button that says, Captivate, Spark, AI, and you can ask it to generate a transcript and AI episode assets. So it will go ahead and, you know, it'll think for a couple minutes, and then it will generate all of these assets for you. And what it includes is a transcript. It includes title suggestions. And what's really neat is, if you like any of their suggestions, you can just hit apply to episode, and it will apply that title for you. It will give you an episode intro summary. This could be really cool for guest episodes, or even if you do like a episode specific intro, you could have it generate that for you, and then you could use that to record. It gives you episode show notes, suggestions, key takeaways from the episode, which are really great for like social media or for your emails, it will break your episode up into chapters and timestamp those chapters. If you've never heard of this before, this is a really cool feature that some listening apps support and some don't, but it's a really easy way to break your episodes down so that listeners can easily jump to specific sections. Right now, I just looked this up and it said that currently there's 25 podcasting apps, like listening apps, that support chapters. So I did double check and it is available on Apple podcast. I just tried this with my latest episode that went live. So if you're listening to an episode on Apple podcast and you are playing that specific episode, there's a down arrow that you can push, and you'll see the different chapters and the timestamps, and you can actually click on those chapters, and it will take you to that specific point in the episode. So pretty cool feature. And if you do use this, I would definitely let your listeners know that this is available. But anyway, this Captivate spark AI, it chooses those chapters for you. It time stamps them, and then you can just push the button that says, apply to the episode. It also gives you time stamped ad marker suggestions. So if you are going to be rolling any mid roll ads in your episodes, it will tell you the exact timestamp that you should put your ad, and it gives you context so it explains why it's chosen this section for you. And again, you can just push the button that says, Yes, create my ad right here at this time stamp. And I, like I said, I'm just kind of like exploring this because it is so new. But I tried this out and looked at its suggestions, and it surprisingly chose some really great spots to put ads in. It gives you any links that were referenced in this episode, so if you shared specific links to your listeners during the episode, it pulled those for you and has them written out, and you can just push the button that says, Add to show notes. And then it also gives you SEO suggestions. So it gives you an SEO title to use. So if you're using SEO, you know that your SEO title might be different than your actual episode title, and it writes out a meta description for you. It also gives you keywords to use if you are on Youtube, you could use these keywords when you're putting your episodes up there. So overall, like some pretty cool assets and pretty neat that it's all done right here inside of your hosting platform. The last thing about this new Captivate spark AI is that inside of Captivate, it does have a feature, and it's always had this feature that's called episode planning, where you can do your planning and, like, outline your episodes, and you can just kind of like, keep track of your ideas if you wanted to. But now, when you click on episode planning, you can select to have Captivate give you suggestions for episodes. And according to captivate, it's actually looking at your specific podcast topics that you've already covered on it, who you've interviewed, and then it's taking that information, analyzing it and suggesting what you should do next, so that you're never like stuck for ideas on what to talk about in future episodes. And it's actually looking at your analytics, it says, so that it's choosing topics for you that are particularly popular with your specific audience. So when you ask it to give you suggestions, it's going to give you a few different suggestions. Like, when I tried it, it gave me three different episodes to choose from. And then when I clicked on the episode, it gives me more information. So it gives me a title for the episode, main talking points. And then what's really cool, I've never seen this before. Is it gives you guest suggestions for that topic, if you wanted to make it a guest episode like it gives you specific people with their website links, social media links, questions that you could ask them and why it's choosing this guest for you, and then inside of your podcast settings. I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like you can train Captivate AI, just like you would with other AI. So inside of your settings, you can teach it more about your tone of voice, what kind of tone you'd like for it to use, if you would like it to have humor, if you would like it to be more serious, lots of different like prompts that you can put in and things like that. So overall, I was really impressed. Like I said, I haven't had too much time to play around with it, but from what I've seen, I think there's lots of potential here. And just like with any AI tool, I think it's always like a great jumping off point. And especially if you are somebody who's doing your podcasts all by yourself. You don't have support in terms of production, this would definitely be a really cool thing to check out. I hope that this breakdown was helpful for you, and that it kind of gave you some more insight. If you've been thinking about trying out Captivate as your host, I will include my personal affiliate link for Captivate. Hopefully you can tell by now, like, this is a platform that I use and that I really, really love. So if you do decide to try it, I'll have that link for you in the episode description as well as in the show notes on my website. If you use my link, you'll get a free seven day trial. So if nothing else, like, you can get in there and just kind of poke around and try things out and see if it is the right platform for you. I also do offer the service of setting up the transfer for you. It really is not that complicated of a process, but I know this is definitely something that maybe, like, you've been wanting to do, switching over to captivate but maybe you just, like, don't have the time for it, and you just don't even want to learn how to do it. I can set up that transfer for you if that's something that you'd like me to do. I've done that for several clients before, and it's something that I can get done within a day. So just reach out to me. You can always email me, Sara podcasting for educators.com or you can send me a message on Instagram, at podcasting for educators, and we can talk through that a little bit more. All right, let's end this episode with something that I'm loving and something that I am listening to right now, something that I am absolutely loving is a few weeks ago, I shared that I'm loving really simple, easy dinners, especially in the crock pot. Now that it's fall, crock pot dinners are where it's at. So this is kind of similar to that. Something that I'm loving right now is Costco French onion soup. I don't know if they sell this at every Costco, but they do at hours during the fall and I think, into the winter, but it is in the frozen section, and it is so, so good for being frozen. And like being such an easy meal is just delicious. You just we take it out, put it in our little soup cups. I know that there's an actual word for that, but I'm blanking on what it is. Pop it in the oven for, I think it's 40 minutes, and it just comes out perfect. It's so good, and we usually pair it with a Caesar salad, and it's just the perfect, super easy fall dinner. So if you're a French onion soup guy or a girly, go check your local Costco see if they have it. Something that I am listening to is a new podcast called The holiday Head Start, and this is actually hosted by one of our clients. Well, two of our clients, Heidi and Emily, who are sisters, who co host the teacher approved podcast, but they've started a second podcast called The holiday Head Start, and they are just absolutely amazing at planning all things in the classroom, and they've really taken those skills and applied it to planning for the holidays, and definitely a big emphasis on Christmas, but also holidays throughout the whole year. Right now, we are gearing up to be in the holiday season. It's always a super overwhelming time for me. I'm somebody who loves to make the holidays feel really special, but I also get overwhelmed in the execution of that. So I've really enjoyed listening to this podcast, because it's all about how to kind of alleviate that overwhelm that comes with the holidays and still being able to make it really special. One of their taglines is that they share how With a little planning and a little prep, you can ensure that the days that make life special don't become the days that make you stressed. So that's kind of just a quick little snippet of what that show is about. I'll link it in the show notes so that you can go check it out. All right. As always, I so appreciate you spending some time with me here today, and I will catch you here next week.

    Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. To keep this conversation going, connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support in launching, managing or growing your podcast. Check out my online course, the podcasting for educators prep school. At podcasting for educators.com/prep school. I'll see you here next time you.

More about Podcasting for Educators:

Podcasting for Educators is the podcast for TpT authors and other online educators. It's a show that will help you get your podcast in front of those who need it most - teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, SLPs, parents, and more! Each week, Sara Whittaker and her guests will share top tips and actionable strategies that you will need in order to launch, manage, and grow your podcast. You’ll learn how to leverage your show to build long-lasting relationships with your audience and promote your TpT resources, courses, and memberships, all while providing valuable and accessible content!

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Sara Whittaker