Who is Jesse Chappus & the Ultimate Health Podcast
Jesse Chappus is a former chiropractor turned podcaster, he retired from Chiropody in 2016 to concentrate on pursuing his life’s work of finding what is ultimate health and to educate the public.
The Brief
Jesse a successful audio only podcast wanted to transition to a video first podcasting approach. Seeing the benefits of having video as part of the strategy and knowing how that could accelerate the growth of the podcast. We were challenged in spearheading growth through video, giving video it’s own visual identity and keeping up with the weekly schedule whilst constantly improving each and every episode.
Branding The Podcast
Jesse had limited branding, mainly focussed on static imagery. Our goal was to immediately create additional branding for Video, these included a thumbnail design and also animated assets for intros, outs and subscribe animations to name a few.
Thumbnail Design
CTR (click through rate) is huge for the growth of a podcast, so having a thumbnail and title combination that encourages clicks are as important as the episode itself. You may have created a great informative podcast that could really impact peoples lives but if your thumbnail and title combination isn’t as enticing as the thousands of other podcast episodes, it may not see the light of day.
Here you can see our style, it’s clean, gives space for clear enticing text an image of the guest and more importantly remains the same so viewers know this is the same podcast they’ve listened to before.
Below you can see common structures tried and texted for many other podcasts.
Animation
Creating respectful animations for a podcast are one of the elements that can really show a professional element to the podcast. For Jesse we created one off animations for lower third host/guest names, custom animation popups and end card animations which are unique for each episode to encourage the viewer to click on another episode increasing YouTubes Average Views Per User stat which lets YouTube know you videos are good and you should be shown more often to users.
Here is an example end screen.
Animated Lower Thirds used within templates to customise for each guest.
Editing The Ultimate Health Podcast
Jesse conducts his interviews over riverside.fm Which I believe is the best remote recording software out there. He also provides us with clean footage from his camera directly (a Sony ZV-1). Our task is to enable the conversation to flow, making sure the correct person is on camera at the same time. We also must clean the audio, usually the guest may have a poorer quality than our host, so improvements can be made to bring the guest unto standard.
AI Podcast Tools
We do use some AI tools, mainly for audio cleaning and caption generation. We find AI a useful tool to help us. Currently it is not there yet to do anything unsupervised.
Tools we often use:
- RX Izotope (Audio manipulation)
- Adobe Podcast Enhance (Simple AI audio cleaning tool)
- Submagic (Caption generation)
Improved Strategy
In September 2022 we decided to incorporate daily content clipped from the podcast anywhere between 3-30minutes on average onto YouTube. The time cost on this is relatively small, but what it managed to achieve was huge in-terms of views, subscribers and ultimately monetisation.
The consistency of the uploads played into the hands of the algorithm. You can see below how an episode with 31k views created tripled those views from the clips alone.
Subscriber Growth
In November 2020 The Ultimate Health Podcast had 3,000 Subscribers which came from audio versions uploaded to the platform with each upload receiving high double digits to low triple digit views.
Comparing that to todays figures here are some of the most popular uploads.
1% Improvements
Podcasting is not a short-term game. It rewards consistency and dedication. Concentrating on the things that move the needle the most first. Learning from other podcasts and staying up with trends is a given.
We have years of experience in this field and have learnt countless lesson we can implement into other podcasts, it’s helped with speed and efficiency in an industry that is often week by week releases.
Final Thoughts
Don’t forget to check out Jesse’s Channel here.
If you have a podcast and you want help with production we are happy to chat.
