Happy New Year!

I just wanted to say “Thank You” for a wonderful 2014 and I hope that everyone has an even more fantastic 2015!

2014 saw a few changes at ALsensei.com and on the English 2.0 Podcast and I’m happy to report that we have seen some numbers increase. However, on the other side of the coin, I wasn’t able to reach some of the goals I had set out to achieve.

In this blog post, I’m going to take a look at some of the numbers that helped the English 2.0 Podcast take a step forward in 2014 and I will reveal my plans for the upcoming year: 2015!

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English 2.0 Podcast

Positive Outcome: Increase in Total Downloads

Overall, the number of total downloads DOUBLED in 2014. To be clear, since launching the English 2.0 Podcast in May 2011 until the end of 2013, the total number of downloads was at about 94,000. By the end of 2014, the total number stood at 188,000 (almost exactly 2X!).

May 2011-Dec 2013: 94,000
Jan 2014-Nov 2014: 188,000

Increase in Single Day Downloads

For single day downloads, the numbers also improved quite a bit. The average number of downloads per day increased by over 200:

Avg. downloads per day in 2013: 340
Avg. downloads per day in 2014: 550

Top 5 Single Episodes of 2014

In 2014, there were 25 new episodes of the English 2.0 Podcast. The top 5 single episode podcasts based on number of downloads were:

1. Episode 25: How to Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Fun and Exciting
2. Speaking Skills 4: Introducing Yourself and Others
3. Episode 27: How to Use Movies to Study English
4. Your Question 12: How Can We Remember New Words?
5. AudioBLOG 6: 3 Things That are Making Your English UNNATURAL

New Countries Reached in 2014

The final statistic I’d like to share with you is the additional countries that discovered the English 2.0 Podcast in 2014. There were 11 new countries in total! They were:

Congo Republic
Sierra Leone
Barbados
Turks and Caicos Islands
Bhutan
Fiji
Northern Mariana Islands
Suriname
Niger
Andorra
Liechtenstein

Total number of countries through 2013: 161
Total number of countries through 2014: 172

Welcome to the English 2.0 Podcast! By my count, there are about 55 countries/territories that still haven’t found the podcast. Some of them may be quite impossible to reach due to political reasons such as North Korea and Cuba. Others may not have access to the internet or large enough populations to reach such as Greenland and Tibet. However, there are a few countries that I think we can reach in 2015. If you know anyone in these countries, please help us spread the show and try to cover the whole globe! Here are the countries I think we can reach in 2015:

Bahamas
Iceland
Trinidad and Tobago
Montenegro
Palau
Marshall Islands
Central African Republic

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Slightly Positive Outcome: Small Increase in iTunes Rankings

If you watched Episode 25: How to Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Fun and Exciting, you may have noted that I stated some bold goals for the podcast. The most prevalent one was to become the #1 podcast in iTunes in the category of Education-Language Courses (Video). Now, at the beginning of 2014, I didn’t realize that there were different rankings for each country so my goal was not clear. So, I checked the rankings for the top 20 countries of the English 2.0 Podcast to compare our position at the beginning of 2014 to the position at the end of the year. Here are the results:

Overall, the podcast increased in ranking in 13 countries, decreased in 5 countries and remained the same in 2 countries. Not the results I was hoping for, obviously.

The largest increases were found in:

Turkey +18
South Korea +18
Taiwan +17
Japan +14
Brazil +13
France +13

The decreases were in:

Germany -7
United Kingdom -3
Italy -2
USA -1
China -1

Among the Top 20 countries, the highest ranking positions were:

Nepal #9
Vietnam #13
Turkey #16
Brazil #17
Saudi Arabia #19

My Thoughts

We finished with one Top 10 ranking and four Top 20 rankings for the year. Not bad! Not great either unfortunately. Frankly, I thought we could get into the Top 10 in at least half of these countries. Actually, we were in the Top 10 in Brazil in the middle of the year and we were in the Top 10 in very small counties like Yemen.

How are these rankings calculated?

According to my research, iTunes does not keep track of the number of downloads so that is not a factor. However, what they do measure is the number of Subscribers and the number of Comments and Ratings. That’s why you will find many podcasts with a higher ranking than the English 2.0 Podcast which have not been active for 3 or 4 years. My guess is that many people “subscribed” to these podcasts and never “unsubscribed” when they stopped updating.

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In 2014, the English 2.0 Podcast reached a maximum of about 900 Subscribers and ended the year at around 650. This could be explained due to the holiday season. In 2015, I’d love to see this number sail past 1,000! I think we can do it!

Plans for 2015

I’m hoping to really push the English 2.0 Podcast forward this year as well as the blog at ALsensei.com. I truly think that the message of English 2.0 needs to be spread to as many students as possible and 2015 is going to be a year of amazing growth!

On the podcast, I’m hoping to do more this year and increase the number of podcast episodes. Here are the main ideas I am planning to add:

More Teacher Interviews: I want to continue to bring you the best and most current information in the world of English study. Learning from many different teachers gives you access to a multitude of views as well as tools and strategies.

Movie Study Lessons: I’ve started to post these on the blog but I want to bring them to the podcast so that there is an audio format as well as a written blog. These will work well together and hopefully encourage more students to use movies that they enjoy to learn English in an effective and practical way.

News Topics: I’d like to bring some short news topics to the podcast for a few reasons. First, they will encourage students to learn something of interest outside of the typical English topics. Second, it can be an instructive way to teach people how to use news articles for effective study.

As always, these are just ideas I have in mind to keep the show fresh and to allow me to update it more frequently. I noticed that when the podcast was being updated more frequently on a regular basis, faster growth started to occur. If there is something you’d like to see or hear more of on the podcast, please let me know. If there is something that you don’t like, please let me know in the “Comments” below. I’d love to hear any feedback you have about the show!

I Need Your Help!

I understand that the podcasts are free and that many students cannot afford to pay for lessons. This is exactly why I love the podcasting format! It gives me a chance to reach so many different people from so many different countries. However, this is not my full time job (yet) so I cannot afford (time and money) to keep this going if I don’t hear from you in the “Comments” and “Ratings” sections.

So, please, please take a few minutes out of your schedule to leave a comment and rating in iTunes. As always, if you’re not comfortable writing in English, please feel free to write in your own language. It would really mean a lot to me and you can consider this a “payment” for getting a free resource that I believe is the best and most valuable English podcast in the world.

Thank you in advance!
Here’s to a magnificent 2015!
Cheers!

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