How to Grow Your Podcast - 3 Ways to Grow Your Podcast

Hello, hello. Welcome to Episode 480. I’m really excited to talk about how to grow a podcast audience today. The last few weeks we talked about launching your show. Last week, we launched the Launch Your Podcast challenge, which by the way, you can absolutely still get the five audios and the workbooks and the whole thing right here. And you’ll be able to go through it, all right there. It’s all available for you.

Actionable Podcast Growth Tips for New or Existing Podcast Shows

One of the most important things we talk about in launching your show is, some of the stuff we’re going to talk about today, that works for growing your show. And so, everything I’m talking about today can be used on day one or day 1000 of your podcast, as a way to bump some new energy into your show. So, I want to keep this one quick and actionable and ready to go.

If you want to grow your podcast audience, what I want you to do is, I want you to commit right now to, for the next 30 days, really taking action on one of these things.

Really taking action on one strategy to grow your show. Not all of these strategies will have immediate payoffs. Some of them take time, as you will hear as we’re digging into this. But all of these will net you a positive result in growing your show, if worked consistently.

If worked consistently, that doesn’t mean constantly. That doesn’t mean burn yourself out. It just means consistently showing up, which means working a plan, which means creating a plan. All right, so let’s dig in, keep this really, really rolling.

Tip #1 to Grow Your Podcast Audience: Be a Guest on Other Shows

This is far and away always the fastest way to get new listeners to my show, it’s to go spend an hour on somebody else’s show. However, this does take some upfront legwork. Meaning, you’ve got to be putting together a system to consistently pitching and showing up on other shows. I’ll be honest, this is something I am not great at on my own. And I am endlessly grateful that my team is stepping in and taking on the role of podcast pitchman because doing this is so much fun for me.

I love getting to go on other people’s shows but also I’m getting in front of my audience that listens to a podcast. There’s winds all around, my friend. And so, I’m committing to us working this for the next 30 days, really strategically. That meant going through and creating a list of what shows we wanted to pitch, writing out the emails, figuring out how each of those emails is customized but also formatting them enough that the solid points can be copied from email to email, figuring out a tracking system.

We use a Google doc, who’s been pitched, who hasn’t been pitched. And guess where I started? And this is where I really want you to look for the next 30 days. What shows have you been on before that maybe it’s time to visit again? As I looked at my list of podcasts I’ve been on before, I realized there were several that we could be touching base with and seeing how things are going now. And so, I want you to be looking at where is that possible for you? Where can you be reconnecting and following up with content providers you’ve already partnered with? Hosts you’ve already guested for. Start there. That’s a really good place to get some fast results and some quick wins.

I know this one feels really obvious but really, are you consistently sharing your show? And I don’t just mean the episode that came and went live this week. What about last week’s? What about six weeks ago? What about eight weeks ago? We are constantly sharing episodes, new and old, across our social media platforms. Because guess what? Somebody is just discovering us today. Someone is just discovering our show today. It doesn’t matter that I’ve done the show for nearly seven years. It doesn’t matter that we’ve done nearly 500 episodes. Someone is discovering this episode as their very first episode and that’s only possible if you’re consistently sharing it. So, as you map out your social calendar and your social content plan, I want you to be setting aside spots for podcast shares. Not just this week’s episodes but episodes from your entire catalog of content. There’s a ton of value there, be using it. Especially if you’re somebody who has pre-launch content for a program that you launch over and over again, great.

Be utilizing the assets you created last round. I don’t care if that was six months ago or last year, you can always be making sure that you’re making edits or tweaks or updates, keeping them timely with what’s happening in the world. Now because the core of the content is very likely, still good and is very likely still going to work for you. So be really, really sharing your show.

Tip #3 to Grow your Podcast Audience: Repurpose Your Show

This could mean taking the transcripts and turning them into blog posts for your site or other sites. It could be that you are breaking them into smaller social media posts. It could be that you are repurposing them into trainings or opt ins but be sure you’re doing as much as you can with the audio.

Because it’s a great way for people to realize, “Hey, I’ve got a podcast. I’ve got this asset that you can be looking at.” Because it gets them in front of your content and whatever medium they prefer consuming content in. So, repurpose your show, share it in as many ways as possible. Get creative. This is one thing I really love to encourage attendees of our workshops to sit down and do. Is brain dump all the ways you could use one podcast episode, everywhere you would repurpose it into a blog post because here’s the deal. When you take your transcripts and you start repurposing it, you’ll find that you can usually pull one or two or three blog posts out of a podcast, depending on how long it was. I’ve been able to turn entire points into a single blog post. I then shared it across medium and LinkedIn and other sites I submitted to. All of which drove back to, find out more in such and such podcast episodes. So, I just found three ways to get in front of new eyes and drive them back to my podcast.

So, be looking at ways you can repurpose, reuse, restructure. Because at the end of the day, the best branding we can have is that people know exactly what we talk about. Exactly how we talk about it and exactly how we serve them with it. And that comes mostly from repeating ourselves a lot. All right. I told you, this was going to be quick and dirty this week. I hope it was helpful. Now I want to hear from you, though.

Let me know which one you’re taking action on in June. Which of these three key ways are you going to be implementing for the entire month of June? Like I said, “We’re really focusing on getting me on other shows. That’s going to be our focus.” I will be coming back in July to tell you how that went. I can’t wait to tell you it went great. So, let me know which one your going to be implementing on. And don’t forget, you can still grab access to the Launch Your Podcast Challenge. I will see you next week.