112: The Four Things That All Successful Podcasters Do

This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts from anywhere. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, companies like Spotify, and even the New York Times. What's amazing about Riverside is that when you're recording a podcast or a remote interview, the recording quality is independent of Wi-Fi stability, which is huge. Your content is recorded locally, which ensures reliable and uncompressed content quality. It's basically a studio inside your browser, and it is super intuitive and easy to use. Once your recording is done, you'll automatically be able to download separate audio and video tracks and edit your content all with a few clicks. If you haven't yet, give Riverside a try. Visit Riverside.fm and use my code Grow15, that's GROW15, to start recording studio quality sound and video and get 15% off a membership plan. Hey there, fellow podcasters! Do you ever feel like you're struggling to grow your podcast audience or you find it challenging to monetize your podcast despite all of the hard work that you've put in? Don't worry, you are not alone. As your personal podcast coach, I am here to help you turn your podcast into a success story. Now, I know firsthand how frustrating it can be when your podcast doesn't gain traction, or when your efforts really don't seem to pay off. But just imagine if you could unlock the secrets to a growing thriving podcast, you could create a loyal fanbase, you can expand your impact, and yes, you can generate consistent revenue from your podcast business. Well, that's what my mission is going to be today. Today, I'm going to be sharing with you the four things that I have found successful podcasters do differently than podcasters who have no audience and no growth. But before we dive into those strategies just so that you know, I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. Let me quickly introduce myself. So, my name is Kevin Shridland. I'm a podcaster. I'm a podcast coach. I launched my first podcast, Philly Ho, as a side hustle in 2018. Within 18 months, it had surpassed 100,000 downloads and more than $140,000 in monetized revenue. Then in 2020, I began helping other podcasters, just like you, to grow and monetize their show via the Grow the Show podcast and my online program, the Grow the Show Accelerator. So over the past five years at the time of this recording, I have helped generate millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of monetized revenue. And today, my mission is to help you do that as well. So, let's get started. Okay, so today we're going to go into the four things that successful podcasters do that unsuccessful podcasters don't do. And you'll notice that one of those four things that I'm not going to mention is be consistent. Now, I know that's probably a surprise. What I'm not saying is that successful podcasters are inconsistent. What I am saying is that in general, a lot of podcasters are consistent and there are tons of unsuccessful podcasters who are consistent. It is well-known, it is common knowledge, it is beat into our brains on a regular basis that in order to be successful as a podcaster, we need to be consistent, right? But if you're somebody who's watching this video and you are not yet a successful podcaster, I'm willing to bet there's a good chance that you have been consistent, right? So that means that consistency alone is not enough to be a successful podcaster. If we define success as growing your audience and generate revenue, if that's how you define success, if you're a podcaster who doesn't define success that way, that's awesome, totally cool. Love that for you. I'm a little bit jealous and hopefully you can get some value out of the rest of this. But anyway, before we get into the four things that successful podcasters do differently than unsuccessful podcasters know, that successful podcasters, yes, are consistent, but consistency and publishing is not one of the four things I'm about to mention. You must be consistent, yes, but consistency alone is not enough. Okay, so let's dive in. What is the first thing that successful podcasters do that unsuccessful podcasters don't? Well, the first thing that successful podcasters do differently is they create what I call a cat one premise, C-A-T-1 premise. What that stands for is category of one. This means that their show stands out as unique. They focus on a specific target audience. They focus on what their show is going to do for that specific target audience. And they focus on how that show is going to do that thing for that target audience. Your show is in a category of one when you have a unique combination of those three things. So you can have the same audience that another podcaster has, but if you really want to stand out, then you should focus on having a unique conversation of what your show does for that audience and how it goes about doing it. So for example, when I launched my first podcast, Phillyhoo, I launched that to tell the stories of the successful folks in Philadelphia. I said the doers, thinkers, and performers of Philadelphia. That alone was not a cat one premise because my audience was people in Philadelphia who are interested in hearing successful Philadelphia stories. There were other podcasts that existed before I launched my show that had that audience. The next question is what will your show do for those listeners? Phillyhoo was there to inspire Philadelphiaians to get them to love the city and to hopefully get to know the other Movers and Shakers in Philadelphia. That also was not unique to my show. There were other podcasts that were there to do that, but the third piece, the how is where I really was able to differentiate my podcast from the very start because Phillyhoo was a narrative podcast. So it wasn't just me having a conversation and then posting that conversation. I had the conversation. I did tons of editing. I recorded tons of voiceovers and made it a really unique listening experience. So when people discovered that show, yes, it was another interview show interviewing successful Philadelphiaians, but it was the first one that presented the final product in a really highly produced storytelling fashion. Now, what I'm not saying is that you need to do a narrative podcast. Those are expensive, not everybody like those. That's totally cool. But the message behind that is you can have the same audience as another podcast. You can even have the same purpose of as another podcast. But if you go about delivering on that purpose a little bit differently than other shows, then you will have a cat one premise on the flip side. You can also have a podcast that is there to do something for an audience that other podcasts do, but it's the only podcast that does that thing for this specific audience. So as an example, there are tons of podcasts out there about motivation, but there might not be motivation podcasts for fish farmers. I don't know. This is the only podcast in the world that is here to motivate fish farmers. I don't know. I came out of nowhere, but you get it, right? So if you take those three things, who are your shows for, what it will do for them and how it will go about doing it for those listeners, you will have yourself a cat one premise. And you'll be able to avoid being yet another cookie cutter interview show that interviews, successful people and tell stories, all those things like you don't want to do that because there's a billion of those and in order for your podcast to be successful, it must stand out. It must be somebody's favorite show. And if it's like every other show on the planet, it's not going to be anybody's favorite show. And it's not going to resonate with anyone. Okay, so the second thing that successful podcasters do that every other podcaster really doesn't do is successful podcasters focus on keeping listeners, keeping listeners. Everybody wants to grow their audience, right? Virtually every single podcaster I've ever spoken to from those who haven't launched yet or just launched all the way to those who already have multiple million downloads per month. And that's not hyperbole. They all say, how do I grow my audience? I really wish it would grow faster, right? But the difference between the ones who just launched and have no audience and the ones who are already at a million plus is that those folks while they are looking to grow, they first focus on keeping listeners, retaining listeners. And after serving more than 350 podcasters through my programs and my consulting work, what I have found is that many podcasters have more of a retention problem than a growth problem. And what I mean by that is they actually are getting more new listeners into their podcast every single week than they realize it just doesn't look like it because so many listeners that they had are leaving are no longer listening to their podcast. And so every single week they have to go out and drum up brand new people and convince them to listen to their podcast where everybody that they convinced last week to listen to their podcast are nowhere to be found. Now again, when you look at your downloads, it looks like your show is stagnant because you have the same amount of downloads every single week. But in reality, your show is leaking. If your show is a bucket, there's a hole in the bottom where your listeners are leaving. You're not keeping them around. They thought your show sounded cool, but you didn't really keep their attention. So they're leaving. Meanwhile, you're focusing on getting more listeners into the bucket. And while you're doing these things to get more people to discover your show, for some reason, the level isn't rising. Well, it's because you're not keeping listeners. And so there's three levels to focus on if you're a podcaster and you want to keep more of your listeners. Number one, it's the episodes intro. You want to grab your listeners attention right away with an interesting question or an emotional hook right away in the first 30 to 60 seconds. Ideally, also in that intro, you want to pose a specific question that this episode is here to answer. Even if your show is discussion based, it still should have one purpose, one mission. If you pose that question to the listener in the first 30 to 60 seconds of your podcasts, and you say, Hey, this is what we're going to explore today. It's going to be a lot more clear what the listener is going to get by sticking around and by giving you 20, 30, 60, even 120 minutes of their attention. The vast majority of podcasters that I see struggle with retention, all I have to do is fix their intro, make a better intro, and actually do a good job of convincing listeners to listen to the whole episode. And their show starts to grow. In fact, this happened with Nate, who is a client in the Grow the Show accelerator. He joined us at 20,000 downloads per month. And his show was doing okay, but it really wasn't growing. I listened to his intro, and as soon as you press play on the episode, it was super digressy. It wasn't really clear what he was going to talk about or who the guest was they had on the show. He just like went into talking about the weather. And I was like, Nate, we need to fix this. So we took one week. I taught him how to write a better intro to his podcast episodes. And within a month, he was up to 30,000 gallons in episode. Now remember, this was not a new growth strategy. This was a retention strategy. So what that means is Nate had a massive hole in his podcast. His episode intros were losing people by literally the thousands. We plugged that hole. And within one month, his audience level rose by 50%, which is 10,000 people. That's what's at stake here. So number one, your episodes intro is probably the most important place to keep listeners. Number two, after you successfully hoax your listener, and they've decided that they're going to stick around and listen to your whole episode, then you need to keep your episode focused. Right. So remember how I said before you want to pose a specific question at the beginning of your podcast episodes? Well, as the episode goes on, you want to loosely stick to answering that question and stick to delivering on the promise that you made to the listener when they pressed play. It's okay to digress a little bit because a wonderful thing about podcasting is that we can, you know, go deep and talk about different things. And we've had some space to really digress. But some podcasters take that way too far. They talk about literally anything, a wide variety of topics, whatever the heck they want. And the problem with that is that when you talk about many different things in one single episode, there's a really high chance that the people who are listening to this episode are not going to be interested in all of those things. So the more wide variety of topics you talk about, the more listeners you're going to lose because they're not interested in that topic. So keep the content of each podcast episode tight and relevant. The third place that you can focus on keeping listeners is in your show's focus. The podcast feeds overall focus. So just like if you talk about too many different things in one episode of your podcast, if you have too many different episode themes on your overall podcast feed, you're going to lose listeners as well. If your podcast covers too many topics, you're probably going to lose listeners who can't find the content at their interested in or they just are tired of looking at your feed and being like, ah, I'm not really interested in that. And so eventually they just quietly stop looking at your feed and you have lost them. So remember, it's critical if you want your podcast to grow and generate revenue to focus on keeping listeners before trying to focus on getting more listeners because you can literally have the best audience growth strategy in the world. But if you can't keep any of the listeners that your incredible growth strategy brings you, then guess what? You're going to think that that growth strategy doesn't work because your show isn't growing. When reality, you have literally the best growth strategy ever created. It's just you're losing all the people that you get. Okay, so the third thing that successful podcasters focus on that unsuccessful podcasters do not and this one might shock you. Successful podcasters focus on getting more listeners where they already listen. What this means is all of the talk on how to get more podcast listeners on social media, which used to include me. I used to talk a ton about how to get podcast listeners on social media. In fact, for a time, it was the only thing that I talked about. But what I have learned is that while you can get some podcast listeners on social media, it is extremely ineffective and inefficient. What actually works in my experience is focusing on getting podcast listeners where they already listen. And so allow me to explain. When you focus on getting more listeners where they already listen, there are two things that are true that make your growth strategy super successful. Number one, if you make it so that people find out about your podcast when they are listening to another podcast, you guarantee that 100% of the people that you reach with this strategy listen to podcasts on a regular basis because I've got news. You can make the most amazing TikToks or YouTube shorts or Instagram reels or short form videos or social media posts or Facebook group posts ever to try to get podcast listeners to your show. But guess what? Roughly half of the people who see that interview clip on your TikTok or who see that post in a Facebook group don't listen to podcasts on a regular basis and you're not going to get them to start. And so while you have put all this work into creating the perfect repurposed content on social media, 50% of the people who watch that video are just not podcast listeners. And so all of those people that you went into that effort to reaching with that video was a complete waste, maybe not a complete waste. But they're not going to become your podcast listeners. The second thing is that when you reach somebody via social media, they may be a podcast listener. So for the second half of people who you reach on social media, they might be podcast listeners on a regular basis. They might listen when they commute or when they work out or when they clean or go for a walk or something like that. But you don't reach them while they're doing that thing. You reach them while they're scrolling on social media. The odds that that person is going to close out the social media after they are currently on stop what they're currently doing sitting on the couch, maybe they're in the bathroom, maybe they're in the line at the grocery store and go start listening to your hour-long podcast episode. Odds of that happening are slim to none. So you may have with that short form video reached somebody who would be the perfect listener of your podcast. But because you reach them at a time where it's just too much work to go give your show a try, they're not going to do that. And so while you reach that potential listener, you didn't get them to actually tune into your show. And so all that effort was wasted. This is why so many people have really strong social media presences and they post short form videos all the time about their podcasts and those videos actually get some serious reach. But they get no podcast listenership from it because they did not reach people who are guaranteed podcast listeners and they did not reach them in the moment that they are being a podcast listener. If you reach somebody while they're listening to another podcast, it is way easier for them to switch over and give yours a try and eventually become your loyal raving fans. So how do you do this? How do you get more listeners where they already listen? Well, the best way is by collaborating with other podcasters who already have your target audience. And you can do that through guest swaps, right? So you can have each other on each other's show. You can do it through promo swaps where you promote each other's podcast. This is a little bit more quick and a little bit more efficient because instead of you having to book an interview, do the interview at the interview, publish the interview and wait for the other podcast or to publish the interview, which sometimes takes months. You just simply talk about their show on yours. They talk about your show on theirs and pow, you share your audience. You can also do something called episode drops where they share a full episode of your podcast or if you've got some cash to put into this, you can buy ads on other podcasts or you can buy ads in podcast listening apps like overcast or podcast Republic. There's a bunch of them. You don't need to do that. It's just something if you've got some money that you want to spend on growth, which some people do. So overall successful podcasters focus on reaching potential listeners while they are already engaged in the podcasting world. They focus on reaching listeners where they already listen and because of that, their show grows way easier and way faster. All right. So the fourth thing that successful podcasters do that unsuccessful podcasters don't has to do with the M word monetization successful podcasters get their listeners to buy stuff. In my opinion, that's literally all that podcast monetization is. So if somebody says, oh, there's a million ways to monetize your podcast. I assert that every single way to monetize your podcast boils up to one, which is getting your listeners to buy stuff. Now they can either buy something that you create yourself or something that someone else makes. So if you're selling your own products or services, you're the classic creator entrepreneur. You're selling stuff that you make like digital products, courses, merch, memberships, masterminds, events or anything else that you can produce and sell to your audience. On the other hand, if you're selling something that somebody else makes, you're tapping into affiliate partnerships or classic podcast sponsorships, which everyone thinks of as like the main only way to monetize a podcast, but it's actually, in my opinion, one of the last ways to monetize the key is to figure out what things your listeners want to buy and then either make it yourself and sell it to them or find somebody who already makes it and sell it to them and you get paid a cut. That's literally it. On successful podcasters, unfortunately, tend to be the ones who think that selling is bad and that if you sell something to your audience, you are a sell out. That means you're not a creator. The reality is that is not true literally every single podcast that has a listenership. It has to generate cash because a podcast is not free to make and produce. It is not. Eventually, especially as it grows, it's going to require money to keep it going and as long as you're in a capitalistic system, which whenever you want to say about capitalism, we are in a capitalistic system. The only way to generate a revenue is to sell something to somebody and so the question for you is if you want your podcast to generate revenue, what are you going to sell to who? So there you have it, my fellow podcasters. Those are the four things that successful podcasters do differently than unsuccessful podcasters. Number one, successful podcasters have a Cat1 premise, C-A-T-1. Their show is in a category of one. It is the only podcast on the planet that blank. Number two, successful podcasters focus on retaining listeners, keeping the listeners that they already got by staying focused and making sure that they keep the show within their listeners' interests. Number three, successful podcasters get more listeners where they already listen rather than trying to get listeners where they don't listen a podcast like on search engines or on social media or literally anywhere except other podcasts. And number four, successful podcasters monetize by getting their listeners to buy something. Either something that they make or something that somebody else makes that they can get a commission on. Now remember, I am here as your personal podcast coach to guide you through the journey. So if you follow these strategies in order, you'll be well on your way to transforming your podcast and boosting your online business. Now, if you found this video helpful, don't forget to like, subscribe and share it with other podcasters who might benefit from these strategies. And if you've got any questions or need additional guidance, feel free to let me know in the comments and I'd be happy to provide whatever I can. Also be sure to check out other episodes of the Grow the Show podcast every single episode dives into a specific framework or strategy that you can use to grow and monetize your show. And if you'd like to work with me and my team directly, you can apply to the Grow the Show accelerator or to my mastermind master the show. I'd love to hear from you and see if it might be a fit. So that's it for this one. I'll see you in the next video and here is to your podcasting success.