147 | 12 Days of Podcast Growth Day #5: How to HOOK Your Listeners In

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast growth coach and welcome to lesson five of this 12 lesson, 12 day course on how to grow and monetize your podcast. Now I know what you're thinking. All right, Kevin. This is lesson five. This has got to be the part where we talk about getting more listeners, right? Wrong. This is the part where we talk about keeping the listeners that we already have. And so that's my first question for you today. Have you thought about the listeners that you already have for your podcast? I know that you're like me and like every other podcaster around and you want more, you want growth, you have goals, but are your current listeners actually sticking around? Well, this is skill number two of the four skills that are required to achieve podcast success. Skill is retention, keeping the listeners you get. But how do you know whether you're actually keeping your podcast listeners? The answer is analytics. Now, when I mention analytics or data or statistics, you might think that I'm talking about the number one metric that podcasters look at downloads. But I'm actually not because in my opinion, there's another metric that is actually more important to the health of a podcast. And that is your average completion rate. You see, many podcasters who have never looked at their completion rates are stumped as to why their show is in growing. They're doing everything that they believe they should do. They're posting on social media. They're asking their guests to share, but still no podcast growth. And they're not sure why until I get them to actually look at their completion rates. Because when you finally do look at your completion rates, you see that you actually don't have a growth problem. You have a retention problem because when you don't have good completion rates, here's what happens listeners tune into your show for the first time within a couple minutes of pressing play because you don't know how to keep their attention. You lose their attention. And then they would doubt that they actually want to spend the next 30-ish minutes listening to your show and they pull out their phone and they turn your podcast off. And most time when that happens, they don't ever turn another episode of your podcast back on. But I have good news. This problem can be fixed. Because when you change your focus to keeping the listeners that you already have, many times your download numbers start to go up without changing your growth strategy. And you're like, what the heck? My show is growing. I'm like, yeah, because you're actually keeping the listeners that you get. You stopped trying to fill a wicker basket with water. You learned how to keep people's attention and you converted your wicker basket to a steel bucket. And now when water goes in, it doesn't go out. The water level, which is your audience size, can rise. So let's dive into how we can actually make that happen. Now many beginner podcasters and actually, honestly, podcasters of all podcast ages have no idea how or where to look for their completion rates. Everybody knows where to check their download numbers, but where can you actually see your completion rates? Well, this metric is actually not provided by your hosting provider. Your hosting provider is Libson, Buzzsprout, where it is that you upload new podcast episodes. That's your host. And your host actually doesn't know how much of a podcast episode a listener listens to. That host doesn't have access to that information. They only know if a device downloaded the file. They can't tell how much of the file was actually played. But there is one piece of software that can tell how much of the episode was played. And that is the app that the listener uses to listen to your episodes. And for most listeners, that's either Apple podcasts or Spotify. And so that's where we must go to check on our completion rates. Apple podcasts has an analytics dashboard called Apple podcasts connect and Spotify has Spotify for podcasters. Once you get to either Apple podcasts connect or Spotify for podcasters, what you want to do is fire up Apple podcasts connect. Log into the Apple ID that is connected to your podcast. And once you get there, you'll be able to check out your episode by episode analytics and see what your average completion rates are. And so what is a good completion rate? Well, that depends on two things. Number one, your show's format. Interview episodes usually have lower completion rates than solo episodes. And it also depends on your average episode length as well. Shorter episodes by nature have higher retention rates. And for those of you who have episodes that are beyond an hour long, you can expect to have pretty low retention rates, but that's okay. That said, for most podcasters who show is between 20 to 60 minutes, the completion rate that I recommend that you shoot for is about 70% plus. That's the average. Now, again, that's going to be lower for interview episodes. So 70%, 75% is generally pretty good for interview episodes. We'd love to see higher. But for solo episodes, we definitely want to see higher, 80, 85, even 90%. Anything lower than that? And your listeners are literally going out of their way to stop listening to your podcast episode. And that is an indication that you do not yet have the skill of capturing attention and rewarding that attention. But if that's the case, have no fear, that's what you're about to learn. Okay, so let's say you have managed to access your completion rates and you find that they are too low. What do you do? Well, in my experience, nine times out of 10, your podcast's low completion rate is actually due to a bad episode intro. Here's why. When a listener presses play on your podcast, you as the host have one job. Your job is to sell the listener on why this episode is going to be great and what it is going to do for them and nothing else. No ads, no calls to action to rate and review and visit your website and follow you on social and subscribe to the show, no life updates, no talk of the weather, no long pre-recorded show intro with a voiceover guy, you get the picture. It should be your voice saying hello, setting the stage and hyping up the episode that they are about to hear. Now you might have heard me in the past talk about the option to include a clip from later on in the episode as an intro and I've said that in the past where that is an option you can do that, you know, and you might be somebody who does this or you might have heard this on another podcast where as soon as you press play, they play an interesting clip from later on, like a little preview and I actually don't recommend doing that anymore because that is just so difficult to pull off. Because when you do that, we call that the intro clip. When you have the intro clip, you are relying on your guest having accidentally delivered a great intro to your podcast while they answered one of your questions and it is extremely rare that that actually happens. There's a lot that has to happen when you introduce your podcast episodes because you want to introduce the show, right? Because all in one go, you need to first off introduce what is the listener going to get out of this episode? Number one, most important. Number two, you want to introduce the podcast, right? So introduce your show, introduce your listener mission, introduce yourself and why you are the one leading the journey. And ideally, also make a promise. Make a promise that this episode can keep. Tomorrow's lesson is going to dive deeper into the promise that you make, how to pick the promise that each episode makes and how to actually deliver on it, but suffice it to say those are the things that you want to touch upon in the intros of your podcast. Number one, introduce the episode and what it's going to do for the listener. Number two, introduce the show itself and the podcast mission. Number three, introduce yourself and why you're the one leading the journey. And then number four, make a promise that the episode is going to keep. As I mentioned before, in my experience, nine times out of 10, this is the lowest hanging fruit in improving episode completion rate. And when you improve episode completion rate, your show grows a lot easier because people actually stick around. Now this is the part in the audio course where you're probably thinking, okay, you have that sounds cool. I understand I need to introduce the episode and what it's going to do for the listener. I need to introduce the podcast and to mission, introduce myself while they're leading the journey and make a promise. But what does that actually sound like? How do I actually do that? Well, for that, I want to share an example with you. And if you've been listening to Grow the Show this year, you've actually already heard this example because I'm going to share an example from one of the top five most popular episodes of Grow the Show this year. And that is with former Grow the Show client, Nate Palmer. Nate is one of my best case studies of a podcaster who had a pretty good show, but had horrible intros. And he is an incredible example of what good can happen just by fixing your intro. When I started working with Nate in October, 2022, he came to me and he had 12,000 downloads per month of his podcast. And that's pretty good. But he wasn't happy with that because his show wasn't growing at all. He was doing tons of stuff to try and grow his show. He was showing up on other podcasts. He was actually really good at social media. He was even doing some paid advertisements to try and grow his show, but no matter what he tried, he could not get his download numbers to go up. As soon as I checked out a show, as soon as he joined my program and I started working with him, I immediately knew, ah, this is going to be one of those intros. Because as soon as I pressed play on his podcast, I heard how bad his intro was. And I was like, oh, great, let's fix this and watch what happens. And we did. And in three months, his show tripled. He went from 12,000 downloads a month to 36,000 downloads a month in only three months. And so what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to play you a clip of the episode where Nate came on to this podcast, Grow the Show, to share the before and after. So you're about to hear an example of a really bad intro that was literally holding a show back. And then you'll hear how Nate was able to change his intro so that he could actually keep listeners attention. And that for him was the linchpin that got him to 3x his show. Since then, his show has grown to 75 plus thousand per month. Incredible. He's amazing. But what I want you to hear is the before and after. So I'm going to cut right now to me interviewing Nate about his intro. And he's going to talk through the changes that he made. So when we met in October and I started working with the Grow the Show Accelerator, we were hitting about 10,000, 12,000 downloads a month, which was great for me because even up to like March of that year, I was only hitting about 2,000. So this is a 5x the show's listens and I've been doing some paid advertising and I've been doing some like podcast pitching where I've been on other people's shows and trying to grow the show through that and through Instagram, et cetera. But I came to you because I couldn't really break that 12k mark. I hit like 9, 10, 10, 12, 10, a few months in a row and I couldn't really get much growth. And what was interesting is that when we started working together, you showed me how to pull up my metrics and see how long people were listening for the show. And what we noticed was insane. We're going to like a 30% drop off rate in the first three minutes of each show. And you were like, hey, you're probably getting growth. You're just not seeing it because people aren't sticking around long enough to listen to a full episode, much less come back and listen to another episode. So I think that the thing that we really worked on was how do we get people to understand what the show's about, stick around to actually get to the meat of it and turn them into raiding fans? What was your reaction when we pointed that out? Because you know, I was like, had you ever even considered retention before looking at the graph? It was not even on my radar. I wasn't sure, like I feel like I just kind of showed up. I'd podcast it and I post it on Instagram and I was like, that's it, right? That's how you do it. So you just brought a depth of knowledge of like, okay, here's what we should be looking for. Here's what we should want to see. We want to see any drop offs in the first five minutes, we want to make sure people are getting through about 75% of the episode. So the education component was was huge for me and give me a little bit of a different focus, which I think changed a lot about how we conducted the show and how we structured it. I'm going to play the first like 16 to 90 seconds. So let's listen. And then when it's done, what I'd like for you to do is just talk me through what your intention was, or if you didn't have it, just like, what was your mindset in putting that intro together with no judgment? Someone who just does it, whether it's perfect or not, but does it consistently will always, always, always win or get ahead of the person that's trying to do the perfect workout or the perfect diet here and there only half the time. You are listening to the low carb hustle podcast or we help you burn fat and put some muscle behind that low carb hustle. Here's your host, Nate Palmer. Well, screw my friend. Welcome back to the low carb hustle podcast. It's me, your boy, Nate Palmer, and then joined us always with the illustrious juicy cheeks. What? Checking in. That's me. Kyle, someone asked me to the day they're like, why is Kyle juicy cheeks? And I was like, have you seen that thing clap, dang with an A? That's all that you say. What a stupid question to ask. Why is a juicy cheeks? No, actually, I think I tried to explain it. I didn't say, do you see that thing clap? I thought about that afterwards. I was like, that's a better question. That's better. It would have been. But I think the answer to that is there is a need for an explanation, right? You got to get that point. Why for? There's no need for an explanation. Right? Well, when they see you walking around, they're like, yeah, I get it. There's no need for an explanation, but the podcast is a hard medium to really grasp. Okay. So we'll stop there. So tell me about the question I asked before. What was your thinking in putting it together, the intro like that, where it was the clip, and then the voice over announcement, and then your intro, and then some discussion? So I think that a lot of times I see that the big podcast, they'll pull something, scintillating from the conversation and throw it around in the front to create more intrigue. And I feel like you've done that pretty well with your show, because I remember one time I was talking about like, what does a banana have to do with, I even forget what it was, but it was talking about how a lady showed up in a Zoom banana costume. That's right. And it was a whole thing about that. It was really, like, I was like, what are we talking about in this, but I got me to stick around. So I was trying to do the same thing, but I don't necessarily know if I was always choosing the right clips. Then I had the canned intro, which was like, hey, I thought you needed a canned intro for the show. I had something with a great voice, my buddy, Adam do that. I thought it was awesome. And then I would just jump in and try to like be a bit entertaining and just kind of have some like back and forth banter beforehand. My thought was always like, oh, people are going to want to get to see me and what I think about and just kind of like being silly and stuff like that. So I would talk with my buddy Kyle, who was beyond the show fairly frequently with me. But you notice that I like when I look back on it, I don't introduce him. I don't say what relevance he has to the show. And so we're what 90 seconds or a minute and a half into that. And I don't know what this podcast is about. I don't know why I should stick around. And to be honest with you, if it wasn't my sultry voice that I was listening to, I'd be like, all right, I'm out. That seems like a waste of time. I'm surprised I had 10,000 downloads at this point. It's true. Well, I mean, what you brought up before was that you were doing tons of stuff to grow your show. You were doing ads. You were, you know, being out of the shows, you were doing social media. And so what you were experiencing was that 10,000 per month, we'll never know how many of those people were one and done where they tuned in and then and then heard that and kind of got confused that didn't tune back in. But we don't know how much, but that's what was happening. Your show was a bucket that it holds in the bottom. Now I know very well the changes that you made, but can you talk through then? First of all, before we talk about your new intro and what it sounds like, what has happened in your show since improving your intro, how have your numbers improved? So over the course of the last 10 months or so, we've seen another 5X growth. My biggest month is 70,000 downloads, averaging about 50,000 now pretty regularly. I'm not pouring any money into advertising and I'm honestly not even spending that much time or focus getting on other people's podcasts to grow my own show. So I haven't even been putting as much effort into it and I've still been seeing higher numbers and bigger downloads because I think what's happening is that people are actually sticking around and you know, maybe out of 10 people, we resonate with six or seven of them. They add us to our like their daily feed. And so now I'm trying to secure a spot. So every Monday, they're listening to the 30 minute episode. So you mentioned earlier how at the beginning of each episode, you were losing 30% of people just within the first couple of minutes, and I remember it being a steady drop off from there. What are your attention rates looking like now? Or keeping about 82% of people to the 75% mark and then it kind of fades to that last bit of the episode. Yeah. That's fantastic. That's like the dream to get eight to nine of people who tune in to listen to three quarters of the episode is just exactly all that you could hope for. Awesome. So now let's listen to the intro that you published yesterday, which was by the way, episode number 200. So congratulations on hitting 200. And now let's listen to this one. Have you ever wanted to start eating healthier, but weren't sure exactly what to do first? Or maybe you want to start meal prepping your food, but you don't want to spend five hours every single Sunday, making the kitchen all hot, cooking a bunch of stuff that you're just going to hate eating by Friday. Well, if that's you, then you don't want to tune into this episode. We're talking about the beginner's guide to meal prep. I'm going to share with you a few secrets, the ways that you can meal prep faster and easier than ever before. The appliances that you're going to need, a quick grocery list that you can start adopting right away. Just a couple criteria that I always think about when it comes time to meal prep my food. You're listening to the low carb hustle, home of your million dollar body method. We help you get leaner and live longer. My name is Nate Palmer. I've been a coach since 2008. Now I helped over 1100 people level up their health and fitness. My mission is simple to show you how to easily drop fat so you can feel lean, strong, and energetic. So if you're ready to dive in and see some of the basics of meal prepping and how you can use this simple skill to get the results that you're looking for in your life, stick around. Let's do this. We just heard the new intro. What do you do differently now compared to what you used to do? So one of the things that you taught me was focusing in on my ideal client, focusing on my ideal avatar and then answering a question that they're going to have. So I always start off my intro now by asking a question that people have. Like, have you ever felt like this, you've ever done this, you're gone to this and didn't get results because someone is going to be like, yes, I resonate with that. You know, like it's a difference between being like, hey, today we're talking about back health and being like, hey, if you've had back pain that you wouldn't go away, instantly we call that dog whistle. Like that's instantly someone is going to be like, that's me. That's exactly what I'm dealing with. So I tried to figure out a, what are the common questions that people have? So that's really helpful when I think about my ideal avatar, you know, his name is Joe. He works next door to me. That's a good guy. So I was figuring out, like, what does Joni help with? What does Joe have questions about? And I try to structure all my episodes like that. Then I think about what is in it for them? What are they going to get out of this episode? How am I going to deliver value to them in that way? And one of the things that you said to me about guests, because this episode was a solo episode. I've been doing a lot of solo episodes this summer, it's been really fun. When it came down to intro, guess what I was always doing was always always reading a bio. This next guest, his name is Kevin Schmidland. And he is the owner of Grow the Show, he's been a podcast host for 16 years. And he has great hair, you know, like I'd read it off. And people would be like, Hey, we don't care. Yeah, that's not about me. That's about Kevin. So what you told me to do with a guest was talk very specifically about how that person can help them with their goals. And I took that and I applied that to everything about the intro. So hey, this is Kevin. I'm having him on the show today because I know that he can help you elevate your show. And a couple simple tips, he's going to give you these easy ways that you can increase listenership, increase listener retention, and really develop a dominant show that's top 1% in the industry. Now that's an episode that's tailored to someone. It's not about Kevin anymore. It's about what he can do for my audience. And I wanted to make sure that my whole intro had that same feeling. So I tried to like ask some questions that are pertinent. Then we kind of go into that canned part where I introduce myself because I think one of the things that, you know, we noticed about the first one is I'm like, what's up? It's Nate. You know, here with Juicy Cheeks. Who's Nate? Who's Juicy Cheeks? Why do we give it? Why are we even listening to these people? So I'd like to be like, you know, it's a little bit of a humble brag, but like, Hey, I'm Nate. I've been in the coach for 15 years. I helped 1,100 people. Sometimes I was, I played around with being like, I wrote two books. I've done a much podcast, but that didn't seem to be as pertinent. But I wanted to provide some, some reasonable expectations about what they're going to get from me and why I have the expertise to help them out. And so doing that, introducing the show, introducing myself because one of the things that you would say is that we're going to have new listeners every episode. And so if they're coming in and we're talking straight up like just bantering inside jokes, being silly, we're going to lose people because they don't know who we are or what we're up to. So given them just a brief intro, who I am, why I have the authorities to talk about what I'm talking about and then what we're going to be speaking about in the episode, I think gives people a lot of clarity and also allows them to listen to my calls to action a little bit longer because they know what's coming. All right. So that was a clip from episode number 132. That's 132 of this podcast, the Grow the Show podcast. If you want to hear that full episode where Nate dives deeper into his intros, he also explains how he writes great titles for his episodes and he talks through his growth strategies which propelled a show past 75,000 downloads per month in just a few months after fixing his intro. Again, that's episode 132 of the Grow the Show podcast with Nate Palmer, super grateful for Nate for letting us show the before and after so that you can learn from his example. And so that's going to do it for today. By now you have learned the importance of completion rate and you have also learned the importance of having a great intro. But the work of building the skill of keeping attention is not done. We still have a couple things we have to get right and that includes making a promise to the listener and making sure that your episode actually delivers on that promise. And so that is what we are going to dive into tomorrow on day six. I will see you then. By the way, if you want the text versions of these lessons delivered to your inbox each and every day for the remainder of this 12th day course, all you have to do is go to 12daysofpodcastgrowth.com that's one two days of podcastgrowth.com and give me your email and I will email you the remainder, the remaining text versions of this lesson so that you can read as well as listen as you learn. The link is in the show notes.