168 | 3 Ways to Grow a Podcast

I've spent the last six years of my life doing nothing except studying how to grow and monetize podcasts. And what I have found might make all the difference for you as you look to grow your podcast audience. After diving deep into what the biggest podcasts around have done in order to grow their audiences as big as possible, what I've found is that there's three core strategies to grow a podcast audience that are working well right now. Those strategies can take entrepreneurs with podcasts from a place where they have little to no audience growth and are getting only a handful of downloads per episode and bring them to a place where their audience is growing. They've got tens of thousands of subscribers and their show is fully monetized. In this episode, I'm gonna break down what those three strategies are. I'm gonna share some examples of shows that these strategies have grown and I'm gonna help you choose which of the three strategies is best suited to grow your show. This is Grow the Show. The podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Stridland. I am your podcast growth coach. I've been a full-time podcaster since 2018 and I've generated almost $3 million in revenue from my podcasts while helping more than 400 entrepreneurs with podcasts to grow their audiences well and grow their businesses at the same time. And in that time period, I've seen tons of really smart entrepreneurs struggle to grow their podcast. And inevitably after several months or even years of being totally stagnant with their shows, those entrepreneurs think that the problem is themselves and so they give up and their podcast dies, which sucks because the entrepreneur actually had awesome content and a great message to share with the world. They just failed to get a single podcast growth strategy working. And so my goal with this episode today is to prevent your podcast from dying and instead help it thrive. And I'm gonna do that by sharing with you the three main strategies that I have witnessed growing shows in today's content landscape. Now a few words of caution before we begin. Everything I'm about to share is my own personal observations and so I wanna make a couple things clear. Number one, I don't believe that any growth method is the best and I don't believe that growth methods work or don't work. The truth is pretty much all growth methods that you've heard about work. It's not a question of whether it works or it doesn't work, it's not binary like that. It's a question of how well it works today and it's a question of whether you can learn the skill of getting that strategy to work for your show. So if you've ever heard my fellow podcast growth gurus or even me in earlier times tell you that a strategy is the best way what they really mean is that that's the strategy that they got to work for themselves or that they are seeing working really well right now. The second thing I wanna call out is that I am not telling you what you should do. So if you try to growth method that I'm about to mention and you didn't like it, fine, don't do it. If you found a growth method that works for you and I haven't mentioned it, awesome, keep doing it. I would love to hear about it. Finally, I'll get this out of the way. I can already hear the word of mouth purists saying that the best way to grow your show is by creating great episodes that are so good that your audience tells other people about it. Yeah, sure, in a way they're right. No growth strategy will work if your content sucks, if it's not packaged well or if it's boring. But I've also come across podcasters who have some of the most amazing podcast episodes I've ever heard and they have no growth and no audience. And what I get from that is while putting out high quality episodes is indeed a prerequisite to grow, it's a requirement. None of these tactics are gonna work if your show sucks or even if it's mediocre and that's all true. I still believe that content quality and word of mouth alone is not sufficient to maximize an audience. So if you wanna make word of mouth your only strategy and you don't wanna learn how to grow your show even faster alongside word of mouth, then just turn off this episode now and go back to hoping that your audience tells their friends. But if you wanna learn strategies that can supplement word of mouth and turbocharge it, stick around. All right, let's dive in. So as I've said, I've been podcasting and helping others grow their shows for more than six years. And I've seen a lot of podcasters stumble and give up, but what I've also seen are a lot of podcasters who broke through and were able to accomplish unbelievable audience growth. And what I've noticed is that those podcasters who have broke through the mold really got good at least one of three strategies that I'm about to outline for you. The entrepreneurs who didn't grow and gave up were the ones who either didn't try any of these three, didn't stick with them long enough to get them to work or they tried to do all three at the same time. And in doing so, really didn't do a good job with any of them. And so my number one piece of advice if you take away anything from this video is pick one of these three strategies and go all in on it and get it to work first. And then you can worry about the other two. Okay, so enough ado, what are the three strategies that are working now? Strategy number one. So the first strategy is one that I noticed when I recently did a study of all the clients that I work with who were the most successful. And the ones that got the most growth and got the most results were the ones who post content regularly on social media. But it is not the content that you think. It is not a headshot of your guest, you know, horrible picture that has camera graphics on it with a caption that says, new episode, Lincoln Bio, I'm so excited to interview this person today. It's not that that doesn't get any reach those posts don't do anything. Instead, the content that these people are posting that doing really well is good social media content. I'm gonna give you three examples of what that looks like. Sometimes it's repurposed content that gets a ton of reach. And so I know everybody talks about, you know, taking clips and chop up a bunch of clips and put them everywhere. Most people I think don't do a good job of that because the clips aren't good videos. It's just randomly someone's face, so you know, really zoomed in and you really know what they're talking about. And so people scroll past that right away. But if you create clips from your show that are good clips like they are by themselves, they have a beginning, a middle, and a really satisfying ending. And here's what's important. Those clips tap into stuff that people are talking about today. You can get tons and tons of reach. My favorite example of that over the last year is the fantasy fan girls. So the fantasy fan girls are two sisters Nicole and Lexi who launched a podcast in September of 2023. And as they launched the show, they took some of the clips from their show and put them on TikTok and Instagram. And it blew up. I'll let Nicole tell you firsthand. I used a script, so it was really easy for me to cut, like, you know, social clips and all this kind of stuff out of the episode. And we started posting them on TikTok as like a teaser of like, here's what's to come from the fantasy fan girls. And we went viral, not even on day one. It was day negative one. It was before the episode even came out. And we just started going viral over and over and over again for like 10 weeks straight. Now to the point where actually just yesterday, we hit our first one million viewer video. Now, if you want to see how Nicole and Lexi executed this, you can go to their TikTok or their Instagram, their app fantasy fan girls. And you can see how they did a great job of repurposing content. And here's what's crazy. Three months after they launched their show completely from scratch, they had gotten over a million downloads of their podcast, unbelievable. The second example of social media content that you can post actually has nothing to do with your podcast. So it doesn't involve repurposing content, but it does still involve tapping into what people are already talking about on social media. And one of my favorite examples of someone who has done this really well is a former client of mine, Brian Lubin. Brian is the host of the Action Academy. And he has absolutely blown up his online presence. Last time I checked, he's got 250,000 followers on Instagram. And when I met him a couple of years ago, he really didn't have any. Brian gets social media reached by finding videos that are currently going viral, that are related to his podcast topic. And he just piggybacks off of them to add his own take to the conversation. Here's how he does it. I'm going to do what's called a stitch. I'm going to take their video the first two seconds and then I stitch that. And I put my content on the back end of it. At the end of the video, hey, if you guys are interested in this, my name is Brian. If you like this content, give me a follow, click the link in my bio from my daily podcast. Now again, Brian has grown his show past 100,000 downloads for a month, his audiences at about a quarter million and the business that he launched behind his podcast recently surpassed seven figures. And by the way, he just does this twice a day. He has a cup of coffee, shoots a video, and moves on with his day. Finally, the third way that you can post content on social media that gets you reached doesn't involve necessarily tapping into stuff that already people are talking about. But it involves just putting together your own content. And so you just make a video or write a post that shares something that's on your mind. And here's the key. In that post, you mention the podcast as the next thing the viewer can consume if they are interested in hearing you talk more about the stuff that you talked about. And a great example of that is a recent post on X, formerly known on Twitter, from a creator named Greg Eisenberg. You see, on X, Greg wrote this basically a blog post. It's super long. He's talking about a product that he really likes. And then in the bottom of the post, which is super, super long, he mentions his recent podcast episode. And if you go through and you read this post, you'll see that it's just a natural mention. He just tees up the conversation that he had with the person that was his guest on the podcast. And then he mentions, by the way, we had a long conversation. We talked about all these different things. I think you might really like it, you know, you should check it out. So this is an example of somebody who is not just saying, hey, everybody, new episode available now. He writes a post that's super valuable, interesting, entertaining, you learn something. And then at the end, he's like, oh, by the way, you should check out my podcast. We dive deeper into this. This post got tons and tons of reach. It got like 200, you know, quarter million views. And I don't know Greg personally, but I'm willing to bet that he got some podcast downloads from this. Now I shared this example because in this one, you can see that it does not have to be a video that you publish on social media. It can be text. This can work on LinkedIn, X, threads, even Facebook. The key difference to understand here is that all three of these podcasters are participating on social media. They're not using social media to promote their podcast. They're firing up social media and using their podcast to participate on social media, a key distinction. They're adding to the discussion there in the app. What they're not doing is just promoting, because nobody likes that. And that's why those posts don't work and they don't get any reach. So next time you're posting something in an attempt to get people to find out about your podcast, ask yourself, if somebody sees this post, this video that I made or this thing that I wrote up, are they gonna find this post useful and entertaining all by itself? If they never listen to my podcast, well, they still be like, man, that was a really great post. If you do it that way, you're likely to grow your audience and yes, get more podcast listeners. And again, this is the way that I have seen the best podcasters grow their audiences on social media and in doing that, get more podcast downloads. Now, it is true I know that social media is not the perfect solution to getting more listeners to your podcast. And if you get tons and tons of reach on social media, that usually doesn't equate to tons and tons of downloads. It does with time. If you grow your social media audience, you're going to grow your podcast audience. But it's not a one-to-one thing where you get a million views on a real and that means a million views on the podcast. That's not how it works. So that's just something to understand about social media. So that's the first thing that I see that the best podcasters are doing to grow their audience. The second thing I discovered when I appeared on one of my favorite podcasts about podcasting, the School of Podcasting with Dave Jackson. So it was early in my journey as a podcast pendant and Dave invited me on to his show. And so he interviewed me on his podcast and a week later he published the episode and literally overnight, my podcast audience doubled. Now at that point in time, I knew that podcast collaborations was powerful, but I had really never gotten around to doing it before. But once that episode hit, and I saw that I had spent a year getting my podcast to a certain place and then one interview doubled it. I was like, whoa, this is incredibly powerful. And I'm not the only person who's noticed this. In several other episodes of Grow the Show, I've interviewed some of the most successful podcasters ever, legends who have been doing this for more than a decade. And still to this day, when I asked them, how do you grow your podcast? They to this day consistently make sure that they appear on other podcasts. And these are again, podcasting legends like Pat Flynn. The most recent example of podcast growth was an actual collaboration that we did. Amy Porterfield. The thing that I think probably worked the best is what I'm doing right now. I go on other shows. If you love Kevin's show, then you're going to possibly love mine as well. And you're all podcast listeners, so why not come over and check out my show as well? And John Lee Dumas, it is that, telling my audience about their shows and their telling their audiences about my shows. And if you think about it, it makes sense that this is a great way to grow your podcast audience, because when you appear on other podcasts, 100% of the people that you reach are podcast listeners. It's another drawback to social media is that literally 60% of the people on social media don't listen to podcasts on a regular basis. So it can only add best, be 40% effective. Podcast casting ensures that 100% of the people that you reach are podcast listeners and you reach them while they are listening to a podcast. So it's while they are doing the thing. And it's way easier for them to pull out their phone and switch and check out your show. Now, of course, this is also not a perfect solution. There are drawbacks to podcast pitching. A lot of people get tripped up because they send really bad pitches. They send too many pitches to the wrong shows. A lot of podcasts are kind of overwhelmed with guest pitches right now, so you gotta make it personal and you gotta make sure it's a good pitch and you're going after targeted shows. And another mistake that I see is that people, do a million guest appearances on tons of podcasts that have no listenership. And they're like, I tried podcast guessing. It didn't work. And I'm like, how many did you do? And they say 100. And I'm like, let me see the shows. And they went on 100 shows that have no listeners. So of course you didn't your audience didn't grow. You didn't reach anybody. The other drawback to podcast pitching is that it can take a while for it to get kicking. So if you do decide to do this strategy, you wanna give yourself three to six months to really start seeing results because you gotta find the podcasts, pitch them. If they accept you, they book the interview for three weeks out, then they do the interview and then they take three weeks to sometimes six months to publish the interview. So if you do it this way, what you wanna do is just intend to just do podcast interviews every single month. You're not even thinking about it. You just send some pitches, get on some shows. Next month you rinse and repeat. And with time you start to see those numbers really start to grow. The final strategy that I have seen work really, really well for podcasters over the past year is one that is controversial. And so again, I am not saying that you have to do this. It is not required. And anybody who tells you that you must do this to grow your podcast, they mean well because they want you to tap into the power that is this strategy. But I'm here to tell you there are tons of podcasts that do not use this strategy, have no plans on using it and they're getting growth and they're getting monetization. And that strategy is YouTube. So again, you do not have to do YouTube. If you don't wanna be a video podcaster, that is okay. But let's talk a moment to those who are interested in being video podcasters or are curious about it. YouTube is extremely powerful if you do it well. My favorite example of a podcaster who has converted to a video podcast in the past year is Jay Klaus. He's been doing his creator science podcast for a few years, but the inflection point of that show really came when he went all in and converted it to a YouTube show. At the time of this recording, creator science is that over 77,000 subscribers on YouTube, and I know at this time last year it was not that much, it was only a couple thousand. And it's true if you look at other podcasters as well, if you look at the biggest audiences of those who podcast, the big names, the ones that everybody want to emulate, they tend to have YouTube channels. That's Chris Williamson, that's Eric Aruni, that's Andrew Huberman. And if you think about it, it makes sense because YouTube has an incredible algorithm. More people use YouTube to consume content than listen to podcasts. And did I mention that YouTube has a crazy algorithm? But YouTube indeed has drawbacks as well. It is expensive to make great video content. Let me tell you, when I decided to convert from an audio only podcaster to a video podcaster and learn how to make all this stuff work, it's way more expensive than I thought, and it also is more difficult to get right than I thought. And what's also true is that when you decide to make your show a YouTube show, it constrains you a little bit, because when you're just a microphone show, you can record anywhere and virtually any room. But then when you become a YouTube show, you start to pressure yourself to only record when you're in the perfect studio with the perfect lighting and stuff like that. So again, just something to understand. What's also important to understand is that the audience for YouTube is different. So your audio downloads audience is more familiar with you and generally more loyal to you, because they're the people that are going to be listening every single week. With YouTube, it's a little bit different. YouTube is this huge marketplace of tons of videos all the time, and while you do have returning subscribers who watch your videos when you publish new ones, you're gonna get a lot more people who are watching your videos for the first time. So when I switched from audio only to YouTube, I had to start saying a little bit more of who I am and why I'm here in my episodes more than before, because I know that my YouTube version of the episodes are gonna be seen by more new people than the audio versions of my episodes. So again, there's pros and cons. YouTube can be expensive to start and expensive to get going, but it's really, really powerful once it does get going. And that's why I've also made the decision to convert to a video podcast. If you're listening on audio, have no fear, nothing's going away. You know, I'm not abandoning you, but I can't deny the power of YouTube and I wish I had started it earlier. And again, it's hard to deny that video is playing an increasingly big role in the growth of podcasts. And I feel like with every year, the word podcast, people start to think it means a video interview more and more. So whether or not you believe that should be the case, it is true, and so I'm just deciding to lean into it. But again, one more time, you don't have to do YouTube. There is no right or wrong. And in fact, in a recent episode of his podcast, Tim Ferris, the host of the Tim Ferris Show, one of the biggest podcasters ever, recently shared on his show that he's not doing video episodes of his show anymore. He started doing video, he didn't like the pressure that it put on getting everything, getting the video right and having to record in person and everything like that. And so he's decided to go back to just audio only because that's the way that he likes to create. And that's awesome. He doesn't want to make video, so he's not. And the same can be true for you. All right, so as I've mentioned, I can only speak from my own experience of studying podcast growth full time over the past three years and observing the common threads between the shows that have been the most successful. And what I've noticed is that the most successful shows with the biggest audience have gotten really good at least one of those three things. Number one, participating on social media, not promoting but participating. Number two, collaborating with other podcasts and getting in front of other podcast audiences. And number three, yes, sharing video episodes of their show on YouTube. The biggest shows do all three, but you don't have to do all three now to start to see growth. But what you do have to do is pick one of the three, the one that sounds the most fun to you and the one that you can handle. And I would say devote yourself to getting it to work. It may not work right away because it is a skill. And remember, anytime you catch yourself saying, this strategy doesn't work, you're not serving yourself because the strategy does work, all of them work. It's better to say, I haven't gotten that strategy to work for me and my podcast yet, but that's okay because I can learn and I will get it to work. All right, so that's it for today's episode, but I'd love to know what you got out of it. So comment below with your key takeaways and let me know what questions might have come up so I can potentially answer them in an upcoming episode of Grow the Show. And of course, don't forget to subscribe to the channel so you can get that episode as soon as it comes out. That is gonna do it for this episode of Grow the Show. Now, I have a quick favorite to ask you. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five-star rating and if you're feeling generous, a review in the app that you're using to hear my voice right now. It just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show because it helps us land bigger guests and it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment, leave us a five-star rating, maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post-production by Podcast Boutique and if you want your show to be post-produced with quality really freaking fast and if you wanna save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with Podcast Boutique. Just head to podcastboutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them because I spent no time editing this episode and neither should you. All right, that's gonna do it for Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schmittlin. I'll see you next time.