[2021] How to Build a Community Around Your Podcast, With Yuval Yarden

Hey, Grow the Show listeners, Catherine Nails here. I'm the GTS content manager and podcast producer, and in case you missed our past couple of episodes, Kevin was actually out the other week because he totally lost his voice. He sounded like a toad with allergies or a bullfrog or something, and we were unable to record any new episodes as a result of that. But we also didn't want to leave you guys hanging, so we've been re-releasing some of our favorite and most helpful episodes from this past year. The third and final one of these re-release episodes is going to be all about building a community around your podcast. And to help us do that, we've brought in a community expert. Her name is Yuval Yardin, and she really knows her stuff. She's been building communities all over the world for companies and organizations and even just around her own hobbies and interests. In this episode, she's going to teach us her tried and true formula for building a thriving, organic community. She'll also teach you about how building community can actually add a ton of value to your show and help you monetize just a little bit quicker. We'll be back next Thursday with a brand new episode for you. But until then, enjoy how to build a community around your podcast with Yuval Yardin. Question for you. Which episode of your podcast is your listeners favorite episode? Do you know? If not, how might you find out? If your first thought was to check download numbers and to simply see which episode was downloaded the most, you wouldn't be alone. But I can say from experience that download numbers actually have no correlation to how much listeners love the episode. It actually indicates more which episode seems most compelling before pressing play. But which episode is your listeners favorite? As in, they listened and they loved it. It's their favorite one. How might you find that out? Furthermore, how would you ask your listener base any questions at all? How do you know what they like about the show? What things they'd like to hear next? What sponsors they might be interested in hearing from? What other podcasts they listen to? Why they listen to your podcast at all? If you're like many, in fact, most podcasters, you're not sure what the answers are to any of those questions. In fact, in my experience, most podcasts have virtually no interaction with their listener base at all. It's totally a one-way street. You publish an episode into the void and the only feedback you get is the number of downloads you receive on the episode. There isn't even any feedback on your social media posts promoting the episode. No comments, maybe a couple likes. It's not fun, right? Can you relate to that? I can. My first podcast, Philly, who launched three years ago, and it has been successful. It's accrued over 200,000 downloads and over $200,000 in revenue. But at first, I also had no interaction with my listener base. Now, my second podcast, this podcast, Grow the Show, launched just over six months ago. And it's accrued just over 10,000 downloads and has driven over 165K in revenue for my coaching business since it launched. And while this show is young and the revenue numbers are good, I can tell you with certainty that the second time around, this podcast is way more fun for me. Why is that? It's because of the Grow the Show community. You see, Philly, who is a beloved brand in my home city of Philadelphia. And it is, of course, one of my favorite things to sit down and interview the most incredible Philadelphia. But I didn't realize the importance of building that place for the Philly, who community to gather. And so for a long time, I really felt no connection to my audience at all. But with Grow the Show, we already have an incredible community over in the Facebook group that just surpassed 700 growth-minded podcasters. It's through that community that I can understand what's working, what's not working, and what my audience wants from this podcast. I'm able to ask questions, get feedback. And I can see firsthand the success that this show is helping other podcasters to achieve. And I've never even met them. It is an incredible feeling. And honestly, it's the whole reason I launched this platform to begin with. And I bet you would feel the same about your show and your platform. So do you have a place where you can go to interact with your biggest fans? Do your listeners have a place where they can go to interact with each other? If not, that's okay. Because you can create that place. It's not too late. And in about a half hour, you're going to know exactly how. This is Grow the Show. The podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to grow your audience and monetize now. So your podcast can be a thriving business. Today, we're going to be joined by a mentor and friend of mine, Yuval Yardin. Yuval is a seasoned community builder who has traveled the entire world, building communities for companies, organizations, and around her own interests. And today, Yuval is going to share her tried and true formula for building a growing, thriving, organic community. And she's going to teach you exactly how you can build and grow a vibrant community around your podcast. So stick around and turn your audience into a community. Now, on Grow the Show. My name is Yuval Yardin and I'm the head of community at Venwise and I also coach lots of budding community builders on how to successfully build a community to achieve whatever goal it is that they're working towards. I've been building communities my whole life. I remember when I was in middle school, organizing, hey, we're going to do an activity for all the kids on the block and here, pamphlets for when to show up. And then we're going to do a game and you're on the red team and blue team. And then I grew up very involved in the Jewish community. So two things, one, I went to Jewish camp and it was part of a youth movement, which just meant like young people got to have a lot of a leadership experience very early on. We didn't have a lot of grown-ups air quotes at our camp, which meant that at a young age, I had the opportunity to do a lot that I think people wait till they're older to do. For example, like leading discussions about serious topics or running days of activities around themes and things that like just a very common skills for community builders to have. And so I just fell in love with kind of doing those and that led me to being part of a lot of communities. And then, you know, every time you're part of a community, it was always, hey, who's the young gun that wants to like do some things to, you know, be the leader of this community. And so I took those really seriously. Building community was a huge part of Yuval's life throughout her childhood. Once it came time to start thinking about college, Yuval's dad sat her down to talk about her future career aspirations. He's like, so, daughter, what are you going to major in? And I was like, I want to be like a camp counselor, but for adults, is there like a major that fits? And we went through all the majors and the one that worked for you is strategic communication and organizational leadership, which was also the major with the least amount of required credits to graduate from Temple University. And that was the time where I took kind of my passion and like, interest in this and turned it into kind of a practice and had education around what it means to bring a team together, a group of people, the phases of bringing people together and how that can impact communities in different ways. So you've all graduated college with aspirations to build communities professionally. Typically, it can be tough to find community building jobs for recent grads and many of the ones available are volunteer positions, but Yuval caught a break. I was really lucky to kind of fall into an opportunity to do it professionally because it was very early in the professional community world, but I got to do that with Philly startup leaders. They were able to carve out being the head of community or community leader for an organization that already existed. This is how Yuval and I met each other way back in the fall of 2016. I attended a startup boot camp held by the nonprofit called Philly startup leaders. This was a year and a half before I would launch my first podcast, but that 10 week boot camp was the first time I started to learn about entrepreneurship and how it's vastly different than working a corporate nine to five. Yuval, who like me at the time was only in her mid 20s was totally crushing the leadership of that startup community. I carved my niche of community building in the startup and entrepreneurship space, and that's where I've mostly been. Community is community. We could do it with moms who are dentists, dog parents, and founders of startup, so now I'm doing that. And so now you organize communities of people who organize communities. That's true. My favorite community to organize is community builders, very meta, but important. She worked at Philly startup leaders for about two years, and throughout her time there, she further learned about just how powerful communities can be. When I left my role at Philly startup leaders, one of the things I fell in love with is using community for economic development, which I think is very powerful and not used very often in a way that it really could be. And it's also very cheap compared to a lot of other economic development initiatives. And so when I did that in Philly, I never knew anyone else who did it anywhere else. I just thought, Oh, and Philly were cool. We came up with this cool thing that we do that's very unique and different. But as you've all would soon discover, it turns out that there were plenty of people out there who were just as passionate as she was about building communities. That is to say, there was a community of community builders that she didn't even know about. I actually was at South by Southwest and I bumped into this guy. Andy worked at the Kaufman Foundation. He was like, you know what? I know a bunch of people who are just like you. And I was like, no one does this. I'm telling you, it's just us and Philly. And he's like, what about if I could introduce you to 300 people that do that? So he brought her to another part of the conference. I got into this room and I was like, wow, these are 300 people. I never knew. I didn't even know Google the term ecosystem builder to be able to find these people. And if I even knew the term, I wouldn't even know where to find them like on LinkedIn. So like, this is incredible. And I was probably one of the youngest people there running around like, I think I was 23 years old. And people would describe what they're doing. And I was like, I got to tell these people stories. So that's when I reach out to you. And I was like, I'm going to do a podcast. If you could like teach me how to do podcasts, that would be helpful. This was mid 2019. And by then, I had launched Philly, who I was living off of it and had started producing and consulting for media companies and other podcasters. I was happy to help you all develop her podcast, which is called The Keystone. We have about 35-ish episodes on how to build a startup community and your local ecosystem. And my co-host Charlton spent years doing it and still doesn't in Atlanta. So we had two different perspectives on cities that we had experience with. And then we brought in guests of people who did similar work in different cities. And that's how the Keystone came to be. It came to be at the perfect time because as you've all started and growing her podcast about growing community, other people were beginning to catch on to what she's known all along. The power of community is incredible. 2019 was like the year of community all of a sudden is a thing that people care about. It was like a community boom. And two things happened. One, people started realizing the community is a good strategy to solve a lot of problems that they have with their organization. Community can solve your customer attention. It can solve your sales funnel and like how to bring in more pipeline. It can solve customer support. It can solve getting product development and getting to know your people better so that you can build better product. So that's one piece. And then the other piece is the product world of community totally shifted. So all of a sudden people like this is a platform for building communities. Well, before we only had Facebook, LinkedIn, you know, Slack, but these are tools that weren't ever meant to be for community builders. They were like social media platforms that had group functionality. Now I could not even go a day without hearing about a new community tool that just raised money. And so there's a new era now. And so why does community solve so many problems like that? Because at the end of the day we're all humans and we want to connect with people, feel like we belong and not feel like we're chatting with a bot or that like when I log on to something, I want to feel like I'm connected to a person. And so it's a much more valuable, when you say you have a customer, you know, you can value that however your company values that. But if you have an engaged customer, it's like 10 fold the value of just like someone who pays. And that's why I think people have invested in it a lot. You've all this talking about the value of community in a business sense. But the same idea applies to our podcasts. After all, you want your podcast to be a thriving business, right? This is exactly what we as podcasters want to encourage. We want to have a hyper targeted listener base who feels a connection to our show outside of the hour that they listen to us every week. We want this one because if we have hyper engaged listeners will have a better business because those listeners will be far more likely to become paid members of our premium tier and more likely to become customers of our sponsors. But we also want this because it's just more fun to be engaged with your listeners. You might think that cracking 10,000 downloads per episode would lead to riches, fame and everything you're longing for. But without any engagement, your life is exactly the same as it is now. You just add a couple zeros to the number that you see on your hosting provider. So the big question today is how can we as podcasters harness the incredible power of community to create a hyper engaged audience? That's what we're going to learn today. The three stages of how to build a community. But before we get into that, there are two community building pre-recresits that you should take some time to think about. Before you even start thinking about your community, you need to be honest with yourself about the time you have to manage it. Communities take hard work to manage, and according to you all, it's better to have no community than to have a poorly managed community. It does take a lot of energy to build a community and a lot of creativity, and it takes work. If you're trying to build a business, this is like the best way to build a business. If you said on our Facebook group, we are going to have a weekly book club. Do not not have a weekly book club. It won't go well because the community is all about building trust. And so I would say if you don't have a lot of time investment, probably not a good fit to build a community. The other big thing is generic content. So if you're like, yeah, we're going to build this community, and then you go on Google and find inspiring words. Think big, fail fast, you're just sharing those on your community wall. It's not anything that actually comes from you, or it's not your voice, or even if you put your picture against, I have seen so many people do this. Humans can smell inauthenticity so quickly, and it's not good. And then the last thing is limited engagement. So if you bring people on, but you don't actually start to do something regularly. So you said book club every Monday night, even if three people show up, we're doing book club every Monday night, and you keep that up for like eight weeks straight. So first community prerequisite, make sure you have the time to actively manage, so you don't fall into these traps. The second prerequisite is, well, if you've heard any episode of this podcast before, you know what the second prerequisite is. Find your audience, find your niche, start with a niche. They are those niche communities team up with other podcasters in your niche. niche niche niche niche. I don't know, be more specific. It's cliche because it's true. 99% of the problems I see podcasters having are problems with audience definition. And you've all seized the same thing with people trying to start a community both inside and outside the podcasting world. So to help with this, you've all came up with a super simple rule of thumb to help yourself and to help other people find their niche. I try whenever I'm building a new community or coaching someone to build a new community to think about three things everyone in the community must have so that they fit. You've all learned this power of three first hand when she moved to a completely new city and decided to make friends doing what she does best, building a community. I moved to New York. I didn't know anyone and I was like, I need to figure out how to meet people. Well, I'm just going to build a community. And so I built New York Jews in tech. And that's when I realized, well, by creating a tag of three things that everyone has in common, there's enough commonality and enough difference. But if there is not enough difference or enough commonality, then it's either boring because we're all the same. And so we don't have answers to each other's things or we can't really help each other. Or it's we're so different that it's very hard as a community to actually create value for each other because if you just said, like, this is a WhatsApp group for Jewish people, all of a sudden, there's my grandma, there is my boss. But if you're doing this, you probably have a big heart. And you want to include everyone, especially because it's 2021 and you do not want to say anyone is excluded. And so you're like, yes, you can join, right? Even though in your mind, you're like, this is a women's community and you're not a woman. I totally get that. And we have to be careful about assuming things about people that aren't clear. And that's really important, especially when you're leading a community and bringing people together and making them feel like they belong. But if this is a community for women and we're going to talk about things that women only feel comfortable talking about, then adding a man is going to decrease the value of everyone in the community. And it's just not going to be valuable for them and it's not going to be valuable for you. And so it's important to create kind of a clear sense of who makes sense for this group and who doesn't. And by having three kind of guiding words or like persona characteristics that allows you to get there. Yeah. And that makes it like really feel like you really belong when you walk into a room. Yeah, fantastic. You should define your audience as having three distinct characteristics. Blinks, who blank and blank Jewish people in New York who work in technology, podcasters who are or want to be entrepreneurs and are frustrated with growing their podcast. Philadelphiaans who are growth minded and want to feel more connected to their city. What's yours? That might be a separate homework assignment all by itself. And that's fine. But moving forward, we will assume that you do have a target audience defined as blanks, who blank and blank. And with that, it's time to build your community. So the three phases are sparking the flame, stoking the fire and passing the torch. Sparking the flame is all about understanding your personas, your listeners, who are you trying to get to and what do they need and then kind of engaging them to the point where they want to join your community. I think just having people congregate in a place is the first thing to do. And so you can start by speaking to them and say, Hey, so I would love to create a community. And like, would you be interested in joining this group that I've created where we can do that? So you can start with your friends. You can share it on your show. Hey, this is where we connect. If you want to go to a listener, only group on Facebook, you know, you can find that through our website, etc. But the big question here is, where should I build that community? Should I make a Facebook group? What's app a discord? Should I use circle or one of the many other new community specific platforms? So you want to ask yourself, who are my listeners? Where do they spend time already and how can I meet them where they're at, especially when you're a new brand and a new show and you don't want to add that learning curve to them? And so it really depends based on where your listeners spend time and what products they're comfortable with. Observe where they like to hang out online. Are they Facebook people? What about discord? Maybe Slack? For example, if your target audience is college students in their early 20s, you'd probably consider discord over Facebook. Be careful though. Do not assume there are tons of younger folks on Facebook and tons of older folks on TikTok. Use actual data and actually talk to your target audience to figure this out. Don't make assumptions. Once you have, create the community on the platform where your users already are. And once you do that, you'll start to see new members join. What will happen is you'll see some trickling in and some you'll have to invite some people individually and maybe in your email list or friends. But then invite them and then set up a time to speak to them. Like I really get to know them and understand what is it about your show they like? What has been helpful? What do they learn? What do they want more of? Your community will generate the ideas for what you can do with the community. And then from these conversations, understanding how you fit into people's lives, how you benefit them, what they want more of. And then from there, you go to what's your biggest problem and how could we solve that through our show or what's a hobby of yours that we can engage with. And then when you build that persona, then you can start to understand how to serve that persona. That's the secret weapon of building a community around your podcast. When you have 1000 of your fans all in one place, you'll never have to wonder what people think or what content you should make next ever again. But we're not quite there yet. We've just started this community and it's in the early days. There are only a few people and there's not a lot of activity. So as the leader of this group, how often should you post? What should you post? So what do I post is easy? When you speak to people, they're going to say a lot of things and you're going to write them down. For example, I was the community I lead is called Venwise. Venwise is a network of C-suite executives at growth stage startups. They're all CXOs at companies that have raised at least 15 million dollars. And when we invite people to join the community, they join this one hour round table. And during that time, they say a lot of things. It's like a peer advisory group. And so they say things like, you know, when I interview people that are the wrong fit, I just can tell right away like there's like a few buzzwords they use and that's how I know it's the wrong fit. Great. I'm going to go to the Slack channel and I'm going to say what are the buzzwords that people have heard that make you instantly know this person is not a fit? Guess what? The person who asked that question is not in the Slack group yet. They are going to join the Slack group and be like, whoa, there are answers to the thing that I just talked about. So the person feels like they belong when they join the group. Again, like it seems kind of complex, but it's very simple if you break it down. I heard a question, put it in the group, people answered it. And so when you're getting to know people and you're having these calls or if people are emailing and about your show or if you, there is questions that are being asked on your show, for example, how do you get people involved in your community? You know, put that on the Facebook group, like because we're talking about community building in this episode and I'm sure Kevin will share this on the Facebook group that he's built. How are you building community for your organization and share that on the Facebook group? Yeah. Because that's what this conversation is about in this topic. And so you've listened to me talk about this for a while. Well, how do you feel about it? You know, and so take questions from either the conversation you're having on your episode or the interaction you're having directly with members and just place it publicly. The thing is, sometimes no one is going to answer that question and that's embarrassing or feels like a waste of time or you're like, wait, why did I even do this? But the reality is no one ever like naturally just go, there are definitely people who just are like, yeah, let me give you my opinion, but it's more rare, especially if you're at the beginning of a community. So here's what you have to do. You have to kind of become the magician on the back end. So you go, all right. I just ask people, what are the buzzwords they hear when they know that it's the wrong person that they're in an interview with, right? As an example of one that could happen just today. Great. Well, what are the five companies in our network that just hired the most amount of people? Let me reach out to them, send them a link to this post that I said and be like, hey, Jeff, I'd love your help. Just like, can you tune in here and share? We have a new member coming in and we want to make sure that, you know, there's some content on there that's helpful. He just reached out asking this question or do you have a second to just share with me and maybe like I can tag you and share that that was your thought and you, you know, you reached out and let me know. And so what you're doing is you're asking people to answer the question that you have asked instead of putting it into the world and hoping that people magically saw the notification that you posted and it felt inspired and immediately available to respond, which is not most humans, especially in like today's world where there's just so many notifications. So you post something, you share it with people who probably have the answer, you inspire them to share it there. And based on your show, there might be a different tone to how you reach out to them and but then you ask them to share. And usually after a few people have shared, you'll start to see other people naturally share. Another thing you could do is after you post, you can tag the people that you think might have answers to that post. So instead of going out and speaking to them, you can tag them. What you should not do is tag 30 people. This is your opportunity to tag like three people and say, Mary, I think you mentioned this last week when we were talking about that. Jeff, you mentioned that you are interested in this conversation too. So I want to make sure you can follow along. This is me displaying to my community that I actually know you and I listened to you and this is something you're probably going to care about or know about. And so by tagging people, you can kind of invite them to join the conversation lightly and also make sure they're following along if you think it's something they're interested in. So we've got a fledgling community. We're having some conversations and we're off and running. How quickly should we expect it to grow? Slow and steady growth is the most important thing for this phase. So getting a lot of people to join really quickly, not that great, a steady growth of people to join great because you can keep up with actually introducing them, getting to know them and understanding what they want. This is my analogy. If you walked into a party and you know, there were a few people there, you could like grab a drink and then go sit down and talk to a group of people on the couch. But if 100 people showed up at the same time to something, you'd just be like, what are we all doing here? And who are you? And where's the bathroom? And where are the drinks? And where do I put my coat? So if you slowly have people trickling in, then you blink and all of a sudden the party's full. And there's a lot of people at the apartment and you were able to welcome each one of them kind of as they filtered in. And that's the key to sparking the flame. Now we've sparked the flame. People have entered our group at a nice study pace and have introduced themselves. Now it's time to stoke the fire. Stoking the fire is really about, okay, so I got my five best friends to join and we all did intros like, what are we doing next? Or even, you know, so my listeners came around and they did the intro rounds and everyone said who they are. But like now, what do I do with them? A big component of stoking the fire is establishing yourself as a community leader, not as a thought leader. So when people have those questions that they pose and no one answers for like a minute, they freak out and they're like, I know, I need to just like instead of asking questions, I just need to make statements or I just need to record a video of me talking about this. And that is when you cross the line between community builder and thought leader influencer person. And I think there's a difference between a thought leader and an influencer. But in this case, you're kind of, it's the difference between you sitting in a circle and having a conversation and you giving a TED talk on a stage. And you giving a TED talk on a stage is valuable. And that's what YouTube is for. That is not what your community is for. Maybe you share some links of you giving TED talks on stages based on the questions that people have generated in the group would be even better if you shared TED talk speeches of other people in your community answering questions that other people in your community had. So I know that you love this image that we were kind of looking at during the community workshop you came to. Everyone loves this image and maybe I can send it to you to share in the show notes. But it's essentially a hub and spoke model where it's you and everyone knows you is what a network is and that is what influencers are and that is what thought leaders are is where I post something in the world who receives it. That's not a community. A community is about how can I inspire you guys to engage with each other and facilitate that because I know you all or I have I have an awareness of who is in this group and therefore I can add value to you by sharing connecting you to each other. Very different. If you're the first one then you probably should be like on Instagram or Twitter and you should do that and that's totally fine but just know that that's not community. Again totally fine just different. If you want to build a community your job is to inspire people to engage and with stoking the fire the biggest when people get worried oh my god people aren't asking questions are not commenting whatever they immediately move into that phase but they're like I'm going to do a talk I'm going to do a I'm going to do a video I'm going to do a post that's really long about the 10 things I learned about this is this is this and just it be the you've all show that Kevin is coming to watch and so the way to not avoid that I mean I feel like a broken record is to just speak to your people and say hey that sounds like an awesome question thank you for reaching out and asking I think you should pose it in the group here's my thought by the way I'm happy to share but let's pose it in the group and see what everyone else says and kind of just that focusing on making sure that they know it's the group that has the knowledge it's not just me it's all of us together that are going to give you the answer and then the other pieces of stoking the fire are kind of around creating this language and identity that everyone uses together so for example what is the name of the event you do on a regular basis and can you remind people hey that's a good question to bring to this event or we're going to answer that on this theme thing or podcast episode segment whatever it is so that people start to feel like we were the same t-shirts we speak the same words like you know think about we work like everyone where is the we work t-shirt and they're all or you know you uber places or these are things that make you feel connected to a product when you start using words and language so that's the kind of thing you can build to make people feel like they belong and then invite them into make that their language too not just my language that you guys hear but also the language that you guys use so we've sparked the flame we've stoked the flame what's the last thing we do with the flame and then the last piece passing the torch is well if it's going well you probably can't do it on your own and at some point you might say hey you know there's other things I am passionate about doing like but this community is really valuable what do I do to make sure this community stays alive while I move on to my next thing so people often say to me great I got this group of people together they're really excited we all introduce each other everyone you know commented in the like to introduce posts and then crickets like well what do we do after we introduce each other I thought people would just like start generating stuff you know or people come to me and they're like our community is going to be amazing we're going to have a class and then we're going to have a talk and then we're going to have a trip and then we're going to have a and they give me like 80 things that they do and I'm like first of all can you even handle doing all those things well the answer is probably no because you're probably also producing a podcast so like the amount of things that you can really do and your podcast is probably like connected to like your job or a service you have that isn't community that like you your coaching business or your writing or whatever it is so like let's be real about what you can get done and so this is a model structure three words that can help you the three are knowledge opportunity and significance knowing these three things will help you prepare to pass the torch to someone else and perhaps a community manager so that you can focus even more of your energy on growing and monetizing so what do your members want to know that they can learn again not from you but from being part of this community you are one of the people in the community but what can you teach them through this community or what can you inspire others to teach each other in this community second is opportunity who do they want to meet what do they want to achieve by being part of your community are they launching a podcast are they losing weight are they do they want to get more PR for their sort of and then significance is a last and really like key details so significance is how do you make them feel special for being in your community this again can be a million different things but at the end of the day when people ask me how do I grow my community the answer is you make people feel really special for being part of it so that people say to you whoa Kevin how did your show get so big and what did they say I'm in this Facebook group called grow the show and there's a podcast too and you should join because I feel so good about looking really good that I want to invite you to look really good with me because that is going to make me even look better because I'm going to be the guy that introduced you to the thing that made you look good and that is cool and so you don't want to be again disingenuous here but if you're calling out names of your listeners on your show make some feel really good if you're letting your listeners or your community members either join the show when they're not like an expert on something and they're just like a community member and you're giving them a chance or you're letting them like lead a class about something or be part of a conversation or they succeed it in some way like hey they just finished my coaching class and they like achieve this awesome goal you give them the recognition in this group because people just want to feel like they belong and they're recognized and you are at a position to be able to do that for people and oftentimes also on social media if you do that the right way they'll share it which will go to their social media feed which will then well you know from there that people will ask them oh you you know you got this job by working with Mary whatever like on her job coaching project like I would love that me too so we have covered a lot of stuff in this episode number one we introduced a new framework to use while you define your audience blanks who blank and blank decide on three characteristics that your audience must have and serve those folks only then we learned how to create a community where our podcast listeners can come and interact with each other and where you can stay insanely well engaged with your audience first you need to choose a platform where your audience already goes and start your community there spark the flame by personally inviting people to join the community and you can even go so far as to interview them and ask them what they're looking for what they like and what they want out of the community stoke the flame by posing questions in the group allowing natural discussion to occur and by being a community leader not a thought leader then once the group grows to the point where it needs more attention pass the torch and allow other community members to lead the group if you would like to see how we are employing this framework here at Grow the Show you can join us in our Facebook group which just surpassed 700 growth minded podcasters both you've all and I will be in there answering questions and helping you to get your podcast community started so you can have an engaged passionate audience which will propel your podcast into a thriving business grow the show is a Q9 production this episode was hosted by me with associate production by Catherine Nails and very special thanks to you Vaal Yardin for Grow the Show my name is Kevin Schmidland until next time