205 | How 12 Days of Podcast Growth Transformed My Business

This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. And this episode is being published on December 23rd, 2024. And you may not know this, but my birthday is December 28th. So this is always a very fun week for me. It has been since I was a wee child. I celebrate Christmas in my family and so Christmas is on the 25th. My birthday is on the 28th New Year's Eve is on the 31st. And so it is a fun and action packed week for me every year and I always take the whole week off. However, today what I want to do with you real quick before I let you get back to holiday celebrations is share with you the story of the 12 days of podcast growth. There's a really good chance you at some point have either listened to my 12 days of podcast growth series or maybe taken the email version of the course. And so I wanted to share with you the story of how this came to be. And my hope is that it might inspire something cool for you because today in 2024, I can confidently say from data that the 12 days of podcast growth has been the key driver of my business in 2024. So on my sales calls for my high ticket one on one program, more often than not those who joined the program at some point mentioned the 12 days of podcast growth. They either listened to the audio version of the lessons or they took the email course. Likewise, the 12 days of podcast growth is the top driver of new students in the Grow the Show Academy. And it is the most opted into lead magnet that I have had this year. It is my bread and butter. It has supplanted my Grow the Show hour long masterclass as the thing that brings me the most business and the most audience growth. And here's what's cool about it. This was totally not intentional. In 2023, I kind of oversold my email list a little bit. And what I mean by that is on Black Friday and throughout December, I had a lot of sales e-messages on my email list. I hadn't really provided any value to my email list. It was just by my thing, by my thing, by my thing. And so whenever that's the case, it's good practice to refill the tank as it were because when you get too salesy on your email list again and again and again in quick succession, you'll start to think, why am I on this email list? This guy's just asking me to buy stuff. Now, let's not have to say you should never get salesy on your email list. There's a time and a place for everything. But the thing is after you get salesy on your email list, it's really good practice to take a period of time where you're actively not salesy to your email list and give value. Put Goodwill back in the tank. So it was mid to late December last year. I had a clear calendar because I always take a week and a half or two weeks off of meetings. So I usually extend all of my clients two weeks of time so that I have no meetings in this time period. But I still work, right? I'm still a productive entrepreneur who likes to work. And so it's actually one of my favorite periods of the year. And I'm not saying I work through Christmas. I celebrate Christmas. I celebrate my birthday. I always attend high jinks, which is a two day music festival in Philly. I take some time off, but there's days when there's nothing going on. And I actually really love to take that time to really have a full day to dig into some stuff, whether it's planning or catching up on content or whatever it might be. So last year in 2023, I was like, okay, I really want to re-engage my email list right now. I've been a little over salesy and I'd love to have some momentum heading into 2024 and just put some great content out there. So I said, how can I do that? I was like, what if I created an email course because I had heard people talking about email courses and how they were really driving business results? And I was like, all right, well, what if I did that? And I looked at the calendar and I was like, oh, it's 13 days until the end of the year, when it'd be cool to do the 12 days of podcast growth, like the 12 days of Christmas. So it was literally the day before I launched it. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do that. I'm going to every single day write an email to my list for the next 12 days that teaches them how to grow and monetize their podcast. And here's the process that I use to create the 12 days of podcast growth. First, I went for a walk. I brought my iPhone with me and I have the ChatTBT mobile app. And I literally just brain dumped what I wanted to share in that episode, in that newsletter, in that version of the email course. I was like, today I want to cover audience definition. And I just walked around, back then I lived in Miami. It was awesome. It was like 80 degrees. I went for like 30 minutes and just blabbed to ChatTBT about what I wanted to say. And then I had ChatTBT give me a nice outline of what I had shared, so ChatTBT took everything that I blabbed and organized it in a great way. I then went back to my apartment, took that outline and spent about 20 to 30 minutes writing out the email. Then I was like, ooh, I could turn this into an audio episode as well because I had heard of people going daily with their show and getting great results. So I was like, well, I don't want to go daily forever, but I could probably do daily for the next 12 days. So I wrote the email and then I opened up to script and I literally just read the email. I read the email into the podcast episode, but I also gave myself permission to digress from the written email because when I listen to audiobooks, it's actually one of my favorite things. So I was like, oh, I'll do that for these audio versions of these emails. It would take me usually 10 to 20 minutes to record me reading out the email. And then I would spend another 10 minutes quickly editing it down in the script. And then I would use the script to publish it. So this is a case where I did not send it to an editor. I don't recommend that because there's actually some errors in it. So if I did this again, I would absolutely send these over to podcast fatigue to touch things up. So that was my process. Every day for 12 days, I would blab the chat GPT, GPT would give me an outline. I would write the email from the outline. I would then read the email into an audio episode, use the script to quickly edit it down anytime I would stammer or repeat something and then publish it. That was it. And I did that for 12 days in a row. The exception to that was I didn't record one on Christmas. So I think Christmas Eve, I did two. Same thing. There were a couple of times where I got ahead by a day or so, but it was actually really nice to wake up in the morning and spend two hours writing and creating this thing. Well, fast forward to after the 12 days of podcast growth was done. Oh, my goodness. I have never gotten so much interaction from my email list in my life. It was so powerful. And people were saying, I learned so much from this. This was great. Then sure enough, right at the beginning of January, several people joined the Grow the Show Academy, who had been super engaged by the 12 days of podcast growth. And that was that. So I was like, OK, this was incredible. How can I take advantage of this work that I did? So while the 12 days of podcast growth was live, I was just email blasting my list with each email after I was done with the 12 days of podcast growth. I then took each email and put it into an email automation, where people would get that email every single day. And I made an opt-in page that sends people right to that automation, put it at the 12 days of podcast growth.com. And by the being, I had a brand new lead magnet, which is an email course. And sure enough, I get more uptake to this email course than I do to the master class. And I get new leads to the 12 days of podcast growth every single day. And many times I don't even know where they came from. So maybe there's some word of mouth about it, I don't know. But that's the story. And so what's funny is clients come to me now and are like, you know, do you have a course on making email courses? And I'm like, no, I literally just ripped this thing. Like it was just on a whim. I just wanted to add some value to my list. So I said, next 12 days, I'm going to do this fun thing. I'm going to make an episode every single day. One other thing that I didn't mention is that I wanted to do daily because I figured that if I published a podcast episode every single day, it would like change how I felt about publishing podcast episodes and how much work is involved. And it really did. It made me go from thinking that like four episodes in a month was, you know, that's a lot of work to once I did 12 over the course of 12 days, four episodes a month became really easy. So it was good for me to increase my conditioning, I'd say, as a content creator. And so that's all I wanted to do. I had no intentions on creating the next lead magnet that would drive my business for the next year. And honestly, that's probably why it became that because I was genuinely creating this thing from a place of, I want to add a tremendous value to my email list over the holidays. And it became a thing that I was able to leverage and continue to leverage to this day. So that is the story of the 12 days of podcast growth. Here we are one year later. I'm going to continue using this email course, leveraging it, using it as a place for people to learn. If you are somebody who consumed the 12 days of podcast growth over the past year, I invite you to consume it again. It is worth returning to. And so in the show notes of this episode, you will find the link to the 12 days of podcast growth Spotify playlist. It will have all the episodes in one place and you'll also find the link if you're on Apple podcasts to the first episode of the 12 days of podcast growth. So it should bring you all the way down in the feed to the very first episode. That way, you can scroll back and find it so that you can re-listen to the 12 days of podcast growth. If you again are like me and you're someone who listens to podcasts while you are traveling to holiday shenanigans. So that's going to do it for this episode. My hope is that somewhere in this story, you've gotten some inspiration to help you add value to your audience, maybe create a new lead magnet. And who knows? Maybe it was just valuable for you to hear this story. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year. Although there will be a new episode next week on December 30th. But until then, happy holidays to you and yours. And I will see you in the next one. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. I have two things for you before I let you go. Number one, real quick, if you've ever gotten any value from the show, please, if you haven't yet, leave us a five star review. I get a notification every single time reviews come through and they almost always make my day. So please, please, I would love to hear from you. It really, really helps us. And then the second thing is if you are a podcaster who needs help with production, if you are struggling with all the time it takes to make these things and you haven't yet definitely set up a conversation with podcast boutique. They are the team that I've been working with for five, six years. They're my most trusted production agency. And recently they added an incredible service that you're going to want to hear about. They call it record and forget I've been using it for months. It is amazing. You just record your episode and send it to them. They do the content editing for you. They create titles, show notes. They can make it into an amazing YouTube video clips and of course, high value production. So the content editing piece is the thing that I know people have been asking for for a long time. It is unbelievably good. All I do is record. I send it off to them. They handle the rest. And by the way, they are also closely in lockstep with me. So anytime I discover something that is working to grow and monetize a podcast, I immediately share it with them. We work to implement it with my show and then they implement it with the other shows that they work on. So if you're spending time yourself doing any of the editing or post production or if your current post production team isn't cutting it, maybe they're an internal team that doesn't know what they're doing or they're an external team that's either too expensive or does not keep their promises, which is very common. Check out podcast boutique and go to podcast boutique.com. Let them know that I sent you one thing though. It is podcast boutique, not the podcast boutique. So if you Google podcast boutique, watch out because it is not the podcast boutique, it is podcast boutique.com. All right. I'll see you in the next episode.