97: The Biggest Social Media Mistakes Podcasters Make, With Arielle Nissenblatt

Hey Kevin here, so I have decided to take a brief vacation. I am going on a cruise, so there's a chance that when you hear my voice right now I will be in the middle of the ocean with no internet access. Now I'm a big believer in taking breaks, so for this break rather than rushing to get ahead of producing episodes of my podcast, I decided it's a good time to republish a couple of our best Grow the Show episodes from the past year, and so that is what we are doing today. I spent some time digging into the Grow the Show archives to see what are the most valuable episodes that we've had on Grow the Show over the last year, and what are the episodes that I have referred people to the most to help them to grow and monetize their podcast. And so this episode, the first one that I am re-releasing, is all about social media, and I have to admit something, teaching Grow the Show listeners about social media is usually pretty tough because the social media landscape is constantly changing, and it's particularly changed a lot within the past two years. What works and what is most efficient for everybody now may be irrelevant in six months, and I'll admit that because of this, I'm always a little worried when I make social media grow the show episodes because I'm worried that they will be obsolete, but even though social media is constantly changing, there is some advice out there that stands the test of time. And that is why we are re-sharing this episode with Ariel Nissenblatt. It's all about social media, except instead of giving you the latest laundry list of what you should be doing on social media, this episode covers how not to use social media as a podcaster. And what's even better is that it's one of those episodes where the advice is so good that it remains equally as relevant and helpful today as it was the day it was recorded. So whether or not you're a Grow the Show veteran or a newbie, I hope that you get a ton of value. In fact, I know you will get a ton of value from this Grow the Show episode. Enjoy. Let's be honest, using social media effectively as a podcaster is hard. For something that's supposed to be secondary and complementary to your podcast, it oftentimes eats up all of your time and attention, right? There are so many different approaches, so many people giving advice, and so much of that advice contradicts itself. So what are you supposed to do? How can you leverage social media to enhance your podcast and connect with your audience without having it suck up your time and destroy your sanity? What should podcasters do on social media? This week on Grow the Show, that is not what we're going to talk about. There are plenty of voices, including mine, usually, already telling you what to do on social media. And, you know, I feel like this week, we just don't need another one. So instead, you're about to have a voice share with you the other side of the equation, the side that judging by what we see on social media every day, most podcasters have not considered, and that is what not to do on social media. And I don't know about you, but I'm pretty pumped to hear what not to do because it's way easier to stop doing something than to start doing something, right? So what should you stop doing? Today's guest is going to map it all out for you. Her name is Ariel Nissenblatt. She is a well-known podcast influencer who has been around the podcast block. She's the community manager at Squadcast. She's the creator of the Ear Buds podcast collective. She's the co-host of the sounds profitable ad tech-applied podcast. And she's pretty freaking good at social media. You just have to look at her Twitter to see that in action. Today, Ariel is going to share how social media has carried her to podcasting success and how a lot of that success comes from what she doesn't do on social media, how those things are what most podcasters are doing, and how you can stop doing those things and start doing the right things, right now. This is Grow the Show. The podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland, and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to grow your show faster and monetize now so that you can have a thriving podcast business. Today, we're going to reset our social media mindset and learn what not to do on any of the social media platforms if we want our podcast to grow and make money. So if you're looking to happily continue doing the wrong things on social media, then you should probably turn this episode off because what not to do on social media is coming at you. Now, on Grow the Show. My name is Ariel Nislett, I am the community manager at squadcast.fm, I am the founder of Earbuds Podcast Collective, I'm the co-host of the Soundsprofitable AdTech Applied Podcast, and many other things and I'm sure we'll get to some of them today. Have you ever seen someone on social media who is just so good at it and then wondered how the heck they're able to think of such good content all the time? Well, that's how I felt when I first saw Ariel's Twitter. She's extremely active and her content proves just how much she loves and knows about the podcasting space. You see, Ariel was born to be a podcaster, which at first was pretty tough because for the first half of her life, podcasting didn't exist. I think I've always been an auditory learner, but I didn't know to call it that. And growing up, there's such an emphasis on visual learning. And if you can't look at a board and absorb information, people don't think you're smart. And so for a while, I didn't think I was smart. She lived with this lack of podcasts all the way through school and even after school, where she really didn't feel like she was where she belonged. I worked for a nonprofit after college and was not particularly interested in the work of a nonprofit sitting in an office wasn't really doing it for me. And the nonprofit I worked for would agree. I worked in Jackson, Mississippi, right after college for two years and then moved to LA in 2016 and continued to work for nonprofits because it's where I had experience. And I was stuck in traffic constantly and thought I was going to lose my mind. Being in traffic for hours under the hot glare of the LA sun was brutal. And it was even more brutal because she was doing all of that for a job that she really didn't even like. But luckily for Ariel parked on the interstate, she was able to find an oasis. I listened to 89.3 KPCC and LA shout out to them and that paired with listening to podcasts and some of the programming was the same from one to the other made me realize that I was not going to lose my mind because I was constantly learning by listening to these podcasts and listening to these stories. Listening to all these shows about stuff that she was actually interested in made her daily drive bearable and even fun. So fun. In fact, that she kind of got obsessed. I was taking in information at speeds and at levels that I had never experienced beforehand and I was just learning so much about people and about concepts and I was addicted to that and wanted more and more and more. She loved it so much that she didn't want to stop just listening while in the car. She wanted to spend as much time listening to podcasts as she could. My whole theory was, why can't I come home at the end of the day instead of turning on the TV with my roommates? Why can't we just all put on a podcast and gather around the podcast? And I would say that to people and they'd be like, because where would we look? Where would we put our eyeballs like, what are we going to do? And I was like, okay, I get it. There's definitely a flawed thought there. Nonetheless, Ariel spent tons of time in the car listening to podcasts and with that heavy listening load, she was burning through shows really quickly. Soon, she needed to discover more of them. So she set out to do just that. My goal was reach out to people who also love podcasts because they probably love podcasts that are different from my favorite podcast and they probably have friends who love podcasts. Maybe there's some overlaps, but for the most part, it's probably different. So that's why I started this newsletter. And that newsletter is called the Earbuds Podcast Collective and it's really great. It features a themed curation of five podcast episodes every single week. Recent themes have included upgrading human health, spooky stories, podcasts for belly laughs. It's all over the place and it's great. Even better, each newsletter is curated by a different person. So subscribers have tons of different points of view and tastes to choose from. Now that's what the newsletter looks like today, but it was not always a smooth, well-built out operation. Back when it initially launched, Ariel was still working her job and on top of that, she had no idea how to operate an email list. The first newsletter went out on February 13, 2017. I sent out this ugly, looking Gmail and I sent it BCC-ing everybody and then one time I accidentally cc'd everybody and I was like, okay, I got to make a change here. So that's when I learned MailChimp and it took me a while still to figure out like how to make something look pretty on MailChimp and how to personalize things on MailChimp and how to use buttons the right way and what shape should the buttons be and also the buttons should probably be consistent week to week. After a decent amount of time working for nonprofits while growing a podcast newsletter on the side, Ariel started to think about whether she could do podcasting stuff full time. I would love to be paid to do something in the podcast space. I just don't have any experience in what I traditionally thought of as the podcast space. The people that I meet in LA going to live podcast recordings and even podcast networking events were all on the production side. I didn't really meet people on the business side or people on the quote unquote curation side. I didn't really know that that existed. So I thought, let me leverage this newsletter. Let me have this newsletter, tell people that I run it, maybe try to go to events for free. So in 2017, she emailed the leaders of podcast movement, which is a massive podcasting conference that happens every summer. And I was like, you're coming to add a high I'm, hello, let me run some ads in my newsletter for your event. Maybe I can come for free and they said, yes. So she went. I had my little backpack on and I just went from booth to booth making connections alone, like picking up all the swag and just again, like the passion carried me there. And yes, I felt awkward at times going around alone and shaking hands and like being like, I love your work. How can, like, can I work for you? And I just did that to as many people as possible. It turns out that this one event would change Ariel's career trajectory forever. I met the cast box team. Right. They're booth and I took their swag and I said, I love this swag. It was a little key chain on the back of the phone. And because they gave out good swag, I started using cast box and then telling everybody about cast box and then tweeting at them and then eventually they bought ads on my newsletter. And then they thought of me when a job came up. And from there, I became friends with the squad cast team and then the squad cast team had a job opening. And I was like, you know what, I use squad cast for iPod cast. I would love to work for squad cast. Really quickly Ariel went from not having a clue how to work in the podcast industry to having one of the deepest resumes in the podcast industry. And now she gets to do more than just listen to tons of podcasts. She's now a core part of the industry, which if you couldn't tell by now, she loves. I think I just love newness. I think I love being at what I perceive as the forefront of something that I can look back in 20, 30 years and be like, I remember when this was the thing. Yeah, when we believed this and I can't wait to see how that's going to change. So I think what I'm obsessed with about the podcast space is that things are changing. And I really try to keep up with what is at the forefront. That newness means that the landscape is constantly changing. And part of that changing landscape is another rapidly changing landscape, social media. Since Ariel is so in tune with the latest and greatest in both of these intertwined internet worlds, she is absolutely the person to ask about the right way to promote a podcast on social media. So what is the right way to promote a podcast on social media? There's no one right way to do things, but a lot of people seem to believe that there is one right way to do things and take my advice with a grain of salt. I think I know what I'm talking about. It's backed up by experience and it's backed up by data, but also do your own research. All that, make your own decisions, make your own, formulate your own opinions, because ultimately this is relatively a new space. This is true, I'll admit, as much as I do my best to share with you what I believe are the right and wrong ways to approach podcast success, Ariel's right. There is no true right way and wrong way to do anything. What simply matters is whether doing something works or doesn't work. That is why this week we're going to talk about what you shouldn't do when it comes to your podcast's social media feed, because while what you should do varies from person to person, from audience to audience, and even from day to day, there are some don't do's that are a bit more universal. And these don'ts actually begin before you even open up a social media platform, because that's the very thing you have to watch out for. Which one should you be on? You should not have an account on every single platform ever. Choose where you spend your time wisely. If you like writing, Facebook might be good for you. If you like writing in snippets, Twitter might be good for you. If you like images, Instagram might be good for you. If you like video, TikTok might be good for you. Think about what you're naturally good at. Think about where you like to spend your time as a consumer. And then that is probably where you should be spending your time as a creator. But what about your audience? What if as a creator, I love TikTok, but my audience lives on Facebook? A lot of people will say, I have a personal Facebook page. Should I make a Facebook page for my podcast? And the answer is it depends. The answer is who is your audience? Say you have a podcast about what to do when you become an empty nester. That's probably a good podcast for you to be on Facebook, because we know that a lot of that demographic is on Facebook. But say you have a podcast about mydochondrial DNA and you're a professor, you probably want to be on LinkedIn, because you probably have a lot of colleagues who are on LinkedIn who are talking about biology. Say you have a podcast about pop culture and about trends in fashion. You probably want to be on TikTok. You probably want to be on Instagram. So you just have to think about where your audience is already spending their time or where your desired audience is already spending their time. And then go and explore those hashtags and interact with the people who are already using those hashtags. Respond to them, ask them to collaborate, ask them to jump on a phone call, because you will probably come up with collaborative ideas if you talk to those people. So you don't just want to focus on one or the other. It's all about finding this sweet spot. That plays where what you love to create and where your audience loves to hang out intersects. For us at Grow the Show, our main platform is Facebook. That's where I spend the majority of my time and energy because my audience is most active in the free Grow the Show Facebook group, as well as in the private inner circle group for my accelerator students. Then with any extra attention I have to give, I'll spend time on Instagram. And if there's any time leftover after that, which there often isn't, I'll spend time on Twitter or LinkedIn. But the key is I know what my priorities are when it comes to the social media platforms. And I'm okay if some weeks I don't post or engage on Twitter or LinkedIn. I don't have to be everywhere all at once to serve you. You're here. You should have this level of prioritization too. Give your all to one platform and maybe dabble with some others if you've got time. But if you try to split your time evenly across all social media platforms from the very beginning, you're going to have a really hard time establishing any momentum on any of them. So once you've figured out the platform that is your primary platform, it's time to set up your account and your presence. So say that my podcast is about Chapsdick. I wouldn't necessarily default to calling my podcast the Chapsdick podcast, right? I would call it something more like Chapsdick Chronicles or Chapsdick Adventures or whatever. I would avoid the word podcast because I think ultimately you should be ready to make a pivot to all of the social, you know, your podcast exists maybe on YouTube in the future, maybe on TikTok in the future, maybe on LinkedIn in the future. And I think it has more staying power if you don't limit yourself to just the word podcast in your social handles. So refrain from making your social media presence specifically about your podcast. Instead, make your social media account about the thing that your podcast is about. This is actually a mistake that I made in my first go-around in podcasting when I had a show about my home city of Philadelphia. I made my social handles Pod Philly Ho and everything that I posted was trying to get people to listen to the podcast which was called Philly Ho. What I now understand is that when people are consuming one type of content on one platform, they actually really don't like to be told to go consume different content on another platform. It doesn't work. Instead, rather than making my handle Pod Philly Ho and making my content about the podcast, I should have made my handle just Philly Ho and made the content itself about sharing Philly stories just like the podcast was. That way, the social presence would be a companion to the podcast rather than simply an attempted promotion vehicle for the podcast. Are you hearing the subtle difference here? Differences like that can be easy to miss, especially if you regularly don't pay attention to this stuff and you're not tuned into what is and isn't working in the world of podcasting. I think a lot of people start making a podcast and they don't plug themselves into the larger podcast world. I think it is really important to know what else is going on in the podcast world. So the first thing that I say is subscribe to all the podcast newsletters. Subscribe to the podcast recommendation newsletters. Subscribe to the podcast industry newsletters. Subscribe to all of them. Maybe you read them every day. Maybe you don't. But it is very important for you to know podcast recommendation newsletter wise. What other podcasts are being released? What is popular right now? Is something that is being released right now? Yeah. Similar to the show that you're about to release. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you probably want to know what they're doing so that you can either collaborate with them or go in a different direction from them. And then podcast industry wise. James Kribland at pod news inside podcasting. Brian Barletta it sounds profitable. They're putting out information that can be really helpful to you as a creator. So you're going to get those pieces of advice from these newsletters and you're going to take them to heart and it's going to influence the way you create your podcast. You should make sure you're not just following other podcasters on social media because other podcasters are great. They will like your stuff because you're going to mutually like each other's stuff and you're going to support each other as you grow. And that's awesome. But you should also make sure you're following other chapstick influencers. The mistake that I see a lot on Twitter, for example, is circles and cycles of people tagging each other. Hey, love these podcasts and then they just tag each other. And then the people who are tagging those posts don't actually have time to listen to all of these other independently produced podcasts because they are busy making their own podcast. So it's a lot of, oh my gosh, I love your show but not a lot of listening to each other's shows. So make sure you are actually following the people who might be listening to your show and other chapstick influencers where you can share ideas and advice and be in that world. Be in the world of the niche that you are podcasting about not just the world of podcasting but also the world of podcasting. Okay, so by now you've been intentional and you've chosen a primary social platform to focus on. You have a handle that works on its own. You've followed both other podcasters and industry leaders in your niche and you're ready to go. It's now time for the fun stuff. Let's dig into what you should actually post your social media content. When you are a podcaster, you are sort of the owner of a mini media company because your show exists on the airwaves but in order for more people to find it, you also have to have that show exist elsewhere. And when I say show, I mean the larger entity of your show. So your podcast is a podcast but you also have social media that you need to be filling out in order to send people to your podcast. Self promo is very important and everybody should be promoting themselves but there are some mistakes that people make when it comes to self promotion. When you have a new episode out, what you should not do is post, hey, new episode out now with a link to that episode because that is doing nothing for anybody, including yourself. Each of your social handles, each of your social accounts should be able to stand on their own as content so that if people never listen to your podcast, they would still get value out of following you on Twitter, following you on TikTok, following you on LinkedIn. So that people trust you and over time, they'll say, oh, you know what, I want more from Kevin. How do I find more from Kevin? He actually talks directly to me on his podcast and I can listen to that if I want more from Kevin. But if when people go to your LinkedIn, they just see a wall of you promoting your podcast, that does nothing for me because what if I don't have time to listen to the podcast? Instead, what if you tell me once a week how to grow the show in three bullet points? And then if I want more, if I want an explanation on how to grow the show, then I can listen to Kevin talk in my ear about that. So I'm a big fan of each of your social standing on its own. The mistake here would be posting content that only makes sense if people are able to hear the entire episode of your show. Instead, you want the content that you post to be valuable on its own because you want potential listeners who have never heard your show before, to consume it, to get something out of it by itself and then to want more from you. But how can you actually do that? How can you make it so that your social content compels strangers to want to hear your podcast? So let's say I'm a chapstick influencer, I'm just looking and I'm seeing Burt's Bees chapstick. Let's say I know about the history of chapstick, I know about what it does for your lips, I have partnerships with Burt's Bees, I have partnerships with Vaseline, whatever it is. And I have a series on the history of chapstick. And let's say your episode with the CEO of Burt's Bees came out and you want to tell people on social media to go and listen to that episode. So your episode came out, it's an amazing episode, you've got great music, you've got great audiograms, you've got great assets to go along with the show. And on Twitter, my recommendation is to have a nice long thread, at least five tweets long that hooks people in the first sentence. So maybe have you ever wondered what it's like to own a company that is completely reliant on wax, you know, because that's weird. That's like something that you're like, what, I need to learn more. And then I would do the little thread emojis and I would say read on to learn what that means. And then I would in the next four tweets say something about this CEO and how they came up from a background of living on a farm and they got stung by bees growing up and I'm completely making this up. So I'm so sorry CEO of Burt's Bees, if this is not accurate, most likely it is not. And we'll have mom to see you to everything. And the last tweet would be, if you want to learn more about this, I interviewed the CEO of Burt's Bees, here is the link to the episode. So that people who love Chapsdick and follow your show, get information about this episode without having to tune into that episode. But if they don't have time, they still see you as an expert in this space. And if they do have time, then they will listen to the episode. The key here is that what you post on social media is valuable in a vacuum. Meaning, if somebody comes across the thing that you post, let's say a Twitter thread just to keep with the example. If somebody comes across your Twitter thread and they read it, but they don't ever listen to your podcast episode that goes with it, will they have gotten something from just the thread? Will they have been entertained or educated or even empowered? If they have, then they will see that awesome thread and see you as an awesome content creator who can serve them. And they're going to be more likely to want to hear a longer podcast episode from you. In Ariel's Chapsdick scenario, anybody who is into craft Chapsdick, if that's even a thing, will enjoy the Twitter thread, even if they've never tuned in to the episode about Chapsdick. That strategy paradoxically, will get more people to want to tune into the podcast episode than if the social media content didn't provide value on its own. It's kind of like a free sample outside of a bakery. Have you ever seen a bakery giving away free samples of the ingredients of their cookies? Like they're just handing out sticks of butter or piles of sugar? No, they're giving away entire cookies. If it's good, you'll go inside and buy a dozen of them. That's what your social content should be like for your podcast, free samples. But obviously that analogy ends with the fact that you can't really just share many podcast episodes on these social platforms. You have to make it so that your free sample looks and feels exactly like the other content on the platform that you're on and you really, really shouldn't try to mix them. So video content can work on Twitter every once in a while, short-form videos if it's a really great video, but videos really should be on TikTok. Videos really should be on YouTube. There are different places where you should house the different content that you create. In Ariel's case, her strength is Twitter. So she shares her podcast free samples via Twitter threads. If your platform is Instagram, you should probably use Reels. TikToks are TikToks and Facebook and LinkedIn use slightly longer form text and images and are actually pretty similar. Careful though, if you get the urge to repurpose content across multiple platforms. The biggest miss that people make is not formatting images for specific platforms. The way Facebook optimizes an image is different from the way that Twitter optimizes an image is different from the way LinkedIn does it. So go to Canva, which is free to a certain extent. Canva FYI is a free website that will allow you to optimize your visual content for the platform you want it to go on. They also provide pretty cool templates for simple graphics. We use Canva here at Grow the Show. Go to Canva, search what size an image for Facebook should be, search what size an image for LinkedIn should be, and then move your assets onto that blank page, make your thing, make it look all good, add the image of the person that is your most recent guest, and then say, hey, I have images for you, for LinkedIn, for Facebook, for Twitter, for Instagram, whatever it is, where are you most likely to share? That is a big, this is kind of answering a different question, but a lot of people like to say, I interviewed this person, how do I get them to share the episode? I realized I interviewed a lot of people and nobody ever shares the episode. The best thing you can do is ask them, hey, I would love for you to share this episode. Where are you most active? Where are your followers most active? What assets should I create for you? Would you share an audiogram? So I'll go back to your initial question, but that's the first thing that I say when it comes to, like, why am I gonna share this episode that I'm on with you right now? It's because you're gonna make me look like an expert in the assets that you send me. You're gonna put my face, you're gonna ask me for a nice headshot, you're not gonna pull one randomly from Google, where I don't like what I look like or that's pixelated. You're gonna ask me for my most updated headshot, and you're gonna ask me what my headline is, how I wanna be called, and then you are going to use yellow and black, the colors of Grow the Show to set me amongst your logo, and then I'm gonna share because it makes me look like an expert on how to grow the show, which is something that I wanna be perceived as an expert in. So that's why I'm gonna share. I'm particularly motivated to share, because I literally am talking about this right now, so I wanna make good on my relationship with you, but generally speaking, most people wanna share when you make them look like an expert in the field that they are trying to look like an expert in. If you're not gonna use the audiogram, or the person is not going to share an audiogram, don't make that audiogram, ask them, ask your guest if they're going to share an audiogram, in which case maybe you should make an audiogram. Don't automatically make a Twitter image if you are not gonna share on Twitter. If it's an automated process for you, fine, it's not that hard to do, but if it's not gonna get used, don't make it. You're probably getting the sense now that there should be a decent amount of thought put into this, right? And if so, I'm glad, because social media isn't as impulsive and off the cuff as a lot of businesses and podcasts will have you believe. Even a quick tweet from your account should really have some level of strategy and intention behind it. Social media is, after all, a big chunk of how you present yourself and your podcast to the world. This just all harkens back to social media is important. You should have social media. You should spend your time wisely on which social platforms you are on, but you should not drive yourself up a wall thinking that social media is going to convert to listeners. Because think about yourself as a scroller. Think about yourself when you're spending time on Twitter. When I'm spending time on Twitter, I'll speak from my perspective. When I'm on Twitter, I'm on Twitter. I'm scrolling. I'm thinking, what do I want to respond to? What do I want to laugh at? What influencers do I want to see what they're up to today? I'm not thinking what podcasts do I want to find on Twitter and then go over to my podcast listening app of choice, type it in and listen to. So your social media is there for people to be reminded that you exist and for you to give value to people. So if I'm scrolling and I see my favorite podcast about Chapstick telling me that there's a new, really interesting episode about how the CEO went from a farmer to the CEO of Burt's Bees, I'll keep that in mind in the back of my head for when I go over to my podcast listening app of choice and I type it in and maybe I'll listen to it. But I'm not going to do it right then and there. But your job as the creator of that podcast is to remind me that you have a new episode out or that you exist in some way. So you should keep your social media populated and it should look good and should be uniform and the fonts should be uniform and the colors should look nice and be consistent. But you should not drive yourself up a wall thinking that it's going to convert for you. Do you think that podcasts should have an email list? Not every podcast should have an email list. I think, and ideally yes, if you can gather an email list for your podcast, that's great because you don't own your subscribers on Apple. You don't own your subscribers anywhere. You can't tell who your subscribers are. It's not like you can go into the back end of Apple and export that data and know who they are and know what their email addresses are and know what they're interested in in order to target them for ads. You don't have that information. But if on your podcast you say, hey, subscribe to our newsletter, then you have their email addresses and they have opted in to receive contact from you. They have opted in to receive correspondence from you. In that sense, it is definitely worth it to have an email list for your podcast. However, when you have an email list for your podcast, you have to think about putting out contact consistently for that email list or when you're putting it out, not just spamming them with new episode out now. That's yet another piece where you need to be an expert in the field that you are purporting yourself to be an expert in and sharing information that's relevant to them that may eventually bring them back to listening to your podcast or whatever it is that your call to action is within that newsletter. So yes, I think it's great if you can have an amazing landing page drive people to that landing page, get them to subscribe and then use your correspondence with those subscribers wisely. I think it's great, but not everybody can do that. The mistake that she's talking about here is biting off more than you can chew, which is why I asked Ariel an email newsletter savant whether she of all people thinks we should all have email lists. I kind of love her response, which echoes her overall advice to you as you listen to us and many other self or damed podcast experts as we tell you what to do or not to do. And her advice is this, focus where you can. Don't worry about making yourself present on a billion channels all at once and try your best to do a few things really well rather than trying to just do a bunch of things and kind of doing them poorly. And I agree with her wholeheartedly, but while she's here before she goes, it wouldn't be grow the show if we didn't ask her how to grow the show. So what not to do on social media aside? I wonder what is Ariel's most recommended way to get more podcast listeners? Open an Excel spreadsheet and make a list of 75 to 100 shows that you think you should collaborate with in some way, whether those shows are connections through keywords or through audience match or through whatever it is. Maybe you're genuinely friendly with the hosts of these podcasts. My advice is to make that list, separate that list into safety's targets and reaches. If you've ever applied for college, you probably know what those are. Your safeties are your shows that you can definitely collaborate with in some way. Your targets are shows that you can probably collaborate with and your reaches are shows that if you were to get a collaboration with them, it would be huge for you. And then your spreadsheet should have the name of the podcast you're trying to collaborate with, the contact info for that podcast, what you wanna do with that podcast, meaning do you wanna do a promo swap? Do you wanna be a guest on their show? Do you want them to be a guest on your show? Do you wanna do a social media swap? Do you wanna do some other sort of creative integration with them? And then go about writing pitch letters to all of them individually. I know it's hard and I know it's frustrating, but it is worth it because if you create partners, if you can find, say out of that list of 100 podcasts, you find 10 shows to collaborate with over the next year and you're sharing audiences with each other. You're getting people from their audience to come over to you and vice versa. They're gonna look to you when they have an opportunity and it's worth it. And honestly, this is the way to create consistent growth over time. There you have it. And note that her biggest piece of growth advice has nothing at all to do with social media. So if that isn't more evidence that you don't need to promote your podcast on every single platform, I don't know what is. But as she said, you do need to make sure that you have some sort of presence somewhere so that you can actually engage with your listener base, you can get to know them and you can have a relationship with them. So if you need any help with that, if you need help figuring out what platform is for you or how to make content that is valuable in a vacuum, or even if you just wanna learn exactly how other growing podcasters are doing it so that you can model them, join us in the free Grow the Show Facebook group and you can get personalized advice from any of the over 2000 other Grow the Show podcasters. The link to join us there is in the show notes. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was hosted by me, duh, and was produced by me and Catherine Nails with post-production by Jeremy Bishop and a very special thanks to Ariel Nissen Black. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidland. Until next time.