How to Get Podcast Listeners from Facebook Groups, with Alex Hillman

So I'm going to go ahead and guess that if you're listening to this, you are a podcaster who's interested in getting more listeners and growing your show. Is that right? Cool. You are in the right place. Now, this is the third of my launch episodes for this podcast, Grow the Show. And really, this serves as almost part two to episode two with Eric Newsom. So in the most recent episode with Eric Newsom, we talk about how to figure out who your audience is and be really, really, really specific about who you're making your podcast for. So this episode is going to talk about, okay, now that we know who it is we want to serve and who those listeners are that we want to go get, now we're going to talk about how to get more of them. So if you haven't listened to episode two of Grow the Show with Eric Newsom, listen to that one before you listen to this one because if you don't know who you're going to get everything that we talk about in this episode isn't going to work because you don't know who you're searching for. But if you have listened to episode two of this podcast and even better if you've completed the 10-word description and audience persona exercises, then now we're going to learn how to go find more of those people. And to help us do that, I'm bringing in a mentor of mine, Alex Hillman, who lives in the same city as I do Philadelphia. He was an early guest on my first podcast, Philly Ho, and ever since then has been helping me to navigate the space of being a creative entrepreneur and of growing and more importantly serving a really specific audience. Now, Alex has recently released a book and we're going to talk about that book and specifically how that book can help you as a business owner because whether or not you have launched your podcast business yet you do want it to be a business. So we're going to talk about a few lessons from that book and how they apply specifically to podcasting. And even better, we're going to share exactly how you can go about finding new listeners online for free and without being super annoying, right? Without being that person in the Facebook group who just logs in and says new podcast episode available and it gets no engagement from anybody in the Facebook group and it's just super awkward self-promote and just doesn't work at all. And then actually lowers the value of the Facebook group because people hate that so much. So we're going to teach you how to actually promote your podcast online in Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, wherever your listeners are while not being too self-promote and actually building trust with the people who very soon will be your listeners. So if you're ready to go get more listeners for your podcast and to learn from an expert audience builder how to do that, then let's go. 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 show, get more listeners and monetize now so you can have a thriving podcast business. This episode is going to teach you how to get more listeners for free spending only 10 minutes a day and those listeners are going to trust you more than they trust their own mom. So if you want that stick around and get ready to grow the show. Hi, my name is Alex Helman and I make things, put them on the internet so that people can buy them. Okay, okay. So he's being pretty modest there. Even if you make the coolest and most amazing things that have ever been made and put them on the internet, if you don't have an audience that knows and trusts you enough to buy those things, nobody's going to buy those things. But Alex is able to do that. That's because he's an absolute pro at building large engaged audiences both online and in person. But what's even more impressive than the size of his audiences is just how much trust he's built with these people. So today we're going to learn how Alex does that and we'll be able to take those lessons and apply them directly to growing a large and trusting podcast audience. Now, like I said, Alex has built a couple of large distinct audiences. The first one is in the world of co-working. That's because back in 2006, Alex co-founded the first co-working space in the city of Philadelphia. That co-working space is called Indy Hall and it's still a thriving community to this day, even as it's gone virtual during the 2020 pandemic. But it's immediate success in 2006 made Alex a thought leader in the earliest days of the co-working industry. I don't even know if I would say that there was a co-working industry, yet. There was a nascent community of people that were interested in creating these places for laptop enabled workers who were being booted out of coffee shops in some cases. The best way to describe it is kind of like imagining walking into a room where a bunch of people are hanging on out and talking about their projects and going, well, your project sounds really interesting and maybe like something I would like to do. So, for the right person, it created this sense of bigger than just me, which I felt was super powerful. That was more interesting and attractive to me than anything to do with an office. The sense of being a part of something bigger about creating things together. That was really exciting to me. So, he created one of the first ever co-working spaces and by sharing his knowledge of this new field, built a loyal audience of independent business owners. The second audience Alex built is in the same world and really you could argue that it is all one big audience of independent business owners. But for our sake, let's call it the second audience. So, with Indy Hall, Alex created a space for people who were already self-employed. But with time, he saw the need to also help people who wanted to be self-employed. But couldn't fully wrap their heads around how to do that. So, to help those people, he co-created stacking the bricks. Stacking the bricks is a website and a business that I started with my friend Amy Hoy about 10 years ago when we realized that a bunch of our creative friends were hopping from startup job they hated to startup job they hated to corporate job they hated back to another startup job. And in some cases, going out raising a bunch of angel or venture capital money to create a business that they hated, I was visiting her and we were just kind of like drunkenly musing what's wrong with our friends. Kind of judging, but also I guess a little true. And realize it like there's a blind spot for them and a lot of creative people because of what they're exposed to where they've learned about business, what they're perspective on businesses. You know, the examples they have are all they can really match against. Why have we done things differently? It's not what do we know that they don't, but what do we see that they don't? So we started writing more about, you know, what is different about our approach than the quote-unquote common knowledge approach to starting a startup. And everything came back to start with the people first. You know, how do you center the other person as a core philosophy, as a core strategy and make sure all of your tactics align was really what seemed to be missing. People would come up with a good idea and they were centered around the idea rather than who the idea was for. And so we have a flagship course called 30 by 500. And 30 by 500 is actually a math equation that says if you get 500 people on the entire internet to pay you $30 a month, you're making $180,000 a year gross, which was a healthy software developer salary. Philosophically and strategically, it's more about taking the big goal of 180 grand and breaking it down into numbers that suddenly feel a lot more manageable and achievable. 500 people on the entire internet, $30 worth of value every month, those numbers feel human scale. And it's not that you do them overnight, right? You don't flip a switch and suddenly you're making 180 grand so you can quit your job. You stack the bricks in that direction. You build this one small brick at a time, one small tweet at a time, one episode at a time. The small things add up to the big thing. This is sort of the through line in how you build big things. So through the past decade and a half of building multiple communities, helping hundreds of online entrepreneurs build their businesses, listening to their problems, their questions, their worries, Alex has seen insanely similar patterns. So this year he published a book. That book is called the Tiny MBA and it's not like any other business book you'll ever read. It's only a little over a hundred pages and each page features only 240 characters. So rather than some sort of owners manual of new tactic advice that takes about six hours to read, the Tiny MBA is just 100 tweet sized gems that give you food for thought. You can get through the whole book faster than this podcast episode. Really, you can read it in like 30 minutes max. This is the first time I've ever read a book three times in preparation for an interview and it was not that hard to do that, which is great. But can you tell me about how you came up with this format for a book? The core of the book was written in public on Twitter. A challenge was issued as sort of a Twitter meme to post to Twitter and say, if you like this first tweet, I will respond to it with one strong opinion, belief, perspective, piece of advice, something along those lines for every time that the tweet is liked. And so I posted it and I said, I will do this up to 100. And so I started writing my 100. And when I got to like number eight or nine, I was like, this is difficult. What I was trying to think of is what are things that I answer for people often, questions I answer for people often, or what are things that I see people make mistakes that they don't ask about. Maybe they wish they had before things went ay, why are those kinds of things? What are the common things I see or get asked about? But then I've got to figure out a way to say it in the space that Twitter gives me over the course of three or four days I got to 100. And I was like, cool, I did it, go me. And then I walked away. And it was Christmas and New Years. And I went on vacation and I came back mid January. And some of these tweets, actually quite a few of them were still getting retweets and faves. And like a full six weeks later, that was still happening. And I've had some tweets go viral, but never anything with this kind of staying power. And I was still getting replies like, you know, I just read X business book and this Twitter thread was more valuable than it. Things like that, which you know, I always take things like that with a grain of salt. But I also have to acknowledge that it was happening as a pattern, including with people that I didn't know. And so I kind of off-handed, you know, quote, tweeted that original when I was starting to think about what it would look like to turn this into a book. And my replies just totally blew up again. And that was how this book actually turned into. So all of that reader-centric focus, like making each individual tweet useful to the reader was built in from the start. People say writing a book is the hardest thing you'll ever do. This wasn't, it was challenging, but it was not the hardest thing I ever did. By a long shot, I think it's because I wasn't trying to write a book. I was just trying to help the reader. And then later I edited it down into something that was a bit more polished and provided a bit more framework and narrative and things that in a package that people knew they wanted. If I had said pay $10 to download my tweets, nobody would have done it. But people know what a book is. So take this thing that clearly worked and say, what would it look like to take a thing that I know works and put it in a format that people already desire? I think this will sell. And turns out it did. So there are so many lessons in there that can be tied directly to podcasting, but just in general helping people. Bringing to light the fact that this thing was just like yes, it's a new format. I haven't read a book like this before, but it was just born in an exercise in getting your thoughts and getting your help out into the world and in front of people. So I'm going to call out two sets of three cards in the book, three pages if you will. And the first one is about audience building. And if I go to page 38 of my copy and I'm just going to read the three. So quote, lots of people get stuck on the idea of audience building because it feels like an abstract outcome of self-promotion. And for a lot of people, self-promotion holds serious negative connotations. This is because most people have only seen examples of bad self-promotion. Audience building should really just be called earning trust at scale because that's what it is. Unquote. Oh my goodness. So podcasters, number one question. How do I grow my ideas? How do I get more listeners? When you frame it like this, building trust at scale, it's actually more clear, right? How do you build trust at scale? I love this framing and podcasting. And I certainly wasn't thinking about it specifically when I wrote it. A couple of specific things come to mind for me in that podcast's require, I think two things of the audience. One of them is time, which is I think kind of obvious. The other is a little less obvious. I'm going to frame it as intimacy. There is something that podcasting does that I don't think any other medium does because we listen to it and we only listen to it. We stick a thing in our ears or on our ears and we let somebody closer to our brain than literally anybody else in the world. And you combine that with the time factor. I podcast that I've listened to hundreds of hours of. That means that I've spent more time with that host than any movie star. Most singers. And maybe any human being that I know personally, that's wild. So what does it take to earn that? I think is really a really cool way to frame this. And trust is the key to unlock. And when I think about trust in the context of podcasting, the first thing I think of is, are you going to value my time as a listener? Which I know from a production perspective means editing. Having editing even be a thing. But also it's like, are you going to consider my time? Are you going to be thinking about where am I listening to this podcast? A subtle thing that I hear podcasters do often that I feel like is subtle, but fits into this category is letting the listener know when there might be swearing. So if they've got kids around, they can make the choice to listen to that show on their own or not. Or if there's any sort of depictions of, you know, violence or abuse, what it says to me is you were thinking about my time and my space where I'm listening to your show. That little thing earns a little bit of my trust. The other thing that I think is broadly universal is why would I listen to you talk about the thing you're talking about. And you don't get a lot of time to establish that. But I think the advantage of podcast is once it's established, you get to keep it so long as you don't undermine it. You know, if you put yourself in the shoes, maybe another exercise here is put yourself in the shoes of the audience member, what reason do they have to recommend you credibly as a listen to someone else, right? Because a big part of the way that audiences grow is word of mouth. Somebody goes, I read this thing. You should read it. I listen to this thing. You should listen to it. And that only gets to happen if I trust that this creator can do that more than once. Yep. So I think there's an element of the work of speaking directly to the audience. If you're ambiguous, it's not that you can't earn that credibility. It's that this is harder, right? You instantly get some credibility points when somebody goes, ah, this person's talking directly to me, they know who I am, right? I think people think about audience building as I need to go get lots of people and they skip over the one-on-one, which could be in the case of growing an audience for a podcast, you know, interacting with those listeners on social media, right? In a one-on-one fashion or on other platforms besides the podcast that have better discoverability, building trust and credibility off platform in places where maybe it's a bit easier to do those one-on-one interactions, and then bringing people over to the podcast because A, you've earned that trust and credibility, and they go, I like what you did on TikTok, let me see what your podcast is like, and then they're coming in with an understanding of who you are, a context a bit of trust. Not that you need to go on TikTok, but like if you can learn from that, and then bring that to a place where your audience is, right? Build that rapport and then use that to direct people to the podcast as your main long-form value delivery tool. I feel like that stack gives you the full one-on-one to repetition of that one-on-one that is needed to build that trust. Again, it's not just one time, it's a pattern to a bridge to whatever the actual thing you want them to do. In our case, the thing we want them to do is to listen to our podcast and subscribe, become a repeat listener. So of course, the question then is, where can we go online to find those dream listeners where they already are, where they congregating, and where can we go start to build trust with them so that they might be interested in becoming podcast listeners? Well, to understand that, we're going to borrow a concept from Amy and Alex's course, 30 by 500. This was created to help business owners find their customers, but we can apply it to how we can go find our listeners. And the answer is that we have to go find them in the online watering holes. Yeah, a watering hole can take so many forms, and this is actually one of the harder parts about teaching a watering hole is we've got to give you like a really specific place to start and a good example. The trouble is is most watering holes don't look like the good example a lot of the time. So knowing whether or not you found a watering hole or a good one can absolutely be difficult, but the key factors are do you have the ability to observe people talking about their work, their interests, their questions, are they asking each other questions is like number one, right? And do they help each other? Do they come there when they have a problem? I can give a really interesting example that I bought a motorcycle a couple of years ago, and it's an all-electric motorcycle that has a pretty, it's like a niche, but pretty intense fan base. And so there's a Facebook group for this particular brand of motorcycle called zero. And I have zero interest in creating products for zero motorcycle riders, but darn it if my brain didn't kick into safari mode safari is our approach of researching these watering holes where I'm actively taking note of the problems that people talk about the questions they ask as patterns that you can then turn those answers or solutions, or we call them fixes to those problems into either free things to give away, a blog post, a podcast, a cheat sheet, a diagnostic, whatever it is, something that is useful to solve a specific problem, use that to earn trust, and then down the road have something to sell, whatever that may be. It took a lot of energy for me to resist doing that because this watering hole was just packed with people asking like interesting to me questions because I was also a beginner who had these questions. And that's another thing that I hear people say. I was like, well, I'm new to this space and I'm not the expert. I'm like, that is not your job. Your job is not to be the expert. Your job is to be helpful, which expertise is useful in, but sometimes being the person who points another peer, another newbie peer in the direction of the expertise is equally or more valuable because people trust you and listen to you because you were like them, also a beginner. So Facebook forums can be an example, any kind of forum or discussion board or email list, Twitter itself, jump on a hashtag, right, or just set a search terms and see what's happening. Now don't just look at the first tweets, but look at the entire conversation that's happening. One of the more challenging ones now, especially as we're in this sort of movement towards private communities is things like Slack and Discord and group message chats and stuff like that. Obviously, those are a place where trust is even more important because you're being allowed in. But what the watering hole looks like, what tool it's on is not really the point. The point is, is this a place where people go out of habit to interact with people like them? The watering hole safari analogy is important because sales safari is this technique that my partner Amy invented and basically takes ethnography, so observational research, not asking questions to get answers, but observing what people do and say when they don't know that they're being asked or observed, the act of ethnography, applying that to the internet is so much more valuable than asking questions because when people get asked a question, they answer the way they think they're supposed to answer. But when people go into a watering hole and post a question or even a statement to a room full of, in some cases, relative strangers in other cases of relative trusted set of peers, you have to take a couple steps back and go, what was going on in that person's day where their instinct was, I'm going to go to this place on the internet and talk about this. If you can be there in that moment or the beauty of this happening over text is you don't have to be there in that moment, you can read the chat scroll back or the archives. The observability of those moments is incredible and the depth of the insights and understanding you can gain about your audience and what they want and need, they aren't explicitly saying, but their actions are telling you is maybe one of the most powerful superpowers and also one of the things like once you learn how to do, you can't unsee it. And like I said, I joined a new forum on a personal interest, this happened. We're going to join a wine class too. I joined a wine class to not be thinking about business. All of a sudden we're talking about global markets and distribution and I'm like, a dammit. So like I'm at the extreme end of a spectrum, but watering holes can be anywhere. So long as they are a place that people instinctively go to interact with their peers. So it's one thing to be able to identify the watering holes while it's another thing to observe. The next step is actually contributing to it, helping these folks that went there to help. That I think many folks can understand. So there's a card in the book where you say, if you're looking for your first clients or customers, start by asking yourself, where do they go when they have questions or need help? What resources do they trust? What communities do they belong to? Then go there. But don't go there to sell. Now, so you are talking in this page of the book about watering holes. Don't go there to sell. When do you sell? When can I say, hey, I have this podcast? There's two answers to this. One is a little more vague and I think the other is more of a never. And I'll explain what that is in a second. Love it. So the vague answer, I can give a concrete example here. A lot of the students in 30 by 500 find their audiences on Reddit as one of their, Reddit itself is not a watering hole. Subredits on Reddit can be watering holes because they are those niche communities where we will go to interact with each other. The important thing here is that because Reddit is not a monolith, it also proves the point that not every community has the same rules and guidelines. Some places are way more strict about anything that looks and smells like self-promotion. You mentioned one of the other pieces in the book talks about people's reactions to self-promotion are because they've mostly seen the worst. When you're interacting in these communities, you have to remember that there's usually a team of moderators who are there keeping the place neat and tidy and keeping spammers and all kinds of other bad behavior out. Power can go to those moderators' heads and some moderators can become jerks, but for the most part moderators are doing a very difficult service for their community, in guiding the right kinds of posts and away from the wrong ones. So part one here is learning, participating, contributing, not to link to your stuff, but to be a part of the conversation, to earn that credibility and trust, become a regular, start going to your favorite neighborhood restaurant or comic book shop or you're not going to go to any of these places right now in 2020, but to be a known regular, that earns you the trust, but also to get a sense of what are the social norms of that community. Another piece of advice I often give is to get to know the moderators. And go from the perspective, not of you want to win the ability to post whatever you want, but to make it clear to them, like, hey, I recognize you've got a hard job. If I've ever got something that I wanted to share here, is there something you would, a way you would prefer me to do that, right? And then do what they say. Don't talk back. Don't try to convince them that you're going to do it another way and it'll be fine. Like show them that you're listening and show them that you deserve their trust because you're there to participate and follow by those community guidelines. Some of our students follow an unwritten, unspoken rule of, you know, 10 posts, like 10 comments or community interactions for everyone self-post. Is that a useful number? I don't know. That's not really the way my brain works. I think it's useful for some people. So if you're looking for a rule of thumb, I think that's a good maybe North Star to show you, like, proportionally, you know, 10x more value than you're trying to extract in terms of sending them a link to your latest episode or whatever it is. So it's give 10x more than you're looking for. I think is it perhaps a good starting point ratio, but again, that's not a hard and fast rule. Depends on the norms, depends on the mods. There's some places where it's a hard and fast, no, never. Go find somewhere else. It's a big internet, right? There's so much room. So that's the how to interact, right? So be there when people ask questions, be there in the comments. When people post successes, be there to cheer them on. Be a part of the community that you wish to serve is the best way to become a leader in that community. And ultimately, what you want to be seen is as a leader in that community, because that's the kind of people that new people will see as someone worth pointing to referring to. They'll share links for you, so you don't have to, that helps. The other side of this is, you know, you can make a decision early on that you're never going to share new episodes of your podcast into that watering hole. But what you can do is share things that are useful into that watering hole that aren't the podcast that get people over to your website and onto an email list. And use the email list as your primary method of letting people know, hey, there's a new episode for you to check out. Right? So in 30 by 500, we teach a technique called E-bombs or educational bombs dropping an abom of education and knowledge on people. And that's sort of where you take your comments from a post that are the people that sound useful. And you kind of pull it out of the comment, you drop it into a text editor and you put a little bit more work into it, maybe some graphics, maybe some additional resources, maybe a downloadable PDF, you know, here's the three things to remember. Print out this cheat sheet tape at your wall so you don't forget it. Those kinds of things. Right. And again, the goal here is not to extract. The goal here is to earn trust. And once you've got that trust, then the ability to say, hey, I've got something useful. Check this out. You know, I personally really don't see a lot of success from being the person to create an entire new post in that forum or Facebook group or Reddit. This is, I made an article, right? In the same way you don't won't see as much traction from making a top post or a first post about your new thing. The real actions in the comments, right? So if I make that thing about a question that gets asked, you know, once a week, every time that question gets asked, I can be in the comments being like, here's a helpful tip. If that was useful, here's three more link, right? So I never post without their being value, even if they never click on the link. Right? That's super important in terms of rule of thumb. So when that happens, what I'm really doing there is I'm building my own little place where I own the rules. I can send emails whenever I want. Those people have opted into here for me, right? The mods aren't in control. And I'm playing by the rules. And I'm only there to give, give, give, right? If somebody likes what I gave and they want more, I've given them a place to get it. And that is a bridge to an email list which in my experience continues to be the number one place to make sure that that repeat reach is available. Yeah. I've learned as well. Like if we port this example to Facebook groups, a strategy that I've seen before is to have your Facebook profile have every link, you have the links, right? Right there in the headline, I do this at this website. Be so good that they click on your profile to see what you're about and then make it easy for them to find the other thing. Exactly. Your profile is where you self promote like crazy. You can get people to see it by just being incredibly helpful in the Facebook groups. And that goes everywhere. So the stacking the bricks podcast feed has recently featured several episodes of you on other podcasts almost on a podcast tour. So I have not seen this before where somebody goes on a podcast tour and then puts all of those episodes on their own feed. So can you talk about that idea a little bit? And if you've seen any results from that. So three years ago, things got kind of hectic and I stopped producing the stack in the bricks podcast. Despite the fact that it was doing quite well, you know, well over a thousand downloads in the first seven days. So like not huge, but absolutely respectable. But most importantly, it was a place where I knew our audience was getting a lot. We heard from people that they love the podcast. And when it went away, we heard even more, you know, every couple of weeks I get a message from somebody, Hey, are you bringing about the podcast? Hey, are you bringing back the podcast? And I always wanted to, I just didn't, you know, a combination of the time, the tools have gotten better. So I could cut the time down. But like it's just another thing to do, man. I kind of got to fit it in somewhere. So I knew when I was planning out the promotion, book launch stuff that podcasts were going to be a big piece of the strategy, partly because I'm independently published by us. And I don't have some like, you know, publisher budget to send me on a bunch of planes. Also, it's 2020. And that's not an option. So I was like podcasts or live streams are going to be it. And I, you know, did my brain storm of who are the people who have shows that serve the audience that I think would love the book? Who are people that I know? And I think we'd love the book. And they can tell me if they're, you know, what is the angle for their audience? That sort of thing. And I started also thinking, you know, I was like, all right, these are the ones that I know. How do I get beyond the podcasts that I already know that I already think of or that come up when I search? And I started thinking about what I'd seen other authors do. And Derek Severs is a incredible human being and entrepreneur. And someone I can proudly call a colleague in that we've actually gotten to interact a few times over our years through mutual friends. And Derek just published a couple of new books as well, which are excellent. And I highly recommend checking them out. And I watched Derek, my initial thought was say like, what podcast did Derek gone on? Because the audience for Derek's book is pretty similar to mine. And he has a much bigger audience than mine. So podcast that he's picking are probably good candidates. I might have to sell myself a little bit harder than than he did. Maybe not, I don't know. But like if he's there, there's a good chance that I being me being there would be advantageous as well. So I started doing that research. And then I realized that Derek had a feed of all of these shows. And I was like, this is such a good idea. So he had a feed of all the podcasts that he'd been on. Yeah, it's just basically the Derek sever guest feed. Wow. Which he had been doing like previously he'd been doing really little, almost like meditations, like little bits and pieces of advice and a sort of build momentum for the books that were coming out. But it was like, it was very sporadic. It was inconsistent. For me, it was kind of nice to hear Derek, you know, drop a little bit of knowledge from time to time. And then all of a sudden, like a bunch of them started out. Derek on this show, Derek on that show. And I was like, uh-huh. Not only is this giving me fodder for shows to reach out and see if I can be on the but like a meta feed of all of the shows that I'm going on would be awesome. And I am not starting from scratch. I have a feed that people ask me at least a few times a month. Hey, when are new episodes coming? So I reached out to the first couple of people I had recorded with to bank episodes before the book launch. And I said, hey, thinking about putting episodes on the stack in the bricks feed. I'll record an introduction that sort of tease it up. Explains who you are and tells people, hey, like if you like this episode, there's more of this episode on their feed and you should absolutely go check out their show for more stuff like this. And of course, they're down for that. Most podcasts just want other people to hear their show. Yeah. As we talked about, but you know, to say I'm going to not just post your file, which is what Derek was doing, I decided to go one step further and record a little special intro, which over a couple now, I've got like a script roughly for and things like that. And I have a bigger bank of back episodes now than ever before because I'm getting these episodes from other people's audiences. Wow. In order for me to produce an episode, I need to do all of the work I need to decide to do an episode. I need to book the guest and all the things that go into it. I need to do the recording. I need to do the post production. I need to publish the episode. In this case, I've got somebody else doing three quarters of that work. I just need to say yes to show up to be on a show, get the file from them, record my now relatively templated intro and put it on the site. And the maybe most surprising part to me, I was not surprised that people would be excited to show us back. Our feed had gone, you know, dormant for three years. And there was still some downloads coming in. You know, new people discovered this show because it's on our website. You know, we were averaging in the load amid hundreds of downloads a month, up until June and July. And in August, when I started releasing new episodes, August, we only released episodes in the second half of the month. And we have 10 times the downloads in August, then we did in the previous months. Right. So this is the feed that's on our website. And the feed that people were already subscribed to, if they had not unsubscribed, that's right. But this just speaks to the fact that if the feed goes dark for a little while, it's not the end of the world. Right. Another fear podcasters have in that hole because it's just banged in everyone's head to be consistent. And that's how you build trust. And that's how you have a successful show. And it's, you know, there are tons of podcasters out there who are as consistent as can be and don't see any growth. And they wonder why. But at the same token, if you need to take a break, if there's, you know, an episode that you created that doesn't add value and you don't have one to take its place, whatever, even if you have a successful feed and life gets in the way for three years. If you come back and you continue to add value, people will still be right there with you. We also had a lot of folks say enthusiastically that they were coming, you know, they came back. Right. So, you know, we did let people know via the other channels that we still do have active and people were enthusiastic to come back. So yeah, I agree with you consistency is valuable. But is it priority number one so that all of the others are priority zero? You know, not at all. No, no, it's definitely a balance. I agree with that. Priority one, your audience, who are they? Where can I go get them? How can I go find the watering holes? By the way, this 40 minute podcast episode covered only three of the 100 pieces of business wisdom in Alex's The Tiny MBA. So if you want the other 97 pieces of business wisdom and want to become a better business owner in only 30 minutes, grab the Tiny MBA. You can get a print or Kindle copy at tiny.mba, real simple URL. And actually, if you use promo code, grow the show, you'll get 20% off. So where is your audience currently hanging out online? Where do they go to interact with each other? And how can you go join those communities, become a leader of that community by serving them by adding value, by contributing without pitching? If you want some guidance on how to do that, I invite you into my watering hole. There's a link in the show notes to the Grow the Show for Podcasters Facebook group. If you'd like some help in figuring out where your listeners are hanging out, where the watering holes are, what watering holes you should be participating in. Go ahead and jump in. Let us know who you are, who your show is, and who you're looking to reach. And we'll help you out. There might even be somebody else in the group who is also serving the people you like to serve and could help you to find new listeners. Now, if this episode was helpful for you, I'd like to ask one thing in return. And I think you know where I'm going with this. If you find this valuable, please make sure you're subscribed to the show. Leave a rating and a review if you're on Apple podcasts. Join us in the Facebook community so you can connect with even more high performing independent podcasters, share notes, share strategies. And of course, if you know any other podcasters who might benefit from learning about how to find more listeners in the watering holes, send them a text right now asking if they'd like to get more listeners. And if they say yes, send them a link to this show. Now, next week's episode is going to talk about how you can get your podcast featured on TV and in major media outlets. So now that we know who our listener is, now that we know how to go find them for free and on our own, next we learn how to get ourselves featured so that they can find us. That episode comes out next week. Grow the Show is a Q9 production. This episode was produced and hosted by me, Kevin Schmidland, with masterful post-production from Max Graham, see music by two guys and a cat, and special thanks, of course, to Alex Hillman, 4Q9, and Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schmidland. See you next week.