How to Know if Your Targeted Daily Engagement (TDE) is Working

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Sridland, I'm a podcast coach, a podcaster two times I've taken two shows past 100K in revenue and this show has surpassed 300K in revenue in less than a year. My mission is to help you the independent podcaster to grow your audience and monetize now so that you can have a thriving growing business that is anchored by your podcast. And today I want to talk about targeted daily engagement. Now this is our framework here at Grow the Show that we use to grow a show every single day on social media. It's called TDE, targeted daily engagement and one of the early episodes of this podcast goes deep into exactly what that is and how we do it. I believe it's episode eight targeted daily engagement. In a nutshell, the framework says that you should be online for 15 minutes every day engaging with your dream listeners, dream guests, dream collaborators, dream sponsors, dream clients, all the people that are going to be involved with your growing thriving podcast business. You want to be engaging with them on social media every single day for a minimum of 15 minutes. You do this in Facebook groups on Instagram, on Twitter, and even on TikTok. In fact, I've been perusing TikTok lately to get a better understanding of how it works, what content is working there, how we might be able to utilize it as podcasters. And what I've noticed is that with really, really viral videos on TikTok, if you go into the comments, you're going to see a bunch of like sports teams commenting funny jokes and ridiculous things on these viral videos that have nothing to do with basketball or football or baseball. What are they doing? What are the teams doing TDE? That's why you will have a comment by the Portland Trailblazers on a viral video about a dog like they're doing TDE, right? So we have to do it as well. If these massive media companies and corporations are doing TDE, there is no reason why we as independent creators aren't doing TDE targeted daily engagement. So I'm going to be speaking to those now who have started doing TDE. If you've never done TDE before, you're definitely going to want to check out episode I think it's eight or nine targeted daily engagement. Go ahead and scroll back in the feed to learn the basics of that. The rest of this episode is going to assume that you already know that. And so with that, I want to answer a question that I get all the time about TDE in our free Facebook group in the accelerator program and just kind of all over the place. Anybody who's heard of this framework to grow your podcast on social media, they ask, how do I know if my TDE is working? And so today we're going to answer that question. So here's the thing about targeted daily engagement. It is absolutely. If you show up every day for 15 minutes, your social media accounts will grow and your download numbers will grow as well. I personally guarantee it. If you are doing it right, if you have a really specific audience that you are trying to reach and you are engaging in a way that is actually thoughtful and meaningful and not just phoning it in and trying to game the system. If you have a specific audience, you're being thoughtful. It will absolutely grow your following, grow your audience and grow your podcast download numbers. However, there are actually other benefits of TDE and those benefits will indirectly grow your show more than TDE itself will directly grow your show. Let me explain why. One, one of the biggest benefits of targeted daily engagement is that it builds the habit within you of engaging online. Most people do not engage on social media. They simply publish and consume, right? They post and they scroll. They don't comment. They don't DM. They don't actually be social on social media. But that is what social media platforms are for. And by the way, that's what the algorithms want, okay? Every time you hear somebody complaining about the algorithm, the algorithm is literally computer code built to make you be social and put stuff on these platforms that people like and actually interact with those people. It's not the algorithm. It's humans, right? So if you want to be a professional independent creator, which if you're listening to this podcast, you do, you must get good at engaging with your audience online. Full stop. There is no scenario. No scenario where you simply create and somebody else does the marketing for you. It doesn't work. Maybe there are some exceptions like writing a best selling New York Times novel or you're super, super famous and you get a TV show on CBS like, yeah, fine. In those cases, you have somebody else to do the marketing for you, but we don't have that as independent creators who want to build an audience online ourselves, right? So we have to get good at marketing our creations. And so if you're somebody who has the thought, I just want to be able to create this and let somebody else, you know, spread the word, I just want people, you know, I just want to just create. I'm with you. I'm totally, totally with you and I resisted this at first, but the reality is it just can't be done. You have to have to get good at engaging with your audience online, just the way it is. And so with that, TDE is a habit to get you to show up every day, get in the trenches, get in the trenches and interact with the folks that you want to serve. If you want to have a large growing audience, you have to interact with those people, right? And so the thing that TDE does is it emphasizes the start, ETS, emphasize the start. This is something that I picked up recently, which has been very, very, very beneficial to my own productivity, ETS, emphasize the start. I have a tendency to overthink things and blow things up in my head, some task or some, you know, thing or initiative that I have to do in my head, it's way bigger than it actually is. So lately, what I've been doing is emphasizing the start. Just do it for five minutes, do it for 10 minutes. You can always quit. You never quit, right? So with TDE, we have to get in the habit of interacting with our audience online every single day. And so in order to do that, we emphasize the start by saying 15 minutes is all we have to do. I'm willing to bet that if you've ever done TDE before, most times, it's hard to stay at 15 minutes, right? There might be a couple times where you've done 15 minutes. And that was great. You got in, checked the box. You got on with your day. But most of the time, you stick around because it's fun and because it's really, really effective. So number one, TDE gets you in the habit of engaging online with your audience. This is something that you absolutely must do if you want to make money as a creator online. Once we build that habit, we then get the benefit of showing up every day, of tending our garden of online relationships every single day because here's the thing. TDE is not about getting people to listen to your podcast. It's about building relationships. This isn't when people want though, right? They're not going to be searching online. How do I build relationships? It's people are searching. How do I get more listeners to my podcast? What the secret is that I'm showing with you today, you get more people to listen to your podcasts by building relationships with those people. Why do you think that the first 100 listeners of your podcast is friends and family? They're not even interested in what your podcast is about. Most of them, they listen because they have a relationship with you. They don't care about what your podcast is about. They care about you. They listen anyway because they love you. Now this actually trips up a lot of new podcasters. They say, oh my gosh, I have 75 downloads per episode. That's amazing. But then that 75 number doesn't grow. Why? Because those 75 people are your friends and family who actually don't even like your show. They're not interested in your show at all. They just want to support you. Because of that, they love you, which is great, but it also can be a false positive. It can be a bit of a misnomer where a podcaster can be like, I got 75 listeners. Why can't I get more? It's because you're not building relationships with more people. Imagine if those 75 friends and family members who aren't really interested in your content, like I think of my aunts and uncles who live an hour and a half north of Philadelphia. My very first podcast was about my home city of Philadelphia. They were the first listeners of Philly. Who? They don't give a crap about Philadelphia, but they tuned in for me. Imagine though, if those people were interested in your show, right? So I'm not saying that you need to make a podcast that your immediate friends and family will be interested in, no, I want you to imagine if not only were these people actually interested in what your show is about, but they also love you as much as your friends and family do. Can you imagine if that's what your audience was like? Imagine if you had an audience of thousands of friends and family who not only love you and want you to succeed and want to support you, but also love the show that you're making and absolutely want to binge and listen to more of them, right? Well, what if that were the case? Well, you would have an audience of thousands of people who listen to every episode. They subscribe. They spread the word. They grant you the almighty word of mouth. They buy from your sponsors. They pay monthly from your membership. They become a client or a customer of your business. And you have yourself a growing thriving podcast business. This is because these folks not only are the perfect person who are totally entertained by and get massive value from the podcast that you make, but they also feel like they know you. They love you. They want you to succeed. This is how we create an audience that we can make a living from and that we can have a great relationship with. Okay. So targeted daily engagement, yes, it will absolutely grow your podcast faster than what most of you are doing now, but the real, real gold, the real getting to what you want, which is money and an audience, right? We want to be able to make this show, have adoring fans and actually pay our bills and make some money on top of that, right? This is what's going to get us there. So back to the question, how do you know if your TDE is working? Well, it's a qualitative thing, not so much quantitative. It is slightly quantitative, but it's in the quality of your interactions, right? So you'll know that TDE is working if you're building relationships, you're having meaningful interactions that have to do with the topic of your show online on social media and groups on Instagram, TikTok, wherever your audience is already hanging out. And if you don't know where your audience is already hanging out, we have to solve that first, right? That's how you know if it's working. And I'm willing to bet that if you've been doing TDE recently, you probably already know if you've been building new relationships or not, if you haven't, then it's not working and we need to adjust, we need to be more specific with our audience or we need to find a different place to do TDE. There are tons of Facebook groups that might be, you know, that might have the title that is like literally your dream audience, but really isn't a good Facebook group because it's not a good community or it's just not a place that people interact at all, you know? Not every Facebook group is good for TDE. So number one, we have to make sure that we're doing TDE in the right places. Number two, we need to make sure that we have a super painfully specific idea of who our listener, our dream listener is. Number three, we need to show up every single day and begin a new, begin new relationships and tend establish relationships with these dream folks. So that's how you know there's the, there's another side though of TDE, which is going to be even more impactful because when you're doing TDE, you're not only building relationships with your dream listeners, you're also building relationships with your dream collaborators. These are dream guests, dream sponsors, people who have already assembled your dream audience and who want to help you spread the word on your show. And in one fell swoop are going to bring you hundreds, dozens, thousands of listeners. These are the admins of the Facebook groups. These are authors, influencers, journalists, bloggers, celebrities, other podcasters, pretty much anybody who has access to your dream audience. You're interacting with them as well when you're doing TDE. So it's not just the one on one, you know, interact with one person who's a dream listener, they become a listener and you do that every single day. You do those for sure via TDE, but you also begin building relationships with your dream guests, dream sponsors, dream collaborators and the people who have already assembled your dream audience and who want to share that audience with you. So as you're doing this, as you're continuing to show up every day and do your TDE in a thoughtful way, never phone it in, you're going to start to get lucky. You're going to start to come across tons of totally quote unquote lucky opportunities. You're going to be invited onto other podcasts. You're going to have articles written about you. You're going to have sponsors suddenly reaching out. You're going to be invited to speak at conferences and events and other creators are going to want to collaborate with you on their Instagram lives, LinkedIn lives, YouTube channels on their podcasts on their newsletters, their blogs, whatever it is. And so why is it that all of this luck seemed to suddenly appear? It's because you've started building relationships with the people who have already assembled your dream audience. You are not assembling this audience from scratch. They are already assembled somewhere. We just have to go find them. These collaborations are going to bring you 10 to a hundred times the audience growth, the listenership growth that TDE itself will bring on its own. But these things will not happen without TDE, are you following? You show up every single day for 15 minutes to tend your relationship garden, have thoughtful interactions with your dream listeners, thoughtful interactions with the people that would be a dream to have on your show someday with people who have already assembled your dream audience, simply interact with them, add value to their day, have great interactions and don't pitch them, don't ask them to do anything. Your social media numbers will start to increase and yes, your podcasts download numbers will as well. You will start to see a bump. No doubt about it. We have seen people who have discovered this podcast listened simply to episode eight or nine. Maybe in the show notes, which one it is. And they start doing it within a week, they show doubles. That happens. You will start to get quantitative results just when you start doing TDE, but TDE isn't scalable. You're still only able to spend the same 15 to 60 minutes every single day, right? And so with that, TDE is not going to give you hockey stick growth alone. The hockey stick growth is going to come with time as all of these seeds that you've planted every single day. One week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, a month, two, three, four, six months, imagine how many relationship seeds you've planted. Some of those seeds don't sprout for months. You won't hear from them. Some don't sprout at all. It's true. Some of them are a fully grown tree in three days flat and you're like, whoa, that usually comes from some big collaboration invitation or opportunity or something like that. So all of these things build with time by showing up every single day, doing your TDE in a thoughtful manner and tending the garden of your relationships. So as you're doing this 15 minutes every single day TDE, look for qualitative evidence of success. You want to have the feeling that you're building relationships with your dream listeners and dream collaborators online. You're still having conversations that you started last week in a Facebook group or you're starting to connect and collaborate with other creators in your space. Some of whom you didn't think you deserve to talk with quite yet, but you do. You're starting to see lucky opportunities arise, right? Oh my gosh. How lucky is this? It's not luck. You build your own luck. Luck is not lightning that strikes. Luck is a bus that comes pretty regularly and you just need to show up and have your fare. Overall, growing a podcast audience is a marathon. It is a long slow build. It is not something that's going to blow up in three months. It's just not. And it's better that way because online viral growth tends to be very, very shallow and fleeting. Ask anybody who has ever gone viral online. You get a million views one day and the next day you're right where you were three days prior. It doesn't stick. What does stick is thoughtful relationship building day in and day out building a podcast audience, one relationship, one listener at a time in 15 minute increments every single day. And if that sounds intimidating, I hear you. It sounds like a lot of work, right? But I would ask, aren't you already doing a lot of work? The alternative to that, which is what podcasters are doing right now, most of them anyway, is to spend the same amount of time. In fact, more than 15 minutes a day, right? We're talking hours, days, months, sometimes years on their podcasts with zero qualitative or quantitative results. So given that, given that the alternative is to just continuously bang your head on the desk and not get any more listeners or any type of opportunity or growth, wouldn't you rather just spend 15 minutes a day just being thoughtful and interacting on social media with the people who you want to serve and you want to interact with anyway? All you have to do is show up, be thoughtful, be specific, and I guarantee you will start to see immediate growth results now. And you'll really start to see hockey stick growth as you keep doing it, keep showing up. You keep building relationships and all these quote unquote lucky opportunities start to really move the needle on your audience. So I totally hear you that this TDE, everything that I'm talking about is hard to measure, right? We want measurement. This is working. So I'm here to help if you want validation from me and from the Grow the Show community, which is already over 1100 growth minded podcasters, which is incredible. If you want to hear from us whether your TDE is working or whether we might have some suggestions on how you can adjust it, hop into our free Grow the Show Facebook group, the link is in the show notes, and just ask. Just let us know. We'll be happy to let you know if you're in the right track. There are literally over 1,000 podcasters who have experienced with TDE and several of them have seen incredible growth results all the time. I'm just amazed at what people are posting in that group. So this targeted deal engagement is how I took my first podcast past 100K in revenue. It's how I started with this one as well grow the show. This podcast says surpassed $300,000 in revenue in less than a year, and it's going to work. We just need a little support. So hop into the Facebook group. Let me know if you have any questions about your success. Look for the qualitative signs of success more so than the quantitative, although you should still track that. And next week, we're going to hear here on the Grow the Show podcast from Gary Art, who is a podcaster who has spent the past year doing nothing but growing his podcast that he launched in spring 2020. He is very, very active in the Grow the Show Facebook group. And in the past year, he has also become our resident expert at growing his podcast via paid ads in the podcast players, right? So those are the apps that people use to listen to podcasts. He has spent tons of time and energy learning how to make that work, how to make it profitable. And next week, he will be here on the show to teach you exactly how you can do the same. So be sure you follow us here on the Grow the Show podcast. Join us in the free Grow the Show Facebook group. Go up, do your targeted daily engagement, and I'll see you next week.