Podcast Hackers

Audience was born to be an unfiltered, raw look at one brand’s quest to test the most popular podcast growth strategies. To stay true to our word, we’re looking back at our results to date and detailing what lies ahead. In the 10th episode, Early Results And Our Growth Strategy Looking Ahead, we’re diving into the important growth numbers to see how we’ve done. Audience’s Podcast Format And Workflow In terms of the content mix, we’ve focused the format on monologues instead of interviews to start. This was because we wanted to cover a lot of technical and practical advice about podcasting. Our host, Craig, has years worth of podcasting experience to draw upon and we felt he was the perfect voice to get our listeners up to speed on podcasting basics. We also wanted to get into the groove of our show’s workflow and figure out how to fit this project into the overall work we’re doing at Castos. Audience is one part of our content strategy, so we needed to find the balance of producing the show alongside our larger projects. At episode ten, our workflow looks like this: At the start of the month, plan the topics of the upcoming four episodesOutline each episode’s script on the Monday the week of the episode’s releaseRecord the episode on Tuesday and edit on WednesdayWrite a blog post, show notes, and email blast on Wednesday after the episode is finalized. Generate a transcript of the episode using Castos’ automatic transcription feature.Publish the blog post, send the email, and promote the episode across social media on Thursday when the episode goes live We’re operating on a short timeline each week to allow for potential pivots if a more engaging content topic pops up unexpectedly. Outlining, recording, and editing an episode within one week may not work for most hosts but we’re getting our process down to a science. For hosts who are just starting out, we can’t stress enough how important it is to figure out your most efficient workflow from the start. This will help you create new episodes consistently and keep you from podfading. But now with nine episodes under our belt and the basics covered, we’re ready to transition more into the interview format. Future episodes promise to feature interviews with subject matter experts in key areas of podcasting. These expert interviews should prove to be “really good radio”, and we hope you enjoy them too. Audience’s Analytics To Date Here is where Audience differentiates itself from many of the other podcasts about podcasting. We’re transparently laying out our stats, including our successes and missteps. At the start, our goal was to generate 1,000 listens per episode. We started out on the right foot but we have some major room for improvement to get there. As of publication, we have 3,984 total downloads from our first nine episodes. With a few promotional tactics up our sleeve, we hope to increase the number of downloads to our back catalog and new episodes. Read on below for more color around how our audience is consuming Audience. Audience’s most popular episode Our most popular episode, Crafting The Narrative, has 646 total listens. This episode was released in our launch week and featured an engaging interview with two expert storytellers. The success of this episode is why we want to lean more into the interview format, offering actionable tips along the way. A misstep we ran into with this interview was not finalizing how our interviewees would promote the episode after its release. We likely would have seen a higher listen count if we asked our guests to cross-promote the content to their channels. Luckily there’s always the opportunity to re-promote your back catalog to gain additional listens at a later date! This episode sees a healthy amount of listens, even a month after its in

In this episode of Audience we talk through the 4 most common advertising platforms you can use to grow your podcast. While the quality of your content is, and likely will always be, King if you have the budget to amplify that already-awesome content with advertising it can be a really effective way to accelerate the growth of your show. In this episode we talk about the following ad platforms for your podcast: FacebookOvercastQuora and RedditOther podcasts But fair warning, good advertising will never make up for a lack of good content. We spent a few previous episodes talking about how to craft an interesting story, and not to follow your own narrative, and now that we’ve got a good idea of what good content is we can look to start amplifying that with ads. Resources Mentioned Overcast.fmFacebook AdsQuora Ads In this episode of Audience we talk through the 4 most common advertising platforms you can use to grow your podcast. While the quality of your content is, and likely will always be, King if you have the budget to amplify that already-awesome content with advertising it can be a really effective way to accelerate the growth of your show. In this episode we talk about the following ad platforms for your podcast: FacebookOvercastQuora and RedditOther podcasts But fair warning, good advertising will never make up for a lack of good content. We spent a few previous episodes talking about how to craft an interesting story, and not to follow your own narrative, and now that we’ve got a good idea of what good content is we can look to start amplifying that with ads. Resources Mentioned Overcast.fmFacebook AdsQuora Ads

When it comes to creating great content everything starts with consistency. You’ve got to be able to publish episodes on schedule, week after week. And a big part of that is having a system to allow you to create those episodes easily over time, with spending just the minimum amount of time necessary, so you can spend the rest of your time on higher value (and higher leverage) activities, like connecting with your audience, promoting your podcast, and growing your brand. In this episode, we talk through the 8 tactics we use to create content for this show. Resources Mentioned CalendlyBook Like A BossGuest Email Template Episode Transcript Craig: 00:08 Hello and welcome back to audience. I’m Craig Hewitt, your host from Castos. If you’re new to the podcast, we’ve been talking the last few episodes about creating great content and how that’s really a cornerstone of growing your podcast organically. We’re going to talk a lot about promotional and marketing efforts for, for growing your audience a bit later in the podcast, but in this episode we’re going to really focus on how to efficiently and effectively create your podcast content. There’s a lot that goes into creating really great content and a lot of it is a stylistic and artistic and creative to be, to be honest, but a lot of it comes down to creating good systems and processes for how to go about creating that content. So putting some structure around how you create content will make you more effective and efficient with the time you’re spending creating your content for your podcast. And today we’re going to dive into a handful of tactics and strategies that we like to use in creating the content for audience that you can use as well. So let’s dive in. Craig: 01:11 The first thing that we liked to look at is the concept of working in series a. So a series of a podcast is typically a grouping of episodes anywhere from, I’ll say six to, I don’t know, 20 episodes, but it has a predefined scope, do it, and duration typically. Uh, the nice thing about this is it gives you that kind of mental and emotional break that you know, is coming, uh, podcasting and perpetuity forever. Every week can be daunting to a lot of people. So to know that, okay, I’m gonna record 12 episodes for the season, then we’re going to take a break for three weeks and we’re going to come back with another season that might be themed differently or have something, a different topic you’re going to talk about, gives you and your audience a nice, uh, potential like mental break from the day to day or week to week grind, honestly, uh, of creating a podcast every week. Craig: 01:59 Uh, for those of you who have a podcast already, I’m sure you’ve experienced this where you say, I would love to just take this week off. Uh, I think if you’re working in seasons and you know that you’re only creating 12 episodes of content, it might be a little easier for you to say, okay, I only have three more weeks, then I have three weeks off. It also lets you form your content into a really cohesive grouping because you have again, say 12 episodes to talk about a particular topic and your overall subject area. And I think that it does allow for better cohesiveness and the grouping of, of your episodes when you’re talking about a particular aspect of your topic. So think about working in seasons and the big thing here is to let your audience know that your podcast is going to be a seasonal podcast. Craig: 02:41 So give your audience something to expect with respect to the seasonality of your podcasts. They were going to be on for 12 weeks. Then we’ll be off for a couple of weeks. Then we’re going to come back and talk about this other aspect of our topic. The next one is also kind of a format thing and it is to do solo episodes. U

In this our 6th episode of the Audience podcast we dive into the tactics you can use to broaden your listenership through better promoting your podcast. Promoting your podcast comes down to finding new ways to reach prospective listeners outside of your existing audience circle. Effective podcast promotion starts with knowing your ideal listener and the places where you can connect with them, and then building the systems and practices to connect with people in those communities every time you publish a new episode. Resources Mentioned: Audience Persona WorksheetPodcast Promotion blog postYouTube RepublishingHeadliner AudiogramsPodcasting Directories To Submit Your Show ToEmail Marketing for Podcasters Episode Transcript Speaker 1 00:05 Welcome to audience. I’m your host Craig Hewitt from Castos. Here we uncover it the best tactics, strategies and plans you can use to grow your podcast from zero to a meaningful and impactful marketing asset for your brand. Here with audience, we’re using ourselves as kind of a crash test dummy to build a podcast from scratch, literally zero listeners just a month ago to a meaningful and impactful podcast and marketing tool for our brand Costos and today we’re going to be talking all about promotion of your podcast. We’ve covered a lot of the kind of nuts and bolts in the basis of what constitutes a good podcast here in the first six episodes. Covered a lot about storytelling and creating interesting and meaningful content that’s share worthy with your audience and other. We’ve covered that and the basics of how to get started. Podcasting and some of our first two episodes. We’re going to talk all about podcasts for promotion today. Speaker 1 01:08 If you do a quick search for how to podcast on Google, you’ll find a lot of content out there about how to get started and rightfully so. This is a big barrier for a lot of folks. You know what podcasting microphone to use. What the heck is an RSS feed, where to host your files, how to submit to places like Apple podcast and Spotify. But a lot of the resource out there really stopped there and, and don’t talk about how to promote your podcast and how to grow your audience. And that’s really what this show is all about. A bit of fair warning here. This is a super tactical and practical episode. So, uh, if you’re, if you’re on the go, uh, you’ll probably want to come back and catch the show notes for this episode. We also reference one of our blog posts in here. Speaker 1 01:50 That is a really good resource too. It’s going to give you a checklist of exactly how to, how we like to promote a podcast episode. We’re going to run through some of our favorite tactics and strategies, but first, I think from a very high level, it’s important to think about the two. We call them pillars of what makes a successful podcast. And the first is really high quality content. That’s the reason we spent two of our early interviews talking with subject matter experts in this field. The first talking about effective storytelling and creating that arc of a story that makes your podcast content interesting and people want to follow along with. And then we followed up with somebody who’s really an expert in kind of creating your own voice and creating content that you want to create and following your guiding light as far as the the kind of content you want to create and what it’s gonna do for your brand. Speaker 1 02:39 Those two episodes kind of drew a nice circle around what really good, meaningful and impactful content is for your podcast. And now we’re, we’re sitting back and kind of letting this simmer a little bit. The key now is is time and promotion. I put those two as kind of the, the, the two parts of the second pillar. The first one is really good content and the second is creating that cont

Being a content leader (as opposed to a follower and copying what everyone else is doing) is scary, especially for first-time podcasters. In Audience’s episode 5, we’re taking a closer look at podcast content tips. But this “Blue Ocean” of content for your listeners creates an opportunity for you to explore what you really want to talk about on your podcast and creates for your audience that engaging, share-worthy material that they so desperately are looking for. In this episode, I sit down with Srini Rao from the Unmistakable Creative podcast to talk about how he’s followed the ethos of their podcast brand to talk to interesting people who are forging their own paths. In so doing he has built a large, and loyal, audience and their brand now includes a private social network, several courses, and a podcast library that is 700+ episodes strong. Resources Mentioned In This Episode Unmistakable CreativeAudience Of OneMighty NetworksSrini Rao on Twitter Episode Transcript Speaker 1 00:08 Hello and welcome back to audience, the podcast where you follow us as we build a podcast from scratch here. We’re early on a quest to find the best tactics and strategies to grow a podcast audience literally from zero to tens of thousands of listeners each episode. Today I’m joined by fellow podcaster Srini Rao from the unmistakable creative podcast. I really liked the conversation I had with Srini here because he talks about a lot of his kind of reason for creating content and the way that he creates it and a lot of the, the motivation behind the, the style he has with his content and where that’s going to driving his brand. I’ll let Srini talk a lot more about this in the episode, but wanted to continue this thread of what constitutes really good content. Uh, and our second interview here in the audience podcast because I think this is a real key driver of the organic growth side of your podcasts. Uh, we’ll experiment with a lot of different marketing tactics paid and organic, but I think creating really good content is the cornerstone of a lot of what makes our content shareable. And kind of go viral. So here to share more about kind of how he creates this kind of viral content that his audience obviously loves. Speaker 1 01:23 Would you mind kind of sharing with folks who aren’t familiar with you and you’re in your show, kind of what you guys are all about? Speaker 2 01:29 Yeah, I think that, you know, so it’s funny because Simon Sineck once told me that my why is that I am obsessed with people who are good at unusual things. And I think that if you look at the guests on unmistakable creative, that’s a pretty clear reflection of that. I mean our guests have ranged from bank robbers to drug dealers, to billionaires, you know, all sort of with this theme of, you know, unmistakable or something that they’re, you know, makes them very distinctive and interesting and fascinating. And I think the whole idea of creative is one of those things that I think we gave a very sort of broad definition to the word creative. And we did that on purpose because we wanted to make sure that our focus was interesting people. And I think that the problem is you nowadays, you see a lot of like early podcasts like, Oh, I want to get these like famous internet celebrities on my podcast cause they’re gonna make me like grow and you know, be really successful. Speaker 2 02:14 But they don’t, that’s, that’s far the furthest thing from the truth. I know this only because that was my thought process when we first started. And you know, I, I got a rude awakening pretty quickly that that wasn’t going to be the case. Yeah. So we ended up basically starting in 2009 as this podcast for bloggers. And it kind of evolved and you know, today we have, you know, we’ve had I think more than 700 guests. I th