Show IH: Grew my podcast to 15k downloads/month in 6 months

Hey IH!

It's been a while. But I'm excited to be sharing a my new-ish podcast, The Sh*t You Don't Learn in School.

I started this podcast around 6 months ago with @crosser.

We started with a 30-day challenge, to get the hang of the craft. And even though the quality of those 30 weren't amazing, we slowed things down after and now publish weekly.

Since we improved the quality, our numbers have gone up and we recently hit a few exciting milestones:

• 15k downloads/month
• Hit our first 1k download day
• 2k downloads/episode in the first week of one going life
• My mom even heard about the podcast through the grapevine

You can see all of our milestones here!

And if you're a podcaster wondering how we've grown... read on.

Let me start by saying that podcast growth is HARD.

We've tested a ton of things (and we'll be doing a podcast episode on exactly this), but one (perhaps non-obvious) tactic that has worked wonders for us: Twitter prompts.

You can read a little more about our strategy here, but here's the tip:

Don't start by tweeting out your episode link. Not only does Twitter de-prioritize external links, but people don't engage much with a link.

Instead, if you start with with a tweet related to your episode topic, that will have a higher likelihood of catching someone's attention. Perhaps it's a hot take. Perhaps it's an inquisitive question.

If it does end up gaining traction and you have someone's attention, THEN you can really cleanly insert your episode link or clip in.

Here are a couple examples:

• A bold statement on pricing followed by a clip and link
• A question on whether billionaires should exist followed by a clip and link
• A question about 80/20 habits followed by a clip and loink
• And finally, my most successful version of this was this tweet about the 40HWW, which was followed by a link that drove over 1k downloads to the podcast episode.

I've also appended them to popular tweets like this, but on a relative basis, they don't drive as much impact because they're less specific. For example, this one also drove around 1k clicks, but compared to the reach of that tweet (nearly 100k likes), the results aren't very significant.

Like I said, we'll be releasing an episode in the next month or so on all the things that have worked for us re: podcast growth, because I've been so surprised at the lack of good advice out there on the topic. If you have any podcast growth suggestions, drop 'em below!

On that note, if you want to check out out pod, you can do so at here, follow our new Twitter account here, or subscribe to our milestones here.