What's worked for growing your podcast?
I haven't seen much online about growing your podcast listenership besides some basic tips for launching brand new shows. Most of the people I've talked to have had their listenership plateau after a while.
What are you all doing, if anything, to grow your podcasts? How well is it working?
Aside from the usual tactical advice: prepare.
It is remarkable how low the bar is for the amount you have to prepare for a show to differentiate from the crowd. I regularly hear shows where the host is completely unprepared for their interview with a distinguished guest. There's no reason to put yourself in such a position.
Every podcast interview is an open note exam. If you fail to create a compelling narrative within the episode, it's your own fault.
For my part, the IH podcast is averaging 43k downloads/episode this year. Probably my main "growth" channels are:
Episode quality seems to matter a lot more than tweets. I had an episode this year with something like 900 likes and 90 retweets total. But that episode is barely doing better than another that only got 30 likes and 5 retweets. And it has 30k fewer downloads than another episode this year that got 140 likes and 15 retweets. It looks like the bulk of the downloads come from simple word-of-mouth sharing going on behind the scenes.
I've also noticed that growth strongly correlates with how consistently I'm releasing episodes. If I can go at least a couple months without missing an episode, download numbers begin to slowly accumulate. Missing a week means a big hit that it can take several weeks to recover from. I'm trying an experiment now where I double my frequency to 2 episodes/week, will report on how that goes.
Finally, appearing on other people's podcasts seems promising? I was on the Syntax podcast with Wes Bos earlier this year, and something like 10% of the people who've joined IH since then and responded to my survey have said they heard about the site from that episode. Planning to go on a lot more shows in the next 6 months and see what happens.
A few months ago, I went through every episode of Neil Patel and Eric Siu's Marketing School podcast where they talked about podcast marketing and growth. The strategies outlined here parallels what worked for them. It helps a ton to have a big email list, but that alone can't build an audience (article here: https://podreacher.com/how-neil-patel-and-eric-siu-grew-their-podcast/)
By far, being a guest on other shows where there's audience overlap is the best way to find new audience members. I spoke to Jordan Harbinger about this. When he started his current podcast (after a break up with his business partners), he basically built the new audience entirely from going on other shows. For something like the first six months, he did 4-5 interviews per week (apart from recording for his own show). So he really doubled down on this. Of course, he had an advantage because he had name recognition from his previous podcast. It helps. But even if you're totally unknown to the audience, if they like what they hear from you, they'll want to hear more.
How much do you think good titles drive listenership? I know with your podcast I'll skim through backlogs and click on something that seems like it might appeal to me.
I think it matters. I used to listen to the a16z podcast, but I found myself skipping too many episodes, because a lot of them had title that were super niche and didn't appeal to me.
So I decided to make IH titles non-specific and widely appealing. For me it's not so much about convincing you to listen to an episode as it is about avoiding giving you a reason to skip it. Of course some titles still come out better than others, but it seems to be the case that I have a consistent baseline of downloads per episode, and the ones that get more downloads do so because of the quality of the conversation rather than the quality of the title.
Awesome, thanks for the feedback!
Thanks that was really helpful! I'm trying to think why consistency is so important. Don't they get notified when a new episode comes up? through either, twitter, email, or their podcast app? Or is it something like if you keep giving them it they stay glued in on your kind of content, where otherwise they kind of get off a indie hacker high and move on to other things?
My guess is that if I release on the same day every week, people work the episode into their routines. "Oh I'll listen to IH every Friday on my drive home from work." So when the show doesn't appear, they have to find something else and they stop relying on it. This is just a guess, though.
It's that way for me. Always slightly disappointed if there isn't a new IH episode on a Friday ;)
At the podcast network where I work here are the top 3 things we've seen work in this order (assuming you already have stellar content)
Guests
By far the most effective growth channel is affiliating yourself with experts in your niche (preferably ones with podcasts of their own!) by guesting on their shows and vice-versa
Titles
After people discover your show by hearing you appear as a guest on one of their favorite podcasts, now they're looking at your episode feed. There are 2 things here to hook people
And if you can combine the 2, you're golden!
Time
This one is two-fold:
Thanks for sharing these amazing insights @RecordEditPodcast !
Curious to know if you have any studies/observations on the duration of podcast.
Do long form (1hr +) generally work better than shorter ones (<20 mins) ?
What show duration do you think is suitable for podcasts in business category ?
What frequency (episodes per week or month) has generally worked for podcasts doing well?
This is helpful stuff! The patience part is big for sure.
Do you see any bigger shows with 50k, 100k, or 500k+ downloads/episode? If so, does all this advice hold true for them? I wonder if growth strategies change at some point, because I know a lot of people whose shows have plateaued.
Similar to market caps in business there are "listener caps" in podcasting, sometimes a niche is only so big & that's that.
Which honestly does hover around the 50k download/episode range for many shows.
100k is more for broader audiences but this usually plays off of the personality of the host and is usually someone with great cultural intelligence or a comedian.
Then there's the 500k+ download/ep range which this is an entirely different monster. At this point people bandwagon on simply because the show is popular & is generally pretty volatile - some episodes getting 200k downloads, some getting over a million. When a show is on this level virality becomes a key component and that 500k/ep comes from an averaging of sporadic numbers.
Hey guys I'm working on a product that is similar to what Product Hunt used to do for Podcasts. Should be a good way to promote/grow your podcasts.
I did the soft launch yesterday and would love early feedback from anyone interested in podcasts (host or listener).
Just reply and I'll reach out to show you more, or you can DM me on Twitter to start the conversation!
Came here for a strong seconding of @Content_boss_jws advice:
In my experience, the long term impact is the greatest, too!