5 Things We Did to Grow Our Podcast to 1M Listens

All right, we're going to start this one off with a Marketing School 2023 retrospective. We're going to talk about some lessons learned from this podcast, even from business as well. And this episode's probably dropping right as the new year hits, sometime around that time. So happy new year to you all. But we wanted to do this one just to make sure that we reflect because we've done some predictions already. We have talked about some lessons as well, but a retrospective is always good. So you want to start first?

Sure. So One lesson that we learned is if you want to grow your podcast really well, you should consider joining some sort of podcast network. Podcasting isn't as competitive as blogging, but there are more and more podcasts that are popping up. What people don't talk about with podcasting is a lot of podcasts pop up and they don't create enough episodes and continue it, but it still shows that they're around even though no one's really listening to that podcast anymore. If you want a ton of traffic, I had a buddy who ended up doing this. You know Jeff Fenster? Jeff Fenster joined the Entrepreneur Network. I think we were part of it for a while too.

We were, yeah.

And it drives tons of views. He was telling me some of his episodes get 200,000, 300,000 views per episode because Entrepreneur just pushes it. And I think it's a really smart way to get the reach because most people can create the content. It's hard to get the reach. And these networks or these sites, media properties like Entrepreneur, Forbes, or whoever it may be, or HubSpot, they're looking for more, they have the audience, they're looking for more content. And if you can create the content for them and, you know, maybe, yeah, you have to give them a cut of the advertising revenue, but you would've never had the views in the first place. I think it's a great strategy.

You know what's funny, Neil? I'm emailing them, Entrepreneur right now, see if we could get back into the network.

Yeah, why not? And I was like, we had 200,000 views per episode. That's a lot of views. You create, you know, 4 or 5 episodes a month, adds up really fast.

There's a lot of these networks too. There's the HubSpot Podcast Network, there's the Entrepreneur Network, there's the LinkedIn Podcast Network as well. We were talking to them. I'm going to try to get— make sure that we're on that one. But ultimately, it's a win-win for all sides because everyone's cross-promoting each other. So that's one thing. The other thing that we learned from this podcast is that Even though podcasting is very much a blue ocean right now, there's millions of podcasts versus billion-plus blogs out there. It's getting more competitive and that's forcing us to raise the bar, which is good, right? We've gotten feedback over the years. We've done the same format for 7 or so years and we've changed it now to instead of 7 episodes a week, it's 5 episodes a week, but it's 15 minutes. And this new format, I'll be honest with you, we're enjoying it. We've been figuring out the kinks with it, But we think it's a lot more engaging. We're talking about topics that are recent. We're no longer batching 30 days ahead or so. We're just trying to record for each week so we can touch upon current events. And that allows us— that's going to allow for more shares. That's going to allow for more retention at the end of the day because people are going to keep coming back more because the content's good. The feedback we've gotten in the past, Neil, I don't know if I told you this, was that Marketing School was really good. We binged on it in the beginning and then we stopped listening to it because it got too basic, right? This new format allows us to keep it advanced and also address maybe the beginners that are coming in. And what that just basically tells us is that you have to constantly iterate on your product. In this case, our product is our content.

Yeah. And the other lesson that we learned this year in 2023, a lot of the podcasts that are popular aren't actually popular. What they're doing is they're running ads to get listens to. They don't necessarily have the reviews, the engagements. And they're doing it to jack up their ad revenue or to seem more popular, climb the ranks of the, you know, Apple iTunes Store, whatever it may be. So then that way they can get bigger guests or more advertising revenue or have the perception that they're doing much better, which isn't a bad strategy. You know, there's nothing wrong with it. I don't think it's unethical. You're just running ads to climb the top of the charts. And even Eric and I are looking into Doing that as well, because why wouldn't you just run ads so you can be number one in, you know, within your category, assuming you can arbitrage it through leads or revenue or some other form. It's just like any other business.

Yep. The other thing too is we believe that the social network that has the most long-term potential in the next 10 years or so is YouTube. And yesterday I was, or maybe 2 days ago, I was listening to some other podcasts out there and their YouTube views are growing a lot more. Maybe they got, I believe this is my first million. I think they got maybe 10, 12 million, 15 million podcast downloads for the year, which is great. But I think they got like 80 million or so views from YouTube. And bear in mind, a lot of these are reels at the end of the day. But what we're doing now is we're trying to figure out, okay, how do we push YouTube even harder? We know the content we're putting out is good because the, and this is for beginning creators right now. If your unsolicited response rate, meaning that Maybe you create a video, it gets 10 views on it, but one person comments and says, I don't know how you don't have more subscribers, then you know your content is good. We're getting a lot of that right now because we reset our channel and a lot of people are like, how come this has so little subs? This content's so great, right? We know it's only a matter of time before it takes off. So please make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube as well. We're going to be putting a lot more effort there. The final thing I'll say from my side is for 7 years we've been putting out this content, but we haven't been Been figuring out how we can add it to text-based, right? And then now we've added an AI-assisted process where it will take the transcript from this and then it'll write out maybe a blog post, maybe 60% of it will be done. And then a human, it will come in the loop and then they'll add, they'll fact-check it, they'll add other insights, they'll add other links, they'll add images to it. And it looks like a legit blog post. And that helps us get more bang for our buck from all the content that we're creating.

To go back really quickly on the video side, I don't know about you, but like when I listen to My First Million or All In Podcast or a lot of them out there, I tend to just watch them on YouTube. I myself don't drive a lot. I know you drive more than I do, but I tend not to listen to the audio version. I tend to just watch the video versions. I don't know how you consume those podcasts.

You know, I do that sometimes. I save the video versions, but for the most part, I use the app called Snipd. That's the one I showed you this morning. S-N-I-P-D. And it has like AI summaries. You can even snip like bookmarks and things like that. And you can see which podcasts are really popular based on the number of snips people like are bookmarking. So I like to listen to audio because I'm like, you know, I go to the gym and I work out right in the morning. That's my podcast time.

Oh, got it. Yeah, so I think every user's different. I don't know if video's more popular than audio. My guess is the audio's more popular, but still video is, where it's at because you can just repurpose. You got the Reels, you got the Shorts, whatever you want to end up calling them. You got the TikToks, you got the long form. You can also convert it into text and then you can take the text, make blog posts, make tweets, make LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts. The repurposing is really where it's at. And if you're going to create a podcast, start with video. And if you do that, you're going to be in a much better position in the long run.

Cool. So I just hit up the LinkedIn Podcast Network as well. So see what happens when you create content? Sometimes good ideas lead to action. And if you're listening to content, you're not taking any action, it's mental masturbation. Don't do that. So let's move on to the next one over here. Neil, what do you got?

So, you know, funny enough, speaking of doing marketing and podcasting and it being much more competitive, I have this belief because it's like a lot of people always tell me, Hey, if you want to win, you know, you got to be better than the competition. And I always tell people, if you want to win, you have to copy the competition. I'm not saying you shouldn't be better than them, but people aren't really copying. And they're like, oh, copying's so bad. You can't copy others. Well, Google wasn't the first search engine. MySpace wasn't— MySpace was the first social network that really took off. Maybe there was one before that that I don't know about, but Facebook was a clear winner at the end of the day. They copied a lot of what other people had to do. Like if you look at Foursquare, we were talking about that earlier on the phone today. Dude, Facebook jacked the check-ins and really crushed that company. You look at TikTok, Facebook ended up saying, hey, we should put this kind of stuff within Instagram, Facebook. The heck, they even have, you know, short-form videos in any platform that they want to acquire. They just add that in. Disappearing images like Snapchat? Facebook copied it. Couldn't buy them? No worries. We're just going to copy that feature. Your stories disappear now. All I'm getting at is if you want to do well, you have to copy the competition. If you don't copy the competition, people are just going to be like, wow, their features are great. We're just going to stop using you and just use them instead. And ideally what you should do is have your features, copy the competition for the features other people love, and try to figure out how to make those features better. So not just copy them, but make them better.

You know, I'm just staring outside. I see all these buildings. Like, do we think like every building is like, it's like completely unique from like an architectural strategy standpoint? It's like, no, like people are building off of knowledge from the past and we're all building off the shoulders of titans. And it's the same thing with computers too. Like we built up, like Xerox was the big company back in the day. And what did Steve Jobs do? He copied the mouse. He took the mouse, he copied it. And then Apple became one of the biggest companies in the world, right?

Yeah.

And when you think about Kodak, they didn't adapt. And so copying, like it is a part of strategy and people don't like the word because it's very precious. Now we're not saying go out there and plagiarize, like that will never work, but we're really just saying, go out there, look at what people are doing and figure out how you can bring that into your company and make it your own version. That's what true creativity is. So Neil, did you see the— you probably didn't see this, so I'm not even going to ask you the question. So this post over here is from our mutual friend, Patrick Campbell. He released this maybe a week or two ago, But here's what it says. So this is his competitor research and strategy. And it's a really in-depth post on how to do competitor research. But here's what it says. Competition is for losers. So don't focus on competitors, is the quote. People love to share this advice and why wouldn't they? It's cute, it's tweetable, and it calms the anxiety center of your lizard brain every time a customer asks you about a competitor. Yet it's also the dumbest piece of business advice I've ever heard. That's right. And that's saying a lot. So all I'm saying here is that, look, we're in a world now where buyers look at 3 times more of your competitors than they used to, right? So 1.1 to 3.2x. So he's saying it is like, it's not even, you're right. It's like, it is your job to look at what competitors are doing and figure out what works for you. So his whole post over here, I'm not going to read this. It's really long. He talks about how to build a competitive intelligence program. Bear in mind, Patrick worked for the NSA. So that's the natural. National Security. What's the A stand for, Neil? Agency advisors agency. Yeah, National Security Agency. Yeah, and here's a nice graph over here too. So it shows like the market, right? So incumbent used to be MySpace. The competitor was Facebook. They took over movie rental used to be Blockbuster, then Netflix, right? Phones used to be BlackBerry and then Apple. So look, this is a really long post. I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling. I'm still scrolling. I'm still scrolling. It's a really long post. I highly recommend you all go read it. Just go Google Patticus. That's P-A-T-T-I-C-U-S competitor research. And you should be able to find his piece. And I think this is a must-read for everyone.

Where does he blog now? Because he sold ProfitWell.

It's on his personal blog now.

Oh, cool. I didn't know he has a personal blog.

It's a really good post.

He's a great writer. Especially when it comes to data and insights. Yep.

So is it on me now? Yeah, we have a little more time. So let's talk about— well, you know what? Let's leave it with that for now. Let's end it on— let's talk a little more about Patrick and then we're going to wrap this episode. So in the past, we've talked about how Patrick, he sold ProfitWell, it was a great company, it was a pricing company. He sold it for $250 million or so. In the last 12 months or so, maybe a little over 12 months, 14 months or so, he's gone hard on creating content. And so we mentioned before his YouTube Shorts, they were really high quality. He was spending a lot of money per month. He was only getting 100 views per short, 200 views per short. By month 8 or 9, that's when his views started to take off. And then his views would go to like a million or 11 million views per short. And now he has 150,000 subscribers on YouTube. That's just a matter of him Understanding how the game is played and understanding that in business there's certain games to play, in content there's certain games to play. And now he's going to long form because he realizes, he understands that if he wants to build an audience around this and he's going to continue to get more views, he needs to drive people to his email list. And I believe that's what he's doing right now, which is why he's writing these super long form pieces. But he knows there's a progression to all of this and that is a good model to follow. And it's worked well with his business. It's working well with his new business, his new media Media company, I'll call it. And I think there's a lot to learn from that. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and also subscribe to us on YouTube. And we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.