9 Proven Strategies to Grow Your Podcast (7+ Years of Experience) | Ep. 2598

All right, so we're going to talk about how to make your podcast more popular. These are lessons learned from 7 years of doing this pod. And what we're also going to do with the bonus here is we're going to share how we're changing things up. Tweet at us if you like this change or if you hate these changes. So Neil, you can go ahead and kick this one off.

Yeah, so the first thing that we learned is podcasting is like index. And just like your website, the more webpages you have, the more traffic you can get. But with most podcasts, once you've been doing it long enough, they only show the last 10, 20, 30 episodes or whatever it may be. Showcase all your episodes in your feed. If you showcase all your episodes, it's like content, just like on your website. The more episodes you're showcasing, the more traffic you're going to get from people searching. That's a big mistake that most new podcasts make and it can impact your views and listens quite drastically. The other thing that I would say that we've learned, and Eric can talk more about this, he has the retention numbers more than I do. Eric, what percentage of our listeners are repeat?

I was going to give you the retention. Let me give you the retention graph first. 85% to 90% of people will listen through our podcast. They're like 5 to 6 minutes each. In terms of people that return, it's actually not as many as you would think because if I pull up our cohort retention graph, Let's say you listen to this podcast episode, maybe 40% will come back for the next one. And then for the next one after that, maybe only like 10% and there's a significant drop-off. And so, that's the quantitative data that we have, right? But then when Neil and I go to conferences, people come up and say, oh my God, I used to listen to Marketing School. I used to listen. I had someone come up to me yesterday at a conference in Puerto Rico and then she's running up to me, right? She's like, oh my God, you and Neil are my heroes. I used to listen to you in college and high school, blah, blah, blah. But I used to listen to you is the keyword here. So. Yeah.

And our podcast is you digest a lot of information, you take action on the strategies, and then you end up going from there. And you can always end up listening again when you want more marketing advice. But the big thing that I was getting with retention is the better your retention, the better off you're going to end up doing. When you have crap retention, we find that It's just not as good when it comes to views, whether it's the algorithms within these platforms. We just find that they are tracking retention and how many people are watching through. But even though our retention is high, the caveat I would give is we still get way more listens if our episodes are double or triple the length, even if the retention drops down. So the algorithms aren't just looking at retention for your episode, they're looking at retention for your episode based on how long it is. So they're taking that in factor from what we can Yeah.

And the thing to also speak to too is, so yes, we're approaching 100 million downloads, but I think the way to break through to the next level, which we'll talk about what we're planning to do, I think for the next half of this video, is Neil and I now live— Neil lives about a mile and a half away from me. It's now— it's going to become 0.4 miles away at some point in the near future. And we're just going to be recording a lot more in person. And so, what we're going to do is there's going to be 2-hour recording sessions. And we're going to break things down a little bit. So, we're going to have different categories of shows, right? So, one might be on reactions to news this week. The other one might be experiments that we're running. The third one might be trends or behind-the-scenes stuff we're hearing from other people, right? So, we might have these different categories in that 2 hours and the shows instead of 7 days might become 5 days. And so, each week you have these categories where we're reacting to stuff, giving you experiments and things like that. But each of these episodes now can be 15 to 20 minutes or so. So we're trying to go longer here. We're trying to go more in depth. And we also know that when we record in person, the videos perform a lot better for whatever reason on YouTube, because whatever you're seeing on the screen right now, people are sick and tired of watching these Zoom meetings, these talking heads, right? And sure, this is higher quality, but also like we can feed off of each other's energy. It's more fun in general. And yeah, we're aiming for higher quality, which means higher retention.

Yeah, the other thing that we've learned about podcasts is similar to just SEO. If you do your keyword research and you put in keywords within your title, it makes a massive difference on listens. I don't know why people just don't do this. You can use any of the tools out there for this, but no joke, putting popular keywords in your title towards the beginning generates you way more views than if you don't have popular keywords within your title.

Yep. The other thing is, Go ahead.

And on top of that, just having keywords but not promoting it isn't enough. Similar to how you do like traditional SEO, you want to spend a lot of time with promotion. You know, I've always talked about if you create, if you spend 20% of your time creating the content, 80% of your time promoting, you'll do much better versus just cranking out tons of content. And similar to podcasting, the thing Eric and I don't do enough, but we found it to really boost our numbers, We've done, I don't know what you want to call them, but let's call it shout out for shout outs, right? In which we'll trade impressions, ad impressions. So let's say if there's another show, we'll trade 1,000 impressions for 1,000 impressions or 100,000 impressions for 100,000 impressions, whatever the number is. And this is important because if you have a new podcast with only 1,000 impressions, you can still trade 1,000 impressions and someone else, even if their podcast has 10 million impressions a month, they can just give you 1,000 impressions and you shout out their episodes. or their podcast within your episodes and they shout out your podcast within their episodes. And that really helps juice your numbers and create, it creates amazing, not just fans or subscribers, but it creates loyal ones as well.

So just to speak more to the impression trades that we've done. So we've done one with Jordan Harbinger. He gets a couple million downloads a month. We did one with My First Million as well. And I think with them we did like a $500K trade. And so you use a tool called PodSights. That's one. And so podsite with an S, it's plural, .com. And I think they might've renamed it, but just search for that. You should still be able to find it. And then we also use Chartable as well. So Chartable has a conversion pixel and we can see how it converts and we want, we can see how many listeners are converting over to listening to Marketing School. So that's another thing. Other than that, I think it's, you know, at the end of the day, it comes down to the, if your ideas are good. So you think about, we talked about a couple episodes ago, With YouTube, the total addressable market of your idea, the broader it is, the better, right? And I think the total addressable market also with the idea as it relates to the quality of your niche, that matters too. So whenever we talk about experiments that we're running that work really well, those tend to do a lot better than us talking about more general topics. And so that's why we want to go more in depth with these episodes because we know they're just going to perform better. It's going to be high retention rates also on YouTube. Also, what we try to do in the beginning of these episodes is I try to lead with a hook. At the very least, it's like an okay hook. And then sometimes, you know, the team might find a better hook in the middle of the video and then they'll use that instead. So we are trying to play the YouTube game from a discoverability standpoint. So for long-form YouTube and also for short-form. So like Reels, TikToks, and all that. So we're getting more aggressive with it and I think we're going to start to get a lot better. You'll see this in the next couple weeks. Just look at our YouTube because I'm doing it for my other channels right now.

Dude, and I do the same thing. I used to create content just for YouTube, but now I slice and dice a lot of our Podcast videos and our recordings for YouTube, Instagram, et cetera. It does wonders for us. It performs very similar and it saves a lot of time. But, you know, that goes back to content repurposing. And we didn't do that at the beginning. I don't know why, but we started that years later and we should have started that literally from day one.

Yep. So take that for what it is. The good news with podcasting now is that there's more discoverability because of these short-form platforms. And when we do these live and let's say I'm telling the story, Neil's telling the story, that's going to be good fodder for us to just go ahead and repurpose to our respective Instagram or social channels.

Totally.

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