Eric Siu shares how he grew Marketing School to 600k downloads a month and Growth Everywhere to 120k. He emphasizes consistency, repurposing old episodes as nurture sequences, getting guests to promote episodes on social, and running giveaways tied to email signups or reviews. Paid ads, Facebook groups, and cross-promotion with other podcasters are additional levers.
Okay, so in this video I am going to talk about how to grow a podcast. So for those of you that know, I have 2 podcasts. One's called Growth Everywhere, that one gets about 120,000 downloads a month. And then Marketing School, we're about to break about 600,000 downloads a month. We started that in August. So, you know, we have a little experience when it comes to the world of podcasting. So I want to give you some tips because I think it's going to continue to get bigger and bigger because you see it, you know, the fact that it's appearing more in cars, people are talking about podcasts they want to listen to more. How do you get into the game of podcasting? I think this is, you know, we're still in the really early stages of it. You know, you think about the days of blogging when it started to get really big. I think, you know, podcasting is getting there. It's getting bigger and bigger. It's growing, you know, I think 17 to 20% year over year. So I guess one of the first things when it comes to the world of podcasting is consistency. So just like blogging, you have to establish a kind of schedule that your audience can be attuned to, your audience can kind of expect. So if you're doing a weekly show on Mondays, keep it on Mondays, keep it at the same time so people know what to expect. It's almost like watching a TV show too, right? You want to have it at the same time. What I would also say is, you know, as you continue to build up that library over time, Don't be afraid to repost the content as long as it's relevant because not everyone's going to see the same stuff that you have. Just, it's just like having an email nurture sequence. You have your best content in there so people can see it because not everyone's at the same chapter. You know, someone in your audience might have consumed everything that you have and they might not be happy that you're kind of repurposing stuff. But for the most part, most people haven't seen your other stuff and they'd be happy to see it. Like for my interview podcast Growth Everywhere, We repurpose a lot of the content because it just makes sense, because a lot of these stories are evergreen and we're just trying to get these stories out there so people can get new ideas. Stories don't change. We want people to get at least one actionable thing to do and they can go back and go out there and grow their business. So the other thing is, this actually ties in with marketing school, is, is, you know, having really good titles. So You know, we try to make sure, you know, before we do each podcast, Neil and I will look through the titles people give us ideas and we'll redo the titles to make them better because we know good titles are gonna get people to click. Try to do the same thing to an extent to Growth Everywhere, but mainly we just show kind of numbers to try to get people to, you know, to entice them to click. And what happens with that one— I'm like losing my breath here— but what happens with that one is that, you know, most people are Well, I should say my editor, what she does is she will send me ideas for titles and then I'll go ahead and edit the title that I like most and then she'll go ahead and get it out there. And then also we make sure that if we're interviewing people, we email them when the interview goes out and they'll help push it too. So hopefully they can get their team to help promote it, get their social people to promote it, and that helps a lot, especially when you have Let's say like if I were to interview someone like Tim Ferriss, he's got a really big audience. Hopefully he tweets it, maybe he pushes it to his email list. I know that when I interview like venture capitalists, for example, it helps because some of these lists are fairly sizable and people, you know, get to learn more about Growth Everywhere. And, you know, they hit the Growth Everywhere page, guess what? I'm gonna retarget them and hopefully get them into the funnel. And then the other thing is, speaking about the funnel, is email. Emails, right? You want to make sure that you're emailing your list. You can use— we use like a blog RSS feed and it pushes automatically on Sundays for new Growth Everywhere episodes. And then on Mondays it pushes— I'm sorry, new Marketing School episodes on Sunday. And then on Mondays it's new Growth Everywhere episodes. So we have that automated. So automate what you can. Paid ads is really helpful too. You know, Russell Brunson, if you go to marketinginyourcar.com, he has a free plus shipping offer. Basically he's giving away this MP3 player with all his episodes of his podcast on there. And that actually does well for generating subscribers and it does well for getting people into his funnel as well that will come back and buy. He's actually profitable on the front end on that funnel and it's working really, really well for him. And I think it's something that we're looking into as well. It's just good to see what other people are out there doing and see if you can make it work for yourself. So if you do actually have a podcast, consider that as well. You know, you can go to the site like Alibaba and get more information around that. So other thing you could do is giveaways too. You know, giveaways where you might, you know, let's say for me, I might reach out to my favorite SaaS companies and say, hey, I'm looking to give something away to my audience. And I'll say, hey, like if you want to get into this giveaway, well, you know, you need to, you need to leave a rating and review. I need to show that you did it. Or, you know, you need to, what do you call it? You need to subscribe to our email list or you need to, you know, you need to follow us on Instagram. So just choose one goal. I'd recommend choosing one for each giveaway that you do. But a lot of these SaaS companies, it's really almost no cost to them to give away a piece of software. And you know, for them to get that kind of publicity, it's definitely worth it. So you can consider that. And then cross-promo as well. You can have, let's say, you know, I get Tim Ferriss on my podcast, maybe he gets me on his, which is unlikely. But you know, being able to cross-promote and build relationships with other people. And also go to like, you can go to Facebook groups as well. And then also you can use communities as well. So if you're doing like a marketing podcast like mine, you can go to inbound.org, you can go to growthhackers.com, you can go to Slack groups as well. A lot of different ways to do it. But these are just a couple ways that we found to be really effective when it comes to growing a podcast. And we're hoping to get our podcast to, you know, 2 million downloads a month for Marketing School. And, you know, for Growth Everywhere, hopefully around 250,000 a month by the end of this year. So hopefully this helps. Let me know what you think.
