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Grow Your Podcast Audience Quickly
Rip Up The Rule Book - Lets Go
Podcast Tonight
July 23, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
Welcome to your daily dose of podcast growth, monetization, news & more…
Owning Your Audience
Premium Content - If you implement just one technique alone that we send out over the next month, please let it be this one. It will, without doubt, shape the way your podcast grows over the next few months and years.
I spoke briefly yesterday about being at the mercy of podcast hosting and social media platforms and their ever-changing algorithms that no one on this planet can keep up with. It simply isn’t an effective strategy to publish a podcast and rely on software to tell the world about your new podcast episode. In fact, more often than not, you will be convinced that you’ve created your best episode yet. However, when you hit the big red button to shoot your episode into the public domain, it underperforms and disappoints your expectations which is one of the most common reasons podcast creators throw in the towel and stop recording each week as they’re frustrated by slow growth.
The first step to creating a community and building a business or purpose for your podcast is to have one piece of information that is so damn powerful that every thriving business fights for it. By creating insane offers, deals, giveaways, and anything they can legally do to obtain this piece of data, it’s the proverbial gold dust for any business, and that one thing is a good old-fashioned email address! Sounds so boring and from the 90’s right?
Imagine having 1000, 10,000, or even 50,000 podcast downloads every week and not even owning one single email address from your loyal listeners. It’s just the biggest growth killer your podcast or business could experience.
Once you own an email list of your loyal listeners a whole world of opportunities awaits…
The first use case for having a database of listeners at your disposal is by far the most obvious one, which is to notify your fans the moment a hot new episode drops live. This will instantly lead to an increase in your weekly downloads as there’s nothing more important than drawing attention to your show. And what better courtesy to your fans than to notify them there’s a new episode of their favorite podcast?
Second, you can leverage your existing listener base by implementing a referral bonus scheme for your fans to recommend your podcast to their friends & family to earn rewards from you. This could be anything from a shout-out in your podcast for being a superfan that’s referred 10 new listeners to a baseball cap (branded, of course) or a t-shirt for referring 25 friends. This can be done on your email provider to keep everything simple in-house. We switched to Beehiiv at the end of January as they have built this referral feature.
Third, having an email database of your listeners is the quickest way to monetize your efforts by creating merchandise, info products, and courses related to your podcast and its respective niche (we will dive into monetization over the next few weeks).
Sponsorship. Once you get to the point that sponsors start reaching out to you for brand deals to place in your podcast, and you happen to mention that not only do you have X amount of downloads a week, but you have an email database of your fans, they will be biting your fingers off to affiliate themselves with your podcast💸💸💸.
So, the small step to success for today is to set up an account with an email provider. We highly recommend Beehiiv as they’re breaking boundaries with their features and pricing within the newsletter industry (this is in no way a paid promotion, we just absolutely love this software). In fact, Beehiiv is FREE until you reach 2,500 subscribers, which is sweet.
Whichever platform you choose to host your emails, set up the account today and take the first step of being in charge of your destiny.
Tomorrow, we will cover the steps of setting up a landing page and driving your listeners there to build an awesome email list.
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The Mike O’Meara Show
Comedy Podcast
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News
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Bourbon Podcast Hits #1 on Apple Podcasts in Hobbies Category Bourbon Podcast, a top source for whiskey news and reviews, has topped the charts on Apple Podcasts in the hobbies category as it nears its 100th episode. The podcast is released every Thursday and boasts thousands of weekly subscribers along with over 90,000 social media followers. |  |
MARC ROSE’S PODCAST JOURNEY
Marc is a talented musician, amateur mixologist, and ferret-wrangler from the West Coast. He owns an award-winning audio design studio called Fuse in the Pacific Northwest. Marc has even won an Emmy award for his work on NBC's "Shamu TV". However, it's best not to ask him about chem-trails or Florida. |  |
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? I'm an audio post-production engineer, voice actor and composer, living in Portland, Oregon. Have produced an award-winning radio series for public radio called "Dry Smoke & Whispers Radio Theatre". Have also produced audio imaging for radio stations all over the world. | What inspired you to start a podcast? I started, for the first time, in 2005 with a show called "Area51" which was always in the top 10 comedy shows back then. It wasn't till 2015 that I decided to try it again with a slightly more "topical" slant, yet still full of the audio cartoon spice that makes Fusebox what it is. |
How did you come up with the name of your podcast? Fusebox is a logical merging of the name of my audio production company, "Fuse" and the idea of a "Soapbox" a place where one’s personal ideas about the world around us can be discussed. | What is the main focus or theme of your show? We like to say it's "quirky conversation and comedy" but the tagline of the show is, "The Show For Everybody...But Not Everybody Will Like it" which is quite true. The show is sometimes very topical; politics, entertainment, pop culture, and then can become completely surreal at other times. An example is our pilot show which was made to sound like it was recorded in 1950.  |
Have there been any particularly memorable moments during recording that stick out to you? There are always surprising moments when working with talented folks. One instance involved the recording of a nine year girl saying, "WTF, Florida!" We had to clear it with her parents first though, but she was absolutely fabulous and although that bit was recorded nearly 10 years ago, we still use it today. | Who has been one of your favorite guests so far, and why? We've had many, but for me anyway, it was Bob Blackburn, who is the heir apparent of the film maker Ed Wood. What's next for your show – any exciting plans we should know about? We're beginning our 11th year soon so, expect anything, anywhere, anytime, for no reason at all. |
A special thanks to Marc Rose for sharing his insightful podcast journey thus far and we wish his all the best with his continued podcast growth.
If you would like your podcast journey featured here for free please email the editor on [email protected]
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Podcastpage.io is a user-friendly, all-in-one website builder tailored specifically for the needs of podcasters. |  |
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