Lazy ways to grow your audience

The best way to learn how to do something well is to give it to someone who is lazy. The thing is, an ambitious person can make any quick task super long and complicated. 

We do NOT want that. You want to do quick, effective things that can attract the right listeners to your podcast, right? 

Here are 5 ways to do just that.

Transcript

The most common post in podcasting forums is help. My podcast is not growing. I don't have any downloads.

How do you promote your podcast? I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. Okay, now I'm gonna give you five quick tips, things you can do or not do that will help you bum bum bum bum bum.

Jumpstart your podcast growth. So here we go. Here are the five things.

Number one, stop saying rate and review my podcast. Very few listeners know how to do any of that. When you tell them to go to Apple podcasts, you're losing a potential half of your audience that listens on Android.

What can you do instead? I'm not leaving you just with a don't. I'm leaving you with a do. If you really want feedback on your podcast and you're going to use it for your promotions, ask people to take a screenshot of the episode and upload it to whatever social media platform they want and tag you if you're there.

What you can do with that screenshot is endless. But honestly, ask yourself this. If you are your main CTA or you use the CTA at all, remember to rate and review my podcast because it really helps us get discovered.

Ask yourself this. Have you ever discovered a podcast? From going to podcast reviews and looking there for a new podcast to listen to, most people are very quiet when I ask that question because most people don't do that. Most people still 20 years in, get their podcast recommendations from word of mouth.

So encourage your listeners to do word of mouth. Number two, in your titles of your podcast, your podcast titles front load the keywords in your podcast apps. Go ahead and look.

You have, what, three or four words before it gets cut off and they have to actually click on the episode to see the full title. If you have guests, if you put the guests or some sort of like beginning joke or a lot of filler words in the beginning that don't have keywords in there. If listeners are looking through, they found your podcast great.

They're looking through the different episode titles. They're looking for some words to pull them. You don't give them any keywords.

They're not going to click on anything. They're likely to go find another podcast and look at keywords from there. Pull your keywords first.

One exception to that is if you have a celebrity on your podcast, apparently putting their name first turns into a keyword. But if it's not a celebrity, and I know you love your best friend, but let's be honest, they're probably not a celebrity. If it's not a celebrity, pull the keywords first.

The most important keyword first. I know it's not as creative of an episode title. I understand this stunts your creativity to some degree, but you have a choice to make.

Do you want to be discoverable by keyword, by topic, by something that somebody's searching for a listener is searching for? Or do you want to be creative by yourself? That is your choice. I'm sorry for the tough love today, but these things need to change. We need to be smart about wanting to grow our audience.

We have to make conscious decisions about what to do to grow them. And we have to put our creativity a little bit aside on these small things because these are practical things that help people find us. Once you get into your podcast, episodes go crazy with your creativity.

Please do. Number three, submit your podcast everywhere. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, PlayerFM, Alexa, blah blah blah James at Pod News has a long list that he keeps updated on where to put like every platform to put your podcast in.

Go there, make a spreadsheet, track it. You only have to submit it once and then it's done, done, done, done, done. Yes.

Each one has different instructions, so it takes some time. My favorite tip is to put podcast distribution as one column in your tracker for your episode publications. And if you don't have one, let me know.

I can send you a template and have one at the one column that says submit to one platform and do that until you get through all of them and then go back and check cause James updates it. So if there are any new ones, you want to make sure to get on there. Submit everywhere.

I don't care how tiny the platform is, those are potential listeners and it takes you just a few minutes to submit to each platform and you only do it once and then you're in there and then it just goes by your RSS feed. So every time you send out a new episode, it automatically goes in there. Submit everywhere I'm not necessarily talking about YouTube.

Let me know if you want an episode on that. I probably need to do a whole series on YouTube, but I don't know. Comments let me know.

Let me know if you're watching this on YouTube and you like these tips so far. Please like and subscribe. If you're listening to this in audio, please do.

As I said at the beginning, screenshot the episode, share it on your social media. Tag me off media. I'm on everything except for TikTok and Xdev.

So that's one, two, and three. So one was to stop saying rate and review, start saying screenshot and share. Two is front load your keywords and your episode titles so people will actually see what the episode's about.

Three, submit your podcast to every platform. I don't care how many months it takes you to do it. If you can do it in small bits or you can spend just the day getting through it.

Either way, spend the time. Number four, your call to actions. I give you a call to action in number one.

But this is so important that this needs to straddle two different areas here. I know you're shy about asking podcast listeners for stuff, but your call to action needs to be before the end. Most people don't even make it to 80% through most podcast episodes.

Most people? There are exceptions. You might be one of them. Check Apple podcast.

Check Spotify for podcasters. Check your consumption rates on those two platforms and see where people go if the majority of your listeners make it to the end. Keep your CTA wherever you want.

Your call to action, the thing you want people to do when they listen to your podcast? Fine. Keep it there. Ignore this step and go on to number five.

Everybody else, put your call to action in a different place. Personally, I like to put them at the beginning because regular listeners will. They don't care.

They're used to ads. People, they live in this world. They will skip over it and actually keep reminding them of something that you have that they might like.

Eventually they might say, hey, maybe it's time I do that thing. If it applies to them, if it's a new listener, they'll probably not pay attention to it the first few times. And as they get to know, like and trust you, they might consider doing that thing.

Put your call to action first now, not before your teaser or your intro. Somewhere in your intro, right? My call to action was a few minutes in because that's where it needed to be. If you have dynamic ad insertion with your podcast host, use that and you can change your call to action on all of your episodes with one tiny message you can put at the beginning and the middle.

Refer to my message earlier about the end. So that is a super handy thing to do for your call to actions. But whatever you do, have one.

I don't care if you're not monetizing your podcast, that's fine. But there's something you want to do if you're listening to this. You want to grow your audience, have your call to action be screenshot the episode and post it on social media.

If your audience is a lot older and you think they're not going to really know how to screenshot with their phone or, you know, they're listening on laptop versus a phone. Okay, don't use that one. Use a different one to tell a friend, email a friend, look at who your audience is with your podcast stats, and make your call to action.

Tailor their behavior. Your podcast stat should tell you information like what kinds of platforms they're listening on, where they live, and so on and so forth. So you can kind of get an idea of who your listeners are a little bit in order to craft your call to action.

If you need help with that, you know who to talk to, or you can leave a comment wherever you are watching this. Also, I use Buzzsprout for my podcast host and you can send a text message to me via their show notes. There's a note at the top that says, send me a text message.

So send me a text message. Ask me a question about any of these things. And if you use Buzzsprout, use that to hear from your audience.

Make your call to action. Hey, send me a question or answer this question. Ask them a question.

For example, if I said, hey, if you're listening to this on a podcast app, hit send me a text message and let me know where you are. I'm curious where my audience is. Let me know about a city.

Don't give me an address. Please do not give me an address. Just give me a city and say hi from blah, blah, blah.

No, seriously, that's, that's another call to action that I'm putting in here. I would love to know if you're listening to this on a podcast app, text me and tell me where you are. I'm in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Hey. Hi. Also, a reminder, before we get to number five, which is the most important one that many people miss, is we're rounding out the end of the free audits this month.

And if you're curious how they went, you can tag the people I've been tagging on social media who've gotten them, and you can ask them how it was. Also, if you would like a full audit, you can go to coffeelikemedia.com services and you can take a look at all of the information that is in the full podcast audits.

One of the biggest ways that you can get a comprehensive list of practical, quick tips to grow your audience. Things you can change, alter, and add to increase your audience growth. So the biggest one, listen button.

No matter where you are promoting your podcast, you need people to be able to hear your voice within one to two clicks max. What does that mean? If you're on Instagram, it means, say, a link in bio. And they can go, boom, click on your bio.

Boom, click on the podcast and listen on LinkedIn, you can click a link and then, so then it would be two, click on the link, click on the play button. So that's two. So very few clicks to get to your voice.

The more barriers you put between the potential listener and your voice, the less likely they are to convert. It's already hard for people to convert over from social media to listening to your podcast episodes. It is not an easy process.

The conversion rate is super low. But you can make it quicker by making it very clear how they do it. So make sure you have your link in bio.

The number of times I see an audiogram, I go, oh, that sounds good. And I go over and I click on their bio, and there's no link to the podcast. Then I have to go back to the audiogram because I am a stubborn human being and I have to look at the name of the podcast, which sometimes isn't the name of the account, oftentimes isn't the name of the podcast, is not in the post itself, in the text.

It's so frustrating. I just want to hear the whole episode and they are putting barriers up. Don't be that person.

Put your link in the bio. Tell people the links in the bio. Link in bio is a very common phrase on instagram.

On other platforms. You can put the link. Put the link, please, for the love of everything audio, put the link so people can listen to the episode.

Okay, so those are five to recap. One, don't ask for ratings and reviews unless you've got an amazing marketing team. And even then, I bet you would get more traction if people screenshotted and put it on social media themselves.

Two, front load your keywords so people can find and find the episode and so that they know what it's about when they're scanning. Number three, submit your podcast everywhere. It doesn't matter if it takes time.

If you do it, it'll eventually get done. Four, have your CTA early and have it clear and have it match your stinking audience. Five, have very few clicks to the listen link.

Make sure that people can listen to your voice soon after they start clicking. All right, if you do these five and they work for you, which they will, or if you do any of them and you start seeing an increase, I love seeing download graphs. Yeah, download graphs that go up my favorite, my absolute favorite.

Even better if you start getting engagement, tag me on social media. I met Steph Fuccio. Easier to spell is I'm also @coffeelikemedia

Also, you can go to coffeelikemedia.com if you want to find out about any of my services, listen to any of my other podcasts, my clients podcasts. Get more information about that podcast audit or my other services that I do to help people.

You know what? Sound more like themselves in audio and in text. They can grow their audience and reach their podcast goals. If that sounds like you, copylikemedia.com,

I'll see you next time. Bye.