Podcast Workflows - Tips for podcasters to grow their podcast without wasting time.

I want to tell you about my friend Rose. She's the host of Autism Outreach, a podcast that helps professionals and parents working with students with autism. And recently she hired me to audit her podcast. It's approaching 200 episodes and she's ready to take it to the next level. Her goal is to double her weekly downloads. And this is a great goal. She has a fantastic show already, which is really the first thing that you need to grow your podcast at all. And with a strong base, I know that there's a lot of ways we can optimize her podcast to help more people find it. And I was so excited to help her that while I usually do a 15 minute video along with the audit, I ended up talking for 27 minutes. We walked through a bunch of actionable tips from optimizing her show's title and description to updates to her call to action and doing more podcast swaps. And she was really grateful for it. She said we are nearing 200 episodes and I needed a fresh set of eyes to help me level up the show. Joe did an amazing job of really digging into my show and giving me actionable tips and strategies that I can start implementing now. So I want to tell you in today's episode some of the things that I helped Rose with. I'm going to tell you five key changes that you can make to start growing your podcast. And this isn't going to be huge shifts in your content, hiring a team, or putting a ton of time and money into ads. Because those things can help, but only if you already have a good foundation to attract the right listeners to your podcast. So today we're going to get in to the fundamentals. Hey everybody, my name's Joe Cacibona. Welcome to Podcast Workflows, which provides insights into how to improve your podcast systems and workflows, allowing you to create and grow a high quality podcast by showing you how to best spend your limited time. So let's get in to today's topic. Okay, so there are five key changes that you can make to grow your podcast. This all has to do with the packaging or the presentation. And I should say right off the bat that this is going to depend heavily on whether or not you have a show that's aligned with an audience. And so before you walk through these things, I would strongly recommend that you define your podcast mission statement. I have a whole article and episode about that that I'll link in the description for this podcast. You can find everything over at Podcast Workflows. But your podcast mission statement basically answers three questions. Who is my target audience? What problem do they have? And how does my show help them solve that problem? Because you can't package up your content for somebody if you don't know who you're packaging it up for. So before you even dive into these five changes, make sure that you're clear on those questions. You need to have a goal and a specific audience or a specific niche in mind. I cannot stress enough, if your podcast is for everyone, it is for no one and none of these things will help you. Because if you're trying to talk to everybody, then it's going to get ignored. It's going to feel like people aren't, that you're not talking to those people. So define your mission statement first. Who's your target audience? What is their problem? How do you help them solve their problem? That's the ultimate goal of your show. So with that in mind, let's get into the five key changes that you can make to start growing your listenership today. And this is going to be like more listeners, but also better listeners, like because people who you're actually trying to reach to grow your business, to sell your services, your products or to or and or to create really good content for them. So number one is look at your title. Does it clearly communicate the value proposition of your podcast? And does it have a tagline that uses the exact words your audience is looking for? This is super important to not just have a title, but to have a tagline. This is going to be extra words at the end of your podcast title. So for example, my, well, this show is called Podcast Workflows Dash and here's the tagline, tips for podcasters to grow their podcast without wasting time. I have the name of the show and then I have the audience and why the audience should listen all in the title. For my other podcast, that's called Streamlined Solopreneur Dash, tips to help busy solopreneurs free their time. You can see I'm all about the time saving stuff here. I've got three kids and a business and a family and I want to make sure I have enough time for all of those really important things in my life. But both of these taglines, right, if people don't catch the drift from the actual name of the show, Podcast Workflows and Streamlined Solopreneur, they will understand from the tagline who the audience is and how they are helped. And so you want to identify a keyword or a couple of keywords based on your mission statement that you can put into the title and the tagline because this is how people are going to search for your show as well. Before I rebranded the Streamlined Solopreneur, it was called How I Built It and that was fine for a while when I was interviewing developers on how they built whatever, you know, their product or whatever. But I stopped asking that question in 2020. And so the title didn't really tell anybody what the show was really about. I added a tagline that included the words solopreneur and creator and coaching calls and that did help. I saw like a 20% bump just by adding the tagline and my show was showing up in the searches I wanted to. But the title was a real detractor. And so I knew it was time for a rebrand because people didn't know what they were getting. Imagine going to a store and just seeing like an aisle of white boxes, right, or like cardboard boxes with prices on them. Are you going to buy that box without really knowing what's in it? Probably not. So that's your title and tagline. Both are super important. Number two, does your description read like a movie synopsis? You need to hook people in the first line, like in a world style, right? Like we all know that that's like the stereotypical intro to a movie title. But we need that sort of thing, right? You're setting something up. Don't waste space with in this podcast, podcast workflows, you're going to learn X, Y, and Z. That doesn't hook people and you're wasting precious space. Waste that you only have like a few lines to convince the listener, right? Or the potential listener. Instead, you want to open with a leading question. You want to open a curiosity loop with the listener. So for this show, if you look at the description, it's do you love having a podcast, but hate the amount of time you spend on it? Do you feel like you're spinning your wheels? And that's probably in like in mobile apps, that's probably where the description is going to cut off. But do you feel like you're spinning your wheels trying to grow while also putting on a quality show? This is for you, right? If people are saying yes to those questions, then they should listen to the show. And I once, you know, like a quote unquote marketing expert told me that I should never open my copy with a question because it gives people the opportunity to say no. And I wish that I had the presence of mind back then, or maybe the experience back then to push back. People should say no. I don't want people who would say no to these questions listening to the podcast because they're not going to get anything from it. And so you should think about that too. Again, by trying to talk to everybody, you are going to inadvertently exclude the people you're trying to reach. And so with your description, you should open a curiosity loop. Again, for my other show, the Streamlined Solopreneur, it's a little bit more of a concrete description. It's going to say, what if you could save 12 plus hours per week in your business? Wow, like, wow, that sounds good. Being a solopreneur sometimes focuses too much on the solo part, doing all the jobs, figuring things out yourself and spending too much time in your business. But we didn't start our own business to spend all of our time at our desk, right? So if people are like, yeah, I agree with that, then they should listen to the show. So that's number two. Make sure your description reads like a movie synopsis. Don't waste precious time with things like, in this podcast or the name of the podcast. Again, people already know it's a podcast. They already see the name of the podcast. You don't have to put your name as the host in the description, at least early on in the description because people are going to see your name too. We'll get to that in a minute. We want to optimize those first two lines for maximum curiosity. Okay, number three, does your artwork stand out? This is going to be a little less concrete. I'll give you my best tips, but this is really going to depend on your show. Make sure your artwork is eye catching and avoid using photos of yourself or of microphones. So faces, there's a trend with podcast artwork that people have faces on their podcast artwork because that's what YouTube recommends. Faces draw attention, right? But the difference between YouTube and podcast artwork is you have a lot more space on a YouTube thumbnail than on podcast artwork. And if people don't know who you are, then your face isn't going to attract them. So instead, and actually I have anecdotal evidence on this because I put my face on my podcast artwork for a while and my only change I made, downloads plummeted. And I was talking to another podcaster and podcast producer. Her name is Tracy Hazard. And she ran this experiment and ran this data with her and her clients too and found the same thing. So don't put your face on it and don't put a microphone or headphones on it either because people already know that they're about to listen to a podcast, right? A book cover doesn't have a picture of a book on the cover because you know you're getting a book. So my best advice here is to do a search for the terms that you want to rank for in Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Look at the artwork there and see where your eye is drawn, right? And then I would say like a solid color or light gradient, the name of the show in big letters that should be like the only text on the artwork. And then an image or icon that clearly communicates what your show is about. I think a really good example of this is from a client I'm working with. It's about car dealerships. There's the word roadmap and the artwork has this road that's like really eye-catching popping road with little map icons all along it. I think that's a really good imagery for what they're doing here. And so something like that, right? I'm not a graphic designer. I worked with a graphic designer on my artwork, which is sand going up through an hourglass, which hopefully communicates to you like you're getting time back, right? That's hopefully the imagery that I'm creating with my artwork, but it's not my face. It's not a tagline. It's that one image, which based on feedback I've gotten is good. So like that's good imagery, right? And then like show it to people if you're unsure and be like, hey, what does this artwork say to you? But like definitely don't have a picture of yourself and definitely don't have a picture of a microphone or headphones like that's just like that's tired. Okay, so look at your title and tagline. Look at your description. Look at your artwork. Number four, are you using the host field effectively? This is like a little known one, right? But there's like the author or host field in your podcast host where you put your name. And this is a place that people don't consider, but there's more information there, right? So my friend Rose, who I told you about earlier, who hosts the show Autism Outreach, Rose is a smart lady and has a bunch of letters after her name. But if you look at the show, well, before the audit at least, it just said hosted by, you know, the author field just said Rose Griffin. So I told her one of the things that she should do is take all the letters after her name and put them in the author field or the hosted by field, because then you don't have to waste that space in the description and you can clearly establish authority. And that's really important information, especially for her topic where people don't just want anybody talking about autism. They want someone who's qualified to talk about autism. So if you look at my titles, right, for this show, it's going to say podcast systems coach, because that is what I do. And that should give some credibility to why you should listen to the show. If you look at streamlined solopreneur, it says parent plus solopreneur, right? So it's like podcast systems coach may not mean a lot to those people, but the fact that I'm a parent running my own business, because that's my target audience will mean a lot. So leverage that space. That is, we want our ultimate goal here with our packaging for our podcast is put as much relevant information in front of the listener as humanly possible, which means reduce redundancy, use terms that they use, create a tagline that answers the question, what's in it for me, and tell them why you're qualified. And we have a lot more spaces to use that than we think. And then number five, are you leveraging the right category? This is tough because there's not a lot of hard data, but some categories are more competitive than others. So make sure you're choosing the right one for your show. These categories help people find your show better, and it helps apps surface your show to the right audience. So how to is like a good catch all, but a lot of people are in how to, right? If you are talking to parents about parenting, and it's like how to parent, sure, but like kids and family or kids and parents might be a better category, right? Or maybe mental health is a better category there, right? If you're helping people deal with the stress of gentle parenting or something. And this is something that you can experiment with, right? Well, my other show is currently in the business colon management category, but I'm probably going to move it someplace else while I do some tests to see if that helps, right? This show is currently in business marketing, and so I need to follow up on the data. That's not, you know, initial test show, that doesn't really help. So I might move that somewhere else, but I need to figure out where, like what's not competitive? Where would people look for this? Is technology the place where it needs to be? And you can look at the top charts in these categories to see what kind of shows, right? Because there's no guidance really. I will link to a resource that looks at how competitive each category is, and then you can kind of make a decision based on that. But don't sleep on the category. That's another place where you can change it and see if it surfaces to different people or the right people, right? So these are the five things. Look at your title and your tagline. Does your description read like a movie synopsis? Does your artwork stand out? Are you using the author/host field? And are you leveraging the right category? Remember that none of these things are set in stone. While we were talking, while I was recording this, I was making some slight tweaks to my description, right? I was looking at my categories and saying, "Oh, is this right?" I updated my author field to be parent plus solopreneur. So this is a place where you can experiment. Like set something, let it go for a month, see how it goes. Do you see an increase in downloads or a decrease? And then make another change. But these are things that you can play with that will not take you a lot of time, that will yield results. Making a change to my tagline got me a 20% increase in downloads month over month, right? Changing the name of my podcast is... Now I did this around a time where Apple is making changes to how their downloads work. But so my downloads are technically down, you know, again, like year over year, because last year, Apple was downloading way more episodes when someone subscribed. But I'm seeing more people join my mailing list. I'm seeing more traffic to my website. And I'm seeing more click throughs on show notes. So I'm seeing positive results from these changes I'm making. And I know you will too. And hey, if I talk through all of this, you know, like, how do I know what to change? Are there other things that I could look at? Yeah, these are the first five things I look at. But I have like a nine point growth framework I look at when I'm auditing podcasts. And so if you want to take the same path that Rose and many others have taken, I can give you specific advice tailored to you and your show like I did for Rose, right? I didn't just walk Rose through these five things. I said, maybe this could be your tagline. Change your description to this. Add these things to the hosted by here are the categories that I recommend. And so much more. I talk again, 27 minutes, I recorded a 27 minute video for her. So if you're interested in that, you can go to podcastgrowthaudit.com and you can buy an audit from me. And there's also a self-paced template too. It's a lot cheaper. You're not going to get my advice. But if you want to do this yourself, there's a do it yourself option too. So again, that's podcastgrowthaudit.com. Another piece of advice I give is a good clear call to action. And I don't think it gets clearer than that. Podcastgrowthaudit.com. But that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Everything I talked about will be in the description, including a link to the podcast growth audit, a way to give feedback and all that fun stuff. But thanks so much for listening. And until next time, I can't wait to see what you make.