BONUS - How to Grow Your Podcast with Colin Gray

In this bonus episode, Buzzsprout's Head of Marketing, Alban Brooke, sits down with Colin Gray to discuss Colin's new book "Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Audience."

Grab the book at ThePodcastHost.com/PodcastGrowthBook

Connect with Colin on Twitter @colinmcgray and @thepodcasthost

Record your podcasting question at Speakpipe.com/Buzzsprout to be featured on a future episode.

Review Podcasting Q&A in Podchaser to let us know what you think of the show.

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Transcript

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Alban: 0:00

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Podcasting Q&A. This is Alban on the head of marketing for Buzzsprout. You're probably not used to hearing me on the podcast, but I got a podcast interview that I really couldn't pass up and I wanted to bring it to you. In this bonus episode, I'm talking to one of my good friends, Colin gray, of the podcast hosts calm. Colin's been writing about podcasting for over 10 years. He is the creator of the popular editing software, alpha two. And he recently published a book called podcast growth column. Thank you so much for joining me on the show.

Colin: 0:35

Hey, Alban. Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.

Alban: 0:38

Yeah, it's great to have you. Yeah. So to start, I just read the book. I love it. There's tons of actionable insights on how to grow your podcast audience. I guess to start, I just like to hear why you and Matt decided to write a book.

Colin: 0:51

Yeah, actually, you know, I should give credit where credit's due to Matthew that way more into this than I did. So should really be home here in the seat. It was him and Lindsay Harris feel as well. So having Lindsay really lead on there. So they contributed to it. So yeah, I have to thank them for that. But we're the reason we came up with the idea was really it was we wanted to we wanted to get something out there in the world. That was the next level podcasting, you know, education. So we the biggest question we always get as our own launch, I'm sure the same with you, as well. Albin, like people that come along and see how do I get my podcast out there in the world, and then they disappear into the ether and you, you barely hear from them again. And next, you know, the podcast is defunct, it's fallen off, it's fallen by the wayside. And this was really our attempt to answer that next stage question which people always struggle with, which is how do I then make it achieve those aims that I always wanted to, you know, how do I make it all work for me? How do I grow that audience? And there's a lot of growth advice out there, we have a lot on our website as well. But we really, we found that when we are working with people, when we're coaching people through, it takes just you know, growth is a funny thing, because it's long term, especially especially with podcasting, it takes a little bit every day, a little bit every week, a little bit on a regular basis, it's not one big thing. It's a little bit ongoing for a long term, which makes it work. And that's really the premise behind the book, it was the idea of just putting in as many different tasks as many different activities as many different tactics that can take anything from just a few minutes, up to you know, a couple of hours, but most of them are really short and actionable. So that was kind of the the idea behind it really, to try and give everyone out there one place to come to get as many different growth tactics as possible, really

Alban: 2:45

well, the book is broken, like you said, into, you know, dozens and dozens of these actionable tips. And you explicitly right, in the beginning say, nobody should be trying to do everything in this book. Yeah. So many tactics, and it's very easy to see them and maybe get overwhelmed. I think you should do everyone. But really what you should be doing is kind of flipping through and finding which of these. I mean, honestly, they're going to end up being for you experiments. Do you want to try to see if it will resonate with your audience?

Colin: 3:18

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, there's, there's lots of different types as well. So absolutely, you could go in and I mean, I The way I see it working probably best as somebody picks it up, they have a flick through the packer chapter, possibly, that seems to resonate with them. So something like, you know, helping yourself by helping others. Or, also we've gotten here, we've got like user surveys, we've got social media, we've got communities, that kind of thing. So pick one of them even, and actually just work through each of the tasks in that chapter one a week. And I think one a week would work really well, because it means that you've just got you know, you've got your podcast making time, but attack on an extra 1520 minutes. And you can do one of these growth tactics and start to grow. And I think if you I mean, we're we're not fans of hyperbole over the podcast host. We don't kind of guarantee anything, but if there's anything I can guarantee is if you did one of these tactics every week for a whole year, let's say by the end of that year, your audience will be unrecognizable in terms of size and engagement and, and everything. So yeah, I think that's the intention behind it.

Alban: 4:23

Yeah, I love your mindset from the outside, or from the outset is, if you can do some of this every week for a year, you're gonna be able to see some real results. I recently looked at just some industry data for podcasting. There's right now over 1.5 million podcasts. And people often feel overwhelmed when they see those numbers. But if you just limit that to podcasts that have 10 episodes, and are still active, meaning they've published in the last 90 days, now we're down to 600,000 podcasts. You look at all the biggest podcasts. There's certain things you can learn about how they've grown but one of the big Glenn's it's just they've stayed consistent for years and they've tried new things. And they've found things that work for them their audience, would it be okay, if we just kind of went through and touch some on some of the sections from the book?

Colin: 5:11

Yeah, for sure. And you know, I'll throw a couple of stats in there, too. You're absolutely right on that, that 600 K or so that's, that seems like a lot of competition. But then I just looked at ease. Recently, the number of blogs out there, so you want to start a blog, there are last dilutes numbers, we're looking like something like 600 million 600 million blogs. And on YouTube, I can't even I couldn't even find a measure. When I looked at how many YouTube channels how many YouTube videos are aware, because it's changing so quickly. And it's in the billions and billions. And it was something like the best that I could find was something like, there's they're uploading, like millions of hours, every minute of you on YouTube. So it's a it's ridiculous how much competition there is out there on all the mediums. So 600,000 podcasts to compete with is really nothing compared to that.

Alban: 6:03

Especially when you think, you know, with a world of billions of people, there's lots of people who eat no matter what your podcast is about. There's people who are listening to it, who are interested in listening to it. And the main problem is connecting you the podcasts, to your potential fans. So the first section that really stuck out to me, was the section enabling your existing audience. And I love this because word of mouth is still the most common marketing channel. Even with sophisticated ads, and social media and all these different channels. Word of mouth is still number one is how people learn about everything. And this whole section is really about enabling your audience and making it easy for them to share your content. So what are the some of the tactics that kind of stand out here?

Colin: 6:51

You know, this is one of my favorites as well, actually, just because it's like you say it's the easiest one. And it's the one that act just about everyone can do. Because you can do this, no matter how big your audience is, like it's effective, even if you've only got 10 people and many ways never means having 1000s of listeners. And some of them are so simple, but they still get forgotten. And it's amazes me sometimes. So I started with just actually thinking about your website. So how do you make it really easy on your website for people to help share your stuff. So even simple things like share buttons isn't It's crazy how many people we we get asked to have a look at their podcast, like, I can't grow my podcast, and we go along to their website. And they don't even have share buttons on their, their website for each of their episodes. So somebody, Lesnar comes to their website that looks at look at the show notes. And there's nothing on there to share on you know, Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, whatever it may be. So get a good plugin. And use it. There's tons of them out there for WordPress. And many of the other CMS platforms have these as well, you can just pair social media sharing button directly on your website, make it really simple. The other one that I find a lot of people don't do, which is really effective, is actually just be really good with your calls to action, or CTA is whichever we want to call them. So make sure on your podcast and on your website, actually, you're you're giving them a call to action every single time. And I really like the quite personal ask, you know, this is something that we always do on our podcast is we just we take 30 seconds at the end of the podcast to say, you know what, if I can ask you one favor. If you've enjoyed this content, I hope we've given you some value today, I hope you've enjoyed that hope it's been worth your time, if you think it has, please do go out there and find just one or two other people and tell them about the show. Find one or two other people that you think will enjoy it, you know, a friend or colleague someone at work, take that time and just mention the show to them and see if they think it would be useful. If they don't know podcast and get on the phone and show them how it works. That would be very much appreciated. If you could take the time to do that it helps us grow our audience. You know, just actually, it's a little bit of time spent on it 30 seconds a minute. And it's a personal asked, there's a bit of personality in there a bit of emotion, you know, put yourself in there and give them that proper direct call to action. And the important part there as well as this kind of ties into our whole approach how we've written the book, but it's, it's specific, you're telling your listener your audience exactly what you want them to do, like literally step by step, go and find this person. Tell them about our show, if they don't have on the phone already go Apple podcast there. So I love those really kind of specific calls to action and they work so effectively when you do them in a personal way.

Alban: 9:36

There's another one from this section that I really liked called personal outreach to your true fans. And every podcast and TV show and blog has a core of true fans, people who really love the content. You know, the people that are actually they know you release every Tuesday and Tuesday at noon, they actually are refreshing their feed looking for it. It's a very small Not out of the audience, but they exist as soon as they exist. These are the people who you really want to bring them in, and make them feel like they're part of the show. So I just I loved this tactic, you know, you're saying, send them some, send them some swag. Get on the phone with them, ask them how they found the podcast and what they enjoy about it, what questions do they have, that they would like you to be talking about on the podcast?

Colin: 10:25

Yeah, the other one as well. Related to that maybe is, you know, creating memorable links as well. And this is another really simple one, like using a tool like cat like pretty links, or there's a few other good redirect tools out there as well, just to make relates to the call to action, at least to talking to your existing listeners, it's giving them something really memorable. That's the downs that you know, we love podcasting, podcasting is brilliant, but the one downside of it is that people are out in their cars, they're walking their dogs and washing the dishes. So if you give them a go over to the podcast, source.com forward slash publishing forward slash home slash how dash dash dash.do all this stuff and the URL, they're never gonna remember. But you get your Pretty Link and just do the podcast host comm forward slash makes an SEC. So using tools to really make those really memorable links make it really obvious, can make it really simple. And we actually came up with that there was a structure around our podcast with pod craft, for example, we just say pod craft dotnet, forward slash 106. And that's Episode 106, you can make it really simple that way. And that redirects to the ratios paid. So having a structure having those memorable links, so people can figure out the nowhere to go, that can make a huge difference to to people hitting your show notes page, and then therefore sharing it or engaging more or just being a more regular part of your audience.

Alban: 11:48

Yeah, this sounds probably pretty basic to a lot of people. But I can tell you from doing conversion rate optimization, just, you know, normal marketing things on a website, just changing the location, or the phrase of a link changes the percent of people that click it. And if you're asking people to, and that's just when it's on the page of links there, and they would click one link versus a different link. The difference in click through rate when someone has to remember something like the podcast host.com slash publishing slash, bests. Mike's like all that does make it very difficult and the chances people are going to remember that dropped to almost zero. And so making these pre links, makes it easier. And it isn't just so that the person listening to the podcast can find it, they could click it the show notes. Now they can remember it. And when they tell someone else, oh, here's where you should go. They can actually remember where to send somebody.

Colin: 12:48

Absolutely. And you know, it's a funny thing I find as well working with people on growth. So many people, they want to jump to the big tactics, they want to jump to the fancy new, fashionable things like, Alright, my strategy is Tech Talk, I'm going to use Tech Talk to grow my podcast because everyone else is talking about that right now. And it's I'm going to spend five hours on it every week. And that's going to be how I grow my audience. But they haven't, you know, cross the T's and dotted the eyes in terms of the really simple stuff. Like you said, you know, this does sound basic, it does sound some of these things do sound simple, but they only take five minutes to do. And then they're done forever, you know that you know, the share buttons, you say, or they're just setting up your simple link, and setup and all these other things we've gotten here that just take 510 15 minutes, one off tasks, there's plenty of big ones in here two big, fancy, meaty, long term strategies. But those small things are gold, like get them done once at the start. And then work your way up. Don't be Don't be afraid to do those basics to really set the groundwork and then get to the fancy strategies that are kind of, you know, trained base that you can really jump into.

Alban: 13:57

Yeah, like thinking of marketing. In general, as we're trying to build something up, you have to make sure you have a firm foundation. And a firm foundation is going to be a good website, that you've kind of made sure all the technical things are in place. You have shared links on there, you've made it easy for people to access. It's mobile friendly. These things should all be basic, but often they're Miss, they're missed. And then if you're doing things like saying, you know later maybe we could talk about pack podcast advertisement next. But if you're doing advertising, and you're sending people to a website that's broken half the time or is not mobile friendly. Well, you're going to quickly realize nobody subscribes. And you'll actually write that tactic off and say, I'll never do that one again. But that's actually a huge mistake, because it probably wasn't the tactic that was broken. It may be that the foundation was there not that wasn't there to support that tactic. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's

Colin: 14:56

like It's like the the classic example of you know, conscience. on bringing in new customers, when actually there's, you're only converting half a percent on your website, because, you know, yeah, the copy is terrible or the buttons are bad, or there's just a broken form somewhere, you need to make sure that place you're sending them first is, is golden first and then concentrate and bringing in more people.

Alban: 15:19

I like it. Well hold podcast advertising for later, because there's another one that's before that, that I love. And it's online communities.

Colin: 15:27

Oh, yeah.

Alban: 15:28

So what's the value of joining or creating a community to grow a podcast? Yeah, I

Colin: 15:35

mean, the, there's, there's a bunch of value, I think in online communities, especially in, you know, if you start your own online community, there's the the obvious ones, which are, you know, starting to give your listeners a place to talk to each other. So they feel a part of something, they feel a part of something bigger, it's not just a one way conversation anymore, because you're speaking out, but then they can kind of, they can talk back to you in that community. And that just feels so much more powerful to the listener, they're so much more likely to hang around long term and be a part of you your journey, then. But the biggest kind of the biggest one that I love that isn't so obvious is just the fact that it really powers your content. You know, if you've got a group of 100 200 1000 10,000, even listeners and your online community, they'll be asking questions all the time, not just a view, but of each other, that we're having conversations there'll be, there'll be sharing their tidbits, and you can use them to power your show. No longer do you have to look around for eight years, you know, you just have to delve into your community and see, what was the last thing that was asked, What's the most common thing being asked right, and how it just helps you follow those trends and really narrow down exactly what your listeners want, and give the best content. I mean, that's the best growth tactic out there is actually just give your listeners put into your podcast, the content that your listeners really want, solve their problems really strongly. And they'll always come back no matter what. So yeah, that's, that's kind of one of the best, the best benefits of creating your own community to me,

Alban: 17:06

you talk about creating your own community, and then you talk about leveraging an existing community. And the thing I like about leveraging existing communities is, oftentimes, it's hard to connect, let's say you start a new podcast, and it's about classic cars, it's hard to build that community from the ground up, especially when maybe you only have 50 listeners in the beginning. But if you go to your ground online, there's already communities of 10s of 1000s of people who are talking about classic cars, and there's probably one on Reddit, and there's probably 15 on Facebook, and there's a one a slack group, and you can go and join the communities. And then you can share your podcast with people in the community. So you're actually leveraging an existing network that's already there. And like you said, you get a lot of ideas, you what may seem obvious to you may be a very common question. Do you have any thoughts about how to balance if you are joining an existing community? Maybe before you start your own? How do you make sure you're not just spamming the group? And you're actually going to be welcomed when you share your podcast?

Colin: 18:14

Yeah, yeah, it's all about gifting, isn't it, it's all about that, you know, you need to spend a little while at the start, you know, a month, a month, two months, even just contributing, just get them there and given as much value as you can. And I like, I like making this quite structured as well. You know, just, it's Wednesday, four to five, Wednesday, at the end of the day, Friday, at the end of the day, four to five, whatever it may be whatever suits you. That's my community time. And I get in there every couple of days. Some people are enthusiastic enough to get in, you know, a lot. You don't want to take over, of course, because it's kind of good growth. But it can you know, you can get drawn into these things and waste too much time. But yeah, get in there and contribute a few hours a week for a couple of months. And there's no doubt that people will start to trust you, they'll start to know you. And they'll start to take your recommendations. And if you're answering questions and given value, and you have good resources, good tools, a good show that you can share with people, it goes on naturally, it's not sailing. So as long as you don't do it immediately, you know that first two posts, where you start suddenly selling your stuff already. You're selling your show, it's kind of tricky. But now if you build the groundwork, you're all good.

Alban: 19:27

Well, you and I both teach podcasting. So I feel like this is the examples that naturally popped to mind for me. But if I joined a podcasting group, and just started posting two to three times a day, hey, here's my tutorial on how to edit a podcast and Audacity. It would actually would not go over well, even though it's great content for that community. But the minute that somebody else says, Hey, I'm trying to do this edit in Audacity, how do I do it? How do I do set up my new microphone, and then you go in and you answer the question. Fully, if you say, here's how to set the mic, here's what you're looking for. Here's the common pitfalls to watch out for. Now that I've told you those, I'm going to also recommend that you also you, you know, read the rest of this blog that I wrote. Yeah, yeah.

Colin: 20:15

If you want some further detail, if you want more detail, right, and

Alban: 20:19

then people are going to be excited to click on the link rather than frustrated that you've been spamming their nice group.

Colin: 20:26

Totally, you're not holding it back, or you're given the info. You're teaching them how? And they just say no, this is just in case it's useful. Here are some extra, if you want to go and see it. Yeah, absolutely. Totally agree.

Alban: 20:36

All right. So you've got this other section. That is, I think this is gold, because what you're doing is you're teaching SEO and content marketing, without all the jargon. And you're actually doing it without using expensive tools. And SEO tools can get very expensive very quickly. So it's this section being found easily, I guess, to just a high level, why do you think content marketing and SEO are a natural fit for podcasting?

Colin: 21:02

I mean, I think it's it's one of the most under estimated parts of podcast growth, actually, because because we're an audio we kind of forget, but the fact that we can still be found really easily via text, and actually spending a little bit of extra time just to do your show notes, just to think about the podcast titles to think about how you structure your blog posts that go along with the podcast, otherwise known as your show notes, is so so valuable, because, you know, we we want to appear in iTunes and Apple podcasts, because that's our natural search engine. But Google and YouTube are just so much bigger in terms of the reach they have. And people search in Google people. People don't tend to search, you know, our podcast directories for a query for answers to questions, not necessarily. It's not, it's not a common way to do it. You'll never go to Google and you're doing text instead. And people will want a text answer often because they want something quick. But if you can have your show notes there, your title is a question. So that's a big part of the SEO it's in that question, research that keyword research. So you know, what questions people are asking in your topic in your niche. Then you title the podcast by that not the name. So it's not. Today I'm speaking to Colin gray, or to the I'm speaking to Alban Brooke is I'm speaking about, you know, I'm answering the question, how do you start a podcast? Or how do you choose a good maker, whatever. That's the title. That's the SEO part, then people find that they read a little bit of the text summary, but they see this little player, Oh, what's that player, load your player, I'll place play on that, see what it is. And it, let's say draws them into the podcast. And it's huge, actually. Because not only are you finding podcast listeners that way, because podcast listeners still search that way. But your search people that don't even know what a podcast is, you're creating new listeners, you're not competing for podcast listeners, you're you're creating new podcast listeners, you're you're searching from this completely new pool. So that's why I think about it so strongly.

Alban: 22:59

Yeah, I think that that's a great way to put it. And just seeing those questions, he kind of raises the question in your mind, in your mind, you know, if you see, what's the best microphone, you kind of go, Oh, I know, I have a microphone. But I wonder if it is the best one? Well, why don't I use an episode to find out? Rather than just saying the answer or the topic, you know, hey, I talked to Martha about microphones, you know, saying what's the best microphone kind of draws your interest in a bit more? You write a whole section on keyword research, finding the right questions to ask, and how to know, you know, what to make your podcasts about? What are some of the ways people can find topic ideas that are going to have a chance of getting surfaced in Google and attract listeners?

Colin: 23:47

Yeah, there's some great tools out there. And I'm sure I'm sure you know, these well as well. But But and one of the best is answer, or do I always get mixed up as the answer the public or ask the public? I think it's answered the public. But if you search both if it's wrong, anyway, it's a tool where you look it up. And all it is to start with it's quite an awkward like Google, you just type on your topic. So if I type in podcasting, or podcast, then it creates this big web this visual web of questions on screen. And it has why questions what questions Who questions and these are all mapped out like a mind map? And you end up with all these questions and and answer the public shows you all these questions that are commonly asked around your topic and is absolutely brilliant, because it just you can get in there and you can get 100 topics via podcast easy. Doesn't matter what topic you're in. It will get dozens and dozens of questions. And it's so good. So yeah, have you used that before album?

Alban: 24:44

Yeah, absolutely. So you you really you can just hop on answer the public any type in anything. So going back to that classic cars example you just type in classic cars and you'll get questions like what are the most expensive classic cars what why to classic cars looks so much better than new cars. Are there any of these type of classic cars left? Whatever the question may be? A, it's basically going through and finding all of the things people are searching on Google. And then you have hundreds of questions to kind of go off of. And it's really nice, because if you were doing a podcast on something, you're probably a subject matter expert, or at least you are, well, more well versed than the average person in the thing you're talking about. And well, you probably have is what we call the curse of knowledge that you know, something. And so you've quickly forget what it's like to not know it. And so like, I'm using this classic car example, I don't know anything about classic cars. And, you know, the questions I would have are like, you know, Is this considered a classic car, I don't know, what are the top three or four of them. Whereas somebody who's been in that world for years, kind of assumes everyone knows everything. And so they only get down into the details. And so it's really good to use these tools. You can always use those. Google also asks questions that pop up in search results, pulling your own audience.

Colin: 26:11

Yeah, I love Cora as well. Cora is great. Like, get on Cora qu RA, if you haven't come across it and just type in your topic again. And you just got all these real questions like answer the public scrape for all these, it shows you the most common questions, but Cora is actual people that you can see the person there as well. And you can even answer them, you can answer them and talk about your show, like, similar to the communities idea, give them an answer and say, Oh, if you want some more, here's a link to my blog post on this, which also includes my podcast player in case you listen to podcasts.

Alban: 26:40

I yeah, I love Cora, as well, for that reason, you could put it in there. And people love it, when you take the time to answer it fully. It's one of these areas that you can actually do really well, by spending a little bit of time and caring about what you're writing. You know, a lot of the answers are very short and often rude. For some reason somebody took the time to be rude online, not gonna be that surprising. But you could just sit down and you spent 15 minutes answering someone's questions. Well as you can, at the end of it, you have a link saying and if you want to learn more, I did a podcast episode about this. Well, that actually might be a link that ranks in Google results for years and gives you new listeners.

Colin: 27:23

I love the fact as well to answer the public. It's it shows you these really unusual questions quite often, like I every time I go in, there's different questions because it's always updating its data. And and you get these trend based ones as well. So you'll get all the top long, sorry, all the top short tail ones, all the ones that are kind of like high search volume, but you'll also get some ideas that are quite very, quite specific, quite small. And they're great in podcasting. Like they're not so good and blogging, because in blogging, really you're going for the volume, you're going for the search volume. But with podcasting, you're more often than not, you're serving existing listeners. And if it's a trend based one, if it's a sort of smaller, more niche interest one, it's the kind of question that's probably going to draw any existing listeners, it's gonna, they're gonna go Oh, that's cool. He's just, that's on my mind right now. And, and, you know, Alban's know talking about on the show, it's, so I love just checking in every couple of weeks at least, and seeing if there's new things popping up in there, too.

Alban: 28:21

This is actually my favorite part of the whole book. I think if you want to learn about SEO, if you want to learn about search engine marketing, content marketing, if you want to learn about those areas at a very beginner level, without a lot of jargon, without all these expensive tools, you just want to get started. I think, Colin, I think your book is a very good way for people to be introduced to these ideas. Without a bunch of jargon, that's gonna kind of scare everyone away.

Colin: 28:48

Thank you. I'm glad it comes across that way. That's great. That's the intention.

Alban: 28:53

So let's go and maybe let's wrap up with podcast advertisements. There's quite a few ways to advertise a podcast, there's apps like overcast and castbox. You can do advertisements in Facebook on Google. What do you think is the best way to advertise for a podcast? Actually, that will actually get you new listeners?

Colin: 29:16

Yeah, sure. We've tried a lot of these actually, in the last year or so because there's so many new ones come out as well, like many of the podcast listener apps actually, more recently have added in like overcast. So we tried the overcast advertising quite recently. And it's actually really good. It's really, it's just so specific. So with overcast, if you haven't, if you're out there listening, you haven't come across overcast, it's a listening app or player app, people subscribe to podcasts in it, and it's advertising supported. So you can actually put a little banner ad at the bottom of the player that has a little you know, a title and a bit of text for your podcast. So you can see what the topic is very quickly you can give a very short benefit. And then when people click it The reason it's so good is again, the downside of podcasting is that it's, it's quite high barrier to get people to listen. Because you know, their longer shows they have to go in and listen to their app. But with overcast are already in their podcasting app, they're already listening to a podcast, it's so easy to click subscribe from there. In fact, the advert takes them straight to the subscribe button. So the advertisements that you can get in these podcast listening apps, I find are really effective. And they actually, they tend to be quite good value, they tend to be quite cheap, because they convert so well. And because, you know, rightly or wrongly, our industry still tends to be quite undervalued. You know, a lot of it is still quite kind of still quite nice, and people are still figuring it out. So we're not charging these high, massive big, you know, advertising fees yet. So, I mean, to give you an idea, we've got overcast podcast addict to do it as well, you've got pocket casts. So there's a few different places you can do it, and even looking at Spotify. So Spotify actually do audio advertisements to their podcast listening app, but you can actually play an advert for your podcast and audio inside Spotify, you just record a trailer, you set up in this podcast, Spotify, advertising studio. And then suddenly, for people who are on a free tier with Spotify, they might hear your podcast advert in amongst all of the other things they're listening to. And it's really well target targeted to like, Spotify is pretty good in terms of knowing demographics and interests. And you can target people who have listened to this type of music, for example. So for certain niches, it's called actually, like, if you're an entertainment podcast, you know that people that tend to listen to, you know, Metallica tend to like your content. And you can target Metallica listeners, that kind of thing. So there's there's a couple there that I really like for sure.

Alban: 31:51

Yeah, I actually spoke recently with Jordan Harbinger of the Jordan Harbinger show. And he's grown his podcast over the last few years, primarily by purchasing advertisements on other podcasts. So yeah, in that interview, he told me he was spending over a quarter of million dollars every year on podcast advertisements, all focused on getting more listeners to the Jordan Harbinger show and he's now getting, I believe, it's millions of plays per month, I think it may be something like three to 8 million is one of those numbers that I know there's a pretty big difference there. But yeah, he is using this pretty well, to get a lot more listeners. I've never found much success with the Facebook in Google Ads versus advertising the apps. Do you have any feelings on those? Yeah, no,

Colin: 32:41

we've tried about Facebook advertising to I think it's worth trying. I think it works for some niches for some topics. But you're right is it's not ideal for everyone. But the The great thing about PPC advertising like that or pay per click advertising letter is that it's really easy to see if it's working quite quickly. So you can always see like, how many people are actually clicking? How many people are they converting into, you know, see email subscribers, or visit a few pages in your website or click the player even if you set up your analytics rate. So you can tell if it's working at least but yeah, you're right is they're not, they don't tend to be. They don't tend to work for everyone, for sure.

Alban: 33:18

I think that castbox is probably the easiest way to go. I'm sorry, overcast is easiest way to go. And then all the other ones including castbox, that's one we've actually used before, those are all quite a bit more expensive, because they put you out in front of a lot of listeners, overcast is quite a bit more focused. So that's probably the place to start. And if you think about it, the average podcast is really only getting about 30 plays in the first seven days of releasing an episode. And so if you were to advertise and get another 100 listeners, even if it cost you a few $100. Well, now your podcast is doing maybe four times as many plays per episode. That's significant growth, just off of a few $100 especially if this is something you're focusing on long term.

Colin: 34:05

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, every every may seem expensive in some ways for each listener, but you should those listeners, you know, if you're putting out good content, if you're giving them value, they may stick around for years, they might listen to hundreds of episodes. And the power of I mean, that other growth tactic you're thinking back to enabling your existing audience, like you said, Alban, word of mouth is still huge. And podcasting. We've said a few times now the barrier to listening and podcasting is quite high. Like it's quite a big step to get people to actually open up the podcast app, hit subscribe, and then lesson for an hour and really get drawn into your content and become a fan of it. So the word of mouth you know recommendation is so important because you know what else can can encourage people to do that more than actually the trust they have and other people you know, somebody they know seeing? You're going to enjoy this. It's worthwhile half an hour, an hour. Do you have time to figure that out? On top of that, I'm just looking through the list of the advertising when actually one of my favorites and here I remember talking to Matthew about this one was the event sponsorship one. I think that is one that hardly any podcasters generally think about. But it's so valuable, because think about your topic, there's many, many podcast topics out there around sort of hobby niches, maybe TV programs, or board games, or a video game or you know, something like that quite kind of hobby niche things. And there's so many meetups and events, and different places where you can meet other people that do that thing. And in many cases, they're quite community driven. They're not professional events, they're not like, they're not run by a company who is like charging a fortune for sponsorship, quite often, you can go along to these events and say, you know, if I buy everyone a drink, that's gonna cost me 100 pounds? And will you let me sponsor this, like, literally just put my podcast all over the place and mention it in the newsletter that goes out? just telling people about the details. And more often than not, people say, Yeah, absolutely, you're gonna buy everyone a drink, that's amazing, I'll tell I'll do anything, I'll tell them to do anything. I find that the board kind of community based event sponsorship type approaches could work really well. And you don't even have to go to them, you can just start your own. So like I'm based in the UK Originally, I can look around and just find a few meetups and some of the bigger cities and just get in touch with him and say, Look, we do this podcasting app, would you mention that if I like Chuck you 200 pounds to buy everyone around by the end of the night, and they're all it? Yeah, totally go for it. So events, but event sponsorships really useful. And it's, it's ties in a little bit to the M, the word of mouth thing as well, because then you're getting to know the event spot, the event organizer, the event organizer gets to know you, you've given them something. And therefore they're then using Word of mouth to pass on to the people that trust them. Because you know, people that come to an event, they trust the event organizer, they see them as an authority, and therefore their recommendation is really valued. So it's kind of a, it's a really good way to pass on that authority in that trust, I find,

Alban: 37:18

yeah, that's a great way of putting it. And I love the idea of sponsoring of small meetups to get in front of more people who are perfectly targeted for your podcast audience, the book is great. I hope that people are able to pick this up and kind of flip through and find tactics that are going to be really useful for them. And, you know, you hit a lot of different things. So if you heard some of these, and some of these sounded good, and some of them don't sound applicable. Well, that's kind of the whole point of the book, that there's some things that will work brilliantly for your podcasts and other things that you've probably already done, or that just wouldn't be a good fit. So the book is on Amazon, is it anywhere else? Are there places you prefer people to buy it?

Colin: 38:01

Just on Amazon? Actually, we've only we've published it through Amazon on Yeah, so that's the only place so if you get we've got a short link for it, though, talking about short links, which is the podcast host.com forward slash podcast growth book. It's not a short podcast, the podcast hosts.com forward slash podcast grew with book but if you search just podcast growth on Amazon, too, it pops up first.

Alban: 38:24

Well, we'll include a link in the show notes for this call. If anyone else wants to follow you or ask any questions is the best place to connect to you on Twitter or somewhere else?

Colin: 38:34

Yeah, Twitter's generally the best place to ask any questions or company account to the podcast host and I am Colin MC curry on Twitter. Well, great. Khan.

Alban: 38:43

Thank you so much for being on the podcast, and hopefully we'll talk to you soon.

Colin: 38:47

Thanks for having me. Cheers.