Ask HN: How do you grow a pod? Justin Kan here. Been trying to grow my pod The Quest (https://listen.justin.quest), would love to hear some tips about how to best scale audience and distribution. Atm downloads averaging ~3K/week, trying YouTube next. Feedback on pod welcome too! |
You already have more downloads than I do, so you can take my advice with a grain of salt.
- My written articles have done well and drove a bunch of signups to my newsletter. That introduces people to the podcast (substack lets me do combined newsletter/podcast). People are more likely to share and read articles, and the really interested ones tend to listen to the show as well.
- I use Descript to make YouTube clips of the show, and link to the full episode, where people can listen to episodes. I've found that a successful YouTube video doesn't drive that many sign ups/subscribers to the show, but drives subscribers on YouTube.
- Some influential guests on the show drive a "pop" when they retweet their episode.
- It took about 3-4 months to show up on Google when you search for "Software at Scale", but that drives some organic traffic.
- I get some of my new subscribers for the podcast by posting in relevant subreddits like r/programming. It's a struggle :-)
I see podcasts just like businesses and I am not as successful in either as you are, so you can take my advice with a grain of salt, so here are my basic 2 cents:
- You currently target a very specific target audience with your 'happiness beyond success' tagline (I personally liked the Cuban episode a lot). I suspect that the 1% of the 1% currently thinks about this important topic on a constant basis, and this may limit your 'TAM'.
- Your guests are focused on business and tech so people who don't know who Laura Wu or Emmett Shear are may not be enticed to listen to the episodes. Thus, you could expand your guests from other industries who also speak their minds about mental health, success and life beyond success (e.g. Michael Phelps in sports, Demi Lovato in music, the Kardashian family in entertainment/business).
- you can explore shorter versions for different platforms (speculative, but maybe Spotify users listen to longer pods compared to Youtubers who prefer shorter videos)
My startup[1] works with a good amount of podcasts on a daily basis and here’s what we have seen work for them:
- SEO is still king (publish transcripts as blog posts, write detailed episode descriptions, tag each episode properly)
- Cross promotion works wonders (appear on other podcasts, plug yours)
- Reel them in with Clips (share multiple clips of each episode on all your socials, have a separate clips channel on YT if possible, ask your guests to promote with Clips or audiograms)
This advice can be applied to all podcasts and we have really seen podcasts benefit from them. Let me know if you (or anyone in the thread) has some specific questions about any of these points. You can reach out to me on Twitter (in profile) if you want to discuss everything a little deeper!
[1] useCastup.com