Welcome to Podcast To Connect, where we help you navigate common podcasting challenges. These could be workflow, audio quality, marketing, or all of the above. We want to help you streamline these things so you can get to the connections faster, enjoy them, and spend more time with the connections you make through your podcast. Because you will.
You will make those connections. Whether you're a small business owner, a community leader, or a hobby podcaster, it doesn't matter. These tips will help you get to the point where you can relax with creating and marketing your podcast and focus on the people you'll meet through it.
Hi, I'm Steph Fuccio of Coffeelike Media. I have just started an audience growth month on Podcast To Connect, where I'm going to help, hopefully, a lot of folks reach more of their ideal listeners, more of the people they want to have in not just their podcasting community, but their content community or their life.
To be quite honest with you, this month I'm going to dive into eight different tips that will help you streamline all of that stuff so you can get to the connections. These are the eight things I find that most people do that stop the connections from happening. So it's more like a "don't do this, do this instead" kind of thing.
So, number one today is number one. Number one, I want to help you think differently about your social media posts. For example, when you have a new episode and you say, "Hey, new episode here," and you put a link, you might put an audiogram, you might put a quote, but oftentimes folks just put a link with a pretty picture of the guest.
Or, if it's not a guest episode (because podcasts are not just interviews), they put some information, but the new episode and the link usually come first. I want you to think of at least three different buckets of folks that you could be talking to on your social media to invite them into your podcast, into your connections, your networking person, or group.
One is your current listeners. Your current listeners probably need very little nudging. They probably need the smallest amount of information to know, "Ah, I gotta go to my podcast app and listen to this episode soon."
So your "Hey, I have a new episode" post might work for them. I still think it's good to have a little more information because they're probably listening to more than one podcast. To get them to go to your podcast episode sooner than later, it would be good for you to give them a little bit of information. So, what's more effective than just saying "new episode"? A little bit of information, then hashtags, and maybe tagging people.
Put the value first. Take the stuff at the bottom, the nuggets of value that they'll get from your episode, put that at the top. Maybe form a question, maybe have a shocking idea or something you learned from the episode, something they can learn from the episode. Don't worry, you're not going to give stuff away so that they won't listen.
What will happen is they'll want more, and the more is that play button. So, have the value stuff first.
Then you can learn more about this, something like that, in the new episode. Then have the link or the play button, depending on where you're posting it and what's available to do in those places. So, there's that.
That's group one: current listeners. Group two are potential new listeners. These are the harder folks.
This is the hardest group of folks because they're going through your social media relatively quickly and you need to capture them. You need to get their attention. So, you need not more flash (although sometimes visual flash, depending on the platform you're on, is good).
But you need more information, more value, shorter text, but more powerful text. Long paragraphs explaining X, Y, and Z just don't work on social media most of the time. Again, it depends on the platform.
But generally speaking, to get people's attention, you need powerful, practical, short, concise, keyword-heavy text. By keyword-heavy, I don't just mean to optimize things for computers. I mean to get people to understand the main things you're talking about.
If you have "new episode" first and somebody doesn't even know you have a podcast, they're just going to keep scrolling because "new episode" is not going to help me eat better today. It's not going to help me understand my anxiety. It's not going to help me grow my podcast audience.
I need important words at the beginning of the post. So grab people with some value, then explain to them or tell them or share with them that they can get more stuff like this in your episode. Maybe describe your podcast with a quick elevator pitch for your podcast.
That would be good information. They'd be like, "This episode sounds good. Oh, I can listen to it."
That sounds okay, but I'm just so busy. So, if you give them a little bit about the podcast and the podcast sounds like it meets a need that they have, they're much more likely to go listen to that one episode because it looks like the whole podcast might help them.
And then, of course, wherever you can put a link would be good. Hashtags, tag people who might be interested. The third group of people are people that you're probably going to say, "No, they're my competitors."
These are the people making similar podcasts to you. They're not your competitors. You are all the lens to the information, the tips, and the conversations that you're having.
You're all doing it slightly differently, but you all have a common interest in that content area. So, what you can do is not just build up your audience base, but you can build up your community around that content. And you can do this by sharing, for example, some behind-the-scenes information.
You can share what you maybe learned from creating that episode, whether it be from another person (if you have a guest), from your research (if you do research), or just in the process of creating the content. You might have learned something about your thought process, about how you think and feel and maneuver through that content, that topic, that idea. That's something you can share. I call this a "process post" because it's behind the scenes or it's like in your head.
It's what happened after the record button was stopped, what happened after you got off the mic, that kind of information. Or it could actually even be before, it could be while you're preparing it, depending on the type of episode. It could be on the conversations you've had or why you selected guests, why you picked that topic. So it could be before or after.
It doesn't involve the microphone. It's all the other stuff. That kind of stuff, that kind of geeky behind-the-scenes stuff may very well interest the people who are also interested in that content area.
When you do these types of posts for that third group of folks who are people making similar podcasts or YouTube channels or articles or content in other ways and forms (because it doesn't just have to be podcasters), tag them. If they're not on that particular social media, literally go and find their contact information.
Send them an email or DM, wherever they're listed, and tell them you mentioned them. Sometimes nothing happens, but sometimes they'll go, "Oh man, I've been so swamped," or "I haven't looked at that yet," or "I'm rarely on that particular social media, but I'm going to hop on there now and blah, blah, blah," you know, engage in that conversation. What you're doing with all three of these posts is you're not just getting people to go over to your podcast to listen to it, but you're starting conversations about the content.
And those conversations build momentum that will get not just the people that see it, but other people in their networks to see it. And it will build a momentum that'll be much more powerful than just, "I have a new episode, press play," and we're done. I hope you consider doing at least two of these three different kinds of posts.
There's probably more. There's definitely more. But if you do at least two of these for each new episode and do them in the different ways that I talked about, I think you'll open up your audience growth to more than just who you're talking to right now.
Remember, just like you talk differently to your family members than you do to your friends, than you do to your teachers or your boss, your partner, your. I mean, all of your different, the different people that you talk to on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, monthly basis, who you talk to, how you talk to them online is also different in different spaces, and it's different for different people that you're talking to in these different spaces. It's not as complicated as it seems.
You do this already. Naturally, when you talk to people in your daily life, it's just a little bit of intentionality before you start writing that post. And then, after you're done with the post, maybe say something like, "Who is this for? Does that make sense for that person?" And then post it with tags and hashtags, you know, tag people, hashtags, all that kind of good stuff, a nice picture or video or what have you.
All of the things. All of the things. People are getting better and better at all of the things to make posts look nice. But there's still a lot of posts that don't have that content and that tone and that connected quality that can really attract the kind of people that you would want to talk to.
So, I hope these tips have been helpful for you to expand your audience base for your podcast. I'm sure you have a lot more things that you'd like to know about your specific podcast, and I am happy to offer you a chance to get a free podcast audit this month. Don't get caught up on the words.
Audit just means formal feedback. This is just organized feedback
Audit just means formal feedback. This is just organized feedback about your podcast. There is an entry form.
I am selecting one person every Monday for this and they will get a free podcast audit from me. All the information is on www.stepfuccio.com.
I will have the link in the show notes or video notes, depending on where you are consuming this. I'm also doing these tips on the podcast to connect podcasts twice a week for the entire month. Hopefully this works for you in expanding your audience base.
If it does. If it does, do tag me on the hashtags. Also, Coffeelike Media is also in all of those places except for X or TikTok. I'm on everything else. So I hope to I look forward to hearing about all of your audience expanding experiences and the connections that come from them.
Because it's not just the downloads of those do tell a story. It's about the experiences that happen afterwards. Okay, bye bye