The Secret Way to Effectively Grow Your Podcast Audience That No One Is Doing

There are people who already love your podcast; they just don’t know it exists yet. Growing your podcast audience is hard if you just wait for them to find you. But when you control who learns about your podcast and are able to find the people who really want to share it, you change the narrative. In this post, Dan R Morris shares his secret strategy for growing your podcast audience by finding your future fans instead of waiting for them to come to you. There are thousands/millions of people with a vested interest in sharing your episodes; let’s get your show in front of them!

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Read the Blog Post: The Secret Way to Effectively Grow Your Podcast

How do you market your podcast if you do not have podcast guests with large email lists to promote your show?

When we research podcast marketing strategies, this is often the kind of answers I’m looking for. How to find the right guests and how to get them to promote you.

Unfortunately, if you have a narrative podcast, you can not leverage this information.

You are going to have to come up with something else to help you find people who are interested in what you are narrating

These people already want to share the podcast episodes you are releasing without you knowing it. They actually want to share this information. I am going to show you how to find them.

I’ll also introduce you to the different tools that I use.

Everyone Loves To Share Funny Videos

If you have been on Facebook lately, you’ve probably come across people sharing a Jimmy Fallon video. Maybe you even shared it yourself because you thought it was funny and thought your tribe might find it hilarious as well.

I know my wife Rachel, who runs a motherhood site, occasionally shares a Jimmy Fallon video when he is talking about moms.

She knew the group will appreciate it and have a good laugh together, which will ultimately have a positive impact on her business.

For every single episode you create, there are people who want to share it immediately because it can influence their standing in their own online community.

Onto my secret strategy For growing your podcasts audience.

1. Note Down Everything You Referenced

The first thing I do with every episode after recording it is to note everything I referenced in the episode.

Any city, person, profession, product, era, historical references, famous people, etc

For example, in one particular episode, I mentioned the Tour de France, Thomas Jefferson, Canals in Ohio, the city of Cincinnati, President Rutherford B. Hayes, Dayton, Tennessee, etc

In another episode, it might be Juicy Fruit, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Rand McNally, Satchel Paige, or Comiskey Park.

With a narrative podcast where I write the story, it’s easy for me to go back over the story and then just take notes.

In your case, you might want to hire someone on Fiverr or Freeup to listen and take notes.

Or just do it yourself. It’s not as hard as it sounds.

2. Set Up Talkwalker

For step two, I use a service called Talkwalker. Some people still use Google Alerts, but I can not confirm how reliable the service is.

Either way, the idea is to take our list of topics and start tracking whenever they have been mentioned online, anywhere on the internet.

I am particularly interested in Reddit, Twitter, and blogs.

Here is a practical example. Let us say you made a note of Comiskey Park in Chicago.

You type in Comiskey Park and tell Talkwalker, “If anyone mentions Comiskey Park on Twitter, Reddit or blogs, send me an email alert.”

That means you will go through your list and insert as many keywords as you can.

I believe Talkwalker allows 30 notifications at a time before you have to pay for the service. So you can start with the free version while you figure out how everything works.

Now that you have entered all your keywords and key topics into Talkwalker, you can wait for the notifications to start rolling in.

Every day you will receive alerts with a list of all the things that have been said about your keywords

“This was said on Twitter, this was said on Facebook, etc.”

You’ll quickly find out which of your keywords will be helpful and which will not.

In one episode, we talked about the history of “Wonder Bread” When I type in ” Wonder Bread” as a phrase, I got all kinds of crazy stuff like “You are as white as Wonder Bread” or “My Wonder Bread fell apart.”

These had nothing to do with the history of Wonder Bread in the United States!

My point is that in the first few days you will quickly learn which searches are completely useless. You can delete them and narrow down your search.

This means that you will refine your keywords to make sure that you reach exactly the people who are interested in your topic. This is so critical if you want to grow your podcast audience effectively.

I think you can see where we are going with this.

3. Start Connecting with These Individuals

On Twitter or Reddit, it’s not hard to connect with people because there are open conversations and it’s so easy to join a conversation via comments.

You might even ask a question. If the person responds and you can say, “We did this episode on (X topic with the link). I’d like to bring it to your attention.”

90% of the time people will write, “Thanks. That’s great, I can not wait to hear it.”
I have given them something that is very relevant to the topic they were just discussing.

Once you start engaging, some new exciting things happen.

You start to figure out who are the people interested in these topics.

I’ll give you another example here.

Pizza Almost Never Existed

In one of our episodes, we talked about the history of pizza and the cholera epidemic in Italy.

If it was not for the cholera epidemic, they would not have started frying the dough. Pizza would never have existed!

When I recorded the episode, I did not realize that there were people who were really interested in this kind of content– actual cholera historians!

I sent the episode to them and on several occasions, people said, “You just made my day. This is fantastic. I am going to share it with my group.”

Basically, I just used keywords to find out who had an interest in the episode.

If you can find the right people and they can share the episode with their group, you will have a much broader reach.

It takes a little bit of work and time. The hardest part is probably refining your keywords. If you have one good keyword that gets you a few good leads a week, that’s not really good enough.

You only have 30 slots before you have to pay for the next level. So make sure you make them count. You need keywords that will deliver at least 30 good mentions on the specific topic of your podcast episode.

Hopefully, that will lead you to the people who can publish your episodes in their newsletters, magazines, or even YouTube videos.

That’s what I do as a history narrative podcaster to generate interest and grow my podcast audience exponentially.

About Dan R Morris

Dan R Morris is the CEO of Audience Industries. Along with PodcastersKit every October, he runs three podcasts, including the popular Tracing the Path podcast. Dan is also a Director at Podcast Magazine.

• Visit Dan R Morris’s Bundle: Podcaster’s Kit
• Check out Dan’s Podcast: Tracing the Path Podcast
• Read Dan’s Column in Podcast Magazine
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