Ep 85: Are You Killing Your Podcast’s Growth?

Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Lazy Girl's Guide to Podcasting. I have a different setup going on at the moment. I am currently, and I am not exaggerating at all here, I am currently in the corner of my bedroom Everything, including me, is sat on the floor. My microphone is balanced on my knee. The reason for this is, where I was recording in this spare room, which I was using as a little podcast studio, has now been turned into a bedroom for Dear Daughter 2, which is wonderful. Don't get me wrong, I'm just very happy with it. And we had a great weekend as a family designing it, putting it all together. But, um, But it means that the podcasting studio, and I'm very much saying that in adverse commas, is now corner of my bedroom and my husband's bedroom, whilst we now figure out how we are going to make that go forward. But actually, I've already been testing out the sound on GarageBand. I'm now recording in Descript and I'll come onto that in a little bit, but I was recording in GarageBand just to, just to play around with it. And actually, I feel that the audio is actually a little bit better because it's carpeted in here. I'm talking into like a bit more of a corner, so I feel like the audio is a bit better. I'd be interested to know what, what you all think. As I said, I am recording in D script at the moment. I have for been recording in Riverside. You all know, but I'm a huge, huge advocate for Riverside. But I just found that, I dunno, I just feel like it's been kind of glitchy over the last few months or so. So I don't know, it could just be me, but I decided that I was going to take the opportunity canceled my subscription. This isn't hating on them. I was just finding that, I don't know, maybe it's my bandwidth. I don't know. But I've cancelled my subscription to Riverside and I'm now taking the opportunity to try out a few different things. So, I was playing around with GarageBand but then I decided, actually, I have a free account on Descript. Why don't I trip over to Descript again? I used it at the beginning of the Lazy Girls Guide to Podcasting. So, I'm going to try it again. So, here we are. But we're not talking about any of that for this episode. What we're talking about for this particular episode is, are you killing your podcast growth? And you're probably thinking, no, I'm doing absolutely everything I can to make my podcast grow at an amazing rate just no verity. What are you chatting about? But I think you could possibly be killing your podcast's own growth without even realizing that. And I'm going to explain that to you and then stick around until the end of the show where I'm actually going to give you three top tips that you can implement today. To make sure that you are actually growing your podcast at a rate that you want to be seeing results from and getting your podcast to whatever that point is that you define as your podcast being successful. So do stick around for those top tips for how to grow your podcast at the end of the show. Let's unpick this Are you killing your podcast growth? And it's that idea. I feel of Podcasters just being scared to make changes, you know, we start with a certain status quo You know, we stick with the same software the same tech the same marketing, whatever it is, we have systems and processes in place. And that's great. But I think it's really important to realize that people are creatures of habits and therefore by default, podcasters are creatures of habits. And I think that there's this massive conversation to be had around people being scared to change things because we don't like major changes. So why would we want major changes in our podcasting? And, you know, changes could be anything. It could be, like I've said, how I have decided to stop using Riverside. temporarily, might be permanent. We shall see. And I'm experimenting with Descript or I might even go back to GarageBand. That's a change that some people might think, well, I'm not going to do that. But actually through one way or another, it might. improve my podcast growth. It could be that you find that you have this little bug at the back of your mind that you need to change your podcast name or even just tweak your podcast name slightly. Maybe you want to insert some more keywords or any keywords at all that people are searching for to find your podcast into your show name, but you're scared to do that because, well, what if I rebrand and I lose all of those listeners? Yes, but what if you rebranded and you gain loads of visitors as well? And, you know, that was exactly my experience with my first podcast. It was originally called bloggers creating courses. I was really, really worried when I changed it to the confident CEO that I was just going to lose all those listeners. But actually what I did was I. Saw exponential growth with that change with that name change because it was much more specific I was using keywords that people were searching for and I carried those through to my show notes through to my episode descriptions through to the podcast description as well And I think that's another key point as well is looking at your show notes. Are you somebody who's maybe just used a couple of lines before? And actually you could be writing show notes that are much more in depth. And if you're thinking verity, I don't have the time to do that. You could use a free tool such as chat GPT. You could use paid for systems such as summarize or cap show. And those tools will really help to flesh out your show notes. Get those keywords in there and it could be that you change the format of your episode slightly That again could be huge. So I had so many people, when I got rid of the introduction for Lazy Girl's Guide to Podcasting, being like, oh, what are you doing? But everyone said you need a podcast intro, and all these kind of things. And I just think, you know what, if you want a podcast intro, like, you know, a formalised one with music and stuff, fine, and I'm not saying I'll never go back to that, but what I am saying is that it seemed like a scary change to implement, and not have a kind of, you know, traditional, quote unquote, Intro for my show, but actually I found that it's been really, really great at retention for the podcast. And it's given people the opportunity to message me in DM, particularly on Twitter and say things like, Oh, it's actually given me the confidence to, to do this myself. So what I mean when I say, are you killing your podcast growth? I think a lot of it is podcasters kill their podcast growth by sticking with a status quo and sticking with strategies that just aren't working. And I think sometimes we need to be really critical with ourselves and look at our show and if we're not growing in the way that we want, and that growth by the way, can look awful. So many different ways. It could be growth in terms of download growth. It could be growth in terms of audience retention. So having your audience listen to your episodes for longer. That growth is going to look different for every single podcaster. And we need to be out of the mindset that growth doesn't exist. Always equates to more downloads, but I do honestly think that a lot of people get in the way of their own podcast's growth because they're not willing to try new things. So that then brings me on to these three tips, which I promised you that I would give you about how to grow your podcast and you can implement these today. So the first thing is to tell everybody about your podcast. The number one way of getting new listeners and new ears on your podcast is. to tell people about it. Word of mouth referral is the top way for people to discover podcasts. So tell people about your podcasts. And if you want more information about that, clink the link in the show notes where I've got a five day email challenge, which focuses on those easy wins, those strategies to help you grow your podcast and make sure you signed up to that. The second way to grow your podcast is play around with different keywords in your podcast title, and in your podcast show description, really consider not what you think your audience are searching for in the keywords, but talk to your audience and find out what kind of keywords are they typing into the podcast. Apple podcast, Spotify, et cetera, and utilize that knowledge and utilize those keywords because that is going to help you rank in search results. And finally, experiment with different podcast podcast to be listed in. So if you're in an education category for your podcast, that's not really working too well for you. Well, maybe switch it up a little bit and. Are you better suited in business or equally if you've got a podcast in the business category, but you're finding it's not ranking too well and your goal is to get in the charts, well actually have you got a tech based business podcast and you could put yourself in the technology category? You might find it doesn't work and you want to put yourself back in the business category again, but experiment with these things. Try yourself out in different categories and see if that helps with your podcast growth. Consider to yourself when my audience is searching for a podcast like mine, which categories are they going to? It's not the categories you think they're going to or you want to rank in. It's thinking about where people are going in Apple podcasts, in Spotify, which charts, which categories are they clicking through and scrolling through to find shows like yours. So those are my top three tips. Tell everyone about your podcast, play around with different keywords and experiment with your podcast in different ways. different categories. Do you think that you're actually guilty of killing your podcast's growth? Jump on over to Twitter, send me a DM. And if you have got a podcast friend who you think could benefit from this episode, I would love it if you could share the link with them and see how these strategies can also help them. Otherwise, thank you so much for spending another episode with me and I will see you next time.