PodCraft by Alitu: Honing the Craft of Podcasting

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience

Questions are great. More and more, users are typing full questions into Google, rather than single words or phrases. Google can see this, and loves it when you answer them directly. If it’s obvious what you’re answering, they’ll direct ever more users to your answers. 

On top of that, when you think in questions, you tend to solve a real problem. Solve someone’s problem and they’ll be a loyal listener for life! That’s what powers real audience growth. So, where do we find these questions?

“Answer the Public” is a great resource for this. It’s a website which is similar, in a way, to the keyword tool discussed earlier, but it’s designed to surface every possible question around a keyword or keyphrase. Type in your keyword - eg. podcasting - and you’ll see a huge list of questions. You’ll see them grouped by type - why? what? Who? - and you can refine it along the way. Wait till you see the questions that you never even considered!

Next, let’s use social media, and Twitter in particular, to see what people are asking, right now! The technique is simple: type in your keyword AND a ? or a question word. This prompts twitter to surface all tweets that ask a question related to your topic. Eg. 

• Podcast AND ?
• meditation AND how
• Nutrition AND what

Another great resource is Quora, an entire website of questions! Type in your topic, or related keywords, and see what questions pop up.

Finally, try Buzzsumo to see what type of content is really resonating with your niche right now. Type in your keywords and it’ll surface the most shared content in your niche. This should give you ideas on what people are really connecting with right now. 

Task List: 

• Pick at least one of the above tools and go in deep on it.
• Try all your topic or keyword variations and see if you can write down at least 10 of the most common questions people are asking.
• Use these as your next set of podcast topics and you'll increase your search visibility by a huge amount.
• Bonus points: use the Google keyword tool from above to check search volume and prioritise your questions

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience

Support the show (https://pod.academy)

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience

Admit it: you can always use the support of your colleagues. Whether other people who make podcasts have more experience, less experience, or different kinds of experience, there’s always inspiration and strength that comes from being involved with other podcasters. Creating a local group takes some work, and a long period of time, but in the end, you can build community, grow your show, and help others. 

Type: Regular technique

Time Required: Put an hour a week into promoting it and an hour for each meeting. 

Podcast Level: 10 episodes, or when your workflow is established and comfortable

You probably participate in an online community of podcasters already. If you don’t, you certainly can. You can also survey your audience to find out where your listeners are, and what percentage of them are podcasters themselves.  

Find a local coffee shop, pub, or community centre that will let a few people sit around and chat over a beverage for a while.  Plan a recurring meeting, brainstorm some discussion topics, and promote the meeting to your friends and followers. 

It can be handy to set a topic in advance for each meeting. This can encourage people to turn up. 

You can also create meetups online. This gives you the option to meet people anywhere in the world, but removes the impact of face to face interaction. 

Whichever you choose, be open to listening, use your best manners, and empower others to do the same. 

Task List: 

• Decide if you want the meeting to be virtual or actual (online or in-person). 
• Find an online platform to use, or a venue to meet up in. 
• Arrange a time and date. 
• Mention the meeting on your social media, and in your podcast’s call to action. You want to be able to do this for at least three episodes of your podcast. 
• Set a topic (or topics) in advance.  
• Get to the meeting early, greet people when they arrive. 
• If you meet in a physical location, make sure that you leave it clean, and in better shape than you found it. 

Further Reading: 

• Building a Community
• Creating a ‘Real Life’ Podcast Community

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience

Your current listeners are the best PR team to increase audience growth. Get to know your current listeners. They'll tell their friends about your podcast. Find out what their interests and habits are. Get them to tell you what they want your podcast to do. This way, you can fine-tune your podcast to increase your audience and reach more listeners.

I'm not suggesting you take each individual listener out for a chat over a cup of coffee (though that would be very nice of you). The best way to get the information about your audience that you need, is with a short and carefully crafted podcast survey.

Podcast Survey Tools For Growth

I like a free tool as much as the next podcaster, so let's start with a couple of them. And I'll include one paid option if you want to really ramp up your data gathering.

Google Forms has a gallery of templates which you can use to create a standard type of form. It's easy to use, and everyone knows the brand, so it's pretty low-barrier. The look is, for me, a bit dated, but it's totally adequate for your average survey.

SurveyMonkey is a lot more flexible. It's a paid product, normally, but the freemium tier will let you make a short podcast survey with ten questions or less, for nothing. If you don't need to go long, or need any of their other premium options, it could suit well.

Paperform is my final recommendation, for those who want the full power of a paid product. Full flexibility and a range of beautiful templates, you can make a survey that looks great and really draws people in.

One of the best Paperform features is the ability to create what they call a ‘landing form.' In plain English, it's a page creator that includes survey elements, so you can build a great looking ‘audience welcome page' which asks them questions, gets your data, but also gives them a bunch of value through episode guides, downloads, contact info and more. You can build a place where you give as value them as they give to you in filling in their data.

You really don't want your podcast survey to be longer than ten questions. Your listeners are already giving you their time and mental effort. Ask for a little, and you'll get a lot.

Multiple-choice questions will get you results that are focused and specific. Open-ended questions can give you results you hadn't expected. They can also lead listeners to use them as a personal soapbox or open-mic night. Limit the amount of characters responders can use, so they have to keep their response short.

Read the guide at Running an Audience Survey

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience

We're delighted to announce our latest book. It's called Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience

To celebrate, we're making season 13 of Podcraft all about podcast promotion and growth. We'll be going through the book, chapter by chapter, and picking out a single task to focus each episode around.

On this episode, we're pulling from the first chapter - Enabling Your Existing Audience - and the task in question is around Calls to Action. 

Calls to Action (CTAs) are low-hanging fruit that many podcasters miss a huge opportunity with. 

There are some key questions to ask yourself when thinking about your CTAs. Questions like how does your CTA uniquely engage your listeners? And what do you want your listener to do? 

A specific, memorable Call to Action engages your audience and drives them in the direction you want. 

You should also make it easy for them to do it. If you’re sending them to a particular web page, use a shortlink to get them there. If you want them to talk about your show on social media, invent a hashtag so you can track it.  

Your CTAs will totally depend on your content and motivations. But some of the most common and effective podcast CTAs we see are;

• Subscribe to the show in your listening app of choice
• Share this episode with someone you think will benefit from it
• Leave a rating and review on your listening app of choice, or in Podchaser
• Get in touch (solicit particular questions so this is more effective)
• Download a resource, sign up for something, or purchase an upgrade

Finally, include your CTAs in the show notes of each episode, in the episode outro, and if possible, linked in a button on your website podcast player. 

Task List: 

• For your next Call to Action, what do you want your listeners to do? Sum it up in a short sentence or less, such as “sign up for our email list.” 
• Look at the ‘Creating Memorable Links’ task, and practice making a short link. 
• Practice your intros and outros. How can you fit your new CTA into your outros?

Related to: Creating Memorable links, Encouraging Reviews

Further Reading: 

thepodcasthost.com/driveaction - How to Drive Action From a Podcast

thepodcasthost.com/outros - Introducing & Ending Your Episode

Check out the full book - Podcast Growth: How to Grow Your Podcast Audience

Now that we’ve covered the stacking process, in the episode, I want to cover some extra resources that’ll help you. That includes equipment, software, and much more. I also want to give you some next steps, so you can get started on this right away. By the end of this episode you’ll be fully armed to start building your own stack!

Now you know how to create a content stack, getting so much more from every piece of content you create. Next, we’re going to amplify that through the wonder of seasons. Not just a tool for fiction or documentaries, seasons can work for everyone. They make it easier for you, and more effective for your audience. That combination leads to quicker growth, bigger reach and even more fans.

Before we jump in, I just want to say thanks to Memberful for support this episode. They make membership sites really really easy, and they just launched private podcasting too - so you can do private website content, private newsletter AND a private podcast now, for all your members. Pop over to memberful.com to read more about it.

Last week, we covered the content stack, and how it works. This week, we’ll get right into how to create it, from start to finish. If you don't have the time to create great quality blogs, videos and Podcasts, then I’ll show you how through smart repurposing. This isn’t just plain cutting and paste. Instead, I'll show you a way of creating and repurposing which takes advantages of the direct strengths of each. Not only that, but every element links and builds, so that you build engagement and trust with every episode.

Before we jump in, I just want to say thanks to Memberful for support this episode. They make membership sites really really easy, and they just launched private podcasting too - so you can do private website content, private newsletter AND a private podcast now, for all your members. Pop over to memberful.com to read more about it. 

Hey folks, Colin here from thePodcastHost.com and bringing you a special short series on podcraft, starting today and continuing another 3 weeks. 

The aim of the series is to cover something I call the content stack. This is a concept around creating much more content, much more easily. Specifically that means making planning super simple, and creating a podcast episode, a blog post and at least 1 video, all in one process - often in the same time it takes you right now to create your podcast, so you're getting tonnes more benefit out of the time you spend creating. So, I'm going to cover the whole process over the next 4 weeks - all actionable, showing you exactly how to do it. This was originally recorded for the brilliant Boagworld podcast - one of the first shows I ever subscribed to and still going strong, so when I mention Paul, that's who I'm talking about, over at Boagworld.com.  

Before we jump in, I just want to say thanks to Memberful for supporting this episode. They make membership sites really, really easy, and they just launched private podcasting too. So you can do private website content, private newsletters AND a private podcast now, for all your members. Pop over to memberful.com to read more about them. 

In this series on video conferencing for remote or big teams, we're looking at how best to setup, prepare for and run your online calls. 

On this episode, it's the final step: running the call! What's the etiquette, online? How does it differ from in-person meetings? That's what we explore here. We'll show you how to think about it differently, so that you get the most value from the time you spend with your team, and keep everyone engaged throughout. 

In this series on video conferencing for remote or big teams, we're looking at how best to setup, prepare for and run your online calls. 

This episode is all about the preparation. What can you do, ahead of your online meeting, to make sure it runs smoothly? In some ways it's no different from an in-person meeting, but in others, there are some very specific things you can do in the online context. Let's find out what!