On today’s show, I want to talk about how to grow your audience. First of all, you may want to stop thinking about them as your audience. At least, don’t call them that. Your tribe, your community, your peeps, something that makes it feel like they are like you, that you’re on the same team together. After all, with a podcast, you’re trying to build a community (unless you don’t care about having listeners or you’re just so naturally engaging that you don’t need anyone’s help — in which case, why are you listening to this?). So, build a community. It occurs to me that that could be a podcast (or a series of episodes) of its own. However, for now, I’ll stick with the topic at hand — How To Grow Your Audience.

You want the secret to growing your audience? Be remarkable. Be interesting. Create something that’s worth sharing. Amy Grant once said, “There’s not much good singing unless you’ve got something good to sing about.” Amen, Amy. Seth Godin wrote a whole book about this idea (Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable), in which he writes, "The key to success is to find a way to stand out - to be the purple cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins."

The same is true for podcasting. If your content isn’t good — strike that, remarkable, it won’t matter how professional you sound. Some guru (probably Seth, but I’m not looking it up now) said, “Good marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.” Yeah, that. You can have the slickest sounding audio, a great radio voice, the best equipment, and killer theme music. If, when you start talking, your listeners start to nod off, you’re in trouble (unless, of course, if your show is on the Calm app;).

So, that’s the most important piece: Remarkable content. The second piece is the presentation. This is where you make sure the sound quality and the delivery are professional. They don’t have to be perfect. They just need to not distract from the content. It’s ok if you don’t have the best microphone and a perfectly treated sound-proof studio and you never say “um,” but if every other word is punctuated by an annoying lip smack because you’re eating peanut butter while you record, or your dog barking in the background is as loud as you are, you may as well name your podcast the “Go Listen To Someone Else Show.”

That’s it — remarkable content, good presentation. That will grow you a community, right? Not quite. I mean, it might, if you’re lucky. I started publishing episodes of this show, but I wanted to have a certain amount of episodes already released before I started promoting it, so I didn’t tell anyone about it. Yet, I still got listeners. They (you?) may be people that liked me from another podcast and searched me in your podcast listening app and discovered this show. Thanks, btw. Maybe you shared it with someone else or several others. Thanks again! It is possible to grow your podcast, slowly, this way. Just put it out and hope people listen and share it. However, there are ways to facilitate that process. But, as I said, that could be an episode (or multiple episodes) of its own, so let’s pick that up next time.