The Surprising & Delightful Way To Grow Your Podcast

Begging your listeners to tell others about your podcast will only get you so far. Getting more people to do it starts by understanding what people love about your podcast and why they keep listening.

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Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

Think about the things you recommend to people - like TV shows. I'll go first. Mine is Ted Lasso. I recommend that to everybody all the time. How about books? I highly recommend The Three-Body Problem by Liu Chixin. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And for podcasts, I'll go with My Dad Wrote a Porno. I recommend that quite a lot to people.

Now, of course, these aren't the only properties I'm aware of. I watch a fair amount of television programming, and I subscribe to, I think, every streaming service. I read almost every single day, or at least in the evenings. And yeah, I listen to a whole lot of podcasts.

Now, also, I only watch/read/listen to things that I find genuinely interesting. However, if I'm being honest, it's only a few that I'll proselytize for. Only a very few have hit that "recommendability" level that Tom Webster spoke of at Podcast Movement '21 last week, and forms the basis of this week's Podcast Pontifications episodes.

Here's what Tom said on his final-ish slide about recommendability. There was a bullet point, and the first one was to increase the recommendability of your show, you must know who you are for and why they are there because you can't give your listeners the unexpected, if you don't know what they expect.

There's a lot to unpack there, and that's what we're going to unpack today on the episode. So let's just take it in stages. "Know who you are for." Not who you are, and not who your audience is in two separate groups. These two things go together. It's the Venn diagram of the overlapping between who you are and what your audience is there for.

Now, there's a very good chance you listen to Podcast Pontifications because of, well, me. But that in and of itself is not enough, and here's proof. There is a very good chance that you have never listened to a single episode of The Bangkok Podcast, which I was the co-host of for seventy episodes a few years back. Even though Bangkok is one of the top destinations in the world, you probably didn't listen to that show.

It's also unlikely that you've listened to the audiobook as podcast that I wrote and produced a decade ago on the topic of writing awesome book blurbs. It's good. People need to know this, but you probably haven't listened to it.

Look, I know you know who I am, and now you know those exist, but neither of them are likely for you. You know they're out there, but they're not for you, so that's why you don't listen to them. And that's okay.

Let's break down the next part, which is "why they are there." So yes, people are there for you. Your listeners are there for you, but as I just established, that's not enough. It's not enough. And yes, of course, they are there for your content, the content you make, and you put blood, sweat, and tears into all the time. You're here because you enjoy the fact that I'm talking about things that only are interesting to podcasters like you.

But honestly, I don't know your motivations much beyond that. What I do know, I actually just infer. I infer from looking at consumption data on the episodes themselves, like at Apple Podcasts and Spotify and Google Podcasts provide that for us. And yes, I actually do look at those reports. And frankly, not as much as I should, obviously.

So maybe, speaking to that, maybe a breakdown at some point of how to read those and what you can infer from them might be a good thing to talk about. I'll stick a pin in that and come back to it later.

I also infer a lot of information about why people are here because I'm looking at information from the Advancing Podcasting community. Sometimes some people will give me direct feedback on Twitter. I can look at the shows of the people who support me on BuyMeACoffee.com/EvoTerra and make some inferences. But honestly, I need more than that. You need more than that if that's all you know as well.

Going back to Tom Webster who inspired these sessions I'm doing today. Now, Tom knows how to understand what consumers want. It's his profession. But it's not my profession. And it probably isn't your profession. So Tom has gifted us, the podcasting community, a way to learn more about what it is and why our audience is there, less about them, more about why they're there. He's gifted us that in the form of a survey that we can easily implement and ask our listeners. Again, it goes well beyond demographics, gets down to the motivation of why your listeners listen.

I have a link to that survey in the episode details/notes, and I'm going to implement it on my own. I don't know that I'll get it done today, but I will try. I will let you know as soon as you can go, give me lots of information about you.

But let's move on to the long bit at the end, when it says, "You can't give your listeners the unexpected, if you don't know what they expect." I'm already running short on time, so I've decided to shove all that into one big chunk.

To me, this is summed up in a theme I've learned across the thirty-some-odd years I've been in business, and that is surprise and delight your customer. Not surprise or delight. Surprise and delight. Not all surprises are good. In fact, some surprises are downright bad. If we're lucky, when we surprise someone they're tolerated, but it's very hard to make a surprise that really delights the customers. And it's really hard just to delight the customer when you're not surprising them on occasion.

That's why you're at this plateau with your podcast growth. You've reached consistency. Good for you, your audience loves what you do, and they're going to stick around. That will retain your audience. But very few people in your audience are going to be excited because of consistency. And it's an even smaller set that think consistency is something worth sharing.

So putting that whole thing together once again -  let me just read Tom's words. I'm getting it mixed up. "Know who you are for and why they are there. You can't give your listeners the unexpected, if you don't know what they expect." That's what you're going for.

Now tomorrow, we're going to get to the second part of his recommendedability suggestions, and that was ensuring your show is easy to recommend. Chances are, there are some improvements you can make on making your show more recommendable. We're going to dig into those tomorrow.

If you got value out of what I'm talking about so far on this episode, and everything else that I do for you here on Podcast Pontifications four days a week, please return some of that value by going to BuyMeACoffee.com/evoterra. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra. He's on a mission to make podcasting better. Links to everything mentioned in today's episode are in the notes section of your podcast listening app. A written-to-be-read article based on today's episode is available at podcastpontifications.com where you'll also find a video version and a corrected transcript, both created by Allie Press. Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. Find out more at Simpler.Media.

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