I've published 6 podcasts - my learnings, so far...

I'm 6 episodes deep into my podcast journey - the plan is to grow to 10K streams per month. I wanted to post an update on how it's going.

Here's what I've learned:

👉 Organising is hard, well, for me anyway, and it is my biggest weakness. I'm still trying to nail a process from start to finish without sinking and wasting a huge amount of hours.

I like automation, and I have a few systems in place to streamline the whole thing; they look like this:

❇️ I use Reply to cold/warm email potential guests. I've written email templates and email sequences. I have two sequences at the moment - one for the initial outgoing email trying to book them as a guest and another sequence thanking them for agreeing to be a guest - this also includes a calendar link. Email sequences reduce a huge amount of time and work very well, completely on autopilot. I'm going to try and find a way to automate further - I want Reply to move the prospect from one sequence to another, depending on their reply.

❇️ To book the guest; I use Calendly. More automation: Calendly handles everything and even reminds the guest to show up.

❇️ I use Zoom to record the podcast - in Zoom, if you're not aware, they have an option to split the speaker audio. Set up a podcast folder, and Zoom will neatly organise into a new recording folder and name the speakers.

❇️ I write a brief cue sheet for the speaker. They may be competent, but live recordings can cause people to go blank. Having a cue sheet with a few prompts works well - I also briefly outline my questions.

❇️ I am using Descript to edit the podcast - I automatically remove the 'uh', 'ers' and 'ums' from the recording. I don't edit much further as things start losing their flow. I bounce as an MP3.

❇️ I use Anchor as the host - Anchor is free, and it works well. No issues so far.

❇️ I automatically post the new podcast to Asana for my Virtual Assistant to post on my website's blog and email lists. I use Zapier's RSS function and hook it up with Asana - this sets up a task for my VA. VA creates the blog post and publishes it - she then posts it to Promoly's (my business) Facebook group, writes a new email, and delivers it to our list.

👉 The hardest part: PROMOTION! Growing a podcast is hard work, and I'm yet to find a way of consistently bringing in traffic.

Here's what I'm trying:

❇️ Using Headliner app to create audiograms for Instagram and social media - I'm posting interesting snippets that will hopefully get people interested. The downside - it's a massive time suck and not interesting to do. Once I work a good process, I'll pass this task over to my VA.

❇️ Facebook ads - I ran a few £££ in ads - so far, little success. I want to try again but using carousel ads to the blog posts. I'd get traffic to my website, hopefully, a few conversions too!

❇️ Reddit works well, but I have to be careful not to get banned 'promoting' myself. The Reddit crew are heavy-hitting with the banhammer.

❇️ Indiehackers sends a good chunk of traffic to my YouTube, where I am also documenting the setup process. This is good; it builds awareness, but it's not building traffic to the actual podcast.

❇️ We email our list every week, telling them about the new podcast. I'm trialling different times and days at the moment. So far, open rates average at 17.33% and CTR of 0.53%. Not amazing, and looking to improve that.

That's it for now - tbc!

ps, if you have ideas on growth, please post them below :)