How to Grow Your Podcast by Being a Human

We can't ask listeners to make us their number one, must-listen podcast choice without giving them a reason to do so.

In fact, podcasters like you and I fall into a trap of expecting listeners to do too much for us as soon as they've begun to listen to our podcast. We ask them to share, to subscribe (follow, now!) and to review our podcast "if you like it".

The problem is, there's no structure to any of it.

It's something that we fall into because it's what every other podcaster does. I'm not even sure we know why we ask for a Podchaser review; why do we want someone to press "follow" or (deprecated) "subscribe" in their podcast app "of choice"?

What's the point?

Stop for a second and try to answer that.

If you did spend a second thinking on it you'll have come to the same conclusion as I did: we want a review because we think it'll help new listeners to choose the show and listen to us; we want someone to press "follow" so that they get new episodes directly sent to them when we publish them.

These are actions that the listener takes to benefit us. They don't benefit the listener and, whilst a fan or longer-term supporter of your show will feel good about leaving a positive review, these are things that we internally class as marketing activity.

I'm not telling you to stop doing these things. I'm asking you to think about why you do them so that we can begin to think differently about people, together.

People are the core of podcasting. They always have been and they always will be. It's a human being (or team of) that creates an episode, it's a human being that consumes it and it's a human being that tells another human being to listen to it.

All of the calls to action that we add to our podcast benefit us as podcasters. That's fine. The problem is that they're the only things that we ask of our listeners and we do that because we believe that we've delivered so much time and value during the production of our episode - "Hey it's free, isn't it!" - that we feel it's ok to ask for something in return.

My view is that we can do that but if we want to scale it, we have to put a focus on interacting with our listeners much more.

Think about this: in podcasting we measure downloads, we ask for subscribers/followers but we want actual people as listeners.

We believe that because someone listens to our show, it is enough to class them as a fan.

It's not.

A fan is someone who advocates for you, who shares your content and tells the world about you without you asking them to.

To create fans, your podcast has to be one of, or a combination of, two things: 1. SO good it hooks people. 2. Accessible enough that they feel part of the community.

I have no doubt that your podcast is good. But it's not Serial or Business Wars - nor is mine - because we don't have the time or budget to make it that outstanding. That's alright, no one expects us to.

Our advantage is that we can make our podcast accessible enough that listeners feel like they're a part of the show and, once they feel that way, they'll be more open to doing the things that we ask them to and connecting other people to our content as fans, not listeners.

In short: if we can connect to more people and help them to connect us to more people in their circles, our downloads will naturally grow as new people discover our show.

How to grow your podcast by being a human.

Indie or hobbyist podcasters don't have marketing budgets.

Fact.

This is partly why we ask a lot of our listeners: we need them to help us to reach new people because our options are limited when we have no budget.

The mindset that many podcasters have - "Hey, I create free content for you, the least you can do is do what I ask you to in return." - is flawed, though.

We chose to create a podcast because we wanted to.

Even if we had no...