Growing Your Podcast

As full-time podcasters, we often get asked: how do you grow your show? It’s a great question, and there are a lot of things you can do. But, in order to avoid burnout (or podfade), there are a couple key things you should focus on to grow your podcast.

Establish a routine

Create processes and workflows for yourself, so you can easily go through all the steps necessary to record, edit, publish, and promote your show each time you drop a new episode.

This way, you don’t have to worry about forgetting a step, like accidentally forgetting to press the “record” button. (I’ll pretend this example isn’t based on personal experience…)

When you have a routine, you free up time and energy to focus on growing your podcast.

You should also try to automate as many steps as possible, so it feels less daunting each time you work on a new episode. A few ways to do this include:

• Using software to automatically remove background noise, repeated words, and long pauses from your recordings
• Turning your script into show notes and social media posts
• Scheduling in advance when to share episodes with your audience online

Grow your podcast by collaborating

One of the best ways to grow your podcast is by collaborating with other podcasters. There’s a few ways to do this:

• Feed drops: dropping another podcast’s episode into your feed, and vice-versa
• Cross promotions: exchanging ads in each other’s shows
• Interview swaps: taking turns being interviewed on each other’s shows

When you’re looking for podcasts to collaborate with, try looking for shows that may not have the most obvious connection.

For example, we produce a weekly dinosaur podcast. In the past, we’ve collaborated with a horror podcast, and gained some new listeners in doing so.

How did this work?

Well, the movie Jurassic Park is of course a popular topic for our show. And in many ways, Jurassic Park is a horror movie. There’s a lot of suspense and fear, often caused by the awesome dinosaurs.

So go out, search for podcasts who have listeners who may be interested in your topic and what you have to say. Once you find those podcasters, don’t be afraid to reach out and ask if they’d like to work with you in some capacity. Best case scenario is you reach new listeners and grow your podcast. And if they say no, you can always try again with someone else.