Welcome to Help Me Podcast, a show designed to help you
launch and grow your podcast. I am your host, Gino, and twice
a week I will release a new episode with different tips and tricks
for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering to
planning, intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will be a bite
sized tip to help you podcast.
Welcome back to another episode of Help Me Podcast. This is episode
76, and in today's episode we
are going to talk about hosting an event for your podcast.
And I think I brought this up in a previous episode more
briefly, talking about maybe ways to grow your
podcast by putting on like a live in person event. But today
I want to go in a little bit more detail in how to do it
because I'm actually putting on my own event. And by the
time this comes out, which will be Thursday, it'll have already been
passed. But at the time of my recording, it
hasn't happened yet. It's going to be on Wednesday, on the 11th,
and it's basically an event for entrepreneurs
and creatives to meet up, kind of like a networking event. But I don't really
like to use the word networking. It feels very corporate. But
that's the event that I'm putting on and I've kind of gone through the process
of how to set one up and everything like that. So I figured that I
would be able to share it here in case anybody was looking to
put on an in person event for their podcast. So I'm basically just going to
run you through what I did in order to do that and
hopefully it will be helpful. So the first thing that I did
was I had the idea of it and I wanted to do it for a
little bit. The first thing I did was tell a couple close
friends. And I think that that was really helpful and beneficial
because what it did was they immediately offered to help,
which was amazing. And I think in order to put on an
event like this, and I'm talking like a smaller
sized event, like if 20 people showed up, that would be great.
So that's the kind of event that I'm talking about. It's not like a major
sort of thing and it's basically just going to be a meet up
and I'm going to provide drinks and there'll be music and stuff
like that. But basically just like facilitating conversations. There's not going
to be a speaker or anything like that. I'm just keeping it really simple for
the first one. So that's the kind of event that I'm planning
and even keeping it as simple as that,
there's still a lot of things that I didn't really think that I would
need help for, but for example, things like checking
people in and getting their information or
things like that. So it's been great to get help from friends
who are also excited about it and willing to help out. And
I think asking for help is one of those things that I always struggle with.
So it's been a good exercise in asking and receiving
help. So that being said, that was the first thing that I
did was I told people and I think regardless of
however you do the event, it's definitely a good
idea to have at least one person to help
you do it because it's going to be much harder to do it all by
yourself. And I thought that I could have done it all by
myself, but definitely glad and thankful for friends
who have offered to help. So the next thing that I did was I
created a flyer on Canva and I really wanted to kind
of capture the essence of
who I was trying to bring to this event. I
think I intentionally didn't use the word networking because
of its corporate kind of sound. I want people to show up
who are creatives and entrepreneurs
and people who are doing things that they feel called to
and passionate and they're passionate about. So I really tried to make a poster
that used those keywords and would attract those types of
people. And I think that that was a helpful
exercise for me to refine the target market
of, not to sound too businessy, but to refine the target market
of who I want to show up. And I
created that and then I sent that out to a few friends too for feedback
and then got some nice comments on it and adjusted. And then when I
was happy with the actual poster and the flyer, the
next thing I did was I went on eventbrite and I
learned how to make an event because eventbrite is great
for smaller, local events, like this because
it's a professional way to get a ticket and to have people
be able to download a ticket even if it's a free event. Also you are
able to charge for events too, which is great. I think you have to have
the paid version of Eventbrite in order to
do that. I'm not positive, but you can host a
free event for up to 25 people for free on Eventbrite
and you just need to log in and make an account, which is amazing. So
what I did was I made an account, I signed up, I made my event.
And you basically just put all your information in and then you could
put like an image in and then it creates basically
this event page for you where you can post anywhere
and you can share the link. People can go and professionally
purchase a ticket to your event. It's easy to share, you could throw it on
your socials. So that's been really cool. And then another really
cool aspect of eventbrite is when people purchase tickets or
when they sign up, you're collecting their information, which is
great if you're going to do it again or if you want to add them
to an email list or something. It gives you their first name, their last
name, their email, and also a way to reach out to
them too. You can also go into the eventbrite dashboard
and you can send them emails and that sort of thing.
So that's been really cool. You can actually export the data
from the event. So that's what I did. As far as
creating the event, obviously you also have to find a space to do
it. I live in New Haven and I'm fortunate
to have a space that's free to use if you sign up and it's
like a great event space, so you're definitely going to want to find a space
where you can actually host this sort of event. And yeah,
lastly is like just picking a date and kind of sticking to it. I
think when I found the space, I kind of just
signed up for an event like a month out and just kind
of as a way to kind of force myself to do it
and to put some urgency behind it. So
because I had that date booked, there was a little bit of an accountability part
of it where it's like I probably could cancel it, but I don't want to
cancel it. So making sure that I get everything done in time
and that's been kind of helpful as far as actually making me have the
event. So then once I created the event
and I had the Vent prite page and I shared it to my socials, I
then was able to send links to people that I wanted to be
there, like friends and different people that I've met through networking. And
I shared the link and I shared the ticket and
got some good, helpful, supportive feedback
and some people saying they'll be there and some people saying they can't make it,
but they wish me the best and that sort of thing. So I really like
post sharing it once I had the link and the eventbrite and everything
ready to go. So that was helpful. And then the last thing
that I did, which was yesterday, was I actually printed the
flyer that I made. I think I printed like 30 or 40 copies
and I just went around town and I hung them up. And I
do live in a small city so that's something that I could
do. If you don't live in a populated area,
places like libraries are great for putting flyers up or like
cafes and stuff like that. I didn't even actually do that, which I
probably should have, but I kind of just went around town to some of the
more walkable streets and just hung up flyers where
I saw other flyers. So I checked my eventbrite this morning
and I actually got two people who I don't know sign up for the
eventbrite. Which leads me to believe that they saw the posters yesterday
and that's kind of how they signed up for it, which is amazing.
So yeah, that's awesome and definitely looking
forward to the event. But yeah, kind of wrapping this up and bringing it back
to your podcast. Having an event
is something that you could do to boost your
podcast and whatever your podcast is about, you
probably have some sort of niche and you probably have some sort of community
aspect to it because that's what podcasting is. It's creating
community around specific topics and I think
that kind of goes hand in hand with in person events
because it's possible to build community online. And sure, there's
tons of communities online, I mean, if you just think about the gaming community or
streaming and twitch and all that. But there's also in person
communities and I think that podcasting has a
great way of being able to transition the
online communities into in person communities. And you see it
a lot with the bigger podcast. They go on tour or they do events and
tons of people show up just thinking about comedians who have
podcast and the amount of tickets that they sell now because of their
podcast. And I don't know, I think podcasting has
a great way of starting that community and building the
community that you can then transfer into real life.
And even if you don't have thousands of listeners or anything like that, you
could still start an event for your podcast and
encourage people who don't listen to your podcast to go there. And
that's kind of like where my head was at when I created this event.
At some point it might be awesome to do my other podcast working towards
our purpose, to have like a live podcast at one of these events, taking it
one step at a time. But the commonality for me between the podcast and
the event is purpose and creativity and
alignment and entrepreneurship and working for yourself.
And I guess what I'm trying to do is have an event for those types
of people and then the people that come to the event might be
great listeners for the podcast, right? They might want to listen to a podcast
like this because of the commonality. So if you can create an event
in a similar way where it's like you have a podcast about a
specific topic, but you can hit this target market with an
event and then the target market might be interested in your podcast,
that's a great way to be able to get new listeners. And as
I'm talking about this now, I'm kind of thinking like I should probably have some
sort of business card or piece
of paper that says like, hey, thanks for coming, here's my
podcast. If you're interested in pursuing your purpose,
here's a podcast that's about it and maybe you'll like it. So that's probably something
I should do before the event. But anyways,
I hope this episode was helpful in describing my process
and how to put an event on and using eventbrite and
utilizing it again because I think it could be a great way
to create community and to build community around your
podcast and around the topics of your podcast. So thank you for
listening as always, and I will see you on another episode real soon.
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