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little disclaimer for the show. I accidentally just recorded the whole
thing and did not hook up my microphone properly. So the
audio quality is going to be worse than normal since it's my
laptop speakers. But I did the best that I could to try to make it
tolerable without having to rerecord it and to not be a
perfectionist. So here you go. Hey. Welcome
back to help me. Podcast. This is episode
67. Thank you for being here. And today we're going
to talk about starting with Community and how
you can use a community to grow your existing podcast or
your new podcast. I was talking to somebody about this just
yesterday about how much work a podcast is and
just to be able to create it and to edit it and to come up
with topic ideas. Maybe you're interviewing people, it's a lot of work to get
the actual product out there. But if you look
at a podcast that's successful, really just creating
it is like half the battle, right? Because the other half of it
is also marketing the podcast and getting people to know that it
exists and doing different things to grow your
podcast. So in this conversation, I just want to talk about how
you can use community to grow your podcast. And I was listening to
another video, as I always do, doing some new research every
week to try to learn more things about podcasting. And I came across
this topic within a video that was basically
talking about leveraging your community and kind of
doing a grassroots sort of marketing plan, at least
for a new podcast at the beginning. But this could also work for
a podcast that you've had for a little bit. And basically the idea is just
getting like ten people or friends who you have
in the niche of your podcast and basically reaching out to
them one on one and being like, hey, I know you're in this
community or you're familiar with this niche or you
enjoy this niche. I have a podcast about this niche if you wouldn't mind
taking a listen. I think you'd like this episode, something like
that, where you physically reach out one to one to people. But
in order to do this, I think it's also important to figure out what your
niche is and what your community is. And that's what the
conversation that I heard was talking about, is being
able to find out where people that would listen to your show
would hang out, whether that's in person groups
or events or networking events, or maybe it's Facebook
groups or know, there's tons
of places that people form communities. And how can
you become a part of the community that would want to listen to,
your know, just a simple example would be something
know if you have a podcast about farming, right? And maybe
there's a local farming meet up every Wednesday night where
all the farmers kind of get together and talk farm stuff, right? Kind of a
silly example. But if you have a podcast about farming,
the people that go to this event about farming might be
interested in your podcast. So that would be a perfect place to go
and just discuss your podcast and to talk about your
podcast. If I look at myself, I certainly don't really
sell my podcast as much as I could be. And I think maybe that might
be hard for a lot of people to just say like, hey, I created this
thing, go listen to it. You're kind of asking almost a little bit of a
favor. Maybe you're not 100% confident with what the podcast is
and it's growing, and maybe you're a perfectionist, but you kind of
have to silence all those voices, I think, in order to grow your
podcast and to get people that could actually find some enjoyment out of it.
And maybe if you look at it in that way of like, okay, well,
maybe this person will enjoy or learn or find a sense
of community with this thing that I created. Even if it's not perfect, you can
almost look at it as like, well, if I can connect the right people to
the show, then I'm kind of helping them out in a way. So maybe
that seems less selfish. But another thing that you
could do for, like, a newer podcast, if you haven't started a podcast yet, and
maybe you're trying to refine your podcast and figure out
what niche or what genre your podcast is going to be, something you can
do is to spend some time in different communities and to become a
member of those communities again. If it's a subreddit or if it's a
Facebook group, those are places online that you can
join and you can see what people are talking about and what people are interested
in and you can make connections and you can friend.
You know, if you're in a community like that, let's just say you're in a
Facebook group for a couple months, six months, people are going to start to
notice your name and they're going to start to see, oh, this person's an active
member. And I remember when they commented on something else. And once you kind
of gain a little bit of that leverage, now you can start asking questions like,
hey, I'm thinking about doing a podcast, or you can get
feedback from the community as to what people enjoy.
And when you do launch a podcast, you could ask of them,
hey, I just started this podcast. I'd really appreciate it if everyone
listened to it and gave me some feedback on it, what they liked, what they
didn't like. And then right off the bat you have maybe if the community
is a couple of hundred people, maybe let's just say ten people listen to your
podcast. Now you have ten new listeners that you didn't have before and
if they enjoy your show, they're going to want to share it and they're going
to want to tell other people about it. So I guess
the topic of this episode is kind of this grassroots sort of effort.
And something else I heard in the video that I was listening to was that
some of the guys that have bigger podcasts that were talking
were saying that this is how they started their first podcast and how
they started to gain some traction is they literally just reached out to all of
their friends or their network circle who might be
interested in that topic and just said, hey, I'd appreciate if you listen to this
one episode and let me know what you think. And kind
of manually getting new followers. And I think that
that is a really good idea. But I could also see how it would be
difficult for people, like I said, struggling to ask for help or
struggling to put your face or your product out there if you're a
perfectionist, but I think that it could be a beneficial thing
for your podcast. And after listening to that, I also
kind of challenged myself to do it more often. And when I am in
groups of networks or when I'm meeting new people to just
kind of talk about myself more and to talk about what I do more and
to be like, hey, I have this podcast and this is what it does.
And if you're interested, maybe you should listen to this episode. It's my most listened
one, that sort of thing, more of selling yourself. And
actually right after I listened to that video, what I did was I
went on Canva and made like one of those I'm sure you've seen
barcodes that you could scan on your phone and it takes you to a link.
Well, if you go to Canva, you can actually create those custom barcodes.
So what I did was I went to my transistor site, which is just my
main page that has all my episodes and then all the links to the streaming
sites. So I took that link and I made a barcode in
Canva just like a very simple page,
PDF sort of thing and I
downloaded it to my phone. And now I have basically
like a little app on my phone that I could click and it's a barcode
to my podcast. So now it makes it that much easier for me to share
my podcast to people because sometimes when people ask me I'm just like,
oh, this is the name. It's working towards our purpose. And they're like,
oh, okay, cool. But I'm certain
90% of those people forget the name and forget to look it up. But
it's much easier if you could just pull out your phone and be like, hey,
here's a barcode that you could scan and you can go follow
it on Spotify in two clicks. So that for me,
I hope is going to make it a little bit easier for me to be
able to share my own podcast when I meet people and when people ask me
about it and also encourage me to bring it up
more often and to sell myself more often. So I
think a lot of that is going to be with practice
and something to get better and better at. But yeah, I think that that
was a thing for me anyways. That feels like it'll be easier for me
to then share my podcast with other people is going on canva
making a barcode and just giving people a really easy way to
get to your podcast and to go listen to your podcast
and also putting it on my phone. I don't know if you could do this
on Apple, but I know on Android you can create like a link for a
document and it looks just like an app. So you click it and then
it'll just open up that PDF that I made from Canva. So I hope that
this was helpful. Thank you for tuning in as always, and I will see you
on the next
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 learning intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will be a
bite sized tip to help you podcasts.