#40 | The ULTIMATE GUIDE To Growing Your Podcast To Attract Clients Without Social Media, Paid Ads or High Profile Guests

0:00You're posting on social media constantly, chasing high-profile guests, but your podcast still isn't growing. Welcome to How to Grow a Podcast that attracts high-ticket online coaching clients. The show helping coaches, consultants, and experts turn your slow-growth podcast into a profitable client attraction system. At the end of this episode, I'll share a little more about who I am and what we do at my company, GetMoreListeners.com. It might even shock you. But for now, let's dive into the episode. In today's episode, you'll discover the ultimate guide for growing and monetizing your podcast way faster without social media, paid ads, or high-profile guests.

0:44One simple change that helped a client grow past 30 ,000 monthly downloads and earn tens of thousands. And finally, three fundamental things every podcaster needs to grow a profitable show. Let's dive in. Well, look, let's give it away right off the bat. Peel back the curtain and then explain exactly how to implement what we're going to talk about. The three things that you need to grow a profitable podcast is firstly, a way to turn more strangers into listeners. Secondly, a way to keep those listeners coming back for more. And thirdly, a way to reach more of those listeners consistently. It really is as simple as what we just mentioned there.

1:23Turning strangers into listeners, getting them coming back for more, and then having a mechanism to reach more of them. After interviewing, coaching 400-plus podcasters, the sad reality is that most podcasters we speak to, entrepreneurs, experts with shows, have dying podcasts that aren't growing. They're reaching the exact same 100 listeners after years of podcasting. And for a lot of them, they don't feel like they're making the impact, and they're certainly not making the money they want to. And the reason why they're struggling to grow is because they're following the typical growth strategy, which looks like what?

1:58Well, it tends to look something like you launch a show and then you post consistently. You invite the biggest names you can onto your show and you invest energy into getting high-profile guests, credible people to interview for your own podcast. You post about it on social media and you hope for the best. That's literally it. But the issue is for most people, and maybe you've experienced this as well, years go by and the show hasn't gained the traction it deserves. You've spent years on the podcast. And yeah, you've become this amazing podcaster who has these impactful conversations that you really enjoy.

2:34But you are wishing the show would reach way more listeners, make way more money, make way more impact. But it's having the complete opposite reaction. It's actually this expensive thing you keep doing that's barely growing. And the reason why this happens to so many podcasters is because they don't have an actual plan in place, a process, a proven way to reach more listeners. Without those things, you end up stuck with a podcast that feels like a time-sucking hobby with no clear or straightforward ROI. You start feeling embarrassed when people ask about your download numbers, maybe even not looking at analytics because you feel a bit embarrassed.

3:12You put out episodes every single week, but you still feel invisible in your industry. You are uncertain about what's actually working and you feel like you're constantly guessing when it comes to an actual growth strategy. If any of this resonates with you, you might even be left wondering if you should just quit. Or you might have considered that at some point because the show is not paying off and not bringing you what you thought it would, apart from obviously all the enjoyment, but nothing else from a business point of view. If that's you, if any of those things feel familiar, that's exactly what we want to fix in this episode.

3:46It's not all doom and gloom, and we actually have a solution. So look, we want to quickly reveal the missing things that most podcasters are missing that causes endless pain, frustration, and makes the podcast feel like this additional thing you're doing that's starting to feel exhausting, defeating, and unmotivating. Most podcasters are missing either a uniquely positioned show that really stands out in their space, meaning amongst other podcasts in their space, or a reliable system for reaching new listeners. Reliable, meaning you actually understand what you're putting in, will get you X result.

4:21Not hitting and hoping, but knowing, Okay, I do this, I will get on average this many listeners. And most podcasters, sadly, miss both for a very long time. But even if you have fixed one, you'll still fail without the other. Today, we want to walk you through four specific steps we take our clients through to grow highly engaged listeners as fast as possible, and start making way more money from their show. So what's step number one? Step number one is about building your show's USP or unique selling point. What does that mean? Give me some more. What's the juice here? The unique selling point, the thing that makes it unique.

5:01Like, are you talking about my content is 10 out of 10? I just give practical tips and frameworks? Absolutely not. Let me explain it a little bit more. Imagine you own a food truck business. you move it into a small town to sell smash burgers at a food market. And it's a small town, and the people who live there have never tasted a smash burger before. What would happen? It would be exciting. People haven't experienced it before, so it would likely grow in popularity, and you would have a fairly straightforward path to really succeed with your food truck business because you'd be bringing something new to the market.

5:37There's so little competition that it's easy for you to be the top choice. Of course you're going to be the number one place for Smashburgers. And of course people are going to be excited about it. But let's say 10 years go by and there's now 25 different Smashburger trucks at the market. Let's say you were the 26th and you were then just coming along at that 10-year point. What would it be like to try and make it with selling Smashburgers at that point? How different would it be? I think it'd be way harder. You'd have much higher competition. It'd be way harder to actually stand out because you're just essentially a commodity.

6:14There's a bunch of different Smashburger stands out there. And quite frankly, there's no reason why people should go to your new Smashburger stand versus everyone else. So you're not really an obvious choice in the market anymore. Exactly. And this is such a big issue in the podcasting space. Now, how this looks is having an interview-based show. Having a show that releases weekly, it's about an hour. having a show that covers general topics. If you fall into any of those categories, and there's probably a few others I can list as well, these are the type of characteristics that put you in the 26th Smashburger category, where it worked a while ago, but it's been very overdone now, and it makes it near impossible to rise to the top and actually get noticed.

6:59Now, it's important to know that we're not saying you shouldn't have a podcast in a popular space. That's actually a good thing. But you need to have a podcast where there's a twist. If not, it's way harder to stand out and gain traction fast. Look, I remember we had a client called Laura. For four years, she was podcasting. She grew a show to 4 ,000 monthly downloads. But her issue was, she launched her show back in the leadership space. And at that time, there was barely any other shows actively posting talking about leadership. Her show was super general, interviewing leaders in the space, and the podcast took off.

7:37But years down the line, as more people started making podcasts about leadership, her show was no longer different. It no longer stood out, and the growth started to flatline at this 4 ,000 download mark, to the point where the numbers started to decline month after month after month. She got to a spot where she's feeling defeated, demotivated, and she started questioning, hey, I'm investing all of this time. I'm spending it on this podcast. But the show isn't growing, and I'm not generating an income. And that's when she started to reach out to our team to work with us one-on-one to fix her growth issues.

8:15Now, what we found when we started working with her was that although she was in a popular niche, and there was tons of demand for her type of content, there was nothing unique about her specific show. So new listeners would essentially ignore her and just go to the industry leaders in her space. That's what led to the decline in her listenership. Now, what was the shift that we made with Laura's specific show to make it more unique, to help it stand out, and to help her go from declining growth at 4 ,000 monthly downloads to six months later, 15 ,000 monthly downloads, and six months after that, 30 ,000 monthly downloads and tens of thousands of additional profit added to her podcast?

8:57What did we shift? Well, we made her show more unique, and there were two main ways that we did it. Number one was we helped her better target a segment of the market within leadership so she could be the absolute only option and most obvious option for those listeners. So within the leadership space, there's a ton of different types of people listening to shows. There are managers, there are C-suite leaders, there are entrepreneurial leaders, there are people who want to be leaders. It's very hard to ever be the best show when you're trying to serve all those different types of people. We helped Laura reposition the show.

9:34So instead of just an overarching leadership communication show, she honed in on what she was best at, which was helping introverts in a corporate role improve their communication and charisma so they could work their way up and step into more of a leadership position. This change was huge because it meant that out of all the people searching for leadership podcasts, the ones who actually were introverts who wanted to work on their communication aspect of their leadership the most, this show just became the gold mine. Now, this is great, but something else we did is we found a really interesting and exciting way to deliver that content.

10:11Instead of just bog-standard interviews, and maybe some solo episodes too, we added a completely new segment. In Laura's case, it was bite-sized solo episodes where each one reverse engineered a speech done by an A-lister, whether that's a famous politician, artist, spokesperson, whatever. She reverse engineered what they did in that speech that made them charismatic and a good communicator, and then tailored the insight to her specific audience. Again, introverts in a corporate role. You can imagine not only how valuable this was to that particular audience, because it's made for them specifically.

10:50All the examples, everything is filtered through the nuance of if you're an introvert in a corporate setting. But also, it's just something new and exciting. Way more exciting compared to the normal interview-based shows who are all talking about leadership. Number one, she's attracting way more of the right listeners. But two, when they listen to the podcast, they're like, holy crap, I literally can't get this content anywhere else. And that's why people stuck around. The audience went crazy for it, and the show exploded in a span of 6 to 12 months. Now look, when it comes to your unique positioning, it's not about just being different for being different's sake.

11:31It's about presenting your podcast in a way that's wildly attractive, catches the attention of the listeners you want to reach, and consistently delivers high-quality content they can't get anywhere else. That's what it means to have a truly unique show that stands out and gains traction fast. So that's step number one, having a truly unique show that stands out and gains traction fast. Step number two is building a demand-based content strategy, where you're covering topics based on what's proven to gain the attention of the listeners you want to reach. Step number three is podcast SEO, the process of ranking your show higher in the search results on Apple and Spotify specifically.

12:15This has nothing to do with Google. It's purely on the podcast streaming platforms. And why this is important is because most potential listeners are actually searching for what they want on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you can get onto the first page and put yourself in front of that audience, you can imagine how much of a difference this can make to the growth and visibility of your show. And finally, step number four, podcast guesting. But not landing the big guests on your show, instead flipping the script where you, the podcast host, are featuring as a guest on other people's podcasts. Why this is so important is because if you think about it, there are thousands of other shows within your space where those hosts have spent the last three, four, five years building their audience into the thousands of listeners per episode.

13:07How much faster would it be for you to grow your audience by simply shortcutting your way to a bigger stage and being featured as a guest on their show, where the host themselves will interview you? You share your valuable insights, share your story, give your frameworks, and in doing so, you build trust with an entirely new audience. And the best part about this is that's an audience you want to reach anyway. So these are four steps that are proven to work, and we've seen this process turn around hundreds of shows over the last five years. We know it works, and that's why we want to share it with you today.

13:44If this is clicking for you, if you are starting to see where the holes are with your current strategy, then that should be encouraging because it means that you're not at this brick wall. You can push through. You can grow your podcast. It is possible. We want to make this clear that you don't have to try to figure this stuff out alone. By all means, if that's what you want to do, fantastic. But if you are in a spot where this totally makes sense to you, but you don't want to just spend another three to six months, another year, two years, going through a process of trial and error, you don't want to get bogged down in the wrong details.

14:20You'd rather just work with mentors, experts, directly one-on-one to hold your hand every step of the way to make sure you have a well-positioned show that's unique and stands out. To help you build a demand-based content strategy based on what's proven to gain traction in your space. To help you rank on page one of Apple and Spotify so you're being found by thousands of the right listeners every single month organically. And finally, to place you consistently on top podcasts in your space. I'll share some details of how we can work together in just a moment. With that being said, we want to give you the biggest encouragement.

14:59Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. At the start of this episode, I said I'd tell you a little bit about me. So I'm about to share a secret with you. One that might mean you hate me. Completely quit listening to this podcast and think I'm a total scam. However, I want to be transparent. Are you ready? Well, my name is Tony. No, of course that's not the secret. The secret is that I'm actually a robot. My creators are Tig and Anthony, hence my name, Tony. The sick bastards. Anyway, they are the founders of GetMoreListeners.com. In the last five years, they've coached and interviewed over 400 podcasters and generated multiple six figures from their own show.

15:50They gave me access to everything they know, and I'm here to share it with you. So while I don't understand why you humans are so obsessed with coffee, I do understand how to grow a podcast that actually brings you new clients regularly. So here's my offer to you. If you want to finally understand why your podcast isn't growing and get a personalized roadmap to fix it, in less than 30 seconds, you can go to getmorelisteners.com slash onlinecoachaudit. Enter your show name and we'll send you back a free mini podcast audit. It's completely customized to you and your show. That's getmorelisteners.com slash onlinecoachaudit.

16:31The link is also in the show notes of this episode.