AP 0816: I Have a New Podcast. What Can I Do to Build My Podcast Audience?

AskPat 816 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 816 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week. We have a great question today from Theresa, but before we get to her question I do want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.

FreshBooks is an awesome, awesome company that's helping to serve over 3,000,000 business owners with managing their business finances, including myself, so the income that's coming in, the expenses that we have, and also the invoicing that we do. I've been doing some more coaching and consulting lately. I use FreshBooks to bill and to get paid and it's really nice, because with 30 seconds I can send a very professional looking invoice and I can keep track of who opens it, who doesn't, and follow up if needed. I highly recommend you check them out, and what's cool is you can check them out for free for 30 days if you go to FreshBooks.com/askpat. Just make sure you enter “AskPat” in the how did you hear about us section.

All right, now here's today question from Theresa.

Theresa: Hi Pat. My name is Theresa and I just started a brand new podcast called Simply Toy Collecting, which is a show about Pop Vinyl collecting. My question for you is what should be the main thing that I'm focused on now that I've finally got my podcast started? Should it be building an audience or should it be growing my website to get email subscribers?

Right now what I've been doing is focusing on showing my collection over on Instagram to build an audience there, to get them over to my podcast. Since my podcast is only about a month old, of course my Instagram is also a month old. I don't have that many subscribers, but I just want to make sure that I'm on the right track. I would love to hear your thoughts on this Pat. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my question. I was so happy to meet you over at Podcast Movement this year. It was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for your time. Take care.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Theresa, thank you so much for the question. This is a really cool topic. When I go to Disneyland with my family, and we go quite often, there's a store over there and in front of that store, which is called D Street, which you might know about, I always see people with these Pop Vinyls that look amazing. They have these treasure chests full of them and people are sharing and trading and doing all these really fun things, so there's definitely absolutely an audience there. It's so cool that you're serving them with this particular podcast.

What I would try and do even before we talk about sort of strategy and what not, just in your head want to become the podcast for this, like you want to be the podcast that everybody talks about. You want to invite all the top Pop Vinyl people on the show to talk about their collections and some of the rare things they have and all those kinds of things, the people who make the Pop Vinyls, people over at Disney, any sort of cool stories that you can collect to go on top of these things.

The podcast is the perfect platform for things like that. Even though this is a collectable and something you'd want to see, people who are going to listen to the show know about these things and would love to get the insider scoop and the behind the scenes and the background of all these things. I mean it's super cool, so I'm very encouraged. I think it's a great niche topic that you could become the podcast for, like own that. You have the podcast on Pop Vinyls, and that's what I would kind of have as your motivation as you approach this.

I think Instagram is also a great platform. You can cross-promote all these things. It doesn't necessarily have to be a linear funnel, if you will. It could be a cross-promotion triangle sort of situation, if you will, and I like the idea of using Instagram to build your audience, because a lot of times people who are obsessed with these things, they're going to share things that they find interesting.

You could also use Instagram to tease some of the content that you have coming out in the podcast, and vice versa, and talk about certain. . . Hey, check out on my Instagram page this week we're featuring the top sort of retro looking ones and we're going to talk about that with somebody who has a huge collection of them this week, but also check out our Instagram at this particular website URL. Then you could do a short link to your Instagram page, SimplyToyCollecting.com/Instagram (or “Ig”) even to drive people to there.

Then on Instagram say, for example “hey, the latest podcast episode came out.” You could even have clips of it and really nice graphics to go along with that and then drive people to a link to the particular podcast episode that you just came out with.

You had mentioned should I be focused on building an audience? Yes, absolutely, and that's what you're going to be doing on all these different platforms, again doing this by owning the fact that you are going to be the podcast for this sort of toy and this hobby. From there, yes, absolutely. If you could bring them to your website at some point. . . And you don't necessarily have to be very aggressive with this. I feel like this is the kind of topic that once people find value in what you're providing, they're eventually going to end up through random calls to actions here and there on your website, where you can then provide them some sort of email.

You could even do. . . With things like this you could do giveaways, where once a month you give away one of these things. This is something that at some point, once you get to a critical mass, you could then reach out to Disney and just see if they'd want to work with you on this, or other people who have Disney brands, and see if they'd want to be interviewed or also interview you. This way you can grow your brand sort of exponentially from there.

Yes, absolutely build your audience. Use these platforms. I think that you know now, after hearing this, that you are indeed on the right track. I would just put the pedal to the metal on this and keep going with it. I think it's pretty inspiring just to see sort of a hobbyist go down this route and I'm encouraged. I'm excited to see where you end up Theresa, so keep us posted and yeah, that's how I'd go about it.

Thanks so much for your question. I appreciate it, and I want to wish you all the best and also send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show, and I look forward to potentially seeing you this year at Podcast Movement. This question, for those of you listening, came in a few months ago before the turn of the year, so Theresa and I had met at Podcast Movement in. . . Where were we? Chicago, and this year it's going to be in Anaheim, which I will be at as well. So for those of you other podcasters out there, I hope to see you there. Look out for me. I may be wearing an AskPat shirt, but I'll definitely be wearing my red and white “Hello, My Name is Pat” backpack, so look out for me there too.

Also, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page, and thank you so much. I appreciate you, appreciate all the reviews. It just means the world to me. As always, we're going to end with a quote here. This quote is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He says, “I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.” That's deep.

Guys, thanks so much. I appreciate you and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.