AP 0963: How Do I Increase My Podcast Download Numbers?

AskPat 963 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 963 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a question coming in today from Mar, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is DesignCrowd. If you're stuck on ideas of how to develop any sort of design-related things—website, logo, business cards, whatever—connect with DesignCrowd. They have over 500,000 designers there to help you, and you can get the perfect, custom design every time or your money back. You can check out DesignCrowd.com/askpat to learn more and download your free guide to crowdsourcing great logos, graphics, and websites for your business, and you can get $100 of your next design when you enter the promo code “AskPat.”

All right. Here's today's question from Mar.

Mar: Hola, Pat. I'm Mar del Cerro, from Mexico City. I am a meditation teacher. I have a podcast called Medita Podcast. I upload a ten-minute meditation every fifteen days, so everyone can start meditating and get to know my guided meditations. I also have a gratitude journal that you can download when you subscribe, and I give online meditation courses. My question is about keeping the momentum of the podcast going. I upload a session every fifteen days. The first three days, I get 1,000 downloads. After that, it starts to decrease up to 100, 200 downloads per day. My question is, how can I keep it up and get more downloads through the fifteen days without being too pushy? Hope to hear from you soon. Gracias.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Mar, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. Congrats on the numbers for your podcast. Those are great numbers, and let's see if we can get you some more.

One obvious thing you can do to increase your downloads in between podcast episodes is actually publish every seven days instead of fifteen days. The reason I say that is because when I started podcasting, I was actually doing every fifteen days, or twice a month. When I finally realized just how much of an impact the podcast was making and that people were hungry for more, it became very easy for me . . . It wasn't easy just like a push of a button, it was more work, but it was very easy for me to see that it would obviously help out with my business. If you really want more download numbers, the easiest way to do it is to come out with more episodes. That's not always the best solution, but if you're going every fifteen days, you might want to test it out and see how much more workload that is. You might find that that regular weekly rhythm might actually be better for those who are making your podcast a part of their daily life or their ritual every single week. You could potentially explore that option. That way, by the time each episode dies down, a new one comes up, and there's not that fifteen-day waiting period.

Whether you choose to do that or not, there's other things you can do to keep those episode downloads coming in between each episode. One thing you can utilize is social media. You might be able to take clips or segments of that and share it on social media, like on Facebook or on Twitter or on Instagram even. There are some great tools out there that can help you even just take that audio and turn it into something cool that you can put on those social media platforms.

One of them is called Wavve, Wavve.co. What this does is it promises to help you get more listeners by promoting your audio, by easily turning it into social videos, so things you can post on Twitter and on Instagram and on Facebook. Essentially, it creates that thing that has the little waveform on it, and it has a clip from your audio, and it just is really easy to work with. Now, obviously, there's a price to it, but it does work. I've actually manually created those myself. There's actually a free plan where you can get one minute of video monthly with a 24-second video limit, so you get a couple for free. There's a $10-a-month plan, which is the alpha plan, where you can have three different templates, ten minutes of video per month, and unlimited video clips, so a cool solution that you could do to promote your previous episodes or even earlier episodes with social media.

Speaking of that, there are potentially places you can go to have more people find your show—for example, getting on other people's shows. If there are other meditation podcasts, there might be guest meditations that you might be able to get involved with, where you're on another person's show. That way, consistently, while people are listening to that show, they're coming and listening to your show, too. That's going to give you a really cool, organic, long-term flow of new listeners coming from a spot outside of what it is that you're working on, which is really cool.

In addition to that, there is the email list, so emailing your audience, maybe, in between each one. I don't know if you're doing that already, but it might be a cool rhythm for you to do a podcast episode one week, then an email to promote that podcast episode. Offer a few more pieces of value in there, maybe interesting entries into specific audience members' gratitude journal, for example. Then the week after that, come out with the next episode, and then the week after that, another email that then mentions that previous episode. That way, you're getting some more eyeballs on your podcast and a few other things. Just, even though you're not coming out with an episode every week, if you choose not to do that, you're actually still in front of your audience every week in that way, which can be really helpful. It's just going to take some time, Mar, but creating a rhythm in that way, where you're consistently either promoting those episodes after it goes live and also staying in connection with your audience, that's going to be the great combo for you.

Mar, I hope that answers your question. Thanks so much. I want to offer you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by Muriel Rukeyser: “The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.” That's awesome, and podcasting is definitely the perfect platform to tell stories. Perhaps, Mar, there is, in between your meditations—maybe the every-other-week show—in between are stories and people getting to know you a little bit better or stories from your audience, as well. Those are some ideas for you. Thanks again, all of you, for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.