Help Me Podcast

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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.