The hardest part of building an audience around your podcast is to gain an initial foothold.
Even a small base of loyal listeners can offer feedback, provide content suggestions, and even bring in some income if you have a compelling offer.
But finding those first few people can be difficult.
When it comes to gaining that initial foothold and kickstarting your audience growth, I like to take a two-step approach.
Niche Down Further
Most likely, if you’re struggling to get established, you haven’t niched down far enough.
Narrow your focus down until you’ve identified a thin slice of people for whom you and your content can be the very best in the world.
You won’t necessarily have to aim this narrow forever, but identifying a niche within a niche that you can become everything to is essential for gaining the traction you’ll need to later expand.
Carpet Bomb Your Niche
Once you’ve zeroed in on your target audience, start regularly releasing high-quality content that speaks directly to them.
If you’ve adequately niched down, you should be able to put out more content in a month than your audience has seen in the past year.
Consider taking a multi-platform approach, releasing podcasts, blog posts, social content, even videos if you can produce them at an acceptable level and absolutely carpet bomb your niche with content showcasing that you are the person who is most committed to serving them.
I’d recommend building up this content prior to the launch of your carpet-bombing campaign, rather than producing it on the fly. If you do this well, you’ll want to be releasing something pretty much every day, and then sharing it in relevant communities where your audience members are already hanging out.
When you release this much hyper-targeted content for a group of people who may have been underserved in the past, buzz will start to grow.
Word spreads fast in small, connected communities, and if all goes according to plan, within a month or two you’ll be a household name to almost everyone in the niche.
This approach definitely takes some work from a content production standpoint, but the results are worth it, and it will likely accelerate your audience growth by many months if not more.
Create a list of all the content topics you could potentially create for your niche and then start churning out content based on that list.
If you’ve targetted your audience effectively and the content is good, in short order you’ll make yourself impossible to ignore.
Every Sunday I send out an exclusive article on how to use podcasting to build an audience and grow your business.
No opt-in, no freebie no bribe. But hopefully a new perspective, encouragement, and maybe even some occasional wisdom. It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
Jeremy travels full-time, loves long-distance cycle touring, and will always look back on the day he finally saved up enough money to buy the Millennium Falcon Lego set as one of his proudest achievements. He believes that the way to grow sustainable businesses is by leading with heart, vulnerability, and helping your people be and become their best selves.
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