Hey Reader,
Imagine running a high 7-figure business with over 300,000 followers on social media, then launching a podcast. How many downloads would you expect? 100,000? 150,000? What about…10?
We’ve all been there: we spend a TON of time pouring blood, sweat, and tears into a project just to have it launch to crickets. That’s exactly what happened to Yong-Soo Chung with his podcast. Despite the social following, no one cared about his show.
But instead of wallowing in self-pity or shutting the show down, Yong-Soo took action. He reactivated his 12-year dormant Twitter account, and started basically from scratch, growing to 20,000 followers in less than a year.
Now he has a great process for getting people from Twitter to his newsletter, to his podcast.
We’ll cover his entire journey and more. Plus, in the PRO show, we exchange notes on our production processes!
Thanks to Hostinger, Lulu and Sensei for sponsoring this week's episode.
Life Lessons
- Have a clearly defined niche, and know how to reach people in that niche. Yong-Soo’s initial problem was a mismatch between his businesses and his show. Once he started to find people in the right niche, he started to find listeners.
- Share personal stories – these are the things that resonate with people, no matter what platform or niche. By being a little vulnerable, people will want to learn more about you and your story.
- Continuously hone your target avatar and make sure to grow your show to serve your audience and yourself. You need to be interested in the show – after all, that’s how you tell a good story.
| Listen Now |
There are some things that need to come out in the order in which they’re set: Baseball lineups, sitcom episodes, serial podcasts. There are also some things that are commonly a particular order: appetizer, main course, dessert, for example. While you can do things slightly out of order (like Tarantino’s move of showing you the ending first and then figuring out how you go there), you usually do things in the order that makes the most sense to the most people. But that’s not really the case for episodic podcasts like mine. I used to put a lot of thought into the order of the episodes to make the show seem more pedagogical – as if it were designed to teach a concept from start to finish. As the show has changed focus, I’ve gotten away from that. Now, I generally put the episodes out in which they’re scheduled. The way my guest flow works, usually guests will self-schedule chronologically – that is, whoever schedules first records first. But that’s not always the case. So one crucial part of my guest flow and podcast planner is to show the recording date right next to the publish date. I need to make sure that not only are we recording before the next available publish date, but that it’s several weeks out so I have time to process, and send off to my team. Because once we record, I’m locked in. I say the episode number and link during the recording, based on the episode number I see in the podcast planner. This makes it easier to say the link to the show notes on air, and that link is automatically generated when an episode publishes. Something I may want to be more mindful of in the future is how I’m presenting the guests and concept – the order, and how it makes the most sense. A few times over the summer I found myself referencing episodes that were coming out after the interview I was currently recording. This will take a little extra planning on my part – I’ll want to set the topic and order before I record a set of episodes (which I do), and then consider how they relate to each other. Perhaps that will be my next experiment for the membership. |
Until next time,
Joe Casabona
The Podcast Systems Guy
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