Early Results And Growth Strategy Looking Ahead

Audience was born to be an unfiltered, raw look at one brand’s quest to test the most popular podcast growth strategies. To stay true to our word, we’re looking back at our results to date and detailing what lies ahead.

In the 10th episode, Early Results And Our Growth Strategy Looking Ahead, we’re diving into the important growth numbers to see how we’ve done.

Growing a podcast takes diligence, strategic thinking, and an eagerness to keep at it. We’re currently not hitting our goal of at least 1,000 listens per episode but with these strategies, we hope to get there soon.

Audience’s Podcast Format And Workflow

In terms of the content mix, we’ve focused the format on monologues instead of interviews to start. This was because we wanted to cover a lot of technical and practical advice about podcasting. Our host, Craig, has years worth of podcasting experience to draw upon and we felt he was the perfect voice to get our listeners up to speed on podcasting basics.

We also wanted to get into the groove of our show’s workflow and figure out how to fit this project into the overall work we’re doing at Castos. Audience is one part of our content strategy, so we needed to find the balance of producing the show alongside our larger projects. At episode ten, our workflow looks like this:

1. At the start of the month, plan the topics of the upcoming four episodes
2. Outline each episode’s script on the Monday the week of the episode’s release
3. Record the episode on Tuesday and edit on Wednesday
4. Write a blog post, show notes, and email blast on Wednesday after the episode is finalized. Generate a transcript of the episode using Castos’ automatic transcription feature.
5. Publish the blog post, send the email, and promote the episode across social media on Thursday when the episode goes live

We’re operating on a short timeline each week to allow for potential pivots if a more engaging content topic pops up unexpectedly. Outlining, recording, and editing an episode within one week may not work for most hosts but we’re getting our process down to a science. For hosts who are just starting out, we can’t stress enough how important it is to figure out your most efficient workflow from the start. This will help you create new episodes consistently and keep you from podfading.

But now with nine episodes under our belt and the basics covered, we’re ready to transition more into the interview format. Future episodes promise to feature interviews with subject matter experts in key areas of podcasting.

These expert interviews should prove to be “really good radio”, and we hope you enjoy them too.

Audience’s Analytics To Date

Here is where Audience differentiates itself from many of the other podcasts about podcasting. We’re transparently laying out our stats, including our successes and missteps.

At the start, our goal was to generate 1,000 listens per episode. We started out on the right foot but we have some major room for improvement to get there. As of publication, we have 3,984 total downloads from our first nine episodes. With a few promotional tactics up our sleeve, we hope to increase the number of downloads to our back catalog and new episodes.

Read on below for more color around how our audience is consuming Audience.

Audience’s most popular episode

Our most popular episode,