Episode 153. How to Grow a Successful Podcast and Increase Podcast Listeners

Ready for my best and most recent tips to help you become a successful podcaster? That’s exactly what this episode is about.

In This Episode:

My Spotify Wrapped 2023 results and podcast statistics thus far in the year
What worked in 2023
What didn’t work in 2023
My plan to grow my podcast in 2024
You need consistent implementation to grow your podcast

Listen on Apple Podcast | Spotify | YouTube | Any Player

Tips to Become a Successful Podcaster

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As we near the end of the year, many of us may have seen people post their Spotify Wrapped on social media. Whether it be for their top songs of the year or maybe you’ve seen podcasters share their Spotify wrapped results.

In celebration of us podcasters collectively wrapping up another year of creating incredible content for the world, I’d love to dedicate this episode to all the fellow podcasters who are planning to grow their show in 2024, just like myself.

In this episode, I’ll first share my 2023 Spotify Wrapped results for my podcast, as well as some stats from my podcast hosting platform, from iTunes and Spotify. I wanted to start here because that will give more context to the second part of this episode, which is where I unpack what worked, what didn’t work, and what my current plan of action is for Q1 2024.

Speaking of Q1 2024, our next cohort of Thought Leader Club starts in March 2024.

The Thought Leader Club is THE room to:

Start putting in the reps to create your thought leader career
Build a body of work that lets you become known for your unique thought leadership, your story, and how amazing you are at what you do
And ultimately set yourself up for making your 1-3 year dreams a reality

Book a discovery call with me to have a conversation about

1) What are your dreams in the next 1-3 years

2) The coaching, skills, and actions you need to make these dreams happen, and

3) How coaching together will support and guide you with all the above.

You can schedule a discovery call by first filling out a short application form on the sales page for The Thought Leader Club: www.cheryltheory.com/program. After you submit the form, you’ll get a link to book a discovery call.

My Spotify Wrapped 2023 results and podcast statistics thus far in the year

Spotify Wrapped Results

To start the conversation for today, I’d love to share some of the most relevant Spotify wrapped results for this show, the Thought Leader Club podcast:

For 154 listeners, my show is in their top 10 podcasts for 2023
For 86 listeners, my show it in their top 5 podcasts for 2023
For 27 listeners, my show is their top 1 podcast for 2023
The show was streamed in 42 countries, Singapore being the top countries with 19% of the total streams on Spotify
In 2023, my followers on Spotify increased by 42%
In 2023, I have the most new listeners in the United States, Italy, and France
The most popular episode this year was 108 How to structure your week as a side hustler, with 10% of new listeners started with episode 108

Please note that these results are only for my show listeners who use Spotify to listen to the podcast. It does not include listeners on Apple iTunes or any other podcast platform.

Libsyn Stats

Now, let me share some of the most relevant stats from my podcast hosting platform, which is Libsyn. Libsyn collects data across all platforms like Spotify, iTunes and others.

The following stats are collected between January 1 2023 to the day of me writing this episode, which is December 9 2023. Please note that this isn’t the complete set of 2023 data.

Across all platforms, from January 1 2023 to the day of my writing this episode on December 9 2023, we have total 10809 daily downloads.
Among these, the United States makes up 5098 downloads, Singapore makes up 1331, Canada makes up 1088, and the United Kingdom makes up 859.
About 60% of listeners use Apple podcasts, and 20% use Spotify. The remaining 20% seems to come from miscellaneous sources, like Chrome browser or other podcast listening platforms.
The top 10 most download solo episodes are

With that, I’d love to share what I believe “worked” and what “didn’t work” in terms of my podcast growth thus far in 2023.

What worked in 2023

Regarding the episode titles or topics that seem to do well in terms of actually getting people to click on the episode and listen, there are three things we could extrapolate from the data:

1. Titles with “measurable results” or “time-based results” seem to do well. This makes sense. We as humans like it when something is measurable and specific. It’s the rationale behind the concept of setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timed goals). We all want evidence that the success or results we’re striving for is doable and within the timeline we can expect.

2. Personal experiences and storytelling related to “how I did something”, also seem to do well. This also makes sense. I suspect that the reason for this is two fold.

One, people want to know how someone like them or someone who they find relatable, were able to do it. Because if they can do it, then perhaps maybe we can do it too.

Two, we want to learn to do cool new things, and what better way to learn how to do something than consuming an educational piece of content that is supposed to teach you how to do that, right?

3. Titles containing a bold statement that you don’t often hear from others in your industry. For example, “the art and science of growing your coaching business” or “quitting the traditional for the exceptional”. I feel that these titles, although they may not necessarily contain clickbait words or even, let’s say, “words that my ideal clients are using”, were able to capture attention by standing for something or offering a fresh new way of looking at something in just the title alone. So imagine what the full episode will be able to do if you actually click on it and listen to it.

Writing quality content

Which leads to another thing that worked for me – writing quality content. Here’s the thing. Sexy titles or topics that people want to click on is one thing, but having actual substance and depth in the actual episode to actually keep the listener listening, is a completely different thing.

When I quickly looked at the scripts for the top ten solo episodes, I could see that each of them contained one of the following:

My own personal examples and stories
Metaphors and analogies when explaining a concept
A bolder or very direct way of saying something, instead of using more watered down language
Offering a structured set of tips or step-by-step explanations of how to do something
Opinions or examples from outside my industry

My hypothesis here is that these are some of the “best practices” that work well for my show and contribute to the overall experience that listeners have when they tune into an episode.

Actually, I want to share another observation that I realized earlier on in 2023. Prior to 2023, for about 2 years, all I really did was:

1. Post on Instagram stories once a week each time a new episode is published

2. Re-share someone’s Instagram stories about my podcast each time they share it. In other words, I didn’t really make an effort to tell people about the awesome podcast. Even though my promotional efforts were minimal (and this was reflected in the relatively small listenership size prior to 2023), almost all of our coaching clients said they were listeners of the podcast.

This suggests that the quality of content was helpful for our clients, and helped them make a decision to work with me. I hope this is encouraging for you to start thinking about how you can amp up the overall quality, depth, and caliber of your podcast content.

Becoming known for something

One more thing that I feel like was helpful for the overall success of the show in 2023 was that, at this point, I do think I’ve built up enough brand awareness for the things I’m known for.

That includes being the coach for side hustler as well as my law school and PhD quitting story. For the former, I know this is happening because when I recently went to a friend’s talk show event and was meeting people for the first time, several people said to me, “Oh, you’re Cheryl! Side hustle, right?”

I am confidently able to say that after consistently podcasting for 3 years, I have been able to become known for both my scope of work as well as my story, which is probably helpful in some way, shape, or form.

So how do you become known for something ?

Decide what you want to be known for
Repeat what you want to be known for, over and over again, over time. This could look like repeating specific keywords, sharing certain concepts through different examples, angles, applying these concepts to recent/current events, and so on. Basically, talking about what you want to be known for, from twenty different angles, over and over again.
And also. Be clear about how you can help and why you want to help. That matters too.

It’s your job to build brand awareness for what you want to be known for. And keep doing it for months and months and months. This is an ongoing journey until you yourself can confidently say that yes, I AM known for XYZ.

This is not just a 3-month project, as in after 3 months, you’re officially known for this. Honestly, the process of becoming known for something is relatively simple. But actually staying in the game to become known for something is the part where most struggle. And I want to change that.

This is why the Thought Leader Club Program exists. The Thought Leader Club honestly isn’t a four-month one-and-done thing. Thought leadership and building your thought leadership is a journey. It’s a journey that doesn’t just end in 4 months. It continues on and on until you fully see yourself as a thought leader.

Why it’s important for me, as the coach, to make sure that for those whom the program is a fantastic fit for and to get them into the room, because your thought leadership journey starts as soon as you commit to it.

The sooner you sign up for the Thought Leader Club and commit to this journey, the sooner you put in the reps to build your thought leadership and body of work.

Imagine how many more opportunities you’d have brought in by the end of 2024 because you started now. Imagine how your self-concept and identity would be like one year from now because you started today.

Ultimately, my job isn’t to convince someone whether or not they’re a thought leader right now. Because chances are, you’re not! You haven’t built that body of work.

Instead, my job as the coach is to help you see that the Thought Leader Club as the bridge to becoming that person you want to be.

It’s my job to straight up tell you that you won’t magically be a thought leader overnight or even by the end of one round. Because if you are someone who values integrity and knows it takes legit time and effort to create a substantial and deep body of work, you’re willing to put in the reps, starting now, and commit to the journey ahead.

It is also my job to tell you that no, it is not a requirement to renew with me round after round and that you need to join every upcoming cohort of the Thought Leader Club in order to see results. NO.

The point is to take the first steps and build momentum now, for the journey ahead. START NOW.

You have the choice over how long you want to have me walk alongside with you on this journey. It could be one round of the program, two rounds, three. That’s beside the point. The point is that this is a journey.

Right now, you don’t need to believe that you’re already a thought leader. It’s not a requirement. It’s also not a requirement to believe that you will become a thought leader in 4 months.

My goal right now is for you to believe that you can do it in the journey ahead. But it’s so important to start the journey now instead of waiting another 4 months. And another 4 months.

This is exactly what the Thought Leader Club is for. It’s the room for aspiring thought leaders to start putting in the reps to create their body of work and build thought leadership for the years to come.

What didn’t work in 2023

In 2022, I *tried* starting a separate Instagram account just for the podcast, but didn’t make efforts to share that account or create fresh new content for that account. So it wasn’t surprising to see that this second account didn’t really grow.

For 2023, I simply posted an Instagram reel on my main account @cheryltheory, and added the second account as a collaborator. But again, if I’m literally posting the same content on both the main account and second account, there’s really no incentive for people to follow the secondary account. This second Instagram account didn’t necessarily work, from what I can see, and I am not sure if it contributed to the growth of our show in 2023.

I also want to share that in the most recent months this year, for some reason, my show’s monthly downloads were a lot lower than usual.

Because, again, December 2023 has not yet come to completion at the time of me writing this episode. Here are my monthly downloads for the show from January, up to November 2023:

January – 1262

February – 1026

March – 1216

April – 923

May – 1230

June – 1411

July – 931

August – 625

September – 692

October – 765

November – 413

As you can see, the past few months, especially from August to November, were surprising because during the first half of 2023, as well as during the latter 2022, our podcast was typically averaging between 1000-1200 downloads per month.

So something is clearly happening, whether it be something collectively among my existing /returning podcast audience. Or perhaps it’s because my show naturally shifted away from side hustling and how to grow your coaching business, and has since then zoned in on thought leadership and building your body of work. And/or maybe there’s something I can be doing to get my show to new listeners to discover my show.

This is something that although I don’t necessarily have clear data on, I can start looking at what is within my control and start doing mini experiments in Q1 2024 and see if we can get our podcast monthly downloads back to 1200 per month, and then grow beyond that by the end of 2023.

Let’s talk about my plan of action for 2024.

My plan to grow my podcast in 2024

Here’s what I’m already doing in 2023:

1x written episode script per week
1x audio podcast on Spotify, iTunes, etc per week
1x video podcast on YouTube per week
Turning the written script into 1) LinkedIn newsletters and 2) Blog articles (My awesome friend and content repurposer, Esther, does this for me)
Turning the video into shorter video clips for LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok (Esther also does this)
1x email on Wednesday to promote the new episode that came out on Monday

All of these items, whether it’s done by me or my awesome content repurposer, Esther, I plan to continue doing them in 2024.

To set myself up for podcast growth in 2024, here’s my to-do list for the month of December:

Optimize my Spotify show page – Update the following: Show Description, Best Place to Start, Host Recommendations, Audience Q&A Responses, Chapters, and Episode Reviews. Side note: I was able to generate this list of mini action items thanks to the following resource: https://podcasters.spotify.com/resources/learn/grow/podcast-marketing. I thought this article was very concise and covered everything marketing-related that I need to consider when it comes to my podcast particularly when it comes to Spotify.
Review my show’s SEO on Spotify – Refresh the show description to contain more keywords, consider renaming old episodes where necessary, rewrite all past episode descriptions, and customize my Spotify for Podcasters’ profile.
Create promo materials for upcoming guests to use when their episode is released – For example, last week, we had three guest interviews as part of a brand new series called “The Quit Story”, so I spent an hour or so last week making a template on Canva which I can now use for all future Quit Story guest interviews
Start posting on LinkedIn several times a week. Here’s the thing. A lot of marketing people are saying that LinkedIn, TikTok, and perhaps even YouTube shorts, are the platforms/mediums where you have a higher likelihood of being discovered, compared to posting on Instagram. Although I do believe that any platform can still work, whether it be Instagram, email, LinkedIn, podcast, Reddit, Discord or YouTube and whatever else exists… For me, Linkedin is an experiment I’m willing to take on. In 2024, I want to shift my focus there. To set myself up for this, I’ve got to FINALLY get over my own mind and resistance to show up on the platform.

That’s exactly what I’ve been doing so far in December and in November as well.

Since January 2023, I’ve been posting LinkedIn articles for my old podcast episodes, and posting videos of my recent podcast episodes. But I didn’t actually write content for the platform per se.

So, since November, I challenged myself to post my actual thoughts on LinkedIn. I started by simply repurposing some of my Instagram content and posting it on LinkedIn, but that was initially a lot for me because I was definitely nervous to share more “thought leadership” content or storytelling content on the platform.

But with each post, I find myself feeling more and more at ease. In the beginning, after I post, I’d get a rush of anxiety and think that maybe I should just take down the post. Now, my comfort with the platform has definitely stabilized. And wow, let’s just say that I’m definitely seeing a lot more traction on LinkedIn as opposed to Instagram. I’m definitely excited to see how my LinkedIn efforts will support my podcast and overall business growth in 2024.

What I’d like to do more of or do differently in 2024:

1) Create more behind-the-scenes content to show what I do as a podcaster.

This can be done via Instagram, LinkedIn, and email. And my rationale for this is, I think for a lot of us, we’re nosy AF and we love seeing behind-the-scenes content or day-in-the-life content from people we consume content regularly from.

My hypothesis here is that this sort of content will be very interesting for existing podcast listeners, but it will also be interesting enough to new people who may not have yet checked out the show, but now they might see my behind-the-scenes and go, “Okay, I keep seeing Cheryl work on her podcast and how she’s doing it. Let me check out the actual thing.”

2) Enhancing my email newsletters.

Specifically, I’m thinking about adding visual explanations of concepts discussed in the podcast episode, compiling resources that listeners can use, teasing upcoming episodes or guest interviews, and adding a link to an anonymous Q&A Google form (which, by the way, is already available – I’ll drop it in the show notes moving forward).

My rationale here is, well, first, I want to enhance the overall experience of listeners who will tune into the actual episode. But also, these emails might prompt existing email subscribers to go listen to the episode if they aren’t already regular listeners.

3) Pitch my podcast.

Whether it is pitching to guests on a podcast or pitching myself to local press features like the newspaper, I want to make conscientious efforts to get the podcast out to more listeners in 2024. I’d like to make a dedicated effort for this once a quarter.

Pitching my show could also look like guesting on other podcasts and sharing about my work, introducing myself as a podcaster during future speaking gigs, or talking about my podcast when I’m networking offline or in person. Perhaps in Q1, I need to spend time thinking about organizations and podcasts I can pitch to.

I want to share some interesting ways listeners have found our show. I don’t have too much data on this, but this is what I was able to gather from the listeners who I was able to speak with:

They were following me on Instagram → Saw the podcast
Word of mouth → Followed me on Instagram → Saw the podcast
They searched “side hustle” on Spotify → Saw the podcast
They found me from someone else’s podcast → Followed me on Instagram → Saw the podcast
They saw an article I was featured on → Saw the podcast

What we can gather from this is:

1) YOU NEED TO TELL PEOPLE ABOUT YOUR SHOW

2) Optimize your existing accounts so when someone new finds you, it’s *obvious* to them that you have a podcast.

3) You can leverage other people’s platforms to share about your work. Hence, I’m focusing some of my efforts on pitching myself and my work in 2024.

Action plan aside, I also wrote down what could be considered indicators of my progress when it comes to my goal of growing my podcast:

Consistency in my posting and in the actions I say I’d do
I make efforts to optimize SEO (search engine optimization) for every episode instead of just doing the bare minimum
I make efforts to talk about my podcast both online and offline

And finally, my belief plan – which is the set of thoughts and beliefs that I will make a conscientious effort to ground back into on a daily basis:

I am proud of my podcast
People WANT to listen to my podcast
People WANT to learn about my show or discover it for the first time
I am an incredible podcaster and I produce world class podcast content

You need consistent implementation to grow your podcast

As you may be able to gather from my plan of action, there’s nothing particularly extravagant or super secret about my plan. It all sounds pretty straightforward and doable. And that’s exactly the point. The way I see it, it’s not about needing more information to grow your podcast. But it’s about implementation. Consistent implementation.

This is why I really, really mean it when I say that I’d love to have you join me inside the next round of the Thought Leader Club – A 4-month weekly 1:1 and community program.

This is THE room to:

Start putting in the reps CONSISTENTLY to create your thought leader career.
Build a body of work that lets you become known for your unique thought leadership, your story, and how amazing you are at what you do.
And ultimately set yourself up for making your 1-3 year dreams a reality.

Maybe your 1-3 year dreams are to:

Attract really cool speaking opportunities
Set yourself up for a successful book launch
Sign best-fit clients for your coaching program or services
Grow an award-winning podcast
Facilitate workshops for organizations you care about
Climb the corporate ladder
Or something else!

Whatever it is you want to build, the Thought Leader Club is THE room to help you do exactly that.

Inside the Thought Leader Club, you will have a specific set of tools and frameworks as well as both 1:1 and group coaching, structure, and accountability to make this happen.

Your next step is to book a discovery call to chat about you joining us inside the Thought Leader Club.

You can schedule a discovery call by first filling out a short application form at: www.cheryltheory.com/program. After you submit the form, you’ll get a link to book a discovery call.

Sounds good? Awesome. Let’s get to work.