Yes, I listened to all 3 hours of this episode so you don’t have to.
However, there are so many fantastic nuggets, I still highly recommend it to any podcaster.
We align on virtually everything, from his simple approach to gear, to handling guests and prepping for episodes.
But like you, I was most curious on how Tim’s brilliance had been applied to growing his show.
In some areas I was surprised, and I’ll give you my overall conclusions at the end, but for now let’s dig into the nitty gritty.
Here are the Tim Ferris Top Tactics for Podcast Growth….
Podcast interviews
Meaning you being a guest on other podcasts, which is foundational to the MicroFamous system.
Tim’s best advice here was to be explicit in sending people to your podcast. “If you don’t, there’s not an automatically high conversion rate.”
It’s easy to forget that, and end up plugging a book or a lead magnet. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But if your goal is to grow your podcast by giving interviews on other podcasts, don’t send people to 5 other things.
Send them to your podcast and make it clear that’s the best way to connect with you.
Now, if you’re really good at getting people off podcasts and into your email list, keep doing that.
Over the long haul, I believe an email subscriber is worth more than a podcast subscriber, because an email subscriber will get your podcast episode via email and have plenty of chances to subscribe to your podcast.
So I think there are 2 lessons here.
First is not to forget to send people to your podcast in the quest to give them a bunch of options to connect with you.
Second is to sprinkle in mentions of your podcast naturally into any conversations you have on other podcasts. So people know about your podcast even before you get to the end where you can give a call-to-action.
Email & Newsletters
This one surprised me a little, but as Tim put it, “They’re only one link click away from the action you want them to take.”
So email is still incredibly powerful and if you have a podcast, make sure to incorporate your podcast into your email strategy. Tim obviously came into podcasting with a large and engaged email list he’d built up for years, which is a great advantage.
But all of us have an email list of some kind, and it still remains one of the best ways to promote our podcast, so don’t neglect it.
Yes that means sending new episodes to your list, but it can also mean tactics like:
– adding your podcast episodes into your initial follow up sequences
– recording certain podcast episodes specifically for your email list or email follow up system
– creating special short-run podcast series which can then be offered to your email list on top of your normal level of communication with your list.
Andre Chaperon and Digital Marketer are both good at this, where they offer a certain email series with a specific goal. Each email is numbered and has a set limit so people know exactly what to expect, and it’s delivered on top of normal communication with their list.
Now I’ll interject that with all the inbox filtering going on, the more authentic and personal your emails are, the better. Dean Jackson and Andre Chaperon are my personal email heroes, and inside our agency we’ve nudged our clients in the direction of super personal, less branded emails.
Big Name Guests
Tim has a big caveat here, and I’ll paraphrase: A no-name guest with good content will beat a mediocre celebrity guest every time. Which I completely agree with.
We booked Grant Cardone on a client’s podcast a couple years back. It was so bad the client called me afterward and said, “I don’t even know if I can release that episode.” And it did nothing for his podcast in terms of podcast downloads.
So as Tim pointed out, chasing big name guests can be a fool’s errand.
Obviously Tim has big name guests on his show, and it’s a big part of why we still listen. I know I tend to ignore the guests I don’t care about and zoom in on guests that draw me in, like Derek Sivers or Richard Koch or Seth Godin.
So a big name can mean vastly different things to different audiences.
What’s interesting about Tim is I don’t feel like he has big names guests just for their own sake.
If he’s not genuinely interested in them, I don’t see him sitting down and calculating, “Let’s just have them on the show cause they’ll draw big numbers.”
The lesson I take here is don’t go after big name guests for what they can do for your podcast. Invite big name guests that you genuinely want to connect with and share with your audience.
Remember that the bigger audience a guest has, odds are unless they have a massive social media audience, they’re not going to share your episode in such a way that draws vast numbers of new listeners to your podcast.
In 5+ years of producing podcasts, we’ve found that big name guests are more about giving your audience something that delights them so much that THEY share the episode, and then over the long haul, getting the show discovered through search or recommendations in podcast apps.
So big name guests have their place in the overall ecosystem, but they aren’t a magic silver bullet for podcast growth.
Paid Acquisition
Tim mentions this in the context of a big name guest, and offers as an example the Arnold Schwarzenagger episode and the promotion he was able to put behind it.
He didn’t go into detail but it sounds like they may have run Facebook and Instagram ads to promote that specific episode. And that’s something we haven’t experimented with that I think could absolutely be worth it.
The YouTube version of the interview also has 300k+ views, so maybe they ran some YouTube skippable in-stream ads as well.
Fair warning if you try paid acquisition for podcast growth, it’s going to be hard to track results for a few reasons.
If you’re promoting a podcast episode, people can just look up the episode on their podcast app without even clicking on the link in the ad or going through your landing page. So it will be hard to judge exactly how effective any ad is.
Then if you try to judge the effectiveness of an ad by the overall number of downloads compared to your other episodes, that gets messy because after all, it was a big name guest. What if that was going to get a spike of downloads anyway?
So paid acquisition for podcasts has always been tricky and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
The best info I have from someone in the podcast space is that Spotify ads to boost a podcast run about $5 per new podcast subscriber. That might be good now in an age where getting email opt-ins from Facebook is up in the $8-10 range, but it’s still not great unless you have money to burn on experimental advertising.
For most online products, paid acquisition just doesn’t work with lead costs at $5 or more.
Even in an environment where leads were cheaper, Russel Brunson and the ClickFunnels crowd was having to do all these super complex funnels with a million upsells and cross-sells just to get close to breaking even on the ads.
Now that lead costs continue to go up, it’s questionable whether that business model works for anyone outside the top 5-10% of the internet marketing crowd. So paid acquisition for podcasting, where there’s almost zero opportunity to get something back right away, is tough to justify for most experts.
YouTube
YouTube has been very good for me, and at one point over a few years my real estate podcast put 4k new subscribers into our email list. Mostly from people finding full episodes on YouTube and going to a landing page.
According to Tim, YouTube can be extremely helpful, and he pointed to examples like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.
However, if you know Tim’s content and his journey, YouTube has not been a big part of his strategy.
The content on his YouTube channel that comes from his podcast is a mix of full episodes and clips, but the full episodes get a fraction of the audience of the audio podcast, and he hasn’t had the success with his clips as Joe Rogan has had.
The intersection between podcasting and YouTube is a huge topic and I have a lot to say, so check out the episode on YouTube vs podcasting for experts.
So I don’t get the impression that Tim has any special insight on how to use YouTube for podcast growth. As with any platform, content that is created specifically for that platform will outperform anything that’s been repackaged from another platform.
Traditional PR
This was Tim’s last tactic and basically a throw in at the last minute, and he means other media outlets outside of being a guest on podcasts.
Obviously Tim has had fantastic and wide-ranging PR over the years, being featured in blogs, magazines, speaking at events, doing collaborations with BitChute and ProductHunt, and so much more (his blog posts on book launch strategy are genius level).
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So after listening to all 3 hours, here are a few general conclusions.
There is no magic silver bullet for podcast growth.
I didn’t hear Tim say anything that our clients aren’t already doing or we haven’t tested with our clients.
Obviously if you have a big existing audience on a platform like social media or email, that gives you a huge leg up.
Tim brought his huge blog audience and an engaged email list when he launched his show.
Is the show unique and amazing? Absolutely.
But would the show have had the same level of success if Tim started his podcast as an unknown?
Absolutely not.
Even if it was the same quality of podcast, with the same great questions, the same great guests.
One of the most powerful things Tim said was that he’s aware of his metrics but he doesn’t think much about growth.
He does the podcast because he wants to.
He gets something out of it
So he would do it even if it was far less successful.
If you wouldn’t host a podcast unless it hits a certain level of success, or only to generate leads, it won’t be enough. It won’t sustain you. It won’t satisfy you.
The best reason to host a podcast is because you want to.
The second best reason is to serve your audience.
So the best strategy for podcast growth is create the podcast you and your audience would listen to.