Michael Jordan, Simone Biles, Wayne Gretzky. Every so often, someone comes along who is playing the game at a whole different level. And when it comes to podcasting, we've got two of them.

Jay Clouse and Chris Hutchins each host hugely successful shows. And this special episode, we're getting inside the minds of these two creators to understand the thought process, experiments, and personalities behind the downloads (not to mention some serious revenue).

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Resource

Listen & Subscribe to Sound Judgment

Creator Science Podcast
Creator Science
All the Hacks Podcast
Tim Ferriss Episode w/ Chris Hutchins

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Plus, we need your help to decide what to make next.

We spend the majority of our time thinking about podcast marketing & growth. But that doesn’t mean we have it all figured out.

In this final episode of Season 1 of Podcast Marketing Trends Explained, we break down our stats from the season along with our mistakes and missed opportunities, lessons learned… and the surprising insights we’ve gained along the way.

Plus, we brainstorm three new show concept ideas to keep us busy between seasons… and ask your feedback on which one we should pursue.

Cast your vote for which show we should make next

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Topics Covered
00:00 Intro
00:49 How many downloads we expected to get going into this season
02:35 Breaking down our Season 1 stats
03:22 Is YouTube worthwhile for the average podcaster?
08:34 Engagement time and consumption rates
12:44 The metric we care about more than analytics
20:26 Assessing Season 1: What we did well
23:02 How experimentation led us to find our structure
28:21 A big mistake we made with Season 1
32:05 Mistakes and missed opportunities in Season 1
36:18 Help us decide which show we should create next
40:57 Concept idea 1: “Make it Big”
45:03 Concept idea 2: “Why It Works”
49:48 Concept idea 3: “Podcast Riffs”
54:35 Listener feedback and what to expect from Season 2

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Resource

Jay Clouse from Creator Science
Josh Spector
Bumper articles on measuring listen time
Growth In Reverse
Arvid Kahl
LinkFire
Chartable
The Futur
Unthinkable w/ Jay Acunzo

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Less than 5% of your potential audience is listening to your show. Here’s why, in their own words.

Even small shows with just a few hundred (or few dozen) downloads an episode have usually been listened to—at one point or another—by thousands of people.

A small number of those people are your regular listeners and superfans.

A larger number are casual listeners and samplers, people who don’t listen to every episode, but rather based on their interest in a specific episode topic or guest.

And then there are the people who listened to one episode or less… and never came back. While the data is hard to measure, chances are, less than 5% of the people who are both aware of your show and interested in your topic are regular listeners.

Which begs two questions:

1. Why aren’t they listening?
2. Is there anything you can do to change that?

To get to the bottom of this frustrating phenomenon, we ran a survey to our larger audience to find out—in their own words—what kept them listening more regularly… or at all.

The good news?

They didn’t hold back.

And in this episode, we break down their feedback, which—while aimed at our show—likely applies to your show as well.

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Topics Covered

00:00 Intro
00:49 9k email subscribers… 350 downloads
02:41 How listeners choose what content to engage
04:50 The role of 'Jobs to Be Done' in podcasting
11:32 Why our audiences are tuning us out experiment
15:30 Understanding your Total Addressable Market
18:32 Strategies for retaining podcast listeners
21:24 Earning the right to long term listeners
26:28 Breaking down our casual listeners repsonse data
29:01 The challenges of creating career-adjacent content
30:16 Creative ideas to engage more listeners
33:36 What listeners like about our titles and descriptions
37:13 Using feedback to guide your content strategy
41:50 Why non-listeners choose not to listen
44:06 How to break through to non-listeners
49:43 How we’re incorporating this feedback

⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️

Resources

Check out our full audience survey data
Walkthrough: How to replicate this survey for your show

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They’re not always obvious, but the elements of storytelling are at the heart of every great episode. This is as true for interview and solo shows as it is for narrative. For comedy & fiction as it is for business.

And in this episode, with the help of a special guest, we’re breaking down the core principles of storytelling and how to incorporate them into your show.

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Topics Covered

0:00 A new podcast growth experiment
3:21 Introducing Sound Judgment
6:24 Crafting your show’s Sound Vision
16:06 Structuring your episodes for impact & retention
18:54 Thinking in scenes
23:20 Surprise: The unexpected emotion behind all great podcast episodes
35:42 Why specifics are the key to unlocking memorability and emotion
40:20 Our analysis of the Sound Judgment episode
42:17 Digging deeper into defining your sound vision
47:35 How we use scenes to structure this show
51:33 How to incorporate surprise & suspense into your episodes
58:47 How to be a more specific (and thus, better) interviewer
1:01:52 The elements of a fantastic cross-promotion pitch

⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️

Resource

Listen & Subscribe to Sound Judgment

The Story Grid
YouTube: Brandon McNulty
On Being
Wild Boys
Famous & Gravy

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We all know success doesn’t happen overnight. But what does the data say about how long it takes to reach 1k… or 10k downloads per episode?

Podcasting is inherently a slow-growth medium.

Without a central discovery system offering the potential for virality, growing a podcast is a long game of slow, steady, incremental growth that compounds over time.

But while you might expect growth to be somewhat slow when you start out, how long should it take before it speeds up?

In this episode, we’re breaking down what the data says about how long it takes the typical show to reach the 1k and 10k milestones, the factors that influence those timelines, and what you can do to accelerate the process.

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Topics Covered

00:00 Intro
00:59 Podcast growth lessons from Warren Buffett
05:00 When typical shows hit the 1k & 10k dl/ep milestones
10:36 How experience affects a show’s growth rate
15:21 What everyone gets wrong about consistency in podcasting
26:16 The powerful compounding of relationships
31:33 Stacking micro-improvements to your show with every episode
35:26 Strategies for navigating (and avoiding) creative burnout
38:28 Building your transferable skill set
44:22 Our personal stories of creative compounding that have got us here
56:12 The impact of mentorship and constructive critique

⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️

Resource

Mike Birbiglia’s Podcast, *Working It Out*
Build and Launch, Past Project by Justin Jackson
Mega Maker, Project by Justin Jackson

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How long should your episodes be? What’s the best format for growth? Plus... the single most important decision you can make if you want to grow.

Before you launch a new show, you have to make a number of creative decisions that set the course of your show.

Will you do an interview, solo, or co-hosted show? How long should your episodes be? How often will you release new episodes? And who is this actually for?

These structural decisions tend to get made once, sometimes without much thoughts… but they cast a long shadow over the growth potential of your show forever.

So how do you ensure you’re making decisions that align with your goals and give you the best chance at success?

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Topics Covered

00:00 Intro

00:53 How much does a podcast's structure matter in terms of its success?
03:26 Breaking down our recent episode length experiment
10:12 A better question than “how long should my episodes be?”
19:03 Which show format is best for growth?
23:48 The impact of podcast format for success and audience growth
25:22 What makes for a great interview show?
25:43 The art of crafting compelling interview shows
29:45 What makes for a great solo podcast?
33:31 What makes a great co-hosted show?
37:01 How we would design a show to get to 50k downloads/episode

⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️

Resources

Akimbo
You're Wrong About
How I Write
Essay - Hide Your Work
Tanner Campbell - Practical Stoicism
Pod Save America podcast
All In podcast

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Most podcasters waste their time on these tasks that will never lead to growth. Are you?

Producing a regular podcast is one of the most grueling, time-intensive forms of content creation in existence.

But what if 80% of the time you’re currently spending on your show isn’t actually contributing to growth?

In other words, what if you could get the same results while spending drastically less time on your show?

Or, what if you were to redirect that time towards higher leverage activities that actually did move the needle for growth?

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Topics Covered

00:00 Intro
02:13 Breaking Down the Numbers: Data on high-growth show time spends
08:39 What stood out from the categories of growth in the data?
11:19 Where to spend time when you’re first starting your show
19:18 Finding opportunities to improve your show in your daily life
20:48 Where to spend your time once your show has traction
29:00 Time-sucking tasks to ignore or eliminate
40:21 The ultimate amplifier of every hour you spend on your show
42:37 How much time are you spending on your show each week?

⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️

Resources

David Perrell: How I Write Podcast
Chat GPT
Everyone Hates Marketers
Ira Glass

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How to get the best ROI on your podcast production and marketing budget to maximize growth… whether it’s $100 or $10,000 per month.

You’re probably pretty confident that if you had more money to spend on your podcast, you’d be able to grow it faster.

But have you ever stopped to think about how you would spend it to get the greatest ROI?

Should you buy ads? Invest in better gear? Hire an editor or assistant?

In this episode, we break down our takes on where your podcast budget is best spent in order to grow the fastest.

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Topics Covered

00:00 Could we grow faster if we had more budget?
02:47 How much the average podcast spends on production & marketing
06:41 How much high-growth shows allocate to marketing
08:11 How we’d spend $500/month to grow
15:23 How we’d spend $2,500/mo to grow
27:23 How to figure out what brought people to your show
31:00 How we’d spend $10,000/mo to grow
38:03 Understanding your brand
50:24 Running retargeting ads to your podcast
52:33 How we’d grow our podcast with zero budget

⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️

Resources

Descript
ConvertKit
Cast Magic
Calendly
Zapier
Chartable
Linkfire
Figma
Canva Pro

Complete the Podcast Marketing Trends 2024 Survey

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