Double downloads in 5 months, expanded online reach & more engaged followers

Door Key Podcast has doubled in downloads over the first 5 months that April, the Creator of the podcast, and I have been working together. Additionally, her podcast workflow has been drastically streamlined AND she feels more confident and relaxed about her content and outreach tasks. 

Although it's impossible to draw an exact correlation between the things we worked on together, I'll list them out in this post because clearly it worked in streamlining April's workflow, bringing her personality out in the audio episodes and growing her audience. The tasks we did to make these changes to Door Key, a history focused community podcast, are also the same ones I use with my business clients as well. 

Here's a quick snapshot of the progress we've made. The yellow time period is the first 5 months of our time together. 

Zooming into the first 3 months, which is when the most marketing tasks took place, there appears to be a rather substantial increase in downloads. 

If you follow me on LinkedIn or consume any of my podcasts or YouTube videos you've heard me say time and time again that downloads are one tiny metric that you can use for your podcast growth assessment. We also looked at workflow time saves (reported in season 3, episode 7 of Podcast To Connect, available in December 2024) and audience engagement growth (shown in the most beautiful spreadsheet in Season 3, episode 8 of Podcast To Connect, available December 2024). 

---

Context: How we worked together

For context, April started Door Key Podcast in June 2022, about 2 years before we started working together. Initially I was helping April with podcast editing because that workflow was overshadowing the creation and outreach side of her efforts. But because I'd been listening to her podcast and following her on social media for over a year already, I had a lot of marketing ideas already in mind. 

So we jumped in and started working on her outreach both on social media and by starting a Substack newsletter. April was quick to try out recommendations and this made it easy to track what was bringing new people to the podcast quickly! We ended up doing a 3 month marketing push, which is now formally known as the Tandem Podcast Coaching program. Tandem because it's a team effort where we're trying out many things to massage the podcast and online presence of the podcast to attract the right audience. 

Most of our communication was on WhatsApp in the form of voice messages, although files were shared via Google Drive and episode tracking was done in Google Sheets. But the marketing tasks below were suggested, talked about and tracked mostly verbally in these often daily (weekday) messages. This is a cadence that fit April's schedule. Each Tandem participant's communication preferences are taken into account when creating their personalized program before we begin. 

---

My marketing recommendations (that we experimented with)

• Using engagement questions in her social media posts (instead of just info dumping)
• Adding pre, mid, and post rolls to the podcast with calls-to-actions for the things she wanted her audience to do (share the podcast, subscribe to the newsletter, etc). You can hear them by clicking on any episode of Door Key. 
• Adding more of her connection to the content in her social media posts and Substack newsletter posts.
• Trying out different ways of ordering her social media posts, ways to add hooks to the beginning of them and so on.
• Questioning the topics she picked for the podcast and the reasons why she picked them. (She  ended up explaining some of these decisions in the episodes themselves). 
• Starting a Substack newsletter to support the podcast. She had so much extra content from her episode research, it felt like a natural place to use it and give even more value to her followers. 
• Adding transcripts to the audio files. This increases discoverability and opens up the audience to people who are hearing impaired, hard of hearing or prefer to read. 
• Tagging people on social media (to involve them in the conversations)
• Doing more guesting on other podcasts (which she had time for since her workflow had decreased!)
• Doing promo swaps with other podcasts ​

---

These are the main things that we experimented with during this time period. And are to some extent still experimenting with now, 5 months later. There are more things that we did but I wanted to paint of a picture with the largest brushstrokes to give you an idea of how extensive the Tandem Coaching Program is AND overall, how much there is that can be done to expand the reach of a podcast. 

If you want any help with your podcast audience growth, contact me here. 

---

November 22, 2024 update
From 5,680 to 6,240 in about 2 months. And Door Key Podcast is on hiatus during this one of those months.