Kevin Chemidlin: [00:00:00] So I'm going to go ahead and guess that if you're listening to this, you are a podcaster who's interested in getting more listeners and growing your show. Is that right? Cool. You are in the right place now. This is the third of my launch episodes for this podcast, grow the show. And really this serves as almost part two to episode two with Eric Newsom.

[00:00:24] So in the most recent episode with Eric Newsom, we talk about how to figure out who your audience is and be really, really, really specific about who you're making your podcast for. So this episode is going to talk about, okay, now that we know who it is we want to serve and. Who those listeners are that we want to go get.

[00:00:43] Now, we're going to talk about how to get more of them. So if you haven't listened to episode two of grow the show with Eric Newsom, listen to that one. Before you listen to this one, because if you don't know who you're going to get everything that we talk about in this episode, isn't going to work because you don't know who you're searching for, but if you have.

[00:01:04] Listened to episode two of this podcast and even better if you've completed the 10 word description and, and audience persona exercises, then now we're going to learn how to go find more or of those people and to help us do that. I'm bringing in. A mentor of mine, Alex Hillman, who lives in the same city as I do Philadelphia, he was an early guest on my first podcast, Philly who, and ever since then has been helping me to navigate the space of being a creative entrepreneur and of growing and more importantly, serving a really specific audience.

[00:01:40] Now, Alex has recently released a book and we're going to talk about that book and specifically how. That book can help you as a business, this owner, because whether or not you have a launched your podcast business, yet you do want it to be a business. Yes. So we're going to talk about a few lessons from that book and how they apply specifically to podcasting and even better.

[00:02:02] We're going to share exactly how you can go about finding new listeners online for free and without being super annoying. Right. Without being that person in the Facebook group who just logs in and says new podcast episode available, and it gets no engagement from anybody in the Facebook group and it's just super awkward self-promoting and just doesn't work at all.

[00:02:26] And then. Actually lowers the value of the Facebook group, because people hate that so much. So we're going to teach you how to actually promote your podcast online in Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, wherever your listeners are while not being too self promoting and actually building trust with the people who very soon will be your listeners.

[00:02:49] So if you're ready to go get more listeners for your podcast and to learn from an expert audience builder, how to do that. Then let's go. This is grow the show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidlin. And my mission is to help you the independent podcaster to grow your show, get more listeners and monetize now.

[00:03:15] So you can have a thriving podcast business. This episode is going to teach you how to get more listeners for free spending, only 10 minutes a day. And those listeners are going to trust you more than they trust their own mom. So if you want that stick around and get ready to go grow the show.

[00:03:35] Alex Hillman: [00:03:35] Hi, my name is Alex Hellman and I make things, put them on the internet so that people can buy them.

[00:03:42] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:03:42] Okay. Okay. So he's being pretty modest there, even if you make the coolest and most amazing things that have ever been made and put them on the internet, if you don't have an audience that knows and trusts you enough to buy those things, nobody's going to buy those things.

[00:03:58] But Alex is able to do that. That's because he's an absolute pro at building large engaged audiences, both online and in person, but what's even more impressive than the size of his audiences is just how much trust he's built with these people. So today we're going to learn how Alex does that and we'll be able to take those lessons and apply them directly to growing a large animal.

[00:04:20] Trusting podcast audience. Now, like I said, Alex has built a couple of large distinct audiences. The first one is in the world of coworking that's because back in 2006, Alex co founded the first coworking space in the city of Philadelphia. That coworking space is called indie hall. And it's still a thriving community to this day, even as it's gone virtual during the 2020 pandemic.

[00:04:45] But it's immediate success in 2006, made Alex a thought leader in the earliest days of the coworking industry.

[00:04:52] Alex Hillman: [00:04:52] I don't even know if I would say that there was a coworking industry yet. There was a. Nascent community of people that were interested in creating these places for laptop enabled workers who were being booted out of coffee shops in some cases, the best way to describe it as kind of like a map, then walking into a room where a bunch of people are hanging out and talking about their projects and going well, your project sounds really interesting.

[00:05:19] And maybe like something I would like to do. So yeah, for the right person, it created the sense of bigger than just me. Which I felt was super powerful. That was more interesting and attractive to me than anything to do with an office. The sense of being a part of something bigger about creating things together.

[00:05:38] That was really exciting to me.

[00:05:40] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:05:40] So he created one of the first ever coworking spaces and by sharing his knowledge of this new field, Built a loyal audience of India dependent business owners. The second an audience Alex built is in the same world. And really you could argue that it is all one big audience, independent business owners, but for our sake, let's just call it the second audience.

[00:06:01] So with Indy hall, Alex created a space for people who were already self-employed, but with time he saw the need to also help people who wanted to be self employed, but couldn't fully wrap their heads around how to do that. So to help those people, he co-created stacking the bricks.

[00:06:20] Alex Hillman: [00:06:20] Stacking the bricks is a, the website and a business that I started with my friend Amy Hoyt about 10 years ago, when we realized that a bunch of our creative friends were hopping from startup job, they hated to startup job.

[00:06:34] They hated to corporate job. They hated back to another startup job. And in some cases going out, raising a bunch of. Angel or venture capital money to create a business that they hated. I was visiting her and we were just kind of like drunkenly, musing. What's wrong with our friends. Okay. Kind of judgy, but also I guess, a little true and realize that like, There's a blind spot for them.

[00:06:57] And a lot of creative people because of what they're exposed to, where they've learned about business, what their perspective on business is, you know, the examples they have are all they can really match against. Why have we done things differently? It's not, what do we know that they don't, but what do we see that they don't?

[00:07:11] And so we started writing more about. You know, what is different about our approach than the quote unquote common knowledge approach to starting a startup and everything came back to start with the people first, you know, how do you center the other person? As a core philosophy as a core strategy and make sure all of your tactics align was really what seemed to be missing.

[00:07:36] People would come up with a good idea and they were centered around the idea rather than who the idea was for. And so we have a flagship course called 30 by 530 by 500 is actually a math equation that says, if you get 500 people on the entire internet to pay you $30 a month, you're making $180,000 a year gross, which was a healthy software developer salary.

[00:07:58] Philosophically and strategically it's, we're about taking the big goal of 180 grand and breaking it down into numbers that suddenly feel a lot more manageable and achievable 500 people on the entire internet, $30 worth of value every month. Those numbers feel human scale. And it's not that you do them over night, right?

[00:08:19] You don't flip a switch and suddenly you're making 180 grand, so you can quit your job. If you stack the bricks in that direction, you just, you build this one small brick at a time, one small tweet at a time, one episode at a time, the small things add up to the big thing. This is, is sort of the through line in how you build big things.

[00:08:38] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:08:38] So through the past decade and a half of building multiple communities, helping hundreds of online entrepreneurs build their businesses, listening to their problems, their questions, their worries. Alex has seen insanely similar patterns. So this year he published a book. That book is called the tiny MBA.

[00:08:59] And it's not like any other business book you'll ever read. It's only a little over a hundred pages and each page features only 240 characters. So rather than some sort of owner's manual of new tactic advice that takes about six hours to read the tiny MBA, just 100 tweet sized gems that gives you food for thought you can get through the whole book.

[00:09:25] Faster than this podcast episode. Really? You can read it in like 30 minutes, max. This is the first time I've ever read a book three times in preparation for an interview. And it was not that hard to do that, which is great. But can you tell me about how you came up with this format for a book?

[00:09:43] Alex Hillman: [00:09:43] The core of the book was written in public on Twitter.

[00:09:48] A challenge was issued as sort of a Twitter meme, too. Post to Twitter and say, if you like this first tweet, I will respond to it with one strong opinion, belief perspective, piece of advice, something along those lines for every time that the tweet is liked. And so I posted it and I said, I will do this up to 100.

[00:10:13] And so I started writing my 100 and when I got to like number eight or nine, I was like, this is difficult. But I was trying to think of as what are things that I answer for people, often questions I answer to people often, or what are things that I see people make mistakes that they don't ask about.

[00:10:32] Maybe they wished they had before things went haywire, those kinds of things. What are the common things I see or get asked about, but then I've got to figure out a way to say it in the space that Twitter gives me over the course of three or four days. I got to 100. No, I was like, cool. I did it go me. And then I walked away and it was Christmas and new year's and I went on vacation and I came back mid January.

[00:11:01] And some of these tweets actually, quite a few of them were still getting retweets and faves and like a full six weeks later that was still happening. And I've had some tweets go viral, but never anything with this kind of staying power. And I was still getting replies. Like, you know, I just read. X business book and this Twitter thread was more valuable than it, things like that, which, you know, I always take things like that with a grain of salt, but I also have to acknowledge that it was happening as a pattern, including with people that I didn't know.

[00:11:33] And so I kind of off-handed, you know, quote, tweeted that original one. I was like, starting to think about what it would look like to turn this into a book and my replies just totally blew up again. And that was how this book actually turned into. So. All of that reader centric focus like making individual tweet useful to the reader was built in from the people say writing a book is the hardest thing you'll ever do this.

[00:11:58] Wasn't. It was challenging, but it was not the hardest thing I ever did by a long shot. I think it's because I wasn't trying to write a book. I was just trying to help the reader. And then later I edited it down into something that was a bit more polished and provided a bit more framework and narrative and things that in a package that people knew they wanted.

[00:12:18] If I had said pay $10 to download my tweets, Nobody would have done it, but people know what a book is. So take this thing that clearly worked and say, what would it look like to take a thing that I know works and put it in a format that people already desire. I think this will sell. And it turns out that, so

[00:12:43] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:12:43] there are so many lessons in there that can be.

[00:12:47] Tied directly to podcasting, but just in general, helping people bringing to light the fact that this thing was just like, yes, it's a new format. I haven't read a book like this before, but it was just born in an exercise in getting your thoughts and getting your help out into the world and in front of people.

[00:13:06] So I'm going to call out two sets of three cards in the book, three pages, if you will. And the first one is about. Audience building. And

[00:13:17] Alex Hillman: [00:13:17] if I go to page 30, eight of my

[00:13:19] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:13:19] copy, and I'm just going to read the three. So quote, lots of people get stuck on the idea of audience building, because it feels like an abstract outcome of self promotion.

[00:13:31] And for a lot of people, self promotion holds serious negative connotations. This is because most people have only seen examples of bad self promotion audience building should really just be called earning trust at scale because that's what it is on quote. Oh my goodness. So podcasters. Number one question, how do I grow my audience?

[00:13:54] How do I get more listeners when you frame it like this building trust at scale it's, it's actually more clear, right? How do you build trust at scale?

[00:14:05] Alex Hillman: [00:14:05] I love this framing and podcasting. And I certainly wasn't thinking about it specifically when I wrote it. A couple of specific things come to mind for me in that podcast require I think two things of, of the audience.

[00:14:21] One of them is time, which is, I think kind of obvious the other is a little less obvious. I'm going to frame it as intimacy. There is something that podcasting does that I don't think any other medium does because we listened to it and we only listen to it. We stick a thing in our ears or on our ears, and we let somebody closer to our brain than literally anybody else in the world.

[00:14:46] And you combine that with the time factor I podcast that I've listened to hundreds of hours of that means that. I've spent more time with that host than any movie star, most singers, and maybe any human being that I know personally, that's wild. So what does it take to earn that I think is really a really cool way to frame this and trust is the key to unlock.

[00:15:17] And when I think about trust in the context of podcasting. The first thing I think of is, are you going to value my time as a listener, which I know from a production perspective means editing, having editing even be a thing, but also there's like, are you going to consider my time? Are you going to be thinking about where am I listening to this podcast?

[00:15:44] A subtle thing that I, I hear podcasters do often that I feel like. Is subtle but fits into this category is letting the listener know when there might be swearing. So if they've got kids around, they can make the choice to listen to that show on their own or not. Or if there's any sort of depictions of, you know, violence or abuse, what it says to me is you were thinking about my time and my space, where I'm listening to your show.

[00:16:16] That little thing earns a little bit of my trust. The other thing that I think is broadly universal is why would I listen to you? Talk about the thing you're talking about. And you don't get a lot of time to establish that. But I think the advantage of the podcast is once it's established get to keep it so long as you don't undermine it.

[00:16:40] You know, if you put yourself in the shoes, maybe another exercise here is put yourself in the shoes of. The audience member, what, and do they have to recommend you credibly as they listen to someone? Right? Cause a big part of the way the audiences grow is word of mouth. If somebody goes, I read this thing, you should read it.

[00:17:01] I listened to this thing. You should listen to it. And that only gets to happen if I. Trust that this creator can do that more than once. So I think there's a, an element of the work of speaking directly to the audience. If you're ambiguous, it's not that you can't earn that credibility. It's that this is harder, right?

[00:17:23] You instantly get some credibility points when somebody goes, ah, this person is talking directly to me. They know who I am. Right. I think people think about audience it's building as I need to go get. Lots of people and they skip over the one on one. Yep. Which it could be in the case of growing an audience for a podcast, you know, interacting with those listeners on social media, in a one on one fashion or on other platforms besides of the podcasts that have better discoverability building trust and credibility off platform in places where maybe it's a bit.

[00:18:02] Easier to do those one on one interactions and then bringing people over to the podcast because a you've earned that trust and credibility. And do they go well, I like what you did on tech talk. Let me see what your podcast is. Even though they're coming in with an understanding of who you are, a context, a bit of trust.

[00:18:21] Not that you need to go on tic talk, but like, if you can learn from that. And then bring that to a place where your audiences build that rapport and then use that to direct people to the podcast as your main long form value delivery tool. I feel like that stack gives you the full one-on-one to repetition of that one-on-one that is needed to build that trust again.

[00:18:49] It's not just one time. It's it's a pattern too. A bridge to whatever the actual thing you want them. Yeah. In our

[00:18:57] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:18:57] case, the thing we want them to do is to listen to our podcast and subscribe, become a repeat listener. So of course, the question then is where can we go online to find those dream listeners where they already are?

[00:19:11] Where are they congregating? And where can we go start to build trust with them so that they might be interested in becoming podcast listeners? Well, to understand that we're going to borrow a concept from Amy and Alex's course 30 by 500. This was created to help business owners find their customers, but we can apply it to how we can go find out the listeners.

[00:19:34] And the answer is that we have to go, go find them in the online watering holes.

[00:19:40] Alex Hillman: [00:19:40] Yeah, well, watering hole can take so many forms and this is actually one of the harder parts about teaching a watering hole is I've got to give you like a really specific place to start. And a good example, the trouble is, is most watering holes.

[00:19:51] Don't look like the good example, a lot of the time. So knowing whether or not you found a watering hole or a good one can absolutely be difficult, but the key factors are, do you have the ability to observe people talking about there? Work, their interests, their questions, their pro are they asking each other questions is like number one.

[00:20:15] Right. And do they help each other? Do they come there when they have a problem? I can give a really interesting example that I bought a motorcycle a couple of years ago. And it's a, it's an all electric motorcycle that has a pretty, and it's like a niche, but pretty intense fan base. And so there's a Facebook group for this.

[00:20:34] Particular brand of motorcycle called zero. And I have zero interest in creating products for zero motorcycle riders. But. Darn it. If my brain didn't kick into Safari mode, Safari as our, our approach of researching these watering holes, where I'm actively taking note of the problems that people talk about, the questions they ask as patterns that you can then turn those answers or solutions, or we call them fixes to those problems into either.

[00:21:06] Free things to give away a blog, post podcasts, a cheat sheet, you know, a diagnosis, stick, whatever it is, something that is useful to solve a specific problem that to earn trust and then down the road have something to sell. Whatever that may be. It took a lot of energy for me to resist doing that because of this watering hole was just packed with people asking like interesting to me questions because I was also a beginner who had these questions and I, and that's another thing that I hear people say all the time.

[00:21:34] I was like, well, I I'm new to this space and I'm not the expert. I'm like, that is not your job. Your job is not to be the expert. Your job is to be helpful, which expertise is useful. But sometimes being the person who points another peer, another newbie peer in the direction of the expertise is equally or more valuable because people trust you and listen to you because you were like them also a beginner.

[00:21:58] So. Facebook forums can be an example, any kind of forum or discussion board or email list. Okay. Twitter itself, jump on a hashtag, right? Or just to set up terms and see what's happening. Not don't just look at the first tweets, but look at the entire conversation that's happening. One of the more challenging ones now, especially as we're in this sort of movement towards.

[00:22:22] Private communities is things like Slack back and discord and, you know, group message shots and stuff like that. Obviously, those are a place where trust is even more important because you're being allowed in. But. You know what the watering hole looks like, what tool it's on is not really the point. The point is, is, is this a place where people go out of habit to interact with people like them?

[00:22:49] The watering hole Safari analogy is important because sales Safari is this technique that my partner, Amy. Invented and basically takes ethnography. So observational research, not asking questions to get answers, but observing what people do and say when they don't know that they're being asked or observed the act of ethnography, applying that to the internet is, is so much, well, then ask him questions because when people get asked the question, they answer the way they think they're supposed to answer.

[00:23:17] But when people go into a watering hole and post a question, or even a statement to a room full of. You know, in some cases, relative strangers and other cases of relative trusted set of peers, you have to take a couple steps back and go what was going on in that person's day, where their instinct was.

[00:23:34] I'm going to go to this place on the internet and talk about this. If you can be there in that moment, or the beauty of this happening over text is you don't have to be there in that moment. You can read the chat, scroll back, or the archives. The observability of those moments is incredible. And the depth of the insights and understanding you can gain about your audience and what they want need.

[00:23:58] They aren't explicitly saying, but their actions are telling you is maybe one of those most powerful, super powers. And also one of the things like once you learn how to do it, you can't unsee it. And like I said, I joined a new forum on a personal interest. This happened, we'd want to join a wine class too.

[00:24:18] I joined a wine class to not be thinking about business. All of a sudden we're talking about global markets and distribution and I'm like, damn. So like I'm at the extreme end of the spectrum, but water, the holes can be anywhere as long as they a place that people. Instinctively go to interact with their, with their peers.

[00:24:37] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:24:37] Right? So it's one thing to, to be able to identify the watering holes. Well, it's another thing to observe. The next step is actually contributing to it, right? Helping these folks that went there to help, right. That I think many folks can understand. So there's a card in the book where you say, if you're looking for your first clients or customers, Start by asking yourself, where do they go?

[00:25:03] When they have questions or need help? What resources do they trust? What communities do they belong to then go there, but don't go there to sell now. So you are talking in this page of the book about watering holes. Don't go there to sell. When do you, when can I say, Hey, I have this podcast.

[00:25:22] Alex Hillman: [00:25:22] So there's two answers to this one is a little more vague and I think the other is more of a never, and I'll explain what that is in a second.

[00:25:34] Love it. So the vague answer, I can give a concrete example here. A lot of the students in 3,505 of their audiences on Reddit. As one of their, you know, Reddit itself is not a watering hole. Subreddits on Reddit can be watering holes. Cause they are those niche communities where we will go to interact with each other thing here is that because Reddit is not a monolith and it also proves the point that every community has the same rules and guidelines.

[00:26:01] Some places are way more strict about anything that looks and smells like self promotion. You mentioned one of the other. You know, pieces in the book talks about people's reactions to self promotion, or because they've mostly seen the worst when you're interacting in these communities. You have to remember that there's usually a team of moderators who are there keeping the place neat and tidy and keeping spammers and all kinds of other bad behavior out power can go to those moderators heads and some moderators can become jerks, but for the most part, moderators are doing a very difficult service for their community.

[00:26:34] In guiding the right kinds of posts and away from the wrong ones. Right. So yeah, part one here is learning. Participating contributing not to link to your stuff, but to be a part of the conversation to earn that credibility and trust become a regular, you know, sort of like going to your favorite neighborhood restaurant or comic book shop, or, you know, I think it would go to any of these places right now in 2020, but you get to be a known regular, right?

[00:27:02] That earns you the trust, but also to get a sense of what are the social norms of that community. As another piece of advice I often give is like, Get to know the moderators. Right. And go from the perspective, not of you want to win the ability to post whatever you want, but to make it clear to them, like, Hey, I recognize you've got a hard job.

[00:27:21] If I've ever got something that I wanted to share here, is there something you would away, you would prefer me to do that. Right. And then do what they say. Don't talk back. Don't try to convince them of you're. You're going to do it another way and it'll be fine. Like. Show them that you're listening and show them that you deserve their trust because you're there to participate in and follow by those community guidelines.

[00:27:47] Some of our students follow a unwritten unspoken rule of, you know, 10. Posts like 10 comments or community interactions for everyone, self post. Is that a useful? I don't know. That's not really the, my brain works. I think it's useful for some people. So if you're looking for a rule of thumb, I think that's a good maybe North star to show you like proportionally, you know, 10 X more value than you're trying to extract in terms of sending them a link to your latest episode or whatever it is.

[00:28:21] So it's give 10 X more than you're looking for, I think is perhaps a good starting point ratio. But again, that's not a hard and fast rule. Depends on the norms. Depends on the mods. There's some places where that's a hard and fast. No, never. Yeah. Go find somewhere else to big internet. Right. So that's the, the house they interact.

[00:28:39] Right? So be there when people ask questions, be there in the comments when people post successes, be there to cheer them on, uh, you know, be a part of the community that you. Wish to serve is the best way to become a leader in that community. And ultimately what you want to be seen is as a leader in that community, because that's the kind of people that new people will see as someone worth pointing to referring to they'll share links for you.

[00:29:06] So you don't have to, that helps the other side of this is. No, you can make a decision early on that. You're never, we're going to share new episodes of your podcast into that watering hole. But what you can do is share things that are useful into that watering hole. That aren't the podcast that get people over to your website and onto an email list and use the email list as your primary method of letting people know, Hey, there's a new episode for you to check out, right?

[00:29:37] So in 30 bucks a hundred week, Teach a technique called E bombs or educational bombs dropping an ABOM of education and knowledge on people. And that's sort of where you take your comments from a post that are the people that found useful, and you kind of pull it out of the comment. You drop it into a text editor and you put a little bit more work into it.

[00:29:57] Maybe some graphics, maybe some additional resources, maybe a downloadable PDF. You know, here's the three things to remember print out this cheat sheet, tape it to your wall. So you don't forget it, those, those kinds of right. And. Again, the goal here is not to extract the goal here is to earn trust. And once you've got that trust, then the ability to say, Hey, I've got something useful, check this out.

[00:30:19] You know, I personally really. I don't see a lot of success from being the person to create an entire new post in that forum or Facebook group or Reddit. It says I made an article right. In the same way. You don't want to see as much traction from making a top post or a first post about your new thing, the real actions in the comments.

[00:30:39] Right. So if I make that thing about a question that gets asked. You know, once a week, every time that question gets asked, I can be in the comments being like, here's a helpful tip. If that was useful. Here's three more link. Yeah. Right. So I never post without there being value, even if they never click on the link.

[00:30:57] Right. That's super important in terms of a rule of thumb. So when that happens, what I'm really doing there is I'm building my own little place where I own the rules. I can send emails whenever I want those people have opted in to hear from me, right. The mods aren't in control and I'm playing by the rules.

[00:31:17] And I'm only there to give gifts, right? If somebody likes what I gave and they want more, I've given them a place to get it. And that is a bridge to an email list, which in my experience continues to be the number one place to yeah. Sure that that repeat reach is available.

[00:31:37] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:31:37] Yeah. I've learned as well. Like if we port this example to Facebook groups, a strategy that I've seen before is to have your Facebook profile, have every link.

[00:31:45] You have the links, right, right there in the headline. I do this, you said this website

[00:31:50] Alex Hillman: [00:31:50] be so good that they click on your profile to see what you're about and then make it easy for them to find the other thing.

[00:31:55] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:31:55] Exactly your profile is where you self promote like crazy. You can get people to see it by just being incredibly helpful in the Facebook groups.

[00:32:02] And that goes everywhere. So the stacking, the bricks podcast feed has recently featured several episodes of you on other podcasts, almost on a podcast tour. So I have not seen this before, where somebody, you know, goes on a podcast tour and then puts all of those episodes on their own feed. So can you talk about that idea a little bit and.

[00:32:24] If you've seen any results from that.

[00:32:26] Alex Hillman: [00:32:26] So three years ago, things got kind of hectic and I stopped producing this deck in the next podcast, despite the fact that it was doing quite well, well over a thousand downloads in the first seven days. So like not huge, but. Absolutely respectable. But most importantly, it was a place where I knew our audience was getting a lot.

[00:32:48] We heard from people that they love the podcast. And when it went away, we heard even more, you know, every couple of weeks I get a message from somebody here, you bring about the podcast, Hey, you bringing back the podcast. And I always wanted to, I just didn't, you know, combination yeah. Of the time. Yeah.

[00:33:03] The tools have gotten better. So I got the time down, but like, it's just another thing to do, man. I kind of got to fit it in somewhere. I knew when I was planning out the promotion book, stuff, that podcasts were going to be a big piece of the strategy, partly because I'm independently published by us. And I don't have some, like, you know, publish your book to send me on a bunch of planes.

[00:33:28] Also it's 2020, right? That's not an option. So it was like, podcasts are in live streams are going to be it. And I did my brain and storm of who are the people who have shows that serve the audience that I think would love the book, who are people that I know. And I think we'd love the book and they can tell me if they're, you know, what is the angle for their audience, that sort of thing.

[00:33:48] And I started also thinking, I was like, right, these are the ones that I know, how do I get beyond the podcasts that I already know that I already think of, or that come up when I search. And I started thinking about. What I'd seen other authors do. And Derek severs is a. Incredible human being an entrepreneur and someone I can proudly call a colleague in that we've actually gotten to interact a few times, uh, over our years through mutual friends and Derek, just, just a couple of new books as well, which are excellent.

[00:34:25] And I highly recommend checking them out. I watched Derek, but my initial, the thought was say like what podcasts that Derek. Gone on because the audience for Derek's book is pretty similar to mine and he has a much bigger audience than mine. So podcasts that he's picking are probably good candidates. I might have to sell myself a little bit harder than, than he did.

[00:34:47] Maybe not. I don't know, but like if he's there, there's a good chance that I being meeting there would be advantageous as well. So I started doing that research and then I realized that Derek had a feed of all of these shows and I was like, ah, this is such a good idea.

[00:35:04] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:35:04] We had a feed of all the podcasts that he'd been on.

[00:35:07] Yeah. It's just basically the Derek silver guest feed. Wow.

[00:35:10] Alex Hillman: [00:35:10] Which he had been doing, like previously, he had been doing really little, almost like meditations, like little bits and pieces of advice. And you sort of build momentum for the books that were coming out, but it was like, it was very sporadic. It was inconsistent for me.

[00:35:25] It was kind of nice to hear. Derek, you know, drop a little bit of knowledge from time to time. And then all of a sudden, like a bunch of them started out Derek on this show, Derek on that show. And I was like, aha, not only is this giving me fodder for shows to reach out and see if I can be on the, but like a Metta feed of all of the shows that I'm going on would be awesome.

[00:35:46] And I. I'm not starting from scratch. I have a feed that people ask me at least a few times a month. Hey, one are new episodes. So I reached out to the first couple of people I had recorded with to bank episodes before book launch. And I said, Hey, thinking about putting episodes on this stacking, the bricks feed I'll record an introduction that sort of tees it up.

[00:36:08] Explains who you are and tells people, Hey, like if you liked this episode, there's more of this episode on their feed and you should absolutely go check out their show for more stuff like this. And of course they're down for that. Most podcasts is just want other people to hear their show. That's what we talked about.

[00:36:24] But you know, to say, I'm going to not just post your file, which is what Derek was doing. I decided to go one step further and record a little special intro, which over a couple. Now I've got like a, a script roughly four and things like that.

[00:36:36] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:36:36] Yeah.

[00:36:37] Alex Hillman: [00:36:37] And I have a bigger bank of back episodes yeah. Now than ever before, because I'm getting these episodes from other people's audiences.

[00:36:45] In order for me to produce an episode, I need to do. All of the work. I need to decide to do an episode or need to book the guests and all the things that go into it. I need to do the recording. I need to do the post production. I publish the episode and this case I've got somebody else doing three quarters of that work.

[00:37:00] I just need to say yes to show, to be on a show. We get the file from them. Record my now relatively template intro. Okay. And put it on the site and the maybe most surprising. Part to me, I was not surprised that people would be excited to show us back. Our feed had gone dormant for three years and there was still some downloads coming in, you know, new people discovering the show because it's on our website.

[00:37:24] You know, we were averaging in the low to mid hundreds of downloads a month up until June and July. And in August, when I started releasing new episodes, August, we only released episodes in the second half of the month and we have 10 times the downloads and. August than we did in the previous months.

[00:37:45] Right. So read this on our website, but, and the fee that people were already subscribed to, if they had not unsubscribed that's right.

[00:37:52] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:37:52] But this just speaks to the fact that if the feed goes dark for a little while, It's not the end of the world, right? Another fear podcasters have in that whole, cause it's just banged in.

[00:38:02] Everyone's had to be consistent and that's how you build trust. And that's how you have a successful show. And it's, you know, there are tons of podcasts out there who are as consistent as it can be and don't see any growth and they wonder why, but at the same token, if you need to take a break. If there's an episode that you created, that doesn't add value and you don't have one to take its place, whatever.

[00:38:19] Even if you have a successful feed and life gets in the way for three years, if you come back and you continue to add value, people will still be right there with

[00:38:28] Alex Hillman: [00:38:28] you. Yes. I had a lot of folks say enthusiastically, that they were coming, you know, they came back. Right. So, you know, we did let people know via the other channels that we still do have active and people were enthusiastic to come back.

[00:38:42] So yeah, I agree with you. Consistency is valuable, but is it priority number one so that all of the others are priority zero? You know? No, no, it's definitely a balance. I agree with that.

[00:38:58] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:38:58] Priority one, your audience, who are they? Where can I go get them? How can I go find the watering holes by the way, 40 minute podcast, episode covered only three of the 100 pieces of business wisdom in Alex's the tiny MBA.

[00:39:13] So if you want the other 97 pieces of business wisdom and want to become a better business owner in only 30 minutes, grab the tiny MBA. You can get a print or Kindle copy@tiny.mba, real simple URL. And actually, if you use promo code, grow the show, you'll get 20% off. So where is your audience currently hanging out online?

[00:39:36] Where do they go to interact with each other? And how can you go join those communities? Become a leader of that community by serving them by adding value, by contributing, without pitching. If you want some guidance on how to do that, I invite you into my watering hole. There's a link in the show notes to the grow, the show, pod casters, Facebook

[00:40:02] Alex Hillman: [00:40:02] group.

[00:40:03] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:40:03] If you'd like some help in figuring out where your listeners are hanging out, where the watering holes are, what watering holes you should be participating in. Go ahead and jump in, let us know who you are, who your show is and who you're looking to reach, and we'll help you out. There might even be somebody else in the group who is also serving the people you like to serve.

[00:40:24] And could help you to find new listeners. Now, this episode was helpful for you. I'd like to ask one thing in return, and I think, you know where I'm going with this. If you find this valuable, please make sure you're subscribed to the show. Leave a rating and a review. If you're on Apple podcasts, join us in the Facebook community so you can connect with even more high performing independent podcasters share notes, share strategies.

[00:40:49] And of course, if you know, any other podcasters who might benefit from learning about how to find more listeners in the watering holes, send them a text right now, asking if they'd like to get more listeners. And if they say yes, send them a link to this show. Now next week's episode is going to talk about how you can get your podcasts featured on TV and in major media outlets.

[00:41:12] So now that we know who our listener is, Now that we know how to go find them for free and on our own next, we learn how to get ourselves featured so that they can find

[00:41:25] Alex Hillman: [00:41:25] us

[00:41:27] Kevin Chemidlin: [00:41:27] that episode comes out next week. The show is a production. This episode was produced and hosted by me. Kevin Schmidlin. With masterful postproduction from max Graham, see music by two guys and a cat and special.

[00:41:44] Thanks of course, to Alex Hillman for Q nine and grow the show. My name is Kevin. Schmidlin see you next week.