Prologue
15 People > 30,000 People
Are you sick of hearing about Clubhouse yet? (Don't know what it is? Look at this.)
I just did the first session of The Big Podcast Club last night. We had maybe 15 people come through.
Every time I go on the radio, 30,000 people hear my voice. And that's just on the local affiliate.
Talking to 15 people via a social media is very inefficient compared to talking to 30,000 via radio. As the venture capitalists would say, "It doesn't scale."
But the venture capitalists are wrong. Sometimes doing something that "doesn't scale" is the very best thing you can do for your business and for those you connect with.
In a couple of months, I predict that Clubhouse will either be the next big social media network or it will go down in flames as one of the most hyped apps of all time. Regardless, right now, I'm going to be doing a series of small group calls to connect with podcasters like you and help you grow your podcast.
If you'd like to talk to me and other successful podcasters personally, follow me on Clubhouse (@davidhooper) and check out The Big Podcast Club for more details.
The best things don't scale. Personal emails, writing a good book, and getting to know your listeners takes time. That's what this newsletter is about, although I do have a couple of recommended tools to help you make things a bit easier when sending and receiving lots of emails.
Podcast Marketing
Getting Bad Reviews? You'll love this story...
This restaurant owner was having a problem with 1-star Yelp reviews, so he started asking for them. And the results have been pretty amazing.
This takes guts, but is definitely something you could leverage to get attention for your podcast.
If you're worried about "bad reviews" for your podcast, definitely read it. Even if you don't do something like this yourself, I think you'll find it empowering as it shows how little power "negative" online reviews actually have compared to how you respond to them.
Would Writing A Book Help Your Podcast? That Depends...
As an author myself, I can tell you having a book will definitely help you to get attention for your podcast and give you some level of gravitas.
With that said, writing a book can seem like a task that tasks forever. My latest book (which is about podcasting – you should get it) took over four years to write. It's one of the "slowest" things you can do to grow your podcast. The current book I'm writing, even if it's quick, will take a few months.
But what happens once a book is done? That's where things can get really exciting!
Is it worth putting in the time to write your book? This article looks at a few things to help you make that decision for yourself.
Podcasting Tools
GBlast - Free mail merge for Gmail
There's nothing like a personal email, but there are times when you need to send pretty much the same message to a lot of different people. For example, I just sent a "scheduling" email to my producer, my engineer, the guest I'm interviewing, and the guest's publicist.
GBlast is a free Chrome extension that handles this for you. It allows you to "personalize" a general email with somebody's name (which increases open rate and attention) as well as keeps your inbox clean from "reply all" messages that you don't need to see.
This is by the same people who run the email marketing software Snovio. It is VERY good and (obviously) cheaper than similar paid software like Gmass.
Paced Email - Keep Interview Requests (And More) In Check!
Here's the problem... You have to put an email address in your podcast feed, which means you likely get A TON of email from people who scrape the feed and send you messages about:
- being a guest on your podcast
- podcast hosting (remember Pippa? - They scraped THOUSANDS of podcaster feeds)
- sketchy podcast promotion schemes that try to game the Apple Podcasts charts
Paced Email allows you to set up special email addresses, such as one for your feed, that send you a weekly (or even monthly) digest of all the emails you get, saving you tons of time, but more importantly, keeping your real email address private.
You can try it free.