You. We've reached the end of the episode and if you enjoyed this podcast or you got something from it, you might be interested in my weekly newsletter that I send out every Monday morning, full of podcasting tips, tricks, and news. So if you like this show, you might like this newsletter. To sign up, just go to the show notes and click the link. Thanks for listening and happy podcasting. You you little disclaimer for the show. I accidentally just recorded the whole
thing and did not hook up my microphone properly. So the audio quality is going to be worse than normal since it's my laptop speakers. But I did the best that I could to try to make it tolerable without having to rerecord it and to not be a perfectionist. So here you go. Hey. Welcome back to help me. Podcast. This is episode 67. Thank you for being here. And today we're going to talk about starting with Community and how you can use a community to grow your existing podcast or
your new podcast. I was talking to somebody about this just yesterday about how much work a podcast is and just to be able to create it and to edit it and to come up with topic ideas. Maybe you're interviewing people, it's a lot of work to get the actual product out there. But if you look at a podcast that's successful, really just creating
it is like half the battle, right? Because the other half of it is also marketing the podcast and getting people to know that it exists and doing different things to grow your podcast. So in this conversation, I just want to talk about how you can use community to grow your podcast. And I was listening to another video, as I always do, doing some new research every
week to try to learn more things about podcasting. And I came across this topic within a video that was basically talking about leveraging your community and kind of doing a grassroots sort of marketing plan, at least for a new podcast at the beginning. But this could also work for
a podcast that you've had for a little bit. And basically the idea is just getting like ten people or friends who you have in the niche of your podcast and basically reaching out to them one on one and being like, hey, I know you're in this community or you're familiar with this niche or you enjoy this niche. I have a podcast about this niche if you wouldn't mind taking a listen. I think you'd like this episode, something like
that, where you physically reach out one to one to people. But in order to do this, I think it's also important to figure out what your niche is and what your community is. And that's what the conversation that I heard was talking about, is being able to find out where people that would listen to your show would hang out, whether that's in person groups or events or networking events, or maybe it's Facebook groups or know, there's tons
of places that people form communities. And how can you become a part of the community that would want to listen to, your know, just a simple example would be something know if you have a podcast about farming, right? And maybe there's a local farming meet up every Wednesday night where all the farmers kind of get together and talk farm stuff, right? Kind of a silly example. But if you have a podcast about farming, the people that go to this event about farming might be
interested in your podcast. So that would be a perfect place to go and just discuss your podcast and to talk about your podcast. If I look at myself, I certainly don't really sell my podcast as much as I could be. And I think maybe that might be hard for a lot of people to just say like, hey, I created this thing, go listen to it. You're kind of asking almost a little bit of a
favor. Maybe you're not 100% confident with what the podcast is and it's growing, and maybe you're a perfectionist, but you kind of have to silence all those voices, I think, in order to grow your podcast and to get people that could actually find some enjoyment out of it. And maybe if you look at it in that way of like, okay, well, maybe this person will enjoy or learn or find a sense
of community with this thing that I created. Even if it's not perfect, you can almost look at it as like, well, if I can connect the right people to the show, then I'm kind of helping them out in a way. So maybe
that seems less selfish. But another thing that you could do for, like, a newer podcast, if you haven't started a podcast yet, and maybe you're trying to refine your podcast and figure out what niche or what genre your podcast is going to be, something you can do is to spend some time in different communities and to become a
member of those communities again. If it's a subreddit or if it's a Facebook group, those are places online that you can join and you can see what people are talking about and what people are interested in and you can make connections and you can friend. You know, if you're in a community like that, let's just say you're in a Facebook group for a couple months, six months, people are going to start to notice your name and they're going to start to see, oh, this person's an active
member. And I remember when they commented on something else. And once you kind of gain a little bit of that leverage, now you can start asking questions like, hey, I'm thinking about doing a podcast, or you can get feedback from the community as to what people enjoy. And when you do launch a podcast, you could ask of them, hey, I just started this podcast. I'd really appreciate it if everyone listened to it and gave me some feedback on it, what they liked, what they
didn't like. And then right off the bat you have maybe if the community is a couple of hundred people, maybe let's just say ten people listen to your podcast. Now you have ten new listeners that you didn't have before and if they enjoy your show, they're going to want to share it and they're going to want to tell other people about it. So I guess the topic of this episode is kind of this grassroots sort of effort.
And something else I heard in the video that I was listening to was that some of the guys that have bigger podcasts that were talking were saying that this is how they started their first podcast and how they started to gain some traction is they literally just reached out to all of their friends or their network circle who might be interested in that topic and just said, hey, I'd appreciate if you listen to this one episode and let me know what you think. And kind
of manually getting new followers. And I think that that is a really good idea. But I could also see how it would be difficult for people, like I said, struggling to ask for help or struggling to put your face or your product out there if you're a perfectionist, but I think that it could be a beneficial thing for your podcast. And after listening to that, I also
kind of challenged myself to do it more often. And when I am in groups of networks or when I'm meeting new people to just kind of talk about myself more and to talk about what I do more and to be like, hey, I have this podcast and this is what it does. And if you're interested, maybe you should listen to this episode. It's my most listened
one, that sort of thing, more of selling yourself. And actually right after I listened to that video, what I did was I went on Canva and made like one of those I'm sure you've seen barcodes that you could scan on your phone and it takes you to a link. Well, if you go to Canva, you can actually create those custom barcodes. So what I did was I went to my transistor site, which is just my main page that has all my episodes and then all the links to the streaming
sites. So I took that link and I made a barcode in Canva just like a very simple page, PDF sort of thing and I downloaded it to my phone. And now I have basically like a little app on my phone that I could click and it's a barcode to my podcast. So now it makes it that much easier for me to share my podcast to people because sometimes when people ask me I'm just like, oh, this is the name. It's working towards our purpose. And they're like, oh, okay, cool. But I'm certain
90% of those people forget the name and forget to look it up. But it's much easier if you could just pull out your phone and be like, hey, here's a barcode that you could scan and you can go follow it on Spotify in two clicks. So that for me, I hope is going to make it a little bit easier for me to be able to share my own podcast when I meet people and when people ask me about it and also encourage me to bring it up
more often and to sell myself more often. So I think a lot of that is going to be with practice and something to get better and better at. But yeah, I think that that was a thing for me anyways. That feels like it'll be easier for me to then share my podcast with other people is going on canva making a barcode and just giving people a really easy way to get to your podcast and to go listen to your podcast
and also putting it on my phone. I don't know if you could do this on Apple, but I know on Android you can create like a link for a document and it looks just like an app. So you click it and then it'll just open up that PDF that I made from Canva. So I hope that this was helpful. Thank you for tuning in as always, and I will see you on the next welcome to Help Me Podcast, a show designed to help
you launch and grow your podcast. I am your host, Gino, and twice a week I will release a new episode with different tips and tricks for launching and growing your podcast. From audio engineering to learning intentionally to growth tactics, each episode will be a bite sized tip to help you podcasts.