If you’re looking to grow your podcast audience, it may be time to start hiring help. The two ideas may not seem related, but in fact, they are.
When you reach a certain plateau in your audience growth, you will quickly discover that you may not be able to keep up with all the demands on your time.
To truly expand, and find more listeners you’ll need to stop working in your business, and start working on it instead.
What this means is you need to bring in other people to handle the day-to-day processes. You don’t need to be the one handling the editing your audio, updating your website, creating show notes, and a host of other activities.
Instead, you should be doing things like:
- Guest podcasting on other people’s shows
- Writing (our outsourcing the writing of) guest posts for blogs
- Sending out press releases to the media to get the word out about your show
- Attending conferences and more
With all of this in mind, here are seven effective ways to grow your podcast’s listener base by hiring help.
1. Start With Editing
Editing is one of the most important aspects of starting a podcast that actually doesn’t require you to be the one doing the job. While you may want to personally edit the first several episodes to get a feel for how to do it, and how you want your podcast to sound, soon you can hand over the reins to someone else.
You need to be there for the recording, but an independent contractor or an employee can take over the editing to give you back some time for working on growing your listener base.
For example, suppose it takes you 10 hours a week to edit your episodes. By getting that time back, you can start networking with other podcasters and begin building a relationship with them.
Eventually, you can ask them to either feature you as a guest, or for a social media share of your latest episodes to help you get the word out.
2. Work On Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When it comes to keyword research, and seeing what episodes are moving the needle, you can hire someone to do all of that for you.
Not only will you save the time of learning how to maximize SEO opportunities yourself, but you will also save the time of actually completing the task as well.
What can you do with this time saved? Develop an editorial calendar!
Having an editorial calendar will help you come up with new and innovative ideas for future episodes, and you will have the time to determine better means of promotion as well.
For example, while you’re working on your podcast’s editorial calendar you can include space for social media updates as well. Add the ideas for what you will share on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc … directly to the calendar and then outsource the scheduling of that too!
This step will ensure you are never at a loss for what to record, and that you always know what to share to social media so you can continue promoting with less effort.
3. Add Your Show to Podcast Directories
While most podcast hosts know that they should submit their RSS feed on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify, they have yet to take the time to submit it to places such as:
- Deezer
- Stitcher
- iHeartRadio
- TuneIn
- Pandora and many others
Using our Complete Podcast Directory List, create a task for an assistant to submit your RSS feed to every platform on the list.
This step alone will potentially get your show in front of several hundred thousand people who otherwise might not have ever heard of you on their platform of choice.
💡Pro Tip: Do you need a podcast RSS feed? Check out our step-by-step guide on how to create one!
4. Create Social Media Groups
While you and/or your cohost(s) are the face of the business, you don’t have to be in a social media group all hours of the day to take advantage of growth opportunities with them.
Create a community on Reddit, Facebook, or even LinkedIn to have a direct connection with your listeners, and then hire an administrator to help you moderate the group.
How will this help you grow? As more people find out about your community, they will be interested in learning more about your podcast.
Long time podcaster, and multi millionaire John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneurs on Fire fame has two Facebook groups – one related to his paid course Podcaster’s Paradise, and the other for his planners called The Freedom, Mastery & Podcast Journal Family.
By launching Facebook groups, he has created a fiercely loyal community of followers that regularly are informed about the latest news about his podcast and business, but that also promote and share what he is up to.
Imagine having a community of your own that become brand advocates sharing with their friends and family how amazing you are! This could create an amazing word of mouth growth opportunity for your business.
And, by hiring help you can create, maintain, and grow a group like this much faster than you would have if you were trying to do everything yourself.
5. Investigate Sponsors
Earning more money is a key to growth for your podcast listener base. Wondering how to grow your podcast audience with more sponsors?
When you earn more money, you can afford to purchase more ads for visibility, and hire more help to keep spreading awareness of your podcast and brand!
At some point, you probably won’t have enough time to investigate and search for new sponsorships on your own. The good news is that you don’t have to be the one doing this!
Hire help to find sponsors! They can even draft your correspondence for outreach.
You can of course use Podcorn to find sponsors when you are first starting out. As your show grows, you stand to earn even more money based on your numbers with Podcorn.
However, when you are ready to work directly with the bigger brands for larger sponsorship deals, having an assistant will help you immensely with the task.
6. Find and Work with Influencers
Influencer Marketing Hub refers to influencers as people with “the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience.”
They also define influencers as people with “a following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages.”
Imagine your podcast was in a niche that had influencers singing your show’s praises on a regular basis. That could certainly get more visitors to your website and podcast pages.
On the other hand, if you’re spending every waking hour working in your podcast’s day-to-day operations, you likely don’t have time to look for influencers, let alone work with them to keep growing your audience.
Now imagine, you’ve hired help to find the best influencers in your niche to pitch.
And, imagine they are doing all of the initial outreach on your behalf!
Or maybe they are just managing other tasks that don’t require you to physically do them so you can reach out to influencers yourself.
Either way, having more hours given back to you opens up more possibilities for growing your audience.
7. Repurpose Show Content
Even if you have only been podcasting a short time, odds are you’ve already developed a wealth of content for your niche. Don’t hoard that valuable knowledge!
Instead, hire help to repurpose your podcast’s content into:
- Newsletters
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Audio snippets
- Books and courses, and more
You can even hire AV assistants to film you as you turn this content into videos for YouTube, and hire more help to edit and post those videos directly to your channel with optimized tags and descriptions.
Once you start outsourcing all of the tasks that don’t require you to be the one doing them, the possibilities are endless.
Related: How to Promote Your Podcast on Social Media.
The More You Hire, The More You Grow
Start small, and as you earn more, keep hiring help to continue growing. There’s no telling how far or how wide your reach can get.
As you keep growing and finetuning your team and business, you can pump out higher quality content and release more episodes for your growing audience.
You can even have your team schedule your episodes and social media posts ahead of time to keep running on autopilot while you start traveling and crossing items off your bucket list.
Remember, you don’t have to go big in the beginning. Your growth can be limitless, and we want to see your show explode! 🚀
