Podcast Marketing Micro-Lessons For Scrappy Solopreneurs & Creators

1,163 WORDS | READ TIME: 4.4 MIN Hi friends, Good songs are built around a clear, memorable hook. Great songs are built around several. And then there are songs by Taylor Swift. The master of hook writing who brings the craft to another level. Take We Are Never Getting Back Together. In the first 62 seconds, Taylor drops distinct 6 hooks. By my count, the song as a whole has 12, many of them repeating throughout. For Taylor, this was just a warm-up, however. In Shake It Off, she crams 10...

Hi Friends, This week, we’ve been exploring the idea of Craft as one of the defining audience and customer attractors going forward. If you missed the first two essays in this mini series, you can find them here and here. To summarize where we’re at so far: AI has flooded the internet with AI-generated and Human/AI-augmented content. Much of this content is useful, factual, coherent, and better written than many creators could produce on their own. But none of it is content that is the type...

Hi friends, On Monday, I shared my thoughts about where everything is heading with AI, content, and marketing. In short: A dedication to Craft and authentic human creativity will be increasingly rewarded by consumers sick of AI slop, and the humans trying to win the AI-Enabled Content Arms Race. As I’ve been contemplating this new reality over the summer and thinking about how to respond to it myself, as a creator, marketer, and company of one, I’ve noticed some interesting trends in my own...

Happy Labour Day, Friends, It was nearly 30C (86F) this weekend here in Barcelona, but as I sat at one of my weekend cafes to read and journal on Saturday morning, there was no mistaking the slight edge in the air. The first, sweet tinge of Fall. Fall is my favourite time of year. Maybe it's that September is my birth month. Maybe it's that I'm most comfortable wearing wool sweaters and jeans. Maybe it's the smell of roasting chestnuts and woodsmoke on the breeze. Whatever the reason, I find...

Happy Friday, friends, It's been a while since I've had a show that has me drag-down-refreshing my podcast feed like it's Instagram, hoping to see something new pop up. The kind of show that bumps down everything else in my to-listen, to-read, to-watch, to-consume queue. But I finally have one, and I think there's a good chance it could become your new fav as well. It's called How to Change the World. Here's the pitch: How to Change the World is a podcast breaking down the history of human...

Hi friends, Tonight, my hometown team, the Edmonton Oilers, kick off the final challenge in their quest to claim the Stanley Cup—the NHL championship trophy—for the first time since 1990. The Stanley Cup is generally agreed to be the most difficult trophy to win in North American professional sports. To get this far, the Oilers have slogged through an 82-game regular season, then ground their way through three bruising best-of-seven series against some of the best teams in the league. Almost...

Hi friends, The odds are stacked against you. You don’t have to look far to find stats to prove it. Here are a few when it comes to podcasting: 75% of podcasts don’t make it to episode 10… and half of the ones that do don’t make it to episode 20 The median podcast gets 30 dl/ep… and even a top 1% show only gets ~2,000 dl/ep Rough estimates suggest that perhaps just 1–3% of indie shows even break even on their production costs, let alone make significant income The stats in other creative...

Hi friends, When I first got into podcasting in 2015, growth was easy. Or at least it felt that way. I know dozens of podcasters who launched shows in that era who quickly built up significant audiences around their shows that were—at least by today’s standards—wholly generic and uninteresting. Of course, starting a podcast then was much more difficult than today, but if you could get one up and running, you were off to the races. Around 2018, however, things started to shift. New clients for...

Hi friends, Quick note before we get into today's issue: If you'd like my take on how to design the optimal podcast marketing strategy for your business, I'm looking for a couple of brave volunteers for tomorrow's Podcast Growth Engine Masterclass. If you're a coach, consultant, online educator, author, or service provider and you'd like my help designing your strategy, hit reply and send me the following info: A sentence or two on who your audience is and how you help them Links to your...