4 Very Effective Pathways to Propel Your Health-Focused Podcast’s Growth That You Need to Know

How can you grow your podcast? You’re trying to use it to generate leads and sales for your business. So naturally a bigger audience is beneficial. Today we’re going to look at the four growth pathways to help increase your podcast audience. This is Profits Through Podcasting where we help health focused entrepreneurs generate leads and revenue for their businesses through podcasting.

I’m your host, Joel Oliver. 

We are often discussing the methods and tweaks for optimizing your podcast so that it’s able to create leads and revenue for you. And in the context of our four podcast success pillars, that includes a focus on content, audience, offer, and commitment. So that’s the overarching plan on how to make everything work.

And then within that, particularly the audience pillar is where we think about growth. Right? With the pillars in place, what direct strategies can we employ to steadily grow a podcast audience over time? So, I do want to preface this as well, that this is not about going viral or getting millions of listeners, okay?

Most clients that we work with, that’s not their goal, nor is it necessary. to build a thriving business around. It’s just not, it’s just not something they need. They’re just trying to find as many of the right people as possible to listen to their podcasts and then hopefully become clients of their business as well.

So let’s look at the four different pathways to consider when it comes to growing your podcast. 

Health podcast, growth pathway. Number one. Optimize. This is mostly related to organic discovery. So it’s more of a passive thing. You do have to think about it, but you don’t have to go out of your way to do this all the time. It’s just things that you take care of and ingrain in your own habits.

So focuses mainly around things like proper show notes for SEO. So we don’t want to just see sentence long show notes. We want to have some actual substance to them. When you post this on your website, then over time, you’re going to get ranked higher by Google. It’s easier for people to find you online and not only the show notes for the SEO context, but also the podcast title. Whatever your podcast is named that the description of that as well. So that’s like the main one you would see on the Apple podcast page for your show, not the individual episodes, but the main description, but also your episode names. Yes. We want to have keywords in there as well.

So all of this leads to more discoverability across different platforms. So this is what we’re talking about under this optimize section. And I did mention your website there with SEO. If you haven’t done this, make sure that you’ve got ownership of your traffic by having episodes on your website with the full show notes.

There are certain ways to embed these that don’t actually work properly. Okay. SEO ranking of your website. So you can actually think that it’s working properly. But Google, when it looks at your website, it’s not it’s not seeing it. So in that case, you’re actually losing out on a huge opportunity.

And I come across this quite a bit. So you want to make sure that is set up correctly and then make sure that your podcast name and description is proper. That’s the one that stays the same all the time. And then your episode names and descriptions, your show notes, make sure that is of quality of value, proper keywords and has enough substance there to actually help when people are typing things in and searching for content.

Health podcast growth pathway. Number two, connect. Remember, podcasting is about people. You are putting content out there for people to consume and enjoy. So if there’s nobody on the other end, well, nothing is happening, right?

We’re talking here about growth. We’re talking about growing your audience. So keep the focus on people in mind. How can we do this? Well, cross promote, be a guest on other podcasts. This really goes hand in hand with being a podcaster. You’ve already got the setup, you have connections, you know how it works.

So you can go out there, make appearances on other shows and then gain exposure to new audiences. It’s great. And then you can invite those same people. If, if there’s a synergy to be guests on your podcast, right? You’re tapping into each other’s audiences. Then you can become connections on social media.

But it doesn’t stop there. You want to think about engaging your own community as well. Stay in touch with people. Be on social media, be active on their email as well. Respond to inquiries quickly, post interactive content like quizzes and polls and things like that. Interact with their content, right?

People in your network be commenting and liking that sort of thing. This is something that, I feel is quite important, especially these days as AI becomes more and more prominent. There’s more tools that do this all automatically, or people have outsourced social media management. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but if you really want to try to cut through the noise and become someone that is in a person’s network, and they trust you, and they might consider doing business with you.

If they don’t know who you are, That’s going to be very difficult. And then we see like AI making comments on posts or assistance and that type of thing. It’s just really hard to get through to people, right? I I’ve tried to do this. I try to build connections you know, in a , legitimate way.

But oftentimes I think that the owner of the Instagram account isn’t even seeing it. They might be responding. I don’t know if it’s, if it’s a person, it might be an AI, but at the very least an assistant. So being out there and just being authentic and trying to make these real connections is very important.

And as I’m saying here, this may require more and more creativity as we move forward, such as in person events or being introduced. I know that works quite well. When you can’t get through to someone, say through email, it’s just going to spam or Instagram because it’s not them even reading it. When you get a introduction from someone that this person already trusts and you’ve made a mutual trustworthy connection with.

That’s great. And there’s no easy way around this. There’s no sleazy way to do this with AI. Like I’ve mentioned, you know, it just takes authenticity and real connections. And that’s going to go the same for people in your network guests that you want to have on. And of course, people you want to do business with listeners in your audience.

You’ve just got to be a real person. You want to show up. If they are actually coming and commenting on your Instagram posts, for example, I think you better be there and respond. I would hate to have a situation where someone felt compelled to reach out to me and I’ve had this either through guest appearances on other shows or some, you know, our own content, someone reaches out and it’s just, I never even see it.

All this content that I’ve put my heart into creating to help people and someone decides to write and said that they liked it or they want some, give some feedback or ask a question. And I just have some assistant who responds to it or an AI. I can’t fathom that. And I think this is going to be more and more important going forward.

Now, how you deal with that in your own business, in terms of scaling and what you focus on, that’s, that’s up to you. But me personally, I think this is something that, I really value and I want to spend my time on. Like if I’m going to delegate things within my business, one of the last things or maybe never that I would consider would be responding to a nice email or a message that someone left me.

I want to do that. I would have liked to have more free time so I could do that properly and delegate other things that are less important to me. So keep this in mind. You want to be connecting with the people in your audience, being And that will serve you quite well moving forward for growing your podcast. I’ve seen this firsthand as I’ve started podcasting and being a guest on other podcasts as well. Like you really start to know these people. It’s not just that you went and sent a LinkedIn connection request to someone you’ve never met. You’ve actually had a face to face with this person, perhaps podcast.

You had a few minutes of chat, got to know each other a bit and maybe you started doing business with them. That’s happened to me as well. And I truly know these people now. And they are great advocates for my company. I’m an advocate for theirs and it just wouldn’t have happened otherwise if I just tried to send them a LinkedIn DM and it went to their spam or whatever.

You know, I, I had to authentically make those connections or maybe sometimes just got lucky, which you got to show up for. It’s just not all luck. You show up and then, wow, all of a sudden you get lucky. Right. Pod match has been great. I’ve talked about that before, but yeah, I’ve really made some great authentic connections through all of this and it just wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t put in that effort and didn’t consider how this actually works, going and doing business with someone is a great way to foster a connection and Having them on to do interviews is another great way.

If you’re able to get through to them. Now you’ve got an actual real true connection. You may see them in person at some point at a conference or something. Maybe you can even meet people there, but people connecting with people, super important for growing your podcast and your business. Health podcast, growth pathway.

Number three, repurpose. This is getting a bigger ROI from podcasting and making the most of your content. You can turn your podcast episodes into all types of different content with very little extra effort from you. And that’s what I love about it. You can create social media posts, you can create emails, newsletters, blog posts, books, courses, live streams, whatever you can think of.

This is just a great part about podcasting and certain people resonate more with creating certain types of content. Sure. I could sit down and record Instagram reels all day instead, but I just like doing podcasts. I like to talk. I find it’s an easy way to organize my thoughts and then just talk. Talk about it, but I don’t really want to write a blog post.

I don’t really want to sit and make reels and I don’t really have the time to do that. So it’s super efficient when you podcast, just focus on this. I’m going to make my podcast episode, whether it’s a solo one or a guest interview, I’m going to do the prep for that and everything else is delegated or automatic in some way.

 I’ve got my responsibilities and then the team does the rest. Very little extra input required to get more output. And this helps grow your show because imagine these days if you didn’t have social media at all, and not to, not to say that it can’t be done, but realistically, you kind of gotta be on social media or you’re, you’re definitely limiting your growth if you are not.

And by doing that repurposing of the content, it’s so much easier. Now you can actually grow through social media because the content is out there. You can grow through having blog posts and SEO because the content is out there. If you’re using the podcast to repurpose into emails, well that’s another great thing, having an email list.

So definitely taking advantage of the opportunities that podcasting provides in terms of repurposing is huge for growth. Again, most notably because it requires very little extra effort from you, maybe a little extra expense, but it’s so easy to do, right? It doesn’t really require any thought if you have to pay a bit extra.

So what? You know, this is great. I would love to have more opportunities in business where I can just pay a little extra and something great happens repeatedly in a scalable manner. So don’t miss out on these opportunities to repurpose your podcast content.

And health podcast growth pathway number four is promote. You’ve got to actively promote your podcast. Once upon a time, this may have been a little different, but there’s so much competition these days.

You need to be proactive about getting your podcast out there. You can’t just sit and wait. How can you promote? Well, two overall categories, paid or unpaid means. So we’re either going to invest money in some sort of advertising promotion or unpaid where you don’t have to actually spend any money more.

So you just have to spend time or have someone on your team spend time. So what would paid include? A vast variety of things could be sponsoring email lists. If you find someone who has an email list that is very relevant to you, their audience would be interested in what you’ve got to say if they offer sponsorships, or even if they don’t have that promoted, you could go and ask, Hey, are you open to having me pay to sponsor one of your Email blasts, podcasts as well.

You could connect with podcasters who were looking for sponsorships and run an ad on their show. You can do a social media campaign. So typical Facebook or Instagram ads or an episode we did a little while back in middle, the middle of February, we tested a whole bunch of podcast apps where you could run ads.

And that was quite lucrative for us. So you promote your podcast to people who are listening to other podcasts on these different apps. And they can click through and actually subscribe that way So I really like that personally and we’re just in a position where we have A budget that we can invest into promotion.

So that was great because just help speed up the process. That’s essentially what paid comes down to the things I just mentioned there, there could be more, but when you take money, pay, and hopefully get more listeners to your podcast in turn, and obviously with the, ultimate goal of them becoming clients, we will be great now on the unpaid side of promotion, we could look at Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups. You got to be careful there as if you’ve been in any of these lately, I’m sure we all have. You’ve probably seen, there’s just a, a never ending amount of spam people trying to post stuff there and promote things.

And then it seems like someone finds a new way to do it where it’s not spammy, but then everyone’s doing that. So. Like I was kind of touching on earlier, there’s no way around just being authentic and giving value and becoming a member of a community, making connections with other people. You’re not just going to march into a Facebook group and throw up a post and then get a bunch of new listeners.

You’ve just got to be there over time, connecting with people, helping people and having your name seen and making connections. It’s just the way it is. Okay. But anyway, I digress. Facebook or LinkedIn groups are definitely an unpaid method. You just have to spend time finding and interacting with other people on social media.

So following them, commenting on their posts, adding value to their posts, not these dumb spammy single sentence or single word comments or a bunch of flame emojis. That’s not going to work. As I mentioned, there is kind of a challenge with this these days because you don’t necessarily know that the owner of that account is even seeing.

All this work that you’re putting out there, all this value that you’re adding, you might be commenting on all of their posts and really trying, and they might not even know that you exist. So keep that in mind. But it’s certainly, it’s certainly a method. And I know like I was touching on, there is a lot, a lot of people out there who do value running their own Instagram account and it is them watching in reading and responding.

So all hope is not lost. You can go to in person events. Now, this may or may not be unpaid. Depending on how you think about it, you may have to buy a ticket or something. Surely there are free events out there as well, but you can actually go in person and meet people. Yes, in real life. And I think that’s going to become more and more significant as time goes on as well.

It’s just nice to get out from behind the computer. You speed up that entire process because you met that person face to face. There’s a whole bunch of people in the room all at once. Strategically picking the correct events to go to, I think it’s very beneficial. I’ve gone to various networking events over the years and.

at the right places. You start really broad, then you might meet a person every now and then who you have a good value exchange with, but otherwise it could be just a lot of wasted time perhaps. Eventually as you make the right connections, you’ll get invited to better and better events, or you’ll meet people who happen to be doing something interesting. That’s more along the niche or something that’s relevant to you. And then before you know it, you’ve got better events to go to.

And like I mentioned, there are paid ones, so you could just go buy a ticket to something that’s coming through town or fly to it, depending what it is, but there are all sorts of conferences. Out there that would be relevant. I’m sure to obviously the health and wellness industry, the health and wellness space, but something perhaps in your specific niche, that’s useful.

You’re following other people in the industry or organizations and regulatory bodies, whatever the case in your niche, it’s a great way to keep up on what events are coming through trade shows and perhaps attend some of these and meet people face to face. who could end up being clients of yours as well.

And it wouldn’t necessarily only be something that is your peers, depending on who you’re trying to do business with. Think about your ideal client and look at the types of events that they would be going to as well. So you’ve got that. There’s so much online that you can do without paying outright.

But that’s what it comes down to. And remember our episode with Melissa Monte, she had this massive success almost right out of the gate with her podcast launch. And she explained how important it was to connect with people. Like she got featured on some podcast apps just by knowing the right people.

 Again, there’s no, like there’s no faking that she legitimately got to know these people. She went to some events and made those connections and before you know it, because of who she knew she’s able to get featured somewhere and she gets speaking gigs and didn’t necessarily cost anything.

 You got to put in effort, but it wasn’t like she just had to go pay and there, there was no way to even do that, right? That’s an important consideration here as well. Yes, there are some means. through which by paying you can speed up the process of promotion. But there are others that you just cannot, money cannot buy it.

You’ve got to go do this, this unpaid way. Okay. So there you have it. The four health podcast growth pathways for growing your show. I also want to point out here that while growth is important, you want to assess where you are at with your podcast and your business. You know, I had someone come to me a while back and she was in a tizzy.

Business wasn’t really going how she planned. She had a podcast and thought that she needed to invest in working with someone like us but when I looked into it further, was like a whole leaky bucket problem. There was a whole bunch of issues with the business.

So while growing the audience of the podcast is good, you want to have other things in place first as well. Like you don’t want to be putting out poor quality content. So that when you get a listener, they’re hearing it and turning it off right away and not subscribing. So we want to have a lot of foundational things in place before we really delve too deeply into growth.

Okay. So keep that in mind. Once you’re confident of what you’re putting out there, then you could perhaps feel better about putting this effort into growth. Growth is great, but we don’t want to be putting that effort there when there are other bigger priority issues within your business and podcast.

Hope this was useful and we’ll talk to you again soon.