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Hey Reader! - A late Indian summer is hitting here in Scotland. The sun is out, and I am feeling excited about what's to come here at Podcast Marketing Puzzle. The video course is coming soon. Stay tuned.

3 Funnels You Need To Grow Your Podcast

Funnels take a person from one stage of the listener's journey to the next. In podcasting, this looks like a three-step funnel:

Inbound funnel – Profile funnel – Monetisation funnel

You need to think about all three stages of the process if you‘re going to grow your show.

Today, I am going to break down each one so you can better market your podcast.

Inbound Funnel

This is the funnel podcasters tend to avoid. It’s putting yourself out there in front of your audience to try and get more listeners.

This can involve a lot of different strategies:

• Social media
• Word of mouth
• Paid advertising
• Podcast guesting
• Podcast collaboration
• Attending conferences

Any strategy which involves your podcast getting in front of new eyes. Because while people say podcasting has a discovery problem, I think it has a marketing problem. And to solve that marketing problem, you need to have an inbound funnel.

My advice here is to go local if you can and be where your audience are to talk to them in person. Or focus on collaborating and guesting on other podcasts.

Audiences travel well across platforms, so if a person is already listening to a podcast, they will happily listen to a different podcast. Compared to someone who enjoys watching short-form videos, traveling over to listen to a long-form podcast.

I suggest that my coaching clients pick one collaboration method where new listeners can find you and try to master it. Here are a few ideas:

• Trailer swaps
• Episode swaps
• Interview swaps
• Joint hosted episodes
• Content mashup (half of your episode combined with half of another podcasts episode)

Once you nail down a collaboration strategy you will have a steady stream of new listeners coming to your show.

Profile Funnel

After you’ve promoted your podcast, people are going to come looking for you. Make sure you can be found. You want to have a website that people can find on Google and to be sure that you come up first in podcast player search results.

Next, you want to set up your profile so that you hook in window shoppers and convince them to hit play. So you need to nail down:

• Episode titles
• Podcast artwork
• Podcast description
• Episode descriptions
• Podcast introduction

Those should all work together to convince your ideal listener to hit play. Your ideal listener should see every one of your episodes and be excited to jump in and listen.

If you're interested, my Template Vault provides fill-in-the-blank templates for each of these to save you time.

Monetisation Funnel

Lastly, you want to move your fans towards something that earns you money:

• Merch
• Donations
• Advertisers
• Membership
• Affiliate products

I fully detailed the 23 ways you can monetize your podcast here.

You do this with clear calls to action at the end of your episode. You can increase how many people visit a link by not just reading it out in the episode but also adding it to your description below the episode

This takes a clear understanding of what yoru audience wants from you and how you can best serve them. I recommend a proactive approach where you are constantly testing with new partners, new ad reads, and talking to your audience as much as possible.

I like social media as a way to stay connected with your audience. It allows you to talk to them in comments and DMs to understand what they love about your show and how you can best help them.

Don’t Forget Quality

This all becomes easier if you make a fantastic show. The better your show, the more proudly you can promote it, the more people tell their friends, and the more likely new listeners are to click your episodes.

Which part of the funnel do you struggle with the most?

All the best from Scotland,

​Kieran MacRae​

Community Wins

If you have a win you want to share, hit reply!

How I Can Help You

1) ​​How to get your first 100,000 downloads ebook – Learn what it takes to grow a podcast and make sense of podcast marketing.

2) ​​Work with me 1:1​ – I am an experienced podcast coach, and I want to help you master your podcast marketing. Check out my full list of services and discover how we can work together.

3) Growth Machine Podcast Audits are now available. Don't be blind to the mistakes holding your podcast back from the growth it deserves. Get an experienced and critical eye to give you feedback on everything from show notes to podcast quality and delivery.

4) ​Recommended Tools​​ – These are the tools I use to grow my podcast. I focus on tools that improve quality and save time.

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