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Hey Reader! - What a week! I put out a plea on Twitter offering feedback and now have 40 podcasts to check out... Stay tuned for the findings! I'm going to share the most common problems I come across.

Challenge – Email 10 People About Your Podcast

Indie podcasters tend to have the wrong attitude to marketing.

Getting 1,000,000 downloads is too big a challenge to overcome if you don’t know where to start. Instead, the most powerful thing you can do is find one person who you think will like it, and ask them to listen.

How? By looking for people who are writing about your topic.

If someone has written an article on the same thing you’ve made a podcast episode on, there’s a good chance they’ll be interested. Here’s how you find those people:

Step 1. Pick Five episodes to experiment with

I first did this with a mini-series my wife and I made on Scottish fairies and folklore. We had 5 episodes, each about a different fairy or group of fairies. These were my targets. I was ready to take this show on the road.

You might want to cover your five most popular episodes or your five most specific episodes—it's up to you.

Step 2. Hunt through as many Google results as you can

Now, we are going to Google each episode topic. You’ll have to dig to find the gold, so make sure you’re going way back into the search results. Open each one to check it’s relevant, and put it in a spreadsheet.

Do this across your 5 episodes, and you should have at least 10 people to contact.

Step 3. Email the person who wrote the blog

Next we’re going to send a nice friendly email over. Read the article the person wrote and find something nice to say. Here’s an email I sent:

“Hey (name),

Just a quick one, I co-run the Scottish History podcast Generally Spooky and we're currently putting out a mini-series on Scottish Fairies.

I saw you had an article on the Banshee and thought you might be interested in our latest episode. It's on Scottish washerwomen, and we talk at length initially about Banshees specifically.

You can find the episode here

I'm sure you're super busy but wanted to reach out because I thought you might like to listen.

Totally fine if not :)

Have a great weekend,

Kieran”​
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Here are a few of the responses I got:
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This is a process you can repeat for every episode that gets released. You can repeat it with Facebook posts, and YouTube videos too.

It’s that simple

Marketing isn’t about tricking people into listening to your podcast.

It’s finding people who will like it and showing it to them. There are a lot of steps to go from 1 follower to 1000 followers, and you need to go out and collect every one of them. So this week. I want you to:

• Find 1 person already talking about a topic you’ve covered.
• Email them about your podcast.
• Repeat 10 times.

Your podcast grows one listener at a time.

Community Wins

Amazing work, everyone! If you have a win you want to share, hit reply.

How I Can Help You

1) I can add you to my best podcast lists. Just email your podcast, description, and category

2) I have a page of ​Recommended Tools​. These are the tools I use to grow my podcast. I focus on tools that improve quality and save time.